JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  It seemed to me, and many others, that this language made it indisputably clear what the President wanted. On the contrary, the CIA, with the support of certain willing military leaders (such as those with the Army Special Warfare elements), began a long series of meetings to discuss such questions as “What is a small covert operation? What is a large one?” They, of course, battled to stake out as big a claim as possible. Their arguments progressed to the subject of the eventual transfer of such operations from an embattled CIA to the larger and more experienced military.

  This question was raised: “Suppose the CIA begins a certain Cold War operation with a small, covert activity that leads through a normal sequence of events to a large operation that becomes a major military conflagration far beyond that agency’s capability? When and how will the transfer of the responsibility for that operation from the CIA to the military take place, and at such a time is there any chance, at all, that the operation can be kept secret and plausibly deniable?”

  These arguments, plus the natural desire of the JCS to remain uninvolved, doomed this series of presidential directives to the files. The CIA and its allies prevailed. This had important results, especially with reference to the future of the war in Vietnam—and later in the situations in Central America and the Middle East, where almost identical progressions were taking place.

  Gen. Maxwell Taylor became chairman of the JCS in October 1962 and ambassador to the South Vietnamese government in July 1963. Since he himself had written these papers and originated the concept of the Special Resources Group, he knew that the concept, at least, had the support of the President. What eventually came about in Vietnam, when the first U.S. troops under direct military command landed at Da Nang in March 1965, was a direct result of the policy outlined in NSAM #57.

  The warfare in Indochina that had begun in 1945 under the Office of Strategic Services had become too big for the CIA. With the landing of the U.S. Marine battalions, under the command of a marine general, the nature of the warfare that had been carried out under the aegis of the CIA changed. It took twenty years for the clandestine work of the CIA to achieve that level—and it was not accomplished during JFK’s lifetime.

  Returning to the time of the original briefing of these three presidential documents, especially that of NSAM #57, in July 1961, the Joint Chiefs wondered how these new policy ideas had reached the President. Some thought that Ted Sorensen, the President’s counsel, and, perhaps, Bobby Kennedy were responsible for them. Some suspected that Walt Rostow and Bill Bundy may have come up with the concept. If they had been able to discover the source of these documents, they would have been better able to evaluate their true significance.

  This question of the document’s source was an interesting one. During my study of them, I had come to the conclusion that Sorensen and Bobby Kennedy may have put them together, Bobby having attended all of the meetings of the Cuban Study Group. My guess was wrong. As we discovered later, these directives had been written by General Taylor, and a small, select staff.

  Many years later, I invited Admiral Burke to lunch, along with a lawyer friend. I asked the admiral directly if the Cuban Study Group had ever issued a “report” to the President after the conclusion of its lengthy deliberations. He said, “No. The only report our group made to the President was oral.” Furthermore, he noted that Bobby Kennedy had attended all of the meetings. His inference was that with Bobby in the room, there was no need to report the findings to his brother, whom Bobby saw and spoke to every day.

  His response was technically true. There was no “report.” But he shaded the facts. The admiral’s response leaves open another possibility. General Taylor, with the consent of the other members of the Cuban Study Group, may have written his lengthy “Letter to the President” (described earlier) on his own in order to present his personal views about the way this nation should carry out Cold War operations. After all, he was the military expert among that group and the others were not. In view of the situation at that time, this may be the correct interpretation of these important events. The admiral and the others on the group hid under the fine point that General Taylor delivered a “letter” to the President, not a formal report. This famous “report” was discovered nearly a generation later at the Kennedy Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed under “Letters,” not “Reports.”

  The President had recalled General Taylor to active duty on June 26, 1961, two days before he signed NSAM #55, and said that he would be his “military representative for foreign and military policy and intelligence operations.”

  Continuing his behind-the-scenes plan to downgrade the CIA, the President signaled his acceptance of the “Report on the Defense Intelligence Organizations” that had been written by a group headed by Gen. Graves B. Erskine, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret’d), the longtime head of the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. President Kennedy announced his intention, on July 11, 1961, to establish the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Changes were in the wind.

  Following this announcement, on August 1, 1961, Secretary McNamara created the DIA. Its first leader was Air Force General Joseph F. Carroll, formerly an agent with the FBI. This was followed, between August 16 and August 25, 1961, by a large recall of Army Reserve and National Guard troops, ostensibly in support of pressures in Europe. On September 6, 1961, 148,000 more men were recalled to active duty, with 40,000 of them sent to Europe.

  By the end of September the President had announced that John McCone would be the new director of central intelligence after Allen Dulles left the CIA. Dulles, who had been the director since February 1953, left the CIA on November 29, 1961. This marked the end of the Dulles decade. There would never be another like it.

