In mid-1964 Ambassador Lodge had resigned to run for the presidency that fall, and he had been replaced in Saigon by none other than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell Taylor. Taylor’s staff was augmented by an old-line State Department veteran, U. Alexis Johnson, and by William Sullivan, who was made executive officer for the diplomatic mission.
At about the same time, Gen. Paul Harkins left his command in Saigon and was replaced by his deputy, Gen. William C. Westmoreland. In Peer de Silva’s well-chosen words, “Thus, these three [McNamara, Taylor, and Westmoreland], as heavenly stars, were to be perfectly aligned to dominate the American government’s policy and strategy in Vietnam in the crucial decision-making years of 1964—1965, a power alignment which I believe proved most unfortunate. Individually courageous, strong, and forceful, in 1964 they came to the wrong war.”
It would be hard to set the stage for that crucial period better than CIA Station Chief Peer de Silva has done it:
Prior to leaving Washington, Westmoreland had been given his orders by Taylor, then Chairman, JCS:
“Westy, you get out there and take charge. Get the military command and the ARVN [South Vietnamese Army] organized and then fight the war right, the way we did in France. It’s a big war and we’ll fight it like one. We must bring enough firepower and bombs down on the Vietcong to make them realize they’re finished; only then will they toss in the sponge.”
De Silva added, “The principle of fighting the big war, the big action in Vietnam, had thus been established. This doctrine, and the decisions later issuing from it, led inescapably to April 1975 and American defeat.”
The important thing to realize from de Silva’s words is that General Taylor gave these orders to Westmoreland in December 1963—only one month after Kennedy’s death, less than one month after Johnson had signed the rather tentative document NSAM #273, and more than seven months before President Johnson was to ask Congress for the authority to use the armed forces of the United States in a war in Southeast Asia.
What did Gen. Maxwell Taylor know, in December 1963, about “the big war” that caused him to make such a statement? At that time, the United States had 15,914 military personnel in South Vietnam, of whom fewer than 2,000 were “military advisers.” The others were helicopter maintenance crewmen, supply personnel, and the like. Did Maxwell Taylor actually visualize the action in Vietnam as being similar to that which had confronted the Allied forces under General Eisenhower in Europe in 1944? Did General Taylor actually equate the black-pajama-clad “Vietcong” with the battle-trained armed forces of Nazi Germany? What kind of orders was he giving General Westmoreland? What did he expect the warfare in Indochina to become? More important, Taylor’s orders to Westmoreland came at a time when not one single American soldier was serving in Southeast Asia under the operational command and control of a U.S. military officer. How, then, could he have seen it as “a big war”?
These are questions that trail behind the train of events that led both to the death of Pres. John E Kennedy and to the subsequent escalation of the American military intervention in Indochina. There can be no question that there were those who wanted the fighting to develop and to become the war that General Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described to Westmoreland in December 1963 as “big.” After all,3 they had done so much to assure it would be.
In his monumental book Law and the Indo-China War, John Norton Moore, professor of law and director of the graduate program at the University of Virginia School of Law, discusses several of the variables of the quality of the general community’s minimum public order decisions as they pertain to the conflict in Southeast Asia and to warfare in general.
He cites, as the first of the several facts of interdependence that establish common interests in every global interaction, “the accelerating rate of population growth, along with the pluralization of both functional and territorial groups. . . . ”
Any study of the armed conflicts that have taken place during this century reveals that for whatever stated reason or excuse a particular war may have been waged, one of its most glaring results has been the wholesale murder of millions of noncombatants, such as occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1945 and 1980. Another inevitable finding would be that in addition to these genocidal murders, there have been numerous examples of the forced movement and relocation of additional millions of natives from their traditional homelands and communities to other, generally inhospitable locations. Such movements inevitably lead to the destruction of their ancient way of life and its irreplaceable social values.
The result of these actions—which have been carried out during this century both by “the West” and by “the Communists”—has often been the devastation of ancient homelands that had never been touched by warfare—at least not modern warfare, with its vast means of destruction.
The terrible 1968 massacre of more than three hundred women and children at Song My (My Lai) in Vietnam serves as no more than a minor example of the type of warfare that has overwhelmed such rural communities. As a result of the “mere gook” syndrome that prevailed in Vietnam, the enemy was frequently declared to be “anyone who ran,” “anyone of either sex,” “anyone of any age,” or “anyone armed or unarmed. ”
Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, who had so much to do with the early years in Indochina, frequently regaled his associates in the Pentagon with stories of “enemy agents” who had been placed in helicopters to be flown to headquarters for interrogation. En route, “to let them know we meant business,” one or two who had refused to talk would be thrown out of the helicopter, “to teach the others a lesson.” Such murders were of little consequence to those warriors, as My Lai and the movie Platoon confirm.
