Article 1951 of misc.activism.progressive:
From: dave@ratmandu.corp.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: The Saigon Solution, Part 10: source material for the "JFK" film
Message-ID: <1991Dec24.195508.23193@pencil.cs.missouri.edu>
Date: 24 Dec 91 19:55:08 GMT
Sender: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: PACH
Lines: 743
Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Subject: The Saigon Solution, Part 10: source material for the "JFK" film
Keywords: Part X (of 20) in a Series on the CIA and the Vietnam Era
Lines: 743
The "JFK" movie compresses a lot of information into 3 hours, 8
minutes. The movie itself weighed in at 6 hours. A lot of cutting
had to be done to make the thing commerically manageable. Although
I was disappointed in the manner in which some aspects were portrayed
or left-out, I was very pleased to see how much important factual
info *was* included. Through Fletcher Prouty, I have known of this
movie-in-the-making for some time. Initially he was hired by Oliver
Stone to be a consultant for the film. It was only later, as he was
reviewing a portion of the script, that he recognized his own
"voice"/words being spoken by one of the actors (Donald Sutherland).
It turns out Oliver Stone had in fact read the articles Fletcher had
written from 1985 to 1987 on the CIA and the Vietnam era, starting in
1945 and moving up to the assassination of President Kennedy. These
articles are described by Fletcher as " A more or less personal
account of the origins and development of the Vietnam War from the
involvement, in 1945, of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to
the Central Intelligence Agency's operational role, from 1954 to
1965, when the U.S. Armed Forces under their own combat commanders
arrived."
In a previous post of Part 11 in this series, I included a description
of Fletcher Prouty's (Colonel, USAF (ret'd)) duties in the Pentagon
from 1955 to 1963 as a briefing officer and as the Focal Point Officer
for military logistical support of CIA covert operations world-wide,
first for the Air Force (1955-1961) and then for all four branches of
the military (1961-1963). The movie itself covers a wide range of
information that has come to light through the years by the plodding
methodical efforts of independent investigators and researchers.
It can get pretty thick. Perhaps these articles will be of use to
you in understanding what vantage point Mr. Prouty brings to this
massive subject.
excerpts from Part 10:
The author had an office a few doors down the hall from this new
suite and he visited them frequently to join its chief, Ron Linton,
and other McNamara "whiz kids" for lunch. He noticed that the
walls of this suite of offices were lined with maps of the United
States showing all the states and counties. They were political
maps. In short order, at Goldberg's suggestion, one set of those
maps was colored to show every county that Kennedy had carried in
1960, and another color for every county that went to Nixon. . . .
Gilpatric, a New York banker who was McNamara's deputy, was sent
out to make an important speech to a bankers' convention on April
9, 1963.
His title, "The Impact of the Changing Defense Program on the
United States Economy," was actually more pertinent than his
audience expected. He spoke about the TFX decision to bankers and
of course to the news media at a time when this was a white-hot
subject.
In an early paragraph he exposed the extent of his subject. The
new Kennedy policy was a blockbuster. Gilpatric stated--and when
he did, windows rattled in defense installations all over the
world--"I have not the slightest doubt that our economy could
adjust to a decline in defense spending." . . .
To the Kennedy circle, the TFX, the Skybolt, the Dyna-Soar, the
atomic-powered aircraft and all the rest that had fallen into their
laps with the election were just what Kennedy, Goldberg and
McNamara took them to be. They were devices that could be used to
direct money into political districts that needed it for their own
benefit, and to assure the election of a Kennedy for years to come.
This is why Gilpatric made the speech he did to the assembled
bankers and this is why McNamara said that the day had passed when
the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems.
The services and the great industries for whom the military
establishment existed were absolutely staggered by all this. They
had never encountered such a serious challenge. The one-two
combination of punches they had suffered had them on the ropes. On
January 17, 1961, they had heard Dwight Eisenhower, in a farewell
address to the nation, urge vigilance regarding the dangers to
liberty implicit in a vast military establishment and caution
against the power of the military-industrial complex.
Now they had a president who was not just talking about that
danger, but was taking their dollars away to use them as he chose.
This was the enormous significance of that TFX decision.
the following appeared in the May 1986 issue of "Freedom" magazine.
[warning!--"Freedom" is published by the church of scientology.
people unable to decide for themselves whether such a source
might irrevocably corrupt their own capacity for self-reflective
independent thought/critical thinking, shud probably avoid
reading *anything* that might have been published in/by such a
magazine. those capable of forming their own opinions should
check out this (and the other 19 parts in the series)
fascinating and illuminating article by a man who worked in
the belly of the beast.]
_________________________________________________________________________
1000 DAYS TO DALLAS
Part X in a Series on the CIA and the Vietnam Era
by L. Fletcher Prouty
Reprinted with permission of the author
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been a
never-ending puzzle for researchers and assassination buffs. They
can tell you the name of the street where Lee Harvey Oswald lived
while he worked in Minsk in the Soviet Union, or the precise weight
loss of the so-called Magic Bullet which the Warren Commission says
passed through both President Kennedy and Texas Governor John
Connally before it mysteriously came to rest among the sheets on a
stretcher in Parkland Hospital.
This research has become such a mad game that few ever think of
basic facts and causes. Who ordered the murder of President
Kennedy? Why was it done and for whose benefit? Who manages and
perpetuates the always-active cover-up, even in 1986?
On the other side of the coin, those who have created the
entrancing cover-story scenario have provided so many precious
"golden apples" that many researchers have taken the lure and
stopped to examine every one of them. As an example, it is quite
clear from the evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill
President Kennedy. Then why study Oswald and that whole matter to
absurdity? Such actions are an utter waste of time.
The murder of President Kennedy required the simultaneous
existence of three fundamental factors: a) the decision and the
power to do it; b) the professional mercenaries or "mechanics" to
carry it off as a team effort; and c) the application and
maintenance of the cover-story scenario. The first two were
relatively simple. The third, and most difficult of all to create
and to manipulate, is by far the most important. It is this third
factor that reveals the nature of the top echelon involved, and the
power and skillful determination of the plotters who benefited by
gaining control of the presidency.
After all, they were able to control a commission created by a
president and headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
They obtained the written endorsement of two men who later became
presidents: Ford and Nixon. They have controlled the media and
congressional activity to the extent that the assassination has
never been investigated adequately. And they have controlled the
judicial system of the state of Texas where a trial for the murder
of President Kennedy must, by law, be convened. The book is never
closed on murder.
In the final analysis: why was Kennedy killed? What brought
about the pressures that made murder of the president essential to
someone, no matter what it cost? This article probes the subject
within the scope of the overall parameters of this series.
On November 8, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy was elected
president of the United States of America by a margin of 112,000
votes--a one-half vote per precinct edge, the slimmest margin for
high office since 1884.
Just over 1,000 days later, President Kennedy was shot dead in
Dallas by the closely coordinated rifle fire of a team of hired
guns. Pressures that had built during the election had become even
greater during those intervening three years. Someone else wanted
to control the office of the president and wanted it bad enough to
kill, and to put up with the eternal burden of maintaining the
coverstory scenario that said one lone gunman, from a sixth floor
window of the Texas School Book Depository building, did it with
three shots from an old, Italian-made rifle with a telescopic
sight. To maintain that cover story takes real power; and those
responsible have maintained it.
It is easy to assassinate a president; there are ways to beat
the defenses. After all, on November 22, 1963, when JFK died, the
Secret Service did not own a single armored automobile for the
protection of the president. The FBI owned four of them, but the
Secret Service had never asked for one.
The actual killing of the president is relatively simple, but
covering up the murder to shield the gunmen and those who hired
them, arranging for their safe and undetected removal from the
scene, creating a patsy to take the blame, releasing a cover-story
scenario from those first moments and keeping it intact for the
next several generations takes a cabal with the power and longevity
of a great machine. The deft way it has been orchestrated reveals
the skill of the plotters, and indicates those responsible included
top-level government officials. What created this murderous cabal?
