ELEVEN
PRESIDENTIAL POWER: Does it come with the office, or must the incumbent fight for it every step of the way? As James David Barber states in his book The Presidential Character:1 “Political power is like nuclear energy available to create deserts or make them bloom. The mere having of it never yet determined its use. The mere getting of it has not stamped into the powerful some uniform shape.”
John F. Kennedy came to the office of the presidency with style and enough experience to know that he would have to fight to wrest political power from entrenched interests of enormous strength. If anything hit President Kennedy harder than the utter defeat of the Cuban exile brigade on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, it was the realization that he had let himself be talked into that operation by inexperienced men in the CIA.
Kennedy blamed himself and believed that he should not have authorized the invasion. On the other hand, the Cuban Study Group (see below) concluded that the cancellation of the crucial air strike was the cause of the failure of the Zapata operation.
CIA director Allen Dulles had not been there at the time of the final decision making or at the time of the invasion itself. He was on vacation. This was a most unusual absence by the man responsible for the entire operation.
In his book Kennedy,2 Ted Sorensen makes a good case for his doctrine that “the Kennedys never fail.” However, Kennedy did fail in his attempt to gain full control of the CIA and its major partners in the Defense Department. It was the most crucial failure of his abbreviated presidency. He recognized his adversary during his first term, and as he related confidentially to intimate acquaintances, “When I am reelected. I am going to break that agency into a thousand pieces.” He meant to do it, too, but the struggle cost him his life.
Former President Harry S. Truman was deeply disturbed when he learned of the murder of Jack Kennedy in Dallas. That experienced old veteran of political wars saw an ominous link between the death of the President and the CIA. One month after that terrible event, just time enough to get his thoughts in order and on paper, Truman wrote a column that appeared in the Washington Post on December 21, 1963. He expressed his doubts about the CIA directly:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. . . .
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue and a subject for Cold War enemy propaganda.
Truman’s characterization of the CIA as “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue” is, unfortunately, quite accurate. That “foreign intrigue” involved Cuba, Castro, and John F. Kennedy, at least in the minds of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as is evidenced in their later writings about the assassination. And it was Lyndon B. Johnson who said the government operated a “Murder Inc.” in the Caribbean.
It is absolutely astounding that when the thoughts of these four presidents turned to the murder of JFK, they all wove a fabric of sinister intrigue that included the CIA in the scenario of his death. These men were telling us something. It is time we listened to and learned from what they have said.
The power of any agency that is allowed to operate in secrecy is boundless. The CIA knows this, and it has used its power to its own advantage. Only three days after the disastrous Cuban defeat, Kennedy set up a Cuban Study Group headed by Gen. Maxwell Taylor to “direct special attention to the lessons which can be learned from recent events in Cuba.”
With that action, which received little notice at the time, the President declared war on the agency. The Cuban Study Group was one of the most important creations of the Kennedy presidency, and it was the source of one of the major pressure points on the way to the guns of Dallas on November 22, 1963.
President Kennedy was seriously upset by the failure of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide him with adequate information and support prior to his approval of the brigade landing at the Bay of Pigs. He was also upset by the results of the total breakdown of CIA leadership during the operation that followed that landing.3
Kennedy’s good friend Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, in recalling a discussion he had with Kennedy shortly after the disaster, said:
This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect . . . it shook him up!
Can any President “ever be strong enough to really rule” the CIA and the Defense Department? Eisenhower had learned that he was not strong enough when a U-2 went down in the heart of Russia despite his specific “no-overflight” orders in 1960.
Kennedy set out to prove that he was “strong enough,” and he might have done so had he had a second term in office. Instead, he was first overwhelmed and then murdered.
Each member of the Cuban Study Group was chosen for a particular reason. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, for example, had been in retirement since he had differed, in public, with the Eisenhower policy concerning the strength of the U.S. Army and had resigned as its chief of staff. He had not been involved in any way with the decision-making process for the Cuban invasion. In fact, Kennedy had never met General Taylor prior to 1961.
To augment the military side of the study group, Kennedy selected Adm. Arleigh Burke, considered by many to be the finest chief of naval operations the navy has ever had. Admiral Burke had been among the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been most closely involved in the military elements of the Bay of Pigs planning process and support preparation. The actual tactical training for the invasion had been placed in the hands of a U.S. Marine Corps colonel; the transport ships had been assembled in the Norfolk, Virginia, area; and much of the logistics support had been channeled through the inactive navy base at Elizabeth City, North Carolina. All these steps had involved considerable navy support.
