JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  6 There are many truly amazing documents in U.S. military records, as well as in White House files, on this subject. Those that have been used, above, are:

  “Civil Affairs Planning in the Cold War Era”, U.S. Army Civil Affairs School, Fort Gordon, Ga., December 1959.

  Lecture, “Southeast Asia, Army War College, by Edward G. Lansdale, December 1958.

  “Training Under the Mutual Security Program” by R. G. Stilwell and Edward G. Lansdale of the President’s Committee, May 1959.

  Chapter 6: Genocide by Transfer—in South Vietnam

  1 Interestingly, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the much-publicized Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, had worked with Lansdale and others who had been on the SMM team in Vietnam.

  2 Vietnam Crisis, edited by Allan W. Cameron (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).

  3 Liberal extracts above are from Ralph Smith, Vietnam and the West (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).

  4 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952—54, vol. 13, “Indochina.” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982).

  Chapter 7: Why Vietnam? The Selection and Preparation of the Battlefield

  1 I have heard firsthand accounts wherein the CIA agents, on their way back by helicopter, tossed these natives (“mere gooks”) out of the helicopter, alive, “just for the fun of it” and as a lesson to those who remained on board.

  2 In terms of the act and national policy, there is a distinct difference between the meaning and the use of the words “direction of” and “approval.” The National Security Act of 1947 used the word “direction” to mean that the idea for the plan originates with the NSC and, then, that the NSC directs its accomplishment by whatever department or agency, or combination thereof, it may choose. During the Eisenhower days, and with the ease with which the Dulles brothers carried out these things, it was not uncommon for Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, to arrive at a meeting with some scheme. He would present this idea to the NSC and then seek its “approval.” This practice generally worked and was deemed permissible in that environment, but that is not how the NSC was intended to work. President Kennedy found it quite difficult to reverse this practice in later years, because the CIA had been able to have its way in these covert matters over the Department or State and the Department of Defense for so many years.

  3 As a result of a presidential directive, a board of inquiry on the subject of the Bay of Pigs failure, and on what should be done in the future in such cases, met in the Pentagon in May 1961. This most unusual “Special Group” consisted of Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Allen Dulles, Adm. Arleigh Burke, and Robert F. Kennedy. A “Letter to the President” was prepared, written by General Taylor. The existence of this letter has been denied for years by various administrations and by the board members. However, it does exist. I have had a copy of this rare and most important “letter” for years, and it now appears verbatim in a book called Zapata.

  4 As will be seen, this approval included the purchase of new helicopters.

  5 Allen Dulles’s favorite expression for military-type operations by the CIA, or a joint CIA/Defense Department effort, was “peacetime operations”—an Orwellian twist typical of the Dulles turn of mind.

  6 A slang expression within the intelligence community for the practice of establishing one or more parallel identities, or covers, for someone engaged in intelligence work.

  7 Dulles’s statement may be found on page 287 of the Report of the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, volume 12, which was not made public until November 1982. Printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office.

  8 I was there at the time these Cuban exile leaders were in Senator Kennedy’s office. After that meeting, these Cubans traveled to the Pentagon from Capitol Hill, in a military vehicle with me, to meetings that were held in the Office of Special Operations.

  Chapter 8: The Battlefield and the Tactics, Courtesy CIA

  1 “Pre-Brief” is the name given to the everyday, worldwide news summary that is prepared by the CIA and presented to the President early each morning. It is given to a highly select, small group of Pentagon officials just prior to the White House session.

  2 During this period the Diem regime invented the term Vietcong, intending it to mean “Vietnamese Communist.” The National Liberation Front condemned the term as meaningless. Diem and his administration applied the term loosely within South Vietnam to mean “the enemy,” most of whom had no idea what communism was, and most of whom had been Cochin Chinese, or southern, natives. Thus, the intelligence “count” of Vietcong enemy included many natives who certainly were not Communist.

  3 In what was broadly known as the “domino theory,” it was held that if one country fell to communism, neighboring nations would follow. Countries were likened to a row of dominos set on end; the row would fall if the first domino was knocked down.

  4 U.S. News and World Report, June 26, 1967.

  5 This is an intelligence term for a secret operation supported by a unit that has a fictitious designation.

  6 The director of the Joint Staffs was the senior, permanently assigned officer in the then 400-man office which supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Wheeler went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held for some six years.

  7 The study was done by the Okanagan Helicopter Service of Canada, one of the largest commercial helicopter operators in the world.

  8 It must be kept in mind that despite reference to U.S. military personnel, the CIA had operational control of all U.S. activities in Indochina until the U.S. Marines landed in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. Therefore, these helicopter tactics and tactical operations were developed by the CIA.

  Chapter 9: The CIA in the Days of Camelot

  1 Shortly after World War II, Nixon answered a want ad from a Los Angeles newspaper which sought a man who would run for political office. Nixon ran for Congress with the help of these anonymous backers and was elected. These people continued to support him through the ups and downs of his political career. Nixon has acknowledged that he had these backers; exactly who they were is another question.