What were the enormous conflicts that brought about the murder of a
young and extremely popular president?
There can be only one reason to form a cabal for that single
purpose. That reason was to control the power of the presidency.
In raising the age-old question, "cui bono?"--who benefits?--we
must examine the circumstances that enveloped the days of the
Kennedy administration.
The mystery of the president's assassination was supposed to
have been resolved by the commission established by the new
president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, on November 29, 1963, one week
after the death of JFK.
On that troubled day, LBJ called his longtime friend and
confidant, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, to the White House
for a long, heart-to-heart discussion. LBJ and Hoover had lived
across the street from each other in Washington, D.C., for 19
years. Hoover had been a frequent visitor to the Johnson ranch on
the banks of the Pedernales River in Texas. They were the type of
friends who got along by necessity. They needed each other. They
understood each other. They had been through fire together. They
knew where many bodies were buried in the corridors of power.
On this day, LBJ sorely needed the ear and the advice of his old
comrade. A record of this meeting is contained in a memorandum
written and signed by Hoover on the day of the meeting, November
29, 1963. As Hoover reported, Johnson asked him if he had heard of
the group he proposed to put together "to study my [Hoover's]
report" on the JFK murder. Hoover had responded in the negative.
Johnson said he hoped the "study" could get by "just with my
[Hoover's] file and my [Hoover's] report. "
Then Johnson asked Hoover what he thought of the proposed
members of the group. He listed the names: Allen Dulles, John
McCloy, General Lauris Norstad, U.S. Congressmen Hale Boggs and
Gerald Ford, and Senators Richard Russell and Sherman Cooper. "He
[Johnson] would not want [Senator] Jacob K. Javits" for reasons not
explained.
President Johnson did not discuss with Hoover the name of the
man he wanted to head the group, the chief justice of the Supreme
Court, Earl Warren; and for some reason, General Norstad was
omitted from the final commission list.
Following this meeting with Hoover, President Johnson, by
Executive Order Number 11130 dated November 29, 1963, "created a
commission to investigate the assassination on November 22, 1963,
of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United
States. The president directed this commission to evaluate all
facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the
subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its
findings and conclusions to him."[1]
From the very first day of the creation of the Warren
Commission, it had before it the inference that the alleged
assassin was the man Jack Ruby had killed in Dallas while he was
being moved from one jail to another. The commission may have
begun its investigation with the FBI "study . . . and its files and
report," but by the time it published its own 26-volume report, in
September 1964, it had been carried away by the entrancing cover
story designed by the power cabal.
That top-echelon commission ought to have had the full power to
determine how JFK was killed, who did it, and why. That select
group failed miserably to perform its important task and in so
doing bowed down before the ominous power of the very cabal that
had arranged for the murder of JFK.
The first thing the Warren Commission ought to have done was to
demand that a trial for the murder of JFK be held in Texas. The
fact that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald was dead was no barrier to
the legal requirement of a trial. Oswald did not kill JFK. He was
the patsy of the cover-story scenario. The Warren Commission ought
to have been competent enough to understand that. Instead, the
members of the commission were the victims of great pressure
brought to bear by those orchestrating the cover-up.
This was the true nature of those thousand days from November 8,
1960, to November 22, 1963. Some of the elements of the Kennedy
era--remembered by many as the Days of Camelot--will be explored
below.
It all began with the romantic election. Kennedy was viewed as
a virtual messiah; such was the power of his charisma that the
wife of a famous member of the Kennedy entourage was heard to say
during the intermission of a play at the old Warner Theater shortly
after the Kennedy inauguration, "Isn't all this just marvelous? It
is just like the break between B.C. and A.D "[2]
By the closing days of Dwight Eisenhower's second term as
president, the giant multinational business machine that had
engineered his travels from SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied
Powers, Europe) headquarters in Paris, through his stint as
president of Columbia University in preparation for his role as
their candidate for the presidency, had learned that the ever-
popular "Old Man" could be tough.
Eisenhower left office on the wave of a substantial federal
budget surplus, and with a tip of his cap to the dangers of the
military-industrial complex. As a result, these master
manipulators held things back, billion-dollar things, knowing full
well that they could do better with a new president in 1961. They
fully expected that new president to be Richard M. Nixon.
Nixon had always been the special friend of big business. As he
likes to tell it, while he was still in the Navy during World War
II, he responded to a want ad in a Los Angeles newspaper that had
been placed there by a moneyed group which wanted a young,
malleable candidate to run for Congress. He won that election with
their help, in terms of dollars, and the remainder of his storied
political life was lived under the shadow and tutelage of moneyed
power centers.
What Nixon does not say is how he got into that role in the
first place. Back in 1941, he worked in the Office of Price
Administration beside another up-and-coming young lawyer, Irving S.
Shapiro. There they both learned the ways of serving big business
and the value of an "anticommunist" stance. Shapiro, son of an
expatriate Lithuanian, went on to become the Justice Department
lawyer in a widely publicized trial against the 11 top leaders of
the U.S. Communist Party.[3] From there, he moved step by step
upward with the DuPont Company until he reached the position of
chairman. Nixon climbed upward over the bodies of Alger Hiss and
Helen Gahagan Douglas on his way to the House of Representatives
and thence to the Senate, and on to become Eisenhower's vice
president.
Though his long years of public life had won him some
popularity, they did not win him the presidency against John F.
Kennedy in 1960. Thus the many big-money projects deferred from
the Eisenhower era were heaped upon the shoulders of President
Kennedy.
The greatest of these billion-dollar packages, as described in
previous articles in this series, was to be the war in Vietnam. It
had been kept almost dormant during 1960, but it was ready to flare
up on call.
Just before the inauguration, when President Eisenhower spoke
privately to Kennedy, he informed him that his only concern in
Southeast Asia would be the tiny kingdom of Laos. Military
activity in Laos was already a public issue.
In contrast, "Time" magazine had carried only three articles
about Vietnam during 1960. Although the conflict in Vietnam had
been moved along clandestinely since 1945, it was still something
of a sleeper when Kennedy came into office.
The CIA's anti-Castro planning was also heating up. Just before
the election, the CIA had made its move to increase its secret
Cuban project from a small, 300-man operation to a 3,000-man,
over-the-beach assault. By the time of the inauguration of
Kennedy, the momentum of that effort was (as CIA Director Allen
Dulles and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell put it)
harder to contain than to let the Cubans loose to free their own
country. Kennedy was getting his baptism of CIA pressure.
There were even bigger things bottled up and waiting for the
inauguration. For several years, the Air Force had wanted a new
jet fighter. Their dream plane was called the "Everest" fighter,
after General Frank Everest, its staunchest supporter. The Navy
needed one also.
Eisenhower, determined to go out with a budget surplus, would
not allow the award of any major contract. By the time of
Kennedy's inaugural, there was a pot of $2 to $4 billion that could
be used for the biggest military aircraft procurement award ever
made. The entire aviation industry knew this and pressures ran
high in an attempt to win that prime contract.
Kennedy's secretary of defense was Robert S. McNamara, a World
War II Air Force statistician, Harvard Business School professor,
and more recently the president of Ford Motor Company, where he (as
part of a group known as the "whiz kids") had gone directly from
the Air Force right after the war.
McNamara had become president of the Ford Motor Company on
November 9, 1960, the day after Kennedy's election. His much-
touted experience as president of Ford amounted to a bit over one
month.
McNamara was not familiar with aircraft nor with the complex
system of procurement used by the military, but he had a pretty
good idea of what $4 billion was on the political scene. He
announced he would make the award after careful study.[4]
Before long, the contest for the jet fighter was narrowed to the
Boeing Aircraft Company and a joint proposal presented by General
Dynamics and Grumman Aircraft Company.
The aircraft the military desired was called a "Tactical Fighter
Experimental" or TFX. The Air Force wanted an extremely
unconventional aircraft, with wings that could sweep back for
faster flight.
