TWENTY
ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy flew to Dallas, Texas, to deliver a major speech at the Trade Mart. He did not live to deliver that speech. What follows are extracts from the speech that he had planned to deliver and an analysis of events that followed:
I want to discuss with you today the status of our strength and our security because this question clearly calls for the most responsible qualities of leadership and the most enlightened products of scholarship. For this Nation’s strength and security are not easily or cheaply obtained, nor are they quickly and simply explained. There are many kinds of strength and no one kind will suffice. Overwhelming nuclear strength cannot stop a guerrilla war. Formal pacts of alliance cannot stop internal subversion. Display of material wealth cannot stop the disillusionment of diplomats subjected to discrimination.
But American military might should not and need not stand alone against the ambitions of international communism. Our security and strength, in the last analysis, directly depend on the security and strength of others, and that is why our military and economic assistance plays such a key role in enabling those who live on the periphery of the Communist world to maintain their independence of choice. Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. For our assistance makes possible the stationing of 3—5 million allied troops along the Communist frontier at one-tenth the cost of maintaining a comparable number of American soldiers. A successful Communist breakthrough in these areas, necessitating direct United States intervention, would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American lives as well.
In a nutshell Kennedy planned to say much about the reasons for his policy in Southeast Asia. He intended to emphasize that “overwhelming nuclear strength cannot stop a guerrilla war” and to end with “ . . . direct United States intervention would cost us several times as much as our entire foreign aid program, and might cost us heavily in American lives as well.” This was Kennedy’s considered opinion on October 11, 1963, when he approved NSAM #263, and this remained his opinion until the day he died. There is no sign of any plan by Kennedy for the series of policy alterations that began with the draft of NSAM #273 on November 21, 1963, that, with significant revisions, Johnson signed five days later.
It is important to note that Kennedy did not include any statement such as “the President expects that all senior officers of the government will take energetic steps to insure that they and their subordinates go out of their way to maintain and defend the unity of the United States government both here and in the field.” You will recall those words from the draft NSAM #273 that was written on November 21, 1963. Kennedy planned to make the above speech in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Kennedy’s prepared message for delivery at the Dallas Trade Mart had been planned to be the theme of a most important series of speeches to follow. Coming, as it did, not long after the publication of his National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October 11, 1963, it takes on additional significance in retrospect. He had already announced that one thousand American military advisers would be home from Indochina by Christmas and that American personnel would be out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. This subject, and the enormous pressures it evoked, were paramount in his mind on that memorable day in Dallas. Had he lived, and had he been reelected in 1964, this was to be the course he had charted for his administration and for his country.
Kennedy had learned much from experiences in Indochina since the beginning of our military/OSS involvement there in September 1945. He had seen that the billions of dollars of military aid provided to the French had been ineffectual in preventing their humiliating defeat by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
He knew that, during the Eisenhower administration, three U.S. Air Force fighter aircraft armed with tactical-size nuclear weapons had been deployed to an air base in Thailand, just across the river from Laos, for potential use against North Vietnamese forces that had been observed marching into eastern Laos. He knew that these aircraft had been recalled because wiser heads had prevailed and had persuaded Eisenhower that the use of such massive weapons against guerrilla forces could not have altered the course of that insurrection and might have ignited superpower retaliation and the conflagration of Earth.
Kennedy had learned much from his experiences in October 1962, when aerial reconnaissance revealed the possibility that the Soviets had begun to place tactical, short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. At that time he was presented with the stark dilemma of whether to deploy the large conventional military force that had been hastily assembled in Florida for an invasion of Cuba while realizing that if he ordered such an invasion, the Soviets who were based in Cuba may have had the option to respond by firing those missiles at targets in the United States.
This created a unique problem. No actual missiles had been observed or photographed in Cuba, despite the fact that certain “crates” covered by tarpaulin could have been missiles and that certain site-grading work observed could have been done in preparation for missiles; this led to the possibility that there might be missiles there. But if the United States did attack Cuba in full force, Cuban missiles or not, this attack itself could have led to a superpower nuclear exchange. JFK chose the wiser course—not to attack Cuba.
By 1963 Kennedy saw that prosecution of the CIA-directed covert warfare in Indochina would lead to a similar hard dilemma. By the summer of 1963, he and his closest associates had reached the conclusion that the future of South Vietnam must be placed in the hands of the South Vietnamese. He had made up his mind to Vietnamize that conflict, with American financial and material assistance, and to withdraw U.S. personnel as quickly as possible.
This was the basis for NSAM #263 of October 11, 1963, and having made that pivotal decision, Kennedy knew all too well that he would have to go before the American people to gain their understanding and approval. He knew equally well that with that decision to get out of Indochina, he faced strenuous opposition from the all-powerful military-industry combine that Eisenhower had warned him about in December 1960, just after his close election victory over Richard Nixon. He knew that his decision would be violently opposed by the innermost, dominant elements of the OSS/CIA hierarchy that had been forcing events in Indochina since the end of WWII.
