JFK (41 page)

By eight-ten the room was almost full. Everyone there had a clearance that surpassed “top secret”; all were admitted on a “need to know” basis. Three of the Joint Chiefs were there. The usual Office of the Secretary of Defense contingent was there. Everything pointed to a full account of the action at Thuc Dho. It should be recalled that as of that moment in December 1960, only one month after the election of John F Kennedy, the troubles in Vietnam were much less serious than they would become later, and all this attention was something special at the time.

For most of those present, part of this great drama was impressing and winning over the new defense secretary and, through him, capturing the eye of the new administration. The secretary designate, Robert S. McNamara, was particularly interested in the “reported” Vietcong battalion or regiment. If, as reported by the captive villagers, the battalion had fled into the woods, and if, as reported by the Green Beret (CIA) major, the battalion was now surrounded in the woods by the elite South Vietnamese Special Forces troops, then why wasn’t the Vietcong battalion being flushed out, then annihilated or captured?

Discussion of this question was limited somewhat by the fact that the army briefing officer had been ordered to stick to his notes. Then a general, in the second row behind his army chief of staff, rose to report that he had a message, just in from Saigon, saying that the elusive Vietcong battalion had slipped through the South Vietnamese cordon and that, according to army spotter-plane forward observers, there was no one in the woods. As he completed this report, he glanced at the CIA representatives in the audience.

The secretary designate grasped the significance of what had been said and fired another question at the briefing officer and at the room in general. “If we can create the capability to go to the aid of a beleaguered village, as we have done at Thuc Dho, but then having done this we find the village vacant and the enemy fled, how can we ever expect to win the war? We must destroy the enemy.”

An acorn had been planted, and a vast oak grew. Immediately one of the CIA men half-raised a hand, slid his feet out from under his chair, and prepared to rise. He was not the usual prebrief attendee; he was the chief of the supersecret Far East branch himself, an old Asia hand.

“Sir,” he said, “that is a most searching question. It gets to the root of our problem. We have been trying to control a Communist-inspired war of national liberation in South Vietnam that has spread out of control throughout the land. Diem’s forces are much too green. They do not like war, even for their own homeland. And we who have put so much effort into Laos, Thailand, and South Vietnam feel that the advisory role of the U.S. military forces does not go far enough. The Strategic Hamlets and the Village Self-Defense Forces are not enough.

“You have seen the example of Thuc Dho. Fortunately, the village had been prepared by one of our agents and they had a transmitter that linked them to the Village Self-Defense Network. As a result we were able to strike back at once. But this is too little. No network is any good if it is full of holes. We must organize every hamlet, every village, every tribe. Then this Communist-supported enemy can be driven from this peaceful country and these little people can be left to choose their own destiny in peace.”

The secretary designate bought it.

By January 1961, an “Advanced Counterinsurgency Course,” designed specifically to train thousands of Green Berets for Vietnam, had been hastily lifted from the Civil Affairs and Military Government School at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and put at Fort Bragg. One of the last official acts of the outgoing deputy secretary of defense, James Douglas, was to visit Fort Bragg to bless this new school.

But the corner had been turned. Quietly and efficiently, the orders went out. One of the key items was the radio transmitter. The one at Thuc Dho had been a test unit. Within weeks a special order for thousands of these transmitters had been placed with the manufacturer and given the highest priority. Shortly after the inauguration of President John F Kennedy, these transmitters were being bolted to posts in village after village to augment and facilitate the Strategic Hamlet campaign.

Not too many months later, the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, made his first visit to South Vietnam. Thuc Dho was now a model. By the time the secretary saw it, the villagers, the South Vietnamese Special Forces elite troops, and the American Green Berets had worn paths through the area rehearsing and reenacting the famous attack for visiting dignitaries.

The once-lush hills had been dug up by bombs, seared by napalm, defoliated by chemical genocide. But the center of interest was always the black plastic box with the red eye, the famous Magic Box number 1052, the trigger of the expanded war in Vietnam.

NOTE: There were many such villages as described in this story. Thuc Dho is a name created to represent a typical one. The story was compiled from the author’s personal trips to Vietnam and liaison with the CIA between 1955 and 1964.

AS A MEMBER of the U.S. House and Senate, John F. Kennedy was an experienced politician. As the son of the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s during the days just before the start of World War II, he was made privy to the ways of foreign policy and to the world of big business. He was the son of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America. But as the newly elected President of the United States, he discovered that he had to start all over again. The stakes in the game played at the White House were much higher and more complex than those in any of his previous endeavors, and the flow of events during the closing months of the Eisenhower era had not made his task any easier.

Eisenhower’s repeated illnesses, perhaps his age, and particularly the heartache he suffered as a result of the collapse of his dream of a meaningful “Crusade for Peace”
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created a “lame duck” period of deeper than usual dimensions. A counterinsurgency plan for Indochina had been set in motion, and the buildup of the army’s Special Warfare program at Fort Bragg had gotten under way.

