JFK (43 page)

Because all earlier U.S. Special Forces troops had been serving in South Vietnam under the operational control of the CIA, Gen. Maxwell Taylor had proposed in his letter to President Kennedy on June 13, 1961, that National Security Action Memoranda #55, #56, and #57 become the basis of a new order of things. Kennedy had agreed without delay, and by late 1961 he had installed General Taylor in the White House as his special military adviser.

Not long after that, Taylor and Rostow made their trip to Saigon and returned with their proposal to introduce U.S. “support troops” into Vietnam under the cover of a “flood relief” action. Kennedy approved of this modest recommendation, and a new era was begun—one based upon an even greater change in Washington.

Allen Dulles, Gen. C.P. Cabell, and Dick Bissell were out. Ed Lansdale’s star was in eclipse, and a new internal battle was under way in the murky halls of the windowless Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. The fight began with the establishment of the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities and the arrival of its boss, Maj. Gen. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak of the U.S. Marines.

Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the man to whom National Security Action Memorandum #55 had been addressed and delivered, made sure that all of the service chiefs had had an opportunity to read and study these unique presidential papers and then ordered them to be securely filed. Lemnitzer and his close friend Gen. David M. Shoup of the U.S. Marine Corps were traditional soldiers. They had never been “Cold Warriors” or Cold War enthusiasts. Nor were they proponents of an Asian ground war.

It bothered Lemnitzer not at all to observe that Kennedy had created the office of “military adviser to the President” and had placed Taylor in that office. By the end of 1962, General Lemnitzer was on his way to the NATO command in Europe, while Kennedy, Taylor, and all the others had become mired in the quicksands of Southeast Asia.

When President John F. Kennedy published National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28, 1961, “Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations,” he directed the Joint Chiefs to “present the military viewpoint in government councils.” This did not work. The U.S. military establishment was neither designed nor prepared to engage in peacetime covert operations, nor did it wish to be. As a result, this type of activity remained with the CIA by default.

The CIA, however, is no more prepared to wage clandestine warfare than is the military establishment, except for one point: The CIA is always able to incite an incident sufficient to require U.S. action and involvement. The CIA can do this because it has, or is able to create, intelligence assets. The CIA is the first agency of the government to make contact with “rebel” or “insurgent” parties.

CIA spooks prowl the bars and meeting places of other countries in search of just such information. One may overhear, or participate in, a conversation with some natives who are making derogatory remarks about the government in power, as Contra leaders did in the case of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega.

The agent races to his “back-channel” communication system,
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reports directly to his boss in CIA headquarters, and then is urged to obtain more information and to broaden his sources; this is why the agent was sent there in the first place. So he gets more information, even if he has to encourage or generate it. This leads to the beginning of a clandestine operation. It is a reaction process, not a planned affair.

At this point, we recall National Security Action Memorandum #57, “Responsibility for Paramilitary Operations,” wherein it states: “A paramilitary operation. . . may be undertaken in support of an existing government friendly to the United States [as in the case of El Salvador] or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us,” as in Nicaragua.

Those lines were written by Gen. Maxwell Taylor in his post-Bay of Pigs investigation letter to President Kennedy on June 13, 1961. They have always been the doctrine of the CIA and its close allies in the Army Special Warfare program.

With few if any changes, they were also the basis of the doctrine being promulgated by Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, the key policy official for plans regarding paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.

In the same memorandum, there is an important but little-noticed definition that plays directly into the hands of the CIA, even though Kennedy was attempting to refocus this type of activity onto the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said, “Small operations will often fall completely within the normal capability of one agency; the large ones may affect State, Defense, CIA, USIA [United States Information Agency], and possibly other departments and agencies.” What this says and what it means are clear enough. How it is applied becomes the problem.

All clandestine operations begin “small.” Thus, the proposed operation, when presented to the National Security Council for a decision, was sent to the CIA, because the operation was seen to be “small.” But no operation can remain “small” once the CIA begins to pour into the fray tens of millions of dollars and the tremendous military assets of the United States.

Over the years, the CIA has developed an efficient system of obtaining military equipment, manpower, overseas base facilities, and all the rest, ostensibly on a reimbursable basis, in order to carry out covert activities. The reimbursement is made by transferring hidden CIA funds in the Department of Defense accounts to DOD, thereby repaying all “out-of-pocket” expenses of the military. This complex but effective system has been in effect since 1949. For example, in Indonesia in 1958, the CIA was able, quite easily, to support a rebel force of more than forty thousand troops by using U.S. military assets. So what is “small”? And if it is not “small,” if it has got large enough to be transferred to the Department of Defense, how will that be done? How can anyone rescue the situation after it has got out of hand?

At what point should U.S. military forces be prepared, for example, to enter into paramilitary action in Nicaragua or Africa? It is an old military axiom that “as soon as the blood of the first soldier is shed on foreign soil the nation is at war.” The activities in Nicaragua were “small” when they began after the ouster of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The CIA mined a harbor. It supported antigovernment Contra rebels. It spent $20 million for related purposes. Before long, it had spent another $27 million and eventually went on to spend more than $100 million.

