JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  It wasn’t long before the Saigon political observer and the padre reported to the American that they suspected that the patriarch was collaborating with the “enemy.” This sharing of their meager goods with the refugees was called “the payment of tribute” by the Vietnamese. The refugees had become the “enemy,” and the Americans’ word for “enemy” was Vietcong.

  The political leader had explained to the patriarch that collaboration with the Vietcong meant death for him and removal of the village people to a Citizens’ Retraining Camp or a “Strategic Hamlet,” as the Americans liked to call it. No matter what their benefactors chose to call these displacement centers, they were prisons to the natives.

  The more or less peaceful demands of the refugees became adamant orders as their needs increased. What had begun as a reluctant sharing of food became submission to force and banditry. The ranks of the refugees swelled as the exodus from such areas as the no-man’s-land of the once-prosperous and fertile Mekong Delta area of the Camau Peninsula turned into a vast and relentless human wave.

  A situation not unlike that of the Native American migrations westward took place. Each tribe, displaced from its ancestral homeland by the white man, became marauders and attackers in the territory of the next Indian nation. Thus it was that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of once-peaceful, docile, and reasonably well-todo rice farmers became the feared, terrorized bandits called the Vietcong.

  Several nights later, the village was raided. The dogs barked, chickens and pigs ran about, the food huts were ransacked and burned, and several young men of the village were kidnapped. For the first time since the installation of the radio, the old man crept out of his hut and stood before the Magic Box. In the deep darkness of the forest night, the red glow of the buzzer filled the sky with its talismanic power. The chieftain had often wondered what would really happen if he pushed that red button. Even though the padre had told him of the wonders that would take place when he did push the warning device, he had never been able to fully comprehend it all.

  The political observer had warned the patriarch of the punishment he would suffer if he turned in a false alarm. At times the red-eyed Pandora’s box proved too much for the villagers, and they dared the patriarch to push the button. He had steadfastly resisted these temptations. But now, in the heat of a raid by the starvation-crazed refugees, he stood before the box, knowing that he would be calling down the might of the Village Self-Defense Forces and that he would bring down the full wrath of the dread People’s Arms of Brotherhood1 upon his village.

  Yet if he did not push that button, he and his people would suffer the fate of collaborators. He had no real choice. It was his turn, and that of his village, to become part of this war that was being made in Saigon with the expert advice of the American men of goodwill.

  He called upon the wisdom of his ancestors. Banditry, pillage, and rape were not unknown in Asia. Whenever starvation, pestilence, and war had ravaged the land, the thin veil of civilization had been torn away, and the destitute had turned to banditry as the last stage of community life before surrendering to the relentless death of the ravaged.

  Hunger is the general of these armies. Hunger provides a terrible motivation of its own. It needs no ideological boost from Moscow or Peking. The blind, ignorant actions of General Hunger are all it takes to create a war. In a lawless, unorganized society, this was the natural and inevitable reaction. This is especially true in a country where the natives eat by nibbling most of the day. They do not sit down to a hearty three meals a day. Tropical peoples eat a bite at a time, and as a result their stomachs are small, and they have very little fat. For these people, starvation sets in much faster than it does for the people to the north, who are fatter and who eat at longer and more regular intervals. Thus, the time between deprivation of food and the driving necessity to eat is much shorter, and such people strike out hard for food as soon as their supply is wiped out. This explains why napalm, bombings, and defoliation tactics created more instead of less war and created it in a short time. The victims were deprived of food and had to fight for it, without delay. The people who had raided the village were of this hungry, refugee populace.

  As the patriarch sought the wisdom of his ancestors, he found nothing to explain this new terror, that is, the unknown “Vietcong.” Bandits and refugees he understood. But the ideological dilemma posed by his new friends, the American and the Saigon political activist, made him, the patriarch, their enemy if he rationalized and sympathized with the refugees, even under duress. This left him no alternative.

  He knew that many other elders had resisted the refugees and had been slain by them out of the necessity for food. He knew that others who had sympathized with the refugees had been brutally taken to retraining camps (prisons) by the political observers and had suffered cruelly there. He knew that there was no hope. No alternative. The food, the medicine, and “Operation Brotherhood” from Saigon had sealed the fate of the villagers and doomed them to the dread final tactic called “Pacification.” He pushed the glowing red button. The Magic Box did the rest.

  A sleep-dulled South Vietnamese Special Forces elite trooper saw the flickering warning light on the situation map. Grid Code 1052 was hostile! Grid Code 1052: The village of Thuc Dho in Rhade territory was under attack. There was no two-way capability with the village radio equipment, no way to discuss the attack or to evaluate the warning from the village chieftain. Any signal was hostile in the Village Defense Network, and “hostile” meant “retaliate.” The system could say only that there was an attack and automatically identify the location. It could not say that the “attack” was nothing more than a small raid by a few starving natives intent on stealing food.