These accounts from the earlier days of the war would be far surpassed by the record of the CIA’s Phoenix program, which was designed to destroy and wipe out the Vietnamese rural structure, on the assumption that it was the mainstay of the “Vietcong.” In open congressional testimony, William Colby, the CIA’s top man in the Phoenix program, claimed, with some pride, that they had eliminated about sixty thousand “authentic Vietcong agents.” These Vietnamese were “neutralized” without benefit of trial or of the rules of warfare governing the treatment of prisoners. They were simply “eliminated.”
In a war where “body count” seemed to be the primary objective of the fighting forces, one must not lose sight of the great significance of underlying factors that establish a climate of legitimacy for murder, or “neutralization.” In fact, these underlying beliefs serve to promote genocide. For example, there are many people in this world who believe it is not only “all right” but essential to reduce the total human population, and to reduce it by any means. This conviction, which stems from the work of the British East India Company’s chief economist at the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Malthus, pervades certain elements of our global society. Malthusianism is a deeper motivational factor than the more popularly recognized ideological confrontations.
When it is “their turn,” the Soviets have performed these common genocidal functions as well as “the West” has. Witness the slaughter of millions of noncombatants in Afghanistan and the forced movement of no fewer than 6 million Afghan natives from their ancient homeland over the great passes to Pakistan.
The U.S. Department of State’s Office of Population Affairs has stated:
There is a single theme behind our work: We must reduce population levels. Either the governments will do it our way, through nice, clean methods, or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. We look at resources and environmental constraints, we look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population, or else we will have trouble. The government of El Salvador failed to use our programs to lower population. Now they get a civil war because of it. There will be dislocation and food shortages. They still have too many people there.
The above conditions merge
together into a demand for war—any kind of war, anywhere. This is the root concept, and the overall excuse, for an entire series of wars in Third World countries since 1945. Because of the Malthusian belief in the need for population control, the murder, by warfare, of countless millions of noncombatants is “lawfully” justified. This has been true quite recently, and it is why such wars are certain to break out before long in the heavily populated continents of Africa and Latin America.
Of course, national leaders wish to justify their actions and to cloak them in legality. President Lyndon B. Johnson felt the need for such support as he attempted to escalate the long, warlike action in Indochina from its emergent underground stages to an all-out overt military confrontation.
With the statement that U.S. Navy vessels had been fired upon ringing in his ears, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress on August 5, 1964, to request a Southeast Asia Resolution, broad enough “to assist nations covered by the SEATO treaty.” Congress responded quickly and affirmatively.
The Constitution provides that “the President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” However, congressional authorization is necessary before the President can use the armed forces without a declaration of war.
In response to Johnson’s request, Congress passed the Southeast Asia Resolution, providing:
[Sec.1] Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. . . .
[Sec.2] . . . the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.
This resolution was passed in August 1964, nineteen years after the United States became actively involved in the affairs in Indochina. The time of preparation and development had been long. At times it seemed as though things were at a standstill, and at other times the tip of a covert-action iceberg would reveal another step along the way.
After the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a series of air strikes, called “Flaming Dart,” was carried out against North Vietnam. On February 22, 1965, General Westmoreland recommended that American troops be landed on the east coast of Vietnam, at Da Nang. After considerable internecine hassling, it was decided that the marines would make the first landing, and two U.S. Marine Corps Battalion Landing Teams were selected. They landed at Da Nang on March 8, 1965.
This was the first time in almost twenty years of American involvement that members of the armed forces of the United States had entered combat zones under the command control of their own officers. For the first time, the CIA’s role as the operational command in Vietnam was being shared with the military. Despite this development, the “War in Vietnam” was still a strange and unprecedented creation and a clear example of the CIA’s master role as Cold War catalyst.
According to the science of war, as defined by Carl von Clausewitz, when diplomacy and all else fails, the army takes over. Despite nearly a century and a half of this doctrine, the management of the “War in Vietnam” broke all of the rules.
For one thing, the ambassador in Saigon was the senior, and highestranking, American official there, and the military and CIA officials ranked below him. This was a novel way to wage war, that is, with an ambassador over and senior to the general in command. And it did not stop there.
While testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the latter part of the sixties, Sen. Stuart Symington revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane, Laos, had the authority to order bombings and to specify where the bombs were to be dropped. This led the senator to declare that the diplomat was virtually a “military proconsul.” In these terms, the ambassador in Saigon had been given “military proconsul” powers for more than a decade.
Any consideration of leadership in time of war must inevitably lead to the question of the objective. Why was the United States involved in military action in faraway Southeast Asia?
