JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  This helicopter episode has been a tragic lesson. The copters were introduced by the CIA and used by the agency to cause the escalation of the war. Once the pattern had been set, the military commanders who came later, in 1965 and thereafter, were caught in a tactical bind they could not break.

  Much has been said and written about the number of Americans in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, and there are many who attempt to place the blame for the escalation of that conflict on him. The facts prove otherwise.

  As I have shown above, there was a ceiling of 16,000 personnel during the 1960—62 years. This is true; and it must be kept in mind that those Americans, except for such limited assignments as the Military Assistance Advisory Group, were there under the operational control of the CIA. When General Harkins complained about the few combat-effective men he had available, he learned that only 1,200 to 1,600 of the 16,000 personnel in Vietnam were in that category. The rest, more than 14,000, were support troops, and most of them for helicopter support. This was a relatively small number of combat troops considering that the overall total rose to 550,000 within the decade.

  According to interpretations of these data that attempt to place the blame for the Vietnam War on Kennedy, the New York Times publication of “The Pentagon Papers” states, “President Kennedy, who inherited a policy of ‘limited-risk gamble,’ bequeathed to Johnson a broad commitment to war.” This is contrived and incorrect. The Times all but ignored President Kennedy’s important National Security Action Memorandum #263, October 11, 1963, that, as official policy, ordered 1,000 men home from Vietnam by the end of 1963, and all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. That was the carefully planned Kennedy objective announced scarcely one month before his untimely death.

  It was not until President Johnson had signed NSAM #273 on November 26, 1963, that the course of the Kennedy plan began to be changed, and this trend became most apparent with the publication of NSAM #288 in March 1964.

  The directed escalation of the war began under Johnson, as we shall see. Had Kennedy lived, all the madness that happened in Vietnam after 1964 would not have taken place. President Kennedy had vowed to bring one thousand Americans home from Vietnam by Christmas 1963 and to have all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. Kennedy’s death brought about a total reversal of that carefully structured White House policy and that sincere promise to the American people.

  NINE

  The CIA in the Days of Camelot

  ONE OF THE BITTEREST electoral battles of the century was fought in 1960, when Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was elected President over the incumbent vice president, Richard Milhous Nixon. For Nixon and his longtime backers1 in and out of government, the defeat on November 8 proved staggering and unexpected. They had many concrete plans for the next four years, and their dreams had been deflated by that “half a-vote-per-precinct” loss.

  Years later, Nixon wrote one of the most unusual articles ever published for the millions of readers of Reader’s Digest. Under the title “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” the article appeared in the November 1964 issue.

  Nixon began with these remarkable sentences: “On April 19, 1959, I met for the first and only time the man who was to be the major foreign policy issue of the 1960 presidential campaign; who was destined to be a hero in the warped mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin; and who in 1964 is still a major campaign issue. The man, of course, was Fidel Castro.”

  Nixon had been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president during the 1950s, and before that, going back to 1947, had served in both the House and the Senate. He knew Washington well, and the great industrial, legal, and banking combines that are so closely enmeshed with the government. In the article, he looked back over the hectic earlier years and linked the four factors that were uppermost in his mind:

  the 1960 election

  Fidel Castro

  the death of the President, John F. Kennedy

  the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

  He wrote almost nothing about the growing warfare in Southeast Asia, even though he knew very well that it had been under way since 1945, when a vast shipment of American arms was put in the hands of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. By 1964, it had run its complex course, a course he had encouraged under the direction of the CIA.

  Nixon’s article was published just one month after the release of the twenty-six-volume report of the Warren Commission, which made public the incredible finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had been responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy. It is astonishing that, since Nixon’s article was actually written before the Warren Commission report was issued, he had arrived at the same finding as that highly confidential report with his identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as “President Kennedy’s assassin.”

  It is worth noting that a member of the Warren Commission also wrote an identical finding before the report was published. Gerald R. Ford’s article “Piecing Together the Evidence” appeared in Life magazine on October 2, 1964, before the Warren Report came out.

  These two men—subsequently Presidents—for some reason found it necessary to put on the record, as soon as they could and before the official publication of the Warren Commission Report, their support of the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. This allegation of theirs was not true. Anyone with a few minutes of spare time can prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin. Why did both of these men feel compelled to say that he was? To whom were these public figures beholden?

