JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  Therefore, if the ins solicit franchises from businesses in the United States, they are called friendly and pro-Western. If they turn to other sources, they are designated the enemy. If they are the enemy, we have labeled them Communists.

  The leaders of the Contras, who used to serve Somoza in Nicaragua, wanted their valuable U.S. franchises back. For this they were willing to kill. For this the CIA helped them kill. The CIA supported them because it supports U.S. business.

  This may be an oversimplification, but only to a degree. The basic motivations are always the same. Money lies at the root—in the scenario above, the enormous amounts spent on military matériel for the Contras and for the follow-on U.S. troops provided more than adequate incentive for those who intended to make war in Nicaragua.

  In Vietnam the money spent amounted to more than $220 billion. This is why an in-depth recapitulation of the Vietnam era is important in shedding light on the events of today. We have seen it all before. And we have had to pay for it all before, not only with dollars, but with the lives of 58,000 Americans who never returned from that tragic conflict.

  FIFTEEN

  The Erosion of National Sovereignty

  IN HIS NOVEL Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace,1 Leonard Lewin writes: “War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society,” and adds, “War is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state. ”

  Lewin has told me his book is a novel and that he had a serious message to deliver to the public. I was assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1961, at the time Thomas Gates left the office and Robert McNamara arrived. Along with McNamara came a group of dedicated and intelligent men who, for the most part, were not highly experienced in the military and such things as Grand Strategy and the utilization of modern military forces and modern weaponry. Despite this, as I got to know them better—men like Ed Katzenbach, who had been dean at Princeton—we would take part in luncheon discussions that sounded much like Lewin’s writing. This is what was said in the halls of the Pentagon. What Lewin wrote is true to life, and we all would do well to heed his words.

  Novel or not, these were serious words that weighed heavily on the causes of the escalation of warfare in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s. They represent the classic views of a cabal of leaders in our society who fail to see any reason other than war for the existence of man. The very fact that certain select individuals of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were said, by Lewin, to be thinking such thoughts in the face of the reality of the hydrogen bomb shows that this temporal world of ours has been changing faster than its leaders and the public can accommodate.

  And since then, with the lessons of such things as the overt invasion of Grenada, the attack on Libya, the Contra attempt to overthrow the Ortega government of Nicaragua, the use of U.S. military forces to augment the national police of Bolivia, American military aid to the rebels in Afghanistan, the attack on Panama, the “Desert Storm” fighting against Iraq, and the recent creation of a regular U.S. Special Warfare Force for the pursuit of “low-intensity conflict”2 all over the world, respect for the concept of national sovereignty has fallen to a dangerous low in the world family of nations. This is a revolutionary development.

  Knowledgeable grand strategists of the power elite realize today that there cannot be a true, all-out war in a world society equipped with thousands of hydrogen bombs. But Grand Strategy requires that warfare be waged for the purpose of attaining the highest national objective—Victory. No nation can go to war knowing full well that the prosecution of that war with hydrogen bombs will inevitably lead to the elimination of all mankind and to the destruction of Earth as a living system. These strategists have been looking for an alternative. Perhaps Chairman Mao was correct in his forecast: “No matter how long this war is going to last, there is no doubt that it is approaching the last conflict in history.”

  As this realization has permeated the various levels of world leadership, those in positions of genuine power face the chilling reality of this truth. Their game of nations, their house of cards, is already showing signs of falling apart. Principal among these fading truths is the very evident decay of national sovereignty. Without sovereignty there can be no nation-state, and without the state, what remains? A New World Order? Perhaps.

  In the New York Times of July 16, 1986, James Reston wrote, “The Congress has returned from its July Fourth recess to a capital that is changing in subtle ways.” He noted that leaders of both parties have been forced to wonder how the United States could have lost its lead in the trade markets of the world. The United States is now the world’s leading debtor nation. Reston observed that officials in Washington were finding their pet theories being murdered by the brutal facts and were beginning to wonder what went wrong.

  To the question that many were asking, “What went wrong?” he responded, “What we are seeing is just the beginning of a philosophical inquiry about the assumptions of the past—even the validity of the sovereign nation-state.”

  Reston has not been the only one showing concern over this important subject. The fate of our own nation and of the family of nations hangs in the balance.

  During an informal presentation at the National Press Club, a reporter asked the speaker, Richard Perle, then an assistant secretary of state under Reagan and a frequent voice of the Reagan administration on such matters, whether or not he thought the administration had been willfully disregarding national sovereignty. It was the only question Perle evaded and left unanswered during the meeting. He had no other choice. He could scarcely have honestly claimed that the administration did recognize and did honor the principle of national sovereignty. This is evidence of Reston’s “philosophical inquiry.” On a subject of such magnitude, a response is not easy.

