General note: This work is based on a nineteen-part magazine series first developed by the author with and published by Freedom magazine, the investigative journal of the Church of Scientology.
Chapter 1: The Role of the Intelligence Services in the Cold War
1 Report From Iron Mountain, Leonard C. Lewin (New York: Dial, 1967).
2 Read chapter 13, “A Conflict of Strategies” in Gen. Victor H. Krulak’s First to Fight (Naval Institute Press, 1984).
3 It is significant to note that much of this important legislation was written by Clark Clifford at the time he was a naval officer assigned for duty in the Truman White House.
4 See Henry Pelling, Winston Churchill (London: Macmillan, 1974).
5 The case of Gen. Reinhard Gehlen will be discussed below. Gehlen, head of Hitler’s Eastern European Intelligence Division, surrendered to American army officers before the fall of Nazi power and later was made a general in the U.S. Army for intelligence purposes by an act of Congress.
6 “The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War,” GPO, April 1984.
7 The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., by Campbell and Herring, 1975.
8 “The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War,” GPO, April 1984.
Chapter 2: The CIA in the World of the H-Bomb
1 Office of Strategic Services, “Problems and Objectives of United States Policy,” April 2, 1945.
2 Dulles by Leonard Moseley, Dial Press, 1978.
3 “Clandestine Operations Manual for Central America” Desert Publications, 1985.
Chapter 3: The Invisible Third World War
1 Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain (New York: Dial, 1967).
2 We note that President Marcos of the Philippines had been in trouble and that the public had been rising against his harsh regime . . . especially since the murder of his principal opponent, Sen. Benigno Aquino, in August 1983. During a visit to Manila, the director of central intelligence, then William Casey, made a modest suggestion that President Marcos ought to hold an election. At the same time we noted the rise of a new Communist-inspired insurgency there. The same Robin Hood tactic used again. At that point, the director of central intelligence knew and held the winning hand.
3 This was a pivotal meeting in developments leading to the steady escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Gen. Graves B. Erskine was serving as the special assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations. As such he was responsible for all military contacts with the CIA, for the National Security Agency, and for certain contacts with the Department of State and the White House.
With the “Magsaysay Scenario” in mind, it is interesting to note that Allen Dulles had with him at this meeting both Edward G. Lansdale, whom he was sending to Saigon from Manila to head the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), and the station chief for the CIA in Manila, George Aurell. Others present were: Adm. Arthur Radford; Mr. Roger M. Kyes, assistant secretary of defense; Adm. Arthur C. Davis; Mr. Charles H. Bonesteel; Colonel Alden; and Gen. Charles P. Cabell, deputy director of central intelligence. NOTE: The author was assigned to the Erskine office, 1960—62, during a nine-year period in the Pentagon. He served as the senior air force officer for the duties of the Office of Special Operations.
4 This officer was the same Edward G. Lansdale who had skillfully and successfully brought about the election of President Magsaysay in the Philippines. He was being moved to Vietnam to see if he could work the same magic with Ngo Dinh Diem, the Vietnamese exile who was being transported from the United States to Saigon to become the president of the nation-to-be: South Vietnam.
5 The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission was introduced into Indochina in June 1954. For the United States this marked the actual beginning of what we call the Vietnam War. The CIA had operational control over all forces of that war from 1954 to 1965, when the U.S. Marines, under U.S. military command, hit the beaches of Vietnam. The CIA’s role was dominant during those years in this phase of WW III, which cost $220 billion, millions of noncombatant lives, and the lives of 55,000 American servicemen.
Chapter 4: Vietnam: The Opening Wedge
1 Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the “vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.” Fuller noted also, “Always their victories [are] in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers.” See Fuller’s Critical Path, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).
2 Potsdam Conference, held in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, in July 1945. This conference was attended by Truman, Churchill, and Stalin. Churchill was defeated in British parliamentary elections during the conference, and he was replaced by the newly chosen prime minister, Clement Attlee. (General Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952—54, Volume XIII, “Indochina” [two parts], Government Printing Office, 1982.)
Chapter 5: The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission
1 Foreign Relations of the United States: 1952—54. Department of State, Washington, D.C.
2 “Twenty-six Disastrous Years” Hugh B. Hester, Brig. Gen., U.S. Army (Retd).
