Later in the report, that same thesis is sounded again: “The maintenance of internal security constitutes a major responsibility of these armed forces. . . .”
The report states: “. . . a key requirement may be direct military action against armed dissidents; consequently, appropriate elements of the army should be equipped and trained for unorthodox warfare.”
It reaches a climax with the following statements of U.S. military policy, concealed in 1959 behind a Third World policy. This affirmative presentation at the White House level shows how thoroughly the new U.S. military doctrine—albeit for other nations, the authors say—followed the teachings of Chairman Mao.6
Here is the ultimate test of the armed forces. Their role, in the countries under discussion, is unique. They are at once the guardians of the government and the guarantors that the government keeps faith with the aspirations of the nation. It is in their power to insure that the conduct of government is responsive to the people and that the people are responsive to the obligations of citizenship. In the discharge of these responsibilities, they must be prepared to assume the reins of government themselves. . . . We have embraced the struggle for the minds of men. . . .”
The report continues and endorses the “Formulation of a Military Creed.” It cites: “the unique responsibilities of the military forces—one might almost say armies—in the development of political stability and national unity” and talks about “the relationship of the military instrument to the state and to civil power.”
This Eisenhower White House Report takes on full color when we recall that Chairman Mao had launched, in 1957—only two years before this report was written—the Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt to decentralize the Chinese economy, such as it was, by establishing a nationwide system of people’s communes.
At the same time, the CIA, augmented by the U.S. Army and the Department of State and assisted by experts from the Department of Agriculture, was working with the Diem government of South Vietnam to establish hundreds of similar communes, then called “Agrovilles” and later “Strategic Hamlets,” in South Vietnam.
And in May 1959, this White House presidential committee had suggested in the same report: “Military equipment and labor can expedite completion of village communal projects. . . . Only thus can an enduring relationship be established among the government, the military, and the people themselves.”
Mao’s doctrine, even in the Great Leap Forward, found itself flowing from the pens of U.S. military officers in the form of revolutionary ideas. The nations they describe are to be sliced up into three distinct entities: the people, the government, and the military. What kind of country is that? They do not say. But their new U.S. military doctrine was thrust upon the emerging government of Vietnam, and their concept of Cold War (peacetime) operations permeated the highest levels of government at the time Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961.
There is a strangely contrived side to all this. As Mao Tse-tung had said: “The world today is already in a new era of evolution and today’s war is already approaching the world’s last armed conflict. . . . No matter how long this war is going to last, there is no doubt that it is approaching the last conflict in history.”
By the mid-1950s, significant elements of the U.S. military establishment had begun to accept the fact that a nuclear war was impossible and that the Cold War was the best scenario for those who saw some form of warfare as essential to the existence of the nation-state.
In several earlier chapters, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace was cited as a novel of crucial importance. It stated that a nation-state could not survive without warfare, and this work about a top-level study commissioned in August 1963 described an attitude that had begun to surface right after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.
The members of Kennedy’s inner circle were concerned that no serious work had been done to plan for peace in the world, and such discussions were heard in the Pentagon. The commissioning of the study in Report From Iron Mountain illustrates this concern.
The reader will understand that the author, Leonard Lewin, has a perfect right to characterize his work as a “novel.” I have spoken with Lewin at length. He is a well-informed man who was well aware of the situation in Washington as pictured in the Lansdale/Stilwell report in 1959 and its progression into the Kennedy era, with its Pentagon offices filled by Phi Beta Kappas and other men of experience and learning. The most interesting part of both “reports” is the many ways in which they overlap and agree with each other; and, even more important, how they have survived the contrivances of the Cold War and have become thoroughly modern military doctrine.
Chairman Mao predicted all this. Many good strategists in the U.S. military also foresaw it, so they designed the parameters of the new type of military doctrine and a new type of constant warfare that would, for the most part, take place in the territory of relatively powerless Third World nations.
Thus, in the process of stamping out “Communist-inspired subversive insurgency” or other bogeymen foes, millions of defenseless little people were murdered, as though some monstrous Malthusian bulldozer had been mindlessly set in motion to depopulate Earth. Classic examples of this was the massive slaughter in Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war, and subsequently “Desert Storm” and other related hostilities in the Middle East.
It just happened that Kennedy put a man he had never met, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, on the Cuban Study Group after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Taylor had been the chief of staff of the U.S. Army when the Mutual Security Program report was written. No man was better prepared to further that philosophy. It was written in accordance with his guidance. He believed and endorsed this new doctrine that members of his army staff had developed.
The Cuban Study Group was the source of the report that had been given to the President on June 13, 1961, that in turn became National Security Action Memoranda #55, #56, and #57 on June 28. They hit the Pentagon like a thunderclap and caused a muffled roar from the State Department and the CIA. General Taylor was their author. (I have acquired a copy of the original work, and these documents will be discussed in detail in chapter 15.)
