JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  Continuing this account of the period, the chronology prepared by the authors of the Pentagon Papers lists the following:

  22 November 1963: Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.

  23 November 1963 NSAM #273: Drawing together the results of the Honolulu Conference, and Lodge’s meeting with the President, NSAM #273 reaffirms the U.S. commitment to defeat the VC in South Vietnam. . . .

  These are astounding statements, considering that they were written sometime in 1968, when everyone knew that the most important fact of those two days was the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This massive compilation of official documents produced by Secretary McNamara’s “task force . . . to study the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present” (1969) totally ignored the assassination.

  The Pentagon Papers say simply, “Lodge confers with the President,” as though it were just another day in the life of a President. Which President? Didn’t that matter? What a way to dismiss Kennedy and his tragic death! This entire section of the Pentagon Papers, which were commissioned to be a complete account of the history of the Vietnam war period, cannot find a word to say about that assassination. This official history simply skips all mention of the death of the President of the United States and tells the story of the death of Diem as though it had occurred in a vacuum.

  Why do you suppose Leslie Gelb, director of the Pentagon Papers Study Task Force, chose to close his “Letter of Transmittal of the Study” with this quote from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “This is a world of chance, free will, and necessity—all interweavingly working together as one; chance by turn rules either and has the last featuring blow at events. ”

  Then, as if to introduce some reality into the study, he closes with this remarkable thought: “Our studies have tried to reflect this thought; inevitably in the organizing and writing process, they appear to assign more and less to men and free will than was the case.”

  This sounds more and more like the “God throws the dice” syndrome. What could Les Gelb have been thinking about when he saw “chance” taking “the last featuring blow at events?” Did the Vietnam War happen by “chance”? Was President John F. Kennedy killed by “chance”? That takes a strange view of history. When Oliver Stone’s movie asked, “Why was Kennedy killed?” I doubt that anyone in the audience would have answered, “By chance.”

  This “Letter of Transmittal” of January 15, 1969, was addressed to Clark M. Clifford, secretary of defense and a man we have quoted frequently during this work.

  These questions and the subjects they unfold are the things of which assassinations and coups d’état are made. The plotters worked out their plans in detail as they moved to take over the government that Kennedy had taken from them. As a result, every other public official became a pawn on that master chess board. Assassinations and coups d’état permeate and threaten all levels of society.

  These may be entirely speculative questions, but they are based upon a close reading of the subject and firsthand knowledge of the times. They are presented here for the consideration of the reader. Let the record speak for itself. It is unfortunate that most historians have not looked more carefully at Kennedy’s NSAMs from NSAM #55 in July 1961 through NSAM #263 in October 1963; or at NSAM #273 of November 26, 1963, and its draft of November 21, 1963, or at the enormous pressures that all of these documents created. If anyone had wished to zero in on the key to the source of the decision for the “Why?” and the “Who?” of that assassination, he would not have needed to go much further.

  In concluding this chapter, it may be well to add a few more words. I was on Okinawa in 1945 and observed the shipments of arms being loaded onto U.S. Navy transport vessels for shipment to Haiphong Harbor in Indochina, where, as we have seen, they were given to Ho Chi Minh under the auspices of the OSS.

  I was in Vietnam many times during 1952, 1953, and 1954. I saw that serenely beautiful country go from a placid recreation area for wounded and hospitalized American soldiers fighting in Korea to a hotbed of turmoil after the defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, the division of the country into two parts, the forced movement of more than one million Catholic northern Tonkinese to the south, and the establishment of the Diem administration. During this period I had frequent contact with the members of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission.

  Then, from 1955 through 1963, I was in the Pentagon. I served as chief of special operations for the U.S. Air Force for five years, providing air force support of the clandestine operations of the CIA. I was assigned to the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the next two years, and then I was directed to create the Special Operations Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to bring that military support work under the guidance of a single “focal point” office. I headed that office until 1964, when I retired after the death of President Kennedy.

  By the fall of 1963, I knew perhaps as much as anyone about the inner workings of this world of special operations. I had written the formal directives on the subject that were used officially by the U.S. Air Force and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for all military services.

  Therefore, it seemed strange when I was approached after I had come back from a week spent reading intelligence papers in Admiral Felt’s headquarters in Hawaii, during September 1963, and informed that I had been selected to be the military escort officer for a group of VIP civilian guests that had been invited to visit the naval station in Antarctica and the South Pole facility at McMurdo Sound. This group was scheduled to leave on November 10, 1963, and to return by the end of the month.

  Although this trip had absolutely nothing to do with my previous nine years of work, except that I had supported CIA activity in Antarctica over the years, I appreciated the invitation and looked forward to the trip as a “paid vacation.”

