JFK
The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy
L. Fletcher Prouty
Copyright © 2011 by L. Fletcher Prouty
Foreword copyright © 2011 by Jesse Ventura
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Oliver Stone
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61608-291-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
JFK : the CIA, Vietnam, and the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy / L. Fletcher Prouty ; with an introduction by Oliver Stone. p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Carol Pub. Group, c1996.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9781616082918
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963—Assassination. 2. Conspiracies--United States—History—20th century. 3. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—History—20th century. 4. Intelligence service-United States—History—20th century. 5. Vietnam War, 1961-1975-Secret service-United States. I. Title. II. Title:
J.F.K.
E842.9.P76 2009
973.922092-dc22
2009024566
Printed in Canada
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION - The Secret History of the United States (1943—1990)
PREFACE
Epigraph
ONE - The Role of the Intelligence Services in the Cold War: 1945—65, The Vietnam Era
TWO - The CIA in the World of the H-Bomb
THREE - The Invisible Third World War
FOUR - Vietnam: The Opening Wedge
FIVE - The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission
SIX - Genocide by Transfer—in South Vietnam
SEVEN - Why Vietnam? The Selection and Preparation of the Battlefield
EIGHT - The Battlefield and the Tactics Courtesy CIA
NINE - The CIA in the Days of Camelot
TEN - JFK and the Thousand Days to Dallas
ELEVEN - The Battle for Power: Kennedy Versus the CIA
TWELVE - Building to the Final Confrontation
THIRTEEN - The Magic Box, Trigger of the Expanded War in Vietnam
FOURTEEN - JFK Makes His Move to Control the CIA
FIFTEEN - The Erosion of National Sovereignty
SIXTEEN - Government by Coup d’État
SEVENTEEN - JFK’s Plan to End the Vietnam Warfare
EIGHTEEN - Setting the Stage for the Death of JFK,
NINETEEN - Visions of a Kennedy Dynasty
TWENTY - LBJ Takes the Helm as the Course Is Reversed
TWENTY-ONE - Game Plan of the High Cabal
AFTERWORD - Stone’s JFK and the Conspiracy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
Index
FOREWORD
By Jesse Ventura
Although the connections between Vietnam and the assassination of John F. Kennedy are just starting to become recognized, Colonel Fletcher Prouty began writing about the links in the 1970s. This book, published after Oliver Stone’s 1991 film of the same name, gives details to the notion that an extremely powerful group wanted to remove JFK from the presidency in order to control policy and the direction of the government for the next eight, ten, twelve years, and more
JFK’s National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263 called for the total withdrawal of not only U.S. troops, but all U.S. personnel, from Vietnam by 1965. What Col. Prouty has written gives a behind the scenes look at what was really going on and at JFK’s understanding that Vietnam would be a disaster. With Iraq and Afghanistan, we see history is repeating itself.
To appreciate the big money involvement that was in place to keep a war economy going, Prouty provides an understanding of the connection between the Military-Industrial Complex and banking.
Col. Prouty describes the pervasive groupthink belief that small winless wars were all that was possible to conduct in the nuclear weapons age. He explains this in terms of the military’s realization that large, full-scale war—total war—could no longer be fought after the advent of the hydrogen bomb. He also provides insight to the relatively recent idea of so-called Stateless Terrorism—in lieu of a real adversary an imagined enemy will always need to be invented.
In Vietnam, there was no objective and no real city to conquer in order to declare the war over. Prouty underscores that if Hanoi was ever captured, this would have prompted China to directly enter the conflict. Given this constraint, the city was denied to American Generals making war plans. If you can’t take the enemy’s capital how do you know when you’ve won? To understand the military mindset and the idea of a self-made role of the military you need to read this book.
The idea of false flag operations is new to most people, but not to the military. A case in point is Operation Northwoods, which discussed the use of covert actions—including attacks on American cities, ships, and people—to create a pretext to launch an assault on Cuba. Such proposals confront one with the reality of a corrupting influence unimaginable to most: that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would create plans to attack their own people to justify their existence.
Col. Prouty’s contribution comes from his work in the Pentagon and his common sense view that someone needed to level the playing field—to let the public know that military spending and goals are completely unrealistic
Few, if any, explain how over one million Tonkinese refugees of the north were moved to the south by the Dulles brothers to set the stage for a civil war that the United States would be called to help resolve. Some of the worst fighting was in the Mekong delta. The problem was that no one knew where Vietnam even was, let alone its history or its area.
It’s as if they said Canada was invading the United States but the worst fighting broke out in Florida. The whole thing was a set-up job. Another war with nowhere to go to win. Think about it—how could the Vietminh prevail over the U.S. Air Force, the 7th Fleet, U2 spy planes, B52 bombing campaigns, five thousand helicopters, and, at one time, five hundred and fifty thousand troops? These beggars in black pajamas raised their flag over Saigon. Something is really wrong with the picture, unless you understand there never was a “Grand Strategy.”