3 Leonard Moseley, Dulles (New York: Dial Press, 1978).
4 A State Department euphemism for the various indistinct governments of Indochina at that time.
5 This special committee on Indochina consisted of the DCI, Allen W. Dulles; the under secretary of state and former DCI, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith; the deputy secretary of defense and former vice president of the General Motors Corp., Roger M. Kyes; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Arthur S. Radford.
6 There are many truly amazing documents in U.S. military records, as well as in White House files, on this subject. Those that have been used, above, are:
1. “Civil Affairs Planning in the Cold War Era”, U.S. Army Civil Affairs School, Fort Gordon, Ga., December 1959.
2. Lecture, “Southeast Asia, Army War College, by Edward G. Lansdale, December 1958.
3. “Training Under the Mutual Security Program” by R. G. Stilwell and Edward G. Lansdale of the President’s Committee, May 1959.
Chapter 6: Genocide by Transfer—in South Vietnam
1 Interestingly, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the much-publicized Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, had worked with Lansdale and others who had been on the SMM team in Vietnam.
2 Vietnam Crisis, edited by Allan W. Cameron (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).
3 Liberal extracts above are from Ralph Smith, Vietnam and the West (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971).
4 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952—54, vol. 13, “Indochina.” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982).
Chapter 7: Why Vietnam? The Selection and Preparation of the Battlefield
1 I have heard firsthand accounts wherein the CIA agents, on their way back by helicopter, tossed these natives (“mere gooks”) out of the helicopter, alive, “just for the fun of it” and as a lesson to those who remained on board.
2 In terms of the act and national policy, there is a distinct difference between the meaning and the use of the words “direction of” and “approval.” The National Security Act of 1947 used the word “direction” to mean that the idea for the plan originates with the NSC and, then, that the NSC directs its accomplishment by whatever department or agency, or combination thereof, it may choose. During the Eisenhower days, and with the ease with which the Dulles brothers carried out these things, it was not uncommon for Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence, to arrive at a meeting with some scheme. He would present this idea to the NSC and then seek its “approval.” This practice generally worked and was deemed permissible in that environment, but that is not how the NSC was intended to work. President Kennedy found it quite difficult to reverse this practice in later years, because the CIA had been able to have its way in these covert matters over the Department or State and the Department of Defense for so many years.
3 As a result of a presidential directive, a board of inquiry on the subject of the Bay of Pigs failure, and on what should be done in the future in such cases, met in the Pentagon in May 1961. This most unusual “Special Group” consisted of Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Allen Dulles, Adm. Arleigh Burke, and Robert F. Kennedy. A “Letter to the President” was prepared, written by General Taylor. The existence of this letter has been denied for years by various administrations and by the board members. However, it does exist. I have had a copy of this rare and most important “letter” for years, and it now appears verbatim in a book called Zapata.
4 As will be seen, this approval included the purchase of new helicopters.
5 Allen Dulles’s favorite expression for military-type operations by the CIA, or a joint CIA/Defense Department effort, was “peacetime operations”—an Orwellian twist typical of the Dulles turn of mind.
6 A slang expression within the intelligence community for the practice of establishing one or more parallel identities, or covers, for someone engaged in intelligence work.
7 Dulles’s statement may be found on page 287 of the Report of the Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, volume 12, which was not made public until November 1982. Printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office.
8 I was there at the time these Cuban exile leaders were in Senator Kennedy’s office. After that meeting, these Cubans traveled to the Pentagon from Capitol Hill, in a military vehicle with me, to meetings that were held in the Office of Special Operations.
Chapter 8: The Battlefield and the Tactics, Courtesy CIA
1 “Pre-Brief” is the name given to the everyday, worldwide news summary that is prepared by the CIA and presented to the President early each morning. It is given to a highly select, small group of Pentagon officials just prior to the White House session.
2 During this period the Diem regime invented the term Vietcong, intending it to mean “Vietnamese Communist.” The National Liberation Front condemned the term as meaningless. Diem and his administration applied the term loosely within South Vietnam to mean “the enemy,” most of whom had no idea what communism was, and most of whom had been Cochin Chinese, or southern, natives. Thus, the intelligence “count” of Vietcong enemy included many natives who certainly were not Communist.
