The brothers hurried back to their limousine, which had not yet pulled away from the airport ramp, entered it, and drove back into Saigon and to the Presidential Palace at high speed. There they found themselves alone. Their longtime household and palace guards had fled as soon as they realized that Diem and his brother Nhu had gone. Without them, they were all marked men.
The brothers were alone. They had no troops at their call. All anyone in the government knew was that they were going on a trip. There was no fighting, as would have been normal had the plotters made a move against Diem.
This is how their removal was planned, and this is how close it came to success. But they had returned to an empty palace.
The stark realization struck Diem and his brother: They were alone and deserted in a hostile environment. A tunnel had been dug, for just such purposes, from the palace and under the river to Cholon. They ran through the tunnel to what they thought would be safety and ended up in the hands of their enemies. They were thrown into a small military van, and en route to some unknown destination, they were murdered.
EIGHTEEN
Setting the Stage for the Death of JFK,
WHEN I BEGAN TO WORK with Oliver Stone as an adviser for the development of the script of the screenplay for his movie JFK, I realized that few Kennedy assassination researchers and writers had ever looked at the scene in Washington during 1961—63 for clues to the answers to the questions, “Why was President John F. Kennedy assassinated? What enormous pressures had arisen to create the necessity for a decision of that magnitude that would not only result in the death of Kennedy, but in the overthrow of the U.S. government?”
I discussed this subject with Stone and he became most interested in that side of the assassination scenario. I had already written letters to Jim Garrison, judge of the Court of Appeal in New Orleans, as I worked with him on his manuscript of his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. Garrison had become interested in the subject of my letters and had shown them to his editor, Zachary Sklar, at Sheridan Square Press. Sklar became the screenwriter for Stone’s movie JFK, and he had discussed my letters with Stone also. It was Garrison who introduced me to Oliver Stone in July 1990.
The significance of all this was that I had introduced President Kennedy’s Vietnam policy statement NSAM #263, into these discussions. It is my belief that the policy announced so forcefully by Kennedy in his earlier NSAM #55 and in NSAM #263 had been the major factor in causing the decision by certain elements of the power elite to do away with Kennedy before his reelection and to take control of the U.S. government in the process.
Kennedy’s NSAM #263 policy would have assured that Americans by the hundreds of thousands would not have been sent to the war in Vietnam. This policy was anathema to elements of the military-industrial complex, their bankers, and their allies in the government. This policy and the almost certain fact that Kennedy would be reelected President in 1964 set the stage for the plot to assassinate him.
Strong evidence in support of this belief lies in the statements in the previous chapter that are transcribed directly from NSAM #263, and from a description of the deaths of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu.
First of all, NSAM #263, October 11, 1963, was a crucial White House document. Much of it, guided by White House policy, was actually written by my boss in the Pentagon, General Krulak, myself, and others of his staff. I am familiar with it and with events which led to its creation.
Its cover letter authenticated that policy to the addressees. In this case, McGeorge Bundy prepared and signed the cover letter and dispatched it directly to the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Official copies were made available to the director of central intelligence and the administrator, Agency for Internal Development. These formalities authenticated the President’s decision that applied to specific sections of the “Memorandum for the President, Subject: Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam,” dated October 2, 1963.
In order to appreciate what had taken place with the publication of President Kennedy’s policy I shall cite the few paragraphs of this NSAM #263 (Document 146 in the Pentagon Papers)
At a meeting on October 5, 1963, the President considered the recommendations contained in the report of Secretary McNamara and General Taylor on their mission to South Vietnam.
The President approved the military recommendations contained in Section I B (1-3) of the report, but directed that no formal announcement be made of the implementation of plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
After discussion of the remaining recommendations of the report, the President approved an instruction to Ambassador Lodge which is set forth in State Department telegram No. 534 to Saigon.
What is unusual about this cover letter from McGeorge Bundy is the fact that, although it makes reference to the McNamara-Taylor report, it does not carry or cite an enclosure. Without the report itself in the record this cover letter of NSAM #263 is all but worthless. This fact has confused researchers since that time. The cover letter authenticates the fact that the President had approved only “Section I B (1-3) of the report.” In other words, on that date, that was an official statement of the President’s Vietnam policy. What does that section say? In the usual source documents of the Pentagon Papers the researcher will have to turn to another section to find Document 142, “Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam.” Here he will discover the cited sections (pertinent items extracted below):
IB(2) A program be established to 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. military personnel by that time.
IB(3) In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U. S. military personnel by the end of 1963.
In brief, those sections above are the essence of the Kennedy policy that would take men out of Vietnam in 1963 and the bulk of all military personnel out by 1965. At that time, after nearly a generation of involvement in Vietnam, this was a clear signal that Kennedy meant to disengage American military men from Vietnam. This was the bombshell. It made headlines around the world.
