The above paragraph, with its quotes directly from the Defense Department—prepared Pentagon Papers, is truly staggering in light of what actually took place. First of all, it does not seem to concur with what Kennedy was planning; just consider the words of the Kennedy Trade Mart speech planned for November 22 in Dallas. Let’s analyze this bit of propaganda from the Pentagon Papers with care.
Kennedy, his military advisers, and his administration had concluded that things were getting better in Vietnam and that the United States would be able to turn the countersubversion activity over to the Vietnamese and get out of Indochina. Kennedy had not changed his course on Vietnam and never intended to change it.
Who called the strange Honolulu conference of the Kennedy cabinet? Who had tabled the agenda on the “deterioration of the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program”? Not only that, but what unusual event had caused the decision that the cabinet members, or at least a majority of them, should travel on to Tokyo for other meetings—on what subjects? Keep in mind that even the secretary of agriculture and the secretary of commerce had been involved in that excursion to Tokyo via Honolulu.
In considering these strange events, which are cataloged in an official Defense Department summary of the war record, think carefully about this quote fragment: “After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington . . . ”
What a strange way five years later (1968) for the study task force to make the transition from the Kennedy administration to the Johnson era. Lodge had left Honolulu on November 22, the same day JFK was killed. An entry in the Pentagon Papers states: “22 Nov. 1963 Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.”
In all the reports of this period that appear in the voluminous Pentagon Papers material, there is almost nothing at all about the assassination of President Kennedy. For example, it states, quite simply, that Lodge flew to Washington to meet with the President. It does not even make the point that when Lodge left Saigon, Kennedy was President and that when he arrived in Washington, Johnson was President—and Kennedy was dead.
The “Study of the History of United States Involvement in Vietnam From World War II to the Present” (aka Pentagon Papers) had been initiated on June 17, 1967, by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. It is inconceivable that McNamara, Leslie M. Gelb (director of the Study Task Force), and all the others involved intended to scrub that sordid event out of the pages of history; but on the other hand, what they did produce is hard to explain. Along with the rest of the cover-up, including the work of the Warren Commission, the Pentagon Papers material provides the reader with almost nothing at all about one of the most historic events of the entire era, if not the century—the murder of President Kennedy. Is that just an inexcusable omission, or is it a part of the superplanning of the cover-up?
At the very least, this means that as students and historians plunge into the record of this thirty-year period, much of it covered in elaborate detail by the McNamara-Gelb study they are not going to find anything about the death of President Kennedy. As that tragic event drops further into history, it may be all but forgotten, thanks to this type of omission—willful or otherwise. It isn’t difficult to see it as a form of negative propaganda.
It may be that this is all part of a pattern. Within a few days after Kennedy’s death, most of those cabinet members who had attended the Honolulu conference with Ambassador Lodge met with President Johnson in Washington. During that meeting, they discussed the agenda of the Honolulu conference. That agenda gave lip service to the Kennedy plan—but it also laid the groundwork for the change in course that followed as soon as Kennedy was dead.
Following that meeting of November 26, 1963, the President issued NSAM #273. For the most part, its content paralleled Kennedy’s NASM #263 of October 11, 1963, but it also underscored renewed efforts to improve the counterinsurgency campaign in the Mekong Delta. It may be said that this was the “toe in the door.” Alas, the restraint of the policy set forth in NSAM #273 was, at best, short-lived.
It is worth a word here to emphasize the military significance of President Johnson’s NSAM #273 when it states “we should persuade the government of South Vietnam to concentrate its efforts on the critical situation in the Mekong Delta.” This is in the far south of South Vietnam. It is farthest away from Hanoi and the “enemy,” the North Vietnamese. Yet it was then, and had been for years, the scene of much of the “insurgency” and “Vietcong activity” found in Vietnam.
This is like saying that the Canadians were an enemy of the United States and were causing violent insurgency in this country and that this outbreak was most prevalent in Florida. Because we know the geography here, we would recognize immediately that something was wrong with such a scenario.
Why was it, in Vietnam, that the most violent outbreaks of Vietcong insurgency were almost always in the Mekong Delta? It was because that is where most of the one-million-plus North Vietnamese settlers, who had been moved by the U.S. Navy and the CIA’s CAT (Civil Air Transport) Airline, had been placed, the port of Saigon in the Mekong Delta being the only available port in those days. (Cam Ranh Bay was an artificial harbor dredged, and made useful, at great cost many years later.)
This refugee movement, as we have seen, had a profound impact on the southernmost part of South Vietnam. These homeless people, stranded in a strange land, moved in on the settled villages and caused great unrest—which the Diem government, and its American advisers, called “insurgency.” Actually, these northern refugees were simply landless, homeless, and foodless—all conditions that the Diem government was not prepared to improve. As a result, riots and banditry broke out.
