JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  As another chapter of the Cold War, in March 1960, President Eisenhower had approved the beginnings of a clandestine campaign against Fidel Castro in Cuba. Later, during the summer of 1960, while Vice President Richard Nixon was stepping up his campaign to succeed Eisenhower, the VP secretly met with the NSC, urging more action against Castro.

  At the same time, Senator Kennedy, with equal secrecy, was meeting with the eventual leaders of the Cuban exile brigade that landed on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. Manuel Artime Buesa, the beach commander, met with Senator Kennedy at the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, Florida, and in his Senate offices on Capitol Hill8 along with Manuel Antonio de Varona and José Miro Cordona—both former premiers of Cuba—and other Cuban exile leaders of the time.

  Perhaps unknown to both aspiring candidates, Eisenhower had categorically laid down the law to the CIA and to the Defense Department: There would be no acceleration of anti-Castro activity during the lame-duck period of his administration, so that the new President, whether it was Nixon or Kennedy, would not have to confront a situation that had already been decided upon and set in motion.

  During the crucial TV debates between Nixon and Kennedy in late 1960, Nixon, who had been attending all the NSC meetings on the subject of Cuba, felt that he had to play down the anti-Castro rhetoric because of his personal involvement and the requisite bonds of secrecy. On the other hand, JFK, who did not benefit from that official knowledge and was not bound by secrecy but who was well aware of the subject matter because of his closeness to the Cubans, forcefully challenged Nixon and took the initiative on that subject during the debates. The edge gained from that single subject may have provided JFK with the votes that gave him his narrow victory in November 1960.

  After the election, some quick moves were made by the CIA to “lock in” its projects before the new administration took over in January 1961. At Fort. Bragg, North Carolina, an all-new U.S. Army Special Forces organization was hastily increased in size, and its secret mission was enlarged to include “peacetime” covert activities.

  At the same time, an international school was set up at Fort Bragg to provide training for counterpart troops from many nations throughout-the world. This school, although later called the John F. Kennedy Center, was not initiated by President Kennedy, as many believe, but was opened in late 1960 by the then deputy secretary of defense, James Douglas. The Green Berets of Vietnam fame were born there and shortly thereafter were ready to begin their long march to Saigon.

  Similar clandestine camps were rushed into being in Panama, Guatemala, and Nicaragua for the brigade of Cuban exiles, along with other training sites in Miami, at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and in the Lake Pontchartrain area near New Orleans. Aircraft of various types were brought in from CIA assets all over the world, as were CAT pilots. The old, reliable Filipino clandestine experts joined the underground teams.

  Then, in December 1960, President-elect Kennedy made a surprising announcement. He had decided to keep Allen W. Dulles as his director of central intelligence and J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI. With this announcement, the stage was set for the 1960s—the decade in which hundreds of thousands of American fighting men would see action in the escalating war in Vietnam.

  EIGHT

  The Battlefield and the Tactics Courtesy CIA

  WITH THE ELECTION of John F. Kennedy to the office of the President of the United States of America, there was an influx of new men into the higher appointive echelons of the government. Nowhere was this change more pronounced than in McNamara’s Office of the Secretary of Defense and, from there, throughout the Pentagon. It was said that there were more Phi Beta Kappas in that office than ever before. True, but this did not ensure that they were the best military minds.

  However, they overcame their lack of military experience and knowledge through study and dedication to their jobs. They learned from their environment, among the older and more stable bureaucrats. Most important, they brought with them new ideas, new perspectives, and new goals. Nowhere was this more evident than in their approach to the unconventional problems of the Cold War and its greatest battlefield at that time, Indochina.

  One thing became quite clear before too many months had passed. They, and their young President, had come to stay the course. They laid out long-range plans through the first four years and clearly intended to be there for the second four, when their work would come to fruition. And next there was Bobby, and then Teddy. There was always the possibility of “the Dynasty.”

  I had been assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1960 when Thomas Gates, the Morgan Guaranty Trust banker from New York, was secretary. As a businessman, he ran the Pentagon and the military establishment as a businessman would. He was an excellent secretary of defense.

  My military assignment carried over into the McNamara era. He was one of the new world of businessmen. He had been a Harvard professor and had gone directly to a high position with the Ford Motor Company. Much was made of the fact that Kennedy had selected the president of the Ford Motor Company to be the secretary of defense. Few noted at the time that when McNamara came into the Pentagon as the appointee to the job, he had been the president of Ford no more than a month.

  I was called to brief Mr. McNamara on a military activity related to CIA operations on the second or third day he was in office. As had been the custom under Mr. Gates, I prepared a briefing paper on the subject that was only two or three pages long. I discussed it with McNamara and left it in his hands. Just as I reached my office, I received a call asking me to return.

  When I arrived, his executive officer—an old friend of mine—informed me that Mr. McNamara had read my brief paper, liked it, and wanted me to go back and write up the whole business. Over the course of the rest of the day I composed about twenty-five pages and returned them to the secretary’s office. The next morning I found them on my desk with a brief note: “Fine. Just what I wanted” It was signed by McNamara.

