JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  The role of these refugees in the creation of the intensity of this warfare was important. Although the French military had been ignominiously defeated, it was prepared to survive “the painful glory of Dien Bien Phu.” As French foreign minister Christian Pineau said to the Council of the Republic, “I am in a good position in this house to say that when the government of Monsieur Diem was formed I declared very clearly that it was not in my opinion the best formula.” But, he said, “a commercial agreement links us with the country.”

  The French military had left, on orders from Diem—but the huge Michelin rubber interests were still there, and the French banking interests and other commercial establishments were still there, so all was well for the French. They were in place to benefit immeasurably from the Americanization of the war. This was true also of the entrenched Chinese mercantile groups, the Australians, and the New Zealanders, who, because of their relative proximity to Indochina, became the greengrocers, merchants, and bankers in Vietnam (particularly for the enormous illicit fortunes made in Vietnam) during the “American episode.”

  It was one thing for the one million refugees to leave northern Vietnam; it was an entirely different matter for them to arrive in the South to take up homes, land, and key jobs.

  As has been stated above, in 1954 and 1955 the south was disorganized. It had never been a true nation-state. Diem, its premier and later its president, was an outsider from Annam who had long been living in exile. All police power had vanished with the departure of the French. The economy had been shattered with the ouster of the Chinese in response to a Diem edict. And the nation had no army to protect its leader or to defend the republic.

  Into this mess came the one million, one hundred thousand.

  Cochin China, the land of the south, was an ancient, rural land. It was the rice bowl of Asia. Long before the war era, more than 13.5 million acres of land had been planted with rice. As far back as 1931, Cochin China had been growing more than two million tons of rice a year. By the 1950s, this figure had been increased to six million tons. South Vietnam had been a major exporter of rice; under Diem, with the economy in chaos, it was forced to import rice to feed the people. This was one of the most horrible legacies of the war years.

  The people of Cochin China were relatively wealthy. They lived comfortable, peaceful lives and their village-type local government had been perfected over thousands of years. They needed little from the outside world, and the outside world scarcely knew they existed.

  Then the exodus began. The first Interim Report of the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, dated December 25, 1954, said: “The commission took measures to secure freedom of movement in the case of about eight thousand refugees.”

  The foreign secretary of Great Britain, Anthony Eden, said in the House of Commons on November 8, 1954: “The House should recall that in Vietnam. . . arrangements [had] to be made to move tens of thousands of the population from the region of Hanoi to the South. . . .”

  A September 19, 1954, Franco-American communique said: “In this spirit France and the United States are assisting the government of Vietnam in the resettlement of the Vietnamese who have of their own free will moved to free Vietnam and who already number some three hundred thousand.”

  A message from President Eisenhower to Premier Diem on October 23, 1954, said: “Your recent request for aid to assist on the formidable project of the movement of several hundred thousand loyal Vietnamese citizens away from areas which are passing under a de facto rule and political ideology which they abhor, are being fulfilled. I am glad that the United States is able to assist in this humanitarian effort.”

  Then, in a speech delivered nationwide over radio and television in the United States on March 8, 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said: “As always, when international communism moves in, those who love liberty move out, if they can. So far, about six hundred thousand persons have fled from northern Vietnam, and before the exodus is over, the number of refugees will probably approach one million. It is not easy for southern Vietnam to absorb these new peoples. They are destitute and penniless persons with only such possessions as they can carry on their backs.”

  It is exceedingly strange to look back to that time and discover that the officials closest to the action, the International Commission, thought that eight thousand people were moving. The British thought “tens of thousands” were moving. The French, who were still very much on the scene, estimated the number at three hundred thousand. Then the prime mover himself, John Foster Dulles, told it as it actually was, nearly, predicting that the figure would “approach one million.”

  As the refugees moved into the south, the U.S.-advised Diem government began to place many of these Catholics in key offices. Typical of the way things developed, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, a northern Catholic who had left Tonkin China in 1954, was made chief of the Office of Political and Social Affairs, the secret government apparatus that had been organized by the CIA to keep tabs on dissenters.

  In Communist countries, this is called the “block” system. It is an oppressive, omnipresent internal spy organization that uses teachers to gather information from children, wives to tell on husbands, and employers to inform on employees.

  Thousands of these northern Catholics were put into such positions of responsibility by the CIA and the Diem government.

  It didn’t take long before the friction between the southern natives and the Diem-favored northern intruders broke out into fighting and riots. These peaceful southern farmers and villagers rebelled against the intrusion of these refugees on their land, in their villages, and in the new Diem government, which none of them liked anyway.

  Before long, the “friends,” according to the Diem brothers and their CIA backers in Saigon, were the one million northern Catholics, and the “enemy”—or at least the “problem”—was the native southerners.

  The time was right to fan the flames into war and to bring in the Americans. The first wave of Americans to arrive were the “Do Gooders,” or, as others have seen them, the “Ugly Americans.”

