JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  Of interest to our story about Vietnam, it will be noted:

  At the Tehran Conference in 1943, Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek both approved Roosevelt’s proposal for a trusteeship for Indochina, but Churchill was vehemently against the idea. Roosevelt said he told Churchill that Chiang Kai-shek did not want either to assume control over Indochina or to be given responsibility for administering a trusteeship in Indochina.

  Churchill replied, “Nonsense,” to which Roosevelt retorted, “Winston, this is something which you are just not able to understand. You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just do not understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it. A new period has opened in the world’s history, and you will have to adjust to it.”6

  Sometime during the next year, 1944, Roosevelt added, on this subject: “The British would take land anywhere in the world even if it were only a rock or sandbar.”7

  The reader should note the special significance of this exchange in Tehran as it pertains to the “real property” propaganda scheme mentioned above. As Roosevelt confirmed, this has been a paramount driving force of British foreign policy since the days of Queen Elizabeth and the founding of the East India Company during the century following Magellan’s voyage and the return of the ship Victoria with the proof that Earth was, in fact, a sphere with a finite surface and fixed distribution of the wealth of its real property and natural resources.

  This is an unusually important bit of history. The Roosevelt family, and especially the Delanos, have owed their wealth to the old “China trade.” They were well aware of the work of the British East India Company in the Far East since A. D 1600. President Roosevelt was right when he said to Churchill, “You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood.”

  Once the world leaders and great financiers of that earlier period realized that the surface of Earth was finite, and therefore limited in area, and that the natural resources of Earth were limited, too, they began immediately to “stake out their claims” on all the land they could grab, regardless of whether or not it was already inhabited. As the years progressed, they came to believe that “they had the right.” Evidence of the belief in this “right” exists to this day—witness Vietnam and the continuing Kurdish problem in the Middle East, where recently created borders have left the ancient Kurds with no homeland of their own.

  Roosevelt, who understood this concept well as a result of his own family’s China Trade connections, emphasized a point that he knew to be true: the centuries of belief on the part of British leadership, among others, that the territories they “discovered” (despite the fact that the indigenous population may have been there for thousands of years) belonged to them. Churchill gave evidence that this same East India belief in the proprietary colony was still alive when he and the other leaders discussed postwar plans for Southeast Asia. He felt perfectly comfortable making such colonialist decisions about these countries, with or without their consent.

  This driving force continues. When oil is found in the Middle East, it is controlled by the petroleum companies. When gold is found in South Africa, it is controlled by corporate mining interests. And, if such things of value cannot be controlled by direct colonization, they are controlled by an equally powerful and oppressive economic force called the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. In the process, genocide is practiced regularly to limit “excesses” and to preserve Earth for the “fittest.” More than anyone else, Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this characteristically “British instinct,” and when confronted with the grave issue of “postwar colonialism” at the meeting of the “Big Four” in Tehran, he spoke boldly to Churchill—in front of the Chinese, who had suffered so much from the East India Company mentality, and before the Russians, who had suffered so much from British economic power after World War I.

  That was truly a momentous discussion in an unequaled setting, as reported in one of this government’s own publications. Why hasn’t more been written about this story, and why hasn’t the simple fact that Chiang and his influential wife, May Ling Soong, were there in Tehran to witness this drama between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt been included in history books of the time?

  Churchill never forgot, and never forgave, Roosevelt for this exchange. During the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, the subject of “trusteeships” for various British, French, and Dutch colonies came up again. When the heads of state (Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt) met during that session, Churchill was reported to have “exploded,” declaring: “I absolutely disagree. I will not have one scrap of British territory flung into that arena. . . as long as every bit of land over which the British flag flies is to be brought back into the dock, I shall object as long as I live.”8

  Before departing from this subject, I should add a brief personal account that ties together these two most unusual stories. As I was flying the Chinese delegation from Cairo to Tehran in a VIP Lockheed Lodestar, I had to land at the airport in Habbaniya, Iraq, for fuel. While we were on the ground, an air force B-25 arrived. The pilot, Capt. Leon Gray, was a friend of mine, and with him as copilot was Lt. Col. Elliott Roosevelt. They were both from an aerial reconnaissance unit in Algiers.

  During this refueling interlude, I introduced the Chinese to Elliott and his pilot. Elliott told us that his father had invited him to attend the conference because he wanted him to meet Marshal Joseph Stalin. This meeting in Tehran between Elliott and Stalin became part of a most unusual incident that took place only a few years later.

  As reported in Parade magazine on February 9, 1986, Elliott Roosevelt wrote that he had visited Stalin in 1946 for an interview. This had reminded him of something quite extraordinary that had occurred at the time of President Roosevelt’s sudden death less than two months after the Yalta Conference.

  At that time, 1945, Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko had been directed by Stalin to view the remains of the dead President, but Mrs. Roosevelt had denied that request several times.

