SEVEN
“WHY VIETNAM?” Why was this remote, backward, ancient land chosen, as far back as 1943 or 1944, to be one of the major battlegrounds of the Cold War? A dog-eared copy of a 1931 National Geographic likens Vietnam to a Garden of Eden. What was there about this historically serene Asian land that caused it to be chosen to be devastated by this massive war?
I say “chosen” advisedly. Who had directed that one-half of that great stockpile of weapons and other war-making matériel that was delivered to Okinawa for use during the invasion of Japan should, instead, be transshipped to Vietnam? Decisions of such magnitude would have to, one would think, have been made by such men as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Clement Attlee, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek; but these men weren’t making “Cold War”—that is, “communism vs. anti-communism”—decisions at that time.
Questions like these require that we begin to think of the Cold War and its half century in terms of an awareness of a super power elite that can, and does, make such monumental decisions. Lest it appear that I am making these allegations out of thin air, may I suggest that others, now and at other times, have come to similar conclusions. Winston Churchill, in conversations with intimate friends during World War II, made reference to a “High Cabal.” R. Buckminster Fuller wrote positively and powerfully of a super “power elite.” Dr. Joseph Needham, the great Chinese scholar at Cambridge University, writes of a Chinese belief in “the Gentry” as a similar “power elite.” This is a serious subject, and one that concerns us all. The “Why Vietnam?” question causes us to later ask, “Why John F. Kennedy?” We shall see why.
To probe further, why did the Vietnam War cause the dean of American military correspondents, Hansen W. Baldwin, to write, in the foreword to Adm. U.S.G. Sharp’s book Strategy of Defeat, the following:
. . . for this first defeat in American history—the historical blame must be placed squarely where it belongs—not primarily upon our military leaders whose continuous and protracted frustrations burst forth from these pages—but upon the very top civilian policy makers in Washington, specifically the Commander in Chief [President Lyndon B. Johnson].
Admiral Sharp, who was the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC) and thus the senior American military man in the area, wrote, “The Vietnam episode was one of the most controversial eras of U.S. history. . . . When we accepted defeat . . . we seemed to be clearly saying to the world that what we had ultimately lost was our concern for the responsibilities, indeed the honor, that goes with a leadership role. If this is true, I fear for the peace of the world.” Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, USMC (Ret’d), formerly the commander of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, tells a similar story in his fine book First to Fight.
This is what allows me to write from my own knowledge and experience. My immediate boss for two years was General Krulak. During those years I also knew Admiral Sharp. Before I worked for General Krulak, I served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under both Thomas Gates and Robert McNamara. I have worked closely with Allen Dulles and his brother, Foster Dulles. I feel that it is essential to set forth important elements of this historical period in a way that will be most useful to the reader. We need to understand the CIA and its allies. We need to know why we were in Vietnam, or at least what caused us to be there, so that when we arrive at the year 1963 and the “1,000 Days of Camelot” we shall be ready to understand the true handwriting on the wall. These next chapters have the creation of that awareness as their objective.
Years after the Vietnam War had been brought to a close, Gen. Paul Harkins, head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam from February 1962 to June 1964, said he had never been told what the American military objective was in that war. If that is true—and I have no reason to believe that it is not—then why were we there? What was the real purpose of that massive thirty-year struggle that cost 58,000 American lives, as much as $500 billion, and the lives of millions of noncombatants? What kind of a war can be waged without an objective?
Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian general and military writer, declared that of the nine principles of warfare, the most important is that of the “objective.” “If you are going to fight a war and you intend to be the victor,” he said, “you must have a clearly stated and totally understood military objective.” Furthermore, that objective should issue from the highest authority in the land. It is not just permission or authority to “do something.” As we shall see here, there was no official U.S. government directive and objective, of a military nature, in Vietnam at any time.
During World War II, when Gen. Creighton W. Abrams led the point brigade of Gen. George S. Patton’s victorious Third Army after the invasion of France, he had a military objective that old “Blood and Guts” Patton had put in plain words: “Cross the Rhine; destroy the German army; shake hands with the Russians.” That is the kind of job a military man can do, and Abrams did it. That objective led to victory on that front.
More than two decades later, General Abrams, one of the great armored force commanders, was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to replace Gen. William Westmoreland as commander of U.S. military forces in Vietnam. During a rousing “halftime” speech for the benefit of the general and his staff officers at the White House, Johnson said, “Abe, you are going over there to win. You will have an army of five hundred and fifty thousand men, one of the most powerful air forces ever assembled, and the invincible Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy offshore. Now go over there and do it!”
General Abrams, good soldier that he was, remained silent as he reached out to shake the President’s hand. In the rear of that room, however, another army general, a member of Abrams’s staff, a man who had been with him during WWII, spoke up. “Mr. President,” he said, “you have told us to go over there and do ‘it.’ Would you care to define what ‘it’ is?”
LBJ remained silent as he ushered the general and his men out of the Oval Office. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the military role in that long, terrible, winless war. We had no “objective,” that is, no reason to be there.
