JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  It is little wonder that the Diem brothers found the Kennedy administration difficult to accept. The actions of supplying weapons to both sides, on top of the forced movement of more than one million Tonkinese from the north to the south via U.S.-supplied navy vessels and aircraft, constituted “make war” tactics, in the Diems’ eyes.

  It was in this climate that the Kennedy administration welcomed the post—Bay of Pigs report from Gen. Maxwell Taylor and his assignment as military adviser to the President in the Kennedy White House. On October 11, 1961, the President directed General Taylor and Walt Rostow, a foreign policy adviser, to travel to Saigon.

  Rostow had stated, in the fall of 1961, that it was “now or never” for the United States in Vietnam. Bill Bundy, formerly with the CIA (if “formerly” ever applies to CIA agents) as a Far East expert and, in 1961, deputy secretary of defense, said there was a 70 percent chance to “clean up the situation.” He advised a preemptive strike, an “early and hard-hitting operation.” Neither of these men were military experts. They were just trying to show muscle and daring.

  Taylor was a little more patient and, under the guise of a “flood relief” project, recommended that a small number of U.S. servicemen be introduced into Vietnam. Kennedy agreed and in all later public pronouncements referred to them as “support troops.”

  Meanwhile, Robert S. McNamara and his former Ford Motor Company “Whiz Kids” were gearing up to get into the act. Everyone wanted to be known as a military expert. McNamara did not have any experience with warfare; he knew little, if anything, about Indochina. He was a precisionist. He liked things to be orderly and to be explained in “case study” detail. One of his first decisions, based upon a preinaugural briefing in the Pentagon, was to order the use of a defoliant spray in Vietnam. He turned this idea, his own, over to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the high-powered organization of technicians that had sprung up in the Pentagon in the wake of the Sputnik surprise, where it came under the wing of an old bureaucratic professional, Bill Godel.

  Making use of the postelection hiatus in senior government employee activity, Godel had jumped from the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he had worked under Gen. Graves B. Erskine, USMC (Ret’d), along with Col. Edward G. Lansdale and myself, to the greener pastures of ARPA.

  During its first days, this defoliant project was known as Operation Hades; shortly thereafter, it was given the name Ranchhand. No one gave the project much consideration, and the ordinary defoliant used by the railroads was given a try. In the normal course of business, it never occurred to anyone that this defoliant would prove to be dangerous. As was customary with many projects at this time, the Ranchhand project was approved by McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, Robert Kennedy, U. Alexis Johnson, Mike Forrestal, Dick Helms and Maxwell Taylor.

  The aircraft assigned to this project had been left over from other projects, and their modification for spraying purposes did not prove difficult. No one had any concern for the consequences of the decision to defoliate. As events showed later, the use of harmful defoliants served little, if any, practical purpose in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, the “enemy” found it useful to burn the dead leaves and flee in the clouds of smoke, so it had more use from their point of view than for regular Vietnamese forces.

  During May 1961, McNamara set up a project monitoring system called the Combat Development Test Center (CDTC). This process was characteristic of McNamara and his concept of operation. The objective of the CDTC was to place one office “at the front” in Saigon and the other close to the seat of power, and money, in the Pentagon. They were connected by a direct communication channel. As each problem arose and was identified in Saigon, it was numbered and wired immediately to the Pentagon. Thus, if there was a problem with “the action of the M-16 carbine” in combat, it was given a number in serial order and sent to the Pentagon, where #1156 would be given priority treatment.

  Many people, myself included, used to read the lists of the CDTC priority projects every day. One unusual thing about CDTC projects was that their size, complexity, cost, or combat utility made no difference in their serial listing and treatment. All were equal, one after the other.

  One day, I read a project that stated: “Elite troops of the Palace Guard are suffering from malnutrition on the Cambodian border.” These “elite troops” were CIA and Filipino trained, and they were normally assigned to the palace to guard President Diem and his family. As part of their training they were getting “field combat” experience on the troubled Cambodian border.

  For some reason, they suffered malnutrition while on this duty. Without delay, ARPA, the Pentagon manager of the CDTC project, set up a conference in the Pentagon for nutrition specialists from three leading universities. These specialists were next flown to Hawaii for Indochina briefings, then to Saigon, and thence to the Cambodian border. There they learned that the “elite troops,” for the most part Tonkinese, could not eat the food prepared for them in Saigon and flown to them on the border. It lacked a native sauce that, to the Tonkinese, was essential.

  The ARPA team arranged to have the sauce prepared in enormous quantities and, for lack of a better alternative, run through a nearby softdrink bottling plant. The bottles were packed in wooden crates, airlifted to the border, and paradropped to the starving troops. End of case—almost.

  Some months later, I observed a new CDTC project much farther down the numbered list. It read, “Elite troops of the Palace Guard are suffering malnutrition on the Cambodian border.” ARPA handled each case by rote. It called a conference of nutrition experts—in the random process, these were different people—and flew them to Saigon.