  While Elliott was with Stalin in 1946, this subject arose again. According to Elliott Roosevelt, this is what Stalin said:

  “When your father died, I sent my ambassador with a request that he be allowed to view the remains and report to me what he saw. Your mother refused. I have never forgiven her.”

  “But why?” Elliott asked.

  “They poisoned your father, of course, just as they have tried repeatedly to poison me. Your mother would not allow my representative to see evidence of that. But I know. They poisoned him!”

  “‘They’? Who are “they’?” Elliott asked.

  “The Churchill gang!” Stalin roared. “They poisoned your father, and they continue to try to poison me. The Churchill gang!”

  One of the best-kept and least-discussed secrets of early Cold War planning took place sometime before the surrender of Japan. It had a great impact upon the selection of Korea and Indochina as the locations of the early “Cold War” hostilities between the “Communists” and the “anti-Communists.”

  Despite the terrific damage done to mainland Japan by aerial bombardment, even before the use of atomic bombs, the invasion of Japan had been considered to be an essential prelude to victory and to “unconditional” surrender. Planning for this invasion had been under way for years. As soon as the island of Okinawa became available as the launching site for this operation, supplies and equipment for an invasion force of at least half a million men began to be stacked up, fifteen to twenty feet high, all over the island.

  Then, with the early surrender of Japan, this massive invasion did not occur, and the use of this enormous stockpile of military equipment was not necessary. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy transport vessels began to show up in Naha Harbor, Okinawa. This vast load of war matériel was reloaded onto those ships. I was on Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new matériel was being returned to the States.


  His response was direct and surprising: “Hell, no! They ain’t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and support at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea, and the other half is going to Indochina.”

  In 1945, none of us had any idea that the first battles of the Cold War were going to be fought by U.S. military units in those two regions beginning in 1950 and 1965—yet that is precisely what had been planned, and it is precisely what happened. Who made that decision back in 1943—45? Who selected Syngman Rhee and Ho Chi Minh to be our new allies as early as mid-1945?

  This is another one of those windows that permits us to see that some decision had to have been made in some detail by the power elite; yet there is absolutely no record of who made the decisions and for what purpose. Such action is rarely, if ever, proved by positive testimony. In such instances, circumstances bear more compelling witness than proof gained from other sources. As the years have passed, we have witnessed the proof. The U.S. involvement in what later became known as the Vietnam War began on the very day of the Japanese surrender, September 2, 1945. We have seen the remainder of the scenario unfold over the years.

  In 1945, OSS units working with Syngman Rhee in Korea and with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam had set up and coordinated these enormous shipments of equipment into those two Japanese-devastated countries. Those shipments forecast that in these two locales would be fought the two greatest conflicts of the Cold War to date and that both would be fought “Cold War style,” without a military objective and to no victorious conclusion. If, and when, other such conflicts occur, they will necessarily follow the same pattern and will reach similar conclusions, as we have seen more recently in the “Gulf War.”

  By the end of WWII the great financial powers of the Western world, aided by their omnipotent Wall Street lawyers, had decided it was time to create a new world power center of transnational corporations and, in the process, to destroy the Soviet Union and socialism. To achieve this enormous objective they chose as their principle driving force the covert power and might of the CIA and its invisible allies.

  They began this move cautiously. During 1947, the Congress worked on legislative language that would establish a new National Security Council (NSC), a new Department of Defense (DOD) with a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) structure, and separate departments of the army, navy, and air force. Almost as an afterthought, the National Security Act of 1947 provided for the creation of a Central Intelligence Agency.

  There was much opposition to this concept. The United States had never before had, in peacetime, a full-fledged intelligence agency operating in the international arena. Traditionally, there were intelligence organizations in the army, navy, FBI, and Treasury and State departments; but these were all specialist staffs designed to perform the work required for the functional support of their various masters. Furthermore, the work of these traditional organizations was almost always limited to pure intelligence and did not intrude into the area of “fun and games,” or clandestine operations.

  Therefore, when the language of the National Security Act of 1947 was drafted—primarily as written by that most gifted lawyer-statesman Clark Clifford—it was designed to calm the waters. It was the intent of the sponsors of this legislation to have the CIA created, no matter what the language of the law contained, in order to get over the threshold. They knew that no matter what was written into the law, the CIA, under a cloak of secrecy, could be manipulated to do everything that was requested of it later.

  The law that was passed by Congress and signed by President Truman created this Central Intelligence Agency and placed it under the direction of the National Security Council. The agency’s statutory authority is contained in Title 50 U.S.C. Section 403(d). To facilitate the creation of the agency, its expressed legal duties were limited to “coordinating the intelligence activities of the several departments and agencies in the interest of national security.” This modest language was chosen specifically to overcome objections expressed by such members of Congress as Rep. Clarence Brown (R-Ohio), who said:

  I am very much interested in seeing the United States have as fine a foreign military and naval intelligence as they can possibly have, but I am not interested in setting up here in the United States any particular central police agency under any President, and I do not care what his name may be, and just allow him to have a Gestapo of his own if he wants to have it. . . .