This was the framework of what was called “the warfare in Vietnam.” It may not be the entire story, but it is basic to it. When President Johnson was informed by the drafters of NSAM #273 that the counterinsurgency campaign in the Mekong Delta needed to be increased, he knew precisely what they meant. That is where the trouble was, and where it had always been—since the one-million-plus refugees had been abandoned there.
At the same time, plans were requested by the White House for a series of clandestine operations against the North Vietnamese by government forces under the direction of the U.S. military. This was a new departure in a war that had been waged since 1945 under the OSS and the CIA.
For some time, various leaders in the Pentagon, and some from the Kennedy staff in the White House, had recommended that Haiphong Harbor, the main port for Hanoi, should be mined. Others had suggested “hit and run” attacks, to be operated covertly and with a cover story so that the United States could plausibly disclaim responsibility in the event of exposure or capture during a mission. This seemed to be the right time to bring these proposals up again, and Johnson agreed to consider them, provided they had the approval of the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC) and of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Planning for covert action against North Vietnam had begun in May 1963, when the JCS directed CINCPAC to prepare for operations that would be under the direction of the South Vietnamese. All through the summer, various “Special Operations” experts came up with all kinds of lists of “things to do.” Walt Rostow, head of the Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State, had been plugging away at this idea ever since he had made a speech at the Special Forces Center in Fort Bragg in April 1961. The plan, drawn up by CINCPAC staff and known as OPLAN 34A, was approved by the JCS on September 9, 1963.
This was made a part of the agenda for the Honolulu conference of November 20 and was discussed with President Johnson on November 26. He was quick to agree with anything that would put direct pressure on the North Vietnamese. On December 21, 1963, the President directed an interdepartmental committee to study OPLAN 34A further and appointed Maj. Gen. Victor H. Krulak to head the study. General Krulak had been one of those actively engaged in this
planning from the start, and it did not take him long to come up with a proposal.
He submitted this for review on January 2, 1964. His plan was to be applied in three phases, each one raising the level of pressure on North Vietnam. Phase I, planned for February—May 1964, called for U-2 intelligence flights, COMINT [communications intelligence] missions, psychological missions and leaflet drops, propaganda kit deliveries, and radio broadcasts. It also provided for “twenty destructive undertakings designed to result in destruction, economic loss and general harassment” against North Vietnam.
While this planning had been secretly under way, a total exchange of top leadership in Saigon was taking place. Ambassador Lodge had arrived there in late August 1963, at the peak of the Diem “coup” discussions. Early in December, the CIA assigned a new station chief to Saigon, an experienced old pro—Peer de Silva—in place of John Richardson, who had been there since the winter of 1961—62. This was a most significant personnel change, because in December 1963 the CIA still retained “operational control” over all U.S. forces in Indochina. At that time both the CIA station chief and the senior U.S. military commander, Gen. Paul Harkins, were under the direct command of the ambassador.
At that time the director of central intelligence was John McCone, who had been appointed to that office by President Kennedy after Allen Dulles and his deputy, Gen. Charles P. Cabell, were sacked following the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. In other words, McCone was not a Johnson man, and he held the new President in awe.
This was made quite apparent by McCone’s words when he took de Silva under his wing in order to introduce him to the President in the White House, as related by de Silva himself:1
“For God’s sake, remember what’s been happening here recently—President Kennedy has been assassinated, President Johnson is new in the White House, and the Vietnam problem is getting worse every day. Lodge is becoming more and more obstreperous and Johnson wants no more problems out there as there were between Lodge and John Richardson;2 remember all of these things when we go to the President’s office tomorrow.”
In this brief extract, we have another clue to the fact that the Kennedy concept of “things going well in Vietnam” was being eroded almost daily by the change of course being instigated by those who came into power after his death. Here was McCone, the man as responsible for events in Vietnam as McNamara, saying, in early December 1963, “The Vietnam problem is getting worse every day.”
In order to underscore the significance of this change of the CIA station chief, on the same day that John McCone arrived in Saigon to preside at de Silva’s introduction to Ambassador Lodge, Secretary McNamara and a large party, flying in an Air Force One White House jet from a meeting in Paris, arrived at almost the same time. De Silva’s first full military briefing in Saigon was therefore held, about thirty minutes after his arrival, in an atmosphere dominated not by McCone but by the secretary of defense.
As each of these carefully orchestrated events unfolded, it was not too difficult to see that the “Vietnam phasedown” of Kennedy’s plan was in the process of being completely turned around. During that same month, December 1963, the Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs) were transferred from CIA control to the U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. This was the initial move of the U.S. military glacier into combat action in Southeast Asia under the operational control of its own military commanders.
At the time Peer de Silva arrived, the United States had acquired a fleet of small high-speed boats for use with OPLAN 34A—type operations against the North Vietnamese.
John Kennedy had been a PT boat commander in the southwest Pacific during WWII. In a move designed to win his sentimental approval, the CIA, with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, had arranged to procure a fleet of fast boats from a Norwegian manufacturer. These boats were as close as anyone could come, in the sixties, to the famous PT boats of the forties.