  After we went to the South Pole and returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, a member of the VIP party, a congressman, asked me if I would like to go with him on a two-day side trip to the beautiful New Zealand Alps and to the Hermitage Chalet at the foot of Mount Cook, the highest mountain in the country. I said yes.

  On the first morning of our visit I was about to have breakfast in a dining room of rare beauty, offering as it did a dazzling view of Mount Cook and the nearby range. I had secured a table for the two of us and had ordered coffee. The public-address announcer had been reading off the list of passengers to be taken to the top of Mount Cook by small aircraft for the ski ride back down when he broke off his announcements to say: “Ladies and gentlemen, the BBC have announced that President Kennedy has been shot . . . dead . . . in Dallas.”

  That is how I learned of the assassination of the President and of the start of the strange events surrounding that murder and the takeover of our government as a result of that brazen act.

  I have always wondered, deep in my own heart, whether that strange invitation that removed me so far from Washington and from the center of all things clandestine that I knew so well might have been connected to the events that followed. Were there things that I knew, or would have discovered, that made it wise to have me far from Washington, along with others, such as the Kennedy cabinet, who were in midair over the Pacific Ocean en route to Japan, far from the scene?

  I do not know the answer to that question, although many of the things that I have observed and learned from that time have led me to surmise that such a question might be well founded. After all, I knew that type of work very well. I had worked on presidential protection and knew the great extent to which one goes to ensure the safety of the chief executive. Despite all this, established procedures were ignored on the President’s trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963.

  This “Letter of Appreciation” was given to the author by his boss on the Joint Staff, Major General V.H. Krulak, USMC. He ha
d served under General Krulak for two years and had been directed to establish the Office of Special Operations in the Joint Staff by the then Director of the Joint Staff, General Earle Wheeler, shortly before that time.

  The Office of Special Operations was created to provide a system for all military services to provide special support for the clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  President, John F. Kennedy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as he inherited them from President Eisenhower on January 25, 1961. From left: Generals David M. Shoup (Marine Corps), Thomas D. White (Air Force), and Lyman L. Lemnitzer (Army and Chairman), President John F. Kennedy, Admiral A. Burke (Navy) and General George H. Decker (Army).

  The author worked under General Lemnitzer for nearly two years and learned to know him well and to respect him highly. Lemnitzer was a traditional “old soldier,” not a “cold warrior.” His friend and confidant was General Shoup, who shared much the same views. The author served, as Chief of “Team B” (code for Special Operations), under General White on the Air Staff for three years, 1957—1960. At the age of eighteen, General White was the youngest man ever to graduate from West Point. Admiral Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, gets the author’s vote as the finest of all CNO’s. He served on President Kennedy’s Cuban Study Group with General Maxwell Taylor, Allen W. Dulles, and Bobby Kennedy. General Decker, a brilliant fiscal expert, graduated from Lafayette College in 1924.

  In Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, November 22, 1963, actor Kevin Costner played the part of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and actor Donald Sutherland played the part of “Man X.”

  During his January 15, 1992, speech at the National Press Club, Oliver Stone revealed the identity of “Man X,” saying, “So many people have asked me ‘Who is Man X?’ Let me just say that Man X exists. He is here today on the podium. He is Fletcher Prouty.” Fletcher Prouty is seated second to right of podium, looking at Stone.

  L. Fletcher Prouty

  Colonel Prouty and General Abrams are life-long acquaintances, and natives of Springfield, Massachusetts.

  The author, commissioned in the U.S. Cavalry, reported for active duty during July 1941 with the 37th Armored Regiment of the 4th Armored Division. The first officer he reported to was Captain Creighton W. Abrams, adjutant of the 37th Armored Regiment. General Abrams became one of the greatest combat commanders of World War II. He was named Commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam in 1968 by President Johnson and continued in that capacity under President Nixon. He became Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, in 1972.

  The author flew from Okinawa to the Japanese Air Base “Atsugi” on September 1, 1945, the day before the official Japanese surrender. He flew in U.S. Marines, a part of the elite guard for General Douglas MacArthur.

  Atsugi became a U.S. Naval Air Station. The CIA established a Far East Headquarters for its U-2 “Spy Plane” operations at Atsugi. Lee Harvey Oswald served at Atsugi with a complement of U.S. Marines during 1957-1958. Customarily, marines on such highly classified duty are carefully selected and have outstanding records. Oswald had U-2 and radar experience.

  August 22, 1945. Japanese generals from the campaign in Manchuria whitewashed this Japanese bomber and painted a red cross on it. They flew to Yontan Air Base, Okinawa, to surrender to American forces rather than to the Russians or Chinese.

  August 23, 1945. The author in front of the Japanese “Betty” bomber at Yontan Air Base, Okinawa. Note the red cross symbol of surrender.

