JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  It was some time before the news became known that Diem had fled to Cholon and been captured and killed there. This news was flashed around the world; this was the story that everyone heard. The public never heard of the planned flight to Europe that the Kennedy administration had arranged for him.

  Thus it was that the file of routine cable traffic between Washington and Saigon eventually became known with the release and publication of the Pentagon Papers. This is how it happened that Howard Hunt was able to locate certain top-level messages to and from the White House and Ambassador Lodge in Saigon that contained information referring to “highest authority”—the cable traffic code for President Kennedy.

  None of these messages contained any reference to a plot to kill President Diem and his brother or came even close to it. Concealed within these messages were carefully worded phrases that gave Ambassador Lodge the information he needed in order to direct all participants into action and to begin the careful removal of the two brothers to Europe by commercial aircraft.

  According to information that came out during the Watergate hearings, those files that had been forged to smear President Kennedy were put in Hunt’s White House safe, where they remained until discovered by investigators later.

  There is much about this episode that has become important upon review. There are those who have been so violently opposed to Jack Kennedy and all that he stood for that they have stooped to all kinds of sordid activities to smear him while he was alive, to attack his brother Bobby while he was still alive, and to hound Sen. Edward Kennedy to this day. Nixon’s gratuitous reference to Kennedy’s “complicity in the murder of Diem” after a decade of silence on that subject speaks for itself. The efforts of Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson (both employees of the White House at the time) to dig up old files in order to besmirch the memory of President Kennedy provide another example.

  In an ominous way, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate episodes were cut from the same fabric, and most important, their exposure was a direct outgrowth of the nationwide dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War. Because the development of the war in Indochina had been spread out so long, since 1945, and because most of the events that brought about this terrible form of modem genocide in the name of “anticommunism” or “containment” were buried in deep secrecy or not even available in written records, Robert S. McNamara, then secretary of defense, directed, on June 17, 1967, that a task force be formed to collate and study the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present.

  This project, which produced thousands of documents of all kinds from many sources, was the primary source of that group of more than four thousand documents that were surreptitiously released to various news media and called the Pentagon Papers. Almost four years later, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among others, started the serialization of the Pentagon Papers. Few people have been more articulate on the subject than the then senator from Alaska, Mike Gravel:

  The Pentagon Papers reveal the inner workings of a government bureaucracy set up to defend this country, but now out of control, managing an international empire by garrisoning American troops around the world. It created an artificial client state in South Vietnam, lamented its unpopularity among its own people, eventually encouraged the overthrow of that government, and then supported a series of military dictators who served their own ends, and at times our government’s ends, but never the cause of their own people.

  In his brilliant introduction the senator included an extract from the works of the English novelist and historian, H. G. Wells, who once wrote:

  The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than “the gang in possession” and its days are numbered.

  The publication of the Pentagon Papers became an event unique in American history. One day after their publication had begun in the New York Times, I received a call from the British Broadcasting Corporation requesting that I travel to London to participate in a series of programs, live on prime-time TV, with Daniel Ellsberg. I did travel to London and did take part in a daily series on the subject, but Ellsberg did not participate in the broadcasts, because his lawyer advised him not to leave the country at that time.

  In this book, I have used various editions of the Pentagon Papers as reference material. They are useful and they are quite accurate as far as individual documents go, but they are dangerous in the hands of those who do not have the experience or the other sources required to validate and balance their content. This is because their true source was only marginally the Pentagon and because the clever selection of those documents by the compilers removed many important papers. This neglect of key documents served to reduce the value of those that remained to tell the story of the Vietnam War. From the beginning, the Pentagon Papers were a compilation of documents designed to paint President John F. Kennedy as the villain of the story, and to shield the role of the CIA.

  This vast stack of papers has been labeled the Pentagon Papers, but that is a misnomer. It is quite true that most of them were found in certain highly classified files in the Pentagon, but they were functionally limited files. For example, despite their volume—nearly four thousand documents—there are remarkably few that actually bear the signature of military officers. In fact, many of those that carry the signature of a military officer, or that refer to military officers, make reference to such men as Edward G. Lansdale, who actually worked for the CIA while serving in a cover assignment with the military. When such papers are removed from the “military” or “Pentagon” categorization, what remains is a nonmilitary and non-Pentagon collection. For the serious and honest historian, this becomes an important distinction. To be truly “Pentagon” Papers, the majority of them, at least, ought to have been written there.

  In a letter to the then secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, dated January 15, 1969, Leslie H. Gelb, director of the Study Task Force that assembled the Pentagon Papers, said: “In the beginning, Mr. McNamara gave the task force full access to OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] files, and the task force received access to CIA materials, and some use of State Department cables and memoranda. We had no access to the White House files.”