3 In what was broadly known as the “domino theory,” it was held that if one country fell to communism, neighboring nations would follow. Countries were likened to a row of dominos set on end; the row would fall if the first domino was knocked down.
4 U.S. News and World Report, June 26, 1967.
5 This is an intelligence term for a secret operation supported by a unit that has a fictitious designation.
6 The director of the Joint Staffs was the senior, permanently assigned officer in the then 400-man office which supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Wheeler went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held for some six years.
7 The study was done by the Okanagan Helicopter Service of Canada, one of the largest commercial helicopter operators in the world.
8 It must be kept in mind that despite reference to U.S. military personnel, the CIA had operational control of all U.S. activities in Indochina until the U.S. Marines landed in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. Therefore, these helicopter tactics and tactical operations were developed by the CIA.
Chapter 9: The CIA in the Days of Camelot
1 Shortly after World War II, Nixon answered a want ad from a Los Angeles newspaper which sought a man who would run for political office. Nixon ran for Congress with the help of these anonymous backers and was elected. These people continued to support him through the ups and downs of his political career. Nixon has acknowledged that he had these backers; exactly who they were is another question.
2 Nixon was in Dallas with a top executive of the Pepsi-Cola Company, Mr. Harvey Russell, the general counsel. Nixon was a legal counsel to that corporation. That top executive’s son has told of Nixon’s presence in Dallas at the time of the assassination, and Russell has confirmed the accuracy of his son’s account. Later, sometime after the shooting, Nixon was driven to the Dallas airport by a Mr. DeLuca, also an official of the Pepsi-Cola Company. In addition, the son of another Pepsi-Cola executive was in Dallas at that time and had dinner with Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, the night before JFK was murdered.
3 Most references to this CIA proposal are taken from the post—Bay of Pigs Study Group Report, which was actually Gen. Maxwell Taylor’s “Letter to the President” of June 13, 1961, plus my own personal files.
4 This was known as the “5412/2 Committee” established by National Security Council directive 5412, March 15, 1954.
5 This very modest proposal was submitted to the National Security Council by DCI Allen Dulles. It was a plan for the recruitment of Cubans into a military-type organization for training purposes. At that point, the CIA had plans for very little, if any, operational activities in Cuba. From this simple beginning, the agency, spurred on by certain former senior Cuban officials, began to formulate plans for airdrops and over-the-beach landings of small groups of Cuban exiles, as well as airdrops of arms and ammunition for anti-Castro groups on the island.
6 This is taken from a U.S. Army Civil Affairs School lesson guide for U.S. and foreign military personnel. It or a similar guide was used for the training and indoctrination of the cadre of Cuban exile leaders. It is important to note what the U.S. Army teaches on this subject and to consider its applicability in this and other countries. This same document was used widely to train and indoctrinate the U.S. Special Forces Green Berets in Vietnam.
7 I was the chief of that office, which was concealed in the Plans directorate and known simply as “Team B.” Its official duty was “to provide Air Force support of the clandestine operations of the CIA.” This was accomplished secretly, on a worldwide basis. I had been directed, in 1955, to establish that office under the provisions of NSC 5412 and was its chief from 1955 to 1960, when I was transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In this capacity as head of the Military Support Office, in 1960, I went to Fort Gulick with CIA agents.
8 See particularly chapters 5 through 8.
9 Air America was a major CIA air transport proprietary company, with Far East headquarters in Taiwan and operations all over the world. It was a Delaware-chartered corporation and had about one hundred cover names under which it could do business, in order to conceal its identity and its connection with the CIA. At that time Air America was one of the largest airlines in the world, and one of the best.
10 The block system, an old form of control, “pacification,” and surveillance made infamous during the Hungarian revolt of 1956, divides an area into blocks. Each block is under the absolute control of a leader, who knows where everyone is on that block. He uses children and schoolteachers, wives, shop foremen, and all other sources to gain total, twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week surveillance. No one could penetrate the Cuban system either from airdrop entry or by beach landing, and no one could evade it from the inside. The effectiveness of this system neutralized the exile group’s ability to penetrate into, or to support, political guerrillas.
11 See chapter 8.
12 As described by R. Buckminster Fuller in The Critical Path, these are “vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.” Winston Churchill used the term High Cabal in recognition of this group’s existence and supremacy.
