JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  On the day before the coup, CIA agents moved a sizable (in Bolivian terms) military force to the outskirts of La Paz. During the night its members were issued live ammunition, and at daybreak they infiltrated the city. The troops of the civilian militia were caught by surprise, with their weapons in hand but with no ammunition. Paz, yielding to good sense, quickly accepted the offer of a flight to Peru. The battle that never took place was over—except for one detail.

  During the night, my friends, the three CIA operatives, had been hosts, that is, captors, of General Barrientos at a secret safe house. The dinner was bounteous, and the drinks flowed freely. When it was time to take the general to La Paz, they loaded him onto an old Bolivian Air Force C-47 (DC-3) for the final leg of his journey to power.

  When the plane landed in a leaderless city, these CIA agents realized that El Presidente was far from being sober enough to assume his new duties. Cups of black coffee and a long, cold shower later, Barrientos was driven, in proper glory, down the main street to the cheers of his subjects, while the CIA men explained to him what had happened, his new duties and responsibilities, and some of the hazards of his new job.

  Needless to say, my old friends were anxious when I spoke to them to get out of the city that now harbored Paz. Less than an hour later they were at the Lima airport and on their way to Panama. The CIA headquarters in Panama was, at that time, responsible for all clandestine activities in Latin America. The Bolivian coup was over. It had been a success, and the three CIA agents were ready for other assignments.

  This is a picture of the CIA in action. This formula for the transition of leadership in less developed countries (LDCs)4 has been used over and over again. In such countries the politics are very simple. It is always “Us” or “Them.” The people of those countries have little, if anything, to say about it. The record of this type of activity goes back to World War II, and off the record it goes back much farther than that. The conflict in Indochina is the prime example in our time.

  As the progression of events in Central America has demonstrated, the tactics of Vietnam have become the method of dealing with the problems of less-developed countries in the bipolar world. The big enemy has been said to be “communism,” and the presumed threat the dire effects of the domino theory: Lose Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to communism; lose Nicaragua and there would be Communists right on the other side of the Rio Grande, if not in the streets of Houston.

  Despite the changes in what was the Soviet Union, this kind of warfare isn’t over yet. In Vietnam the United States won precisely nothing, but that costly war served the primary purposes of the world’s power elite. For one thing, they benefited splendidly from the hundreds of billions of dollars that came their way. For example, more than ten million men were flown from the United States to Saigon by contract commercial airline flights, representing more than $800 million in windfall business for those airlines. And this is only the beginning. With each takeover, the victors gain access to the natural resources and human, low-cost, assets of the country.

  As Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace found: “War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained—and improved in effectiveness.”

  According to Lewin, the “Special Study Group” that produced this amazing report voted to keep it under wraps, because the members of the group felt that:

  The reader may not be prepared for some of its assumptions—for instance, that most medical advances are viewed more as problem than as progress; or that poverty is necessary and desirable, public postures by politicians to the contrary notwithstanding; or that standing armies are, among other things, social-welfare institutions in exactly the same sense as are old-people’s homes and mental hospitals . . . that the space program and the controversial antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are understood to have the spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement of science or national defense, as their principal goals, and that military draft policies are only remotely concerned with defense.5

  Before we put the CIA-instigated Bolivian coup d’état behind us, we should note that the operational role stops with the completion of the overthrow of the government. Once that “dirty work” has been achieved and the operatives are out of town, a new band of intelligence experts takes their place.

  One of the least-known divisions of the CIA is that headed by the deputy director of economics. This division moves into a country to work with a new regime and to begin the task of selecting and setting up new franchise holders for as many goods as possible to assure that they are imported from American companies and that those from other sources, formerly the Soviet sphere in particular, are excluded.

  These new franchise holders are usually closely associated with the new President. They are members of his cabinet and other top government officials. The CIA screens and selects these new “millionaires” and arranges for them to meet with the various companies they will front for under the new regime. It might be said that this cleansing of the economic system is the real reason for most coups d’état, and that political ideology has very little to do with it. The ins (the men in the foreign government) are called “friends of the West” and “anti-Communist,” but that is just for public consumption. On the other side of the coin, the outs are well aware of the system—having been the ins and beneficiaries of the same, or similar, largess under the prior administration.

  But it happens that over a period of time an administration begins to believe that it is truly in power and that it actually runs the government. This leads its officials to make franchise arrangements with an ever-increasing number of sources. Some of the more daring, in an attempt to escape the severe financial and profit-making controls placed upon them and their government by U. S. manufacturers and by the canopy of international banks that is spread over all imports and exports to their country, attempt to make deals with other countries. They believe that they may be able to buy essential goods cheaper that way and to sell their resources and labor at better rates. To oversimplify, this is what Ferdinand Marcos was doing in the Philippines before he was ousted.