  In Saigon, they were told about the earlier project and shown the large-scale production facility and bottling plant. All seemed in order. Nevertheless, they asked to be flown to the border. There they found the starving troops. The problem was not difficult to discover.

  When the cases of special sauce had been paradropped, the glass bottles were smashed. The troops were not allowed to eat anything for fear of broken glass. There was the problem. Back to Saigon.

  Now the experts looked for a cannery. The nearest available one was at the San Miguel brewery in Manila. It was disassembled, flown to Saigon, and reassembled. The special Tonkinese sauce was made in the same vats and then canned at the new facility. This time, when the sauce was air-dropped to the troops, it survived the impact. The team of nutritionists declared the project a success and returned to their separate campuses. ARPA closed the project without ever looking back and turned to the next case. This was how the modern war was being fought in the halls of the Pentagon—“Whiz Kid” style.

  Other examples were not so amusing. A Washington lawyer with ready and frequent access to the White House had made a trip to Florida, where he saw some massive machines clearing land in great swaths. As rows of these monster machines moved forward in teams, one beside the other, they chewed up everything in their way and left behind bare ground about as smooth as a tennis court. This lawyer was told that such machines were used in Latin America in the upper Amazon Basin, where they chewed their way through the rain forests, producing pulp for paper manufacture and leaving behind nothing but bare, dead ground.

  When he returned from Florida, this quick-thinking lawyer went to see McNamara, after having paid a tactical call on the President, and suggested that an array of these enormous machines, set loose at the noman’s-land of the 17th parallel in Vietnam, could remove everything on the ground and leave nothing but bare earth. He suggested that the bare earth be networked with electronic devices that would permit the instant detection of anything that moved. This became a CDTC project, and before long it became the multi-billion-dollar “electronic battlefield.”

  In a similar but more costly deal, another astute planner learned that one of the major problems in Indochina was its lack of ports adequate for seagoing cargo vessels. Through all the early years of the war, almost all s
upplies delivered by ship had to be off-loaded in the inadequate river port of Saigon, far from the sea. (It is something like the minor port of Alexandria, Virginia, far up the Potomac River near Washington.)

  This man rented a large office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington and had a huge replica of the Cam Ranh Bay (Vinh Cam Ranh) area on the coast of Vietnam constructed on a set of large tables. He filled it with water, and it looked like the real thing. It was his idea that the natural, shallow bay could be dredged and that huge plastic bags could be submerged, with weights, and used for the storage of large quantities of gasoline and jet fuel.

  The weight of the seawater on these plastic bags would pump the lighter petroleum through pipes to a seaside storage site. His estimate for this project ran to about $2 billion. McNamara and his CDTC people put the project up for bid. A huge consortium of general contractors worked together on the project, and before it was done, that original $2 billion project had multiplied in cost many times over. This was the part of the Vietnam War that was rarely seen and is still seldom realized. After all, the $220 billion direct cost of the war—perhaps an overall cost of $500 billion—had to have been spent somewhere . . . somehow.

  The Kennedy team had decided on the priorities. They had learned from the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation that they could not trust the CIA, and they had learned from Gen. Maxwell Taylor that the only way to fight the kind of war they inherited from the CIA in Indochina would be to do it with the kind of paramilitary tactics as waged by the U.S. Army Special Warfare units.

  Because all earlier U.S. Special Forces troops had been serving in South Vietnam under the operational control of the CIA, Gen. Maxwell Taylor had proposed in his letter to President Kennedy on June 13, 1961, that National Security Action Memoranda #55, #56, and #57 become the basis of a new order of things. Kennedy had agreed without delay, and by late 1961 he had installed General Taylor in the White House as his special military adviser.

  Not long after that, Taylor and Rostow made their trip to Saigon and returned with their proposal to introduce U.S. “support troops” into Vietnam under the cover of a “flood relief” action. Kennedy approved of this modest recommendation, and a new era was begun—one based upon an even greater change in Washington.

  Allen Dulles, Gen. C.P. Cabell, and Dick Bissell were out. Ed Lansdale’s star was in eclipse, and a new internal battle was under way in the murky halls of the windowless Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. The fight began with the establishment of the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities and the arrival of its boss, Maj. Gen. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak of the U.S. Marines.

  Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the man to whom National Security Action Memorandum #55 had been addressed and delivered, made sure that all of the service chiefs had had an opportunity to read and study these unique presidential papers and then ordered them to be securely filed. Lemnitzer and his close friend Gen. David M. Shoup of the U.S. Marine Corps were traditional soldiers. They had never been “Cold Warriors” or Cold War enthusiasts. Nor were they proponents of an Asian ground war.

  It bothered Lemnitzer not at all to observe that Kennedy had created the office of “military adviser to the President” and had placed Taylor in that office. By the end of 1962, General Lemnitzer was on his way to the NATO command in Europe, while Kennedy, Taylor, and all the others had become mired in the quicksands of Southeast Asia.

  When President John F. Kennedy published National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28, 1961, “Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations,” he directed the Joint Chiefs to “present the military viewpoint in government councils.” This did not work. The U.S. military establishment was neither designed nor prepared to engage in peacetime covert operations, nor did it wish to be. As a result, this type of activity remained with the CIA by default.