They had urged Ho Chi Minh to create an independent Vietnam and had provided Ho and his military chieftain, Col. Vo Nguyen Giap, with an enormous supply of arms so they could round up remaining Japanese military elements. At the same time, this stockpile of arms, obtained from U.S. Army sources on Okinawa, provided the basis for their own national sovereignty. In this context, this OSS/CIA power structure, fortified by its worldwide allies, had been at the forefront in directing the Cold War since that time.
The CIA knew all too well that Kennedy’s new Vietnamization policy was but the first step of his pledge to break the agency into a thousand pieces and limit its role to intelligence functions, a profession it did not practice seriously.
With these major burdens in mind, Kennedy had begun a series of trips around the country, during which time he planned to deliver several major speeches, all orchestrated to underscore his new direction and to plant the seeds for his reelection in 1964. This is why he had planned to open his speech in Dallas with: “I want to discuss with you today the status of our strength and our security, because this question clearly calls for the most responsible qualities of leadership and the most enlightened products of scholarship.”
At the same time he opened this carefully planned course of action, his powerful opposition fully realized that the popular young President would be able to convince the American public that he was right and that he would be reelected to another four years in office. This his foes could not permit. Their course of action became clear to them: Kennedy must die!
That decision made, the rest followed like a row of dominos. A knowledgeable go-between was notified, and he arranged for the President’s murder by skilled “mechanics” on the streets of Dallas—almost on the front steps of the sheriff’s office. These “mechanics” are members of a select group of specialists, referred to by Lyndon Johnson as “a damned Murder Inc.” and trained and supported by the CIA for use at U.S. government order. Their deeply anonymous system gets them to the target area and into safe positions and assures them of a guaranteed quick exit. Since the “mechanics” are certain to be on the side of the power elite, they never have been and never will be identified and prosecuted.
This preparatory work is charged with another important detail. An assassination, especially of the chief of state, can always be made easier and much more predictable if his routine security forces and their standard policies are removed and canceled. The application of this step in Dallas was most effective. A few examples serve to underscore this phase of the concept:
1. The President was in an open, unarmored car.
2. The route chosen was along busy streets with many overlooking high buildings on each side.
3. Windows in these buildings had not been closed, sealed, and put under surveillance.
4. Secret Service units and trained military units that were required by regulations to be there were not in place. As a result there was limited ground and building surveillance.
5. Sewer covers along the way had not been welded shut.
6. The route was particularly hazardous, with sharp turns requiring slow speeds, in violation of protection regulations.
The list is long and ominous. Such a lack of protection is almost a guarantee of assassination in any country. It is difficult, if not more difficult, to convince trained and ready units not to be there than to let them go ahead and do their job; yet someone on the inner cabal staff was able to make official sounding calls that nullified all of these ordinary acts of presidential protection on November 22, 1963.
At the same time the killers were contacted, another element of the plot—the greatest and most important element—was put in motion. Even before the murder took place, “cover story” experts (their profession is part of a secret world known as “deception” or “special plans”) had already created an entire scenario with a “patsy” gunman and a whole cast of lesser luminaries, such as those concealed within the Mongoose anti-Castro project, who can be exposed and identified as the story paints a fictitious national fable through what is called the Warren Commission Report and other contrived releases over the years. Perhaps the strongest element of the cover-story side of the operation is the power that its perpetrators possess to prohibit normal pursuit and investigation by the media.
There is but one way all of this could have been managed, both before and after this elaborate coup d’etat. That is with absolute control from the highest echelons of the superpower structure of this country and the world. When there is a complete and carefully planned assassination plot that is designed and put into operation to cover, at least all of the items touched upon above, then it becomes evident that there was a conspiracy. In most cases of this type the cabal is not concerned with this discovery, because with the death of the leader they have taken over the power position they sought, and none of them or their inner circle will be captured, identified, and prosecuted.
After JFK was shot, an unusually large force of police and FBI men charged into Dallas’s Texas Theater at 231 West Jefferson Street at 2:00 P.M. and captured an unknown young man who had been sitting near the back of the house watching the movie War Is Hell. At 7:05 P.M. that evening, Lee Harvey Oswald was formally charged with the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. It was 2:05 P.M. of the twenty-third in New Zealand, where I heard the awful news.
Not until more than four hours later, at 11:26 P.M., did Homicide captain Will Fritz formally charge Oswald with “the murder of the President,” and it was not until the early hours of the morning, on Saturday, November 23, that Justice of the Peace David Johnston told Oswald he had been formally charged with the murder of the President and that he would be held without bond.
These were the facts that reporters on the scene in Dallas needed to know, and had to wait for, before they could rush to their own files and begin the laborious task of putting together their own “Lee Harvey Oswald” stories, if indeed there were even any facts on file to base them on.
Before being returned to his cell that evening, Oswald faced more than one hundred newsmen from throughout the nation, from international publications, and from radio and television stations. He told them, “I didn’t know I was a suspect. I didn’t even know the President was killed until newsmen told me in the hall.” These words may have been absolutely the truth. To turn them around, how did the police first get the idea that Oswald was their man? Could the Dallas police have gone into a courtroom, had there been a trial, and explained reasonably how they got the idea that a certain twenty-four-year-old man was the suspect, when they themselves had no clues?