13 Flechettes are small, rocket-powered missiles or darts that can be individually fired from a tube much like a drinking straw. Being rockets, they have no recoil, make little or no noise, have a high terminal velocity, and are hard to detect by autopsy after they have entered a person’s body. (One such weapon, fired from a specially modified umbrella, may have been used to poison President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.)
14 Even this scheme had its uncertainties. Many CIA old-timers hated Nixon. When the CIA-directed rebellion against Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958 failed so miserably, it was Nixon who demanded, and got, the immediate dismissal of that World War II—era OSS hero Frank Wisner and the dispersal of Wisner’s Far East staff. Wisner had been chief of that operation working out of Singapore. The “old boy” network never got over that move by Nixon. Wisner committed suicide some years later. This action by Nixon may have planted the seeds of Watergate.
15 See “Operation Zapata,” University Publications of America.
16 I had an unusual insider’s view of these developments. I knew of Kennedy’s approval early Sunday afternoon, April 16. I knew the ships had been at sea and that forces would hit the beach at dawn on Monday, April 17. I had heard that three T-33s had not been destroyed in the April 15 air strike, when all of the other combat aircraft had been hit. I knew that the U-2 flight on Saturday had located the T-33 jets at Santiago, and I knew that the CIA operator at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, had prepared four B-26s for the dawn air strike “coming in from the East with the sun at their backs and in the eyes of the defenders, if any.”
17 Bobby Kennedy later named a son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.
18 Ordinarily, following a disaster such as the Bay of Pigs, there would have been an official inquiry, with a full detailed report issued. The President, however, did not want a public inquiry, and he did not want a formal report. The Taylor letter was prepared by a committee that met secretly, calling itself “a paramilitary study group.” About ten years later, I called Admiral Burke, whom I had worked with over the years, and asked him to lunch with a friend. During that luncheon, I asked the admiral, whom I have always believed to have been the finest chief of naval operations the U.S. Navy ever had, about that report. He still denied there had ever been a report. He did not fib; he simply toyed with words. It was not technically a “report.” It was a “Letter to the President.”
19 Wyden cites interviews with McGeorge Bundy as material for nearly every chapter in his book.
20 These are the exact words from paragraph 43 of the Taylor Report. Here is how Wyden distorts them to cover Bundy: “Cabell had every reason to be disturbed. He had just had a call from Mac Bundy. Bundy said no air strikes could be launched until after the brigade had secured the Giron airstrip, and strikes would ostensibly be launched from there. This was an order ‘from the President.’” This is a most important bit of revisionism. The Taylor committee, with Bobby Kennedy as a member and one who closely read the report, says nothing about “an order from the President.” Wyden and Bundy added that “order from the President,” after the deaths of JFK and RFK, to cover Bundy’s actions.
Chapter 10: JFK and the Thousand Days to Dallas
1 McCarthy and Smith, Protecting the President (New York: Morrow, 1985). Morrow, 1985
2 From The Warren Report, by the Associated Press.
3 The speaker was Mrs. William Bundy, daughter of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, wife of Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, and sister-inlaw of McGeorge Bundy, whom Acheson had wanted Kennedy to make secretary of state. Actually, Kennedy had listened to his old Harvard mentor, William Yandell Elliott, rather than Acheson, and had chosen Dean Rusk in place of Bundy, whom he brought into the White House as his national security assistant. For this service, Rusk provided Elliott with an office in the Department of State not far from his own; on the otherwise bare walls of that office hung a framed, one-page letter on White House stationery saying, “Thank you for introducing me to Dean Rusk.” It was signed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
4 This sensational trial was known as the Medina trial, taking its name from the judge Harold S. Medina. It was held in federal court in 1948 and lasted more than nine months.
5 McNamara had little experience with service distinctions and tried to take army money as well as navy funds for this procurement. The army persuaded him to leave them out of this matter.
6 Such work neither began nor ended with the Kennedy administration. An article in the Washington Post on February 18, 1986, reported that U.S. representative Mike Synar had gone to see the top-secret Northrup Stealth aircraft. At the hangar, Congressman Synar noted, “They had put up this big chart which showed all the states where Stealth work was being done.” That was the Goldberg/McNamara concept dressed in Reagan garb.