  It has been established that Nixon was in Dallas on the day, and at the exact time, that JFK was shot—12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963.2 Oddly, he avoided that fact in his Reader’s Digest article. Nixon wrote:

  I boarded a plane [in Dallas on the morning of November 22] to New York. We arrived on schedule at 12:56. I hailed a cab. We were waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street corner and said that the President had just been shot in Dallas. This is the way I learned the news.” [NOTE: A man told him the news]

  In the November 1973 issue of Esquire magazine, there’s the following imaginative quote by Nixon:

  I attended the Pepsi-Cola convention [in Dallas] and left on Friday morning, November 22, from Love Field, Dallas, on a flight back to New York . . . on arrival in New York we caught a cab and headed for the city . . . the cabbie missed a turn somewhere and we were off the highway . . . a woman came out of her house screaming and crying. I rolled down the cab window to ask what the matter was and when she saw my face she turned even paler. She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas. [NOTE: This time a woman told him the news]

  That is not the end of Nixon’s version of that busy day. The Nixon story that appears in Jim Bishop’s book The Day Kennedy Was Shot is said to be the “official” account:

  At Idlewild Airport [now JFK Airport] in New York . . . reporters and photographers had been waiting for the American Airlines plane . . . among [the passengers] was Nixon. As he got off the plane, he thought that he would give “the Boys” basically the same interview he had granted in Dallas . . . Nixon posed for a few pictures . . . got into a taxi-cab . . . was barely out of the airport when one of the reporters got the message: The President has been shot in Dallas.

  Nixon covered up the important fact that he had been in Dallas at the very time Kennedy was killed with that erroneous recollection which he included in the Reader’s Digest article. Why did Richard Nixon not want anyone to know that he was actually in Dallas at the time of the assassination? Why did he so categorically pronounce Oswald to be the killer before the specious evidence of the Warren Commission had been made public? Does he have other information that he has been concealing to this day? It is uncanny that he so positively linked Cuba, Castro, Oswald, and Kennedy while at the same time completely omitting other important events. They were his priority; he must have had his reasons.

  Nowhere was Nixon’s bias more evident
than in another passage from the Reader’s Digest article: “Fidel Castro, therefore, proved to be the most momentous figure in John F. Kennedy’s life,” wrote Nixon. This was Nixon’s version. Would Kennedy have agreed?

  As these chapters on the CIA and its role in the warfare in Southeast Asia arrive at the threshold of the Kennedy era, it is important to realize that JFK’s ascendance to power was a much more ominous transition than many have understood. An analysis of Nixon’s unusual comments will make this clear.

  Castro and the Cuban situation in 1960 were the major foreign policy issues during the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, principally because Nixon had made them so.

  On March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a rather modest CIA proposal for “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime”3 developed by the CIA and endorsed by the Special Group4 consisting of a deputy undersecretary of state, a deputy secretary of defense, the director, of central intelligence, and the special assistant to the President for national security affairs. As an ex officio member, Vice President Nixon was almost always present at these meetings.

  This proposal later became known as the Bay of Pigs operation. Nixon not only knew of the President’s approval but, as vice president, was one of the prime movers of that top-secret CIA project. As he wrote for Reader’s Digest: “I was one of only three members of the President’s Cabinet who had been briefed on it, and . . . had been the strongest advocate for setting up and supporting such a program.”

  During the campaign, this inside awareness of a highly classified CIA operation created a cruel dilemma for Nixon. Both Democratic and Republican headquarters knew, as they approached the fourth television debate of that campaign, that the presidential race was neck and neck. Nixon, with his eyes on Kennedy, wrote:

  I was faced with a heads-he-wins, tails-I-lose proposition. If in the TV debate I were to reveal the existence of the [CIA’s Cuban] training program . . . I would pull the rug out from under Kennedy’s position. But, if I did so, the project would be doomed. I had only one choice: to protect the security of the program.

  JFK, unrestrained by such top-secret security considerations, advocated “that the United States openly aid anti-Castro forces inside and outside Cuba.” The Kennedy attack had been released in time to appear in the afternoon papers, before the television debate went on the air. In this release the headlines said: “Kennedy Advocates U.S. Intervention in Cuba; Calls for Aid to Rebel Forces in Cuba.”

  Each candidate was battling with all guns blazing; as in love and war, there are no limits in a political contest. Nixon’s assessment of Kennedy’s wiles fell short. Again, in the Reader’s Digest article, he wrote: “In a speech before the American Legion convention . . . I had gained the initiative on the issue. . . .”

  It is hard to believe the shrewd Nixon still believed, in 1964, that “[he] had gained the initiative on this issue.” He should have known that after that very same American Legion convention, he had easily been outfoxed by Jack Kennedy. Kennedy proved his wide knowledge of this CIA project by his comments during the 1960 TV debates and during the progression of events that followed.

  Immediately after the American Legion convention, the top-ranking ringleaders of the Cuban exile community, some of whom had been on the platform with Nixon at the convention, flew directly to Washington for a strategy meeting. Where did that meeting take place? Right in the private confines of Senator Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office. Kennedy had stolen a march on Nixon. He made himself totally aware of all that was going on in that top-secret CIA program, and when the time came to fire the big guns, during the fourth television debate, he did. He had all the facts.