  In an attempt to create a new nation, to provide it with the means to defend itself with police and an army, to develop its agriculture and economy, and to create schools and hospitals, all kinds of Americans were brought into Indochina to work with the CIA and its Saigon Military Mission, to work with the growing U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, and to increase the manpower of the CIA’s many proprietary companies in Southeast Asia and their burgeoning band of mercenaries.

  The next stage of the Americanization of Vietnam was being set. The plan was to destroy the ancient villages and to replace them with all the advantages of the Western way of life. Someone had decided it was time for the Vietnamese to have the luxury of fast-food hamburgers and fried chicken, not to mention Cadillacs and TV, served up with the American brand of home-view violence and ideology.

  There is, and has been for centuries, in the highest-level power structure, a determination to destroy mankind’s traditional way of life, that is, that of the village. Traditional village life is effective, timeless, and impregnable. It is, above all, self-sufficient, something that American urbanization is not. Villagers have solved the problems of the necessities—food, clothing, and shelter—on a modest scale, and they do not need the omnipotent paternalism of the international banker, the chemical revolution, or the politics of the modern jungle. They would not recognize a lawyer if they saw one. They are not dependent upon the next eighteen-wheel, semitrailer truck for today’s food, either.

  But Indochina was slated to be the next area for Malthusian destruction, and the Americans and the Vietminh knew how to do it. Their mentors in the CIA and KGB saw that they did it according to the planned international scenario. The American plan caused Diem, as its agent, to issue two relatively unnoticed edicts:

  (1) the French must leave, and

  (2) the Chinese, alleged to be sympathetic to the communism of China, must leave
.

  These edicts, which appeared to make sense from the Diem perspective, raised the level of internal warfare and assured the destruction of the Vietnamese village-type economy and way of life; that is, no law and order and no food and water. In the process they paved the way for the entry of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard to take part in the Vietnam War, under the guidance of the CIA’s master planners and the ambassador who remained in Saigon on the job, despite the nondiplomatic formalities of such a war.

  SEVEN

  Why Vietnam? The Selection and Preparation of the Battlefield

  “WHY VIETNAM?” Why was this remote, backward, ancient land chosen, as far back as 1943 or 1944, to be one of the major battlegrounds of the Cold War? A dog-eared copy of a 1931 National Geographic likens Vietnam to a Garden of Eden. What was there about this historically serene Asian land that caused it to be chosen to be devastated by this massive war?

  I say “chosen” advisedly. Who had directed that one-half of that great stockpile of weapons and other war-making matériel that was delivered to Okinawa for use during the invasion of Japan should, instead, be transshipped to Vietnam? Decisions of such magnitude would have to, one would think, have been made by such men as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Clement Attlee, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek; but these men weren’t making “Cold War”—that is, “communism vs. anti-communism”—decisions at that time.

  Questions like these require that we begin to think of the Cold War and its half century in terms of an awareness of a super power elite that can, and does, make such monumental decisions. Lest it appear that I am making these allegations out of thin air, may I suggest that others, now and at other times, have come to similar conclusions. Winston Churchill, in conversations with intimate friends during World War II, made reference to a “High Cabal.” R. Buckminster Fuller wrote positively and powerfully of a super “power elite.” Dr. Joseph Needham, the great Chinese scholar at Cambridge University, writes of a Chinese belief in “the Gentry” as a similar “power elite.” This is a serious subject, and one that concerns us all. The “Why Vietnam?” question causes us to later ask, “Why John F. Kennedy?” We shall see why.

  To probe further, why did the Vietnam War cause the dean of American military correspondents, Hansen W. Baldwin, to write, in the foreword to Adm. U.S.G. Sharp’s book Strategy of Defeat, the following:

  . . . for this first defeat in American history—the historical blame must be placed squarely where it belongs—not primarily upon our military leaders whose continuous and protracted frustrations burst forth from these pages—but upon the very top civilian policy makers in Washington, specifically the Commander in Chief [President Lyndon B. Johnson].

  Admiral Sharp, who was the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC) and thus the senior American military man in the area, wrote, “The Vietnam episode was one of the most controversial eras of U.S. history. . . . When we accepted defeat . . . we seemed to be clearly saying to the world that what we had ultimately lost was our concern for the responsibilities, indeed the honor, that goes with a leadership role. If this is true, I fear for the peace of the world.” Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, USMC (Ret’d), formerly the commander of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, tells a similar story in his fine book First to Fight.

  This is what allows me to write from my own knowledge and experience. My immediate boss for two years was General Krulak. During those years I also knew Admiral Sharp. Before I worked for General Krulak, I served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under both Thomas Gates and Robert McNamara. I have worked closely with Allen Dulles and his brother, Foster Dulles. I feel that it is essential to set forth important elements of this historical period in a way that will be most useful to the reader. We need to understand the CIA and its allies. We need to know why we were in Vietnam, or at least what caused us to be there, so that when we arrive at the year 1963 and the “1,000 Days of Camelot” we shall be ready to understand the true handwriting on the wall. These next chapters have the creation of that awareness as their objective.