  The Viet trooper took one look at the American Green Beret soldier of the Special Forces “A” Team who was sleeping in a native hammock nearby. He knew that after two minutes the flickering red light would cease automatically. On so many other occasions when the American had been out in the village drinking beer with the other “A” Team members and with the young girls of the “White Dove Resistance Sisters,” he had let other warning lights flicker out without sounding the alert. He realized that the Pandora’s box problem caused many red-light alerts. He knew, too, that some elders, eager to flaunt their powers before the villagers, would push the button to bring out the helicopter patrols.

  He understood that the desperate villagers, half-crazed by starvation and by bandit raids, were often “spooked” into pushing that glaring red eye on the Magic Box. And he knew that even when attacks were real, the Magic Box did not save the villagers. It simply brought on more retaliation, the dreaded wrath of a war of recounter in which the aggressor creates his own enemy. By the time the forces got there, the village would have been burned to the ground. The people would have been killed or be hiding in the forest, so that when the “avengers” arrived the chances were better than even that the villagers would be miscast as the enemy anyhow.

  They appeared to be “enemy” on both sides, and the general rule was to shoot at anyone who ran, regardless of who that person might be. From such a “rescue” the villagers had but one alternative, and that was to flee with the refugees and become “Vietcong,” or “enemy” in their own homeland.

  The trooper wrestled with these thoughts. Just then the American rolled over in the hammock and his rifle, which had been leaning against it, fell to the floor. He leaped to his feet. The Vietnamese trooper snapped into action and pointed to the glowing red alert signal, the warning from the Magic Box in Grid Code 1052, the Rhade village of Thuc Dho.

  The Green Beret veteran of Fort Bragg’s stern indoctrination grabbed the single-sideband radio mike and called Division Alert. In minutes, sirens sounded and engines began to roar. Truckloads of South Vietnamese Special Forces—the elite civilian, CIA-trained troops of Ngo Dinh Nhu—roared off into the early-morning quiet of Ahn Lac Air Base.

  Helicopter maintenance crews readied the ungainly craft. Twenty pi
lots dashed to the briefing room. Twenty crews were being assembled. This one was going to be all-out; it was the first attack reported from the Rhade zone.

  Intelligence had predicted a vast enemy buildup in the area, including a reportedly heavy preparatory movement on the trails of Laos. The dread border of Cambodia was seen to be a beehive of activity. Everything pointed to a massive National Liberation Front/ North Vietnamese masterstroke against a new attack zone.2 The enemy must be stopped now with a resolute counterattack.

  As the semitropical dawn burst in all its pink brilliance over Ahn Lac, twenty helicopters stirred up a hurricane of dust as they prepared for the convoy flight to Thuc Dho. Six of the choppers were gun carriers; the remaining fourteen carried 140 armed troops. As the briefing ended, the pilots were told that the refueling stop would be at Thien Dho because the loaded helicopters could not fly a greater than one-hundred-mile radius mission without refueling. The entire flight would be convoyed. This meant that cruising speed would be fifty-five knots for the cargo craft to assure the ability to autorotate safely to the ground in the event of engine failure at the planned “nap-of-the-earth” flight level. In convoy, with formation and linkup, this would mean an average out-and-back ground speed of twenty-five to thirty knots. Therefore, the returning choppers would RON (Remain Overnight) at Thien Dho after hitting the target.

  The 280-mile round trip with midpoint touchdown at Thuc Dho and out-and-back refueling would take two days. This meant twenty choppers to take 140 men 140 miles in two days. Cheap for the price of avenging the attack on Thuc Dho? Hardly!

  The Village Self-Defense Network helicopter force was an incredible organization. Each helicopter could carry ten armed men one hundred miles in one day. With a one-hundred-mile radius for the helicopter and a convoy speed of twenty-five knots, it would be four hours each way, for a total of eight hours in the air.

  Since army/civilian helicopter maintenance was operating at a commendable 49 percent in-commission rate, it took no fewer than forty choppers to assure the availability of twenty for the Thuc Dho mission. The forty helicopters were supported by two aviation companies of about two hundred men each, a total of four hundred men.

  These companies were in turn supported by a supply squadron and a maintenance squadron of two hundred men each. And all of these squadrons were supported by housekeeping units, transportation units, base-defense units, fuel-storage units, and fuel-delivery units. Never before in the history of warfare had so much been expended to accomplish so little as was being demonstrated by sending 140 fighting men in response to the flashing red light of the Magic Box of Station #1052.

  While the chopper convoy was en route to Thuc Dho, advance-scout aircraft were dispatched to reconnoiter the area for a landing zone. This is no small task in this kind of country. The rotor blades of each Huey are fifty-five feet long. A helicopter must touch down on level ground, since any unequal or nonlevel touchdown, one in which a corner of the landing gear touches first, creates a destructive situation as a result of the dislocation of the center of force around the vertical axis of the craft.

  The Huey is built especially strong to resist any uneven landing force, but fully loaded, with the rotors whirling at full power, the strain can be dangerous. Spotter aircraft must find an area large enough to accommodate several Hueys at a time, to assure the protection of massed firepower in the event of an ambush and to reduce costly fuel consumption.