Oswald was formally charged at 11:26 P.M. Dallas time, on November 22, 1963. That was 6:26, P.M. New Zealand time, November 23, 1963. By that time New Zealanders had known, for hours, what the Dallas police did not know until later—that Lee Harvey Oswald had been designated as the killer of President Kennedy. These New Zealanders had read preprepared news that had been disseminated by the cover-story apparatus.
This shows clearly how the scenario of President Kennedy’s death had been prepared well before the actual event and strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald had been chosen to be the “murderer” of the President before Dallas police made it official and despite evidence to the contrary. There can be no question whatsoever that the cabal that arranged to have President Kennedy murdered had arranged and staged all the other terrible events of that day They had also been able to control the dissemination of news that day, and they have been able to control the cover-up—including the report of the Warren Commission—since that date.
The evidence of that part of the plot and of the continuing cover-up becomes quite clear when one goes back through the record. It becomes easier to see why the commission permitted the publication of twenty-six volumes to conceal the bits of information it did discover. Other facets of the work of the cabal have not been as easy to see. But the findings that do exist make it clear that there had to be important reasons for the murder of the President.
Kennedy had stated his position on Vietnam on October 11, 1963. With the new South Vietnamese leader, Gen. Duong Van Minh, in charge as of November 4, 1963, the program to Vietnamize the war—which included an agreement to provide the general with necessary funds and military matériel—appeared to be headed in the right direction.
Then a trickle of reports suggested a reversal of the situation in Vietnam. With a quick, and unexplained, jump from what had been a rather optimistic view of progress in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers add:
These topics [the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program] dominated the discussions at the Honolulu conference in November 20 when Lodge and the country team met with Rusk, McNamara, Taylor, Bell, and Bundy. But the meeting ended inconclusively. After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington, the White House tried to pull together some conclusions and offer some guidance for our continuing and now deeper involvement in Vietnam.
The above paragraph, with its quotes directly from the Defense Department—prepared Pentagon Papers, is truly staggering in light of what actually took place. First of all, it does not seem to concur with what Kennedy was planning; just consider the words of the Kennedy Trade Mart speech planned for November 22 in Dallas. Let’s analyze this bit of propaganda from the Pentagon Papers with care.
Kennedy, his military advisers, and his administration had concluded that things were getting better in Vietnam and that the United States would be able to turn the countersubversion activity over to the Vietnamese and get out of Indochina. Kennedy had not changed his course on Vietnam and never intended to change it.
Who called the strange Honolulu conference of the Kennedy cabinet? Who had tabled the agenda on the “deterioration of the military situation and the Strategic Hamlet program”? Not only that, but what unusual event had caused the decision that the cabinet members, or at least a majority of them, should travel on to Tokyo for other meetings—on what subjects? Keep in mind that even the secretary of agriculture and the secretary of commerce had been involved in that excursion to Tokyo via Honolulu.
In considering these strange events, which are cataloged in an official Defense Department summary of the war record, think carefully about this quote fragment: “After Lodge had conferred with the President a few days later in Washington . . . ”
What a strange way five years later (1968) for the study task force to make the transition from the Kennedy administration to the Johnson era. Lodge had left Honolulu on November 22, the same day JFK was killed. An entry in the Pentagon Papers states: “22 Nov. 1963 Lodge confers with the President. Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu.”
In all the reports of this period that appear in the voluminous Pentagon Papers material, there is almost nothing at all about the assassination of President Kennedy. For example, it states, quite simply, that Lodge flew to Washington to meet with the President. It does not even make the point that when Lodge left Saigon, Kennedy was President and that when he arrived in Washington, Johnson was President—and Kennedy was dead.
The “Study of the History of United States Involvement in Vietnam From World War II to the Present” (aka Pentagon Papers) had been initiated on June 17, 1967, by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. It is inconceivable that McNamara, Leslie M. Gelb (director of the Study Task Force), and all the others involved intended to scrub that sordid event out of the pages of history; but on the other hand, what they did produce is hard to explain. Along with the rest of the cover-up, including the work of the Warren Commission, the Pentagon Papers material provides the reader with almost nothing at all about one of the most historic events of the entire era, if not the century—the murder of President Kennedy. Is that just an inexcusable omission, or is it a part of the superplanning of the cover-up?
At the very least, this means that as students and historians plunge into the record of this thirty-year period, much of it covered in elaborate detail by the McNamara-Gelb study they are not going to find anything about the death of President Kennedy. As that tragic event drops further into history, it may be all but forgotten, thanks to this type of omission—willful or otherwise. It isn’t difficult to see it as a form of negative propaganda.
It may be that this is all part of a pattern. Within a few days after Kennedy’s death, most of those cabinet members who had attended the Honolulu conference with Ambassador Lodge met with President Johnson in Washington. During that meeting, they discussed the agenda of the Honolulu conference. That agenda gave lip service to the Kennedy plan—but it also laid the groundwork for the change in course that followed as soon as Kennedy was dead.