We have to learn from the past and Col. Prouty is one of the few who explain the uncomfortable truth. This uncomfortable feeling goes on today. How do we know when we’ve won in Iraq or Afghanistan? Will this repeat in Iran and North Korea? What is the next military action that will be another unwinnable war designed to keep the Defense Department in business despite the astronomical costs as it bankrupts the nation?
To underscore Vietnam’s significance to the removal of JFK, the first document LBJ signed was NSAM 273 in which he reversed policy and now instructed his Generals to help the South Vietnamese “to win” their
conflict with the north. President Kennedy had been urged many times by his military commanders to commit the United States to victory in Vietnam by including such words in U.S. policy papers and official pronouncements. Kennedy had adamantly refused to tie the United States into such a straitjacket.
Prouty’s explanation of the Saigon Military Mission—that it was not military and not a mission—is worth the price of the book alone. It was a CIA operation. The whole war was a CIA invention and this has to be understood first to keep it from happening again. Or again, we will find ourselves at war with another country with weapons of mass destruction that never can be found . . .
It’s time that everyone examine what Col. Fletcher Prouty wrote as a warning of what was really going on as opposed to what was reported regarding the Vietnam war and the removal of John F. Kennedy.
INTRODUCTION
The Secret History of the United States (1943—1990)
by Oliver Stone
FLETCHER PROUTY is a man whose name will go down in history. Not as a respected Establishment figure, no. He will be erased from the present history books, his version of history suppressed, his credibility denied, his integrity scorned.
Yet in time he will endure. Young students in the twenty-first century (given the planet’s capacity to reform and revive itself before then) will come back to his writings in the alternative written press (small publishing houses, low-circulation magazines) and discover through Colonel Prouty no less than the “Secret History” of the United States, circa 1944 to the present. With this single volume, Colonel Prouty blows the lid right off our “Official History” and unforgivably, sadly, inexorably, for anyone who dares enter this cave of dread and shame, shines his torch forever onto the ugliest nest of vipers the civilized world has probably seen since the dreaded Mongol raiders of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
This is scary stuff. The MK Ultra of espionage books, JFK will anger you and make you sad. You will never view the world again in the same light. Behind everything you read or see from this point on will flicker forever your most paranoid and darkest fears of the subconscious motives beneath the killer ape that became man.
Was Stanley Kubrick right in his revelation of the warrior ape in 2001, throwing the bones of the slain into the air, becoming the spaceship baby of tomorrow? Will we transmute our killer instincts to peace and the search for light? Or will we tread the path of war, not only between tribes, but between us and our environment?
My mother was French, my father American. I had the opportunity young in life to spend summers in France in the 1950s and never once heard anyone young or old ever allude to the massive French collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. In every aspect—even my mother’s tale—the truth was denied, ignored, and mostly forgotten. Of such is “history” made—until, of course, contrary events like the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyons, France, surface and tear and remind. Like my film JFK.
Such was my experience in writing Platoon—out of a feeling that Vietnam was an Orwellian memory hole, to be forgotten, realities distorted by newsmen and official “historians,” official body counts, and the official lies that devastated the American character.
I experienced it again in the mid-1980s in Central America, talking to fresh-faced American troops in green uniforms with no memories of Vietnam, save for embarrassed stares, once again lining up to shoot Nicaraguans in the invasion of 1986 that never was. And again in Russia, in the early 1980s, on another screenplay, talking to youngsters with no knowledge whatever of Stalin’s crimes, and old people who denied their past out of fear.
Such is the memory of man—at best a tricky one, per Orwell. “Who controls the past controls the future.” There is about us a wall, alone, beyond which our conscious mind will not let our unconscious go. That margin, however, fades with the quotient and fashion of time because as time changes so do our mind-sets. The loss of fear allows the mind to drop its censors and think the unthinkable. Such a golden moment. We all know it. The exciting liberation of our own thought process. It is that access point to history which every filmmaker, poet, artist, seeks entry to. To collide with the forces of history—to merge with the backbeat of its onward push. Jack London, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, clashing with the stormy forces of early-twentieth-century history. Glorious cavaliers.
The key question of our time, as posed in Colonel Prouty’s book, comes from the fabled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace by Leonard Lewin (based on a study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in August 1963 to justify the big, planned changes in defense spending contemplated by Kennedy):
The organizing principle of any society is for war. The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers. . . . War readiness accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world’s total economy.
In illustrating this proposition, Colonel Prouty traces the divergent paths of early 1950s Vietnam—the Saigon Military Mission, Ed Lansdale, Lucien Conein, Tom Dooley, Wesley Fishel, and Archbishop Spellman. How Mao with his guerrilla-war ideology deeply influenced our “civic action” paramilitary concepts in Vietnam and Central America. How the helicopter and its econo-military needs drove us to Vietnam. How the TFX fighter battle between Boeing and General Dynamics split the Kennedy administration. He explains clearly for the first time the vast errors of South Vietnam—appointed President Ngo Dinh Diem—his failure with the Buddhists and his own army; the disastrous “hamlet” program that ruined the South Vietnamese peasant economy; the expelling of the Chinese mercantile society; the influence of Lansdale; the arrogance of America’s racist Third World attitudes that blinded us to the true vacuum we created by dividing and marginalizing a wholly artificial client state called South Vietnam in conflict with Vietnam’s post—World War II right to determine its own independence.
