JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  The first bomb was dropped on an already war weary Japanese population at Hiroshima on August 5 and a second over Nagasaki on August 9. The Japanese surrendered on August 14. During the final stages of the war, the Japanese had been unable to send aircraft up to attack American bombers, because they lacked essential parts and, quite frequently, fuel.

  As a gesture of hospitality, the Japanese had opened the American prisoner-of-war camps in Japan weeks before the bombs were dropped, and hundreds of Americans wandered freely throughout Japan, waiting for the day when the first American transport aircraft would arrive to carry them away. I was a pilot of one of the first heavy transport aircraft to land at the only Japanese air base that had not been destroyed by bombs, near Atsugi, not far from Yokohama, during late August 1945.

  As we flew down through the heavy cloud layers that were remnants of a major hurricane that had swept over the islands of Japan, we broke out into a rainy overcast over Tokyo Bay and saw the ships of the U.S. Navy at anchor, with the battleship Missouri in their midst. The air base at Atsugi was covered with new Japanese aircraft that had never seen combat. We saw some military trucks. They were operating on methane and were made entirely of wood, except for the most vital parts, which had to be made of steel.

  Everywhere we looked, we found overwhelming evidence that the Japanese dream of empire had been shattered. It was clear that the long-planned invasion of Japan would have been unnecessary, even without the use of the two atomic bombs.

  We took off from the Atsugi airfield after leaving a contingent of U.S. Marines there to serve with General MacArthur’s bodyguard and flew low over Yokohama and Tokyo. Although I had seen war-devastated cities in Russia, in Europe, and in the Philippines, I had never experienced anything to equal the “firebomb” destruction of Tokyo. It was total. More than fifteen thousand people had died by asphyxiation in a single city block where I rented a house during 1952—54, in the Shibuya-Ku district. Tokyo, that enormous city, had been so flattened that, from our low-flying aircraft, we had an unobstructed view of trolley cars operating from one side of the downtown area to the other. Almost every building had been destroyed, and the streets were a mass of rubble.

  We flew quite low down the east coast of the main island, Honshū. In one of the most memorable and stark manifestations of utter surrender that can be imagined, the Japanese people had tied broad strips of white cloth to the ends of long bamboo poles. They had then bound these poles to the top branches of the ever-present pine trees. The whole country appeared to be flying the white emblem of surrender.

  In the school playgrounds, the children stopped their games and stood frozen, with heads lowered, as our big aircraft flew over them. Fortunately for all of us, we were not on a bombing mission. Then we came to the ruins of what had once been the city of Hiroshima. As I have said, I have seen the destruction of warfare. I had always put the shell of the Russian city of Rostov at the head of my list of the most devastated cities. During the ebb and flow of the great battles in Russia, Rostov had been destroyed four times, twice by the attacking Germans and twice by the returning Russians. But here was Hiroshima just five hundred feet below us. On the coast, at the end of a small valley, what remained of that beautiful city looked like the ashes of a bonfire that, all of a sudden, had been blown out by a massive gust of wind. Nothing moved. Only the pattern of the streets and bridges preserved the identity of a once-proud city.

  When President Truman returned to Washington following his meetings in Potsdam, he announced the results of the conference. At the same time, it was announced that a second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered, and the necessary documents were signed on September 2, 1945, by all parties on the deck of the Missouri. World War II was over. A historic era had ended—with implications that no one in the world fully grasped at that time. Never again would it be possible—or desirable—for those with the power over a nation or an alliance of nations to wage an all-out, unfettered, classic war on another group of nations with an expectation of victory that would include an assurance of their own survival. Nuclear weapons had changed all that.

  That span of history, from man’s first use of clubs and spears to the mass destruction of World War I and World War II—with machine guns, tanks, artillery, ships, and aircraft—had ended with the advent of the atom bomb. If anyone in power was not convinced of this fact by 1945, he had only to wait for the results of the hydrogen bomb tests in the fall of 1952. That single blast, the Mike Shot on Eniwetok Atoll, blew a hole deeper than the height of the Empire State Building. Or he could have waited a bit longer, for the Bravo test shot of the lithium-deuteride “fission-fusion-fission” H-bomb of 1954, when fallout created lethal dosages of radioactivity for 140 miles downwind in a belt 20 miles wide, in addition to massive destruction far greater than that of the earlier test at Eniwetok.

  During the postwar years, a number of important events took place as mankind was herded from the old era to the new. The Cold War, based upon a structured East-West confrontation, provided the basis for a new type of very lethal, global conflict that would depend upon large, invisible armies concealed under the benign cover of intelligence organizations. Almost immediately after the end of hostilities, the great armed forces that had fought World War II were dismantled and disbanded. Nearly all of their arms, ammunition, and other matériel were salvaged, sold, or given away to make way for new procurement.