Following that meeting of November 26, 1963, the President issued NSAM #273. For the most part, its content paralleled Kennedy’s NASM #263 of October 11, 1963, but it also underscored renewed efforts to improve the counterinsurgency campaign in the Mekong Delta. It may be said that this was the “toe in the door.” Alas, the restraint of the policy set forth in NSAM #273 was, at best, short-lived.
It is worth a word here to emphasize the military significance of President Johnson’s NSAM #273 when it states “we should persuade the government of South Vietnam to concentrate its efforts on the critical situation in the Mekong Delta.” This is in the far south of South Vietnam. It is farthest away from Hanoi and the “enemy,” the North Vietnamese. Yet it was then, and had been for years, the scene of much of the “insurgency” and “Vietcong activity” found in Vietnam.
This is like saying that the Canadians were an enemy of the United States and were causing violent insurgency in this country and that this outbreak was most prevalent in Florida. Because we know the geography here, we would recognize immediately that something was wrong with such a scenario.
Why was it, in Vietnam, that the most violent outbreaks of Vietcong insurgency were almost always in the Mekong Delta? It was because that is where most of the one-million-plus North Vietnamese settlers, who had been moved by the U.S. Navy and the CIA’s CAT (Civil Air Transport) Airline, had been placed, the port of Saigon in the Mekong Delta being the only available port in those days. (Cam Ranh Bay was an artificial harbor dredged, and made useful, at great cost many years later.)
This refugee movement, as we have seen, had a profound impact on the southernmost part of South Vietnam. These homeless people, stranded in a strange land, moved in on the settled villages and caused great unrest—which the Diem government, and its American advisers, called “insurgency.” Actually, these northern refugees were simply landless, homeless, and foodless—all conditions that the Diem government was not prepared to improve. As a result, riots and banditry broke out.
This was the framework of what was called “the warfare in Vietnam.” It may not be the entire story, but it is basic to it. When President Johnson was informed by the drafters of NSAM #273 that the counterinsurgency campaign in the Mekong Delta needed to be increased, he knew precisely what they meant. That is where the trouble was, and where it had always been—since the one-million-plus refugees had been abandoned there.
At the same time, plans were requested by the White House for a series of clandestine operations against the North Vietnamese by government forces under the direction of the U.S. military. This was a new departure in a war that had been waged since 1945 under the OSS and the CIA.
For some time, various leaders in the Pentagon, and some from the Kennedy staff in the White House, had recommended that Haiphong Harbor, the main port for Hanoi, should be mined. Others had suggested “hit and run” attacks, to be operated covertly and with a cover story so that the United States could plausibly disclaim responsibility in the event of exposure or capture during a mission. This seemed to be the right time to bring these proposals up again, and Johnson agreed to consider them, provided they had the approval of the commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC) and of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Planning for covert action against North Vietnam had begun in May 1963, when the JCS directed CINCPAC to prepare for operations that would be under the direction of the South Vietnamese. All through the summer, various “Special Operations” experts came up with all kinds of lists of “things to do.” Walt Rostow, head of the Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State, had been plugging away at this idea ever since he had made a speech at the Special Forces Center in Fort Bragg in April 1961. The plan, drawn up by CINCPAC staff and known as OPLAN 34A, was approved by the JCS on September 9, 1963.
This was made a part of the agenda for the Honolulu conference of November 20 and was discussed with President Johnson on November 26. He was quick to agree with anything that would put direct pressure on the North Vietnamese. On December 21, 1963, the President directed an interdepartmental committee to study OPLAN 34A further and appointed Maj. Gen. Victor H. Krulak to head the study. General Krulak had been one of those actively engaged in this planning from the start, and it did not take him long to come up with a proposal.
He submitted this for review on January 2, 1964. His plan was to be applied in three phases, each one raising the level of pressure on North Vietnam. Phase I, planned for February—May 1964, called for U-2 intelligence flights, COMINT [communications intelligence] missions, psychological missions and leaflet drops, propaganda kit deliveries, and radio broadcasts. It also provided for “twenty destructive undertakings designed to result in destruction, economic loss and general harassment” against North Vietnam.
While this planning had been secretly under way, a total exchange of top leadership in Saigon was taking place. Ambassador Lodge had arrived there in late August 1963, at the peak of the Diem “coup” discussions. Early in December, the CIA assigned a new station chief to Saigon, an experienced old pro—Peer de Silva—in place of John Richardson, who had been there since the winter of 1961—62. This was a most significant personnel change, because in December 1963 the CIA still retained “operational control” over all U.S. forces in Indochina. At that time both the CIA station chief and the senior U.S. military commander, Gen. Paul Harkins, were under the direct command of the ambassador.
At that time the director of central intelligence was John McCone, who had been appointed to that office by President Kennedy after Allen Dulles and his deputy, Gen. Charles P. Cabell, were sacked following the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. In other words, McCone was not a Johnson man, and he held the new President in awe.