  On the other hand, Walter Wriston, formerly chief executive officer of Citicorp, the nation’s biggest banking organization at that time, raised similar questions in his book Risk and Other Four-Letter Words.3

  People of all nations have long since adjusted to the grim reality that an intercontinental ballistic missile can travel from the Soviet Union to the United States, or a reverse path, in about thirty minutes, carrying enough explosives to render society unlivable. . . . We now have a less visible but perhaps equally profound challenge to the unlimited sovereign power of nation-states in the technical reality of global communications.

  What we are witnessing and participating in is a true revolution, and like all revolutions it is creating political unease.

  Wriston cites “communications” as a “challenge . . . to sovereign power” perhaps equal to that of ICBMs. Obviously, both serve to severely limit the undivided power of nation-states. Once that power has been divided, it is, by definition, no longer sovereign.

  Things were not always this way In fact, the concept of sovereignty itself is of rather recent origin. During the sixteenth century, the French political philosopher Jean Bodin defined sovereignty as the ultimate location of that power “which legally commands and is not commanded by others.” He wrote, “Sovereignty is what distinguishes the state from any other kind of human association.”It is neither size nor might, nor the lack thereof, that counts on the world plane: “A state remains a state as long as it is sovereign. . . . Sovereignty determines the structure of the state.” It is basically unitary and indivisible. The jurisdiction of the state cannot be divided, and the state is supreme within its own boundaries 4

  These have been reliable and respected definitions and ideas until rather recently. It may be that this international obligation to honor the concept of sovereignty “no matter the size and power of the state” has led to the utilization of deep secrecy to cover those small, secret operations carried out by one state within the borders of another. The operative state believes in sovereignty as a foundation of the intangible structure of the family of nati
ons; it carries out a covert operation for reasons of presumed necessity, hoping that it will not be discovered and exposed. If exposed, the operative state hopes that it may be able to disclaim, quite plausibly, its sinister and unwelcome role in the affair. This has been the unwritten policy among nations for centuries.

  It may be said, with few exceptions of any significance, that this was the policy of the Eisenhower administration and its predecessors. It may also be said that this was why the Eisenhower administration from time to time directed the CIA, rather than the uniformed military establishment, to plan for and carry out such operations, even though the military possessed the experience and the assets required for such activities and the CIA did not. Within the terms of such a policy, the requirement for secrecy outweighed other considerations. In other words, the administration took a gamble and placed its chips on the CIA.

  By the last years of the Eisenhower era, the CIA had overleaped its bounds. Its vast operations in Indochina, Tibet, and Indonesia and its U-2 spy-plane flights over the Soviet Union had seriously compromised this policy because the operations could not be kept secret, if for no other reason than their size and duration.

  The Kennedy administration inherited this situation, and the early exposure of this practice caused by the disaster on the beach at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba brought things to a head. Kennedy’s new policy signaled a direct turnabout of the assignment of responsibility for covert operations from the CIA to the military.

  In June 1961, when this new policy was announced, Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He and the service chiefs were traditionalists. (The chiefs at that time were Gen. George Decker for the army, Adm. Arleigh A. Burke for the navy and Gen. Thomas D. White for the air force. Lemnitzer’s good friend and confidant, Gen. David M. Shoup, commandant of the Marine Corps, also attended meetings of the Joint Chiefs.) These men all believed that warfare and the utilization of military forces was a formal affair and that the military services were not to be used in any other country, large or small, in violation of that state’s sovereignty. They also believed that the utilization of military forces within the borders of the United States, save for accepted emergency situations, was also a violation of the state’s sovereignty, that is, its power to govern and command.

  In this climate, General Lemnitzer and the service chiefs studied each of the NSAMs from the White House with considerable care.

  Not long after NSAM #55, “Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations,” had been signed by President Kennedy, it was delivered to the secretary of the Joint Staff. Discussion of NSAM #55, #56 and #57 was scheduled on the “Joint Chiefs’ agenda” for an early meeting.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff meet regularly in the Gold Room in the heart of the windowless JCS area of the Pentagon in the depths of that vast building. The agenda for each meeting is selected with care, running from routine unclassified items to those of the very highest classification. The military service and the Joint Staff briefing officers are notified well in advance that they are on the agenda for that date.

  In the Gold Room, the chairman and the service chiefs sit at a large table with ranking staff associates from each service. Rows of special staff members are seated behind them. As a result of the security classification pecking order, these extra staff officials leave after the briefing on their special subject has been given and before the nexthigher level of classification begins. As the morning proceeds, both tables thin out with the departure of these officials.

  On that day in July 1961 when the Joint Chiefs met on these directives, the briefing began with the definition of “Cold War operations. They are secret, clandestine operations sponsored by the highest authority of the U.S. government “in support of an existing government friendly to the United States, or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us.” “Cold War Operations” are distinct from ”Secret Intelligence Operations. “5 Both of these types of operations are a violation of the sovereignty of some state, sometimes even of a friendly state that may unwittingly become involved in the action.

