JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  The brigade was scheduled to hit the beach at dawn. The President had been well briefed on the significance of that prelanding air strike and had directed that B-26 attack. But, as we have seen, it was never carried out. Why wasn’t that crucial air strike flown, after the President had specifically directed that it be done?

  This failure has been erroneously blamed on President Kennedy for three decades in various contrived stories, some of which appear to have a bearing on the overall assassination story.

  A most unusual article, “The Brigade’s My Fault,” appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times on October 23, 1979. It contained an elaborate and confusing confession. Its author was McGeorge Bundy, the former special assistant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and the man the “Cuban Study Group” (to be identified below) determined had made the call that directed General Cabell of the CIA to cancel the B-26 bomber strike against Castro’s last three combat aircraft.

  In this article, Bundy wrote about the “brigade in Cuba” and “the famous brigade, a unit of about 2,600 men.” He revealed his top-level views of the intelligence community of that time: “But in fact, like other people, the intelligence community usually has more on its plate than it can handle.”

  He recalled all those major programs the CIA had under full steam when the Kennedy administration came to Washington in 1961, then wrote: “So I have to consider that there was a staff failure—which means mostly me.”

  He leaves no question about it as he writes that after eighteen years of contemplation, “The Brigade’s My Fault.” Kennedy had never placed the fault for the brigade on anyone but himself. Eisenhower had done likewise with the U-2 affair.

  On April 22, 1961, JFK had directed Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in association with Attorney General Robert Kennedy,17 Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Allen Dulles, to give him a report on the “Immediate Causes of Failure of Operation Zapata,” that is, the Bay of Pigs. That elaborate report by Taylor was submitted to JFK in the form of a lengthy letter on June 13, 1961.

  The existence of that report has been denied by those principals and was one of the best-kept secrets of the Kennedy years.18

  However, during 1979, the same year when Bundy wrote his op-ed piece, a book about the Bay of Pigs appeared, written by Peter Wyden, formerly editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. In Wyden’s book there are several quotes that he attributes to the “so-called Taylor Report,” and with that revelation the long-buried report became public. Wyden mentions McGeorge Bundy no less than seventeen times and quotes liberally from the long-missing Taylor Report. This is undoubtedly why, in October 1979, Bundy finally made his long-overdue statement. He most assuredly had read the Wyden book19 and had heard people discussing the critical role he played in the strange Bay of Pigs drama.

  Wyden had stated rather specifically about Bundy:

  Bissell’s former student, Mac Bundy, agreed in 1977 that the air strength was not only too small; it was much too small, but he pointed out that the planners said nothing about it. . . . He felt that the cancelled strike was only a marginal adjustment.

  Bundy blamed himself in one respect: “I had a very wrong estimate of the consequences of failure, the mess.”

  Bissell, Bundy, and Wyden were all referring to a few specific lines from the Taylor Report that placed the blame for the defeat of the brigade on one telephone call. Keep in mind that Kennedy had approved the dawn air strike at 1:45 P.M., April 16, 1960.

  This quote is from the Taylor letter, paragraph 43: “At about 9:30 P.M. on April 16, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President, telephoned General C. P. Cabell of CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes the following morning should not be launched until they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead.”20

  No wonder Bundy admitted he had “a very wrong estimate of the consequences.” First of all, U-2 photos taken late Saturday, April 15, showed the three T-33 jets parked wingtip to wingtip on a small airstrip near Santiago, Cuba. One eight-gun B-26 alone could have wiped them out on the ground. The CIA’s operational commander at Puerto Cabezas was sending four B-26s to do the job that one could have done easily—provided the T-33s were caught on the ground. The brigade was scheduled to hit the beach at sunrise. That would alert Castro’s air warning system and put the T-33s in the air. As reported by Wyden, the Bundy call to Cabell stating that no air strikes could be launched until after the brigade had secured the Giron airstrip constituted a total misreading and a complete reversal of the approved tactical plan.

  The dawn air strikes were essential to destroy the three T-33s on the ground—the only way the slower B-26s could destroy them. With them out of the way, Castro would have had no combat aircraft. The brigade would have been subject to no air attacks, their supply ships would have been safe, and the “air cover” issue that some revisionists have raised would have been totally irrelevant. This was the plan JFK had approved; Bundy misunderstood it—or did he?

  There is one more thing to add about the McGeorge Bundy article. Bundy had no doubt seen the Wyden book. He realized then that, after eighteen years, the “never written” Taylor “Letter to the President” had finally been released. Bundy saw the undeniable evidence that it was he who had canceled the dawn air strike and caused the failure of the brigade’s gallant effort. There was nothing he could do to alter those facts except counterattack. He used a clever Freudian gambit: He let his mind think one thing and his fingers write another.