This was made quite apparent by McCone’s words when he took de Silva under his wing in order to introduce him to the President in the White House, as related by de Silva himself:1
“For God’s sake, remember what’s been happening here recently—President Kennedy has been assassinated, President Johnson is new in the White House, and the Vietnam problem is getting worse every day. Lodge is becoming more and more obstreperous and Johnson wants no more problems out there as there were between Lodge and John Richardson;2 remember all of these things when we go to the President’s office tomorrow.”
In this brief extract, we have another clue to the fact that the Kennedy concept of “things going well in Vietnam” was being eroded almost daily by the change of course being instigated by those who came into power after his death. Here was McCone, the man as responsible for events in Vietnam as McNamara, saying, in early December 1963, “The Vietnam problem is getting worse every day.”
In order to underscore the significance of this change of the CIA station chief, on the same day that John McCone arrived in Saigon to preside at de Silva’s introduction to Ambassador Lodge, Secretary McNamara and a large party, flying in an Air Force One White House jet from a meeting in Paris, arrived at almost the same time. De Silva’s first full military briefing in Saigon was therefore held, about thirty minutes after his arrival, in an atmosphere dominated not by McCone but by the secretary of defense.
As each of these carefully orchestrated events unfolded, it was not too difficult to see that the “Vietnam phasedown” of Kennedy’s plan was in the process of being completely turned around. During that same month, December 1963, the Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs) were transferred from CIA control to the U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. This was the initial move of the U.S. military glacier into combat action in Southeast Asia under the operational control of its own military commanders.
At the time Peer de Silva arrived, the United States had acquired a fleet of small high-speed boats for use with OPLAN 34A—type operations against the North Vietnamese.
John Kennedy had been a PT boat commander in the southwest Pacific during WWII. In a move designed to win his sentimental approval, the CIA, with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, had arranged to procure a fleet of fast boats from a Norwegian manufacturer. These boats were as close as anyone could come, in the sixties, to the famous PT boats of the forties.
These patrol boats were divided into two categories. The fastest, and those most like the original PT boats, were called “Swifts,” and the slower but more heavily armed ones were called “Nasties.” Both of them were employed in “hit and run” operations.
To augment this capability, under OPLAN 34A tactics, the CIA made use of an unusual cargo aircraft called the C-123.
The C-123 was an outgrowth of the original C-122 that had been designed and built by the Chase Aircraft Company. The success of that earlier model led to a merger of Chase and the Fairchild Aircraft Company and the production of the C-123. Some of these aircraft were later modified for spraying Agent Orange over much of Vietnam.
The use of C-123s reveals another characteristic of clandestine operations. These aircraft had belonged to the U.S. Air Force “Air Commando” units, in which many of the same people who have been involved in the Iranian “arms for hostages” swap and in Central American covert activities got their start in the “Fun and Games” business of covert activities. Because such men as Gen. Richard Secord, among others, were familiar with the venerable C-123, they selected it for use in these latter-day activities.
Behind the scenes, the PT-style boats and C-123s were used in late 1963 and 1964. The PT boats landed over-the-beach invasion parties on sabotage missions, and the C-123s were used in clandestine flights over North Vietnam to drop smaller groups of agents.
A line in the usually circumspect Pentagon Papers tells us a little more than it actually intended to: “Covert operations [as outlined in OPLAN 34A] were carried out by South Vietnamese or hired personnel and supported by U.S. training and logistics efforts.” This brief statement reveals a bit more about how covert operations are mounted.
Such U.S. personnel as Special Forces troops were used to train and equip the teams to be dropped, or put “over the beach.” In general, these teams were believed to have been made up of South Vietnamese natives. However, as the Pentagon Papers item reveals, these teams included “hired personnel”—and therefore, special plans were made to retrieve them and to get them safely back out of hostile territory.
These “hired personnel,” as a category of clandestine operators, still exist. They are stateless people who are highly trained and equipped for special operations. They are far too valuable to expend on minor missions, and they must be kept available for such duties all over the world. They and their families are maintained in special safe areas, and their talents are called upon for covert operations of the greatest importance. The very fact that such key people were used in OPLAN 34A operations underscores how important the highest authorities considered these activities. They were seen as the leverage essential to the gradual but certain escalation of military activities in Indochina after the death of President Kennedy and during the early, and more pliable, days of the Johnson era.
These covert operations against North Vietnam were called, in the words of presidential adviser Walt Rostow, “tit for tat” activities; but with a difference. Usually in a “tit for tat” game, one party hits the other and the second party responds. In the Rostow context, the first party—the United States or South Vietnam—would strike covertly. Then, when the second party hit back, the United States would announce that it had been hit first and that it was legitimate to strike back. Such an action took place in the Gulf of Tonkin and led to the famous “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” that gave the President the authority to “strike back” and to utilize U.S. forces against the North Vietnamese. This was all part of the very clever sequence of events that had been planned as far back as May 1963 and was then implemented in after the death of Kennedy.