These patrol boats were divided into two categories. The fastest, and those most like the original PT boats, were called “Swifts,” and the slower but more heavily armed ones were called “Nasties.” Both of them were employed in “hit and run” operations.
To augment this capability, under OPLAN 34A tactics, the CIA made use of an unusual cargo aircraft called the C-123.
The C-123 was an outgrowth of the original C-122 that had been designed and built by the Chase Aircraft Company. The success of that earlier model led to a merger of Chase and the Fairchild Aircraft Company and the production of the C-123. Some of these aircraft were later modified for spraying Agent Orange over much of Vietnam.
The use of C-123s reveals another characteristic of clandestine operations. These aircraft had belonged to the U.S. Air Force “Air Commando” units, in which many of the same people who have been involved in the Iranian “arms for hostages” swap and in Central American covert activities got their start in the “Fun and Games” business of covert activities. Because such men as Gen. Richard Secord, among others, were familiar with the venerable C-123, they selected it for use in these latter-day activities.
Behind the scenes, the PT-style boats and C-123s were used in late 1963 and 1964. The PT boats landed over-the-beach invasion parties on sabotage missions, and the C-123s were used in clandestine flights over North Vietnam to drop smaller groups of agents.
A line in the usually circumspect Pentagon Papers tells us a little more than it actually intended to: “Covert operations [as outlined in OPLAN 34A] were carried out by South Vietnamese or hired personnel and supported by U.S. training and logistics efforts.” This brief statement reveals a bit more about how covert operations are mounted.
Such U.S. personnel as Special Forces troops were used to train and equip the teams to be dropped, or put “over the beach.” In general, these teams were believed to have been made up of South Vietnamese natives. However, as the Pentagon Papers item reveals, these teams included “hired personnel”—and therefore, special plans were made to retrieve them and to get them safely back out of hostile territory.
These “hired personnel,” as a category of clandestine operators, still exist. They are stateless people who are highly trained and equipped for special operations. They are far too valuable to expend on minor missions, and they must be kept available for such duties all over the world. They and their families are maintained in special safe areas, and their talents are called upon for covert operations of the greatest importance. The very fact that such key people were used in OPLAN 34A operations underscores how important the highest authorities considered these activities. They were seen as the leverage essential to the gradual but certain escalation of military activities in Indochina after the death of President Kennedy and during the early, and more pliable, days of the Johnson era.
These covert operations against North Vietnam were called, in the words of presidential adviser Walt Rostow, “tit for tat” activities; but with a difference. Usually in a “tit for tat” game, one party hits the other and the second party responds. In the Rostow context, the first party—the United States or South Vietnam—would strike covertly. Then, when the second party hit back, the United States would announce that it had been hit first and that it was legitimate to strike back. Such an action took place in the Gulf of Tonkin and led to the famous “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” that gave the President the authority to “strike back” and to utilize U.S. forces against the North Vietnamese. This was all part of the very clever sequence of events that had been planned as far back as May 1963 and was then implemented in after the death of Kennedy.
On July 30, 1964, “South Vietnamese” PT boats made a midnight attack, including an amphibious commando raid on the Hon Me and Hon Nieu islands just off the coast of North Vietnam above the 19th parallel, north latitude. The North Vietnamese responded by sending their high-speed KOMAR boats after the raiders. The “Swift” PT boats escaped; but the KOMARS spotted the U.S.S. Maddox in the vicinity. The Maddox claimed that the KOMARS fired torpedoes and that �
��a bullet fragment was recovered from the destroyer’s superstructure.”
On the night of August 3, 1964, more commando raids were made on the coast of North Vietnam, and the Vinh Sonh radar installation was hit. Because of its importance, this raid was most certainly made by CIA mercenaries. Following it, a claim was made of an intercepted radio transmission saying, “North Vietnamese naval forces had been ordered to attack the patrol” consisting of the Maddox and the Turner Joy. It was this incident that triggered the action that led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964. Plans laid in May 1963 and other related actions had been leading up to this event since November 22, 1963, and the guns of Dallas, and the preparatory steps had been under way since at least March 1964.
In March 1964 the familiar team of McNamara and Taylor made another fact-finding trip to South Vietnam. They returned and made their report to the President and the NSC on March 16. As a result of this report the President approved and signed NSAM #288 on March 17, 1964. By this time, of course, the Kennedy plan for Vietnam had been altered considerably. In their report, McNamara and Taylor said that “the situation in Vietnam was considerably worse than had been realized at the time of the adoption of NSAM #273” on November 26, 1963—not to mention at the time of NSAM #263, which was signed by Kennedy on October 11, 1963.
NSAM #288 said, “We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam . . . . Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance. . . .Thus, purely in terms of foreign policy, the stakes are high.”
This was a far cry from the Kennedy plans of late 1963. The stage was now set for military escalation in Southeast Asia. The level of activity was raised as OPLAN 34A strikes were leveraged in severity and with the response of the KOMARS against the attacks by the PT boats and their mercenary crewmen.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 46