  His op-ed article says, “The Brigade’s My Fault.” Any alert reader seeing that title would immediately connect it with the Bay of Pigs brigade and its failure. But Bundy is clever. He instead wrote a rather nonsensical, slightly offbeat, and quite disparaging article on the subject of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He didn’t say one word about the Bay of Pigs. He used the word “brigade,” but in a contrived context of the later event. It was clever, but it doesn’t wash—especially not after the release of the Taylor Report, written right before the eyes of Robert F. Kennedy, who reported the group’s findings to his brother every day.

  During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the problem Kennedy faced concerned the Russian “technicians,” that is, rocket experts, and not a “brigade.” The “brigade” was at the Bay of Pigs. Bundy furnishes two numbers of military unit strength, 22,000 and 2,600. Neither one is pertinent to anything, and neither represents a “brigade” of anything.

  With Bundy’s clever article in the Times, one is reminded of Richard Nixon’s equally clever article in Reader’s Digest, “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” and then of Gerald Ford’s gratuitous article in Life magazine, scooping the report of the Warren Commission with his “Piecing Together the Evidence.”

  Not one of these articles is completely true. They all have a special scenario to build, and all are revisionist. They are all written by men who have held high positions—two by ex-Presidents and one by the man who was formerly the national security assistant to two Presidents. They are, one way or the other, closely involved with that most important subject: the death of John F. Kennedy.

  TEN

  JFK and the Thousand Days to Dallas

  THE ASSASSINATION of President John F. Kennedy has been a never-ending puzzle for researchers and assassination “buffs.” They can tell you the name of the street where Lee Harvey Oswald lived while he worked in Minsk in the Soviet Union or the precise weight loss of the so-called Magic Bullet that the Warren Commission says passed through both President Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally before it mysteriously came to rest among the sheets on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. This research has become such a mad game that few people ever think of basic facts and causes. Who ordered the murder of President Kennedy? Why was it done, and for whose benefit? Who manages and perpetuates this omnipresent cover-up, even today?

  On the other side of the coin, those who have created the entrancing cover-story scenario have provided so many precious and diversionary “golden apples” that many re
searchers have taken the lure and stopped to examine every one of them. As an example: It is clear from the abundant evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President Kennedy. Then why study Oswald and that whole matter to absurdity? Such actions are an utter waste of time and serve to obfuscate the truth.

  The murder of President Kennedy required the simultaneous existence and application of three fundamental factors:

  the decision and the power to do it;

  the professional mercenaries or “mechanics” to carry it off precisely as a team effort; and

  the application and maintenance of the cover-story scenario to assure continuing control of the government of the United States of America thereafter.

  The first two requirements were relatively simple ones and were the work of professionals. Once the decision had coalesced within the power elite, the die was cast. The “mechanics” were from “Murder Inc.,” the international specialist group that is maintained by the government, just as ex-President Lyndon B. Johnson confirmed in his interview with Leo Janos that appeared in the July 1973 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. The continuing cover story, on the other hand, was difficult to create and manipulate and is by far the most important factor. It is this third factor that reveals the nature of the top echelon involved and the power and skillful determination of the plotters who benefited by gaining control of the presidency.

  After all, the members of this cabal were able to control a commission created by a President and headed by the chief justice of the United States. They obtained the written endorsement of two men who later became Presidents: Ford and Nixon. They have controlled the media and congressional activity, to the extent that the assassination has never been investigated adequately. And they have controlled the judicial system of the state of Texas where by law a trial for the murder of President Kennedy should have been, and must still be, convened. The book is never closed on murder.

  Why, then, was Kennedy killed? What brought about the pressures that made murder of the President essential, no matter what it cost? This chapter will probe this subject within the scope of the parameters of that time and will attempt to link the assassination with the Vietnam War—a link that unquestionably exists.

  On November 8, 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States of America by a margin of 112,000 votes—a one-half-vote-per-precinct edge, the slimmest victory margin for the presidency since 1884.

  Just over a thousand days later, President Kennedy was shot dead in the streets of Dallas by the closely coordinated rifle fire of a team of hired guns—or, to use the CIA terminology, “mechanics.” Pressures that had built during the election had become even greater during those intervening three years. Someone else wanted to take over control of the presidency before JFK could be reelected in 1964, and wanted it badly enough to kill and to put up with the eternal burden of maintaining the cover-story scenario—that one lone gunman, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, did it with three shots from an old, Italian-made rifle with an unreliable telescopic sight. To maintain that cover story has taken real power; and those responsible for the assassination have that power.

  It is relatively easy to assassinate a President; there are ways to beat the defenses. “Providing absolute protection for anyone is an impossible task,” as the Secret Service men themselves say.1 After all, on November 22, 1963, when JFK died, the Secret Service did not own a single armored automobile for the protection of the President. The FBI owned four of them; but the Secret Service had never asked for one.