7 Before the Monday following this decision, the entire suite of offices that had developed the maps and data for the Goldberg study had been totally vacated and the staff transferred—moved completely out of the Pentagon building.
8 Leonard Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain (New York: Dial Press, 1967).
Chapter 11: The Battle for Power: Kennedy Versus the CIA
1 James D. Barber, The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
2 Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1965).
3 The absence of Dulles and the ineffectiveness of his deputies, Gen. Charles P. Cabell and Richard Bissell, are described in this book as “a breakdown of leadership.” One must keep in mind, however, that this apparent “breakdown” may well have been intentional. Our so-called national policy on “anticommunism” has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of Castro and his “Communist threat,” just as it has continued to do in Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East.
4 My office was only a short distance from the rooms in the Pentagon used by the Cuban Study Group. I had worked with the CIA on anti-Castro activities since January 1, 1959. I knew almost all the men who had been called to meet with the study group. Many of them would wait in my office until they were called; many came back following their testimony and interrogation. One comment was general among them all. Their words were, in effect: “That group is highly charged with the presence of strong individuals. But the most intense man there is the one who sits in a straight-backed chair, separate from the others, and never says a word.” That man was Bobby Kennedy. It was well known that he returned to the White House each day to discuss developments with the President and his inner circle; but nothing on the record gives any indication that he ever broke the stranglehold the CIA had on that investigation or that he ever became aware of being in the grip of its velvet gloves.
5 As noted in an earlier chapter, following the President’s formal approval at midday of the landing plan, which included an air strike by four B-26 aircraft to destroy Castro’s remaining three T-33 jet trainers on the ground, the air strike had been canceled.
6 The entire anti-Castro campaign was fraught with intrigue. De Varona was one of the four Cuban exiles who, after flying from the American Legion convention in Detroit, where Nixon had spoken in August 1960, to Washington, had gone directly to the offices of then senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. From Kennedy’s office they all went to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Kennedy had been in personal touch with de Varona and the others all through this period. This adds another element to the value of de Varona’s testimony before the Taylor group.
7 Those three aircraft, Castro’s last combat-capable aircraft, were the T-33 jet trainers that had been spotted by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, parked wingtip to wingtip on an airfield near Santiago and were the target of the four B-26 aircraft that were to have been launched from the CIA airbase at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Had that strike been flown as approved by the President, the jets would have been destroyed and the invasion would have been successful. Castro would have had no air force. The Brigade on the beach could have countered Castro’s attacks along the narrow approach causeways while its own substantial air force of hard-hitting B-26 aircraft operated from the airstrip the Brigade had already captured on the beach.
8 It was Allen Dulles himself who revealed that the U-2 had not been shot down as the Soviets and the rest of the world had believed. Although Dulles revealed this information in sworn testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, May 31, 1960, the same month in which the crash landing occurred, his testimony was not released until 1982 and generally has been ignored by the American press.
His revelation was staggering; however, no one has ever fully investigated the possibility that this flight, launched in direct violation of President Eisenhower’s order that there be no overflights before the summit conference, might have been ordered covertly by a small but powerful cabal that intended for it to fail and thereby to cause the disruption of the summit conference. Based upon a number of other strange events related to this particular flight, there is a strong possibility that this could be the case.
9 I worked in the same office with General Lansdale at that time. Those in the Office of Special Operations and the Office of the Secretary of Defense were certain, from what they had heard firsthand, that Lansdale would be named the next ambassador to Saigon.
10 The director of the Joint Staff was the senior permanently assigned officer in the then four-hundred-man office that supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Wheeler went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held for some six years.
11 I was the first chief of the Office of Special Operations and continued in that office until 1964, while Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer and, later, Gen. Maxwell Taylor were the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
12 One of the reasons Eglin Air Force Base was selected for this program was that a major CIA air facility had been established there a few years earlier and had become the worldwide center for CIA air-operation activities, excluding the U-2 program and those within the Air America proprietary airline infrastructure.
13 This program was said to have been developed under the leadership of George Ball in the Department of State.
Chapter 12: Building to the Final Confrontation
1 In addition to this memorandum, there was NSAM #56, “Evaluation of Paramilitary Requirements,” and NSAM #57, “Responsibility for Paramilitary Operations.” Each of these was signed and distributed in the normal manner by McGeorge Bundy for the President.