  Although such operations had been carried out by the U.S. government, in one way or another, since 1948 (and of course during World War II), it was surprising to see how little the Joint Chiefs actually knew about them and how little close-in experience they had in this area of operations.

  One of the prominent members of the U.S. Senate,6 a member of that select group which is always informed of such CIA activities before they take place, told me one day when I had been sent to tell him about one of these operations, “Keep it short. What I don’t know about it won’t hurt me.” I had learned that by “short” he meant, “Don’t tell me anything.” That was Senate “oversight” in the 1950s. The JCS felt much the same way and had limited their participation in both the planning and operation of such activities as much as possible.

  As the discussion of NSAM #55 broadened, General Lemnitzer and General Shoup—both of whom had commanded military units on Okinawa that had provided extensive support for the huge CIA activity that took place against the government of President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1958—admitted that they had not realized that that was what had been done with the planeloads of weapons and other war matériel they had furnished in response to a “classified” request made by a CIA agent in U.S. military uniform. It did not take long to see that these military men, all chiefs of their services, were not Cold Warriors and did not intend to be.

  They listened intently to the President’s statement: “I regard the Joint Chiefs of Staff as my principal military adviser responsible both for initiating advice to me and for responding to requests for advice. I expect their advice to come to me direct and unfiltered.”

  They had rarely been included in the special policy channel—which Allen Dulles had perfected over the past decade—that ran from the National Security Council (NSC) to the CIA for all clandestine operations. They did not want to be involved. Their services, of course, inevitably got involved whenever CIA operators approached the individual services for support, such as weapons from the army, airlift from the air force, or sealift from the navy. But despite this logistical support they rarely, if ever, participated in the overall operational planning with the CIA—even for such complex “secret” activities as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

  After the chiefs had been briefed on the key elements of the directives, copies were given to each of them personally for safekeeping. NSAM #56, “Evaluation of Paramilitary Requirements,” had been delivered to the secretary of defense by the White House. It required the compilation of an “inventory [of] the paramilitary assets we have in the United States armed forces.” This task had been assigned by Secretary McNamara to that longtime CIA operator Gen. Edward G. Lansdale.

  The third presidential directive, NSAM #57, “Responsibility for Paramilitary Operations,” was a document of great potential. As written, the primary thrust was contained in an enclosure that proposed the establishment of a Strategic Resources Group for initial consideration of all paramilitary operations and for approval, as necessary, by the President.

  Despite this quite specific language defining the role of this new group, the covering letter contained a recommendation that “the Special Group [5412 Committee] will perform the functions assigned in the recommendation to the Strategic Resources Group.”

  For an important paper from the White House, the language of the covering letter came as quite a surprise. The message of the directive was carried in the enclosure, yet it was negated completely by the sentence cited above that assigned the responsibility for “paramilitary operations” back to the system used by the National Security Council and the CIA since 1954. The confused language that did this was a “recommendation” about a “recommendation.”

  We know that the basic paper (the enclosure) was written by Gen. Maxwell Taylor. The letter that reversed the Taylor procedure was written and signed by McGeorge Bundy. I
n this connection, it is interesting to recall that it was McGeorge Bundy who had made the telephone call to Gen. Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA, on the evening before the Bay of Pigs invasion, canceling the essential air strikes against the last of Castro’s combat aircraft, even though President Kennedy had approved those same air strikes that very afternoon. Later, Bundy, with his brief message, again reversed a decision of the President as affirmed in NSAMs #55 and #57: “I regard the Joint Chiefs of Staff as my principal military adviser responsible both for initiating advice to me and for responding to requests for advice. ”

  By concluding that the Special Group would “perform the functions” of the new Strategic Resources Group, NSAM #57 left the former Cold War operations system in place with one stroke of the McGeorge Bundy pen. This circumscribed the role of the Strategic Resources Group designed by General Taylor. (The supersecret 5412 Committee had been created early in the Eisenhower years and had become the compliant tool of the CIA.)

  The JCS recognized this loophole immediately and slipped through it. They did not want the job of clandestine Cold War operations. With its toe firmly in the door as a result of the loophole in NSAM #57, the CIA began an argument that effectively neutralized that directive and the others. NSAM #57 said, “Where such an operation [clandestine] is to be wholly covert or disavowable, it may be assigned to CIA, provided that it is within the normal capability of the agency.”

  This seemed to make it clear that a small and covert operation would still be assigned to the CIA, despite NSAM #57. Then the directive added: “Any large paramilitary operation wholly or partly covert which requires significant numbers of militarily trained personnel, amounts of military equipment which exceed normal CIA-controlled stocks and/or military experience of a kind and level peculiar to the Armed Services is properly the primary responsibility of the Department of Defense with the CIA in a supporting role.”