  The actual killing of the President is relatively simple, but shielding the gunmen and those who hired them, arranging for their safe and undetected removal from the scene, creating a “patsy” (the word used by Oswald himself before he, too, was murdered) to take the blame, and releasing a cover-story scenario in those early hectic moments and keeping it intact for the next several generations takes a cabal with the power and longevity of a great machine. The deft way it has been orchestrated reveals the skill of the plotters and indicates that those responsible included top-level government officials, plus their power-elite masters. The fact of conspiracy is revealed by the discovery of such circumstances.

  More important by far, this cover story was not designed for the sole purpose of concealing the identity of the killers and their supporting team. It was designed to make possible the total takeover of the government of the United States of America and to make it possible for this cabal to control a series of Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to the present day. Look at the record.

  What created this murderous cabal? What were the enormous conflicts that brought about the murder of a young and extremely popular President? Kennedy had just established the first plank in the platform for his reelection with his promise to bring one thousand men home from Vietnam by Christmas of 1963 and to have all Americans out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. His trip to Texas with Johnson and Connally marked the beginning of his 1964 reelection campaign. The cabal could wait no longer. The die had been cast, and the shots had to be fired in Dallas that day.

  There can be only one reason powerful enough to cause the almost spontaneous coalescence of such a cabal for that single purpose. That reason was the fear of Kennedy’s all-but-certain reelection. The alternative was to take control of the power of the presidency at all costs. In raising the age-old question “cui bono?”—who benefits?—we must examine the nature of the fatal pressures that enveloped the days of the Kennedy administration; and we must understand how they stood in the way of other plans by other peoples in their relentless drive for world power.

  The American public has been led to believe that the mystery of the President’s assassination was supposed to have been resolved by the massive investigation of the crime by those prominent members of the commission established on November 29, 1963, by the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, one week after the death of JFK. On that troubled day, LBJ called his trusted friend and confidant, J. Edgar Hoover, longtime director of the FBI, to the White House for a heart-to-heart discussion. LBJ and Hoover had lived across the street from one another in Washington, D.C., for nineteen years. Hoover had been a frequent visitor to the Johnson ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River in Texas. They were the type of friends who got along by necessity. They needed each other; they understood each other; they had been through fire together. They knew where many bodies were buried along the corridors of power.

  On this day, LBJ sorely needed the ear and advice of his old comrade. A record of this meeting is contained in a memorandum written and signed by Hoover on the day of the meeting. As Hoover reported, Johnson asked him if he “was familiar with the proposed group he was trying to get to study my [Hoover’s] report” on the JFK murder. Hoover had responded in the negative. Johnson said he hoped the “study” could get by “just with my [Hoover’s] file and my [Hoover’s] report.”

  Then Johnson asked Hoover what he thought of the proposed members of the group. He listed the names: Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gen. Lauris Norstad, Congressmen Hale Boggs and Gerald Ford, and Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper. “He [Johnson] would not want [Sen.] Jacob K. Javits” for reasons not explained, wrote Hoover.

  President Johnson did not discuss with Hoover the name of the man he wanted to head the group, Chief Justice Earl Warren; and for some reason, General Norstad was able to remove himself from the final commission list.

  Following this meeting, President Johnson, by Executive Order 11130, dated November 29, 1963, “created a commission to investigate the assassination on November 22, 1963, of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.”

  The President directed this commission “to evaluate all facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its findings and conclusions to him.”2

  Note that Johnson’s directive required this commission to do no more than “evaluate all f
acts” and “report its findings.” Neither of these is conclusive. The commission served to deter legal action in Texas and silenced the threat of a major congressional inquiry. From the very first day of the creation of the Warren Commission, it had before it the inference that the alleged assassin was the man Jack Ruby had killed in Dallas while the alleged killer was being moved from one jail to another. The commission may have begun its investigation with the FBI “study . . . and its files and report”; but by the time it published its own twenty-six-volume report, in September 1964, it had been carried away by the entrancing cover story designed by the power cabal . . . the same cover story that lives today.

  The first thing that President Johnson ought to have done was to demand that a trial for the murder of JFK be held in Texas. The fact that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald was dead was no barrier to the legal requirement. Oswald did not kill JFK. He was the “patsy” of the cover-story scenario. It would have been utterly impossible for the Dallas police to explain what truly incriminating information they had that was of sufficient merit to warrant the arrest of that young man while he was seated in a distant theater. Certainly the members of the Warren Commission were competent enough to understand that. Instead, they were the victims of great pressure brought to bear by those orchestrating the cover-up.

  Because it is apparent that enormous pressure at the highest level had been generated during those thousand days of the Kennedy era, from November 8, 1960, to November 22, 1963, it is important that the “Days of Camelot” be reviewed and analyzed.