by Tim Weiner
“We were fortunate when Richardson was recalled,” said Conein’s old friend, General Don. “Had he been there, he could have put our plan in great jeopardy.”
“A COMPLETE LACK OF INTELLIGENCE”
Lucien Conein went to meet General Duong Van Minh, known as “Big Minh,” at the Joint General Staff Headquarters in Saigon on October 5. He reported that the general raised the issue of assassination and the question of American support for a new junta. Dave Smith, the new acting station chief, recommended that “we do not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination plot”—music to Ambassador Lodge’s ears, anathema to McCone’s.
McCone commanded Smith to stop “stimulating, or approving, or supporting assassination,” and he rushed to the Oval Office. Careful to avoid using words that could link the White House to a murder, he later testified, he chose a sports analogy: Mr. President, if I were the manager of a baseball team, and I had only one pitcher, I’d keep him on the mound whether he was a good pitcher or not. On October 17, at a meeting of the Special Group, and in a one-on-one with the president four days later, McCone said that ever since Lodge’s arrival in August, American foreign policy in Vietnam had been based on “a complete lack of intelligence” on the politics of Saigon. The situation developing around Conein was “exceedingly dangerous,” he said, and it threatened “absolute disaster for the United States.”
The American ambassador reassured the White House. “I believe that our involvement to date through Conein is still within the realm of plausible denial,” he reported. “We should not thwart a coup for two reasons. First, it seems at least an even bet that the next government would not bungle and stumble as much as the present one has. Secondly, it is extremely unwise in the long range for us to pour cold water on attempts at a coup…. We should remember that this is the only way in which the people in Vietnam can possibly get a change of government.”
The White House cabled careful instructions for Conein. Find out the generals’ plans, don’t encourage them, keep a low profile. Too late: the line between espionage and covert action already had been crossed. Conein was far too famous to work undercover; “I had a very high profile in Vietnam,” he said. Everyone who mattered knew exactly who he was and what he represented. They had faith that the CIA’s point man spoke for America.
Conein met with General Don on the night of October 24 and learned that the coup was no more than ten days away. They met again on October 28. Don later wrote that Conein “offered us money and weapons, but I turned him down, saying that we still need only courage and conviction.”
Conein carefully conveyed the message that the United States opposed assassination. The reaction of the generals, he testified, was: “You don’t like it like that? Well, we’ll do it our own way anyhow…. You don’t like it, we won’t talk about it anymore.” He did not discourage them. If he had, he said, “I would then be cut off and blinded.”
Conein reported back to Lodge that the coup was imminent. The ambassador sent the CIA’s Rufus Phillips to see Diem. They sat in the palace and talked of war and politics. Then “Diem looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Is there going to be a coup against me?’” Phillips remembered.
“I looked at him and just wanted to cry, and said, ‘I am afraid so, Mr. President.’ That was all we said about that.”
“WHO GAVE THOSE ORDERS?”
The coup struck on November 1. It was noon in Saigon, midnight in Washington. Summoned at home by an emissary from General Don, Conein changed into his uniform and called Rufus Phillips to watch over his wife and infant children. Then he grabbed a .38-caliber revolver and a satchel with about $70,000 in CIA funds, hopped into his jeep, and rushed through the streets of Saigon to the Joint General Staff headquarters of the army of South Vietnam. The streets were filled with gunfire. The leaders of the coup had closed the airport, cut the city’s telephone lines, stormed central police headquarters, seized the government radio station, and attacked the centers of political power.
Conein filed his first report shortly after 2 p.m. Saigon time. He stayed in contact with the CIA station over his jeep’s secure communications link, describing shellings and bombings and troop movements and political maneuvers as they took place. The station relayed his reports to the White House and the State Department through encoded cables. It was as near to real-time intelligence as could be achieved in that day.
“Conein at JGS HQS/ from Gens Big Minh and Don and eyewitness observation,” came the first flash cable. “Gens attempting contact Palace by telephone but unable to do so. Their proposition as follows: If the President will resign immediately, they will guarantee his safety and the safe departure of the President and Ngo Dinh Nhu. If the President refuses these terms, the Palace will be attacked within the hour.”
Conein sent a second message a little more than an hour later: there would be “no discussion with the President. He will either say yes or no and that is the end of the conversation.” General Don and his allies called President Diem shortly before 4 p.m. and asked him to surrender. They offered him sanctuary and a safe passage from the country. He refused. The president of South Vietnam then called the American ambassador. “What is the attitude of the United States?” Diem asked. Lodge said he had no idea. “It is 4:30 a.m. in Washington,” he replied, “and the U.S. government cannot possibly have a view.” Lodge then said, “I have a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your brother safe conduct out of the country. Have you heard this?”
“No,” Diem lied. Then he paused, perhaps realizing that Lodge was in on the plot against him. “You have my telephone number,” he said, and the conversation came to an end. Three hours later he and his brother fled to a safe house owned by a Chinese merchant who had financed Diem’s private spy network in Saigon. The villa was equipped with a phone line hooked to the presidential palace, preserving the illusion that he remained at the seat of power. The battle went on all night; close to a hundred Vietnamese died as the rebels stormed the presidential palace.