  His handling of this major issue was so effective that he won the television debate handily and then won the closest presidential election in history over the outgunned Nixon. At that time, Nixon may have taken a page from the Kennedy clan motto: “Don’t get mad, get even.” A bold counterattack began. Nixon and his cronies determined to get even. Most old-line bureaucrats know that the time to make huge gains is during that “lame duck” period between the election in November and the inauguration of the new President in January. At no time is this gambit more opportune than at the end of an eight-year presidential cycle.

  The CIA and its bureaucratic allies in key government positions made some telling moves that, in retrospect, show how astutely they had read the presidential tea leaves. When Eisenhower had approved the CIA “Cuban exile” proposal, he had one thing in mind. Since the Castro takeover on January 1, 1959, tens of thousands of Cubans had fled the island. In Ike’s view, the best way to provide for these refugees, at least those of military age, was to put them in the army or in an army-type environment, where they would get food, clothing, and shelter while they became oriented to the American way of life. After that they could go it on their own. Thus, he approved a plan to put thousands of them into an “army” training program—and no more than this.

  The CIA, however, saw this as an opportunity to go a bit further. The CIA’s presentation, made by Allen Dulles on March 17, 1960, to the National Security Council,5 was divided into four parts, one of which was “the development of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla action.”

  This was later expanded by the CIA to read:

  Preparations have already been made for the development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba, together with mechanisms for the necessary support of covert military operations on the island. Initially a cadre of leaders will be recruited after careful screening and trained as paramilitary instructors. In a second phase a number of paramilitary cadres will be trained at secure locations outside of the United States so as to be available for immediate deployment into Cuba to organize, train, and lead resistance forces recruited there both before and after the establishment of one or more active centers of resistance. The creation of this capability will require a minimum of six months and probably closer to eight. In the meantime, a limited air capability to resupply and for infiltration and exfiltration already exists under CIA control and can be rather easily expanded if and when the situation requires. Within two months it is hoped to parallel this with a small air supply capability under deep cover as a commercial operation in another country.

  This is precisely how the CIA presented its proposal, and this is the way such clandestine operations generally begin. At the time of approval, the President believed the concept of paramilitary action, as described, was to be limited to the recruitment of Cuban exile leaders and to the training of a number of paramilitary cadres of exiles for subsequent use as guerrillas in Cuba. Let no one be misled into believing President Eisenhower approved an invasion by a handful of Cuban refugees—not the man who had led the massive and successful Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944.

  When this Cuban exile program was initiated, the CIA and its allies in the military had prepared a curriculum6 to provide the students in training with background information on Cold War techniques. A portion of this training described what is meant when the CIA uses the term “paramilitary”:

  Paramilitary Organizations: We Americans are not very well acquainted with this type of organization because we have not experienced it in our own country. It resembles nothing so much as a private army. The members accept at least some measure of discipline, and have military organization, and may carry light weapons. In Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s the parties of the right and the Communists had such organizations with membership in the hundreds of thousands. It is readily apparent what a force this can be in the political life of a country, particularly if the paramilitary forces are armed, when the supremacy of the army itself may be threatened.

  Following formal authorization from the White House Special Group, which included Nixon, the CIA set out to recruit three hundred Cuban exiles for covert training outside the United States. As with most such programs, the CIA began in accordance with NSC directives to come to the military for support. An inactive U.S. military base in Pa
nama, Fort Gulick, was selected as the initial training site. The CIA put together a small unit to reactivate the base and to provide the highly specialized paramilitary training that the agency employs for similar units at certain military-covered facilities in the States, such as the one at Camp Peary, Virginia.

  In the beginning, the CIA was unable to obtain properly qualified military doctors for Fort Gulick and therefore went to the Military Support Office at Headquarters, U.S. Air Force7

  This action marked the formal entry of the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs program in support of the CIA.

  To keep the CIA-Cuban exile program in perspective and to understand the significance of how this prior planning had an impact later upon the administration of John F Kennedy, it must be understood that these events were taking place while President Eisenhower was winding up his eight-year term in office. Eisenhower had had high hopes for his Crusade for Peace, based upon a successful summit conference in Paris during May 1960, and for a postsummit invitation to Moscow for a grand visit with Khrushchev. The visit to the Soviet Union was to cap his many triumphant tours of other countries, where the ever-popular Ike had drawn crowds of more than one million.

  In preparation for the summit and its theme of worldwide peace and harmony, the White House had directed all aerial surveillance activity (“overflights”) of Communist territory to cease until further notice and had ordered that no U.S. military personnel were to become involved in any combat activities, covert or otherwise, during that period.

  Because of these restrictions, the support of this Cuban exile training facility began cautiously. Aircraft that had been ordered for a Cuban exile air force were being processed under the terms of an Air Force contract. In the Far East, an enormous overflight program that had been delivering vital food, medicine, weapons, and ammunition to the Khamba tribesmen (who were battling Chinese Communist forces) in the far Himalayas of Tibet was curtailed. Yet on May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers left Pakistan on a straight-line overflight of the Soviet Union en route to Bodo, Norway, contrary to the Eisenhower orders.