  I have thought of that small, introductory incident many times, and I recall that I had said to myself, That man is the secretary. He is going to see mountains of paper. If he wants long briefs loaded with statistics, instead of short summaries, he will never make it. He’ll be buried in bureaucratic paper.

  The Kennedy administration was like that. The men nearest to him were old friends, former associates, family. JFK would rather discuss a serious matter with a roomful of friends than with the National Security Council or any of the other committees that proliferate in official Washington.

  This is the way Kennedy came to the White House. After all, he had grown up as the son of the American ambassador to Great Britain. He had served with the U.S. Navy during World War II. Since World War II he had been a member of Congress, first as a representative and then as a senator. As the record shows, he was a voracious reader, and he involved himself in a broad spectrum of interests. He was a young man with a lot of experience and the capacity to learn. He was a searching questioner.

  As President, he inherited many interesting programs. Two of them played a major part in his life as President. His decisions concerning those projects created the tensions and pressures that brought about his sudden and untimely death. Had Kennedy lived, America would not have become militarily involved in Vietnam. Had he lived, he would have been elected to a second term, and during that term his plans and his goals would have reached fruition. Only his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, kept him from achieving those goals.

  When he took office, he was confronted with the immediacy of the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba utilizing a brigade of U.S.-trained Cuban exiles. Concurrently, he listened to two important briefings about the situation in Vietnam. President Eisenhower had told him that the Southeast Asian problem nation would be Laos and that Vietnam was no place to become involved with American troops. The other Vietnam briefing came from Edward G. Lansdale, who had just returned from a long visit with Ngo Dinh Diem. Some of those who were at the briefing believed tha
t Kennedy intended to make Lansdale the next ambassador to Saigon.

  January 1961 was memorable for another most important event. In that month, Nikita Khrushchev made his famous speech pledging Soviet support of “wars of national liberation.” Almost everyone in the new administration was inclined to believe that unconventional warfare was likely to be vitally important during the decade of the sixties, as we shall see.

  Kennedy knew that the conflict in Southeast Asia had been instigated under the covert leadership of the World War II Office of Strategic Services and the CIA on one side and by the Soviet KGB and the Chinese on the other. Khrushchev’s challenge was ominous, and Kennedy did not doubt that it focused on Cuba and Vietnam. Even before the JFK inauguration, McNamara and a team of close associates moved into a suite of offices in the Pentagon. McNamara attended the “Pre-Brief”1 intelligence-report sessions every morning. He began, right away, concentrating on Vietnam.

  As we have seen in this account of the CIA and the progression of the Vietnam era, there were four major steps in this development of conflict in Southeast Asia, by the OSS and CIA on one side and the KGB, with Chinese assistance, on the other, all leading to the inevitable Americanization of the war.

  Most of the Kennedy team did not realize that the first step along this Cold War trail had begun in September 1945, the month that the Japanese surrendered to end World War II, with that shipment of arms and other war materiel—approximately one-half of that which had been scheduled to have been used by American troops during the invasion of Japan—from the stockpiles on Okinawa to Haiphong Harbor near Hanoi. There an American OSS team turned them over to Ho Chi Minh and his military commander, Col. Vo Nguyen Giap. The other half of that invasion stockpile went to Korea.

  None of us were able to discover, during these early McNamara sessions, who had made that decision in 1944 or 1945. It was an enormously important decision at the time and had monumental impact on the development of the Cold War over the next thirty years. During those next decades, the Vietminh would become a truly formidable foe. One thing we should have learned from that costly experience in Vietnam was that the Vietminh defeated a full array of American military power, including an army of as many as 550,000 men, and in the process had destroyed more than five thousand U.S. helicopters.

  With no air force or navy to speak of, the Vietminh proved tough enough to outlast both the mighty U.S. Seventh Fleet and a modern air force equipped with everything from fighter-bombers and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft to B-52 strategic bombers. They took all we could muster, short of nuclear weapons, including the horrendous Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi, and survived to hoist their own flag over Saigon.

  This tragic debacle of American arms brought to mind the words spoken by Sen. Barry Goldwater during an address in 1983 before a group of retired military men in Washington, D.C., that the trouble with the American military forces at that time was that they had no “Grand Strategy.” Had Kennedy lived, Goldwater would not have had to make that address.

  Step number two was an amazing operation, unnoticed by almost everyone on the new Kennedy team. They did not realize that during the mid-fifties, more than 215,000 half-terrorized Tonkinese natives had been flown to South Vietnam, 660,000 more had been transported there by sea with the U.S. Navy, and hundreds of thousands of others had traveled by foot and by other means. This horde of destitute people flooded the south and began to take over villages, jobs, the police organization, the army, and many of the top jobs in the new Diem government.

  Early in this period the Saigon Military Mission planners had come up with a civic action program “to place civil service [read ”Tonkinese“] personnel out among the people, in simple dress, where they would work alongside the people, getting their hands dirty.” (This is from the official report prepared by Edward G. Lansdale and presented to the new President during a White House meeting in January 1961.)

