JFK (55 page)

Then, from 1955 through 1963, I was in the Pentagon. I served as chief of special operations for the U.S. Air Force for five years, providing air force support of the clandestine operations of the CIA. I was assigned to the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the next two years, and then I was directed to create the Special Operations Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to bring that military support work under the guidance of a single “focal point” office. I headed that office until 1964, when I retired after the death of President Kennedy.

By the fall of 1963, I knew perhaps as much as anyone about the inner workings of this world of special operations. I had written the formal directives on the subject that were used officially by the U.S. Air Force and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for all military services.

Therefore, it seemed strange when I was approached after I had come back from a week spent reading intelligence papers in Admiral Felt’s headquarters in Hawaii, during September 1963, and informed that I had been selected to be the military escort officer for a group of VIP civilian guests that had been invited to visit the naval station in Antarctica and the South Pole facility at McMurdo Sound. This group was scheduled to leave on November 10, 1963, and to return by the end of the month.

Although this trip had absolutely nothing to do with my previous nine years of work, except that I had supported CIA activity in Antarctica over the years, I appreciated the invitation and looked forward to the trip as a “paid vacation.”

After we went to the South Pole and returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, a member of the VIP party, a congressman, asked me if I would like to go with him on a two-day side trip to the beautiful New Zealand Alps and to the Hermitage Chalet at the foot of Mount Cook, the highest mountain in the country. I said yes.

On the first morning of our visit I was about to have breakfast in a dining room of rare beauty, offering as it did a dazzling view of Mount Cook and the nearby range. I had secured a table for the two of us and had ordered coffee. The public-address announcer had been reading off the list of passengers to be taken to the top of Mount Cook by small aircraft for the ski ride back down when he broke off his announcements to say: “Ladies and gentlemen, the BBC have announced that President Kennedy has been shot. . . dead. . . in Dallas.”

That is how I learned of the assassination of the President and of the start of the strange events surrounding that murder and the takeover of our government as a result of that brazen act.

I have always wondered, deep in my own heart, whether that strange invitation that removed me so far from Washington and from the center of all things clandestine that I knew so well might have been connected to the events that followed. Were there things that I knew, or would have discovered, that made it wise to have me far from Washington, along with others, such as the Kennedy cabinet, who were in midair over the Pacific Ocean en route to Japan, far from the scene?

I do not know the answer to that question, although many of the things that I have observed and learned from that time have led me to surmise that such a question might be well founded. After all, I knew that type of work very well. I had worked on presidential protection and knew the great extent to which one goes to ensure the safety of the chief executive. Despite all this, established procedures were ignored on the President’s trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It seems that those who planned the murder of the President knew the inner workings of the government very well. This fact is made evident not so much by the skill with which the murder of the President was undertaken as by the masterful cover-up program that has continued since November 22, 1963, and that terrible hour in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza when the warfare in Indochina moved from a low-intensity conflict, as seen by President Kennedy, to a major operation—a major war—in the hands of the Johnson administration.

BY NOVEMBER 1963, the Kennedy administration had begun to weave subtle changes into the fabric of American life and politics. John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic U.S. President, had been elected to office in November 1960 over the incumbent vice president, Richard M. Nixon, by the narrowest margin in history. As his third year in office drew to a close, Kennedy sensed that his popularity had increased and that his chances for reelection in 1964 were good.

He had not left the possibility of his reelection to fate. From the beginning of his presidency, he had poured billions of Defense Department contract dollars into a savvy plan that benefited the voting districts of the country that were most important to him. He was skillfully changing the method of assigning military contracts, much to the alarm of the powerful arms industry.

By 1963, Kennedy was telling confidants what some of his actions would be following his reelection. One of his memorable statements was that he planned to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. Another was that he would end American military participation in the conflict in Indochina.

He was pragmatic enough to know that once he was reelected, he could do things more effectively than he could with the uncertainties of the election process ahead of him. He sensed the nation’s growing discontent with the undercover warfare in Indochina. He saw this discontent as part of a pattern of rebellion against the Cold War. Furthermore, as the son of the former American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in London, President Kennedy’s interests and instincts were always slanted more toward Europe than to the lands of the Pacific Basin. This, too, created friction among the strong and growing “Pacific Rim” interests of the financial and industrial world.

Kennedy understood the will of the people. He was building an administration designed to respond to that will. Not since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt had a President so moved a nation—and the world, for his popularity didn’t end at the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific. He was recognized, admired, and loved as few leaders have been. However, as his popularity increased and as his reforms began to take root and grow, other forces came into play. Powerful interest groups began to join in a cabal against the young American President.

