JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  President Eisenhower could not have expressed his views on the subject of a “Vietnam War” more forcefully. He knew that we did not belong there. Yet less than a month later, on January 29, 1954, many of the same officials who had been at that meeting, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence, ignored the President and made plans to get on with the business of making war in Indochina.

  In the words of Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace at Kansas State University:2

  We have dropped more bombs on Indochina than all the [other] targets in the whole of human history put together. . . .

  Indochina contains enough bomb craters to occupy an area greater than Connecticut’s 5,000 square miles. . . . We have released more than 100 million pounds of chemical herbicides over more than 4 million acres. . . .

  Two American medical doctors estimate that South Vietnam [alone] has suffered 4 million casualties. . . .

  In the south, Vietnam was under French control simply because there was nothing else for that area. The French used Bao Dai as their puppet-in-command; but he reigned from the Riviera and was seldom in Vietnam. Finally, in mid-1954, when the United States took the initiative to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of the newly established country of South Vietnam (i.e., south of the 17th parallel), that piece of real estate began to have a government, at least in name.

  Diem had no congress, no army, no police, no tax system—nothing that is essential to the existence of a nation. At the same time he had a strong, skilled, and experienced enemy—Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese army. For this reason, many of the requests made upon the Diem government during the period from 1954 to 1963 were quite unrealistic. But this fact never seemed to occur to the leaders of our own government or to those who tried to carry out liaison with Diem’s government, as though it were, and had been, an equal member of the family of nations. We shall see this problem arise throughout the decade that followed.

  Lest there are still some among us who believe that the President runs this country, that the Congress participates effectively in determining the course of its destiny, and that the Supreme Court assures compliance with the Constitution and all federal laws, let them witness this action, and the results of this blatant disregard for all elements of government, as we find it on the record.

  Among those at the January 8, 1954, meeting of the National Security Council, when the President made his views known so forcefully, was Allen W. Dulles, director of central intelligence and brother of the secretary of state. There was no way that Allen Dulles could have misunderstood those words of President Eisenhower’s. There was no way that any of the others at that meeting could have misunderstood or have had any question whatsoever about “how bitterly opposed” the President was to placing U.S. troops in Indochina. But this is not how things work when modern underground warfare is involved. This is not how the CIA and its counterpart, the Soviet KGB, have waged their worldwide invisible wars. Nothing whatsoever has ever deterred them from the essential business of making war.

  These are incredible men, these defiers of presidents. One might say that they do not need them. Ambassador George V. Allen, after a state dinner with John Foster Dulles, said, “Dulles spoke as if he had his own line to God and was getting his instructions from a very high source.”3

  Allen Dulles was also a lawyer and a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell. The brothers were in touch with the power elite, and a mere President influenced them not at all. So many qualified people who have worked “close to the seat of power”—men like Winston Churchill, R. Buckminster Fuller, Prof. Joseph Needham and Ambassador Allen—confirm that these so-called leaders get their instructions from a very high source. These “leaders” are all fine actors, and certainly not true rulers, as we witness in the example of this National Security Council meeting of January 1954. This is true not only in the world of politics but is equally true of banking, industry, academia, and religion.

  This explains why so many of the visible activists in high places are lawyers. In that profession they are trained to work under the direction of their clients. They have been educated for such service in the higher universities, many of them with courses designed for just such purposes. And they are further trained in the major international law firms that make a business of providing many of their skilled “partners” for top-level government service, for directorships on bank boards, and for major industrial positions.

  In the case of Vietnam, the course followed by the U.S. government was established by these two international Wall Street lawyers, John Foster Dulles and Allen Welch Dulles, among other, more invisible powers. A review of the record of the early days of the war in Vietnam will reveal how they did it.

  On January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s “vehement” statement against the entry of U.S. armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said: “Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam.”

  The secretary added:

  [I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, “Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it.”

  If we could carry on effective guerrilla operations against this new Vietminh government, we should be able to make as much trouble for this government [the Vietminh-formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam] as they had made for our side and against the legitimate governments of the Associated States4 in recent years. Moreover, the costs would be relatively low. Accordingly, an opportunity will be open to us in Southeast Asia even if the French are finally defeated by the Communists. We can raise hell and the Communists will find it just as expensive to resist as we are now finding it.

  What John Foster Dulles said exposed the method used to circumvent the views of the President about the introduction of U.S. forces: first, by ignoring him completely, and, second, by changing the words from “making war” to “raising hell” with “guerrilla operations.” Note also that Dulles assumed, as we all did, that there would be some government in existence in the south that could take care of itself and its people.