For General Westmoreland, the man who served during those hectic years of the Johnson escalation of the war, the objective of the war became the “body count”—the number of dead “enemy” reported in a given period of time. A related objective was “enemy strength estimates”—the number of enemy troops calculated to be in the field. It was assumed that if the body count was going up, the strength of the enemy must be going down. The more “bodies” that could be counted, the closer we were supposed to be getting to victory.
Few men, if any, had more experience with the inner workings of Vietnam policy, at the Washington level, than Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak. He served as special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, 1962—63. He was my immediate boss in SACSA for all of that period. The general was a rare and gifted man who might well have been appointed commandant of the Marine Corps had President Kennedy lived.
He left the Pentagon in 1964 to serve as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, with responsibility for all marines in the Pacific Ocean area. That was in itself an oddly structured assignment. His immediate boss in Honolulu was Adm. U.S.G. Sharp, commander in chief Pacific; yet the commanding general over the marines fighting in Vietnam was Gen. William Westmoreland, who had an ambassador and a senior CIA station chief looking over each of his shoulders in Saigon.
Some years later, General Krulak wrote in First To Fight: “I saw what was happening [in Vietnam] as wasteful of American lives, promising a series of protracted, strength-sapping battles with small likelihood of a successful outcome.”
With this in mind and drawing upon his considerable combat experience in World War II, which included those final heavy battles on Okinawa, Krulak came up with a strategic plan designed to achieve “victory” in Vietnam. With this plan in hand, he flew to Saigon to present it to General Westmoreland. Westmoreland was unable to concur with Krulak’s plan. So Krulak returned to Honolulu and presented the plan to Admiral Sharp, who liked it and directed Krulak to take the plan to Washington to present it formally to the U.S. Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Wallace M. Greene.
General Greene approved the plan and made arrangements for Krulak to present it to Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense. Krulak knew McNamara well from his long service with the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. McNamara agreed with the plan, but then did something that uncovers the real source of power with respect to top-level decisions affecting activities in Southeast Asia during the sixties.
McNamara suggested, “Why don’t you talk to Governor Harriman?” Averell Harriman, formerly ambassador to the Soviet Union, was then serving as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. I might add that Harriman comes as close to a model for the power elite as I can think of—with one qualifying exception: He lived a most public and ostentatious life. But perhaps that was a role he was chosen to play by his peers.
Harriman graciously invited General Krulak to join him for lunch at his elegant home in Georgetown. Following their luncheon, Governor Harriman invited the general to present his strategic plan for achieving victory in Vietnam. When he got to the climax of the plan, which recommended “destroy the port areas, mine the ports, destroy the rail lines, destroy power, fuel, and heavy industry,” Harriman stopped him and demanded, “Do you want a war with the Soviet Union or the Chinese?”
Krulak later wrote, “I winced when I thought about the kind of advice he was giving President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.”
And, Krulak sums up, “We [the USA] did not have the Washington-level courage to take the war directly to the North Vietnamese ports, where every weapon, every bullet, truck, and gallon of fuel that was prevented from entering the country would ultimately contribute to the success of our arms and the preservation of our lives in South Vietnam.”
I know General Krulak to be a dedicated American and a tough, battle-hardened marine. He did not stop with this rebuff in that drawing room of Governor Harriman’s home in Georgetown. The commandant of the Marine Corps arranged for Krulak to meet with President Johnson in the White House to discuss the same strategic plan.
About this rare event, Krulak writes: “His first question was ‘What is it going to take to win?”’
In response, Krulak listed:
· 1. Improve the quality of the South Vietnamese government . . .
· 2. Accelerate the training of the SVN forces . . .
· 3. We have to stop the flow of war materials to the North Vietnamese . . . before they ever cross the docks in Haiphong. . . .
Then, with his mind on those crucial moments with Governor Harriman, he added, cautiously:
· 4. “Mine the ports, destroy the Haiphong dock area. . . . ”
At that point in the briefing, Krulak writes, “Mr. Johnson got to his feet, put his arm around my shoulder, and propelled me firmly toward the door.”
Think carefully of this “Vietnam Scenario.” General Krulak summed up this experience by writing:
It was plain to me that the Washington civilian leadership was taking counsel with its fears. They were willing to spend $30 billion a year on the Vietnam enterprise but they were unwilling to accept the timeless philosophy of John Paul Jones: “It seems to be a truth, inflexible and inexorable, that he who will not risk cannot win.”
At this point General Krulak, among others, realized that the Washington strategy was, in his exact words, “a losing strategy.” I might add that when Krulak’s good friend Adm. U.S.G. Sharp wrote his own book about Vietnam in retrospect, he wrote it under the title Strategy for Defeat. This is precisely the way those top military men felt about that war.
America had been told by such experienced men as Generals of the Army Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur and Gen. Matthew Ridgway that we could never win a Vietnam-style land war in Asia. They understood the problem, too.
