JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  In many cases, the United States or the Soviet Union armed both sides of a conflict at different times. Dulles admitted in his St. Louis speech that the United States had been contributing to both sides of the newest “desperate struggle,” that is, “to the combined efforts of the French and of Vietnam”—a rare admission, and true. As major manufacturers of military supplies and equipment, it mattered not at all to the great industrial combines of the United States who bought their products. War was the best business in town.

  Around 1960, the CIA made arrangements to have Soviet tank parts manufactured in the United States and delivered to the Egyptian army, which was equipped with Soviet-built tanks, in an attempt to prove that the United States was a more reliable friend and supplier to the Egyptians than their ally Russia. In this instance, as in many others, the CIA was living up to the name given to it by R. Buckminster Fuller: “The Capitalist Welfare Department.” Of course, this is what perpetual warfare is all about. One of the fundamental purposes of the Cold War has been to escalate arms production and sales on a global basis. This promotion is one of the things that the CIA does best.

  (Because the early history of the Cold War and in particular of events in Indochina during the years 1945—65 is so fragmented, unclear, and unconventional, I am beginning here to enter the period of the withdrawal from Vietnam of the Japanese, the British, the Chinese, and the French, the creation and dissolution of Vietnamese governments, unconventional military activities, and a power elite tapestry that is intricate and complicated. During all of these years, it was the American presence and influence that continued. On the next several pages, I introduce several subjects that I know need more elaboration. I am setting the stage and urge you to read on to these answers and explanations as they enter the pages of history in a more lucid form.)

  Since the OSS had been active in Indochina since World War II, it did not take long for its successor, the CIA, to begin to influence the flow of military equipment into that part of the world. Ho Chi Minh had been supplied with a tremendous stock of military equipment by the United States, and he expected to be able to administer his new government in Vietnam without further opposition.

  But on September 23, 1945, shortly after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had issued its Declaration of Independence, a group of former French troops, acting with the consent of the British forces that had arrived in Saigon from their sweep through Burma in the last days of World War II and armed with Japanese weapons stolen from surrender stockpiles, staged a local coup d’etat and seized control of the administration of Saigon.

  They installed the French government there once again. This move returned the Cochin—the southern sector of Vietnam—to French domination, although it had been agreed at the Potsdam Conference2 that the British army was to have administrative control of the area. Now there were two governments in South Vietnam, with the British army remaining outside the flow of events and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north.

  Based on the record of those years, the Vietminh hoped for American assistance or mediation in attaining their independence from the French. French entrenchment in Vietnam was not limited to its military. Vietnam was an old French colony. A number of French families had been born and raised there, as their parents had been. There were major French business interests there, such as the great Michelin rubber industry. The French banks in Indochina were among the most powerful in Asia. It was one thing to remove the French army; it was an entirely different matter to remove French interests. This is what the Vietminh wanted. They got neither.

  The American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, in May 21, 1944, said, “It should be the duty of nations having political ties with such people [as the Indochinese] . . . to help aspiring peoples to prepare themselves for the duties and responsibilities of self-government, and to attain liberty. ”

  On October 25, 1945, a senior Department of State official, John Carter Vincent, stated, “This [the Hull policy] continues to be American policy.” His speech confirmed the earlier agreement and gave credence to Vietminh expectations. But this faith in the system proved to be fruitless.

  All remaining Japanese forces had been rounded up and had surrendered to the British military command in Saigon by November 30, 1945. By January 1, 1946, the French had assumed all military commitments in Vietnam. Then, on January 28, 1946, command of all French forces in Vietnam passed from the British to Gen. Jean Leclerc of France. Thus began another phase of U.S. military aid in Indochina, this time to the French. Negotiations between the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began early in 1946. Ho Chi Minh traveled to Paris in midyear, but the conference failed due to French intransigence. He continued his own efforts at negotiations until September, without obtaining the agreement he sought.

  Fighting broke out between the French and the Vietminh in late November 1946, and by the end of the year guerrilla warfare had spread all over Vietnam. All hope for settlement of this French/Vietminh dispute evaporated in 1947, and by the end of 1949 the war had become a major international issue.

  This is the way it was. There can be no clearer picture of events of that time. We do not have precise answers as to why we gave U.S.arms to Ho Chi Minh in 1945 and then a few years later provided Ho’s enemy, the French, with $3 billion of our arms. The situation is not supposed to be clear. The plan made before the end of World War II was to make war in Indochina, and this was the way it was done. From 1945 to 1975, there was warfare of one kind or another.

