by Tim Weiner
Conein awaits his biographer. Stanley Karnow, the historian and author of Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), spent seventy hours interviewing him, but abandoned the project after deciding his subject was beginning to resemble Somerset Maugham’s fictional spy Ashenden, a man so consumed by espionage that he cannot sort out his cover stories from the story of his life. “He was out of his time,” Karnow said. “He was the swashbuckling soldier of fortune—the guy who has ceased to exist except in fiction. A marvelous storyteller. Whether the stories were true or not was beside the point. They were almost always almost entirely true.”
The author wrote Conein’s obituary, “Lucien Conein, 79, Legendary Cold War Spy,” The New York Times, June 7, 1998.
“do what you can to save South Vietnam”: Rufus Phillips oral history, FAOH.
“a flashpoint”: John Gunther Dean oral history, FAOH.
a new Lao government: The decision to try to buy a new government was made after Allen Dulles warned President Eisenhower that “we had a good deal to fear in the 1959 general elections” in Laos, and the president replied “that it would be a serious matter if any country such as Laos went Communist by the legal vote of its people.” NSC minutes, May 29, 1958, DDEL. The CIA’s own analysts reported: “The Communist resumption of guerrilla warfare in Laos was primarily a reaction to a stronger anti-Communist posture by the Laotian government and to recent US initiatives in support of Laos.” Special National Intelligence Estimate 68-2-59, “The Situation in Laos,” September 18, 1959, declassified May 2001, CIA/CREST.
“The suitcase contained money”: John Gunther Dean oral history, FAOH.
a roulette wheel: James interview with author.
“That was the real go-ahead”: William Lair oral history, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University, interview conducted by Steve Maxner, December 11, 2001. Used with the kind permission of Mr. Maxner and the archive.
double its tribal forces in Laos and “make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam”: The latter order is in the Pentagon Papers, United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 18. The former is in a Special Group memo reprinted in FRUS, Vol. XXVIII: “The genesis of this program stems from high level U.S. Government approval in late 1960 and early 1961 [for] CIA [to] enlist tribal support to fight communism. The main effort in this program has been development of the Meo, the largest non-Lao ethnic group in Laos…. As authorized by the Special Group in June 1963, this program has expanded to a present force of approximately 19,000 armed Meo guerrillas (23,000 authorized) engaged in village defense and guerrilla activities against the Pathet Lao.”
“the ignorance and the arrogance”: Richard L. Holm, “Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962 to 1964,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.
“the activisits were all for a war in Laos”: There was a great debate inside CIA headquarters about the wisdom of a war in Laos. “The Agency was very badly split,” said Robert Amory, Jr., the deputy director of intelligence from 1953 to 1962. “The activists were all for a war in Laos. They thought that was a great place to have a war…. Fitzgerald was very strong forit.” Amory was not, and he soon resigned, but not before he helped draft President Kennedy’s first major national television address, on the subject of Laos, on March 23, 1961. The president could not or would not pronounce the nation’s name correctly; he thought no one would care for a country called “Louse.” He said LAY-os was threatened by communist forces within and without, including combat specialists from North Vietnam. “Its own safety runs with the safety of us all,” he told the nation. “In real neutrality, observed by all. All we want in Laos is peace, not war.”
The Americans sent to Vietnam had an equally profound ignorance of the country’s history and culture: Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. x, xi. “Added to this propensity to try to make something out of nothing was an American ignorance of Vietnamese history and society so massive and all-encompassing that two decades of federally funded fellowships, crash language programs, television specials, and campus teach-ins made hardly a dent,” Spector wrote. “Before the United States sets out to make something out of nothing in some other corner of the globe, American leaders might consider the historical and social factors involved.”
“They had everything they wanted”: Neher oral history, FAOH.
Project Tiger: The author described the fate of the CIA’s Vietnamese agents in “Once Commandos for U.S., Vietnamese Are Now Barred,” The New York Times, April 14, 1995. Hanoi’s double-crossing of the CIA from 1961 to 1963 is definitively detailed in Richard H. Schultz, Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). Schultz, director of international security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, conducted extensive oral history interviews and reviewed declassified documents for the book.
“We harvested a lot of lies”: Barbour oral history, FAOH.
In October 1961, President Kennedy sent: The sprawl of the CIA’s paramilitary forces in the region at the time was impressive, as detailed by General Lansdale in a report to the White House. In Vietnam, CIA officers commanded 340 South Vietnamese soldiers of the First Observation Group, created by the agency in 1956 and trained to kill Vietcong infiltrators in the south, the north, and Laos. From Taiwan, Civil Air Transport, the CIA airline, flew hundreds of missions a year in Laos and Vietnam; the Chinese Nationalist army and the CIA trained hundreds of Vietnamese to serve as paramilitary officers. In Thailand, Bill Lair’s own paramilitary forces stood at 550 trained Thai officers. At Fort McKinley outside Manila, the CIA ran a sprawling school for Filipino soldiers to fight communism throughout Asia. Hundreds more trainees from all across the region were being sent to the CIA base on the island of Saipan.