At about 6 a.m., Diem telephoned General Big Minh. The president said he was ready to resign, and the general guaranteed his safety. Diem said he would be waiting at the Saint Francis Xavier church in the Chinese quarter of Saigon. The general sent an armored personnel carrier to fetch Diem and his brother, ordered his personal bodyguard to lead the convoy, and then raised two fingers on his right hand. It was a signal: kill them both.
General Don ordered his troops to clean up his headquarters, to bring in a large green-felt-covered table, and to prepare for a news conference. “Get the hell out,” the general said to his friend Conein, “we’re bringing in the press.” Conein went home, only to be summoned by Lodge. “I went to the Embassy and I was informed that I had to find Diem,” he said. “I was tired and fed up, and I said, ‘Who gave those orders?’ They let me know that those orders came from the President of the United States.”
At about 10 a.m., Conein drove back to General Staff headquarters and confronted the first general he met. “Big Minh told me they committed suicide. I looked at him and said, where? He said they were in the Catholic Church in Cholon, and they committed suicide,” Conein said in his classified testimony to the Senate committee investigating the assassination twelve years later.
“I think I lost my cool at that point,” Conein said. He was thinking of mortal sin and his eternal soul.
“I told Big Minh, look, you’re a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic. If they committed suicide at that church and the priest holds Mass tonight, that story won’t hold water. I said, where are they? He said they are at the General Staff headquarters, behind the General Staff headquarters, did I want to see them? And I said no. He said, why not? And I said, well, if by chance one in a million of the people believe you that they committed suicide in church and I see that they have not committed suicide and I know differently, I am in trouble.”
Conein returned to the American embassy to report that President Diem was dead. He did not rep
ort the whole truth. “Informed by Viet counterparts that suicide committed en route from city,” he cabled. At 2:50 a.m. Washington time came a reply signed in Dean Rusk’s name: “News of Diem, Nhu suicide shocking here…important to establish publicly beyond question that deaths actually suicide if this true.”
On Saturday, November 2, 1963, at 9:35 a.m., the president convened an off-the-record meeting at the White House with his brother, McCone, Rusk, McNamara, and General Taylor. Before long, Michael Forrestal ran in with a flash from Saigon. General Taylor recounted that the president leaped to his feet and “rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.”
At 6:31 p.m., McGeorge Bundy cabled Lodge, with eyes-only copies to McCone, McNamara, and Rusk: “Deaths of Diem and Nhu, whatever their failings, has caused shock here and there is danger that standing and reputation of incoming government may be significantly damaged if conviction spreads of their assassination at direction of one or more senior members of incoming regime…. They should not be left under illusion that political assassination is easily accepted here.”
Jim Rosenthal was the duty officer at the American embassy in Saigon on that Saturday. Ambassador Lodge sent him down to the front door to receive some important visitors. “I’ll never forget the sight,” he said. “This car pulled up to the Embassy, and the cameras were grinding away. Conein hops out of the front seat, opens the back door, and salutes, and these guys come out. As if he was delivering them to the Embassy, which he was. I just went up with them in the elevator, and Lodge greeted them…. Here were the guys who had just carried out a coup, killed the chief of state, and then they walk up to the Embassy, as if to say, ‘Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn’t we?’”
21. “I THOUGHT IT
WAS A CONSPIRACY”
On Tuesday, November 19, 1963, Richard Helms carried a Belgian submachine gun concealed in an airline travel bag into the White House.
The weapon was a war trophy; the CIA had seized a three-ton arms cache that Fidel Castro had tried to smuggle into Venezuela. Helms had taken the gun to the Justice Department to show it off to Bobby Kennedy, who thought they should bring it to his brother. They went to the Oval Office, and they talked with the president about how to fight Fidel. The late autumn light was fading as the president arose from his rocking chair and stared out the window at the Rose Garden.
Helms slipped the weapon back into his bag and said: “I’m sure glad the Secret Service didn’t catch us bringing this gun in here.” The president, lost in thought, turned from the window and shook hands with Helms. “Yes,” he said with a grin, “it gives me a feeling of confidence.”
The following Friday, McCone and Helms were at headquarters, sharing a lunch of sandwiches in the director’s suite. The tall wide windows on the seventh floor looked out over an unbroken field of treetops to the horizon. Then the terrible news broke.
The president had been shot. McCone clapped on his fedora and went to Bobby Kennedy’s house, a minute away by car. Helms went down to his office and tried to draft a book message, a cable to be sent to every CIA station in the world. His thoughts at that moment were very close to Lyndon Johnson’s.
“What raced through my mind,” Johnson remembered, “was that, if they had shot our president…who would they shoot next? And what was going on in Washington? And when would the missiles be comin’? And I thought it was a conspiracy, and I raised that question. And nearly everybody that was with me raised it.”
Over the next year, in the name of national security, the agency hid much of what it knew from the new president and the commission he created to investigate the killing. Its own internal investigation of the assassination collapsed in confusion and suspicion, casting shadows of doubt that still linger. This account is based on CIA records and the sworn testimony of CIA officers, all declassified between 1998 and 2004.