Colonel Prouty heartrendingly details the destruction of rural peasant life where age-old communal law was based not on authority but on harmony and law was deemed less important than virtue. This tribal society ultimately presents a nonconsumerist code of life that does not depend on “the omnipresent paternalism of the international banker” or the chemical agricultural revolution or modern politics, and this presents a dangerous alternative and loss of market to capitalism.
In a parallel to our own national sense of betrayal over Vietnam starting with the My Lai incident, the Pentagon Papers, the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia, Colonel Prouty, in a fascinating aside, traces the roots of the key 1950s decisions on Vietnam by the Dulles brothers and goes into the staged Tonkin Gulf incident and the official cover-up that sent us to the war.
Colonel Prouty also explores the true meaning of the Pentagon Papers and the shocking and fraudulent omissions in them, which will blow away the self-congratulatory complacency of our “liberal” media, which, Colonel Prouty shows us, never really understood the malignant forces that were operative behind the scenes of the Pentagon Papers—and once again robbed us of our history. Tantalizingly, Colonel Prouty points the finger of treason at McGeorge Bundy, then assistant to President Kennedy, who signed the key first draft of NSAM (National Security Action Memorandum) #273 on November 21, 1963, which was in contradiction to all previous Kennedy policy. How, Colonel Prouty speculates, could this happen unless such a person knew Kennedy would not be around the next day and “the new president” would? Also there is Bundy’s bizarre role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, reexamined here in a shocking new light.
Having myself spoken with Lucien Conein, our chief CIA operative in Vietnam under Lansdale, I can verify that Mr. Conein totally conformed to Colonel Prouty’s version of events at the Diem killing in South Vietnam.
Prouty in effect totally reexamines the Pentagon Papers and the credibility of what a “leaked document” really is and how the media misunderstood; why the cabinet quorum was out of the country when Kennedy was killed and, more importantly, misunderstood the almost total reversal of our Vietnam policy in a matter o
f days after Kennedy’s death. Prouty rightly lambastes the media as “a growing profession that fully controls what people will be told and helps prepare us for war in places like Afghanistan, Africa, and the Caribbean, most recently Granada and Panama, the Middle East and other “LDCs”—a banker’s euphemism for “less developed countries.”
Colonel Prouty pushes on to the true inner meaning of Watergate and leaves you dangling with the clues, making us fully realize we have only heard some forty hours of four hundred hours of one of the most mysterious affairs of American politics, involving possibly Nixon’s own most secret revelations on the Kennedy murder. We must ask ourselves, What finally does Richard Nixon know of Dallas?
In another fascinating subtheme, Colonel Prouty shows how the roots of the 1950s decisions on Vietnam essentially emanated from the historically omitted presence of Chiang Kai-shek at the Tehran Conference of 1944—where, like colossi dividing the world, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Chaing Kai-shek set forever the fuse of World War III. The enemy for the United States was no longer the Nazi movement but the more pernicious, property-stealing Soviet Communist world-around tribe. And of course, in seeking to destroy this new enemy at all costs, Colonel Prouty points once again to the infusion of Nazi personnel, methods, and ultimately a Nazi frame of mind into the American system—a course which, once seeded, changed forever the way we operated in the world—and led irrevocably, tragically for our Constitution and our history, to the paramilitary domestic coup d’état in Dallas, November 1963.
Colonel Prouty sets the stage for this horrible nightmare with his own personally documented dealings with the Pentagon—a fascinating side glimpse at his involvement in a small coup in Bolivia. He illustrates how Third World politics is more often a game between commercial “In” and “Out” power groups that compete for the lion’s share of the money by controlling their marketplaces with the U.S.A.’s help—the government of such a country is a business monopoly over its people and its territory and is motivated as much by pragmatic ideology as by the pragmatic control of the import-export business . . . by granting exclusive franchises to its friends, relatives, in all things from Coca-Cola to F-14 fighter planes . . . the supremely powerful international bankers keep the books for each side—how these Ins and Outs acquire bogeyman characteristics like “Communist,” “Drug dealer,” per the needs of our government and its attendant propaganda arm, our Fourth Estate; how Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia and Noriega in Panama and Hussein in Iraq have changed their identities several times from our “most-wanted” list to our favored-“commercial-ally” list. Prouty further illustrates that in 1975, our government spent $137 billion on military operations in Third World country LDCs and how that money is essentially funneled through American subsidiaries from our military-industrial complex. Money, Colonel Prouty never lets us forget, is at the root of power.
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