“the sending to Vietnam of some U.S. military forces”: That secret was very deep indeed. The author obtained a unique copy of Taylor’s full and uncensored report to the president from the CIA’s archives in September 2005. It was the personal copy of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles Pearre Cabell. Cabell had highlighted the sentence and written in the margins of his copy, To CIA readers: This concept must be kept very secure. CPC.
“Nobody liked Diem”: Robert F. Kennedy oral history, JFKL, collected in Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (eds.), Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 396.
“Diem himself cannot be preserved”: Telegram from the Department of State to the embassy in Vietnam, Washington, August 24, 1963, 9:36 p.m., FRUS, Vol. III.
“I should not have given my consent to it”: JFK Tapes, November 4, 1963, JFKL.
the president had ordered Diem ousted: On Saturday evening, August 23, 1963, when JFK decided to topple Diem, the news from Vietnam was grim. South Vietnamese commandos trained by the CIA were killing Buddhist protestors, the president’s daily brief from the CIA that morning noted, and “Nhu told a U.S. source yesterday that the generals recommended the imposition of martial law. [Nhu] denied this amounted to a coup, but warned it could become one if Diem vacillated or compromised on the Buddhist issue.” FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. III, document 271. If Kennedy read this, he would have been encouraged to approve the Hilsman cable authorizing a move against Diem. The history of the Hilsman cable has been well established by declassified State Department records in the FRUS Vietnam series. McCone told Dwight Eisenhower that the president’s casual approval of the uncoordinated cable was “one of the government’s greatest errors” to date—a high standard. The former president was furious. Where was the National Security Council? What was the State Department doing running coups? McCone replied that Kennedy was surrounded by “liberals in his government who want to reform
every country” in the world. Well, Eisenhower shot back, who appointed those damned liberals? The old general “expressed much concern over the future of the United States.” McCone memo, “Conference with Former President Eisenhower,” September 19, 1963, DDEL.
Helms handed the assignment to Bill Colby, the new chief of the CIA’s Far East division: It is a terrible irony that Colby—who in a 1982 oral history for the LBJ Library said that “the overthrow of Diem was the worst mistake we made”—may well have planted a seed for it in an August 16, 1963, memo to Helms, Roger Hilsman at State, and Michael Forrestal at NSC. It weighed the chances for a “successful coup d’etat” and noted that “assassination may be an integral part of projected coups or may be done in hope that something better will somehow emerge from the resulting chaotic situation.”
“songs they may sing”: Colby cited in Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/ vietnam/epis1.hmtl. Ford was for many years a senior CIA analyst on Vietnam.
At the White House, Helms listened: Helms was at the White House meeting at noon on August 29, 1963, with the president, McNamara, and Rusk, among a dozen other top officials. The note taker recorded that Ambassador Lodge had already instructed the CIA’s Rufus Phillips “to tell the Vietnamese generals that the U.S. Ambassador is behind the CIA approach.” The message to the generals was that the CIA, the embassy, and the White House spoke with one voice. “The President asked whether anyone had any reservations about the course of action we were following,” and Rusk and McNamara did. The president then decided that “Ambassador Lodge is to have authority over all overt and covert operations” in Vietnam. A personal, eyes-only cable went out to Lodge reserving presidential command over those covert operations. Memorandum of conference with the president, August 29, 1963, National Security file, JFKL. Lodge’s job was to make sure that the American hand would not show. “I received my instructions from Ambassador Lodge,” Conein testified. “If they were cabled instructions, he had a very good habit of not reading something. He would fold a piece of paper and what pertained to you for instructions, he would let you read that, and that alone, so you didn’t know who was sending it or where it came from…. ‘Those are the instructions, do you understand them?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘All right, go carry them out.’” On the president’s desire for secrecy, see Bundy to Lodge, October 5, 1963, FRUS, Vol. IV.
“CIA has more money; bigger houses than diplomats; bigger salaries; more weapons; more modern equipment”: The clash between Lodge and Richardson is poignantly recorded in John H. Richardson, My Father the Spy: AFamily History of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Sixties (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Lodge decided he wanted a new station chief: Specifically, he wanted General Ed Lansdale, the ugly American. Absolutely not, said McCone, who had “no confidence in him at all. They could replace Richardson if Lodge wants it but not someone from the outside.” Memorandum of telephone conversation between the secretary of state and the director of central intelligence, September 17, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. IV, document 120.