They recalled the old story from the days of the Japanese war in China during the 1930s. The Japanese, with their greater firepower and attack aircraft and their more mobile mechanized divisions, wrought terrible destruction on the Chinese. The headlines posted on bulletin boards throughout China gave the figures for battle after battle. It was said that one old man, reading these totals of Chinese and Japanese losses on the ratio of 10 to 1 and 20 to 1 in favor of the Japanese, turned to a friend beside him and said, “Look at those lists, from city after city; just look at those losses. Pretty soon, no more Japanese.”
Many of the older, more experienced American generals looked at the hopeless conflicts in Korea and Vietnam and remembered that story. At the rate it was going, the American casualty rate was becoming similar to that of the Japanese—pretty soon, no more Americans.
This is the account of the generals and the admirals. They saw the terrible losses, and they knew there were more to come. Note carefully that it was not the story of the ambassador and of the CIA’s chief of station. The CIA had set the tone and other parameters of the warfare. This was how the battles of the Cold War were planned.
On the other hand, that was all Westmoreland had to fight for, that is, the body count. Through the decades of the war, the count mounted into the millions. They continued to count the bodies, and no one asked: “Who are these people who are being killed?” Were they really the “enemy”? Were any of those pajama-clad people really a threat to the United States?
There is something remarkable about that word “enemy First of all, during wartime, the adversary, by tradition, is supposed to be in uniform. When the Yankee rebels at Lexington and Concord saw the redcoats coming, they had no trouble identifying the “enemy.” Things were so different in Vietnam. First of all, the Vietcong had no uniforms. Without an “enemy” in uniform, whom do you shoot?
No one believes in killing in cold blood, but if someone is declared to be an “enemy,” then cold-blooded killing of everyone in sight becomes morally permissible, and is even encouraged by an application of the theory of Malthus: “There won’t be enough food anyway; so what’s wrong with killing them?”
An example of this line of reasoning occurred when, in November 1985, the former director of central intelligence, William Colby, appeared on Larry King’s late-night talk show. At one point, King brought up the subject of assassinations by the CIA, while making reference to political assassinations and to the agency’s assassination manual, which had been discovered in Nicaragua. Colby came back with a most interesting, and troubling, response. He said that there had been a time when the CIA had set up certain political assassinations, but that as DCI from 1973 to 1976, he was proud of the fact that he had been responsible for ending that practice. Colby then said that he did not approve of killing anyone in cold blood. Without hesitation, he added that this view did not include the “enemy.” An enemy, he said, should be killed.
This is the same man who, when he headed the dreaded Phoenix program in Vietnam, took credit for the fact that at least sixty thousand Vietnamese had been killed “in cold blood” by his American, Korean, Filipino, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese agents.
This raises a fine point with reference to the Vietnam War. In that war, who was the enemy? And who decided who was the enemy? This most basic question, in warfare, causes us to consider with care the account of the “1,100,000 Tonkinese refugees.” These people had been moved as the result of a hypothetical humanitarian cause in order the create an enemy scenario.
When these one-million-plus Tonkinese from the north were moved into the Saigon area, as has been discussed, you can imagine the impact these destitute and penniless strangers had upon the totally unprepared and disorganized people of the south? Can you imagine the impact of the sudden movement of one million strangers, we’ll say, from the Kansas City area to Los Angeles? This situation by itself created riots, unrest, and general disorder wherever these hordes of people settled. It created enemies, hundreds of thousands of them. This factor alone bred warfare, as the CIA had planned it would.
Then the American advisers to Ngo Dinh Diem tightened the screws a few more turns. They advised Diem to issue two far-reaching national directives, to wit:
1. All French local government officials had to turn over their responsibilities to Vietnamese and leave the country. Among other things, the French had been administering the village constabulary system for decades. This system maintained law and order.
2. All Chinese residing in and doing business in Vietnam had to leave. For the most part the Chinese maintained the local, grass-roots economic system of the rich agricultural countryside.
The ostensible reasons for both of these directives seemed reasonable enough. The French had agreed to leave anyway, and there was no reason why they should delay their departure just because they were involved in local government. But basic law and order, especially in the rural farming regions, had been administered by the French. With their departure this essential government service disintegrated, and it was not adequately replaced by the newly formed Diem government.
Additionally, a rumor campaign was started to explain that the Chinese were, no doubt, spies for the Chinese Communists and the Vietminh; and that, if they were not spies, they were at least supportive of communism.
Both of these directives were forcefully carried out, and before long, the French and Chinese had departed. Many of them were members of families that had been in Indochina for generations. The results of these directives marked another broadening of the definition of “enemy”; in every village, those who had been friends of the colonial French or the entrepreneurial Chinese were moved closer to the “enemy” category.