Another appointee to the study group was the scorpion in the bottle, the President’s brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy’s next choice for the group was Machiavellian in its political implications. He appointed CIA director Allen W. Dulles, the man who in November 1960 had flown to Palm Beach with his deputy, Richard Bissell, to give the President-elect his first official briefing on the plan for the overthrow of Castro. It was Dulles who, on January 28, 1961, gave another briefing on the developing plan to the newly installed President, along with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, among others.
Now, Kennedy had decided to have Allen Dulles sit through the ordeal of this detailed study from beginning to end, to relive the whole scenario as General Taylor interrogated selected officials who had been connected with the operation.4
Despite the fact that Allen Dulles was the director of central intelligence when the plan was first presented to President Eisenhower in March 1960 and that he was the man who briefed Kennedy before and after his inauguration, Dulles had not been present at the White House on April 16, 1961, when the final discussions took place and when the goahead decision had been made by the President. Dulles was also not in Washington during the crucial period of the invasion itself to control the activities of his agency. He had taken that weekend off for a sojourn in Puerto Rico.
There is a businessmen’s group, the Young Presidents Organization, that is closely affiliated with Harvard Business School and with the CIA. It is made up of men who are presidents of their own companies and under forty years of age. The CIA arranges meetings for them with young leaders in foreign countries for the purpose of opening exportimport talks and franchising discussions.
The Young Presidents Organization met in Puerto Rico on the weekend of April 15 and 16, 1961, and Dulles was the principal speaker. Why he accepted—and kept—that appointment at such a crucial time has never been properly explained. Did he prefer to have the Bay of Pigs fail? Did he choose to embarrass the new President?
Former President Harry S Truman visiting John F. Kennedy shortly after the new President’s inauguration. Truman later wrote that the CIA had become “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”
Shortly after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said, “This episode seared him [Kennedy]. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies?”
The President’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (lower left), a member of the Cuban Study Group, scrutinized Allen Dulles’s (lower right) every move during the post-Bay of Pigs investigation.
This historical and seldom cited document, signed by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs investigation, was sent directly to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bypassing the Secretary of State and the Director, Central Intelligence. The Secretary of Defense was given a copy.
As can be noted, the President made the Joint Chiefs of Staff his advisor in peacetime replacing the CIA. This one order created as much opposition to Kennedy as anything else he did during his administration.
The original memorandum was on two pages, in precisely the language shown here.
The Cairo Conference, Nov. 22-28, 1943, featured, seated from left, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston L. S. Churchill, and Madame Chiang. Madame Chiang not only traveled to Cairo with her husband, but participated in the sessions. Her brother, T.V. Soong, was reported to be the wealthiest man in the world at the time, and the man who kept the generalissimo in power. The author was in Cairo at the time and served as a pilot for American and British delegations.
Premier Josef Stalin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston L. S. Churchill met publicly at Tehran, November 28-December 1, 1943. Historians have failed to note that Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek were in Tehran and both participated in the conference. On November 27th, the author flew the military aircraft that transported their staff delegates from Cairo to Tehran. Because of the strong Chinese representation in Tehran the agenda of the conference had much to do with Far East planning.
Significant elements of the McNamara-Taylor Report on the situation in Vietnam, given to President Kennedy on October 2, 1963, became White House policy with the official publication of National Security Action Memorandum #263, October 11, 1963. Most important was that which promised to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by the end of 1965.
Had John F. Kennedy lived, Americans would not have fought and died in Vietnam during that terrible 1965-1975 warfare. The cost: up to $550 billion and 58,000 American lives.
General Maxwell Taylor (left) and Secretary of Defense McNamara discuss their “Vietnam Trip” report with the President, October 2, 1963. It is the leather binder under the file folders.
The President approved “presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963” and to “train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.” These quotations, which prove that President Kennedy positively planned to get all Americans out of Vietnam, are from the official White House document, National Security Action Memorandum #263, October 11, 1963.
The New York Times and Bantam Book version of the Pentagon Papers totally reverses this to read, “President Kennedy, who inherited a policy of ‘limited-risk gamble,’ bequeathed to Johnson a broad commitment to war.” There is no reliable basis for that revision of Kennedy’s policy.