  Despite this disclaimer, there are many White House files in the Pentagon Papers—and it was this group of documents, in fact, that was the source of the anti-Kennedy forgeries.

  The files from which most of these papers were obtained were in that section of the Office of the Secretary of Defense called International Security Affairs. Although this office was in the Pentagon, it was lightly staffed with military officers, and most of its activities concerned other government departments and agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House. That is why its files consisted of papers that originated outside the Pentagon, giving the Pentagon Papers production an entirely nonmilitary slant.

  Another reason for caution regarding the utilization of the Pentagon Papers as history is that, as Gelb said, “These outstanding people [those who worked on the task force] came from everywhere—the military services, State, OSD, and the ‘think tanks.’ Some came for a month, for three months, for six months. . . in all, we had thirty-six professionals working on these studies, with an average of four months per man.”

  That says it all! They had become experts in four months!

  John Foster Dulles, formerly secretary of state, once declared that one of the most complicated periods in this nation’s history began in Indochina on September 2, 1945. There is no way that this group, averaging “four months per man” in its studies in 1967, and 1968, was going to be qualified to present a true and accurate account of that war by the compilation of a scattering of papers that contained bits and pieces of the story.

  This reveals one of my greatest misgivings concerning the accuracy of
the study. There are altogether too many important papers that did not get included in this study, too many that were absolutely crucial to an understanding of the origins of, and reasons for, this war.

  This has been a complaint of historians who have attempted to teach the facts of this war. They have found that the history book accounts of it have been written by writers who were not there, who had little or nothing to do with it—or, conversely, that they have been written by those who were there, but who were there for a one-year tour of duty, usually in the post-1965 period. Few of these writers have had the comprehensive experience that is a prerequisite to understanding that type of contemporary history.

  Regarding the Pentagon Papers themselves, Senator Gravel wrote:

  The Papers do not support our good intentions. The Papers prove that, from the beginning, the war has been an American war, serving to perpetuate American military power in Asia. Peace has never been on the American agenda for Southeast Asia. Neither we nor the South Vietnamese have been masters of our Southeast Asian policy; we have been its victims, as the leaders of America sought to preserve their reputation for toughness and determination.

  He added:

  The elaborate secrecy precautions, the carefully contrived subterfuges, the precisely orchestrated press leaks, were intended not to deceive “the other side,” but to keep the American public in the dark. . . . For too long they have been forced to subsist on a diet of half-truths or deliberate deceit by executives who consider the people of the Congress as adversaries.”1

  It is important to understand the Pentagon Papers’ subtle anti-Kennedy slant. Nothing reveals this bias more than the following extract taken from the section “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, May— November 1963.”

  At the end of a crucial summary of the most momentous ninety-day period in modern American history, from August 22 to November 22, 1963, this is what the authors of the Pentagon Papers had to say:

  After having delayed an appropriate period, the U.S. recognized the new government on November 8. As the euphoria wore off, however, the real gravity of the economic situation and the lack of expertise in the new government became apparent to both Vietnamese and American officials. The deterioration of the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program also came more and more clearly into perspective.

  These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu conference on November 20 when [Henry Cabot] Lodge and the country team [from Vietnam] met with [Dean] Rusk, [Robert] McNamara, [Maxwell] Taylor, [George] Ball, and [McGeorge] Bundy. But the meeting ended inconclusively. After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington, the White House tried to pull together some conclusions and offer some guidance for our continuing and now deeper involvement in Vietnam. The instructions contained in NSAM 273, however, did not reflect the truly dire situation as it was to come to light in succeeding weeks. The reappraisals forced by the new information would swiftly make it irrelevant as it was overtaken by events.

  Recall what had been going on during that month of November 1963. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother had been murdered, and the administration of South Vietnam had been placed in the hands of Gen. Duong Van “Big” Minh. Then, in one of the strangest scenarios of recent history, most of the members of the Kennedy cabinet had flown to Honolulu, together, for that November 20 series of conferences. The full cabinet meeting—even the secretary of agriculture was there—in Hawaii was to be followed by a flight to Tokyo on November 22. Again, almost all of the Kennedy cabinet members were on that flight to Tokyo. They were on that aircraft bound for Tokyo when they learned that President Kennedy had been shot dead in Dallas. Upon receipt of that stunning news, they ordered the plane to return directly to Hawaii and, almost immediately, on to Washington.

  But consider here the strange and impersonal words used by this “official history.” The Pentagon Papers, in its long section on the events of that tragic period, ends its own narrative report of those events by saying: “But probably more important, the deterioration of the military situation of the Vietnamese position. . . .”