  Years after the Vietnam War had been brought to a close, Gen. Paul Harkins, head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam from February 1962 to June 1964, said he had never been told what the American military objective was in that war. If that is true—and I have no reason to believe that it is not—then why were we there? What was the real purpose of that massive thirty-year struggle that cost 58,000 American lives, as much as $500 billion, and the lives of millions of noncombatants? What kind of a war can be waged without an objective?

  Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian general and military writer, declared that of the nine principles of warfare, the most important is that of the “objective.” “If you are going to fight a war and you intend to be the victor,” he said, “you must have a clearly stated and totally understood military objective.” Furthermore, that objective should issue from the highest authority in the land. It is not just permission or authority to “do something.” As we shall see here, there was no official U.S. government directive and objective, of a military nature, in Vietnam at any time.

  During World War II, when Gen. Creighton W. Abrams led the point brigade of Gen. George S. Patton’s victorious Third Army after the invasion of France, he had a military objective that old “Blood and Guts” Patton had put in plain words: “Cross the Rhine; destroy the German army; shake hands with the Russians.” That is the kind of job a military man can do, and Abrams did it. That objective led to victory on that front.

  More than two decades later, General Abrams, one of the great armored force commanders, was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to replace Gen. William Westmoreland as commander of U.S. military forces in Vietnam. During a rousing “halftime” speech for the benefit of the general and his staff officers at the White House, Johnson said, “Abe, you are going over there to win. You will have an army of five hundred and fifty thousand men, one of the most powerful air forces ever assembled, and the invincible Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy offshore. Now go over there and do it!”

  General Abrams, good soldier that he was, remained silent as he reached out to shake the President’s hand. In the rear of that room, however, another army general, a member of Abrams’s staff, a man who had been with him during WWII, spoke up. “Mr. President,” he said, “you have told us to go over there and do ‘it.’ Would you care to define what ‘it’ is?”

  LBJ remained silent as he ushered the general and his men out of the Oval Office. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the military role in that long, terrible, winless war. We had no “objective,” that is, no reason to be there.

  For General Westmoreland, the man who served during those hectic years of the Johnson escalation of the war, the objective of the war became the “body count”—the number of dead “enemy” reported in a given period of time. A related objective was “enemy strength estimates”—the number of enemy troops calculated to be in the field. It was assumed that if the body count was going up, the strength of the enemy must be going down. The more “bodies” that could be counted, the closer we were supposed to be getting to victory.

  Few men, if any, had more experience with the inner workings of Vietnam policy, at the Washington level, than Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak. He served as special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, 1962—63. He was my immediate boss in SACSA for all of that period. The general was a rare and gifted man who might well have been appointed commandant of the Marine Corps had President Kennedy lived.

  He left the Pentagon in 1964 to serve as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, with responsibility for all marines in the Pacific Ocean area. That was in itself an oddly structured assignment. His immediate boss in Honolulu was Adm. U.S.G. Sharp, commander in chief Pacific; yet the commanding general over the marines fighting in Vietnam was Gen. William Westmoreland, who had an ambassador and a senior CIA station
chief looking over each of his shoulders in Saigon.

  Some years later, General Krulak wrote in First To Fight: “I saw what was happening [in Vietnam] as wasteful of American lives, promising a series of protracted, strength-sapping battles with small likelihood of a successful outcome.”

  With this in mind and drawing upon his considerable combat experience in World War II, which included those final heavy battles on Okinawa, Krulak came up with a strategic plan designed to achieve “victory” in Vietnam. With this plan in hand, he flew to Saigon to present it to General Westmoreland. Westmoreland was unable to concur with Krulak’s plan. So Krulak returned to Honolulu and presented the plan to Admiral Sharp, who liked it and directed Krulak to take the plan to Washington to present it formally to the U.S. Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Wallace M. Greene.

  General Greene approved the plan and made arrangements for Krulak to present it to Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense. Krulak knew McNamara well from his long service with the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. McNamara agreed with the plan, but then did something that uncovers the real source of power with respect to top-level decisions affecting activities in Southeast Asia during the sixties.

  McNamara suggested, “Why don’t you talk to Governor Harriman?” Averell Harriman, formerly ambassador to the Soviet Union, was then serving as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. I might add that Harriman comes as close to a model for the power elite as I can think of—with one qualifying exception: He lived a most public and ostentatious life. But perhaps that was a role he was chosen to play by his peers.

  Harriman graciously invited General Krulak to join him for lunch at his elegant home in Georgetown. Following their luncheon, Governor Harriman invited the general to present his strategic plan for achieving victory in Vietnam. When he got to the climax of the plan, which recommended “destroy the port areas, mine the ports, destroy the rail lines, destroy power, fuel, and heavy industry,” Harriman stopped him and demanded, “Do you want a war with the Soviet Union or the Chinese?”