In an action unprecedented in U.S. history, almost the entire Kennedy Cabinet had flown to Hawaii, en route to Japan, for a series of conferences, November 20, 1963. Those shown here are (left to right) Orville Freeman of Agriculture, Douglas Dillon of the Treasury, Dean Rusk of State, Stewart Udall of Interior, Luther Hodges of Commerce, Walter Heller of Council of Economic Advisors, and Willard Wirtz of Labor. Others who attended the Honolulu conference were McNamara of Defense, McGeorge Bundy, National Secruity Advisor, and Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger. Looking back at that meeting and at the list of those in attendance, it appears that somehow something most important, other than the conference agenda, must have caused them all to leave Washington at that crucial time, i.e., two days before the President’s death.
This famous photo of the “tramps” picked up by Dallas “police” shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy is, according to the author, one of the most important bits of evidence of the nature of that crime and coverup of November 22, 1963.
Note that (a) the two “policemen” carry shotguns, not rifles, (b) their caps are different (one white chinstrap, one black), (c) both of their caps differ from a true Dallas policeman’s. In addition, one has a Dallas police shoulder patch (not visible in this photo) and the other does not. These “policemen” and the “tramps” are actors in neat clothes and new shoes. In this photo, one of a set of four pictures, these “police” were leading the men to the sheriff’s office at Dealey Plaza. City cops have nothing to do with sheriff’s offices. These “cops” have not handcuffed these dangerous presidential killers.
During 1959, the author received an urgent request from the Director, Central Intelligence, Allen W. Dulles, to provide support and assistance to prevent the overthrow of a friendly Far East government. This secret operation proved to be a success. The CIA sent a commendation to the Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force, for Lieutenant Colonel Prouty that resulted in the award of the Legion of Merit citation and medal. This was presented by Lieutenant General John K. Gearhart.
Soon after, the author was promoted to the grade of colonel, and assigned in 1960 to the Office of Special Operations, a section of immediate office of the Secretary of Defense, where he became the senior Air Force officer responsible for the provision of military support of the clandestine activities of the CIA, among other duties. This office was headed by General Graves B. Erkstine, USMC (Retired), and was the office of assignment for Edward G. Lansdale of the CIA.
As Maxwell Taylor’s “Letter to the President” on the Cuban disaster later stated: “There was no single authority short of the President capable of coordinating the actions of the CIA, State, Defense, and the USIA [U.S. Information Agency].”
Because of the absence of its director, the CIA’s secondary leaders—officials with no combat or command experience—made “the operational decisions which they felt within their authority.” For decisions above them, they were supposed to go to the President. “Mr. Bissell and General Cabell were immediately available for consultation” but, it is crucial to note, there “were usually emissaries sent to obtain” higher approvals. “Emissary” was a far cry from “commander,” as Dulles’s responsibilities required. This task fell far short of effectiveness, as the Taylor letter noted: “Finally, there was the failure to carry the issue to the President when the opportunity was presented and explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation. ”
In his letter, General Taylor suggested forcefully that after General Cabell had received the call from McGeorge Bundy to cancel the bomber strike planned for dawn on the seventeenth to destroy the last three combat aircraft in Castro’s skimpy air force, someone ought to have gone directly to the President to explain the absolute necessity of the air strike against these three T-33 jet trainers.5
That was the issue. In its guarded language, Taylor’s letter never mentioned the Dulles absence, but it discussed this “breakdown of leadership” during the study group meetings with both Allen Dulles and Bobby Kennedy present. We may be sure it did not go unnoticed by the President during those after-hours meetings with Bobby and his other “Irish Mafia” friends.
At about 9:30 P.M. on April 16th, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President, telephoned General C. P. Cabell of the CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes the following morning should not be launched. . . .
In that volatile environment of the Cuban study group, the direct relationship between the failure of the CIA command element to cope with the air strike issue and the absence that weekend of Dulles, the man responsible for the success of the anti-Castro program, became the biggest issue.
For the study group, the sequence of issues became quite clear:
1. The President had approved the landings and the air strike to destroy the last three combat aircraft in Castro’s air force at dawn before the brigade hit the beach.
2. Later that evening, McGeorge Bundy had canceled the air strike by calling Cabell. (There is a school of thought that raises the possibility that it was Cabell himself who canceled the air strike, for reasons that quite ominously have an impact upon plans for the President’s assassination in Dallas in 1963.)