2 Carl von Clausewitz, 1780—1831. Prussian officer and military strategist.
3 The Joint Staff is the unit that supports the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time of which I am writing (1961) there were some four hundred people in this unit.
4 I was the pilot of a VIP aircraft used during these conferences by the British and Americans, and as pilot of this plane I carried the Chinese delegation from Cairo to Tehran for that meeting. Actually, Chiang Kai-shek and May Ling, who had been in Cairo, went to Tehran, and I believe they traveled on Roosevelt’s plane. I flew their staff of delegates only.
5 Although no relation to the previously mentioned Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, Gen. Richard G. Stilwell was a friend and close associate of Vinegar Joe’s son, Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, Jr., and a close associate of Lansdale.
6 It may be difficult, or at least unusual, for the inexperienced reader to see in such a structured report its real and far-reaching significance. I shall provide an important example:
Just before the election of John F. Kennedy, on November 8, 1960, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and I flew to Fort Gordon, Ga., to pick up elements of the Civil Affairs and Military Government curriculum, which was then used as the basis for drafting the new curriculum for the Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.
At that time, we were both assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. By late 1960, this Mutual Security Program report had filtered down from the Eisenhower White House, without comment but with the weight of apparent approval. As a top-level document of great potential, it then became fundamental to the development of the new Special Warfare curriculum as it was rewritten and merged with the material from Fort Gordon.
Because the Fort Bragg curriculum had the blessing of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, contained elements of a White House report, and was supported by the CIA, this whole layer of apparent authority became the Special Warfare and Special Air Warfare doctrine for dealing with Third World nations--particularly with Vietnam.
There were no specific approvals of all of the above. The author has no evidence or recollection that any of this was ever discussed with the Congress or with the Department of State. Yet, on the basis of these policy statements, evolved from the writings of Mao, among others, the U.S. Army had more or less defined a new Cold War role for military forces.
With this presentation the reader is getting a rare and unusual view of the inner workings of our government as it pertains to the development and utilization of the military in Cold War operations. This is exactly what is being done today in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa.
(Note for researchers: I have been able to acquire a copy of this report, “Training Under the Mutual Security Program,” May 15, 1959. It appears, complete, as Appendix 3 of my earlier book, The Secret Team.
Chapter 13: The Magic Box, Trigger of the Expanded War in Vietnam
1 This was run by the CIA-sponsored Saigon Military Mission, described in detail in earlier chapters. It was part of “Operation Brotherhood,” an organization managed by CIA-run Filipino leaders under the aegis of the International Junior Chamber of Commerce.
2 Intelligence gleaned from paid native informers always reported massive buildups everywhere. These native sources in intelligence never saw starvation-crazed refugees; they always saw what they were being paid to see. Every refugee area was another regiment of Vietcong. General Hunger was General Giap, and Communists were abroad in the land. After all, even the “intelligence source” was a shrewd businessman. He was a creation of the American CIA, and the CIA was running the war, with a checkbook, in 1960—61, as it had been since 1945.
Chapter 14: JFK Makes His Move to Control the CIA
1 Ike’s hopes for detente were crushed by the CIA’s U-2 spy-plane incident of May 1, 1960, as described earlier.
2 The reader should note the similarity of this stage of the process to that which the Reagan administration promoted on behalf of the Contras in Central America during the eighties.
3 For full details on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, see earlier chapters.
4 New York Times, April 25, 1966.
5 One of Robert F Kennedy’s sons is named Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.
6 OSS, the forerunner of the CIA .
7 This is a secret and secure means of direct communication. The chief agent in a country would have a direct line to CIA headquarters, bypassing every other channel of the U.S. government.
Chapter 15: The Erosion of National Sovereignty
1 Leonard C. Lewin, Report From Iron Mountain (New York: Dial Press, 1967). This book is not to be misunderstood. It is a novel; but its content is so close to the reality of those years that many readers insist that the “report” must be true. I have discussed this fully with the author. He assures me that the book is a novel and that he intended it to read that way in order to emphasize its serious content.
2 A recent euphemism for guerrilla warfare or counter insurgency operations.
3 Walter B. Wriston, Risk and Other Four-Letter Words (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
4 Philip P. Weiner, The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1973).
5 As defined in my 1973 book The Secret Team, Secret Intelligence Operations are “clandestine operations carried out to get deep-secret intelligence data.”