  2 Nixon was in Dallas with a top executive of the Pepsi-Cola Company, Mr. Harvey Russell, the general counsel. Nixon was a legal counsel to that corporation. That top executive’s son has told of Nixon’s presence in Dallas at the time of the assassination, and Russell has confirmed the accuracy of his son’s account. Later, sometime after the shooting, Nixon was driven to the Dallas airport by a Mr. DeLuca, also an official of the Pepsi-Cola Company. In addition, the son of another Pepsi-Cola executive was in Dallas at that time and had dinner with Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, the night before JFK was murdered.

  3 Most references to this CIA proposal are taken from the post—Bay of Pigs Study Group Report, which was actually Gen. Maxwell Taylor’s “Letter to the President” of June 13, 1961, plus my own personal files.

  4 This was known as the “5412/2 Committee” established by National Security Council directive 5412, March 15, 1954.

  5 This very modest proposal was submitted to the National Security Council by DCI Allen Dulles. It was a plan for the recruitment of Cubans into a military-type organization for training purposes. At that point, the CIA had plans for very little, if any, operational activities in Cuba. From this simple beginning, the agency, spurred on by certain former senior Cuban officials, began to formulate plans for airdrops and over-the-beach landings of small groups of Cuban exiles, as well as airdrops of arms and ammunition for anti-Castro groups on the island.

  6 This is taken from a U.S. Army Civil Affairs School lesson guide for U.S. and foreign military personnel. It or a similar guide was used for the training and indoctrination of the cadre of Cuban exile leaders. It is important to note what the U.S. Army teaches on this subject and to consider its applicability in this and other countries. This same document was used widely to train and indoctrinate the U.S. Special Forces Green Berets in V
ietnam.

  7 I was the chief of that office, which was concealed in the Plans directorate and known simply as “Team B.” Its official duty was “to provide Air Force support of the clandestine operations of the CIA.” This was accomplished secretly, on a worldwide basis. I had been directed, in 1955, to establish that office under the provisions of NSC 5412 and was its chief from 1955 to 1960, when I was transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In this capacity as head of the Military Support Office, in 1960, I went to Fort Gulick with CIA agents.

  8 See particularly chapters 5 through 8.

  9 Air America was a major CIA air transport proprietary company, with Far East headquarters in Taiwan and operations all over the world. It was a Delaware-chartered corporation and had about one hundred cover names under which it could do business, in order to conceal its identity and its connection with the CIA. At that time Air America was one of the largest airlines in the world, and one of the best.

  10 The block system, an old form of control, “pacification,” and surveillance made infamous during the Hungarian revolt of 1956, divides an area into blocks. Each block is under the absolute control of a leader, who knows where everyone is on that block. He uses children and schoolteachers, wives, shop foremen, and all other sources to gain total, twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week surveillance. No one could penetrate the Cuban system either from airdrop entry or by beach landing, and no one could evade it from the inside. The effectiveness of this system neutralized the exile group’s ability to penetrate into, or to support, political guerrillas.

  11 See chapter 8.

  12 As described by R. Buckminster Fuller in The Critical Path, these are “vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.” Winston Churchill used the term High Cabal in recognition of this group’s existence and supremacy.

  13 Flechettes are small, rocket-powered missiles or darts that can be individually fired from a tube much like a drinking straw. Being rockets, they have no recoil, make little or no noise, have a high terminal velocity, and are hard to detect by autopsy after they have entered a person’s body. (One such weapon, fired from a specially modified umbrella, may have been used to poison President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.)

  14 Even this scheme had its uncertainties. Many CIA old-timers hated Nixon. When the CIA-directed rebellion against Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958 failed so miserably, it was Nixon who demanded, and got, the immediate dismissal of that World War II—era OSS hero Frank Wisner and the dispersal of Wisner’s Far East staff. Wisner had been chief of that operation working out of Singapore. The “old boy” network never got over that move by Nixon. Wisner committed suicide some years later. This action by Nixon may have planted the seeds of Watergate.

  15 See “Operation Zapata,” University Publications of America.

  16 I had an unusual insider’s view of these developments. I knew of Kennedy’s approval early Sunday afternoon, April 16. I knew the ships had been at sea and that forces would hit the beach at dawn on Monday, April 17. I had heard that three T-33s had not been destroyed in the April 15 air strike, when all of the other combat aircraft had been hit. I knew that the U-2 flight on Saturday had located the T-33 jets at Santiago, and I knew that the CIA operator at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, had prepared four B-26s for the dawn air strike “coming in from the East with the sun at their backs and in the eyes of the defenders, if any.”

  17 Bobby Kennedy later named a son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.

  18 Ordinarily, following a disaster such as the Bay of Pigs, there would have been an official inquiry, with a full detailed report issued. The President, however, did not want a public inquiry, and he did not want a formal report. The Taylor letter was prepared by a committee that met secretly, calling itself “a paramilitary study group.” About ten years later, I called Admiral Burke, whom I had worked with over the years, and asked him to lunch with a friend. During that luncheon, I asked the admiral, whom I have always believed to have been the finest chief of naval operations the U.S. Navy ever had, about that report. He still denied there had ever been a report. He did not fib; he simply toyed with words. It was not technically a “report.” It was a “Letter to the President.”