3. Cabell and Bissell, in Dulles’s absence, were inherently unqualified to carry the issue back to the President to “explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation.”
4. The Cuban Study Group added: “This failure was a consequence of the restraints put on the anti-Castro air force in planning and executing its strikes, primarily for the purpose of protecting the covert character of the operation. These restraints included the decision to use only the B-26 as a combat aircraft because it had been distributed widely to foreign countries; the limitation of prelanding strikes to those which could be flown from non-U.S. controlled airfields under the guise of coming from Cuban strips, thus eliminating the possibility of using jet fighters or even T-33 trainers; the inability to use any non-Cuban base within short turnaround distance from the target area (about nine hours were required to turn around a B-26 for a second mission over the target from Nicaragua); prohibition of use of American contract pilots for tactical air operations; restriction on ammunitions, notably napalm; and the cancellation of the strikes planned at dawn on D-Day. The last mentioned was probably the most serious as it eliminated the last favorable opportunity to destroy the Castro air force on the ground. The cancellation seems to have resulted partly from the failure to make the air strike plan entirely clear in advance to the President and the Secretary of State, but, more importantly, by misgivings as to the effect of the air strikes on the position of the United States in the current UN debate on Cuba. Finally, there was the failure to carry the issue to the President when the opportunity was presented and explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation.”
The members of the study group saw this cancellation as the clear cause of the failure of the whole anti-Castro program that had been initiated in March 1960. To fortify their own professional findings, they called before them a man who had been instrumental from the earliest days in these decisions. This man was a key Cuban exile named Manuel Antonio de Varona, premier of Cuba before the Batista regime.6
The CIA tried to monopolize him. Nixon wooed him, as did Kennedy. Finally, he came to the Cuban Study Group and told the whole story. Needless to say, he played all sides, as all “contras” do.
De Varona made the following statement before the Cuban Study Group: “I would like to state that we would be in Cuba today if it was not for the lack of air support that our forces suffered. All those who’ve returned said that but for three airplanes,7 they would have been successful in their invasion attempt.”
Dulles was the man on the spot. There is no record of what he said behind those closed doors, but a record was unnecessary. Bobby Kennedy was always there. Despite this maneuver by the Kennedys, however, Dulles still controlled the moves. Few people have the experience to know how such things work under the cloak of secrecy. This is the great weapon of the CIA, and it is why the CIA cannot be stopped—short of eliminating all of its money. All the people who worked on the Bay of Pigs project—Cuban and American—did so under deep cover. CIA agents and military supporting-cast members all had pseudonyms and lived cover-story lives. The Cubans with whom they worked had no idea who these agents were, and their own American associates did not know their true names and identities.
Thus, after the anti-Castro program had failed and all participants had been dispersed, they themselves did not know who had been there with them. This gave Allen Dulles the key role within the study group. General Taylor had no alternative but to ask Dulles for the names of people—CIA, military, and Cuban—who could be called to testify before the group.
Dulles weeded out the ones who could tell too much and padded the list with those who knew very little. Although Bobby Kennedy sat there and listened to all of the dialogue, he had no way of realizing that he was hearing a carefully structured scenario. The book he wrote several years later revealed how little he really knew about some of the actual activities.
This advantage enabled Dulles and the CIA to shift the blame to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military. Dulles kept quiet about the shortcomings of his own agency and made it appear that Kennedy’s denial of the employment of U.S. Navy fighter aircraft as “air cover” was the real reason for the failure of the project. (Since 1961, in fact, the CIA has mounted a vigorous and comprehensive propaganda and revisionist campaign designed to ensure that the public is afforded no opportunity to discover the true facts.)
The CIA had kept the various elements of the Cuban exile groups apart. Many of them were of different political backgrounds and social levels and did not get along with each other. Thus, these diverse groups were trained in widely separated camps. When it came time to set sail for Cuba, the CIA put some units in the forefront of the brigade and landed them on the beach. At the same time, other units were “lost” at sea and never reached Cuba. Obviously they were the first to return to their separate base in Louisiana. Their emotional story of the failure to use their units on the beaches has led to much of the misunderstanding of the tactics of the operation. The CIA played this up and blamed the U.S. military for the oversight.
It happens that the Louisiana elements of the Cuban exile groups and their “mercenary” American trainers became suspect during the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Many of them had been recruited in the later, and much larger, anti-Castro program Mongoose under the CIA’s most experienced paramilitary leader, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale.
