Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.