JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  On November 1, 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu were killed. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy died. On that date, November 22, 1963, the government of the United States was taken over by a superpower group that wanted an escalation of the warfare in Indochina and a continuing military buildup for generations to come. Within a few days after the assassination, the trends and policies of the Kennedy administration had started to be changed by the new Johnson administration to assure the achievement of these goals. The warfare in Vietnam would go on to become a major military disaster—but at a good price: no less than $500 billion in total expenses.

  Why did this happen? What had created all the pressure? Why was John F. Kennedy killed?

  Around the time Henry Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon, certain Vietnamese generals began talking with U.S./CIA contacts to determine what the reaction might be to a military coup d’état against the Diem regime. In particular, they were opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother, Nhu, who was the head of the Strategic Hamlet program, and his wife.

  Nhu had developed and controlled the CIA-trained Vietnamese Special Forces and had handpicked the generals who commanded the military units around Saigon. None of the plotters wished to attack that strength. Ambassador Lodge sent a message to Washington noting the disaffection with the Diem regime, and particularly with the Nhus, but underscoring that the Saigon generals were still strongly with the Diems.

  At about this same time, Adm. Harry Felt, the commander in chief of the Pacific Command, called Washington in support of a strong stand against the Nhus, both Diem’s brother and his outspoken wife. Admiral Felt, the senior military commander in the Pacific, was not directly responsible for activities in Vietnam because of the dominant CIA role there. Nevertheless, he followed all developments closely and had his own eyes and ears on the scene.

  Shortly after the admiral’s call to Washington, this author was called to Hawaii. After a long introductory discussion with Admiral Felt, I was asked to sit at a table in his office as members of his staff brought stacks of intelligence messages in for analysis.

  I worked in his office for the entire week, reviewed hundreds of messages and letters, and had many talks with the admiral and his staff. He was vitally concerned with the intelligence situation. He believed that intelligence gathering in Vietnam was very bad and that commanders, both Vietnamese and American, were being forced to make decisions without sufficient military information and without knowing what the actual situation was. This was particularly true at that time. There was much controversy over the status of the actual military situation throughout the country. There was dissatisfaction over Nhu’s deplorable attacks on the Buddhists. There were rumors of the possibility of the overthrow of Diem and his government, or at least the overthrow of the Nhus.

  At the same time, as the U.S. government debated the pros and cons of getting rid of Diem and his brother, there was another unusual development. It became necessary to meet with leaders of the various factions who would support a coup. Such meetings had to be held secretly for the protection of all parties. Certain CIA agents were selected to attend the meetings. One of the men designated for this delicate responsibility was one of the most enigmatic characters of the thirty-year war: Lucien Conein.

  Conein was serving in Vietnam in 1963 as a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He was not actually in the U.S. Army, but was a CIA agent assigned to Indochina under the notional cover of a military officer. Conein, born in France, had been educated in the United States. During World War II his duties with the OSS took him to China, where he worked with U.S. Army major general Gallagher, who operated with the nationalist leader of Indochina, Ho Chi Minh.

  At the time of the Japanese surrender, it became necessary to fill the vacuum of leadership in Indochina, particularly in Hanoi, for the purpose of rounding up the Japanese troops still there and providing a rallying point for the people of Indochina, who had been under French colonization and later the Japanese occupation. General Gallagher was sent to Hanoi for this purpose and took with him Ho Chi Minh, Col. Vo Nguyen Giap, and the French-speaking Conein. This was 1945.

  In early 1954, when Allen Dulles created the Saigon Military Mission for the purpose of infiltrating CIA agents into Indochina under the cover of the U.S. military, he chose his most experienced Far East agent, Edward G. Lansdale, to be in charge of that unit. Among those on the SMM team was Lucien Conein. While Lansdale spent most of his time that year in Saigon with the fledgling Diem administration, Conein was in Hanoi at the same time working against his old associates, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap.

  The scope of the activities of the SMM, and of Lansdale and Conein, had been enlarged to include the mounting of “dirty tricks” against the Vietminh, who were led by Ho Chi Minh, and at times against the French. It has always seemed rather strange that the same man who had arrived in Indochina with Ho Chi Minh should have been the one sent back to Hanoi to employ his clandestine skills against the same Ho Chi Minh. Questions have arisen: Did the SMM really work against the Vietminh, or did it work against the French? And why?

  At the same time, of course, the SMM was actively instigating the movement of the more than one million Tonkinese to the south.

  All of this took place between 1954 and 1963. This same Lucien Conein, who had been designated as the go-between for the anti-Diem plotters—principally Gen. Duong Van Minh and newly installed U.S. ambassador Lodge—had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency. In 1963, nearly twenty years after arriving in Hanoi, he was being employed to encourage the apparatus being formed to eliminate Diem—the man whom the CIA had installed as leader of the new government of the south. This certainly raises a number of questions.