All this made a good cover story later, because the individual selected to be the “patsy” in Kennedy’s murder was a former U.S. Marine Corps enlisted man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was born in New Orleans and had been active there with a Fair Play for Cuba organization during the early 1960s. Many assassination theorists have carried this presumed assassin’s trail from Dallas through the “Oswald” scenario to New Orleans and thence to Cuba and Castro himself. This is a futile exercise, because Oswald was only the “patsy,” not the murderer. Yet this trail of diversionary “golden apples” (as we recall them from Greek mythology) continues to divert the unwary and the overeager.
In an earlier chapter, I mentioned an unusual article that appeared in the Reader’s Digest of November 1964 in which the author, Richard Nixon, tied Cuba, Castro, and John F. Kennedy together. Nixon is one of those, as is Ford, who, for various reasons, want the American public to believe Oswald was the “lone assassin.” A single assassin does not have to have a motive for murder; a conspiracy must have a why. The “lone assassin” scenario is a cover story to preclude a conspiracy and its inevitable why.
At another time, Nixon wanted the American public to believe that he and Henry Kissinger had valid reasons for their genocidal bombardment of Cambodia with B-52s. This decision is also woven into the tapestry of history.
This orchestration of hidden motives and public smoke screens caused Kennedy to underestimate the power and skill of the CIA. He did not get to the root of the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and as a result he, too, became a victim of the sinister power of those agencies of the government that operate in total secrecy, knowing that they do not have to account to anyone for their actions and expenditures.
None of this should be taken to mean that Kennedy was not wise to the ways of Washington or that he could not mount extremely shrewd political maneuvers of his own. He was, and he did—but, despite this experience, he was up against impossible odds.
When he created the Cuban Study Group, he made it appear as if he were investigating a failed operation and nothing more. But this was not quite the case. It was only part of the story. Kennedy’s precise instructions to General Taylor were: “. . . to study our governmental practices and programs in the areas of military and paramilitary guerrilla and antiguerrilla activity which fell short of outright war with a view to strengthening our work in this area.”
It was at this time that Kennedy began his campaign against the CIA and its allies of the military-industrial complex, a campaign that reached its climax with his publication of National Security Action Memorandum #263 on October 11, 1963, and that was aborted by his murder. The above statement was the Cuban Study Group’s real directive, and it is what Kennedy wanted to discover for himself, then and for the future. Kennedy did not like what he found when he came to the White House. As he moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a huge tidal wave that had been set in motion many months earlier loomed up to engulf him and his new administration.
The new President had been critical of the way covert operations had functioned during the 1950s. As a long-term member of Congress, he was fully aware of the record of failed intelligence operations throughout the years. With the Bay of Pigs disaster as a case study, Kennedy directed General Taylor to dissect the entire system and to come up with something better. This was an issue that divided the study group and widened the abyss between Kennedy and Dulles. Yet Kennedy continued to make use of Dulles in his desire to probe the real depths of the murky business of intelligence and clandestine operations.
By the middle of June 1961, the Cuban Study Group had gathered a remarkable series of documents. For decades since, these key materials have been concealed, ignored, and sometimes purposely misinterpreted. To fully understand the forces at work during Kennedy’s presidency, it is necessary to lift the curtain of secrecy on a part of top-level government activity that is seldom, if ever, represented accurately.
The work of the Cuban Study Group was unequaled in its level of confidentiality. Even the word for its classification is so secret as to be relatively unknown: The group worked under the rarely used “ultrasensitive” label, that cosmic world above “top secret.”
The reason for this lies in the delicacy of certain types of intelligence activities, namely, covert operations by one government against another. Even the use of the word “against” is not always accurate. Sometimes the target is an otherwise friendly, allied government, when it is deemed essential to acquire information or to confirm information that cannot be obtained by any other means.
For example, the United States has flown the U-2 over many friendly countries, such as Israel, to confirm certain situations with our own eyes and ears.