  The early creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was an inevitable progression after World War II. With the decision already made to turn the Soviet Union, almost overnight, from a wartime ally to a “peacetime” adversary, it became necessary to create an organization that could, in time of “peace,” continue the eternal conflict using the networks of agents and spies in Eastern Europe that had been established by the Allies and by the Nazis during the war. The utilization of the World War II Nazi agent networks in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union became a major characteristic of the new Cold War strategy. The CIA was joined by “Allies” foreign and domestic, governmental and civilian.

  In fact, “peacetime operations” became the new Orwellian euphemism for military-type covert operations, often on a mammoth scale. These “peacetime operations” were carried out whether or not they were secret and whether or not they could be disclaimed plausibly, without benefit of a declaration of a state of war among the adversaries. This was an important shift. Any country—whether it was the United States or the Soviet Union, or even a smaller country, such as Greece or Israel—that employed its undercover forces in peacetime, within the borders of another country with whom it was not officially at war, ignored and degraded the age-old concepts of the independence of nations and of national sovereignty.

  On October 1, 1945, Truman directed the termination of the OSS. While the legislation for the new defense establishment and the CIA was being written and debated, the President established the Central Intelligence Group as an interim measure. The existence of the CIG made it possible to maintain the covert-agent assets of the wartime OSS wherever they existed and to provide organizational cover for former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen and his intelligence staff, along with their voluminous files of former Nazi, anti-Communist agents and spies that were concealed in the undercover networks of Eastern Europe and in the USSR.

  Allen Dulles had been instrumental in arranging, with Gehlen, for this most unusual conversion of one of Hitler’s most sinister generals into an officer in the U.S. Army, but the details of Gehlen’s personal surrender and subsequent flight to the United States—in General Eisenhower’s own VIP aircraft—were arranged by U.S. Army officers. The senior officer of this plan was Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who served immediately after World War II as the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and, upon his return from Moscow in October 1950, as the director of central intelligence. Also involved in this plan was Col. William Quinn, later Lieutenant General Quinn and head of the De
fense Intelligence Agency (DIA).2

  It is important to note the active role of these U.S. Army officials in this unprecedented move of Hitler’s own intelligence chief, Gehlen, directly into the U.S. Army as an officer by a special act of the Congress. This was not a casual incident. The move, planned before the end of the war with Germany and directed from the top, was a classic example of the work of the power elite.

  Shortly after the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the National Security Council met, on December 19 of that year, for the first time. The council had hardly waited for the ink to dry on the new law before it ignored its stricture—that the CIA limit itself to the “coordination” of intelligence—and rushed the fledgling agency into covert action. National Security Council Directive #4 directed the newly appointed director of central intelligence, Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, “to carry out covert psychological warfare,” much against his own professional desires. To this end, a “special procedures group” was set up immediately, and, among other things, it became involved in the covert “buying” of the nationwide election in Italy.

  This early covert operation was considered successful, and in 1948 the National Security Council issued a new directive to cover “clandestine paramilitary operations, as well as political and economic warfare.” This new directive gave birth to a new covert action unit that replaced the “special procedures group.” In deference to the language of the law, if not the intent, this new unit—the most covert of all sections—was named the Office of Policy Coordination.

  As quoted earlier, “The deepest cover story of the CIA is that it is an intelligence organization.” The OPC was headed by Frank Wisner, formerly the OSS station chief in Romania. Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles, then with the OSS in Switzerland, were among the first U.S. officials to begin contact in 1944 with selected Nazis and Nazi sympathizers—with a “Blowback” (“exfiltration” of former Nazis with desired technological skills) operation known as the “Deep Water” (code name only) project—for their eventual evacuation to the United States.

  Of course, the ostensible reason given in most instances for this unusual action was that these Nazis were scientists and technical experts whose skills would be useful in the United States and that it was necessary to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets. As we know today, this was hardly the truth. It was Wisner who had arranged a transfer of a large number of prisoners of war from the Balkans via Turkey and Cairo in the fall of 1944. Among this large group—mostly American flight crew members who had been shot down during heavy bombing attacks over the Ploesti oil fields of Romania—were a number of pro-Nazi intelligence specialists who were fleeing the Balkans, scattering before the approach of the Russian army.

  In his new position with the OPC, Wisner was able to control a large group of Eastern European agents in a massive network of spies. At the same time, he could protect them and their U.S. contacts against hostile, anti-Nazi, and Soviet capture—possibly even assassination. The OPC was a little-known, most unusual organization, especially within the U.S. government, where such deeply covert activity had never taken place before.

  As initially created, the OPC was totally separate from the CIA’s intelligence collection (another function not specifically authorized by law) and analysis sections. The OPC’s chief had been nominated by the secretary of state and approved by the secretary of defense. The funds for this office were concealed, as were much of the CIA funds, in the larger budget of the Department of Defense. Policy guidance and specific operational instructions for the OPC bypassed the director of central intelligence completely and came directly from State and Defense. In other words, the OPC was all but autonomous.