  19 Wyden cites interviews with McGeorge Bundy as material for nearly every chapter in his book.

  20 These are the exact words from paragraph 43 of the Taylor Report. Here is how Wyden distorts them to cover Bundy: “Cabell had every reason to be disturbed. He had just had a call from Mac Bundy. Bundy said no air strikes could be launched until after the brigade had secured the Giron airstrip, and strikes would ostensibly be launched from there. This was an order ‘from the President.’” This is a most important bit of revisionism. The Taylor committee, with Bobby Kennedy as a member and one who closely read the report, says nothing about “an order from the President.” Wyden and Bundy added that “order from the President,” after the deaths of JFK and RFK, to cover Bundy’s actions.

  Chapter 10: JFK and the Thousand Days to Dallas

  1 McCarthy and Smith, Protecting the President (New York: Morrow, 1985). Morrow, 1985

  2 From The Warren Report, by the Associated Press.

  3 The speaker was Mrs. William Bundy, daughter of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, wife of Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, and sister-inlaw of McGeorge Bundy, whom Acheson had wanted Kennedy to make secretary of state. Actually, Kennedy had listened to his old Harvard mentor, William Yandell Elliott, rather than Acheson, and had chosen Dean Rusk in place of Bundy, whom he brought into the White House as his national security assistant. For this service, Rusk provided Elliott with an office in the Department of State not far from his own; on the otherwise bare walls of that office hung a framed, one-page letter on White House stationery saying, “Thank you for introducing me to Dean Rusk.” It was signed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  4 This sensational trial was known as the Medina trial, taking its name from the judge Harold S. Medina. It was held in federal court in 1948 and lasted more than nine months.

  5 McNamara had little experience with service distinctions and tried to take army money as well as navy funds for this procurement. The army persuaded him to leave them out of this matter.

  6 Such work neither began nor ended with the Kennedy administration. An article in the Washington Post on February 18, 1986, reported that U.S. representative Mike Synar had gone to see the top-secret Northrup Stealth aircraft. At the hangar, Congressman Synar noted, “They had put up this big chart which showed all the states where Stealth work was being done.” That was the Goldberg/McNamara concept dressed in Reagan garb.

  7 Before the Monday following this decision, the entire suite of offices that had developed the maps and data for the Goldberg study had been totally vacated and the staff transferred—moved completely out of the Pentagon building.

  8 Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain (New York: Dial Press, 1967).

  Chapter 11: The Battle for Power: Kennedy Versus the CIA

  1 James D. Barber, The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972).

  2 Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1965).

  3 The absence of Dulles and the ineffectiveness of his deputies, Gen. Charles P. Cabell and Richard Bissell, are described in this book as “a breakdown of leadership.” One must keep in mind, however, that this apparent “breakdown” may well have been intentional. Our so-called national policy on “anticommunism” has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of Castro and his “Communist threat,” just as it has continued to do in Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East.

  4 My office was only a short distance from the rooms in the Pentagon used by the Cuban Study Group. I had worked with the CIA on anti-Castro activities since January 1, 1959. I knew almost all the men who had been called to meet with the study group. Many of them would wait in my office unt
il they were called; many came back following their testimony and interrogation. One comment was general among them all. Their words were, in effect: “That group is highly charged with the presence of strong individuals. But the most intense man there is the one who sits in a straight-backed chair, separate from the others, and never says a word.” That man was Bobby Kennedy. It was well known that he returned to the White House each day to discuss developments with the President and his inner circle; but nothing on the record gives any indication that he ever broke the stranglehold the CIA had on that investigation or that he ever became aware of being in the grip of its velvet gloves.

  5 As noted in an earlier chapter, following the President’s formal approval at midday of the landing plan, which included an air strike by four B-26 aircraft to destroy Castro’s remaining three T-33 jet trainers on the ground, the air strike had been canceled.

  6 The entire anti-Castro campaign was fraught with intrigue. De Varona was one of the four Cuban exiles who, after flying from the American Legion convention in Detroit, where Nixon had spoken in August 1960, to Washington, had gone directly to the offices of then senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. From Kennedy’s office they all went to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Kennedy had been in personal touch with de Varona and the others all through this period. This adds another element to the value of de Varona’s testimony before the Taylor group.

  7 Those three aircraft, Castro’s last combat-capable aircraft, were the T-33 jet trainers that had been spotted by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, parked wingtip to wingtip on an airfield near Santiago and were the target of the four B-26 aircraft that were to have been launched from the CIA airbase at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Had that strike been flown as approved by the President, the jets would have been destroyed and the invasion would have been successful. Castro would have had no air force. The Brigade on the beach could have countered Castro’s attacks along the narrow approach causeways while its own substantial air force of hard-hitting B-26 aircraft operated from the airstrip the Brigade had already captured on the beach.