Although it is always assumed that national sovereignty is inviolate, in today’s world national sovereignty has become an archaic and unworkable sham. It does not exist even among the great powers, and it is continuously violated—secretly. It has always been the unwritten rule that any covert U.S. operation must be performed in such a manner as to remain truly secret or, failing that, that the role of the government in the operation must be able to be plausibly disclaimed. The U.S. has spent untold tens of millions of dollars to “sterilize” entire aircraft and other equipment, so that if such a plane on a secret mission crashed while within the bounds of the target country, no one would be able to find the slightest evidence in the wreckage to incriminate the United States. All labels, name tags, and serial numbers are removed in such circumstances, and the crew uniforms are even made out of non-U.S. fabric to enhance denial. Weapons used are “sterilized” at a special underground facility overseas and are foreign-made.
Under the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA operates at the direction of the National Security Council. The intent of this law is to place the origin for any covert operation at the top. This neutralizes and eliminates lesser matters and emphasizes the importance of those that the NSC actually originates and directs.
The NSC can direct any designated department or agency—not necessarily the CIA—to carry out a covert operation. These operations are normally done on a small scale, or else they could not be kept a secret. Being small, they can usually be handled by the CIA, sometimes augmented by the resources of the Defense Department.
These are legal considerations that, by the way, serve to underscore the foolhardiness and deceit of those activities that have been under way in Central America and the Middle East in recent years. Over the years, especially during the 1950s, when Allen Dulles was director of central intelligence and his brother, John Foster Dulles, was secretary of state, this legal precision had become more and more vague. Allen Dulles became accustomed to taking proposals that originated with the agency to the NSC—in those days to the “10/2” or ”5412/2” Committee—for its approval.
In most cases, he would receive the committee’s approval, sometimes with stipulations. But it was the CIA that had originated these plans, not the NSC, and this is a highly significant point with respect to the law.
The difference between a plan of highest national interest that originates within the NSC and is then given to the CIA “by direction of the NSC” and a plan that is originated within the CIA and then presented to the NSC for its “approval” can be enormous. It raises fundamental questions, such as “Who runs this government?” and “Is the government being operated under the law?”
These questions were foremost in Kennedy’s mind when he became President. It was in March 1960 that the anti-Castro program was devised by the CIA and that the deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, had briefed President Eisenhower and his NSC. At that time, Bissell had gained their approval for a rather modest program. It was the CIA that took this approval and turned a program intended to support small over-the-beach landings and paradrop operations into an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
Kennedy inherited the accumulated actions of one full year of this program. He had such strong convictions about it that he did not approve the invasion until the day before it actually took place. The CIA had launched its invasion fleet, small though it was, a full week before the day of the landing. The President was therefore faced with a virtual fait accompli before he had an opportunity to make a decision. Even then Kennedy knew he had been had, and it did not take him long to confirm it.
Moreover, the enormity of the various schemes that had been set in motion long before he was elected was staggering. By May 1960, for example, after the anti-Castro program had begun, the stage was prepared for the entry of American troops into the Vietnam War. The master war planners took advantage of the period when the country was involved with a presidential election—when the powers of the presidency were at their lowest ebb. Eisenhower was not told what was going on, and it would be some time before the new President would be able to do anything about it, once he was informed.
After eight years of peace, the national mood for detente was strong, and an incident was needed to reverse this. Such an incident was conveniently provided.
On May 1, 1960, a CIA U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was launched on what would have been its longest flight ever, directly across the Soviet Union from Pakistan to Norway. When it crash-landed in the heart of Russia, and Eisenhower accepted the blame, Khrushchev concluded Eisenhower had deliberately wrecked what had been planned as the “ultimate summit conference” in Paris.8 This incident served to reverse the trend toward detente that had been carefully orchestrated by Khrushchev and Eisenhower, the two aging World War II veterans. With the summit conference disrupted, the road to Saigon, and disaster, was clear.
The following recapitulation will demonstrate how meticulously the road to Saigon was planned by experts in the war-making business. In order to set this plan irrevocably into motion, the powers-that-be formulated a counterinsurgency plan for Vietnam. The events that followed the formulation of this plan constitute an intriguing series of incidents.
Just prior to Kennedy’s election, the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was rejuvenated. A new curriculum was written that combined counterinsurgency with pacification tactics that were already being employed by the French forces in Algeria and with Civic Action programs borrowed from the U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs and Military Government school at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
This new Special Forces Green Beret school at Fort Bragg received substantial aid from the CIA, as well as from the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The strength of the forces was increased, and the Special Warfare Center opened a new counterinsurgency school for U. S. and foreign military students in November 1960.
President Kennedy was elected on November 8, 1960. Two days later, on November 10, Kennedy asked Allen Dulles to stay on as the director of central intelligence.