“THE EFFECT WAS ELECTRIC”
“Tragic death of President Kennedy requires all of us to look sharp for any unusual intelligence developments,” Helms wrote in his worldwide message to CIA stations on November 22. At headquarters, Charlotte Bustos spotted one immediately. She managed the Mexico files of the clandestine service, and two minutes after the radio announced that the Dallas police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, she ran through the pastel corridors clutching Oswald’s dossier, searching for her boss, John Whitten, the man in charge of the CIA’s covert operations in Mexico and Central America. Whitten read quickly through the file.
“The effect was electric,” he remembered.
The file said that at 10:45 a.m. on October 1, 1963, a man identifying himself as Lee Oswald had telephoned the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, asking what was happening with his standing request for a visa to travel to the Soviet Union. With the invaluable help of the Mexican secret police, the Mexico City station had wiretapped the Soviet and Cuban embassies in an operation code-named Envoy. The CIA had Oswald’s call.
“Mexico had the biggest and most active telephone intercept operations in the whole world,” Whitten said. “J. Edgar Hoover used to glow every time that he thought of the Mexico station” more than a few American soldiers based in the southwestern United States had been caught trying to sell military secrets or defect to the Russians in Mexico City. The CIA also had photographic surveillance of the Soviet embassy and opened every piece of mail coming in and out of it.
But the eavesdropping operations were so big that they inundated the station, drowning it in useless information. It took eight days before the station listened to the October 1 tape, reported Oswald’s visit, and asked CIA headquarters: Who is Lee Oswald? The CIA knew he was an American marine who had publicly defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. It had in its files a collection of FBI and State Department reports detailing Oswald’s attempts to renounce his American citizenship, his threats to tell the Soviets about secret American military installations in the Pacific, his marriage to a Russian woman, and his repatriation in June 1962.
During Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, “CIA had no sources in a position to report on his activities or what the KGB might be doing with him,” Whitten wrote in an internal report. But “it was suspected that Oswald and all other similar defectors were in the hands of the KGB. We were sure that all such defectors would be interrogated by the KGB, surrounded by KGB informants wherever they were resettled in the Soviet Union, and even possibly recruited by the KGB for a mission abroad later on.”
Whitten realized that the man who had shot the president could be a communist agent. He picked up the telephone and asked Helms to order an immediate review of all the Envoy tapes and transcripts in Mexico City. The CIA chief of station, Win Scott, quickly called the president of Mexico, whose secret police worked all night with the CIA’s eavesdroppers to listen for traces of Oswald’s voice.
Word of the Oswald file spread as McCone returned to CIA headquarters. Six hours of hectic conferences ensued, the last one convening at 11:30 p.m. When McCone learned that the CIA had known beforehand of Oswald’s trip to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, he was enraged, ripping into his aides, furious at the way the agency was run.
The CIA’s internal investigation took shape on Saturday morning, November 23. Helms met with the agency’s barons, including James Angleton, chief of counterintelligence since 1954. Angleton fully expected to be handed the Oswald case. To his outrage, Helms put John Whitten in charge.
Whitten was a man who knew how to unravel a conspiracy. A skilled prisoner-of-war interrogator in World War II, he had joined the CIA in 1947. He was the first to employ the polygraph at the agency. In the early 1950s, he used the lie detector in hundreds of investigations of double agents, false defectors, and intelligence fabricators in Germany. He had uncovered some of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated on the agency, including the work of a con artist who sold the Vienna station a fake Soviet communications codebook. Another of the cases he cracked involved an agent Angleton had been running in Italy, a man
whom Angleton launched against five different foreign intelligence services. The agent proved to be a fraud and a pathological liar; he had blithely disclosed to all five foreign services that he worked for the CIA, and he had been promptly doubled back to penetrate the agency by all five. This was not the only Angleton operation Whitten had exposed. In each case, Helms told Whitten to go into Angleton’s dark and smoky office and confront him.
“I used to go in fingering my insurance policy, notifying my next of kin,” Whitten said. The confrontations created “bitter feelings, the most bitter feelings” between the two men. From the moment Whitten was assigned the Oswald case, Angleton set out to sabotage him.
By midmorning on November 23, CIA headquarters knew that Oswald had visited both the Cuban and the Soviet embassies repeatedly in late September and October, trying to travel as quickly as possible to Cuba and stay there until his Soviet visa came through. “His having been to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City obviously was a very important part of the initial impressions one had,” Helms said. Shortly after noon, McCone rushed back downtown and broke the news of the Cuban connection to President Johnson, interrupting a long talk between LBJ and Dwight Eisenhower, who was warning him about the power that Robert Kennedy wielded over covert operations.
At 1:35 p.m., President Johnson called an old friend, a Wall Street power broker named Edwin Weisl, and confided: “This thing on the…this assassin…may have a lot more complications than you know about…it may lay deeper than you think.” That afternoon, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, Tom Mann, a Texan and a close LBJ confidant, relayed his own suspicion that Castro was behind the assassination.