On January 15, 1992, Oliver Stone made a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This was about one month after the movie had opened in theaters across the country. In this speech Stone said, “Had President Kennedy lived, Americans would not have become deeply involved in the Vietnam War.”
For his movie, and for having said things such as the above quote, Oliver Stone was attacked by leading journalists across the country. To this he responded, “Am I a disturber of history . . . [not] to accept this settled version of history, which must not be disturbed? . . . No, ladies and gentlemen, this is not history! This is myth! It is a myth that a scant number of Americans have ever believed. It is a myth that a generation of esteemed journalists and historians have refused to examine, have refused to question, and above all, have closed ranks to criticize and vilify those who do.”
Stone was right. But the problem goes beyond that which he cited so eloquently. Our history books and the basic sources of history which lie buried in the archives of government documents that have been concealed from the public and, worse still, government documents that have been tampered with and forged. As I have just demonstrated above, this most important policy statement, NSAM #263, that so many historians and journalists say does not exist, has been divided into two sections in the Pentagon Papers source history. One section is no more than the simple cover letter, and the other section, pages away in the record, is presented by its simple title as a “report” with no cross-reference whatsoever to the fact that it is the basic substance of President Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Such things are no accident. The record of t
he Kennedy administration has been savagely distorted in basic government documents and by so-called historians who have accepted the myths to be found on the record.
I have cited these facts with care in order to demonstrate what the original presidential policy was and to compare it with what has been done with it since those days by those who wish to conceal and obfuscate the facts of the Kennedy administration by means of such grandiose “cover story” creations as the Pentagon Papers, the Report of the Warren Commission, and the whole family of historical publications both from governmental and private sources. As we have seen repeatedly, the cover-story aspect of the plot to kill the President is much the more serious and elaborate task of the whole plan. Furthermore, as we have seen as a result of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, the cover-story activity lives on today.
When the “Department of Defense Study of American Decisionmaking on Vietnam,” as the Pentagon Papers study is called officially, was completed in January 1969, it was said to be highly classified and did not become available to the public until Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked in Vietnam with Lansdale and Conein, found a way to make the documents available to certain major newspapers in June 1971. While the Nixon administration was bringing charges against Ellsberg and the newspapers in order to suppress their use, Senator Mike Gravel obtained a complete set of these documents and, over a period of days, read them into the Congressional Record as a way of making them available to the public.
In his introduction to this four-volume compilation Senator Gravel said:
The Pentagon Papers tell of the purposeful withholding and distortion of facts. There are no military secrets to be found here, only an appalling litany of faulty premises and questionable objectives, built one upon the other over the course of four administrations, and perpetuated today by a fifth administration.
The Pentagon Papers show that we have created, in the last quarter century, a new culture, a national security culture, protected from the influences of American life by the shield of secrecy.
This was 1971. In 1991, after time enough to permit government historians to correct the brazen errors and omissions of the record of the Vietnam era, the Office of the Historian in the Bureau of Public Affairs of the Department of State has published a new document, “Vietnam August—December 1963.” Even in this new publication, the presentation of NSAM #263 is unclear. On page 395 it publishes document #194, National Security Action Memorandum #263 in the form presented above. Then without any cross-referencing data whatsoever, on page 336, it presents Document #167: Memorandum From the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor) and the Secretary of Defense (McNamara) to the President, Subject: Report of McNamara—Taylor Mission to South Vietnam. Then to further obfuscate the record, this State Department publication omits crucial elements of the trip report entirely. Instead of improving the historical record with the passage of time, the authors are further distorting it. There can be but one conclusion. Almost three decades later the cover story lives on, and records of the Kennedy era, in particular, are the hardest hit.
The deaths of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu in Saigon on November 1, 1963, were considered a Vietnamese internal affair during most of the decade that followed, but on September 16, 1971, President Richard Nixon made a statement that revived those events and put them in a different light. Sen. Harry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, a strong possibility as the Democratic candidate against Nixon in 1972, had suggested that the United States might be in a position to exert discreet pressure upon President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to move toward a more democratic form of government and to settle the warfare in Indochina.
That same day, President Nixon, when questioned by Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News about the Jackson statement, responded, “If what the senator is suggesting is that the United States should use its leverage now to overthrow Thieu, I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem, and the complicity in the murder of Diem; and the way to get out of Vietnam, in my opinion, is not to overthrow Thieu.”
Nixon had put a match to the fuse, and the bomb was certain to explode. The “Pentagon Papers” had been published just three months prior to this exchange, and some of those carefully screened documents did appear to show that the Kennedy administration had had a role in the overthrow of Diem in 1963. But until this Nixon comment, no public official had openly suggested the Kennedy administration was guilty of complicity in Diem’s murder.