  By the time the choppers had refueled at Thien Dho and were back in the air, scout aircraft were able to report a landing site at an abandoned farm a half mile from Thuc Dho. It was estimated that three choppers could touch down at one time, in trail. It was also reported that although smoke was still rising from the village, there had been no enemy action against the spotter aircraft and no enemy sighted. Two troop choppers and one armed Huey had maintenance troubles and were forced to remain at Thien Dho. The remaining twelve troop-carrier choppers skimmed the earth at about fifty-five knots as the five gunships weaved across the course to Thuc Dho at full speed.

  In the direct sunlight of early afternoon, the airborne force arrived at Thuc Dho. The spotter aircraft fired smoke flares to mark the landing zone. The gunships hovered over the area, ready to suppress any movement below with direct machine-gun fire. Meanwhile, the convoy began to form a circle around the zone as the first three choppers settled into the field to disembark thirty men.

  Then, quickly, the choppers leaped upward, whirling dust and straw into the air, just before the next three Hueys landed with the next wave of troopers. These pilots were experienced and wasted no time. Crewmen saw to it that the silent South Vietnamese Special Forces elite troops jumped out immediately. The crewmen, too, were experienced and recalled stories of earlier days when untrained troops had to be ordered out at the point of a gun and a few well-placed kicks. In the commotion and difficulty of this maneuver, the second and third choppers of the third wave had touched blades as they neared touchdown. Both machines had disintegrated.

  As the last wave settled on the field, two circling gunships opened fire into the high grass near the forest. This was the opening action. The troopers on the ground flattened out and fired rapidly and blindly. The spotter aircraft lobbed flares to mark the hostile target. The circling, unarmed Hueys began to back away. At that instant, two of them dropped back to the ground. Old hands recognized the pattern!

  When the old H-19s were being used over the rice fields of the Camau Peninsula, the natives had learned that a crude bow held by the feet of a man lying on his back in the grass could be most effective against low-flying choppers. The arrow was a heavy stick that trailed wire, rope, or even a vine. Since the rotor is the most vulnerable part of the helicopter, this crude weapon, fired to “hang” this hazard in the air, brought down many a chopper. First reports indicated engine or rotor failure, since there was no gunfire or other hostile action observed.

  The remaining gunships were nearly out of ammunition, and all the choppers were low on fuel, so the convoy, now down to thirteen Hueys, left the surveillance to the spotters and sped back to the refueling base.

  At Thuc Dho, 120 men, plus a few injured Huey crewmen, were pinned down in the high grass. Gunfire from the ambush site was sporadic. Sixteen of the 120 were of a Green Beret “A” Team. The radio man was in contact with the spotter aircraft, which directed them to the village. Here in the smoldering ruin of grass huts there was not a sign of life. Even the half-starved dogs were gone. With only a few hours of daylight left, the “A” Team lieutenant placed his troops into defensive positions for the night. Thuc Dho had been regained. The Magic Box had proved its value.

  In the early-morning hours when the first word about Thuc Dho had been relayed to the Division Combat Center, it was also relayed to USMACV (U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam) Headquarters in Saigon.

  Here all Village Self-Defense Forces information was collated into a report that was sent directly to the Pentagon. With the twelve-hour time differential, the Pentagon and the intelligence community were able to compile all data relayed from Southeast Asia into an early-morning briefing for the President and his immediate staff.

  This material from intelligence sources, Combat Center input, U-2 and satellite reports, a master weather report, and certain domestic information were put together at the prebrief in the Command Center in the Joint Chiefs of Staff area at the Pentagon.

  Thus the day begins for official Washington. The briefing of yesterday’s events sets up today’s work and tomorrow’s operations. Intelligence input replaces diplomacy and advance planning as the source of “things to do.”

  However, on this special day in early December 1960, there happened to be some new faces at the prebrief. They were the secretary of defense designate and certain of his transition staff. The alarm from Thuc Dho was mentioned quite routinely by an army officer at the early-morning prebrief. The secretary of defense designate, absorbing the first flavor of Vietnam, requested full elaboration on this action
at the briefing the following day. This special highest-level interest was duly noted by all service chiefs and their attending staff members. During the day a flood of messages filled the air to and from Saigon, placing top priority on the action at Thuc Dho.

  The army arranged for a full supply and manpower buildup for the area. The air force announced heavy surveillance and bombing of all supply lines to Thuc Dho through Laos and the northern routes. Thuc Dho appeared in all news releases. Helicopter reinforcement and supply became a maximum effort.

  Meanwhile, Green Beret “A” Team troops established their base, set out the area perimeter, and sent South Vietnamese Special Forces scouting teams to establish contact with the “enemy.” The efforts of these elite troops were ineffectual. The “enemy” had slipped away. A few elderly villagers, along with young children, were found cowering in holes and huddled in the forests.

  When interrogated concerning the attack and the whereabouts of the village patriarch and the able-bodied men, the captives stared in ignorance. Most of all, they were confused when asked about the “enemy.” They kept referring to the “Viet Kha”—the Vietnamese term for “beggars”: the refugees—but the overzealous interpreter translated this to mean the Vietcong. This confirmed for the eager lieutenant that he had stumbled upon a major Vietcong encampment.