It was announced on November 11 that three battalions of President Diem’s elite guard had taken part in a coup d’état at the presidential palace in Saigon and that the incident was quickly suppressed by Diem’s forces. Under the cover of that contrived action, President Diem ordered the arrest of what was known as the Caravelle Group, eighteen political opponents of the Diem brothers’ dictatorial regime. These eighteen men had in no way participated in the “coup.” But they had published a scholarly “Manifesto of the Eighteen,” and for this they were thrown in jail.
Edward G. Lansdale was a leader in the development of the counterinsurgency plan for Vietnam, author of the new Special Forces curriculum for the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, and an old friend of President Diem’s. He took advantage of Kennedy’s election and of Dulles’s reappointment to make a sudden, unannounced trip to Saigon. The trip was for the purposes of winning Diem’s support and cooperation for the counterinsurgency program in Vietnam and of furthering Lansdale’s own chances, with Diem’s and Dulles’s support, of being named ambassador to Saigon by Kennedy.
During this politically important visit, which set the stage for so many of the events that followed, Lansdale wrote a stirring report on the situation in Vietnam for his boss, the secretary of defense. This report was brought to the attention of key members of the new Kennedy team at the time of the inauguration.
In late January 1961, Lansdale was summoned to the White House to meet with President Kennedy and officials from the Departments of Defense and State, new people who had come in with the inauguration. He was warmly greeted by the President and commended for his excellent report. Kennedy also informed him that he could expect to be sent back to Vietnam in a high capacity.9
On April 12, 1961, a memo was written by Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow that was supportive of the Lansdale report. Lansdale, on April 19, submitted another memo of his own to his new boss, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Up to this time, Lansdale’s strongest support had come from Allen Dulles and Ngo Dinh Diem. For more than a year, the anti-Castro project and the counterinsurgency program for Vietnam had been running simultaneously.
On April 20, 1961, the brigade was defeated in Cuba. The coincidence—or, perhaps, the coordination—of the dates of the surrender of the brigade at the Bay of Pigs and the abrupt turn toward Saigon is noteworthy, for the Americanization of the warfare in Vietnam also began on April 20, 1961.
For it was on that same date, April 20, 1961, that President Kennedy, distraught over the disaster in Cuba, accepted the counterinsurgency program for Vietnam and directed Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric to make recommendations for a series of actions to prevent the Communist domination of the government of Vietnam. Gilpatric and Lansdale headed a task force established to carry out those instructions from the President.
April 20, 1961, was the day Kennedy began to understand how the CIA and the Defense Department operated in this amazing world of clandestine operations. It was also the day Allen Dulles’s influence in the Kennedy administration ended. With the eclipse of Dulles and the CIA, Lansdale’s dream of being ambassador to Saigon collapsed.
Kennedy adopted the concept of counterinsurgency as his own, as he shifted his thoughts and energies from the failure in Cuba to the future in Indochina. The wheels of the counterinsurgency juggernaut were picking up speed. In April 1961, the director of the Joint Staff,10 Gen. Earle Wheeler, and Secretary McNamara decided to create a new section within the structure of the Joint Staff that would be dedicated to counterinsurgency and special activities. The counterinsurgency element of that office was to be the cap on all military services in support of the counterinsurgency program for Vietnam. The special activities were a combination of special operations—that is, the military support of the clandestine activities of the CIA—and special plans, that is, the special art of military cover and deception.11
To balance the rapid growth of the U.S. Army Special Forces program and its new Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, announced that on April 1961, a combat-crew training squadron had been activated at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The mission of that special squadron included counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, and psychological warfare operations. Shortly thereafter, this cadre was expanded significantly to become a Special Air Warfare Center that included an Air Commando wing and a Combat Applications group. Without delay, Special Air Warfare units from the center at Eglin were deployed to South Vietnam.12
It should be noted that both the Green Berets of the Army Special Forces and the Air Commandos of the Air Force had been developed and trained in close cooperation with the CIA, and upon their arrival in South Vietnam they operated under the control of CIA agents. They were very special organizations. They were what President Reagan later duplicated during his administration with some of the same people in Central America. But what Reagan was unable to create was a Nicaraguan George Washington. The first thing Lansdale had done in Vietnam was to create a “Father of his Country,” in the person of Ngo Dinh Diem.