One cannot understand too completely the strength of the village way of life for these ancient people. It began with family loyalty, which was regarded as the most respected value in Vietnamese life. The most significant religious ceremonies of these people were the rites regarding family ancestors. After a man’s family came his farm. A farm consisted of village property cultivated by that family for centuries. After the family and farm came the village, and for millions of Indochinese the village was the only political structure they knew. For centuries they had been allowed to govern themselves. The senior council of village notables selected a First Notable, called the Tien Chi (in the north) or the Huongca (in the south). Theirs was the last word required for the settlement of significant financial and juridical problems. It was here that the American advice to Diem had been most damaging.
The loosely knit, French-monitored constabulary system provided an adequate framework for most legal matters. It easily provided for law and order. Now law and order collapsed.
On the other hand, the Chinese had, for centuries, been the local entrepreneurs. They kept commerce alive and well in the remote, autonomous regions. Now commerce came to a standstill.
The only outside influence from the source of higher authority was that of the tax collector and the military draft. From 1890 on, the French had introduced the land tax and a head tax. Under French control there was not much difference in the communal organization and administration of these thousands of villages, whether in Tonkin, Annam, or Cochin China.
This fragile and ancient network of basic government broke down. Diem and his American advisers were not even aware of this fact and so did not bother replacing it. The collapse could have been expected even under normal conditions; but in South Vietnam in the late 1950s, with one million Tonkinese Catholics thrust into this once stable and docile society at the same time that law and order vanished, the results were predictable. There was widespread banditry as the Tonkinese flocked together to steal food and other necessities, including farmland. There were riots, and before long many formerly peaceful villages had become a no-man’s-land where native owners were the enemy in the eyes of the intruders and their friends in the government of Saigon. The definition of “enemy” was being broadened to include the longtime stable natives.
While these destructive forces were taking place, Ngo Dinh Diem’s new government was being urged by its American advisers to organize and pacify the country and to drive out the Communists. Before that could be done, an “enemy” had to be somehow identified. I have heard people on the streets of Saigon say that as Diem’s forces raced across the land in American trucks and American helicopters, they decided that “anyone who ran” was the enemy. How could anyone tell? How do you identify the enemy under such conditions? Certainly not by the gratuitous exhibit of redcoats.
In the ancient art and practice of warfare, especially at the most basic local level, there is a brutal system of interrogation and control for the purpose of identifying “friend” and “foe” that has come down through the years. It is sometimes known as the “One Hand” or “Five Fingers” system.
The French were using this system in Algeria, and it was passed through the clandestine services from the French to the American CIA and thence to their Vietnamese “elite guard” that had been trained by the Filipinos. It works, most effectively, like this:
1. An armed group rushes into a village and immediately intimidates its people by burning huts and shooting a few random people, if necessary, and then rounding up everyone else in the center of the village.
2. The invaders know that the elders are the leaders, so they single out the oldest active male and order him to point out the members of his family, then have them stand by him in one group. The invaders may have brought with them some informer or agent who will select this elder for them.
3. This first group becomes the “thumb,” or Group 1 on a scale of 5. Then the intruders ask the elder, “Who of the remaining villagers were close to the French or the Chinese? He points out a few families. They are thenceforth declared to be “enemy” and become Group 5.
4. The elder is asked who are his own enemies or persons he does not trust. These, too, are thrust into Group 5. (There is no point in asking, “Who are the Communists?” The villagers wouldn’t know. They don’t know the word or its implication as “enemy.”)
5. Then the others in the village are asked which group they are closest to, and the elder is asked to verify this. These “indefinite” groups are logically numbered 2 or 4. Group 2 identifies with the leader, his relatives, and his friends. Group 4 identifies with the “enemy,” Group 5.
6. Those who belong to none of the above groups become Group 3; this is usually the largest of the five groups.
The invaders tell the chosen elder that he will be responsible for the administration and defense of his village. Then they order the chief to “train” Groups 3 and 4 and to move them closer to his trusted circle, or they will be eliminated.
Before they leave, the invaders either shoot the members of Group 5 or tie them up and take them away for “reorientation” and “pacification.” This places the village in the hands of the elder and leaves no “enemies” there. The Group 5 members will never be seen again.1
In the Five Fingers system, it can be seen that if the invaders, perhaps with prior knowledge, had selected a Tonkinese “refugee” as the leader of Group 1 in the village, the natives and owners of the village property would automatically be put in Group 5 and either be killed or removed. This would be justified, since they would have been “identified” as the “enemy.”
This process made it possible for the newcomers to take over many villages; the system was used all over Vietnam during those terrible early days when there was no true government and after the one million northerners had moved in, before anyone had ever heard the word “Vietcong” and its Communist connotation. The natives became the enemy.
With the departure of the Chinese, an even more fundamental problem was created. The ancient economic system was destroyed and with it the basic food and necessities-of-life economy that had supported millions of otherwise moderately prosperous Cochin Chinese. When the Vietnamese farmer harvested his plentiful crop of rice, he filled baskets woven of rice straw by the women of the families. He loaded those rice-filled baskets into his sampan (flat-bottomed boat) and poled it along one of the ever-present canals to the central village, where his crop was converted by means of a most efficient economic process into a certain amount of the basic necessities of his and his family’s life—essentially salt, tools and blades, fabric, and silver.