  This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began—in opposition to the words of the President and in compliance with the longer-range Grand Strategy of the power elite. After all, we had been arming all sides in Indochina since 1945. According to a record of the January 14, 1954, National Security Council meeting, it was: “b. Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.”

  Two weeks later, on January 29, the President’s Special Committee on Indochina5 met to discuss these plans developed by the director of central intelligence. During this meeting, it was agreed that he could add “an unconventional-warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale,” to the group of five liaison officers that had been accepted by the French commander, General Henri Navarre.

  In this manner, the CIA created the Saigon Military Mission and sent it from Manila to Indochina. This “military mission,” undoubtedly the most important single “war-making” American organization established in Indochina between 1945 and 1975, was seldom in Saigon. It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to “raise hell” with “guerrilla operations” everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.

  By 1954, the French had created a fragile, basically fictitious government of the State of Vietnam under Empe
ror Bao Dai. It was said that none of the members of his Chamber of Deputies could have mustered twenty-five votes from their “constituencies.” This made the issue quite clear to the Vietnamese, even if it could be concealed from the rest of the world. Through seven years of war, the Vietnamese people’s choice was between the French and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

  The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Vietminh on its own behalf did not exist in 1954. Thus, the choice of the predominant number of these Indochinese was overwhelmingly Ho Chi Minh. They felt no loyalty to Bao Dai, who lived in Paris, and they hated the French.

  This was the situation when the CIA created the Saigon Military Mission on January 29, 1954. At this meeting, Allen Dulles was accompanied by his deputy, Gen. Charles P. Cabell; George Aurell, formerly chief of station in Manila; and Edward G. Lansdale. Lansdale, who had been in the Philippines since 1950, working as an agent of the CIA with Ramon Magsaysay and others to defeat President Quirino, had been ordered by the CIA to return to Washington for this series of meetings on Vietnam, preparatory to returning to Saigon to head the newly formed Saigon Military Mission. In his own book In the Midst of Wars, Lansdale says:

  Dulles turned to me and said that it had been decided that I was to go to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese, much as I had helped the Filipinos. Defense officials added their confirmation of this decision.

  I was to assist the Vietnamese in counterguerrilla training and to advise as necessary on governmental measures for resistance to Communist actions.

  Lansdale would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for “cover assignment” purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.

  A statement made by Lansdale is quite relevant:

  I had been told that I was to help the Vietnamese help themselves. As far as I knew, this still was almost impossible for an American to do. The French ran Vietnam as a colony, with a minimum of Vietnamese self-rule. Chief of State Bao Dai was in France.

  It was true that France had said that Vietnam was independent, but the French issued and controlled Vietnam’s currency ran the national bank, customs, foreign affairs, armed forces, and police, and had a host of French officials placed throughout the administrative system. The French high commissioner for Vietnam was the real authority. Was the shock of Dien Bien Phu and the conference at Geneva causing a change of status? I simply didn’t know.

  I had met Ed Lansdale and many of his Filipino associates in Manila in 1953—54, and we were both assigned to the Office of Special Operations in the Pentagon during the late fifties and early sixties. I have heard him speak of his serious problems with the French in Saigon, which were so severe that he thought he might be killed by them. He had similar problems with certain Vietnamese. However, his Saigon Military Mission and its tough, experienced team managed to “raise hell,” weather the storm, and present the U.S. government with a full-fledged, ready-made war by the spring of 1965.

  The Saigon Military Mission entered Vietnam clandestinely to assist the Vietnamese, rather than the French. This was their “official” objective—on paper. Again it might be asked, Who did they mean by the “Vietnamese”? They had the same problem Eisenhower did. What Vietnamese government was there to help? As members of that team understood their orders, they were to wage paramilitary operations against the enemy and to carry out psychological warfare. They might not have known who their friends were, but they knew who their enemy was—the Vietminh. They also knew their job. They did not waste much time on “advisory” work or on PsyWar “Fun and Games.” They were in Vietnam for bigger game. They were a band of superterrorists.

  It must be kept in mind that the SMM was a CIA activity and that when its members said they were going to promote PsyWar and propaganda they had a different concept of these things than did the military. They saw their role as promoting sabotage, subversion, labor strikes, armed uprisings, and guerrilla warfare.

  Their propaganda activity included the use of radio and newspapers, leaflets delivered by the millions from converted USAF B-29 bombers, posters, slogans, exhibits, fairs, motion pictures, educational and cultural exchanges, technical exchanges, specialized advertising, and help for the people in disaster areas. They attempted to do everything possible to exploit the nationalistic feelings of the people in an attempt to unite this new country.