Shortly thereafter, General Taylor moved into the White House as military adviser to the President. This created a rather anomalous situation. President Kennedy had just sent NSAM #55 to the incumbent chairman of the JCS, General Lemnitzer, saying that he wanted his advice on Cold War matters, then he placed General Taylor in the White House for practically the same purpose. That October, the President sent General Taylor to Vietnam for a military report on the situation there. One year later, in 1962, Taylor was made chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he remained until 1964, when he left to become ambassador to South Vietnam.
THIRTEEN
The Magic Box, Trigger of the Expanded War in Vietnam
THIS IS THE STORY of a people who endured war for thirty years, who were driven from farm and home, and who had no way to get food, water, and the other necessities of life other than by banditry.
As veteran bandits they became good fighters—so good that we credited their success to Ho Chi Minh, to General Giap, to Mao Tse-tung, to the Soviets, and, at times, to our own doves. They fought to eat, to live. Some called them the Vietcong. In their own country they were known as the “dangerous brothers” rather than the enemy. They were terrorized refugees in their own homeland, the beggars, the people of a ravaged land.
If a person were to fly over the hills of Indochina, he might be reminded of the Green Mountain State of Vermont. He would see similar lush, rolling hills that pull a blanket of green up one side, over the top, and down the other. But the Vermont hills were not always that way, not always peaceful; read Kenneth Roberts’s great book of our own Revolutionary War, Northwest Passage. To the early American war heroes and to the British invaders, Vermont was a nightmare, a green hell. So, too, was Vietnam to the American GI and to the CIA’s underground warriors.
Glorified in
the pages of National Geographic magazine as the home of the carefree, naked, little brown man, Vietnam has for centuries been considered one of Earth’s garden spots, a place where man had only to exist to live comfortably. Deep in the forest on the mountains, the Rhade (Rah-Day) tribesmen have lived for hundreds of years. They grow crops. They raise chickens and pigs. They have been lumbermen. They lived easily with the French for generations and managed to coexist with neighboring tribes, because they were strong. The Rhade are a closely knit, self-disciplined group.
After the great defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu by the Vietminh army under General Giap, the French lieutenant of police left the Rhade area, taking with him his family and his few belongings. In his place a Rhade corporal took over the police powers, and things continued about the same, except that European-style law and order ended. The village elders, or Huong-ca, resumed their political functions under their own traditional council.
The French padre stayed only a few more months. When he departed, European religion and medical care went with him. Then the French overseer at the lumber mill took off, and work there stopped, for with him had gone the European economy. With the cessation of the only real income-producing enterprises of the area, contact with the outside world was severed almost entirely. Now and then a Chinese trader would come with his few coolies, bringing salt, cloth, blades (axes, knives, machetes), and news. But the Chinese merchants, too, came less frequently. The Rhade farmers had to work all the harder to produce the extra provisions that the elders would have to take to the central village over the mountain to trade for necessities.
In a country where tall grasses and bushes shoot up about as fast as they can be cut down, it is nearly impossible to grow a crop in the fields. A field that has been standing uncultivated abounds with such a thick cover of grasses that the tiny sprouts of seedlings can never grow. These tribesmen farm by cutting, slashing, and burning the forest to get to cleared earth and luxuriant soil. They have learned from their forefathers to kill the trees at the margin of the forest and then, hurriedly, to plant their scant seeds in this new, bare ground. If the farmer diligently fights the inroads of the grasses and weeds, he may have a farm for several years. But if he turns his back, the grasses take over. This battle is eternal.
The Rhade have worked hard to clear more ground and to harvest more crops. But crops alone do not make an economy. Produce must be moved to market; there must be a place where one can buy and sell. Without this, produce rots. When the French and Chinese no longer came to the Rhade regions, the produce rotted, and the basic economy staggered to a halt.
When a basic economy deteriorates in a marginal area—in Indochina, in Africa, or in Oklahoma—the people must move on. When war, pestilence, flood, drought, or some other disaster strikes a primitive society, the people must search elsewhere for food and other necessities. Often this search becomes banditry, and banditry, that last refuge of the desperate and starving—is a violent business—so violent that in this case it led the uninitiated to believe that there was a wave of “Communist-inspired subversive insurgency” in the land, under the command of General Hunger.
During the early, amateurish days of the ten-year Diem dynasty, in that newly defined piece of real estate that was called South Vietnam, there was considerable misinterpretation. Little did Ngo Dinh Diem, that foreign mandarin and erstwhile Father of His Country, realize that by issuing an edict removing French influence he was bringing an end to law and order, such as it was. Nor did he realize that by promulgating a second edict banning the Chinese, he was causing the basic tribal economy—marketplace bartering and produce movement—to vanish.
The French did not return; neither did the Chinese. But one day the old padre came back. The tribesmen turned out to greet the familiar face. This fragile gentleman had new clothes and new shoes, and he rode into the village in a jeep. The Rhade had not seen such a thing since the return of the French after the Japanese had gone—the French lieutenant and his family had arrived in a jeep back in the mid-1940s. The padre dismounted and spoke to his old friends. Then he introduced the young driver of the jeep, explaining that this young white man was American, not French, and that the other passenger was a Vietnamese from the faraway city of Saigon.