  When the going gets rough, the agency professionals circle the wagons and get tough. They began their next moves as soon as Kennedy announced his selection of McCone to replace Allen Dulles. McCone had come from the world of big business. He had no military or OSS experience, although he had been deputy to the secretary of defense for several months in 1948 and under secretary of the air force during 1950 and 1951. The CIA turned this lack of experience to its advantage. McCone could be made into an executive figurehead, while the straight-arrow army general, Maxwell Taylor, could be maneuvered into a most useful paramilitary role.

  To get these plans started, a long orientation trip around the world was scheduled for McCone. The great significance of such a trip is that the new DCI would be isolated from all other contacts and kept in the company of no one but the agency’s best for an extended period. The CIA’s number-one spokesman and craftsman at that time was Desmond Fitzgerald, head of the agency’s Far East Division. He was selected by the “Gold Key Club,” the inner circle of the hard-line CIA professionals, to accompany McCone on this trip. (It is significant that such a crucial choice as the selection of Fitzgerald was made by this inner circle, not by members of the old guard.)

  Before leaving, Fitzgerald came over to the Pentagon for a meeting with key officials in clandestine business. He revealed plans for this trip that would include stops at major CIA stations and a special tour of South Vietnam. Certain villages were to be prepared, like movie sets, so that McCone would believe he was seeing Vietnamese combat action in “real time” and up close. The object of his visit to Vietnam was to have him exposed to as much CIA action as possible and to have him meet Ngo Dinh Diem and other selected leaders who had been working with the CIA for decades.

  As the Pentagon meeting broke up, the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald said that the trip had been timed to provide for lengthy briefing sessions—in the air, where there would be no interruptions and no other expressed viewpoints and where the CIA would have weeks to totally indoctrinate (or, as some said, brainwash) the new director. McCone would not only hear about worldwide political activities, but he would get a good rundown on the key people in the new CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Not long after McCone’s return from the trip, he was sworn in as
the new director of central intelligence, and shortly after that he appointed Richard Helms, a longtime careerist, to the position of deputy director, plans (clandestine operations), and Ray Cline as deputy director, intelligence. Both were old associates of Des Fitzgerald.

  A new era in the CIA had begun, and a new secret team was in control. At the close of 1961 there were 2,067 American servicemen in Vietnam; by the end of the decade there would be more than half a million. As we look back on that decade, we see the record of revolutionary changes. As David Halberstam has written, “Those who had failed, who had misled the Presidents of the United States the most, would be rewarded, promoted, given ever more important and powerful jobs. ”

  Many of these same men have played similar roles for later administrations in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. We cannot but be alarmed at the bewildering innocence of American citizens. Actions of these administrations reflect a policy that began to take shape during the latter years of the Eisenhower era and was then quite clearly documented in those Kennedy National Security Action Memoranda. As presidential administrations come and go, the bureaucracy lingers on to perfect its ways, and this is nowhere more sinister than in the domain of the CIA and its allies throughout the government. The CIA has learned to hide behind its best cover—that is, that it is an intelligence agency—when actually it devours more money, more time, more manpower, and more effort in support of that part of its organization responsible for its covert “Fun and Games” activities all over the world (not to mention within this country).

  When one analyzes such activity carefully, he must realize that the essence of covert operations directed and carried out by the government of the United States, from the top down, is the denial of the international concept of nation-state sovereignty, the principle upon which the family of nations exists.

  This situation has been brought about by the existence of the Earth-destroying hydrogen bombs, by the uncontrolled and uncontrollable growth of world-around communications, by the runaway power of transnational corporations, and by a new economic system of corporate socialism. All of these factors threaten and destroy sovereignty, as is evidenced by the events that have occurred in the Soviet Union since 1990.

  Is the sovereignty of the nation-state worth saving? Lest the significance of such revolutionary change be underestimated, consider the words of Arnold Toynbee, the eminent British historian and friend of the United States, as quoted in the New York Times of May 7, 1971:

  To most Europeans, I guess, America now looks like the most dangerous country in the world. Since America is unquestionably the most powerful country, the transformation of America’s image within the last thirty years is very frightening for Europeans. It is probably still more frightening for the great majority of the human race who are neither Europeans nor North Americans, but are Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans. They, I imagine, feel even more insecure than we feel. They feel that, at any moment, America may intervene in their internal affairs, with the same appalling consequences as have followed from the American intervention in Southeast Asia.

  For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America’s phobia about world communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world’s eyes. Today America has become the nightmare.

  This is what the destruction of sovereignty and disregard for the rule of law means, and it will not stop there. With it will go property rights—as we have witnessed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union—and the rights of man.