  The CIA, however, is no more prepared to wage clandestine warfare than is the military establishment, except for one point: The CIA is always able to incite an incident sufficient to require U.S. action and involvement. The CIA can do this because it has, or is able to create, intelligence assets. The CIA is the first agency of the government to make contact with “rebel” or “insurgent” parties.

  CIA spooks prowl the bars and meeting places of other countries in search of just such information. One may overhear, or participate in, a conversation with some natives who are making derogatory remarks about the government in power, as Contra leaders did in the case of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega.

  The agent races to his “back-channel” communication system,7 reports directly to his boss in CIA headquarters, and then is urged to obtain more information and to broaden his sources; this is why the agent was sent there in the first place. So he gets more information, even if he has to encourage or generate it. This leads to the beginning of a clandestine operation. It is a reaction process, not a planned affair.

  At this point, we recall National Security Action Memorandum #57, “Responsibility for Paramilitary Operations,” wherein it states: “A paramilitary operation . . . may be undertaken in support of an existing government friendly to the United States [as in the case of El Salvador] or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us,” as in Nicaragua.

  Those lines were written by Gen. Maxwell Taylor in his post-Bay of Pigs investigation letter to President Kennedy on June 13, 1961. They have always been the doctrine of the CIA and its close allies in the Army Special Warfare program.

  With few if any changes, they were also the basis of the doctrine being promulgated by Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, the key policy official for plans regarding paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.

  In the same memorandum, there is an important but little-noticed definition that plays directly into the hands of the CIA, even though Kennedy was attempting to refocus this type of activity onto the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said, “Small operations will often fall completely within the normal capability of one agency; the large ones may affect State, Defense, CIA, USIA [United States Information Agency], and possibly other departments and agencies.” What this says and what it means are clear enough. How it is applied becomes the problem.

  All clandestine operations begin “small.” Thus, the proposed operation, when presented to the National Security Council for a decision, was sent to the CIA, because the operation was seen to be “small.” But no operation can remain “small” once the CIA begins to pour into the fray tens of millions of dollars and the tremendous military assets of the United States.

  Over the years, the CIA has developed an efficient system of obtaining military equipment, manpower, overseas base facilities, and all the rest, ostensibly on a reimbursable basis, in order to carry out covert activities. The reimbursement is made by transferring hidden CIA funds in the Department of Defense accounts to DOD, thereby repaying all “out-of-pocket” expenses of the military. This complex but effective system has been in effect since 1949. For example, in Indonesia in 1958, the CIA was able, quite easily, to support a rebel force of more than forty thousand troops by using U.S. military assets. So what is “small”? And if it is not “small,” if it has got large enough to be transferred to the Department of Defense, how will that be done? How can anyone rescue the situation after it has got out of hand?

  At what point should U.S. military forces be prepared, for example, to enter into paramilitary action in Nicaragua or Africa? It is an old military axiom that “as soon as the blood of the first soldier is shed on foreign soil the nation is at war.” The activities in Nicaragua were “small” when they began after the ouster of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The CIA mined a harbor. It supported antigovernment Contra rebels. It spent $20 million for related purposes. Before long, it had spent another $27 million and eventually went on to spend more than $100 million.

  Inevitably, this action in Nicaragua would cross the line from “small” to “large.” Inevitably, American
blood would be shed, and inevitably regular military forces would be called in to bail the Contras out, just as they were called into Vietnam in 1965 after the CIA and the OSS had worked there for two decades to escalate that conflict.

  There are two enormous problems with this method of handling such activities:

  The action initiated by the CIA is a reaction to some minor and, perhaps, misleading event, and

  It is based upon a totally false definition of the problem.

  “Reaction,” by definition, implies the lack of a plan and of an objective. This was the single greatest strategic failure of the Vietnam conflict. The United States had no reasonable military objective; it simply reacted to the situation it found there.

  A false definition of the problem is the greatest failing of American administrations and explains why such adventures are rarely, if ever, successful and productive. Any military activity instigated as no more than a reaction to some minor event lacks the element of strategic planning that is needed to attain an objective.

  The Third World or less-developed countries were poorly defined. Despite decades of propaganda that would have had us believe they lived in either the “Communist” or “pro-West” sphere, they were not dedicated members of the bipolar “Us or Them” political scheme.

  The distinguishing feature of these smaller countries is that they are not broad-range manufacturers or producers. They do not make typewriters, radios or televisions, coffeepots, fabric, automobiles and trucks, etc. Their biggest business, as a nation, is the import-export business. Therefore, much of their national revenue is derived from customs fees, and much of their private wealth is derived from individual franchises for Coca-Cola, Ford automobiles, Singer sewing machines, and so forth. They are totally dependent upon such imports and exports.

  In such an economy, the ins, regardless of politics, control these lucrative franchises, and the outs do not. This creates friction. It is based on pure economics and greed and has nothing to do with communism or capitalism.