Then McNamara sprang a surprise. He took the Navy money and
added that to the total and said this would represent "more bang
for the buck" because of what he called "commonality." He believed
that even though the Air Force and Navy specifications differed
widely, there ought to be enough "common" parts to lower the unit
aircraft cost. By this time, the total program had been increased
to 1,700 aircraft--235 of which would be for the Navy--for a total
initial procurement cost of $6.5 billion.
This was the largest single contract ever put together in
peacetime. Kennedy and his inner circle had their own ideas of
what they were going to do with that vast amount of money. They
were a bold and politically savvy group. The election of November
1960 had been too close for comfort. They looked ahead to November
1964 and realized that $6.5 billion (or more) would pave a lot of
streets on the road to re-election.
So Kennedy added Department of Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg,
a wise old World War II OSS veteran, to the TFX team. He had not
confided in Goldberg before the Bay of Pigs decision, and that had
been a mistake that he was not going to repeat.
Goldberg had an idea. It was to use this $6.5 billion potential
in every possible way, in every possible county in the United
States, to strengthen the Democratic Party.
Goldberg and McNamara began to work together. McNamara set up a
suite of offices, one ring in from his own in the Pentagon, with a
staff that had nothing else to do than to plot the course of the
TFX source selection program.
The author had an office a few doors down the hall from this new
suite and he visited them frequently to join its chief, Ron Linton,
and other McNamara "whiz kids" for lunch. He noticed that the
walls of this suite of offices were lined with maps of the United
States showing all the states and counties. They were political
maps. In short order, at Goldberg's suggestion, one set of those
maps was colored to show every county that Kennedy had carried in
1960, and another color for every county that went to Nixon.
Then the staff of this office, working with Department of Labor
statistics, made detailed studies of each of the major proposals
for the TFX. A proposal is an enormous stack of paper. Quite
frequently a single proposal for some military item would arrive at
the Pentagon in a large delivery truck. This process of "mapping"
the proposals included the prime contractors, i.e., Boeing or
General Dynamics/Grumman, and from them right on down to the
smallest sub-contractor. These were all plotted on innumerable
county maps. Goldberg's team marked the site of each facility, how
many people it would employ, how much money would be spent there,
how much new construction was involved, and every other political
parameter.[5]
In a short time it was possible to get a visual plot of the
impact of the award of a Boeing contract on one set of maps, and of
the General Dynamics/Grumman contract on another. Through
confidential handling of copies of these charts, senators,
congressmen and local politicians throughout the Democratic
organization were able to capitalize on the outcome of these
proposals. Within no time, word of these charts in McNamara's
office reached the contractors themselves.
The author happened to come into the office one day when word
had been received from one of the prime contractors that they
planned to open a new facility in a remote county in Utah. That
county had been a Republican county. Needless to say, the process
of wooing future Republican votes in this manner was repeated all
over the country. $6.5 billion is a lot of money for openers, and
it goes a long way.
While the studies of the political impact of the award of this
huge contract were being made, McNamara was forced to draw out the
routine source selection process.
He had two of the nation's industrial giants, with their vast
array of subcontractors and their sub-sub-contractors, locked in
the biggest battle in corporate history. He managed to string out
four full evaluation studies, each one of which nit-picked every
item in each proposal, before he sent the whole package to what was
to be the final, and ultimate, source selection board made up of
senior officials from both services involved.
Later, during the 1963 senatorial hearings on the award of this
contract, General Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force,
told a Senate Investigations Subcommittee chaired by Senator John
L. McClellan that some 275,000 man-hours of work had been poured
into this selection process.
The selection could have been made during Eisenhower's
presidency. It certainly could have been made during 1961.
Everything had been ready for a quick decision, in favor of Boeing,
right after the Kennedy inauguration.
But, with the addition of the Navy money and the Goldberg-
McNamara political selection concept, the decision was pushed back
month after month in every county across the nation while the
politicians wrung every ounce they could out of this process--to
hell with the aircraft companies and the services.
Finally, on November 23, 1962--more than two years after the
election--the decision of the source selection board was announced.
Most of the senior officials at that meeting came away believing
that the decision had been made in favor of Boeing. The secretary
of the Air Force himself confided to a few friends that evening
that the decision had been made in favor of the Boeing proposal.
Behind the scenes, however, a decision had been made, and it
overruled the entire military system.
Any major change of the military procurement system, especially
as it pertains to a $6.5 billion contract, is bound to have the
impact of someone attempting to rewrite the Holy Bible. It cannot
be done without an intense, prolonged and very heated argument.
McNamara knew that he and Kennedy were playing with fire. On
the Friday afternoon that he received the choice of the source
selection board in favor of Boeing, he already knew the results of
the final political survey of the two proposals, i.e., the Goldberg
comparison. This indicated clearly that the General
Dynamics/Grumman proposal would get a greater return for the
Democrats.
Moreover, he had an additional major problem to resolve on his
own. He had to be sure that the choice he was going to make would
indeed fly.
McNamara basically did not know one aircraft from another. He
had a man on his staff, A.W. Blackburn, who was an experienced test
pilot; Blackburn had been hired in 1959 by the Defense
Department's Bureau of Research and Engineering specifically for
the TFX project. Blackburn, however, favored the Boeing proposal,
so McNamara could not discuss his personal problem with him.
To play this card, McNamara called an old friend and asked the
name of a man who could vouch for the design of the General
Dynamics model. This friend had suggested Kelly Johnson, head of
the famous "Skunk Works" where many of the finest aircraft built by
Lockheed had been designed. Johnson had designed the CIA's U-2 spy
plane, among others. McNamara had the General Dynamics
specifications delivered to Johnson and asked him to verify its
suitability. Johnson studied the aircraft designs carefully.
The fate of the $6.5 billion TFX project had been placed in the
hands of a man who had devoted a lifetime to building superior
aircraft, and to building them in direct competition with both
Boeing and General Dynamics.
Even at this stage of the game fate played its part.
Years before, Roger Lewis, chairman of the board and president
of General Dynamics, had worked at Lockheed. He and Kelly Johnson
had been good friends and still were in 1962. Lewis is an old
aircraft professional who had been around the business since its
golden years in the 1930s. Kelly looked over the General Dynamics
design carefully, no doubt thinking how much this meant to his old
associate.
Johnson called McNamara and told him that the plan from General
Dynamics was acceptable, and he assured McNamara that the aircraft
would fly. Later, Roger Lewis was to say in a rather low-key
manner, "The company expects to produce an exceptional aircraft and
that its qualifications to do so are unparalleled."
With the Goldberg review in hand, and supported by the call from
Kelly Johnson to confirm the airworthiness of the design, McNamara
set a meeting for November 24, 1962, to announce the decision. He
ignored the vote of the source selection board and all its senior
military members and announced his choice of the General Dynamics
design. With that he authorized the start of the engineering
design work, wind tunnel testing, construction of a model of the
plane and the other actions essential to the development of the
total weapons system.
On April 8, 1963, during a period of intense controversy,
McNamara authorized the issuance of a contract from the Air Force
procurement offices at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which in
turn authorized General Dynamics to turn out 22 test models of the
TFX.
General Curtis LeMay later testified that no one from the
original Air Force-Navy evaluation teams on up to the final Air
Force-Navy board which recommended the Boeing design--and this
included himself--had ever recommended the General Dynamics model.
All members of the senior source selection board, which had voted
for Boeing, were stunned by the development. Al Blackburn, who had
worked on the project since 1959, resigned. This is to say nothing
about the shocked feelings at Boeing and its long list of
subcontractors. This decision sent tremors throughout the entire
aeronautical industry. If Boeing, traditionally the number one
defense contractor, could be set aside, anyone could be excluded
from any contract for what seemed to them arbitrary reasons. LeMay
added, "I was surprised that the decision was made without
consultation. I don't consider this the normal procedure. I
thought we had such a clear-cut and unanimous opinion all up and
down the line that I was completely surprised at the decision.[6]
In the face of the heated opposition, McNamara held his ground.