Inevitably, this action in Nicaragua would cross the line from “small” to “large.” Inevitably, American blood would be shed, and inevitably regular military forces would be called in to bail the Contras out, just as they were called into Vietnam in 1965 after the CIA and the OSS had worked there for two decades to escalate that conflict.

There are two enormous problems with this method of handling such activities:

1. The action initiated by the CIA is a reaction to some minor and, perhaps, misleading event, and
   
2. It is based upon a totally false definition of the problem.
   

“Reaction,” by definition, implies the lack of a plan and of an objective. This was the single greatest strategic failure of the Vietnam conflict. The United States had no reasonable military objective; it simply reacted to the situation it found there.

A false definition of the problem is the greatest failing of American administrations and explains why such adventures are rarely, if ever, successful and productive. Any military activity instigated as no more than a reaction to some minor event lacks the element of strategic planning that is needed to attain an objective.

The Third World or less-developed countries were poorly defined. Despite decades of propaganda that would have had us believe they lived in either the “Communist” or “pro-West” sphere, they were not dedicated members of the bipolar “Us or Them” political scheme.

The distinguishing feature of these smaller countries is that they are not broad-range manufacturers or producers. They do not make typewriters, radios or televisions, coffeepots, fabric, automobiles and trucks, etc. Their biggest business, as a nation, is the import-export business. Therefore, much of their national revenue is derived from customs fees, and much of their private wealth is derived from individual franchises for Coca-Cola, Ford automobiles, Singer sewing machines, and so forth. They are totally dependent upon such imports and exports.

In such an economy, the ins, regardless of politics, control these lucrative franchises, and the outs do not. This creates friction. It is based on pure economics and greed and has nothing to do with communism or capitalism.

Therefore, if the ins solicit franchises from businesses in the United States, they are called friendly and pro-Western. If they turn to other sources, they are designated the enemy. If they are the enemy, we have labeled them Communists.

The leaders of the Contras, who used to serve Somoza in Nicaragua, wanted their valuable U.S. franchises back. For this they were willing to kill. For this the CIA helped them kill. The CIA supported them because it supports U.S. business.

This may be an oversimplification, but only to a degree. The basic motivations are always the same. Money lies at the root—in the scenario above, the enormous amounts spent on military matériel for the Contras and for the follow-on U.S. troops provided more than adequate incentive for those who intended to make war in Nicaragua.

In Vietnam the money spent amounted to more than $220 billion. This is why an in-depth recapitulation of the Vietnam era is important in shedding light on the events of today. We have seen it all before. And we have had to pay for it all before, not only with dollars, but with the lives of 58,000 Americans who never returned from that tragic conflict.

IN HIS NOVEL
Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace,
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Leonard Lewin writes: “War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society,” and adds, “War is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state.”

Lewin has told me his book is a novel and that he had a serious message to deliver to the public. I was assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1961, at the time Thomas Gates left the office and Robert McNamara arrived. Along with McNamara came a group of dedicated and intelligent men who, for the most part, were not highly experienced in the military and such things as Grand Strategy and the utilization of modern military forces and modern weaponry. Despite this, as I got to know them better—men like Ed Katzenbach, who had been dean at Princeton—we would take part in luncheon discussions that sounded much like Lewin’s writing. This is what was said in the halls of the Pentagon. What Lewin wrote is true to life, and we all would do well to heed his words.

Novel or not, these were serious words that weighed heavily on the causes of the escalation of warfare in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s. They represent the classic views of a cabal of leaders in our society who fail to see any reason other than war for the existence of man. The very fact that certain select individuals of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were said, by Lewin, to be thinking such thoughts in the face of the reality of the hydrogen bomb shows that this temporal world of ours has been changing faster than its leaders and the public can accommodate.

And since then, with the lessons of such things as the overt invasion of Grenada, the attack on Libya, the Contra attempt to overthrow the Ortega government of Nicaragua, the use of U.S. military forces to augment the national police of Bolivia, American military aid to the rebels in Afghanistan, the attack on Panama, the “Desert Storm” fighting against Iraq, and the recent creation of a regular U.S. Special Warfare Force for the pursuit of “low-intensity conflict”
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all over the world, respect for the concept of national sovereignty has fallen to a dangerous low in the world family of nations. This is a revolutionary development.

Knowledgeable grand strategists of the power elite realize today that there cannot be a true, all-out war in a world society equipped with thousands of hydrogen bombs. But Grand Strategy requires that warfare be waged for the purpose of attaining the highest national objective—Victory. No nation can go to war knowing full well that the prosecution of that war with hydrogen bombs will inevitably lead to the elimination of all mankind and to the destruction of Earth as a living system. These strategists have been looking for an alternative. Perhaps Chairman Mao was correct in his forecast: “No matter how long this war is going to last, there is no doubt that it is approaching the last conflict in history.”