It had long been the custom for each farm family to go to the village and pile their baskets of rice beside the others. Each farmer, by long custom, had a supply of small black sticks (about the size of Magic Markers) with his name or symbol on each stick, and he would place one in each of his baskets of rice. (None of these comparatively wealthy farmers had a broker or other system of marketing.)
On market day, the Chinese merchant would arrive in his large sampan. All of the rice baskets, removed from the village square, would be loaded onto his boat, at which time the village elder would collect all of the marker-sticks. The Chinese merchant then bought the rice, based upon the going price per basket multiplied by the number of sticks. In turn, the village elder bought from the merchant the salt, tools, fabrics, and other assorted needs from that account. If there was a balance to the credit of the village, the Chinese merchant paid it in silver coinage of intrinsic value. Each farmer benefitted according to the tally of his sticks.
This age-old system created the market for the farmer’s produce and provided him with the basic necessities of life in exchange for his labor—until the impact of the Diem edicts that ousted the French and the Chinese. The farmers from these many villages knew nothing about the edict or about the departure of the French and Chinese. Then came the first rice harvest and the first market day after the edict.
Thus, by market day, they had cut the rice, woven the baskets, poled the sampans into town, and placed their sticks in each basket in the village square. They had no telephones. They had no broker. They had no way of knowing that the Chinese merchant was not coming. Their harvests of rice rotted where they lay in baskets in the village.
What would you do with a crop if no marketing system existed to purchase it and there was no means to move it to a national or world market?
One crop cycle could pass, perhaps two or three, but eventually these villagers had to have necessities. In many of the villages, the greatest necessity was potable water. Even though they were knee-deep in brackish rice-paddy water all day, they frequently had to buy their drinking water. They bought it from the same Chinese merchants. After the Chinese left, when the villagers had no water, they had no place to go. When they did not get enough rainwater to fill the huge earthen jars every family owned for their supply of drinking water, they drank brackish water. They became ill. (Throughout history, water contamination has been one of the most effective weapons of war.)
So the stronger men of the village banded together to get water, salt, and the other necessities of life by the oldest means known to man: banditry. This was not political or criminal; it was not ideological. It was a last-resort effort to obtain simple and elementary needs. And one village attacked another in order to get water—to live.
This situation created a deadly, low-level, self-perpetuating turmoil. Diem’s fragile new country was falling apart in the most unlikely of places—in the regions that had always had the most prosperous farms and in the zones farthest from Hanoi. Unrest spread through the most fertile, most stable, and most wealthy regions of the new State of Vietnam. Back in Saigon, the Diem government and its American advisers were totally unaware of the true causes of this unrest, but they were ready with their Pavlovian interpretation. It was, they said, the result of “Communist subversion and insurgency.” Chronologically, this situation began to be identified and studied by the Americans at just the time that Kennedy became President. The concept of “counterinsurgency” had been heard in the Pentagon before the end of the Eisenhower administration; but it came into full flower with the arrival of the Kennedy administration.
The Americans’ only embarrassment, if they considered it at all, was that the most serious rioting was taking place in the southernmost regions of the State of Vietnam, those areas farthest from any appreciable “Communist” infiltration. The Diem government and its American advisers had created the causes of the rioting, but they wanted the rest of the world to believe otherwise. They had much bigger things in mind.
With no system of law and order to replace that used by the French, with no organized means of merchandising to replace that of the Chinese, and with no need for taxes because of the easy access to free-flowing American dollars, the Diem government was not close to the citizenry and had no idea what to do about the rioting, banditry, and boiling unrest. It turned to its American advisers for aid.
Meanwhile, all over South Vietnam, the rioting spread. The rice-producing villagers raced everywhere in a crazed search for essential necessities. They overran other communities—rubber plantations, fishing villages, lumber villages, etc.—in fierce, uncontrollable local battles.
All of this was seriously amplified by a different kind of trouble caused by the influx of the one million strangers from the north. These invaders needed the same things as their hosts: the basic necessities of life. They had left their homeland and found themselves in a new land that was seething with unrest.
To the recently arrived American advisers, such as those in Secretary McNamara’s “Combat Development Test Centers,” a quick-fix concept designed to correct such problems, the American perception of this conflagration was clear: This rioting and insurgency must be the work of the Communists. The Communists, they reported, had infiltrated the refugees and now were linking up with an underground fifth column of natives to create havoc and to embarrass the new Diem government in Saigon.
“Communist-led subversive insurgency” became the buzzwords, and in the United States “counterinsurgency” became the answer. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission and its undercover terrorism and propaganda campaigns were paying off splendidly for the creators of the Cold War. All of Indochina had been prepared for war by them and their undercover activities, and the American armed forces were coming. By the time the American troops arrived, South Vietnam would be seething with an identifiable “enemy.” This had been the objective of those who’d ordered the movement of the 1,100,000 Tonkinese natives in the first place.