  As such actions increase, the national leadership will be increasingly attacked by the United States on the grounds that it is turning toward communism and becoming a base for the infiltration of the Communist ideology and military system into the hemisphere. In other cases there are more or less “legitimate” coups d’état as internal opposition rises against an oppressive dictatorship. There could have been no more “anti-Communist” dictators than Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and then was assassinated with American aid, or Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. All of these men, to cite a few, had been in power so long that they believed they could throw their weight around and extend their franchise selections to other countries. In such cases (Trujillo is the exception) the United States does not so much aid the insurgents as it just sits on its hands and lets the aged dictator be eliminated by others who want his job and the largess that goes with it.

  Sometimes the United States gives the old leader a firm and friendly cue, as when Director of Central Intelligence William Casey visited the Philippines in 1985 and suggested to Marcos that he ought to “hold an election.” As we have seen, such a suggestion is the kiss of death. It remained for President Corazon Aquino to heed the hints that poured out from the Office of the Deputy Director of Economics and other “friends” as she faced the task of rebuilding the franchise networks. This means big money to the country involved and to the United States and to the bankers who manage the finances in both directions.

  According to a September 1986 article in the prestigious Harper’s Magazine, “The amount spent by the United States in 1985 on military operations in the Third World was $137.6 billion.” These figures were compiled by the Coalition for a New
Foreign and Military Policy, in Washington, D.C. That amount is more than 50 percent of the net cost of the Vietnam War—even though it was the total for only one year. Note also that this amount was only for military operations. This type of activity continues with or without the specter of communism.

  This business of military and foreign aid is much more complex and much more important to the economic future of this nation than most people understand. According to R. Buckminster Fuller, who served as a consultant to the governments of many countries, including Brazil and the Soviet Union, the total cost of U.S. foreign aid from 1952 through 1979 amounted to $100 billion, in 1950 dollars.

  In Critical Path,6 Fuller stated (and the New York Times later printed substantially this same quote):

  Each new year’s foreign aid bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present in the country being aided, the money [from foreign aid funds] had to be spent through those American companies. . . . Foreign aid paid for all the new factories and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of America. This became a fundamental pattern: first the 100 largest corporations, then the 200 largest corporations followed, then what Fortune calls the 500 largest corporations. . . . So the Wall Street lawyers simply moved their prime corporate operations elsewhere. . . . But the main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American government. . . . This allowed the corporations to acquire gold equities while U.S. citizens and small domestic businesses could not do so.

  Anyone who wishes to learn even more about the exploitation of the less-developed countries and the control of U.S. corporations should read Walter Wriston’s book Risk and Other Four-Letter Words. As the retired CEO of Citicorp, Wriston knows the subject better than almost anyone else. The only problem is that the reader must understand Wriston’s point of view. This is a man who promoted and fostered sending all of our savings to these LDC under the guise of “loans.” They were strange loans indeed. Almost none of that money will ever return to the United States, and it is our savings and our pension plans—or rather, was.

  Not only do we, the people of the United States, have no idea of what our personal objective and that of our country ought to be with respect to the rest of the world, but on top of that, we so frequently totally misunderstand the nations of the Third World, most of which, like Vietnam, have been created by design . . . the design of other powers . . . in recent centuries to divide ancient groups of people whose native societies are far older and far more experienced in many ways than we are.

  Not long ago the United States celebrated its bicentennial. Many of these Third World social groups, such as those in Indochina, have histories that go back fifteen thousand years or more; as a people, they have survived for thousands of years on the same ground as that of their ancestors. Yet most of the national boundaries of those ancient lands, such as Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, South Korea, and Iraq, are latter-day devices, creations that divide these ancient and quite homogeneous people.

  When we speak of the failure to have and to understand our national objective, we must be able to define its meaning, especially in time of war. Some of the questions most frequently asked since the termination of warfare in Vietnam have been “Why were we there? What was our objective? What did we want to do there that caused us to enter that hostile area as far back as 1945? And what kept us there until 1975?”

  It was that illustrious World War II armored brigade commander, Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, who asked the crucial question of President Johnson. He needed to know what this country’s strategic objective was in Indochina. With that in hand, he and his staff would have be able to draw up a proper and effective military plan to win that war. Without such a statement from the President, the best that men like Abrams and Westmoreland could do was wallow in the quagmire of indecision while counting bodies on both sides.

  General Abrams knew, as did most of the senior U.S. military officers, that if he had been turned loose with the forces at his disposal he could assuredly have captured Hanoi, and all of Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the process. One of the most forceful statements of this belief has been made by the former Commander in Chief, Pacific, Adm. U.S.G. Sharp, in his book Strategy for Defeat.