On July 30, 1964, “South Vietnamese” PT boats made a midnight attack, including an amphibious commando raid on the Hon Me and Hon Nieu islands just off the coast of North Vietnam above the 19th parallel, north latitude. The North Vietnamese responded by sending their high-speed KOMAR boats after the raiders. The “Swift” PT boats escaped; but the KOMARS spotted the U.S.S. Maddox in the vicinity. The Maddox claimed that the KOMARS fired torpedoes and that “a bullet fragment was recovered from the destroyer’s superstructure.”
On the night of August 3, 1964, more commando raids were made on the coast of North Vietnam, and the Vinh Sonh radar installation was hit. Because of its importance, this raid was most certainly made by CIA mercenaries. Following it, a claim was made of an intercepted radio transmission saying, “North Vietnamese naval forces had been ordered to attack the patrol” consisting of the Maddox and the Turner Joy. It was this incident that triggered the action that led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964. Plans laid in May 1963 and other related actions had been leading up to this event since November 22, 1963, and the guns of Dallas, and the preparatory steps had been under way since at least March 1964.
In March 1964 the familiar team of McNamara and Taylor made another fact-finding trip to South Vietnam. They returned and made their report to the President and the NSC on March 16. As a result of this report the President approved and signed NSAM #288 on March 17, 1964. By this time, of course, the Kennedy plan for Vietnam had been altered considerably. In their report, McNamara and Taylor said that “the situation in Vietnam was considerably worse than had been realized at the time of the adoption of NSAM #273” on November 26, 1963—not to mention at the time of NSAM #263, which was signed by Kennedy on October 11, 1963.
NSAM #288 said, “We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam . . . . Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance. . . .Thus, purely in terms of foreign policy, the stakes are high.”
This was a far cry from the Kennedy plans of late 1963. The stage was now set for military escalation in Southeast Asia. The level of activity was raised as OPLAN 34A strikes were leveraged in severity and with the response of the KOMARS against the attacks by the PT boats and their mercenary crewmen.
In mid-1964 Ambassador Lodge had resigned to run for the presidency that fall, and he had been replaced in Saigon by none other than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell Taylor. Taylor’s staff was augmented by an old-line State Department veteran, U. Alexis Johnson, and by William Sullivan, who was made executive officer for the diplomatic mission.
At about the same time, Gen. Paul Harkins left his command in Saigon and was replaced by his deputy, Gen. William C. Westmoreland. In Peer de Silva’s well-chosen words, “Thus, these three [McNamara, Taylor, and Westmoreland], as heavenly stars, were to be perfectly aligned to dominate the American government’s policy and strategy in Vietnam in the crucial decision-making years of 1964—1965, a power alignment which I believe proved most unfortunate. Individually courageous, strong, and forceful, in 1964 they came to the wrong war.”
It would be hard to set the stage for that crucial period better than CIA Station Chief Peer de Silva has done it:
Prior to leaving Washington, Westmoreland had been given his orders by Taylor, then Chairman, JCS:
“Westy, you get out there and take charge. Get the military command and the ARVN [South Vietnamese Army] organized and then fight the war right, the way we did in France. It’s a big war and we’ll fight it like one. We must bring enough firepower and bombs down on the Vietcong to make them realize they’re finished; only then will they toss in the sponge.”
De Silva added, “The principle of fighting the big war, the big action in Vietnam, had thus been established. This doctrine, and the decisions later issuing from it, led inescapably to April 1975 and American defeat.”
The important thing to realize from de Silva’s words is that General Taylor gave these orders to Westmoreland in December 1963—only one month after Kennedy’s death, less than one month after Johnson had signed the rather tentative document NSAM #273, and more than seven months before President Johnson was to ask Congress for the authority to use the armed forces of the United States in a war in Southeast Asia.
What did Gen. Maxwell Taylor know, in December 1963, about “the big war” that caused him to make such a statement? At that time, the United States had 15,914 military personnel in South Vietnam, of whom fewer than 2,000 were “military advisers.” The others were helicopter maintenance crewmen, supply personnel, and the like. Did Maxwell Taylor actually visualize the action in Vietnam as being similar to that which had confronted the Allied forces under General Eisenhower in Europe in 1944? Did General Taylor actually equate the black-pajama-clad “Vietcong” with the battle-trained armed forces of Nazi Germany? What kind of orders was he giving General Westmoreland? What did he expect the warfare in Indochina to become? More important, Taylor’s orders to Westmoreland came at a time when not one single American soldier was serving in Southeast Asia under the operational command and control of a U.S. military officer. How, then, could he have seen it as “a big war”?
These are questions that trail behind the train of events that led both to the death of Pres. John E Kennedy and to the subsequent escalation of the American military intervention in Indochina. There can be no question that there were those who wanted the fighting to develop and to become the war that General Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described to Westmoreland in December 1963 as “big.” After all,3 they had done so much to assure it would be.
In his monumental book Law and the Indo-China War, John Norton Moore, professor of law and director of the graduate program at the University of Virginia School of Law, discusses several of the variables of the quality of the general community’s minimum public order decisions as they pertain to the conflict in Southeast Asia and to warfare in general.