  Every now and then you get a man that comes up in power and that has an imperialist idea.

  TWO

  The CIA in the World of the H-Bomb

  WHEN HE IS UP AGAINST a team of determined financiers, transnational industrialists, and their crack Wall Street lawyers, even the President of the United States can be frustrated, misled, and confused. Harry S. Truman became President on April 13, 1945, after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while the country was deeply involved in the greatest armed conflict of history—the world war against the Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy (which by that time had surrendered). Truman had been vice president under Roosevelt, but at the time he became President he had never heard of the secret work on the atom bomb or of its creator, the Manhattan Project. He was also not aware that “the Office of Strategic Services had issued a policy paper in April 1945 (before the surrender of Germany) stating that the Russians seemed to be seeking to dominate the world, and recommending that the U.S. take steps to block Russian expansionism.”1

  Furthermore, he had not been told that an element of the underground OSS, along with its British counterparts, had been working covertly with the Nazis and with Nazi sympathizers in Europe as early as September 1944 and that plans had been made to alienate the United States’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and to create a hostile, bipolar world. Harry Truman was not aware of, nor acquainted with, the reality of that invisible superpower elite that Winston Churchill called the High Cabal. He was told the details of the Manhattan Project on April 25, 1945, and learned about these other facts of public life through harsh experience.

  Germany surrendered on May 9, 1945. The war against Japan had been accelerated, culminating in the costly battle of Okinawa. On July 19, 1945, Truman arrived in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, for his first meeting with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and the wartime leader of Great Britain, Winston Churchill. He had to deal with them as equal allies despite the widening rift being created clandestinely between them.

  On July 25, 1945, exactly three months after he had first learned of the atomic bomb, Truman took the opportunity to tell Stalin privately that the United States had successfully developed a major new weapon. He did not tell Stalin that this new weapon was based on a harnessing of the atom for explosive purposes. In response, Stalin showed no interest whatsoever and gave no substantive reply. Truman was perplexed. Did Stalin already know about the success in New Mexico of the first atomic explosion, on July 16, 1945? Had he somehow known about things that Truman himself did not know, long before Truman knew them? We may never know; but this is the way of the clandestine world.

  More importantly, was Stalin aware of the fact that the Cold War had already begun and that the Soviet Union would no longer be a full partner in the Western alliance? Stalin did not reveal his hand, but as we have later discovered, he ordered his own experts, under Igor Kurchatov, to accelerate the Russian nuclear program.

  Truman’s low-key announcement about this new weapon to Stalin at Potsdam was, without a doubt, the starting point of the greatest and most futile arms race in history. The world had moved into the awesome era of nuclear power and clandestine operations.

  For Truman, these Potsdam sessions were a rare education, if nothing else. On the one hand, he learned to deal with Stalin, and on the other hand, he saw his strongest and closest ally, Winston Churchill, depart abruptly when his party failed to win in the concurrent British elections. This placed another burden on Truman. He had first to meet and then to become acquainted with the new prime minister, Clement At
tlee, and his newly assembled staff of British advisers during the course of a momentous series of meetings.

  Of course, Truman was not alone. The President was surrounded by his military and diplomatic staff, a coterie of longtime political cronies, and one other man who went generally unnoticed.

  This other man was Edwin Pauley, a prominent oilman from California, a bank director, and a construction company executive. His official position was head of the American delegation to the Allied Reparations Commission in Moscow. Pauley was the quiet representative of the world of finance, industry, and power. His job was to see that the new President adhered to the course already planned for the “Cold War” world.

  “The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains,” Machiavelli wrote, “is from seeing the men that he has about him.”

  We may be sure this very point was not lost on that shrewd veteran of the Kremlin, Stalin, as he looked around the room at Truman and his staff. The Truman team was formidable, belying the Truman “country boy” image. The post—World War II era, it was clear, would be managed and guided by the demands and specifications of those financiers, industrialists, and Wall Street lawyers who were so well represented at Potsdam.

  While in Potsdam in July, Truman received the news of the successful test-firing of an atomic device at Alamogordo, New Mexico. During the next week, there were countless discussions among the American staff and with the British concerning whether or not to use the atomic bomb in Japan. Truman had two principal options: He could modify the “unconditional surrender” terms of the Roosevelt policy toward Japan, which would permit the Japanese to retain their emperor, or he could refuse to modify the terms and give Japan no alternative but to continue to fight until the United States had used the atom bomb.

  The consensus that guided Truman’s decision was that the bombs should be used, as much to impress the Soviets and the rest of the world with their overwhelming power as to further crush the hapless Japanese. The rationale was that the use of the bombs to bring about the abject surrender of the Japanese would save millions of lives—American and Japanese—by precluding a costly invasion of a kamikaze-indoctrinated country.