He said he had chosen the General Dynamics model of the TFX because
that company's proposal showed a better understanding of the costs
involved and offered a minimum divergence from a common design for
Air Force and Navy versions of the fighter. Of course this added
fuel to the fire, because this was the very reason the services did
not like the General Dynamics version. They all knew that a
carrier-based aircraft had to be designed much differently from a
land-based aircraft.
In testimony before Congress, McNamara came back again and
served notice on the generals and admirals, saying that the TFX
decision process was a sample of a new policy. He said that the
day had passed when the services would be allowed to develop their
own weapons systems. He added that he picked General Dynamics over
Boeing because Boeing fudged and actually planned to build
different planes for the Navy and the Air Force.
In the heat of battle, the Kennedy forces were pressing their
point firmly, but cloaking it in more equable terms. In contrast
to some of the Pentagon civilian hierarchy of earlier days, e.g.,
Charlie Wilson of General Motors, Tom Gates of Morgan Guaranty
Trust, and Neil McElroy of Lever Brothers, the McNamara staff was
pure Ivy league: Roswell Gilpatric, Cyrus Vance, Eugene Zuckert,
and Paul Nitze. They were neither military specialists nor
industry favorites; yet they had their friends in high places.
Gilpatric, a New York banker who was McNamara's deputy, was sent
out to make an important speech to a bankers' convention on April
9, 1963.
His title, "The Impact of the Changing Defense Program on the
United States Economy," was actually more pertinent than his
audience expected. He spoke about the TFX decision to bankers and
of course to the news media at a time when this was a white-hot
subject.
In an early paragraph he exposed the extent of his subject. The
new Kennedy policy was a blockbuster. Gilpatric stated--and when
he did, windows rattled in defense installations all over the
world--"I have not the slightest doubt that our economy could
adjust to a decline in defense spending."
He was touching on a sacrosanct subject. Can any nation afford,
or exist with, peace? Having dropped that bomb, he moved along to
a rationale for the TFX decision. He noted "the shifts of defense
spending within the budget can create intense problems in
individual communities."
If his listeners understood what he meant, they knew he was
getting very close to the Goldberg procurement policy. "We do try
to make a special effort to give work," he said, "where it can be
done effectively and efficiently, to depressed areas." If one
would translate the reference to "depressed areas" to "areas that
voted for Nixon and therefore were needed in the Democratic column"
he would be closer to the truth.
Then Gilpatric made a daring comment: "The fundamental fact we
all have to bear in mind is that the Department of Defense is
neither able nor willing to depart from the requirements of
national security in order to bolster the economy either of the
nation as a whole, or of any region or community."
Despite this statement, that is precisely what the
implementation of the Goldberg policy had just done. As though he
believed no one would perceive the real message, he added (perhaps
for the edification of Boeing and its host of allies in and out of
the military), "In the award and management of contracts we have
undertaken a wide range of steps to improve the whole process. . .
. The handling of the TFX contract illustrated several of the
techniques being worked out for use on development contracts where
particularly acute problems have arisen in the past."
Then Gilpatric closed with: "Mr. McNamara and I, after an
acceptable TFX proposal was offered, had to make a judgment between
these two proposals . . . the Air Force and Navy will get a better
buy for the taxpayers' dollars than would have been forthcoming if
the contract had been let earlier. . . ."
Gilpatric made these statements during the time of intense
Senate hearings on the TFX. You will note how carefully both he
and McNamara avoided any direct mention that they had arbitrarily
gone along with the Goldberg formula augmented by the assurances
from Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.
Indeed, Kelly Johnson's role in this selection has not been
mentioned anywhere before this article.
As mentioned earlier, Kennedy's 1,000 days were marked by
repeated and violent eruptions among super-power elements within
the government and its multinational corporate environment, and
this is one of those that stands out. It is ominously coincidental
that Kennedy's murder occurred in Dallas one year later and not too
many miles from the Fort Worth factories where the TFX was being
built.
There was a subtle reasoning behind all of this. Jack Kennedy,
Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Goldberg and many others of the inner
circle were not at all concerned about the final outcome of an
aircraft-to-be called the TFX. Kennedy had been in World War II
and had been a member of Congress for most of the years since that
time. He had seen nearly $3 trillion poured into the military-
industrial machine during those years, and he had seen those
weapons systems all come and go.
To the Kennedy circle, the TFX, the Skybolt, the Dyna-Soar, the
atomic-powered aircraft and all the rest that had fallen into their
laps with the election were just what Kennedy, Goldberg and
McNamara took them to be. They were devices that could be used to
direct money into political districts that needed it for their own
benefit, and to assure the election of a Kennedy for years to come.
This is why Gilpatric made the speech he did to the assembled
bankers and this is why McNamara said that the day had passed when
the services would be allowed to develop their own weapons systems.
The services and the great industries for whom the military
establishment existed were absolutely staggered by all this. They
had never encountered such a serious challenge. The one-two
combination of punches they had suffered had them on the ropes. On
January 17, 1961, they had heard Dwight Eisenhower, in a farewell
address to the nation, urge vigilance regarding the dangers to
liberty implicit in a vast military establishment and caution
against the power of the military-industrial complex.
Now they had a president who was not just talking about that
danger, but was taking their dollars away to use them as he chose.
This was the enormous significance of that TFX decision.
We must turn back now to a closing statement by Ros Gilpatric in
his bankers' speech of April 9, 1963: "I have not the slightest
sympathy for the view sometimes heard that this country couldn't
afford disarmament."
Now, why was that on his mind, and presumably on the minds of
the entire Kennedy inner circle at that time? The answer is quite
ominous. The Kennedys were counting on at least eight years in
office to move mountains.
At the beginning of this series of articles, reference was made
to the "Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and
Desirability of Peace." It happens that the general idea of this
top-level study, which was commissioned in August 1963, dated back
to early 1961. In other words, it started right after the
inauguration with John F. Kennedy and his new administration.
A member of the Iron Mountain Special Study group believes it
began with McNamara, William Bundy and Dean Rusk. The members of
the Kennedy circle were all concerned that no really serious work
had been done about planning for peace. The report contains a most
portentous line: "The idea of the Special Study . . . was worked
out early in 1963. . . . What helped most to get it moving were
the big changes in military spending that were being planned. . .
."
The chronology of these developments is important. It began
with the inauguration. The first big money item was the TFX. That
orchestrated solution was stretched from the inauguration to
November 1962. The reaction of the military, of the aeronautical
industry, and of the Congress was predictable. Then, in April
1963, McNamara announced that things had changed. A few days
later, Gilpatric made his important speech and the Special Study
group was selected in August 1963. The Kennedys were on their way.
They were going to ride on the TFX $6.5 billion into a second term
and then they were going to prepare America for peace.
This agenda began to surface with the TFX decision, and was
confirmed by the existence--known to a very few--of the Special
Study group for "the possibility and desirability of peace."
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have had a greater impact on
the enormous military machine of this nation. This Kennedy plan
jeopardized not hundreds of millions, not even billions, but
*trillions* of dollars. It shook the very foundation upon which
our society has been built over the past two thousand years. As
the "Report from Iron Mountain" says:
"War itself is the basic social system. It is the system which
has governed most human societies of record, as it is today. . . .
The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social
power it can exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a
matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social
control. . . . War-readiness is the dominant force in our
societies. . . . It accounts for approximately a tenth of the
output of the world's total economy."[7]
John F. Kennedy and his advisers were playing a dangerous game
as they expertly moved along the calendar toward re-election in
1964. Kennedy had accepted the challenge. The duel, perhaps the
greatest duel in the history of this country, had begun.
Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor and Secretary McNamara to
Saigon in late September 1963. They returned to the White House
and gave Kennedy their voluminous report on October 2, 1963. In
part that report said: "It should be possible to withdraw the bulk
of U.S. personnel by that time. . . ."
"That time" was the end of 1965. One thousand troops were
already slated to come home in time for Christmas, 1963.
Kennedy was planning to get out of Vietnam and to turn the war
over to a new leader in South Vietnam. To his adversaries, this
confirmed the nature of the course he had chosen. They began to
move, to move swiftly and with finality.