  Another characteristic of their work was the use of paramilitary organizations. Such units are no more than a private army whose members accept some measure of discipline, have a military-type organization, and carry light weapons.

  The most interesting aspect of the SMM was that its leaders were firm believers in the Little Red Book teachings of Mao Tse-tung and spread the word accordingly. That book contained the doctrine of guerrilla warfare as practiced during the Cold War. Years later, after Lansdale had come home from Vietnam, he made many speeches at the various war colleges. Almost without exception he enumerated the “three great disciplinary measures” and the “eight noteworthy points” of Mao Tse-tung’s great Chinese Eighth Route Army.

  I was the pilot of U.S. Air Force heavy transport aircraft on many flights from Tokyo to Saigon via the Philippines from 1952 to 1954. When Lansdale’s team members were on board the plane during some of those five-hour flights between Manila and Saigon, we discussed the Magsaysay campaign being waged by the CIA against Quirino and the plans that were being made for a new government in Vietnam—a new government to be supported by the United States, after the French departure.

  The CIA’s U-2 spy plane. President Eisenhower’s hopes for a “Crusade for Peace” were dashed when the CIA—against Ike’s specific order—sent a U-2 spy planeson a long-range overflight of the Soviet Union from Pakistan to Norway. On May 1, 1960, it made a forced landing near Sverdlovsk. Despite Soviet claims and news reports, the U-2 was not shot down. Allen Dulles himself testified to that fact before the Senate, and Eisenhower has written the true story in his memoirs. It suffered engine failure that may have been induced by a pre-planned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel.

  Captain Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2, landed alive and well and in possession of a number of most remarkable identification items, survival kit materials, and other things spies are never allowed to carry. Did he know he had them in his parachute pack, or did someone who knew the U-2 had been prepared to fail put them there to create his “CIA spy” identity?

  President Eisenhower had ordered all overflights to cease during the pre-summit conference period. The author, supporting a major CIA overflight program in Tibet, grounded all aircraft involved. Why was one U-2 ordered on its longestever overflight at that time?

  Kennedy’s totally unexpected election gave him an enormous fund that had been prepackaged for the expected Nixon administration. The eventual $6.5 billion procurement of the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) was the largest single peacetime procurement contract of its time. A fierce controversy raged over which aircraft manufacturers would get that money. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (lower left), with the shrewd assistance of JFK’s Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg (lower right), eventually awarded the contract to General Dynamics and Grumman, the manufacturers whose procurement plans would do the most good for the 1964 presidential campaign.

  William Colby, who later became the Director, Central Intelligence, claimed before a Congressional committee that during the time he supervised the Phoenix program in Indochina, at least 60,000 Vietnamese had been killed “in cold blood” by his agents. Colby is shown holding a shotgun during a January 1969 inspection tour of a “pacified” area in Vietnam.

  Helicopters were used to deliver troopers of the First Cavalry Division to the site of a raid on the “Little Iron Triangle” near Bong Son, South Vietnam. A B-52 bombing raid had already killed most of the Viet Cong in the area. Overall, in V
ietnam, bomb craters destroyed the land over an area the size of the state of Connecticut.

  The author writes, “There is ample evidence to show President Kennedy was killed because he was moving to end the Cold War. The Cold War was basic and essential to the support of the CIA as well as the Pentagon. It was also a necessary part of the conflict required to generate the funds for the continually expanding military-industrial complex of the world.”

  A large, cleared patch of land on the fork of the river to Saigon was the site of a French Army “Gun Tower” fortification, when this photo was taken by the author in October 1953. This fortification was designed to control river traffic and to protect Saigon from guerrilla assault.

  An April 1954 view of the port of Saigon, taken by the author. The shallow, muddy river was often blocked by the hulls of large ships that had been exploded by underwater mines and sunk. Saigon was, at that time, the only port in the southern half of Indochina that could handle ships of ocean-going size.

  During the spring of 1954, while the French army was being destroyed by Ho Chi Minh’s forces at Dien Bien Phu, this photograph taken by the author over the French military base at Saigon shows huge stockpiles of unused American military equipment in storage.

  The French were forced to surrender to the Vietminh on May 8, 1954.

  Tonkinese northern Catholic refugees on their way to South Vietnam with their belongings. More than 660,000 were transported in U.S. Navy ships under the supervision of CIA’s Saigon Military Mission.