  When a training center, established in Saigon for SMM’s civic action program, failed to recruit any native (southern) volunteers, Diem/ Lansdale “selected a group of young university-trained men from among the refugees [read ”invaders“] from North Vietnam.” Diem ordered the civic action teams and the army commanders to work together on a “pacification” campaign.

  As a result, the immediate beneficiaries of this effort were, more often than not, the northern Catholic invaders.

  This situation, as was intended, created the matrix of war—and predictably the “enemy,” as often as not, turned out to be the southern natives, while the government was augmented by the Catholic invaders. Between 1955 and 1960 this inflammatory situation became worse every year, and it was exacerbated by steps three and four, to follow.

  Ngo Dinh Diem published two edicts at the suggestion of his American advisers, many of them from Michigan State University under the leadership of Diem’s political mentor, Wesley Fishel.

  The third step came when Diem ordered the French to turn over any government positions they held and leave the country. This order destroyed the effective, but fragile, constabulary system, and in a short time there was no law and order in the new country.

  The fourth step in the development of this smoldering internal warfare concerned the issuance of a second edict that directed the Chinese to leave, on the assumption, it said, that they were Communists or Communist sympathizers.

  This had a destructive impact on the economic system, as mentioned earlier. The Chinese had been the brokers. They purchased the rice, other crops, lumber, etc., and in return provided money and the necessities of life for the village. This simple, basic village-oriented economic system had kept a most effective political system alive for centuries. When the Chinese left, this system collapsed. Diem was so inexperienced and so poorly advised that each time he came out with new orders, the situation worsened. In villages where the council form of government had existed for centuries and was the supreme political authority, Diem abolished all elections in June 1956. He followed this by abolishing all municipal elections. These errors tended to help thrust the northern Catholics into positions above the local people. As we have said earlier, the natives of southern Vietnam were rapidly being made into an enemy, known as the Vietcong.2

  By 1960, the situation in South Vietnam was beyond control. The troubles that had been created by Diem’s edicts played directly into the hands of the Vietminh. If anything, the Vietminh were the greatest beneficiaries of this terrible situation. The country was falling into their hands.

  Having been busy setting up this operation from behind its cloak of secrecy since 1945 (as the OSS), the CIA was ready by 1960 to come out into the open in what was known as “the war to save South Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia” from the onrush of communism—precisely the type of “war of national liberation” that Khrushchev had vowed to fight. This Cold War intrigue, abetted by “domino theory”3 fears, was ready to pay off with its first series of moves, which would eventually put hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of the military-industrial complex of the world.

  The CIA’s first major operational plan to achieve this ambitious goal for its allies involved the movement of a U.S. Marine Corps squadron of twenty H-19 Sikorsky helicopters from Udorn, Thailand, to the vicinity of Saigon. This was a most crucial and pivotal development. It not only introduced a major unit of modern equipment into South Vietnam, but in doing so it ignored the restrictive terms of the 1954 Geneva Agreement. Before long there were four hundred helicopters in South Vietnam, at a time when the only U.S. military personnel in that country were restricted by President Kennedy to the role of “advisers.”

  In retrospect, it may seem unbelievable that somewhere in Vietnam lie the rusting hulks of five thousand helicopters lost by American forces, by far the majority of them lost after Kennedy’s death in 1963. This was a stark tribute to one of the most foolhardy chapters in the long history of warfare. The loss of five thousand helicopters with crews, passengers, and the dollars they represented makes the “Charge of the
Light Brigade,” with all of its tragic overtones, seem like a rainy day at a Sunday School picnic by comparison.

  The massive deployment of helicopters in Vietnam, spawned by a secretary of defense who preached “cost-effectiveness” while his department practiced utter waste, makes the helicopter itself a symbol of that war. It is scarcely conceivable that so little tactical effectiveness, across the board, could have been achieved at so horrendous and staggering a cost. In a war that produced so very little of anything upon which we can look with pride, the helicopter certainly has to stand head and shoulders above all others as the symbol of waste, mindlessness, and extravagance.

  At one point during the war, the famous Israeli general Moshe Dayan, who had led his forces in a dash across the Sinai in the 1967 war against the Egyptians, went to Vietnam as an observer and writer. No stranger to Vietnam, General Dayan went out into the battle zones with U.S. troops and studied the combat he found there.

  The general made his conclusion clear that his “lightning war” tactics would not work in Vietnam and then added, “Helicopters may be first-class equipment, but the way they are being used in Vietnam, they are wasted.”4 As much as anything we are aware of, this underscores the great significance of that first CIA move of military helicopters from Laos to Vietnam in 1960. That single action opened the doors to the wanton expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars—for what?

  That was one measure of the helicopter fiasco. There is another. Using a very conservative approach, we can estimate that the loss of five thousand helicopters resulted in no fewer than fifteen thousand to twenty thousand American deaths, based on average crew size and taking into account that many helicopters were lost on the ground, and many others were destroyed without the loss of life. Yet a great number were destroyed with a full crew and a load of American troops. Even if the lower figure of fifteen thousand is accepted, it represents a little less than one-third of all American fatalities in Vietnam. Many of these helicopter and human losses were operational, but a surprising proportion of them were nonoperational—the vehicles just crashed by themselves, without enemy action.