On November 22, 1963, less than a year before his probable reelection to four more years as President, John F. Kennedy was struck down. From all indications, he was killed by a team of gunmen hired as part of a detailed plot to terminate the Kennedy political initiatives—which had the appearance of establishing a political dynasty—and to direct the powers of the presidency back into Cold War activities and into the hands of more amenable “leaders.” There can be no doubts: The Kennedy murder was the result of a coup d’état brought about by a professional team equally skilled in the field of “cover story” and deception activities as it was in murder. We may recall that Lyndon Johnson said, in 1973, “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” (or, as they call them in the CIA, “Mechanics”).

What were the circumstances that led to such drastic action?

Kennedy’s plans for reelection were based in large measure on the allocation of billions of Defense Department dollars available in the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) construction program. This money was going to states and counties that had had the closest balloting during the 1960 election. The $6.5 billion TFX budget made it the largest government contract ever put together in peacetime.

In the process of divvying up the funds, Kennedy had made it clear to the gnomes of the military-industrial complex that he was in control and that they were not. This raised the pressure for the ultimate confrontation between the President and a cabal of extremely powerful financial and industrial groups.

During the Kennedy years, people within the government and their close associates in academia and industry discussed frequently and quite seriously many of the major questions phrased by Leonard Lewin in
Report From Iron Mountain
. I had been assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense before the Kennedy election and was there when the McNamara team of “Whiz Kids” arrived. Never before had so many brilliant young civilians with so many Ph.D.s worked in that office. It was out of the mouths of this group that I heard so frequently and precisely the ideas that Lewin recounts in his “novel.” A brief sampling will show these words’ power on the thinking of that era:

There is no hard evidence that this political philosophy was that of President Kennedy or of senior members of his administration. Indeed, the Kennedy administration had already undertaken several courses of action that showed a clear intention to slow the forward thrust of the Cold War. One of these, of course, was spelled out in NSAM #263, which announced plans for the Vietnamization of the war in Indochina and the scheduled, early withdrawal of all American personnel.

It appeared to many that the process of accommodation that Khrushchev had initiated with Eisenhower, which had failed because of the U-2 affair, had actually begun to take root with President Kennedy. There were other major shifts in direction attributable to President Kennedy as his administration matured in office. The U.S. space program was an example.

As early as May 25, 1961, Kennedy had made a speech stating that a goal of this country was to land a man on the moon “before the decade is out.” He had declared that one of the objectives of Project Apollo was to beat the Russians. He was talking about a plan that had been conceived during the last years of the Eisenhower administration to orbit satellites and to “beat the Russians in the space race.” A 1958 study by the Rand Corporation had forecast that the United States would land a man on the moon.

In 1958, NASA employed nine thousand people; in 1963 that number reached thirty thousand. Project Apollo was projected to cost $40 billion. Then, in a surprising turnabout, President Kennedy appeared before the United Nations on September 20, 1963, and offered to call off the moon race in favor of cooperation in space exploration with the Soviets.

News of this offer was received with horror in certain powerful circles. Clare Booth Luce, wife of Henry Luce (founder of the Time-Life Corporation) and herself highly influential in the Republican party, called this “a major New Frontier
¹
political blunder and economic Frankenstein. ”

With Kennedy’s announcement that he was getting Americans out of Vietnam, he confirmed that he was moving away from the pattern of Cold War confrontation in favor of detente. He asked Congress to cut the defense budget. Major programs were being phased out. As a result, pressure from several fronts began to build against the young President. The pressure came from those most affected by cuts in the military budget, in the NASA space program, and in the enormous potential cost—and profit—of the Vietnam War.

Kennedy’s plans would mean an end to the warfare in Indochina, which the United States had been supporting for nearly two decades. This would mean the end to some very big business plans, as the following anecdote will illustrate.

It was reported in an earlier chapter that the First National Bank of Boston had sent William F. Thompson, a vice president, to my office in the Pentagon in 1959, presumably after discussions with CIA officials, to explore “the future of the utilization of the helicopter in [clandestine] military operations” that had been taking place in Indochina up to 1959.

A client of that bank was Textron Inc. The bank had suggested to Textron officials that the acquisition of the near-bankrupt Bell Aircraft Company, and particularly its helicopter division, might be a good move. What the bank and Textron needed to determine was the extent of use of helicopters by the military and by the CIA then and the potential for their future in Indochina.