  It is in this example of the OPC that we discover most clearly how the new invisible army was brought into the government and created in secrecy. There was no law that authorized such an organization or the wide range of covert functions it was created to perform. When it began, the director of central intelligence, if asked, could have denied that he had anything to do with it, and no one would have thought—or dared—to ask the secretaries of state or defense if they had become involved in covert operations or to ask them about an organization they could claim they did not know even existed. As we see, this most covert office was buried as deep within the bureaucracy as possible, and its many lines to agents and secret operations were untraceable.

  Despite all this secrecy, however, the OPC grew from about three hundred personnel in 1949 to nearly six thousand contract employees by 1952. A large part of this sudden growth was due to the additional demands for covert action and other special operations that grew out of the Korean War and related activities. One of the first things Gen. Walter B. Smith did, when he returned from Moscow and became director of central intelligence, was to take over OPC completely and sever its connections with State and Defense—except for the concealment of funds in Defense and for the rather considerable support that was always provided by military units for these clandestine activities around the world.

  This brings up another important characteristic of the invisible army. While the CIA administered the operations of this fast-growing organization, with its six thousand employees, it could always rely upon the military for additional personnel, transport, overseas bases, weapons, aircraft, ships, and all the other things the Department of Defense had in abundance. One of the most important items provided regularly by Defense was “military cover.” OPC and other CIA personnel were concealed in military units and provided with military cover whenever possible, especially within the far-flung bases of the military around the world—even in Antarctica.

  The covert or invisible operational methods developed by the CIA and the military during the 1950s are still being used today despite the apparent demise of the Cold War, in such covert activities as those going on in Central America and Africa, and even in such highly specialized activities as the preparation of “assassination manuals” of the type that was written by the CIA and discovered in Nicaragua in 1984. That manual was only a later version of one developed by the CIA in the 1950s. Today all of this clandestine activity amounts to big business, and the distinction between the CIA and the military is hard to discern, since they always work together.3

  THREE

  The Invisible Third World War

  THE WORLDWIDE INVISIBLE WAR waged by the Soviet KGB and the American Central Intelligence Agency over the past fifty years, and under the cover that these war-making organizations were in fact intelligence organizations, was being fought with novel tactics. Not only was this type of underground warfare secret, but so were its methods. Discerning readers were not surprised, then, to discover on an inside page of the New York Times on July 25, 1985, a tiny two-inch article, datelined Zaragoza, Spain, describing one of these Cold War battles, being fought with these secret tactics.

  TWO SPANISH OFFICERS SENTENCED FOR ROLES IN FAKE EXECUTIONS

  ZARAGOZA, Spain, July 24 (UPI)—Two army officers who herded villagers into a public square for mock executions were sentenced today to prison terms of four and five months, military authorities said.

  A military tribunal ruled Tuesday that officers, Capt. Carlos Aleman and Lieut. Jaime Iniguez, had been overzealous in carrying out orders.

  “They were ordered to stage a mock invasion of a town and to make it as realistic as possible, but they went too far,” said a Defense Ministry spokesman, Lieut. Jesus del Monte.

  This bizarre incident occurred in Spain. Similar events, using the same tactics, take place somewhere in the world almost daily, despite the apparent demise of the Cold War. They have one unique characteristic, seldom if ever seen in regular warfare, that sets them apart. Incidents such as this one, reported by the Times, serve to incite warfare rather than to bring it to an end. To give the age-old concept new meaning, “They make war. . . out of practically nothing.”

  The methods used in Spain are almost precisely those used by the CIA in, among other cases, the Philippines in the early 1950s and I
ndochina from 1945 to 1965. These will be discussed in later chapters. It is important to note that tens of thousands of foreign “paramilitary” and Special Forces troops have been trained at various U.S. military bases under CIA supervision and sponsorship. Some of this training is highly specialized, using advanced weapons and war-related materiel. Some of it takes place at American universities and even in manufacturing plants, where advanced equipment for this type of warfare is being made.

  Then there are the paramilitary forces of other nations that have been trained in the Soviet Union. Today these graduates, by the tens of thousands, are the leaders of the “elite” forces of many countries and the professionals used to breed a world of international terrorists. For the most part, they are not individuals or members of some small group, but participants in a most sophisticated, worldwide complex of organizations. The Spanish example is a perfect case study in describing the methods and tactics of such units. (For illustrative purposes, examples of operations in other countries will be merged with the Spanish example to portray more comprehensively the potential of these tactics.)

  The Spanish army’s Special Forces troops had been ordered to “stage a mock invasion of a town and to make it [look and feel] as realistic as possible.” The army was ordered to create a battle that would appear to support evidence of insurgency. This is one of the secret methods of the secret war. These special armed forces are used as agitators. It is as though the fire department were being used to start fires, the police department employed to steal and kill, and doctors ordered to make people sick, to destroy their brains, to poison them. Such clandestine operations are designed to make war—even when they have to play both sides at the same time.