On the big business side, proponents of the U.S. Air Force’s “Everest” Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) aircraft development project were rushing plans to have that selection made before the pro-business Eisenhower team left Washington. In 1960, the TFX was visualized as the biggest single aircraft procurement order ever placed—running as high as $6 billion.

At the same time, life seemed relatively quiet in Vietnam as the principal skirmishes, both military and political, took place in nearby Laos. All of these pent-up pressure points exploded after Kennedy’s inauguration and proceeded to overwhelm his new and relatively inexperienced administration.

Barely one week after taking office, Kennedy received a personal report from Col. Edward G. Lansdale, the CIA’s longtime and most important Southeast Asia agent, regarding his recent trip to Saigon. Lansdale also offered a second briefing on the counterinsurgency plan for Indochina. Later, Kennedy approved the counterinsurgency plan, which expanded South Vietnamese forces at a rather leisurely pace.

This plan provided South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem with the financial support for a twenty-thousand increase in his army (then standing at one-hundred fifty-thousand men) as well as support for his counterguerrilla force, then known as the Civil Guard.
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Between January and May 1961, the new President was kept busy with, among other things, the anti-Castro project, which had grown in the hands of CIA opportunists from a cycle of sporadic para-drop raids on Cuba to a full-blown, over-the-beach invasion plan. According to the invasion plan approved by President Kennedy, Castro would have had no combat aircraft remaining by dawn on the morning of the invasion.

However, a key bomber strike that was supposed to destroy the last three aircraft on the ground was called off. This strike had been approved by President Kennedy only the afternoon before the landing. The delay of this mission was found by the Cuban Study Group to be the primary cause of the failure of the invasion.
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Deeply angered by this CIA disaster, Kennedy set up a unique Cuban Study Group to discover what had happened to cause the failure and to make plans for the future actions of his administration in the Cold War arena. This group left its mark on the nascent Kennedy administration. During its tenure, Jack and Bobby Kennedy made up their minds that Allen Dulles, along with other top-level CIA staff, must go.
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As a result of the study-group experience, Bobby Kennedy, a military neophyte, became enchanted with the experienced, educated, and sophisticated Gen. Maxwell Taylor.
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Each evening after returning from the Pentagon, where he had witnessed General Taylor’s masterful control of the investigation of the Bay of Pigs operation and his development of paramilitary plans, Bobby Kennedy would discuss all of that information, augmented by Taylor’s ideas of Army Special Warfare, with his brother and other close advisers.

Concurrently, the President had asked Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, “to work up a program for saving Vietnam.” Lansdale became executive director of Gilpatric’s Vietnam task force and assumed the role of governmentwide coordinator and manager of the concept of counterinsurgency.

This development only seemed fitting, since it was Lansdale, his friend Gen. Richard Stilwell, and their close army and CIA associates who had done so much to launch this new Cold War military doctrine during the Eisenhower period (much of it as we have seen, derived from elements of the teachings of Chairman Mao Tse-tung).

In his own autobiography,
In The Midst of Wars
, Ed Lansdale writes about his own wealth of knowledge and depth of experience with the works and teachings of Mao Tse-tung:

You will recall the many excerpts from the special White House committee report of May 1959 entitled “Training Under the Mutual Security Program” that are included in chapter 12. That report was written by General Lansdale and General Stilwell. They cited references to the teachings of Chairman Mao and recommended them as a pattern for the new armies they visualized “in the Third World.” In this connection, one must keep in mind that when one teaches such policy for another country, he is likely to be convinced that it would work and do well in his own country also. This is the great lesson of our review of this report and of the reminder how important the Communist teaching of Mao Tse-tung has become in American military doctrine and training. It could be used here.

Because a major objective of this book is to analyze the events that brought about the murder of John F. Kennedy and the seizure of power in this country at that time, it may be well to note that in the eight-page index of Lansdale’s book there are six references to Mao Tse-tung—and not one single mention of John F. Kennedy.

By May 3, 1961, the extremely flexible Kennedy administration had changed horses in midstream. The Gilpatric-Lansdale draft for Vietnam of late April was shelved, and a newer State Department draft of May 3 (presumably written by George Ball) was approved by the President. Lansdale’s Defense Department recommendations were eliminated completely, and Fritz Nolting, a man with close CIA ties (if not himself actually a full-fledged CIA agent), had become ambassador to Saigon. Lansdale’s star had been eclipsed, and the Dulles-Cabell-Bissell team was fading fast as Gen. Maxwell Taylor became man of the hour in the Kennedys’ eyes.

By the end of May 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was in Saigon to conduct a fact-finding mission and to deliver a letter from President Kennedy to Ngo Dinh Diem. Johnson had been authorized to raise the matter of stationing U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Diem did not want them at that time; the Diem government had other things on its mind.