“exposed him, and gave his name publicly to the newspapers”: RFK oral history, JFKL; Guthman and Shulman, Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words, p. 398. The burning of a station chief by an ambassador was unprecedented in the history of the CIA. McCone sent a four-page briefing paper to President Kennedy the day before the president had a scheduled press conference on October 9, 1963, defending the CIA against the fury Lodge’s leaks had set in motion. “You will undoubtedly be asked about CIA’s role in Vietnam,” McCone wrote. “The criticism which has found its way into hundreds of news articles and editorials is seriously eroding the spirit of this organization which I have now spent two years trying to rekindle.” The president hewed closely to McCone’s briefing in his answers to the press.
“We were fortunate”: Tran Van Don, Our Endless War (San Francisco: Presidio, 1978), pp. 96–99.
“against the assassination plot,” “supporting assassination,” and if I were the manager of a baseball team: Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, U.S. Senate, 94th Congress, 1st Session, 1975.
“a complete lack of intelligence,” “exceedingly dangerous,” and “absolute disaster for the United States”: McCone memos, “Special Group 5412 Meeting,” October 18, 1963, and “Discussion with the President—October 21,” CIA/CREST. See also Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers.
“We should not thwart a coup”: Lodge to Bundy and McCone, October 25, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. IV, document 216. By then it was too late. On October 29, McCone, Helms, and Colby arrived at the White House for a 4:20 p.m. meeting with the president, his brother, and the entire national-security team. Colby presented a detailed military map showing that Diem’s strength and the coup leaders’ forces were evenly divided. So were the president’s men. The State Department was in favor, the military and McCone opposed. But the White House had set in motion a force it could not stop.
“money and weapons”: Don, Our Endless War, pp. 96–99.
“Diem looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Is there going to be a coup against me?’”: Phillips oral history, FAOH.
The coup struck on November 1: Conein’s account here comes from his declassified Church Committee testimony; the cable traffic is reproduced in FRUS. Conein said that Nhu had arranged with the military commander of the Saigon military district to stage a fake Vietcong uprising in Saigon. The plan included the assassination of key American officials. Nhu then planned to send troops from the commander’s contingent to put down the fake revolt and save Vietnam. But the commander told the coup plotters about Nhu’s plans. As Conein put it, the rebel generals “double bumped” Nhu: when the real coup began, Nhu thought it was his fake coup. According to the Church Committee, Conein passed three million piasters ($42,000) to an aide of General Don’s late on the morning of November 1 to procure food for the coup forces and to pay death benefits for those killed during the coup. Conein said in his testimony the sum he took from his house was five million piasters, or about $70,000. Colby said it was $65,000.
the president leaped to his feet and “rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay”: General Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares: A Memoir (New York: Da Capo, 1990), p. 301. The White House–Saigon cables cited in this passage are reprinted in full in FRUS, Vol. IV.
“‘Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn’t we?’”: Rosenthal oral history, FAOH.
Chapter Twenty-one
In 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter the “Church Committee”) convened under the chairmanship of Senator Frank Church. Its investigators demanded and received depositions taken in secret, and later took limited public testimony. The work of lasting value was in the secret files.
This chapter is based in part on recently declassified testimony delivered by senior CIA officers—among them Richard Helms, John Whitten (identified by the alias “John Scelso”), and James J. Angleton. They gave secret depositions to the Church Committee in 1976 and to a follow-up investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 (hereinafter “HSCA”). Helms, McCone, Angleton, and others also testified before the Rockefeller Commission created by President Ford in 1975. The release of these transcripts twenty and twenty-five years after the fact sheds new light on what the CIA was thinking after the assassination, on its own investigation of the killing, and on its failure to fully inform the Warren Commission.
The depositions were declassified between 1998 and 2004 under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act passed by Congress in 1992. Many have been published on a CD-ROM as Assassination Transcripts of the Church Committee, available online at http://www.history-matters.com. The work of the CIA’s John Whitten investigating the Kennedy assassination for the agency was located at the JFK Library by the journalist Jefferson Morley in his research for a forthcoming
biography of the Mexico City station chief Win Scott. He graciously shared copies with the author in 2006. That work is hereinafter cited as “Whitten report.”
“I’m sure glad the Secret Service didn’t catch us”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 227–229.
“What raced through my mind”: LBJ, telephone conversation with Bill Moyers, December 26, 1966, LBJL. Many of Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes related to the Kennedy assassination have been collected, edited, annotated, and published by Max Holland in The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (New York: Knopf, 2004). Citations from that work are hereinafter “LBJ Tapes/Holland.”
“Tragic death of President Kennedy”: Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 229.
“Mexico had the biggest and most active telephone intercept operations in the whole world”: Whitten deposition, 1978.
“CIA had no sources”: Whitten report, undated but December 1963, CIA/JFKL.
he was enraged: McCone’s 11:30 p.m. meeting on November 22, 1963, included Deputy Director Carter, Richard Helms, and the agency’s chief administrative officer, Red White, who recorded in his office diary that McCone had taken General Carter and “‘wire-brushed’ him thoroughly, had expressed himself as being most dissatisfied with the way the Agency was being managed.” L. K. White diary, November 23, 1963, CIA/CREST.