During this period, as in the late 1950s and the closing years of the Eisenhower administration, the general perception was that the fighting in Laos was actually much more serious than the rising problems in Vietnam. The CIA and its U.S. Armed Forces “Special Forces” allies were playing a monumental role, behind the scenes, in Laos, Burma, and Thailand. This was kept quite distinct from their activity in Vietnam.
In late 1960, when the departing President, Dwight Eisenhower, met with his successor, John F. Kennedy, he told him that the biggest trouble spot would be in Laos and that with Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, he had little to worry about there. U.S. participation in Laos is another story, but one factor of the fighting in Laos did have a most significant impact upon the escalation of the war in South Vietnam: It began the evolution of an entirely new set of tactical characteristics of that warfare.
A full squadron of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters had been secretly transferred, at the request of the CIA, from Okinawa to Udorn, Thailand, just across the river from Laos. The helicopters that saw combat in Laos were based and maintained in Thailand by U.S. Marines. These military men did not leave Thailand; the helicopters were flown to the combat zones of Laos by CIA mercenary pilots of the CAT Airlines organization, under the operational control of the CIA.
In those days, in accordance with the provisions of National Security Council Directive #5412, every effort had been made to keep U.S. military and other covert assistance at a level that could be “plausibly” disclaimed. The theory was that if these operations were compromised in any way, the U.S. government should be able to “disclaim plausibly” its role in the action. In other words, these helicopters had been “sterilized.” There were no U.S. Marine Corps insignia on them, there were no marine serial numbers, no marine paperwork, no marine pilots. This was at best a thin veneer; but the veneer was needed to make it possible to use the marine equipment.
Back in Saigon, CIA operators wanted those helicopters transferred to Vietnam. Many of the CIA agents who had been infiltrated into South Vietnam, contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Agreements, had been moved there secretly from Laos. While in Laos they had become accustomed to the use and convenience of this large force of combat helicopters. They wanted them in Vietnam, where they proposed to use them to transport South Vietnamese army troops to fight the fast-growing numbers of “enemy” who were rioting for food and water in the rice-growing areas of the Camau Peninsula. This helicopter movement was planned to be the CIA’s first operational combat activity of the Vietnam War. It turned out to also be the first step of a decade of escalation of that war.
At that time, all American military aid to South Vietnam was strictly limited by the “one for one” replacement stipulation of the 1954 Geneva Agreements. The CIA could not move a squadron of military helicopters into South Vietnam, because there were no helicopters there to replace. So movement of those helicopters from Laos would have to be a covert operation. Any covert operation could be initiated and maintained only in accordance with a specific directive from the National Security Council and with the cooperation and direct assistance of the Department of Defense.
The CIA’s first attempt to have these helicopters moved for combat purposes came in mid-1960 and was an attempt to beat the system. Gen. Charles P. Cabell, the deputy director of central intelligence, called one of his contacts (who happened to be this author) in the Office of Special Operations (OSO), a division of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), to see if these helicopters could be moved to Vietnam quickly and quietly, on an emergency basis, because of the outbreak of rioting all over the country.
In those days, the Office of Special Operations followed the policy set forth by Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, which closely followed the language of the law, that is, the National Security Act of 1947. The pertinent language of that act states that the CIA operates “under the direction2 of the NSC.”
At the time of General Cabell’s call, OSO had received no authorization for such a move, and the request was denied on the ground that such a move would be covert and that the NSC had not directed such an operation into Vietnam. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the letter of this law was followed carefully.
In most cases, the CIA did not possess enough assets in facilities, people, and materiel to carry out the operations it wanted to perform. Therefore, the CIA had to come to the military establishment for support of its clandestine operations. The Defense Department would not provide this support without an agreed-upon NSC directive for each operation and usually without a guarantee of financial reimbursement from the CIA for at least “out-of pocket”costs. This kept the CIA at bay and under reasonable control during these more “normal” years.
There is an interesting anecdote from this period that reveals President Eisenhower’s personal concern with clandestine operations. Control of the CIA has never been easy. During the early part of Eisenhower’s first term, the NSC approved a directive—NSC 10/2—that governed the policy for the development and operation of clandestine activity. The NSC did not want covert operations to be the responsibility of the military. It said, quite properly, that the military’s role was a wartime, not a peacetime, one. Therefore, such operations, when directed, would be assigned to the CIA. At the same time, it had long been realized that the CIA did not have adequate resources to carry out such operations by itself and that it was better that it didn’t.
Thus, the NSC ruled that when such operations had been directed, the CIA would turn to the Defense Department, and when necessary, to other departments or agencies of the government, for support.
Sometimes the support provided was considerable. President Eisenhower was quite disturbed by this policy. He saw that it would create, within the organization of the CIA, a surrogate military organization designed to carry out military-type covert operations in peacetime. It would follow, he thought, that the CIA might, over the years, become a very large, uncontrollable military force in itself. He could not condone that, and he acted to curb such a trend.