  But these men knew also that such a tactical achievement would not have brought with it victory; it would simply have caused the immediate escalation of warfare on an international scale. Any success they might have achieved on the border of China would have unleashed hordes of Chinese armed and equipped with the modern weaponry of the Soviet Union, and there could have been no victory in a land war in Asia against hordes of well-armed Chinese.

  Such an eventuality would have led inevitably to a so-called conventional war of such fury that the leaders of both sides would have been forced to weight the tactical necessity of the utilization of the hydrogen bomb.

  At that point, there could be no such thing as “graduated” or “limited” warfare. The very heart of the meaning of warfare is that it is, and forever must be, all-out and unrestricted in its fury. There can be no referee in warfare. Furthermore, the progress, or direction, of the course of wideopen warfare is always unpredictable.

  Therefore, if General Abrams had really been turned loose by his commander in chief in the White House, it would not have been long before the President would have been forced to make the decision to use the hydrogen bomb. Would he then have used that enormous destructive power against the North Vietnamese, against the Chinese, or against the ultimate foe, the Russians? Or perhaps, against all three? The response to that decision would have been immediate. The United States would have been made the target of Soviet retaliation. In that series of decisions, which appear to be all but inevitable, lies the power to bring about the destruction of Earth.

  There it is! That is the real significance underlying General Abram’s question to the President. Faced with these facts, and the dilemma they create, no President will ever again be able to order Americans to take part in an all-out, classic war. No President or his counterparts in nuclear-armed nations will be able to commit troops to battle in which the certain outcome will be global destruction.

  There is a little-known secret about the war in Indochina that illustrates how dangerous the H-bomb threat actually was. There was a day when three U.S. Air Force F-84 fighter-bombers had been put on tactical alert at the Udon Thani air base in Thailand, just across the river from Laos. At that time the Vietminh were believed to be mounting an all-out massed campaign, in conjunction with opposition Pathet Lao forces, westerly across the Plaines des Jarres from Samneua (in northeastern Laos) toward the capital of Laos. It was also suspected that the Vietminh were planning a flanking attack into Cambodia on the way to a final strike at Saigon. Thus, although the Vietminh rarely massed their forces, it was believed they had a sizable army on the move.

  The three F-84 aircraft were equipped with nuclear weapons. The year was 1960; this was the first time since the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945 that these massive weapons had been readied for actual combat. Cooler heads, some shocked to the core by the very thought of such a possibility, prevailed, and the F-84s and their nuclear weapons were returned to their bases. As a result, a lower-level form of inconclusive warfare continued in Indochina for the next fifteen years.

  Today this method of “no win” warfare is called the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict.” Therefore, when we discover that $137.6 billion was spent by the United States for “military operations” alone in the Third World during 1985, we must understand that it has become the objective of “low-intensity conflict” to continue the wasting of money, the pointless killing of defenseless people, and the consumption or attrition of costly war matériel to make way for the procurement of more.

  “Low-intensity conflict” is a way in which the hundreds of billions of dollars of armaments produced each year can be used, destroyed, and wasted this year in order that more may be procured and used next y
ear. It is a general rule in the military procurement business that for every dollar spent for new weapons, ten more dollars will be spent on those same weapons for their maintenance and support during their “life of type.”7

  Much of this action is motivated by a misunderstanding of the true nature of what is called a “Third World nation” or “less-developed country.” Although national sovereignty no longer exists as a fact in LDCs, and exists only partially in all other nations today, the rules of the “Game of States” require that the game be played as though sovereignty did exist. As a result, the LDCs are considered to be sovereign equals, as at the United Nations, that is, one state, one vote. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  The true definition of “less-developed country” has nothing to do with politics, ideology, or military power. An LDC is a country that differs from others because it does not have the ability to produce or manufacture all of the things it needs or wants to survive, even at a relatively low level of subsistence.

  As some scholars have put it, the LDCs do not have the “carrying capacity” for bare existence and real growth in modern times. Therefore, they must be “aided.” As a result, the biggest business in a less-developed country, and the sole reason for its governmental power structure, is import and export. LDCs hope that they can export enough, in dollar values, to provide the money required to make payments on the interest on their national debt, with enough left over to pay for all the things they must import.

  The government of such a country is a business monopoly over its people and its territory and is motivated much less by some political ideology than by the very pragmatic aim of controlling the import-export business. In most LDCs the customs activity and border patrol are the most important elements of the governmental structure, because they enable the political leadership to maintain its monopoly and to keep an accurate and absolutely essential account of everything exported and imported by the country, as well as its value.8