He cites, as the first of the several facts of interdependence that establish common interests in every global interaction, “the accelerating rate of population growth, along with the pluralization of both functional and territorial groups. . . . ”
Any study of the armed conflicts that have taken place during this century reveals that for whatever stated reason or excuse a particular war may have been waged, one of its most glaring results has been the wholesale murder of millions of noncombatants, such as occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1945 and 1980. Another inevitable finding would be that in addition to these genocidal murders, there have been numerous examples of the forced movement and relocation of additional millions of natives from their traditional homelands and communities to other, generally inhospitable locations. Such movements inevitably lead to the destruction of their ancient way of life and its irreplaceable social values.
The result of these actions—which have been carried out during this century both by “the West” and by “the Communists”—has often been the devastation of ancient homelands that had never been touched by warfare—at least not modern warfare, with its vast means of destruction.
The terrible 1968 massacre of more than three hundred women and children at Song My (My Lai) in Vietnam serves as no more than a minor example of the type of warfare that has overwhelmed such rural communities. As a result of the “mere gook” syndrome that prevailed in Vietnam, the enemy was frequently declared to be “anyone who ran,” “anyone of either sex,” “anyone of any age,” or “anyone armed or unarmed. ”
Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, who had so much to do with the early years in Indochina, frequently regaled his associates in the Pentagon with stories of “enemy agents” who had been placed in helicopters to be flown to headquarters for interrogation. En route, “to let them know we meant business,” one or two who had refused to talk would be thrown out of the helicopter, “to teach the others a lesson.” Such murders were of little consequence to those warriors, as My Lai and the movie Platoon confirm.
These accounts from the earlier days of the war would be far surpassed by the record of the CIA’s Phoenix program, which was designed to destroy and wipe out the Vietnamese rural structure, on the assumption that it was the mainstay of the “Vietcong.” In open congressional testimony, William Colby, the CIA’s top man in the Phoenix program, claimed, with some pride, that they had eliminated about sixty thousand “authentic Vietcong agents.” These Vietnamese were “neutralized” without benefit of trial or of the rules of warfare governing the treatment of prisoners. They were simply “eliminated.”
In a war where “body count” seemed to be the primary objective of the fighting forces, one must not lose sight of the great significance of underlying factors that establish a climate of legitimacy for murder, or “neutralization.” In fact, these underlying beliefs serve to promote genocide. For example, there are many people in this world who believe it is not only “all right” but essential to reduce the total human population, and to reduce it by any means. This conviction, which stems from the work of the British East India Company’s chief economist at the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Malthus, pervades certain elements of our global society. Malthusianism is a deeper motivational factor than the more popularly recognized ideological confrontations.
When it is “their turn,” the Soviets have performed these common genocidal functions as well as “the West” has. Witness the slaughter of millions of noncombatants in Afghanistan and the forced movement of no fewer than 6 million Afghan natives from their ancient homeland over the great passes to Pakistan.
The U.S. Department of State’s Office of Population Affairs has stated:
There is a single theme behind our work: We must reduce population levels. Either the governments will do it our way, through nice, clean methods, or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. We look at resources and environmental constraints, we look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population, or else we will have trouble. The government of El Salvador failed to use our programs to lower population. Now they get a civil war because of it. There will be dislocation and food shortages. They still have too many people there.
The above conditions merge together into a demand for war—any kind of war, anywhere. This is the root concept, and the overall excuse, for an entire series of wars in Third World countries since 1945. Because of the Malthusian belief in the need for population control, the murder, by warfare, of countless millions of noncombatants is “lawfully” justified. This has been true quite recently, and it is why such wars are certain to break out before long in the heavily populated continents of Africa and Latin America.
Of course, national leaders wish to justify their actions and to cloak them in legality. President Lyndon B. Johnson felt the need for such support as he attempted to escalate the long, warlike action in Indochina from its emergent underground stages to an all-out overt military confrontation.
With the statement that U.S. Navy vessels had been fired upon ringing in his ears, President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress on August 5, 1964, to request a Southeast Asia Resolution, broad enough “to assist nations covered by the SEATO treaty.” Congress responded quickly and affirmatively.
The Constitution provides that “the President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” However, congressional authorization is necessary before the President can use the armed forces without a declaration of war.
In response to Johnson’s request, Congress passed the Southeast Asia Resolution, providing:
[Sec.1] Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. . . .
[Sec.2] . . . the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.
This resolution was passed in August 1964, nineteen years after the United States became actively involved in the affairs in Indochina. The time of preparation and development had been long. At times it seemed as though things were at a standstill, and at other times the tip of a covert-action iceberg would reveal another step along the way.
After the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a series of air strikes, called “Flaming Dart,” was carried out against North Vietnam. On February 22, 1965, General Westmoreland recommended that American troops be landed on the east coast of Vietnam, at Da Nang. After considerable internecine hassling, it was decided that the marines would make the first landing, and two U.S. Marine Corps Battalion Landing Teams were selected. They landed at Da Nang on March 8, 1965.