Ngo Dinh Diem, the first President of South Vietnam, was killed
on November 1, 1963, and Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963.
Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon have written
that President Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin named Lee
Harvey Oswald. The Warren Commission reported the same thing.
That is not the way it happened at all.
[1] From "The Warren Report" by the Associated Press.
[2] The speaker was Mrs. William Bundy, daughter of former Secretary of
State Dean Acheson, wife of Assistant Secretary of Defense William
Bundy, and sister-in-law 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 chose 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 State Department
not far from his own, and 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 John
Fitzgerald Kennedy.
[3] 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.
[4] McNamara had little experience with service distinctions and tried
to take Army money also. The Army persuaded him to leave it out of
the matter.
[5] 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 is the Goldberg/McNamara concept
dressed in Reagan garb.
[6] Before 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.
[7] "Report From Iron Mountain," Dial Press, Inc., pp 18, 29-30, 1967.
--
daveus rattus
yer friendly neighborhood ratman
KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
Article 1936 of misc.activism.progressive:
From: dave@ratmandu.corp.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: The Saigon Solution, Part 11: source material for "JFK", the
Message-ID: <1991Dec21.041024.21124@pencil.cs.missouri.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 91 04:10:24 GMT
Sender: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: PACH
Lines: 913
Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Subject: The Saigon Solution, Part 11: source material for "JFK", the film
Keywords: Part XI (of 20) in a Series on the CIA and the Vietnam Era
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1991 16:15:09 GMT
Lines: 906
it seems appropriate to post this on the debut of Oliver Stone's newest
movice, "JFK". the 2 primary sources Stone used for his film were Jim
Garrison's 1988 book, "On The Trail Of The Assassins" (see book review
of this posted today in sgi.talk.ratical) and the 19 published articles
written as a kind of personal memoire by L. Fletcher Prouty. Donald
Sutherland plays Colonel Prouty in the movie. this movie finally gets
past the "how was he killed" riddle that has diverted people's attention
for over 28 years to "*WHY"* was President Kennedy killed?"
the following is part 11 of 20 articles (# 20 was never published)
written by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (USAF, Ret.) from 1985 to 1987.
Colonel Prouty, author of the classic "The Secret Team, The CIA and Its
Allies in Control of the United States and the World" (Prentice Hall,
1973), worked in the Pentagon from 1955 to the end of the 1963 as the
Focal Point Officer for military logistical support of CIA covert
operations world-wide (first for the Air Force and then, for all
branches of the military):
From President to ambassador, Cabinet officer to commanding
general, and from senator to executive assistant--all these men
have their sources of information and guidance. Most of this
information and guidance is the result of carefully laid
schemes and ploys of pressure groups. In this influential
coterie one of the most interesting and effective roles is that
played by the behind-the-scenes, faceless, nameless, ubiquitous
briefing officer.
He is the man who sees the President, the secretary, the
commanding general almost daily, who carries with him the most
skillfully detailed information. He is trained by years of
experience in the precise way to present that information to
assure its effectiveness. He comes away day after day knowing
more and more about the man he has been briefing and about what
it is that the truly influential pressure groups at the center
of authority are really trying to tell these key decision
makers. In Washington, where these decisions shape and shake
the world, the role of the regular briefing officer is critical.
Leaders of government and of the great pressure centers
regularly leak information of all kinds to columnists,
television and radio commentators, and to other media masters
with the hope that the material will surface and influence the
President, the Secretary, the Congress, and the public. Those
other inside pressure groups with their own briefing officers
have direct access to the top men; they do not have to rely
upon the media, although they make great use of it. They are
safe and assured in the knowledge that they can get to the
decision maker directly. They need no middleman other than the
briefing officer. Such departments as Defense, State, and the
CIA used this technique most effectively.
For nine consecutive, long years--during those crucial days
from 1955 through December 1963--I was one of those briefing
officers. I had the unique assignment of being the Focal Point
officer for contacts between the CIA and the Department of
Defense on matters pertaining to the military support of the
Special Operations (a name given in most cases, but not always,
to any clandestine, covert, undercover, or secret operations by
the government or by someone, U.S. citizen or a foreign national
. . . even in special cases a stateless professional, or U.S or
foreign activity or organization. It is usually secret and
highly classified . . .) of that Agency. In that capacity I
worked with Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, several
Secretaries of Defense, and chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, as well as many others in key governmental places. My
work took me to more than sixty countries and to CIA offices and
covert activities all over the world--from such hot spots as
Saigon to such remote places as the South Pole. It was my job
not only to brief these men but to brief them from the point of
view of the CIA so that I might win approval of the projects
presented and of the accompanying requests for support from the
military in terms of money, manpower, facilities, and materials.
I was, during this time, perhaps the best informed liaison
officer among the few who operated in this very special area.
The role of the briefing officer is quiet, effective, and most
influential, and in the CIA, specialized in the high art of
top-level indoctrination. ("The Secret Team," pp. i-ii)
excerpts from Part 11:
This echelon of hidden motives and public smokescreens is where
Kennedy underestimated the power and skill of the CIA. He did not
get to the root of the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and as
a result, he became a victim--as have many others--of the sinister
power of those agencies of the government that operate in total
secrecy, knowing that they do not have to account to anyone for
their actions. . . .
Kennedy did not like all that 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 did not like the way covert operations had
been run during the 1950s. As a long-term member of Congress, he
was fully aware of the record of failed intelligence operations
throughout the years. . . .
The difference between a plan of highest national interest which
originates within the NSC and is then given to the CIA by direction
of the NSC, and a plan which is originated within the CIA and which
is 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. . . .
Kennedy was directing that the U.S. military forces be used
against any Cold War adversary, whether or not there had been a
declaration of war. This was a revolutionary doctrine, especially
for the U.S., and if these presidential directives had become
operationally effective, they would have drastically changed the
course of the war in Vietnam.
They would have effectively removed the CIA from Cold War
operations and limited the CIA to its lawful responsibility--the
coordination of intelligence. In many situations, these directives
would have made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the day-
to-day counterpart of the secretary of state. . . .
Having been given such vast powers by their president, where
were the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the guns were fired in the
streets of Dallas only 18 months later? Where was Lansdale? Where
was Allen Dulles? Why was Kennedy so alone by the time he made
that fateful trip to Texas in 1963?
the following appeared in the June 1986 issue of "Freedom" magazine.
[warning!--"Freedom" is published by the church of scientology.
people unable to decide for themselves whether such a source
might irrevocably corrupt their own capacity for self-reflective
independent thought/critical thinking, shud probably avoid
reading *anything* that might have been published in/by such a
magazine. those capable of forming their own opinions should
check out this (and the other 19 parts in the series)
fascinating and illuminating article by a man who worked in the
belly of the beast.]
_________________________________________________________________________
THE BATTLE FOR POWER
KENNEDY VS. THE CIA
Part XI in a Series on the CIA and the Vietnam Era
by L. Fletcher Prouty
Reprinted with permission of the author
Presidential power: does it come with the office or must the
incumbent fight for it every step of the way? As James David
Barber stated in his book, "The Presidential Character":[1]
"Political power is like nuclear energy available to create
deserts or make them bloom. The mere having of it never yet
determined its use. The mere getting of it has not stamped into
the powerful some uniform shape."
John F. Kennedy came to Washington with a tremendous amount of
style and enough experience to know that he would have to fight to
wrest political power from entrenched interests of enormous
strength.
If anything hit President Kennedy harder than the utter defeat
of the Cuban-exile brigade on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, it
was the realization that he had let himself be talked into that
operation by inexperienced, secondary men in the CIA.
CIA Director Allen Dulles had not been there at the time of the
final decision-making, nor at the time of the invasion itself.
This was a most unusual absence by the man responsible for the
entire operation.
In his book. "Kennedy,"[2] Ted Sorenson makes a good case for
his doctrine that "the Kennedys never fail."