  What could have been the basis for that conclusion? What caused the Papers’ authors to say that in 1968? Let’s look at the record from the pages of their own work:

  On September 11, 1963, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had cabled to Secretary Rusk saying: “I do not doubt the military judgment that the war in the countryside is going well now.”

  On September 16, 1963, President Kennedy had written a personal letter to President Ngo Dinh Diem in which he said: “ . . . the contest against the Communists in the last year and one half has gradually but steadily turned in our favor.”

  On September 29, 1963, Secretary McNamara and General Taylor met for three hours with President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon. As reported, President Diem said: “The war was going well, thanks in large measure to the strategic hamlets program . . . ” Diem concluded his optimistic presentation by noting that “although the war was going well, much remained to be done in the Delta area” [where most of the Tonkinese had been sent].

  Then we have the McNamara/Taylor “Trip Report” of October 2, 1963, that became the body of NSAM #263 on October 11, 1963, that concludes: #1. “The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress.

  #2. ”A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.

  #3. “ . . . the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963.

  #6. “ . . . We believe the U.S. part of the task can be completed by the end of 1965.”

  News of this “White House Report” was splashed across the front page of the U.S. armed forces Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper of October 4, 1963, in banner headlines: U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65.

  These are quotes taken from official documents of that time, all taking an optimistic view of the war by the leaders closest to it and including statements by President Kennedy and President Diem. The official Kennedy White House policy document, National Security Action Memorandum #263, was dated October 11, 1963, and there is no evidence that the situation, as perceived by Kennedy and his closest advisers, had changed over the next month. General Krulak was as close to the President and his policy as he had ever been, and I worked directly with General Krulak on the Joint Staff. We never heard of any changes in plans from the White House.

  Just four days after Kennedy’s death and less than sixty days after Kennedy published NSAM #263, which visualized the Vietnamization of the war and the return of all American personnel by the end of 1965, Lyndon Johnson and most of the JFK cabinet viewed the situation in an entirely different light. In Johnson’s NSAM #273 they saw the military situation deteriorating (“the deterioration of . . . the Strategic Hamlet program”) and all of a sudden saw the program as a failure. (“These topics dominated the discussions at the Honolulu Conference on November 20. . . . ”)

  This is a remarkable statement. On that date, John Kennedy was still alive and President of the United States. Yet this report says that his cabinet had been assembled in Honolulu to discuss “these topics”—the very same topics of NSAM #273, dated November 26, and a vital step on the way to a total reversal of Kennedy’s own policy as stated in the Taylor-McNamara report and in NSAM #263, dated October 2, 1963. The total reversal was completed with the publication of NSAM #288, March 26, 1964.

  This situation cannot be treated lightly. How did it happen that the Kennedy cabinet had traveled to Hawaii at precisely the same time Kennedy was touring in Texas? How did it happen that the subject of discussion in Hawaii, before JFK was killed, was a strange agenda that would not come up in the White House until after he had been murdered? Who could have known, beforehand, that this new—non-Kennedy—agenda would be needed in the
White House because Kennedy would no longer be President?

  Is there any possibility that the “powers that be” who planned and executed the Kennedy assassination had also been able to get the Kennedy cabinet out of the country and to have them conferring in Hawaii on an agenda that would be put before President Lyndon Johnson just four days after Kennedy’s death?

  President Kennedy would not have sent his cabinet to Hawaii to discuss that agenda. He had issued his own agenda for Vietnam on October 11, 1963, and he had no reason to change it. More than that, he had no reason at all to send them all to Hawaii for such a conference. It is never good practice for a President to have key members of his cabinet out of town while he is on an extended trip. Why was the cabinet in Hawaii? Who ordered the cabinet members there? If JFK had no reason to send them to Hawaii, who did, and why?

  Keep in mind, through this series of vitally important questions, that we are piling circumstance upon circumstance. It is the body of circumstantial evidence that proves the existence of conspiracy.

  As soon as the Honolulu conference broke up, these same cabinet members departed from Hawaii on an unprecedented trip to Japan. No one has explained why the Kennedy cabinet was ordered to Japan at that time.

  This trip to Japan was not some casual event. Someone had arranged it with care. A reading of newspapers from late November 1963 reveals that extracts of speeches supposedly given by some of these cabinet officers in Japan were made available and then printed, for example, even in the Washington, D.C., Star.

  We all know now that these cabinet officers did not reach Japan and that their VIP aircraft returned to Hawaii. Why would newspapers in the United States print extracts of their speeches as though they actually had gone to Japan and delivered those speeches? Who had set this trip up so meticulously that even such details as the press releases appeared to validate the presence of the cabinet members in Japan when in fact they never went there?