The padre said that the French no longer governed the country but that a great man named Ngo Dinh Diem was the president of this new bit of land called “South Vietnam” and that his palace was in Saigon.
The padre avoided mention of Ho Chi Minh and the northern government. He knew it would be useless to try to explain that Ho Chi Minh’s Nationalist government was not the government of all Indochina. It would be too complicated, it would not be believed, and the Rhade would not care much one way or the other anyhow. The Rhade had lived in their ancestral areas for centuries and cared little for the outside, whether it was represented by Japanese, French, American, Vietminh, or Saigonese officials.
The padre, the young American, and the Vietnamese official returned many times. After a while, the American was welcomed without the priest and often stayed for weeks. He was interested in animal husbandry and agriculture. He brought with him some poultry and a new breed of hog that he taught them to raise. He carried with him new seeds and tried over and over to encourage the Rhade to plant them as he directed. On countless occasions he would persuade the villagers to dig holes in the fields and to plant the seeds as he had learned to do at the university in Ames, Iowa.
He never did understand the Rhade farmers and their primitive “slash and burn” farming. And they never could explain to this young expert that the seeds could not grow in that heavy grassland of the open fields. In any event, the American became a familiar figure, and his hard work and gifts of chickens, pigs, candy, and cigarettes were always welcome. Then one day he came with the Magic Box.
The padre, the American, and the Huong-ca sat in earnest discussion all that day. The Magic Box rested on the hood of the jeep while several young men dug a hole in front of the patriarch’s hut. They were unaccustomed to the American’s shovel, and work progressed slowly. Meanwhile, the American felled a tree and cut out a section to be used as a post. This post was put into the hole and the dirt replaced.
Now a tall, sturdy, upright pedestal stood in front of the chieftain’s hut. To this, the American affixed a tin roof as shelter. Then he removed the shiny jet-black Magic Box from the jeep and nailed it firmly to the post, about four feet above the ground, just the right height for the Huong-ca and above the prying hands of the children.
After the box was secured, the padre told the villagers all about the Magic Box and how it would work, about the wonders it would produce to save them from communism. He told them that this box was a most miraculous radio and that it would speak to their brothers in Saigon. It was, in their language, powerful medicine.
At the same time, he warned that only the village patriarch could touch the box. If anyone else did so, the kindly government in Saigon would be most angry, and the village would be punished. The padre told the villagers that whenever they were attacked, the patriarch should push the big red button on the box, and that was all.
At this point in their Village Defense Orientation Program, the Viet soldier and the American interrupted the padre and ordered him to repeat that if the village was attacked by the Communist Vietcong from the forest—emphasizing the “Communist Vietcong”—the patriarch was to push the button. To the Viet soldier and the American, the men in the forest were not starving and frightened refugees; they were the enemy.
Because the elderly padre knew that these native people had never heard of the Vietcong, he explained that his friends called all bandits from the refugee camps in the forest “Vietcong” and that the Vietcong were to be greatly feared because they were the puppets of the National Liberation Front, who were the puppets of Hanoi, who were the puppets of the Chinese, who were the puppets of the Soviets, ad infinitum.
The padre explained that when the patriarch pushed that shiny red but
ton on the Magic Box, the powerful gods of Saigon would unleash vengeful armies through the air, and the dreaded Vietcong would be blasted by bombs from airplanes and napalmed from helicopters. And the village would be liberated and pacified. He also told them that every village that had been selected by the Father of His Country in Saigon to receive the Magic Box would forever thereafter be furnished food, medicine, and special care.
The Rhade would receive these “benefits” whether they wanted them or not. For they knew only too well that the villages that had plenty of food and medicine and that were the special elect of Saigon were always the first targets for the starving bandits. They knew enough to know that they would live in fear of the Magic Box and its munificence.
Ever since the day when the padre had returned with the American, the village had received special medicine and food relief. The “Extended Arms for Brotherhood” program of the new president in Saigon was caring for these tribesmen. Shortly after the first time this extra food had been delivered, the village had been visited by some young men from the camps in the woods. They sat with the patriarch all day and quietly but firmly explained that they came from a refugee camp that was hidden in the hills and that was caring for thousands of homeless natives from the south (Cochin China) who had been driven from their homes by the Diem-backed police and hordes of northern (Tonkinese) invaders.
These people had fled from their wasted homes. They had been enemies in every new region they came to, and now, terrorized and starving, sick and dying, they had had to turn to that last resort of mankind, banditry and pillage. These countless refugees, in their own homeland, had fled the careless deprivations and brutal massacres of the benevolent forces of Saigon. They wished to be peaceful, but they desperately needed food and medicine. They demanded that the village share some of its plentiful goods with them. This arrangement, although unappealing to the village, was accepted, and for a while it kept a fragile peace between the two worlds. However, the refugee numbers swelled, and their demands became greater and greater.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 29