However, Kennedy did fail in his attempt to gain full control of
the CIA and its major partners in the Defense Department, and it
was the most crucial failure of his abbreviated presidency. He
recognized his adversary during his first term, and as he related
confidentially to intimate acquaintances before he began his second
term, "When I am re-elected, I am going to break that agency into a
thousand pieces."
He meant to do it, too, but the struggle cost him his life.
Former President Harry S. Truman was disturbed when he learned
of the murder of Jack Kennedy in Dallas. That experienced old
veteran of political wars saw an ominous link between the death of
the president and the CIA. Only one month after the terrible
event--just time enough to get his thoughts in order and on paper-
-Truman wrote a column that appeared in "The Washington Post" on
December 21, 1963. No one could have expressed doubts about the
CIA more accurately than did Truman:
"For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been
diverted from its original assignment. It has become an
operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. . .
. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would
be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of
the complications and embarrassment that I think we have
experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet
intelligence arm of the president has been so removed from its
intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister
and mysterious foreign intrigue and a subject for cold war enemy
propaganda."
Harry Truman's label of the CIA as "a symbol of sinister and
mysterious foreign intrigue. . . ." is, unfortunately, quite
accurate.
That "foreign intrigue" included Cuba, Castro and John F.
Kennedy, at least in the minds of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
This is evidenced in their later writings about the assassination.
And it was Lyndon B. Johnson who said the CIA had a "Murder Inc."
in the Caribbean.
It is absolutely astounding that when the thoughts of these four
ex-presidents turned to the murder of JFK, they all wove a fabric
of sinister intrigue that included the CIA in the scenario of his
death. These men were telling us something. It is time we listen
to and learn from what they have said.
The power of any agency that is enabled to operate in secrecy is
boundless. The CIA knew this, and it used its power to its own
advantage.
Only three days after the disastrous Cuban defeat, Kennedy set
up a Cuban Study Group headed by General Maxwell Taylor to "direct
special attention to the lessons which can be learned from recent
events in Cuba."
With that action, which received little notice at the time, the
president declared war on the agency. From that time on it was
"the Kennedy clan vs. entrenched power." The Cuban Study Group was
one of the most important creations of the 1,000 days of Kennedy's
presidency, and it was the source of one of the major pressure
points on the way to the guns of Dallas on November 22, 1963.
President Kennedy was seriously upset by the failure of the CIA
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide him with adequate
information and support prior to his approval of the brigade
landing at the Bay of Pigs. He was also upset by the results of
the total breakdown of CIA leadership during the operation that
followed that landing.[3]
Kennedy's good friend, Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas,
in recalling a discussion he had with Kennedy shortly after the
disaster, said: "This episode seared him. He had experienced the
extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious
influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, on civilian policy, and I
think it raised in his own mind the specter: can Jack Kennedy,
president of the United States, ever be strong enough to really
rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect
. . . it shook him up!"
Can any president "ever be strong enough to really rule" the CIA
and the Defense Department?
Eisenhower had learned that he was not when a U-2 went down in
the heart of Russia contrary to his "no over-flight" orders in
1960.
Kennedy set out to prove that he was, and he might have done so
had he had a second term in office. Instead he was overwhelmed,
frustrated and, eventually, murdered.
Kennedy's attempt to gain control of these powerful elements
began with the study group. Each member was chosen for particular
reasons.
General Maxwell Taylor, for example, had been in retirement
since he had publicly differed with the Eisenhower policy
concerning the strength of the U.S. Army and had resigned as its
chief of staff. He had not been involved in any way with the
decision-making process for the Cuban invasion. In fact, Kennedy
had never met Taylor prior to 1961.
To augment the military side of the study group, Kennedy
selected Admiral Arleigh Burke, considered by many to be the finest
chief of naval operations the Navy has ever had--and the man among
the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been the most closely involved in
the military elements of the Bay of Pigs planning process. The
actual tactical training for the invasion had been placed in the
hands of a U.S. Marine Corps colonel; the transport ships had been
assembled in the Norfolk, Virginia, area; and much of the
logistics support had been channeled through the inactive Navy base
at Elizabeth City, North Carolina. All had involved Navy support.
Kennedy's next choice for the group was Machiavellian in its
political implications. He appointed CIA Director Allen W. Dulles,
the man who in November 1960 had flown to Palm Beach with his
deputy, Richard Bissell, to give the president-elect his first
official briefing on the plan for the overthrow of Castro. It was
Dulles who, on January 28, 1961, gave another briefing on the
developing plan to the newly installed president along with his
vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, the secretary of state, Dean
Rusk, the secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, among
others.
Now, Kennedy had decided to have Allen Dulles sit through this
detailed study from beginning to end, to relive the whole scenario
as General Taylor interrogated selected officials who had been
connected with that operation.
Despite the fact that Allen Dulles was the director of central
intelligence when the plan was first presented to President
Eisenhower in March 1960, and that he was the man who briefed
Kennedy before and after his inauguration, Dulles had not been
present at the White House on April 16, 1961, when the final
discussions took place and when the go-ahead decision had been made
by the president.
Dulles was also not in Washington during the crucial period of
the invasion itself to control the activities of his agency. He
had taken that weekend off for a sojourn in Puerto Rico.
There is an organization, the Young Presidents Organization,
that is closely affiliated with Harvard Business School and with
the CIA. It is made up of men who are presidents of their own
companies and under 40 years of age. The CIA arranges meetings for
them with young leaders in foreign countries for the purpose of
opening export-import talks and franchising discussions.
The Young Presidents Organization met in Puerto Rico on the
weekend of April 15 and 16, 1961, and Dulles was the principal
speaker. Why he accepted--and kept--that appointment at such a
crucial time has never been properly explained. Did he prefer to
have the Bay of Pigs fail? Did he choose to embarrass the new
president?
As Maxwell Taylor's report on the Cuban disaster later stated:
"There was no single authority short of the president capable of
coordinating the actions of the CIA, State, Defense, and the USIA
[U.S. Information Agency]."
Because of the absence of the director, the CIA's secondary
leaders--officials with no combat or command experience--made "the
operational decisions which they felt within their authority."
For decisions above them, they were supposed to go to the
president. "Mr. Bissell and General Cabell were immediately
available for consultation" and, it is crucial to note, "were
usually emissaries sent to obtain" higher approvals. In this
sense, "emissary" was a far cry from an effective "commander" as
Dulles was thought to be.
This task as "emissary" fell far short of effectiveness, as the
Taylor report noted:
"Finally, there was the failure to carry the issue to the
president when the opportunity was presented and explain to him
with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-
minute cancellation."
General Taylor suggested that someone ought to have gone
directly to the president to explain forcefully the absolute
necessity of the air strike against those three T-33 jet trainers
that were all the combat air force left to the Cubans.
That was the issue. In its guarded language, Taylor's report
never mentioned the Dulles absence, but it discussed this
"breakdown of leadership" during the study group meetings with both
Allen Dulles and Bobby Kennedy present. We may be sure it was not
unnoticed.
President Kennedy rounded out this Cuban Study Group of Taylor,
Burke and Dulles with the assignment of the attorney general, his
brother, Robert Kennedy. Dulles would not only be reliving the
events of the past year; but Bobby would be watching and learning
from his every move. It was a cat-and-mouse game of super-strategy
between two able adversaries and their allies.[4]
In that volatile environment, the direct relationship between
the failure of the CIA command element to cope with the air strike
issue and the absence that weekend of Dulles, the man responsible
for the success of the anti-Castro program, became the biggest
issue.[5]
For the study group the sequence of issues became quite clear:
a) The president had approved the landings and the essential air
strikes to destroy the last three combat aircraft in Castro's air
force.
b) Later that evening, McGeorge Bundy had cancelled those air
strikes by calling Cabell.
c) Cabell and Bissell, in Dulles' absence, were inherently
unqualified to carry the issue back to the president to "explain to
him with proper force the probable military consequences of a
last-minute cancellation."
d) The study group added: "These restraints included . . . the
cancellation of the [air] strikes planned at dawn on D-Day. The
last mentioned was probably the most serious as it eliminated the
last favorable opportunity to destroy the Castro Air Force on the
ground. The cancellation seems to have resulted partly from a
failure to make the air strike plan entirely clear in advance to
the President and the Secretary of State. . . ."