President Eisenhower had written in the margin of the first page of the NSC 10/2 directive, on the copy that had been sent to the Defense Department: “At no time will the CIA be provided with more equipment, etc., than is absolutely necessary for the support of the operation directed and such support provided will always be limited to the requirements of that single operation.”
This stipulation by the President worked rather well as long as the Office of the Secretary of Defense enforced it strictly. Later, certain elements of the military turned this directive around and began to use the CIA as a vehicle for doing things they wanted to do—as with the Special Forces of the U.S. Army—but could not do, because of policy, during peacetime.
This situation was confronted seriously by President Kennedy immediately following the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961.3
By the early 1950s, former President Harry S. Truman was saying that when he signed the CIA legislation into law, he made the biggest mistake of his presidency. In those same years, President Eisenhower had similar thoughts, and he did everything he could to place reasonable controls on the agency. Both of these men feared the CIA because of its power to operate in secrecy and without proper accountability.
During the Eisenhower administration, the Defense Department was usually scrupulous about this note penned on NSC 10/2 by the President and was careful to limit support to that needed for the current operation. The result was that there was always close cooperation and collaboration between the agency and the Defense Department on most clandestine operations. In other words, the clandestine operations carried out during that period were usually what might be called joint operations, with the CIA being given operational control. This applied to the development of all “military” activities in Vietnam, at least until the marines landed there in March 1965.
This NSC policy applied to that request for helicopters from General Cabell of the CIA and accounts for the fact that his original request was vetoed by the Defense Department. This veto required the CIA to prepare its case more formally and to go first to the NSC with its request for the helicopters. In those days, the NSC had a subcommittee, the “5412/2 Committee,” or “Special Group,” that handled covert activities. This group consisted of the deputy undersecretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, the President’s special assistant for national security affairs, and the director of central intelligence, the latter serving as the group’s “action officer.” In 1957, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also became a member. Approval for these helicopters was eventually obtained from this Special Group, and the secretary of defense authorized the Office of Special Operations to make all arrangements necessary with the Marine Corps to move the aircraft to Vietnam—secretly—from Udorn, Thailand, to an area south of Saigon near Camau.4
Perhaps more than any other single action of that period, this movement of a large combat-ready force in 1960 marked the beginning of the true military escalation of the war in Vietnam. From that time on, each new action under CIA operational control moved America one step closer to intervention with U.S. military units under U.S. military commanders.
By 1960—61, the CIA had become a surrogate U.S. military force, complete with the authority to develop and wage warfare during peacetime.5
In the process, the CIA was fleshed out with U.S. military personnel who had been “sheep-dipped”6 to make it appear that only civilians were involved. This process was to have a detrimental impact upon the implementation of the Vietnam War: It put CIA civilian officials in actual command of all operational forces in the fast-growing conflict, at least until 1965. As an additional factor, the concealment of military personnel in the CIA led to many of the problems that the armed forces would later delegate to the League of Families of Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia.
By the time this policy giving the CIA “operational” control over all American pseudomilitary units in Vietnam was changed, the “strategy” of warfare in Southeast Asia had become so stereotyped that such true military commanders as Generals Westmoreland and Abrams found little room to maneuver. They were required to take over a “no-win,” impossible situation without a military objective, except that of the overriding Grand Strategy of the Cold War: that is, to make war wherever possible, to keep it going, to avoid the use of H-bombs, and to remember Malthus’s and Darwin’s lessons that the fittest will survive.
Therefore, when the NSC directed a move of helicopters to Vietnam, it ordered the Marine Corps unit at Udorn to be returned, with its own helicopters, to Okinawa. New helicopters of the same type were transported from the United States—meaning, of course, that new procurement orders of considerable value were placed with the helicopter-manufacturing industry, a business that was almost bankrupt at the time.
At the same time, the CIA had to put together a large civilian helicopter unit, much larger than the original Marine Corps unit, with maintenance and flight crews who were for the most part former military personnel who had left the service to take a job at higher pay and a guarantee of direct return to their parent service without loss of seniority. This meant that overseas, combat wage scales were paid to everyone in the unit, at a cost many times that of the military unit it replaced.
As soon as the helicopters arrived and were made ready for operational activities, the CIA’s “army” began training with elite troops of the new South Vietnamese army. They were being hurried into service against those villages where the most serious “refugee-induced” rioting was under way. This operation opened an entirely new chapter of the thirty years of war in Vietnam.
Now who was the enemy? When CIA helicopters, loaded with heavily armed Vietnamese soldiers, were dispatched against “targets” in South Vietnam, who could they identify as “enemy”? It was during this period that we heard the oft-repeated reply “Anyone who runs away when we come must be the enemy.”