  Why did the U.S. government, in 1945, before the end of World War II, choose to arm and equip Ho Chi Minh? Why did the United States, a few short years later, shift its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French in their losing struggle that ended ignominiously with the battle of Dien Bien Phu? Why, after creating the Diem government in 1954 and after supporting that new government for ten years, did the United States shift again and encourage those Vietnamese who planned to overthrow it? And finally, why, after creating an enormous military force in Indochina, did the U.S. government fail to go ahead and defeat this same Ho Chi Minh when, by all traditional standards of warfare, it possessed the means to do so? The answers to these and related questions remain buried in closed files, along with so much other information of that time period.

  Negotiations leading to the overthrow of Diem, particularly to the elimination of the Nhus, continued through August 1963 but were not conclusive. An August 31 message from Ambassador Lodge, however, came close to outlining the series of events that became the approved plan.

  It had become clear that the war could not be won with the Diem regime in power in Saigon, that the Vietnamese people were not with him. But these conclusions failed to consider the impact of the one-million-plus Tonkinese Catholic “refugees” on the people of South Vietnam and of Diem’s callous disregard for the welfare of the indigenous population. U.S. officials never seemed able to understand why the situation, political and military, was much worse in the far south, the Mekong Delta region, than it was in the north and central regions. After all, if the Vietminh in the north were behind the Vietcong enemy in the south, how did it happen that the people farthest from North Vietnam were the most hostile to the Diem government and those nearest to the North Vietnamese the most peaceful? The answer never surfaced. Most of the one-million-plus refugees had been dumped into the southern districts south of Saigon. That was the simple, undeniable, and most volatile reason. They had become the “insurgents” and the fodder for the insatiable war machine.

  Under the burden of these and other questions, President Kennedy set up a train of events that became vitally important and that revealed his own views and his future plans for Vietnam. In the aftermath of the showing of
Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, there were many top columnists, among others, who attempted to have the American public believe that the Kennedy administration had not produced any substantive body of historical fact concerning his plans for Vietnam. They were wrong—dead wrong. It is very interesting to speculate on why these columnists all “circled wagons” with their untenable stories even before JFK had been shown in the theaters. What is the source of their common bond?

  In response to their contrived questions and to bring to light the facts of the matter, I shall present selected information from the public record and from personal experience. A recently published (1991) book, the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961—63, volume 4, by the Government Printing Office, specifically covers “Vietnam, August—December 1963.” This book contains the record of frequent meetings, studies, messages, and travels to and from Saigon by top U.S. officials at the White House, the Department of State, and the Defense Department during that period. These meetings often included Kennedy, McNamara, Rusk, General Taylor, and other high-level administration officials.

  At that time my boss was Gen. Victor H. Krulak. He was assigned to the Joint Staff and worked closely with General Taylor and President Kennedy. A review of the above source book will reveal that he was involved in as many as thirty such meetings, messages, and trips on the subject of the future course of the U.S. government in Vietnam. Krulak and I worked closely, and I was involved in much of the preparation of this developing policy. A fact that I recall clearly was that Kennedy was the driving force of these meetings and the “idea man” behind the policy.

  Because Kennedy attended a number of these meetings, it will be seen, quite readily, that he was deeply involved in Vietnam planning from 1961 until his death and that the climax of this work came between August and late November 1963. Chief among these records is the Kennedy-generated National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October 11, 1963, which was developed as a result of the McNamara and Taylor trip to Vietnam during September.

  First, the President dispatched General Krulak to Vietnam so that he would be completely up-to-date on matters there, with the purpose of Krulak’s writing a “Trip Report” that would contain the new Kennedy policy and any last-minute items that the general would be able to pick up that might not have been apparent to JFK during the last round of meetings in Washington.

  Accompanying Krulak was a senior Foreign Service officer, Joseph Mendenhall. What most people in Washington had not noticed was that of all the senior officers in the Pentagon at that time, Krulak had become the one closest to Bobby Kennedy, and through him, to the President. This was not only an official closeness; it was also personal. They understood one another and could work together.

  Krulak and Mendenhall made a whirlwind four-day tour of Vietnam and returned with views so opposite from each other’s that during the NSC meeting of September 10, President Kennedy asked, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” This kind of public small talk about their trip concealed the real significance of what Krulak actually had been asked to accomplish for the President—which unfolded with the next decisions from the White House.

  Shortly thereafter, Kennedy announced that he was sending Secretary McNamara and General Taylor, at that time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on another fact-finding mission to Vietnam. Ambassador Lodge did not like the idea, but the President was adamant. The trip was announced on September 21. The two men left on September 23 and were back in Washington on October 2, with a massive report for the President.