The study group saw this cancellation clearly as the cause of
the failure of the whole anti-Castro program that had been
initiated in March 1960. To fortify their own professional
findings, they called before their group a man who had been
instrumental from the earliest days in these decisions. This man
was a key Cuban exile named Manuel Antonio de Varona,[6] formerly
premier of Cuba before the Batista regime (1952-1959).
De Varona made the following statement before the Cuban Study
Group: "I would like to state that we would be in Cuba today if it
was not for the lack of air support that our forces suffered. All
those who've returned said that but for three airplanes.[7] they
would have been successful in their invasion attempt."
Dulles was the man on the spot.
There is no record of what he said behind those closed doors;
but a record was unnecessary. Bobby Kennedy was always there.
Despite this maneuver by the Kennedys, however, Dulles still
controlled the moves. Few people have the experience to know how
such things work under the cloak of secrecy. This is the great
weapon of the CIA, and it is why the CIA cannot be stopped--short
of eliminating all of its money. All the people who worked on the
Bay of Pigs project--Cuban and American--did so under deep cover.
CIA agents and military supporting cast members all had pseudonyms
and lived cover-story lives. The Cubans with whom they worked had
no idea who these agents were, and their own American associates
did not know their true names and identities.
Thus, after the anti-Castro program had failed and all
participants had been dispersed to the winds, they themselves did
not know who had been there with them. This gave Allen Dulles the
ace cards in the deal with the study group. General Taylor had no
alternative but to ask Dulles for the names of the people--CIA,
military and Cuban--to be called before the group.
Dulles weeded out the ones that could tell too much and padded
the list with those who knew very little. Although Bobby Kennedy
sat there and listened to all of the dialogue, he had no way of
realizing that he was hearing a carefully structured scenario. The
book he wrote several years later revealed how little he really
knew about some of the actual activities.
This advantage permitted Dulles and the CIA to shift the blame
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military. Dulles kept quiet
about the shortcomings of his own agency and made it appear that
Kennedy's denial of the employment of U.S. Navy fighter aircraft as
"air cover" was the real reason for the failure of the project.
Since 1961, in fact, the CIA has mounted a vigorous and
comprehensive propaganda and revisionist campaign designed to
ensure that the public is afforded no opportunity to discover the
true facts.
The CIA had kept various elements of the Cuban exile groups
apart. Many of them were of different political backgrounds and
social levels. They did not get along with each other. Thus,
these separate groups were trained in widely separated camps. When
it came time to set sail for Cuba, the CIA put some units in the
forefront of the brigade and landed them on the beach. At the same
time, other units were "lost" at sea and never reached Cuba.
Obviously they were the first to return to land back in Louisiana.
Their emotional story of the failure to use their units on the
beaches has led to much of the misunderstanding of the tactics of
the whole operation. The CIA played this up and blamed the U.S.
military for the oversight.
It happens that it was the Louisiana elements of the Cuban exile
groups and their "mercenary" American trainers who became suspect
at the time of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963. This
made a good story, because the patsy in that murder was a former
U.S. Marine Corps enlisted man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He had
been born in New Orleans and had been active there with a "Fair
Play for Cuba" organization during the early 1960s. Many
assassination theorists have carried this presumed assassin's trail
from Dallas through the "Oswald" scenario to New Orleans, and
thence to Cuba and Castro himself.
This is a futile exercise, because Oswald was only the patsy,
not the murderer. Yet this trail of golden apples continues to
divert the unwary and the overeager.
The April 1986 article in this series mentioned a most unusual
article that appeared in "The Reader's Digest" of November 1964 in
which the author, Richard Nixon, tied Cuba, Castro and John F.
Kennedy together. Nixon is one of those who, for various reasons,
want the American public to believe Oswald was the"lone assassin."
At another time. Nixon wanted the American public to believe
that he and Henry Kissinger had valid reasons for their genocidal
bombardment of Cambodia with B-52s.
This echelon of hidden motives and public smokescreens is where
Kennedy underestimated the power and skill of the CIA. He did not
get to the root of the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and as
a result, he became a victim--as have many others--of the sinister
power of those agencies of the government that operate in total
secrecy, knowing that they do not have to account to anyone for
their actions.
None of this should be taken to mean that Kennedy was not wise
to the ways of Washington, nor that he was not capable of mounting
extremely shrewd political maneuvers of his own. He was, and he
did--but he was up against impossible odds.
When he set up the Cuban Study Group, he made it appear as if he
were investigating a failed operation and nothing more. This was
not quite the case, however. It was only part of the story.
Kennedy's precise instructions to General Taylor were ". . . to
study our governmental practices and programs in the areas of
military and paramilitary guerrilla and anti-guerrilla activity
which fell short of outright war with a view to strengthening our
work in this area."
This was the group's real directive, and it is what Kennedy
really wanted to discover--for himself and for the future.
Kennedy did not like all that 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 did not like the way covert operations had
been run 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.
By the middle of June 1961, the Cuban Study Group had gathered a
remarkable series of documents. For 25 years these key materials
have been concealed, ignored and (sometimes purposely)
misinterpreted.
To fully understand the forces which were at work during
Kennedy's presidency, it is necessary at this point to lift the
curtain of secrecy on a part of top-level government activity which
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: they 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," as in "against a
government," is not always accurate. Sometimes the target is an
otherwise friendly and allied government, but it is found to be
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
for ourselves 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 in the great
powers, and it is continuously violated--secretly.
It has always been the rule that any covert operation must be
performed in such a manner as to remain truly secret, or, failing
that, that the role of the U.S. government in the operation could
be disclaimed plausibly. 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
U.S. 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 all are foreign-made.
Under the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947, the
CIA operates at the direction of the National Security Council
(NSC). 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 which the NSC
actually originates and directs.
The NSC can direct a designated department or agency--not
necessarily the CIA--to carry it out. Covert 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 which, by the way, serve to
underscore the foolhardiness and deceit of those activities that
have been under way in Central America in recent years.
Over the years, especially during the 1950s, when Allen Dulles
was director of the CIA and his brother, John Foster Dulles, was
the secretary of state, this legal precision became 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.
The difference between a plan of highest national interest which
originates within the NSC and is then given to the CIA by direction
of the NSC, and a plan which is originated within the CIA and which
is 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 had been in March 1960 that the anti-Castro program had been
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, and he had such strong doubts 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 tidal wave that engulfed Kennedy drew its immense
power from many other sources. 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 while the country was involved in 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
after he had been 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, Khrushchev cancelled what had been
planned as the "ultimate summit conference" with President
Eisenhower in Paris.[8]
This incident served to reverse the trend toward detente which
had been carefully orchestrated by Khrushchev and Eisenhower, the
two aging World War II veterans.
With the summit conference disrupted, the road to Saigon, with
its eventual $220 billion in munitions sales (and 58,000 American
deaths) was clear.
The following recapitulation will demonstrate how meticulously
this 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 which followed the formation of this plan form 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 which combined counterinsurgency with
pacification tactics which 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 powerful 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 the CIA.
It was announced on November 11 that three battalions of
President Diem's elite guard had taken part in a "coup d'etat" at
the presidential palace in Saigon. That incident, of course, 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, 18 political
opponents of the Diem brothers' dictatorial regime. These 18 men
had in no way participated in the "coup." They had published a
scholarly "Manifesto of the Eighteen," and for this they were
thrown in jail.
General Edward Lansdale, 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, took advantage of Kennedy's
election and of Dulles' 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' 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, Secretary of
Defense Thomas Gates. 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 the president and officials from the Department of
Defense and the Department of 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.[9]
On April 12, 1961, a memo was written by Kennedy adviser Walt
Rostow which was supportive of the Lansdale report. Lansdale, on
April 19, submitted another memo of his own to his new boss,
Secretary of State 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 program 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.