  SIXTEEN

  Government by Coup d’État

  THE YEAR WAS 1964. Pres. John F. Kennedy had been shot dead months before by bursts of “automatic gunfire”1 in Dallas by “mechanics,” that is, skilled gunmen, hired by a power cabal determined to exert control over the United States government. Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK’s successor, had been only a few feet under the bullets fired at Kennedy as he rode two cars back in that fatal procession.2

  By 1964 Johnson was becoming mired in the swamp of the Indochina conflict. Kennedy, who had vowed to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” was dead. LBJ, who heard those fatal bullets zing past his ears, had learned the ultimate lesson; and for good measure, Richard Nixon was in Dallas on that fatal day, so that he, too, had the fact of this ever-present danger imprinted on his memory for future use by his masters.

  During those fateful years, other events revealed the ubiquitous hand of the rogue elephant that is the CIA. Within a year of President Kennedy’s death, the CIA was on the move again. Following an abrupt coup d’état engineered by the CIA, Victor Paz Estenssoro, the president of Bolivia, fled from La Paz to Lima, Peru.

  This coup established Gen. René Barrientos Ortuño as the new president. The man Barrientos replaced is the same Paz Estenssoro who again served as president of Bolivia in 1986 and who was much disturbed when U.S. antidrug campaign troops showed up in his country with armed helicopter gunships and automatic weapons.

  From long experience, Paz knew what it meant to have weapons in the hands of outsiders who might at any moment permit them to be used by his enemies to threaten the government. It had happened to him before, more than once. Paz was an old hand in the game of international intrigue and power politics; his experience predated World War II. Before the outbreak of that war, the German Nazi machine had built a vast underground spy network throughout Latin America structured around the German airline Lufthansa and its affiliated companies. It was operated in much the same manner as the CIA’s huge proprietary corporation, Air America, was decades later, and it acted in support of a Nazi spy network.

  In 1941, Paz, who already had a political record as the Bolivian minister of finance, sided with the Nazis and was arrested for promising to deliver the oil fields of his country into the hands of the Germans. He had been the leader of the pro-Nazi National Revolutionary Movement and was connected with four Bolivian newspapers that operated under the domination of Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

  On that day in November 1964 when Paz fled Bolivia to seek refuge in the elite San Antonio district of Lima, three men met in the dimly lit barroom of the old, regal Hotel Bolívar, adjacent to the Plaza St. Martin. I had just walked across that sunlit plaza and entered the same barroom through its street-level doorway. I heard those men speaking English and immediately recognized them, even though my eyes had not adjusted enough to the dim lighting to see them.

  In our silent profession we learn never to approach anyone in strange surroundings until we are certain the coast is clear. I went to the bar, where I stood in brighter light and ordered the Peruvian national drink, a Pisco Sour. One of the three men came to the bar beside me, ordered drinks, took out a cigarette, and prepared to light it. “Do you have a light?” he asked. The bartender, hearing me say no, lit the cigarette. A normal conversation had opened. All was clear.

  I returned with the man to his table and joined the others. The three had just finished an assignment in Bolivia and were on their way back to Washington. They had engineered the coup d’état against Paz and installed General Barrientos as president. It had been that easy.

  During the 1964 political upheaval in Bolivia, it had been decided by the U.S. National Security Council that Paz must go and a new man placed in his shoes. The man chosen for this role, Barrientos Ortuño, was a popular young air force general. He was to be given the “Robin Hood” treatment by the CIA to increase his popularity, just as the CIA had done for Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines, for Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and for a host of others around the world.3

  Control of a small Third World country is always tenuous at best. Paz was an old hand and knew the business. The man at the top
must constantly be ready for an attack. He must maintain absolute control over all weapons, and particularly over all ammunition, in his country. In Bolivia at that time, Paz had put control of all weapons in the hands of relatives and reliable friends who commanded the civilian militia as an elite palace guard.

  They maintained an edge over the armed forces by controlling all ammunition—absolutely. Soldiers of the Bolivian army and air force had weapons and were trained with live ammunition; after a day on the firing range or other maneuvers, their unit leaders had to turn in a shell case for every round fired. There was strict accountability not only for every weapon but for every single bullet.

  The task for the CIA—to overthrow Paz and replace him with Barrientos—was clear, and it was simple. All that had to be done was to put more ammunition into the hands of Barrientos’s regular troops than Paz could get into the hands of his own civilian militia, and to do it quickly and by surprise.

  This was done under the cover of an openly declared joint exercise involving United States and Bolivian army and air force units, scheduled to take place in outlying regions of Bolivia. This exercise, in 1964, was designed much as the antidrug campaign in Bolivia would be in 1986. The military maneuvers served to raise the political stature of Barrientos and to cover the secret delivery of tons of ammunition to his troops.

  All of the U.S. Air Force aircraft employed in support of this exercise were “clean”—they had taken no part in the delivery of ammunition. The CIA used a contract Super Constellation aircraft from Air America to fly the ammunition to a remote landing ground in Peru. From there it was flown across the border in CIA-controlled light aircraft to several smaller magazines scattered throughout Bolivia.