This was the first time in almost twenty years of American involvement that members of the armed forces of the United States had entered combat zones under the command control of their own officers. For the first time, the CIA’s role as the operational command in Vietnam was being shared with the military. Despite this development, the “War in Vietnam” was still a strange and unprecedented creation and a clear example of the CIA’s master role as Cold War catalyst.
According to the science of war, as defined by Carl von Clausewitz, when diplomacy and all else fails, the army takes over. Despite nearly a century and a half of this doctrine, the management of the “War in Vietnam” broke all of the rules.
For one thing, the ambassador in Saigon was the senior, and highestranking, American official there, and the military and CIA officials ranked below him. This was a novel way to wage war, that is, with an ambassador over and senior to the general in command. And it did not stop there.
While testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the latter part of the sixties, Sen. Stuart Symington revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane, Laos, had the authority to order bombings and to specify where the bombs were to be dropped. This led the senator to declare that the diplomat was virtually a “military proconsul.” In these terms, the ambassador in Saigon had been given “military proconsul” powers for more than a decade.
Any consideration of leadership in time of war must inevitably lead to the question of the objective. Why was the United States involved in military action in faraway Southeast Asia?
Professor Moore addresses this question in Law and the Indo-China War, stating: “ . . . the principal United States objective in the IndoChina War was to assist Vietnam and Laos (and subsequently Cambodia) to defend themselves against North Vietnamese military intervention. ”
This is as reliable a statement of the U.S. national objective as any other; but it fails to state a military objective. In an all-out attempt to do this, after the enactment of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, President Johnson built up the strength of the U.S. Army in Vietnam to 550,000 men, brought the air force to enormous strength in terms of bombing capacity [more tonnage was dropped than during all of WWII ], and made the Navy Seventh Fleet the most powerful force afloat. Yet this did not get the job done. Despite all this, to put it simply, the United States lost the war; it failed to achieve its goal.
In actual practice, the tactical objective of the war had been the “body count. In Asia, that is not a good indicator of success, and it played right into the hands of General Giap. Guerrilla style, he spread the action out as much as he could, all over the landmass of Indochina. This made the tremendous U.S. military force impotent, diluted as it now was over wide areas.
One of the best examples of this was the battle for Anloa Valley. The “pacification” of Anloa Valley was part of Operations Masher and White Wing, in which about 12,000 men of the U.S. Army First Cavalry Division, Vietnamese airborne units, and South Korean marines took part. They succeeded in capturing the valley and heralded it in Saigon as “a breakthrough in winning the Vietcong-controlled people to our side. ”
In announcing this “victory” officially, Saigon officials would say only that the Anloa operation was successful because it killed a lot of “Vietcong.” In fact, Anloa Valley was captured, lost, recaptured, etc., at least eight times—for no purpose other than to “kill lots of Vietcong.” That does not win wars.
Recall General Taylor’s order to Westmoreland: “ . . . fight the war right, the way we did in France.” Gen. George S. Patton, the hero of the Third Army’s march across France in the face of an experienced German military machine, must have spun in his grave over those instructions for that type of guerrilla war.
It does little good to review the history of a war by basing it on the one time strategic objectives of the victor and the vanquished. What counts is the achievement: What was accomplished by winning that war?
Before WWII, Stalin had purged the Ukraine and wiped out millions of his own people. During WWII Stalin diverted his armies, with Hitler’s in hot pursuit, away from Moscow and across this same “heartland of Mother Russia,” the Ukraine. By the time the war was over, more than 20 million Russians had been killed, and the once vital Ukraine had been reduced to rubble.4
Although the Soviets have claimed victory over Hitler in that war, it would be hard to say that the Russian people won, on any count. Clearly, it had been someone’s strategic objective to wipe out the natives of the Ukraine and to destroy their homeland, in the process completing Stalin’s work and ending Hitler’s dream.
How, then, can one assess the accomplishments of the thirty-year war in Vietnam? It is clear that the United States did not achieve its limited objective of helping the South Vietnamese establish a free democratic nation. What about the yardstick of “accomplishment”? On that score, millions of people in Indochina were killed and removed from the overhang of the Malthusian equation of world population density. Certainly no ideological, “Communist vs. anti-Communist” issues had been settled, and the domino theory and “bloodbath” projections (except in the special case of Cambodia) have not occurred, and the United States initiated that with its massive B-29 bombardment.
This leaves one more enormous accomplishment of the warfare in Indochina to be considered. As R. Buckminster Fuller has stated, “Jointly the two political camps have spent $6.5 trillion in the last thirty-three years to buy the capability to kill all humanity in one hour.”
The American share of this enormous sum expended on the Cold War was spent under the leadership of the CIA, “Capitalism’s Invisible Army,” and no less than $220 billion went to the CIA’s war in Indochina. That has been its accomplishment. Because of the success of that type of “money-making” war, it is not too difficult to be persuaded that a similar and more costly excursion lies not too far in the future.