It was on that date that President Kennedy, distraught by 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 the day Allen Dulles' influence in
the Kennedy administration ended, and 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. During April 1961, the director of the joint staffs,[10]
General 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--i.e., the military support of the clandestine
activities of the CIA--and Special Plans, the special art of
military cover and deception. "
To balance the rapid growth of the U.S. Army Special Forces
program and its new Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, General
Curtis E. LeMay, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, announced
that in 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.[12]
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 tried to duplicate, with some of the same people,
in Central America. What Reagan had been unable to create was a
Nicaraguan George Washington. The first thing Lansdale did in
Vietnam was to create a "father of his country" in the person of
Ngo Dinh Diem.
By the end of April 1961, a revised counterinsurgency
program[13] had been submitted to President Kennedy, without the
Lansdale material. Kennedy lost no time in implementing many of
its recommendations. The first troop movement, the deployment of a
40-man Special Forces group to South Vietnam, was made to
accelerate the training of the South Vietnamese army. This move
was directed by President Kennedy under the terms of National
Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 52, issued on May 11, 1961.
By April 20, Kennedy knew that if he was ever going to gain full
control of the CIA, he was going to have to understand what went
wrong with the anti-Castro program and what he had to do to take
over control of the counterinsurgency program for Vietnam. This
accounts for his strong directive to General Maxwell Taylor written
the next day, April 22, 1961:
". . . to study our governmental practices and programs in the
areas of military and paramilitary, guerrilla and antiguerrilla
activities which fell short of outright war with a view to
strengthening our work in this area."
With the collapse of the brigade in Cuba, Kennedy lost no time
in getting to the heart of the matter.
On June 13, 1961, Maxwell Taylor forwarded his "letter to the
president." It is a most remarkable document. Kennedy and his
inner circle studied it carefully and on June 28, President Kennedy
issued one of the most unusual directives ever to leave the White
House under any president in history.
This directive, NSAM 55, said in part:
"I wish to inform the Joint Chiefs of Staff as follows with
regard to my views of their relations to me in Cold War Operations:
"The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of
the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in
conventional hostilities."
This is a revolutionary statement when one considers who wrote
it and the circumstances under which it was promulgated.
The Cold War is a massive global struggle that exists only in
vague terms. A Cold War operation, however, is a very specific
term which refers to a secret, clandestine activity.
Traditionally, the uniformed services of a country have never
become involved in clandestine activities in peacetime.
Therefore, with NSAM 55 President Kennedy was making the Joint
Chiefs of Staff--the military forces of the United States--
responsible for the Cold War just as they would be responsible for
a real, declared state of war among nations. This was a radical
departure from the traditional rules of warfare among the family of
nations.
Kennedy was directing that the U.S. military forces be used
against any Cold War adversary, whether or not there had been a
declaration of war. This was a revolutionary doctrine, especially
for the U.S., and if these presidential directives had become
operationally effective, they would have drastically changed the
course of the war in Vietnam.
They would have effectively removed the CIA from Cold War
operations and limited the CIA to its lawful responsibility--the
coordination of intelligence. In many situations, these directives
would have made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the day-
to-day counterpart of the secretary of state.
At the same time, these documents stated the Kennedy position,
clearly setting forth his battle plan. Kennedy was taking charge,
if he could, and he was relying upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff for
assistance.
He did not know it at the time, but with the issuance of these
directives, he had only 18 months left to win--or to die in the
attempt.
It was an odd twist of fate that led Kennedy to choose the Joint
Chiefs of Staff over the CIA to become his strong right arm. He
did this because of Maxwell Taylor's letter.
By mid-summer, Taylor had become Kennedy's military and
intelligence adviser in the White House. Kennedy appointed him to
be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1962. It was
Maxwell Taylor--not Jack Kennedy or anyone else in the White
House--who, representing the members of the Cuban Study Group,
actually wrote the paragraphs in NSAM 55 that are cited above.
Those words, along with many others like them from the same series
of documents, were taken absolutely verbatim from that long-hidden
"letter to the president" that Taylor wrote on June 13, 1961.
Why did Taylor, Burke and Dulles, all members of the Cuban Study
Group, unanimously put those words into the mouth of Jack Kennedy?
Why did Kennedy accept them and publish them with his signature
without delay?
Having been given such vast powers by their president, where
were the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the guns were fired in the
streets of Dallas only 18 months later? Where was Lansdale? Where
was Allen Dulles? Why was Kennedy so alone by the time he made
that fateful trip to Texas in 1963?
Kennedy asserted the power of the presidency which he assumed he
had, but when his orders were delivered to the men to whom they
were addressed, he discovered that his power was meaningless. His
directives were quietly placed in the bureaucratic files and
forgotten. There have been few times in the history of this nation
when the limits of the power of the president have been so nakedly
exposed.
In the great struggle between Kennedy and the entrenched power
sources of Washington, as personified by the CIA and its allies in
the Defense Department and elsewhere, the president learned that
his weapons were utterly powerless. His directives went completely
unheeded.
Footnotes:
[1] "The Presidential Character" by James D. Barber, Prentice Hall,
Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972.
[2] "Kennedy" by Ted Sorenson, Bantam Books, New York, 1965.
[3] The absence or Dulles and the ineffectiveness of his deputies, Charles
P. Cabell and Richard Bissell, is being described in this article 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 "anti-communism" has gotten quite a bit of mileage
out of Castro and his "communist threat," just as it is doing today in
Central America, South America and Africa.
[4] The author's office was only a short distance from the rooms in the
Pentagon which were used by the Cuban Study Group. He had worked
with the CIA on the anti-Castro activities since January 1, 1959.
He knew almost all the men who had been called to meet with the study
group. Many of them would wait in his 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 strangle hold the CIA had on that
investigation, or that he ever became aware or being in the grip of
its velvet gloves.
[5] As noted in the April 1986 article in this series, following the
president's formal approval at midday of the landing plan, which
included air strikes by B-26 aircraft to destroy Castro's remaining
three T-33 jet trainers, the air strikes had been cancelled. The
Taylor group responded:
"At about 9:30 pm on April 16th, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special
Assistant to the President, telephoned General C. P. Cabell of the
CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes the following morning
should not be launched. . . ."
[6] This entire anti-Castro campaign was fraught with intrigue. This
same man, Senor de Varona, was one of the four Cuban exiles who, after
flying from the American Legion convention where Nixon spoke in August
1960 to Washington, had gone directly to then-Senator John F. Kennedy's
offices in the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. From Kennedy's
office they 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 his testimony.
The CIA tried to monopolize him: Nixon wooed him, as did Kennedy.
Finally he came to the Cuban Study Group and told the whole story.
Needless to say, he played all sides--as all "contras" do.
[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 wing tip to wing tip in an airfield near Santiago and
were the target for the four B-26 aircraft that were supposed to have
been launched from the CIA air base at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Had
that strike been flown as approved by the president, they would have
been destroyed and the invasion would have been successful. Castro
would have had no air forces. The brigade on the beach could have
countered attacks along the narrow approach causeways while its own
substantial air force of hard-hitting B-26 aircraft operated from the
air strip 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 has been generally 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 over-flights
before the summit conference, might have been ordered carelessly by a
small but powerful cabal that intended for it to fail and, thereby, to
cause the disruption of the summit conference. Based on a number of
other strange events related to this particular night there is a strong
possibility that this could be true.
[9] The author 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 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.
[11] The author was the first chief of the office of Special Operations and
continued in that office until 1964, while General Lyman Lemnitzer,
and later, General Maxwell Taylor were the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.
[12] One or 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
operations activities, excluding the U-2 program and those within the
Air America proprietary airline infrastructure.
[13] Said to have been developed under the leadership of George Ball in the
Department of State.
--
daveus rattus
yer friendly neighborhood ratman
KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
~h
Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.
The views and opinions stated within this web page are those of the
author or authors which wrote them and may not reflect the views and
opinions of the ISP or account user which hosts the web page. The
opinions may or may not be those of the Chairman of The Skeptic Tank.