  During this period, August-September 1945, a 500,000-man Japanese invasion force stockpile of U.S. military materiel was reloaded from Okinawa onto U.S. Navy transport vessels. The harbormaster told the author that one half of that enormous shipment was being sent to Korea, and that the other half was going to Indochina. Both became “Cold War” period war zones.

  A giant mushroom cloud rises over Nagasaki on the southern island of Japan after “Fat Man,” the first combat-ready, five-foot-diameter implosion sphere in a tactical bomb, was dropped by an Air Force B-29 of the 509th Composite Group from Tinian in the Marianas Islands.

  “In the twenty-one short days from July 16, 1945, the date of the ‘Trinity’ test in New Mexico, through Potsdam and Hiroshima to August 9th, the date of Nagasaki, the fate of the world was changed for all time.

  “International control of nuclear weapons means world government, nothing tess.”—Bernard J. O’Keefe, the man who was responsible for readying and releasing the “Fat Man” bomb over Nagasaki, from his book Nuclear Hostages, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983.

  The author (left) with Captain Ed Clark and Captain Harry Rogers at Tokyo International Airport, 1954.

  The author returned to the Far East during July 1952. He became commander of the 99th Air Transport Squadron of the Military Air Transport Service.

  During those years, Colonel Prouty met Edward G. Lansdale and members of his special CIA operation in Manila during 1953-1954, and flew some of them to Saigon when they were transferred there to establish the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission in 1954.

  It seems that those who planned the murder of the President knew the inner workings of the government very well. This fact is made evident not so much by the skill with which the murder of the President was undertaken as by the masterful cover-up program that has continued since November 22, 1963, and that terrible hour in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza when the warfare in Indochina moved from a low-intensity conflict, as seen by President Kennedy, to a major operation—a major war—in the hands of the Johnson administration.

  NINETEEN

  Visions of a Kennedy Dynasty

  BY NOVEMBER 1963, the Kennedy administration had begun to weave subtle changes into the fabric of American life and politics. John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic U.S. President, had been elected to office in November 1960 over the incumbent vice president, Richard M. Nixon, by the narrowest margin in history. As his third year in office drew to a close, Kennedy sensed that his popularity had increased and that his chances for reelection in 1964 were good.

  He had not left the possibility of his reelection to fate. From the beginning of his presidency, he had poured billions of Defense Department contract dollars into a savvy plan that benefited the voting districts of the country that were most important to him. He was skillfully changing the method of assigning military contracts, much to the alarm of the powerful arms industry.

  By 1963, Kennedy was telling confidants what some of his actions would be following his reelection. One of his memorable statements was that he planned to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. Another was that he would end American military participation in the conflict in Indochina.

  He was pragmatic enough to know that once he was reelected, he could do things more effectively than he could with the uncertainties of the election process ahead of him. He sensed the nation’s growing discontent with the undercover warfare in Indochina. He saw this discontent as part of a pattern of rebellion against the Cold War. Furthermore, as the son of the former American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in London, President Kennedy’s interests and instincts were always slanted more toward Europe than to the lands of the Pacific Basin. This, too, created friction among the strong and growing “Pacific Rim” interests of the financial and industrial world.

  Kennedy understood the will of the people. He was building an administration designed to respond to that will. Not since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt had a President so moved a nation—and the world, for his popularity didn’t end at the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific. He was recognized, admired, and loved as few leaders have been. However, as his popularity increased and as his reforms began to take root and grow, other forces came into play. Powerful interest groups began to join in a cabal against the young American President.

  On November 22, 1963, less than a year before his probable reelection to four more years as President, John F. Kennedy was struck down. F
rom all indications, he was killed by a team of gunmen hired as part of a detailed plot to terminate the Kennedy political initiatives—which had the appearance of establishing a political dynasty—and to direct the powers of the presidency back into Cold War activities and into the hands of more amenable “leaders.” There can be no doubts: The Kennedy murder was the result of a coup d’état brought about by a professional team equally skilled in the field of “cover story” and deception activities as it was in murder. We may recall that Lyndon Johnson said, in 1973, “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” (or, as they call them in the CIA, “Mechanics”).

  What were the circumstances that led to such drastic action?

  Kennedy’s plans for reelection were based in large measure on the allocation of billions of Defense Department dollars available in the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) construction program. This money was going to states and counties that had had the closest balloting during the 1960 election. The $6.5 billion TFX budget made it the largest government contract ever put together in peacetime.

  In the process of divvying up the funds, Kennedy had made it clear to the gnomes of the military-industrial complex that he was in control and that they were not. This raised the pressure for the ultimate confrontation between the President and a cabal of extremely powerful financial and industrial groups.