By the end of April 1961, a revised counterinsurgency program13 had been submitted to President Kennedy, without the Lansdale material. Kennedy lost no time in implementing many of its recommendations. The first troop movement, the deployment of a four-hundred-man Special Forces group to South Vietnam, was made to accelerate the training of the South Vietnamese army. This move was directed by President Kennedy under the terms of National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #52, issued on May 11, 1961.
By April 20, Kennedy knew that if he was ever going to gain full control of the CIA, he would have to understand what went wrong with the anti-Castro program and what he had to do to take over control of the counterinsurgency program for Vietnam. This accounts for the strong directive he wrote to Gen. Maxwell Taylor on April 21, 1961.
With the collapse of the brigade in Cuba, Kennedy lost no time in getting to the heart of the matter. On June 13, 1961, Maxwell Taylor forwarded his “Letter to the President.” It was a most remarkable document. Kennedy and his inner circle studied it carefully, and on June 28, 1961, President Kennedy issued one of the most important and unusual directives to leave the White House under any President since World War II.
This directive, National Security Action Memorandum #55, said in part, “I wish to inform the Joint Chiefs of Staff as follows with regard to my views of their relations to me in Cold War Operations: . . . The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in conventional hostilities.”
This is a revolutionary statement when one considers who wrote it and the circumstances under which it was promulgated. The Cold War was a massive global struggle that existed only in vague terms. A “Cold War operation,” however, was a very specific term that referred to a secret, clandestine activity. Traditionally, the uniformed services of this country have not been authorized to become involved in clandestine activities in peacetime. Therefore, with NSAM #55, President Kennedy was making the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the military forces of the United States—responsible for the Cold War, just as they would be responsible for a real, declared state of war among nations. This was a radical departure from the traditional rules of warfare among the family of nations.
Kennedy was directing that U. S. military forces be used against any Cold War adversary, whether or not there had been a declaration of war. This was a revolutionary doctrine, especially for the United States, and if these presidential directives (NSAM #55 was accompanied by two others, NSAM #56 and #57) had become operationally effective, they would have changed drastically the course of the war in Vietnam.
They would effectively have removed the CIA from Cold War operations and limited the CIA to its sole lawful responsibility, the coordination of intelligence. In many situations, these directives would have made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the day-to-day counterpart of the secretary of state.
At the same time, these documents stated the Kennedy position, clearly setting forth his battle plan. Kennedy was taking charge, if he could, and he was relying upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff for assistance. He did not know it at the time, but with the issuance of these directives, he had only eighteen months left to win his battle against the CIA and its allies, or to die in the attempt.
It was an odd twist of fate that led Kennedy to choose the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the CIA to become his strong right arm. He did this because of the strength and courage of Maxwell Taylor’s letter. By midsummer, Taylor had become Kennedy’s military and intelligence adviser in the White House. Kennedy appointed him to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1962. It was Maxwell Taylor—not Jack Kennedy or anyone else in the White House—who, representing the members of the Cuban Study Group, actually wrote the paragraphs in NSAM #55 that are cited above. Those words, along with many others like them from the same series of documents, were taken absolutely verbatim from that long-hidden “Letter to the President” that Taylor wrote on June 13, 1961.
Why did Taylor, Burke, and Dulles, all members of the Cuban Study Group, unanimously put those words into the mind of Jack Kennedy? Why did Kennedy accept them and publish them with his signature without delay?
Having been given such vast powers by their President, where were the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the guns were fired in the streets of Dallas only eighteen months later? Where was Lansdale? Where was Allen Dulles? Why was Kennedy so alone and unprotected by the time he made that fateful trip to Texas in 1963?
Kennedy asserted a power of the presidency that he assumed he had, but when his orders were delivered to the men to whom they were addressed, he discovered that his power was all but meaningless. His directives were quietly placed in the bureaucratic files and forgotten. There have been few times in the history of this nation when the limits of the power of the President have been so nakedly exposed. I was the briefing officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to whom NSAM #55 was addressed. I know exactly what he was told about that series of documents, and I know what he said about them during that meeting. During that meeting, I was told to have them put in the chairman’s file, where they remained. Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer did not choose to be a “Cold Warrior.”
In the great struggle between Kennedy and the entrenched power sources of Washington, as personified by the CIA and its allies in the Defense Department and the military-industrial complex, the President learned that his weapons were powerless and his directives unheeded. Beginning in July 1961 he set out to change that situation.