6 Sen. Leverett Saltonstall (R-Massa.).
Chapter 16: Government by Coup d’État
1 In what was a very accurate on-the-scene account of the murder of the President, an experienced Reuters correspondent wrote, “Three bursts of gunfire, apparently from automatic weapons, were heard.” This first news report by a seasoned combat journalist shows that those in and around Dealey Plaza heard numerous shots -- more than the three bullets reported by the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission.
2 Permitting the vice president to ride in the same procession with the President violated one hundred years of Secret Service policy. Why did this occur on that momentous day? Who directed these changes in standard procedures, and why?
3 As described in earlier chapters, this normally entails a series of orchestrated events that elevate a person, such as those mentioned, to a position where he is regarded as an extremely popular hero.
4 Less developed countries, or LDCs, is a term much used for these small, underdeveloped nations in the banking community.
5 This novel was published in 1967. Today it might have included the Strategic Defense Initiative “Star Wars” project as another boondoggle.
6 R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).
7 A military term referring to the number of years of effective use of an item of military hardware before it is replaced by a newer or updated model. The life of type of most items normally averages between ten and twenty years.
8 On several occasions in 1964, I spent a few hours alone with President Fernando Belaunde Terry of Peru discussing the subject of border patrol. Peru controls the entry and exit of almost 100 percent of its goods through the port of Callao, adjacent to Lima, and a special “free port” in the remote region east of the Andes, at Iquitos on the upper Amazon River.
Belaunde wanted to establish a network of border surveillance by the use of small, capable aircraft, the Helio Aircraft Corporation’s “Courier,” which had been designed by members of the MIT aeronautical engineering staff and purchased by the hundred by the CIA. This small plane could land, STOL (short takeoff and landing) fashion, on unprepared airstrips and even on mountainsides.
Belaunde told me that in conjunction with that type of modern border patrol he had repeatedly refused foreign aid projects for road-building because “all they would accomplish would be to facilitate the movement of the indigenous natives from their ancient communities to the jammed barriadas of Lima.”
With entry into Peru limited, for the most part, to these two ports and their airfields, it was possible for the government to control all import and export business to benefit the Belaunde governmental team, which included certain old and rich families with traditional and banking power.
9 Fuller, Critical Path.
Chapter 17: JFK’s Plan to End the Vietnam Warfare
1 Theodore Shanin, “Peasants and Peasant Societies,” in John Berger, “Historical Afterword,” Pig Earth (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
Chapter 18: Setting the Stage for the Death of JFK
1 Senator Gravel wrote these words in August 1971 for the introduction to The Pentagon Papers (Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1971). They were timely and applicable then. The reader cannot help but note that they are equally timely and applicable to the more recent Iranian “hostages for arms” controversy and even to Desert Storm.
Chapter 19: Visions of a Kennedy Dynasty
1 “New Frontier” was the domestic and foreign policy program of President Kennedy’s administration. It is taken from a slogan used by Kennedy in his acceptance speech in 1960. Edward C. Smith and Arnold C. Zurcher, Dictionary of American Politics (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968).
2 Special Judge Advocate John A. Bingham, The Trial of the Conspirators (Washington, D.C., 1865), cited in The Pope and the New Apocalypse (S. D. Mumford, 1986).
Chapter 20: LBJ Takes the Helm as the Course Is Reversed
1 From his excellent book Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978). This is a good source of “inside the family” information about certain aspects of the intervention in Vietnam and of the role played by the various participants.
2 Previous CIA station chief, Saigon.
3 At the time General Taylor issued these instructions to General Westmoreland, I was serving with the Joint Staff as chief of the Office of Special Operations in SACSA. I attended meetings at which General Taylor presided and was well aware of his brilliance and experience. His remarks to General Westmoreland cannot be taken lightly. For my work with the Joint Staff, I was awarded, by General Taylor, one of the first Joint Chiefs of Staff Commendation Medals ever issued.
4 During the summer of 1944, I had been ordered to fly from Cairo via Tehran over the Caspian Sea and then across southern Russian into the Ukraine to a point just west of Poltava. I saw firsthand the indescribable destruction of such cities as Rostov, and how the once-fertile Ukraine had been laid bare. Only the firebombed Tokyo had suffered more damage.