It was not long after this press conference that a CIA agent, Howard Hunt, then working as a consultant to Charles Colson, Nixon’s jack-of all-trades, mentioned several of the highly classified messages contained in the Pentagon Papers, specifically those that referred to White House action relative to Diem’s death. Hunt suggested to Colson that it might be possible to alter those messages, in White House files, so that anyone using them for research in later years would “discover” that President Kennedy had, beyond doubt, ordered the murder of President Diem.
Colson, the man who had said that he would walk over his own grandmother if it would help the reelection of Nixon, took no action to stop his crafty consultant from trying to see what he could do with those messages.
These events, among so many others at the time, underscored the nature of the pressures that had been brought to bear on President Diem in Saigon and President Kennedy in Washington during those fateful months of October and November 1963. They also demonstrated the deep animosity that still existed between Nixon and the Kennedys. As this example shows, there were in the Nixon camp those who would not stop at forgery to achieve their goal of destroying the Kennedy historical record.
This was a role played quite willingly by Howard Hunt, who was as bitter about the Kennedys as was Nixon. Despite the unclear account of the assassination of the Diems that appears in the Pentagon Papers, and because of the totally false record that resulted from the forgery of the White House records, the extent of the Kennedy role in U.S. government plans to remove the Diems from power has been stated clearly and authoritatively by those familiar with it.
As mentioned earlier, Diem had made it quite clear what his goals with the Strategic Hamlet program were. His position did not jibe with those who wanted to escalate the war in Indochina and who were not at all interested in the introduction of an ancient form of self-government into the battle-scarred countryside.
On top of this came Kennedy’s desire to get the United States out of Indochina by the end of 1965, as evidenced by his orchestration of a series of events such as the Krulak-Mendenhall visit to Vietnam in September 1963. By late summer, and certainly by the time of the McNamara-Taylor trip, closely held plans had progressed for the removal of the Diems from Saigon. President Kennedy had reached the decision that the United States should do all it could to train, equip, and finance the government of South Vietnam to fight its own war, but that this would be done for someone other than Ngo Dinh Diem.
On the same day that the President received this McNamara—Taylor report, Gen. Tran Van Don had his first “accidental” (it had been carefully planned) meeting with the CIA’s Lt. Col. Lucien Conein at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon. This was a meeting of great significance, and one that to this day has never been properly explained. General Don was the commander of the South Vietnamese army. He had been born and educated in France and had served in the French army during World War II. He and Conein were well acquainted.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1963, the CIA designated Conein, one of its most valuable agents in the Far East, to meet with his old friend of eighteen years, Gen. Tran Van Don, to arrange for the ouster of President Diem. Only ten years earlier, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and Conein had worked hard to get Ngo Dinh Diem started as the newly assigned president of South Vietnam.
Conein’s task was to stay close enough to key Vietnamese to assure them that the United States would not interfere with their plan to move in as soon as President Diem had left Saigon, and to keep A
mbassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Conein’s own CIA associates informed.
The plan prepared by the United States had been carefully drawn to leave Diem no alternative except to leave on this scheduled trip. There was much discussion and argument among members of the Kennedy administration, who knew of the President’s intention to oust Diem once he had left the country. With Madame Nhu and Archbishop Thuc already in Europe, Diem and his brother were to follow to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
The evacuation plan, carefully orchestrated under Kennedy’s direction, broke down, and Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were murdered. There have been many accounts of this coup d’état. They do not tell the role that Kennedy played in the story, and many were created to cover the real plan and to protect those Vietnamese who had worked closely with the administration.
I was on duty in the Joint Chiefs of Staff section of the Pentagon on the day of the coup d’état. My immediate boss, General Krulak, knew the full details of the plan to remove Diem from the scene by flying him and his brother out of Saigon. Krulak remained in contact with the White House as developments in Saigon were relayed. I can recall clearly the absolute shock in our offices when it was learned that Diem had not left on the proffered aircraft for Europe.
One of the most important narratives of this event was written by Edward G. Lansdale in his autobiography In the Midst of Wars. Few Americans, if any, knew Ngo Dinh Diem and the situation in Vietnam from 1954—68 better than Ed Lansdale. He wrote:
As the prisons filled up with political opponents, as the older nationalist parties went underground, with the body politics fractured, Communist political cadre became active throughout South Vietnam, recruiting followers for action against a government held together mainly by the Can Lao elite rather than by popular support. The reaped whirlwind finally arrived in November 1963, when the nationalist opposition erupted violently, imprisoning many of the Can Loa and killing Diem, Nhu, and others. It was heartbreaking to be an onlooker to this tragic bit of history.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 39