  On September 29, McNamara, Taylor, Gen. Paul Harkins, Lodge, and Admiral Felt had met with President Ngo Dinh Diem. The next day, most of them had met privately with the Vietnamese vice president, Nguyen Ngoc Tho. Tho was able to inform them about the failure of the Strategic Hamlet program and of the broad-based peasant disaffection with the Diem government. These were the last top-level meetings with President Diem, and from that day forward his days in Saigon were numbered. The decision to remove him had been made. But it had been planned to take effect quite differently than has generally been reported.

  McNamara and Taylor left Saigon and returned to Honolulu for a oneday stop “to prepare their report.” This was an interesting ingredient of such an official, top-level trip. They had spent a lot of time traveling; they had met people on an unbroken schedule all day long and into the night. And yet, when they returned to Washington, they stepped off the helicopter onto the White House lawn, carrying a huge, leather-bound, fully illustrated official report to the President containing all that they had done during the trip—a report written in one day, during their spare time. Could this be true?

  It seems impossible; yet it happened then, and it has happened on other occasions. Let’s see how this magic is performed.

  When Krulak was sent to Saigon, the President knew that he would come home with all the current data essential for final decision making. But the President wanted to move the decision level up to the top. Therefore, he sent McNamara. While McNamara and Taylor were touring Vietnam, the President, Bobby Kennedy, and General Krulak were setting down the outline of their report—aided by frequent contact with McNamara in Saigon via “back-channel” communications of the highest secrecy—which would contain precisely the major items desired by the President, in the manner in which he wanted them. This report was written and produced in the Pentagon by Krulak and members of his SACSA staff, including this author.

  Krulak is a brilliant man and an excellent writer. He set up a unit in his office to write this report. Teams of secretaries worked around the clock. The report was filled with maps and illustrations. It was put together and bound in leather and had gold-leaf lettering for President Kennedy. As soon as it was completed, it was flown to Hawaii to McNamara and Taylor so that they might study it during their eight-hour flight to Washington and present it to the President as they stepped out of the helicopter onto the White House lawn.

  The Government Printing Office history text Vietnam: August—December 1963 includes a brief note about this “Trip Report”:

  10. Final Report.

  ) Must be completed before return to Washington.

  ) Guides for report are proposed outline prepared by General Krulak and master list of questions consolidated by Mr. Bundy.

  ) To maximum extent, report will be worked out in Saigon. Layover in Honolulu is scheduled for completion of report.

  Let no one be misled: This is simply the public record. That McNamara-Taylor report to Kennedy of October 2, 1963, was, in fact, Kennedy’s own production. It contained what he believed and what he planned to do to end the Vietnam problem. More important, this Kennedy statement on Vietnam was the first and major plank in his platform for reelection in 1964. This was one of the rising pressure points that led to the decision to assassinate him. A Kennedy reelection could not be permitted.

  This report, entitled “Memorandum for the President, Subject: Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam,” and the decisions that it produced played a most important part in the lives of Diem and his brother, in those of President Kennedy and his brother, and in those of the American public because of events that it set in motion. Some of the report’s most significant items were:

  [The Vietnamese were to] . . . complete the military campaign in the Northern and Central areas (I, II, and III Corps) by the end of 1964, and in the Delta (IV Corps) by the end of 1965 . . . to include a consolidation of the Strategic Hamlet program.

  . . . train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.

  . . . the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963.

  Then, revealing the President’s plan to remove the Diems from power:

  . . . MAP and CIA support for designated units, now under Colonel Tu
ng’s control . . . will be . . . transferred to the field. [Col. Le Quang Tung led the CIA-trained Saigon Special Forces loyal to Nhu. This deflated Tung’s power.]

  This is a Vietnamese war and the country and the war must, in the end, be run solely by the Vietnamese.

  With this report in hand, President Kennedy had what he wanted. It contained the essence of decisions he had to make. He had to get reelected to finish programs set in motion during his first term; he had to get Americans out of Vietnam. And he had to make a positive and comprehensive move early in order to accomplish both of these goals.

  To achieve his ends, he send Krulak to Saigon first and then followed this with the “official” McNamara and Taylor visit. All of this was made formal with the issuance of National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October 11, 1963, particularly that section that decreed the implementation of “plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. ”

  Plans continued for the removal—but not the death—of Diem and his brother. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu had left Saigon on September 9 to attend the Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, with plans to extend the trip to Europe and the United States. With the intercession of the Vatican and the papal delegate in Saigon, Diem’s brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, traveled to Rome.

  These detailed plans carefully included arrangements for the departure of President Diem and his brother by commercial airliner from Saigon for Europe. This was the most delicate part of the removal plan. The two men actually were driven to the Tan Son Nhut airport, in Saigon, and boarded the [Super-Constellation] plane waiting for them. Then, for some totally unexplained and unaccountable reason, President Diem and his brother turned and left the plane while the few witting Americans on the scene looked on, stunned by their action.