With the passage of time and with the incitement of low-level warfare in South Vietnam while this helicopter campaign was being prepared, the “enemy” was more and more the native population of the villages of southern Vietnam. They were indeed fighting; but they had been forced to fight to defend their homes, their food, and their way of life against the starving refugees from the north. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission had proved its “make war” prowess. In that mixing bowl of banditry, everyone was the “insurgent,” everyone was the enemy. Additionally, Diem’s two edicts driving out the French and the Chinese exacerbated the problem across the land. As things developed, many of Diem’s newest and finest troops were members of that one-million-strong invading force of “Catholic” refugees. They had now become the “friends” of Saigon against the local and native “enemy.”
As discussed earlier, the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission had arrived in Saigon in 1954. It was now 1960. President Eisenhower was winding down his two-term administration, and the young Senator John F. Kennedy was organizing his own group of friends, relatives, and experts to gain the office of the presidency and to set in motion the historic events of those momentous days of Camelot.
We have prepared the way for the main focus of this book with a detailed discussion of the origin and activities of the CIA and with a systematized review of the buildup and early escalation of the warfare in Vietnam. These events present a significant view of the Cold War and what challenges the new President would face. Of course, they are far from the whole story. A brief look at a few other CIA-related activities will serve to broaden the scope of the scene in Washington on the threshold of the sixties.
In May 1960, President Eisenhower had planned to culminate his dream of a “Crusade for Peace” with the ultimate summit conference with Nikita Khrushchev in Paris. On May 1, 1960, a CIA spy plane, a high-flying U-2 with Capt. Francis Gary Powers at the controls, overflew the Soviet Union from Pakistan and made a crash-landing at Sverdlovsk in the heart of Russia and by so doing wrecked the hopes of the summit conference and the dreams of Eisenhower and Khrushchev, two old warriors who understood each other.
As a footnote to that important event, it was Allen W. Dulles himself, giving testimony before a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said positively that, despite Soviet claims, the Powers U-2 had not been shot down but had descended because of engine trouble. This important statement by Dulles has been little noted by the press, and little thought has been given to exactly why that aircraft had “trouble” at such a critical time.7 Later, Eisenhower confirmed that the spy plane had not been shot down by the Soviets and had indeed lost engine power and crash-landed in Russia. Its unauthorized flight was another part of the Cold War game designed to deny President Eisenhower his Crusade for Peace.
As another chapter of the Cold War, in March 1960, President Eisenhower had approved the beginnings of a clandestine campaign against Fidel Castro in Cuba. Later, during the summer of 1960, while Vice President Richard Nixon was stepping up his campaign to succeed Eisenhower, the VP secretly met with the NSC, urging more action against Castro.
At the same time, Senator Kennedy, with equal secrecy, was meeting with the eventual leaders of the Cuban exile brigade that landed on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. Manuel Artime Buesa, the beach commander, met with Senator Kennedy at the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, Florida, and in his Senate offices on Capitol Hill8 along with Manuel Antonio de Varona and José Miro Cordona—both former premiers of Cuba—and other Cuban exile leaders of the time.
Perhaps unknown to both aspiring candidates, Eisenhower had categorically laid down the law to the CIA and to the Defense Department: There would be no acceleration of anti-Castro activity during the lame-duck period of his administration, so that the new President, whether it was Nixon or Kennedy, would not have to confront a situation that had already been decided upon and set in motion.
During the crucial TV debates between Nixon and Kennedy in late 1960, Nixon, who had been attending all the NSC meetings on the subject of Cuba, felt that he had to play down the anti-Castro rhetoric because of his personal involvement and the requisite bonds of secrecy. On the other hand, JFK, who did not benefit from that official knowledge and was not bound by secrecy but who was well aware of the subject matter because of his closeness to the Cubans, forcefully challenged Nixon and took the initiative on that subject during the debates. The edge gained from that single subject may have provided JFK with the votes that gave him his narrow victory in November 1960.
After the election, some quick moves were made by the CIA to “lock in” its projects before the new administration took over in January 1961. At Fort. Bragg, North Carolina, an all-new U.S. Army Special Forces organization was hastily increased in size, and its secret mission was enlarged to include “peacetime” covert activities.
At the same time, an international school was set up at Fort Bragg to provide training for counterpart troops from many nations throughout-the world. This school, although later called the John F. Kennedy Center, was not initiated by President Kennedy, as many believe, but was opened in late 1960 by the then deputy secretary of defense, James Douglas. The Green Berets of Vietnam fame were born there and shortly thereafter were ready to begin their long march to Saigon.
Similar clandestine camps were rushed into being in Panama, Guatemala, and Nicaragua for the brigade of Cuban exiles, along with other training sites in Miami, at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and in the Lake Pontchartrain area near New Orleans. Aircraft of various types were brought in from CIA assets all over the world, as were CAT pilots. The old, reliable Filipino clandestine experts joined the underground teams.
Then, in December 1960, President-elect Kennedy made a surprising announcement. He had decided to keep Allen W. Dulles as his director of central intelligence and J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI. With this announcement, the stage was set for the 1960s—the decade in which hundreds of thousands of American fighting men would see action in the escalating war in Vietnam.