  Behind the scenes, the French, with U.S. acquiescence, were forming an anti-Communist national puppet government under the leadership of the former emperor, Bao Dai. As a result, by the end of 1949, there were three aspiring governments in Vietnam: the French colonial administration, Bao Dai’s State of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

  As early as 1947, the “anti-Communist” national elements of government included Ngo Dinh Diem, the man whom the United States would make president in 1954. But in 1948, Diem refused to support a French proposal for a “provisional central government.” This three-way structure was quite essential to the long-range plan for the invisible war. The French had already decided that they had to get out of Vietnam. They were becoming seriously involved in Algeria, much closer to home, and their own internal political problems were severe.

  However, if the French had withdrawn before the United States was ready to enter the contest, the only government in Vietnam would have been the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. No one else could have contested the Ho Chi Minh regime. Therefore, the invisible war game required a new government to offset the Democratic Republic. The reluctant Bao Dai inherited the task. As the Soviets put it, this was a new “puppet government formed by the French with the blessings of the Americans.” They were absolutely correct.

  By February 1950, both Great Britain and the United States had established diplomatic relations with the new State of Vietnam in the south, even though each relationship was no more than an empty shell. When all these details had been formalized, the situation was ready for development as a war front.

  On May 8, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would give both economic and military aid to France and to the State of Vietnam. The value of this military assistance surpassed $3 billion. One month later, we were at war in Korea, and the war in Vietnam had become another international crisis—in reserve.

  These events closed the circle. At no time were things out of control. The same ponderous glacier that had been set in motion on September 2, 1945, when those heavily laden transports left Okinawa for Korea and Vietnam, had never stopped moving. By mid-1950, important military action, short of nuclear force, was under way. What had begun as a realignment of forces and the production of a bipolar world had become a full-fledged “hot war” on the two chosen battlefields, Korea and Vietnam. It is important to note that it was during these two wars that the CIA developed from a fledgling “intelligence
” agency into its true form as master of American clandestine services. It had expanded enormously and matured.

  Another common misconception is that the CIA acts by and for itself. This is not quite true. It is an “agency.” It carries out the orders of others, as their agent. The CIA is the opening probe, the agitator or facilitator. In many respects it operates something like a law firm. It seldom if ever makes plans. It always acts in response to some other initiative. Right behind it comes its strong and ever-present allies, the rest of the government infrastructure, along with the willing support of the entire military-industrial and financial community.

  FIVE

  The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission

  IT WAS January 8, 1954. Dwight Eisenhower had been President of the United States for one year and was presiding over a meeting of the National Security Council with twenty-seven top-echelon national security advisers in attendance. When the subject turned to U.S. objectives and courses of action with respect to Southeast Asia, the President—our foremost World War II military commander—said, as recorded at the time, “with vehemence”:

  The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight. There is just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!1

  It must be added here that one of the great weaknesses in the approach to South Vietnam taken by the United States in those early days was an oversight that continues to this day. It has been the failure to recognize that the piece of real estate historically known as Cochin China but that we call South Vietnam was not, and never has been, a sovereign nation-state. It has never truly governed itself, despite the fact that Indochina has a history of thousands of years. This significant failure of perception made all attempts at “Vietnamization,” while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to the north was held by Ho Chi Minh, little more than words. A new country was being created and being asked to fight a major war, both at the same time. That was impossible, as we learned too late.

  At the time of Eisenhower’s comment, the indeterminate region of “South” Vietnam was under French military control, and the French army was at war with Ho Chi Minh and his “Vietminh” government. During that period and under those conditions, there was no way that the Vietnamese of the south, without a government, without leadership, and without an army, could have fought for their independence against the Democratic Government of Vietnam, which we ourselves had armed so well after World War II.

  Eisenhower made a powerful and correct statement of policy, but he seriously overlooked these basic facts of Vietnamese history. Eisenhower wanted “to get the Vietnamese to fight” their war for their own country. He wanted to “Vietnamize” the war. President John F. Kennedy made essentially the same statement nine years later when he issued one of the most important documents of his administration—National Security Action Memorandum #263—of October 11, 1963, saying that the Vietnamese should take over “essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel . . . by the end of 1965,” thereby releasing all U.S. personnel from further duty in Vietnam.

  By 1963, the people of South Vietnam had a little more experience with self-government than they did in 1954; but with the death of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu on November 2, 1963, even that small beginning suffered a serious setback. South Vietnam had never had the tradition of being a nation. Most of its rural populace had no concept of, or allegiance to, a government in Saigon, other than memories of the one hundred years of French rule, which they loathed.