Professor Moore addresses this question in Law and the Indo-China War, stating: “ . . . the principal United States objective in the IndoChina War was to assist Vietnam and Laos (and subsequently Cambodia) to defend themselves against North Vietnamese military intervention. ”
This is as reliable a statement of the U.S. national objective as any other; but it fails to state a military objective. In an all-out attempt to do this, after the enactment of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, President Johnson built up the strength of the U.S. Army in Vietnam to 550,000 men, brought the air force to enormous strength in terms of bombing capacity [more tonnage was dropped than during all of WWII ], and made the Navy Seventh Fleet the most powerful force afloat. Yet this did not get the job done. Despite all this, to put it simply, the United States lost the war; it failed to achieve its goal.
In actual practice, the tactical objective of the war had been the “body count. In Asia, that is not a good indicator of success, and it played right into the hands of General Giap. Guerrilla style, he spread the action out as much as he could, all over the landmass of Indochina. This made the tremendous U.S. military force impotent, diluted as it now was over wide areas.
One of the best examples of this was the battle for Anloa Valley. The “pacification” of Anloa Valley was part of Operations Masher and White Wing, in which about 12,000 men of the U.S. Army First Cavalry Division, Vietnamese airborne units, and South Korean marines took part. They succeeded in capturing the valley and heralded it in Saigon as “a breakthrough in winning the Vietcong-controlled people to our side. ”
In announcing this “victory” officially, Saigon officials would say only that the Anloa operation was successful because it killed a lot of “Vietcong.” In fact, Anloa Valley was captured, lost, recaptured, etc., at least eight times—for no purpose other than to “kill lots of Vietcong.” That does not win wars.
Recall General Taylor’s order to Westmoreland: “ . . . fight the war right, the way we did in France.” Gen. George S. Patton, the hero of the Third Army’s march across France in the face of an experienced German military machine, must have spun in his grave over those instructions for that type of guerrilla war.
It does little good to review the history of a war by basing it on the one time strategic objectives of the victor and the vanquished. What counts is the achievement: What was accomplished by winning that war?
Before WWII, Stalin had purged the Ukraine and wiped out millions of his own people. During WWII Stalin diverted his armies, with Hitler’s in hot pursuit, away from Moscow and across this same “heartland of Mother Russia,” the Ukraine. By the time the war was over, more than 20 million Russians had been killed, and the once vital Ukraine had been reduced to rubble.4
Although the Soviets have claimed victory over Hitler in that war, it would be hard to say that the Russian people won, on any count. Clearly, it had been someone’s strategic objective to wipe out the natives of the Ukraine and to destroy their homeland, in the process completing Stalin’s work and ending Hitler’s dream.
How, then, can one assess the accomplishments of the thirty-year war in Vietnam? It is clear that the United States did not achieve its limited objective of helping the South Vietnamese establish a free democratic nation. What about the yardstick of “accomplishment”? On that score, millions of people in Indochina were killed and removed from the overhang of the Malthusian equation of world population density. Certainly no ideological, “Communist vs. anti-Communist” issues had been settled, and the domino theory and “bloodbath” projections (except in the special case of Cambodia) have not occurred, and the United States initiated that with its massive B-29 bombardment.
This leaves one more enormous accomplishment of the warfare in Indochina to be considered. As R. Buckminster Fuller has stated, “Jointly the two political
camps have spent $6.5 trillion in the last thirty-three years to buy the capability to kill all humanity in one hour.”
The American share of this enormous sum expended on the Cold War was spent under the leadership of the CIA, “Capitalism’s Invisible Army,” and no less than $220 billion went to the CIA’s war in Indochina. That has been its accomplishment. Because of the success of that type of “money-making” war, it is not too difficult to be persuaded that a similar and more costly excursion lies not too far in the future.
TWENTY-ONE
Game Plan of the High Cabal
THE ASSASSINATION of President John F. Kennedy was one of the truly cataclysmic events of this century. The murder of a President was traumatic enough; but the course of events that followed and that have affected the welfare of this country and the world since that time has, in many ways, been tragic.
That assassination has demonstrated that most of the major events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one overridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom these others work. Neither is this power elite of recent origin. Its roots go deep into the past.
Kennedy’s assassination has been used as an example of their methodology. Most thinking people of this country, and of the world believe that he was not killed by a lone gunman. Despite that view, the cover story created and thrust upon us by the spokesmen of this High Cabal has existed for three decades. It has come from the lips of every subsequent President and from the top media representatives and their spokesmen. They are experienced, intelligent people who are aware of the facts. Consider the pressure it must take to require all of them, without exception, to quote the words of that contrived cover story over and over again for nearly three decades.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 47