  This serious oversight was not limited to Eisenhower and Kennedy. In an extract from his book Counsel to the President, which first appeared as “Annals of Government: The Vietnam Years” in The New Yorker magazine in May 1991, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford makes many similar remarks. He has written: “ . . . our objectives in Vietnam depended more on the capabilities of our allies in Saigon than on our own efforts.” There was no one closer to the policy and thinking of our six “Vietnam era” presidents and their key advisers than Clifford. All of these presidents, three Democrats and three Republicans, made two serious mistakes in their Vietnam policy:

  They seriously overestimated the ability and character of this either nonexistent or very new Diem government of South Vietnam, and

  Perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of these six presidents ever stated a positive American military objective of that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the “Communists” take over Vietnam, period. This does not constitute a military objective.

  Clifford asked himself those questions when he wrote: “First, can a military victory be won? And, second, what do we have if we do win?” These are meaningful questions, especially coming from the man who served as secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

  What Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy meant in their comments is clear enough under conventional circumstances, but their views made little sense given that the South Vietnamese were not a nation. Even when Ngo Dinh Diem had been established as the president of South Vietnam, in 1954, he had no governmental structure, no armed forces, no police, no tax system, etc. We aided Diem. We aided his subordinates. We armed and fed his troops—whoever they were. We provided billions of dollars in aid, but doing all those things does not make a government that can stand on its own feet in the face of a skilled and dedicated adversary that wanted to create a free Vietnam.

  Ngo Dinh Diem was himself part of the problem. Perhaps Lyndon Johnson said it best, in 1961, during an interview in Saigon with Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History: “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.” Diem had been born in 1901 in the village of Phu Cam. He was not a native of Cochin China, but was from the vicinity of Hue. He was a Catholic, a staunch nationalist, and an anti-Communist.

  In 1933, he had been minister of the interior in the Bao Dai government under French colonialism. After the Japanese had been defeated in 1945 and driven from Indochina, Diem was active against the French. In 1950 he left Vietnam for exile in the United States and lived at the Maryknoll Seminary in New Jersey, where, among other things, he washed dishes.

  Then, on May 7, 1953, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York arranged for a luncheon visit to the U.S. Supreme Court Building and introduced Ngo Dinh Diem to Justice William O. Douglas, Sen. John F. Kennedy, Sen. Mike Mansfield, Mr. Newton of the American Friends Service Committee, Mr. Costello of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Edmund Gullion and Gene Gregory of the Department of State. There Ngo Dinh Diem discussed Indochina for about an hour and answered questions, chiefly from Douglas and Kennedy. Diem had been introduced to this distinguished group as a “Catholic Vietnamese Nationalist.” An account of this important luncheon meeting is to be found in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. 13.

  With reference to President Eisenhower’s comment before the National Security Council on January 8, 1954, relative to “[getting] the Vietnamese to fight,” it may be noted that during this May 7, 1953, meeting Ngo Dinh Diem himself may have initiated that theme. According to the official account, “He thought that the French military understood the problem better than the French civil government. In any case, the French could not beat the Communists and would have to rely on the Vietnamese to do it. They could not get the Vietnamese to undertake the task, however, unless the Viets had more freedom.”

  At no time did Diem, or anyone else, suggest what could be done to arrange for “the Viets [to have] more freedom.”

  Diem left the United States in 1953 and continued his exile from Vietnam in a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. On June 18, 1954, Bao Dai asked Diem to become premier in his government. Diem arrived in Saigon on June 26, 1954, met Lansdale on June 27, and formally assumed that office on July 7, 1954. After an electio
n campaign carefully orchestrated by the CIA and Lansdale, Diem became president of South Vietnam on October 1954.

  Another thing we must remember is that we had been aiding the French from 1946 up until their defeat by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. In other words, we had been helping the enemy of the South Vietnamese people right up until a few months before we installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the new president of this previously nonexistent country. It seems strange that President Eisenhower would want to “Vietnamize” the war in January 1954, six months before the new government, under Ngo Dinh Diem, had been established and during a period when we were still aiding the French. Such factors had a great impact upon the actions of this emerging country during the period of the Vietnam War.

  This oversight, not only on the part of Eisenhower and Kennedy, but also on the part of most Americans, seriously handicapped both countries during the thirty years of American support of the Vietnamese and their warfare in that piece of real estate. Something had to be done to create a viable government and to coalesce the populace before it could act on its own behalf. This is where all of our best intentions failed so badly. Even in America, more than a century and a half elapsed between the landings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and the battle with the redcoats in Lexington and Concord. During that time those early settlers evolved into Americans, and were not simply an aggregate of English, German, Irish, and French people.

  Despite this critical oversight, that was the commander in chief speaking during that important National Security Council meeting of January 1954 to the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the individual chiefs of each of the military services, among others. That was his policy.