JFK (36 page)

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the Department of State—each for its own reasons—probed the White House. They were unable, however, to find any person, or any prior work, that gave clues to the origin of these very special papers. The problem was made worse by the fact that very few copies of these NSAMs had been made available to anyone. The true source was not discovered for many years, and therein lies a story of great importance, one that has threaded its way through the Cold War era for decades. During this period the whole concept of warfare, the role of the military, and the nature of the modern nation-state have been drastically altered, at a cost, to United States citizens alone, of no less than $3 trillion.

In the process of attempting to implement the policy he had promulgated with these three directives on June 28, 1961, President Kennedy created an explosive force within the environs of the government and its allies such that the resulting mass went critical on the streets of Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It all began with one of the best-kept secrets of World War II. As this secret is exposed, it will reveal how it happened that select elements of the U.S. Army and their CIA associates became interested in the undercover warfare tactics written and practiced by the Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung.

This secret originated from the fact that while historians have openly revealed that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt had gone to the Tehran Conference in late November 1943 to meet with Joseph Stalin for a discussion of grand strategy for the prosecution of the war against Nazi Germany, they have failed to note that Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, May Ling, and a special Chinese delegation had accompanied them from Cairo,
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where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang had been meeting. This was a most important summit meeting not only for the purposes of advancing war planning in Europe but for much longer range planning in the Far East, planning that has spilled over into the Cold War era with the Korean and Indochinese warfare of later years.

This select Chinese delegation had a delicate task to perform that involved Stalin and could not be made public for several reasons. Whereas the Soviets, British, and Americans were locked in battle against Germany in Europe and the Chinese, British, and Americans opposed the Japanese on the mainland of China and in the Pacific, the Chinese forces of Chiang Kai-shek had a more complex problem. While Chiang was faced by an external force from Japan, his men were threatened also by the formidable Chinese Communist army under Mao Tse-tung. The British and Americans wanted Chiang to put more pressure on the Japanese on the mainland. But if he moved troops facing Mao, in China, to engage the Japanese, he would expose the rear elements of his army. Therefore, he could not move his army from its positions against Mao’s forces in order to aid the Allies against the Japanese and hope to survive the threat of the Chinese Communists.

The other part of the problem was that as British and American forces were moved in increasing numbers onto the mainland of China to help Chiang against the Japanese, it was inevitable that somewhere along the line they would encounter Chinese Communist forces that were ideological allies of the Soviets—who were, in turn, the military allies of the British and Americans.

Such complex affairs do not digest well in time of war, when the friend-versus-enemy scenario is supposed to be as clear as black and white. This is why the four powers could not meet publicly at one time in one place, and this explains why there had to be two conferences, one in Cairo and one in Tehran. And it further explains why the Chinese met secretly with Stalin in Tehran and how the three Pacific allies—the United States, Great Britain, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese—won a concession from Stalin to have him prevail upon his ideological ally, Mao Tse-tung, to withhold his forces from further pressure on Chiang, at least until the war with Japan ended. (Mao finally defeated the Nationalists in Nanking in 1949.) Such intricate diplomacy in the heat of the war demanded true statesmanship all around.

It is not within the scope of this book to venture into the areas of diplomacy and political intrigue that grew out of this most important meeting. Rather, we shall pursue its impact upon the development of a new trend in U.S. military doctrine that emerged and shaped itself during the Cold War years. Elements of this doctrine became evident in the NSAM #55, #56, and #57 series of presidential directives that John F. Kennedy issued in June 1961 as he initiated his objective of bringing the CIA under his effective control by putting the military into the “Peacetime Operations” (clandestine) business.

Following the Tehran and Cairo conferences, American military aid to and participation with the Chinese on the mainland increased enormously. A group of B-29 Super Fortress bombers was flown from the United States via Africa and the Middle East to bases in the Assam Valley wartime airport complex of eastern India. From there they were flown to advance bases in China for direct operations against the Japanese home islands.

It was during the post-Tehran Conference period that selected American military leaders ran up against conditions in China that were totally uncharacteristic of the military practices and doctrine of the United States. In China, military force was deeply involved in a political role at the same time as it was fighting a conventional war against the Japanese and a civil war with Mao. This necessarily political role of the military opened the eyes of the more traditional U.S. military observers.

The United States had sent a number of its finest military leaders to China. The army was under the command of Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell. The air force units were commanded by the legendary Gen. Claire Chennault of “Flying Tigers” fame. A number of these officers and their key subordinates came home from the war in Asia deeply impressed with what they had experienced there. Two things stood out above all others: the impact of the atomic bomb and the writings and revolutionary military doctrine of Mao Tse-tung.

Looking back at World War II, and even before it, U.S. military men—for the most part—regarded warfare as something that took place overseas, beyond our borders. They viewed military service as a totally nonpolitical function. This, they found, was also generally true of the military traditions of our British and French allies in Europe—until, that is, the closing period of the war. Then things began to change.

After the surrender of Italy, the U.S. Army began to help the Italians, who had been under Fascist totalitarian rule for a generation or more. They needed help not only to obtain food, shelter, and clothing but also to restructure local governments.

The U.S. Army began a program of “Civil Affairs and Military Government.” American servicemen, making use of their civilian skills, pitched in to get public water supplies flowing again, to get transportation rolling, and even to form a political structure that could take over the local administrations. This function spread all over Europe as cities and towns were liberated, one after the other, by the advancing U.S. armies.

The U.S. Army was getting into politics. But it was someone else’s politics. This new role for the army came at a fortuitous time. Two cities had been totally leveled by atomic bombs in faraway Japan. If the future of warfare was going to face up to reality, it would have to recognize that whole countries, or at least major regions of countries, would be totally devastated by nuclear weapons and their lethal fallout.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the War Colleges, where military doctrine is developed, began the study of nuclear weapons and their immense power, with the idea of placing these weapons into wartime Grand Strategy. If the entire span of the evolution of warfare had created a spectrum based upon weaponry from hand-held clubs at one end across to the B-29 bomber at the other, then it might be said that the nuclear weapon extended that spectrum of power almost to infinity.

The curriculum of each of these schools for senior officers contained major segments on nuclear warfare. “War Plans”—those very formal and fundamental plans designed to implement Grand Strategy and used in the budgeting process to ensure the availability of men, money, and matériel essential to carry out and fulfill those plans in time of war—were being developed that contained major segments dedicated to “poststrike” activity.

This new nuclear-age strategy recognized a type of warfare initiated by a sudden exchange of nuclear weapons, followed by a time of shock and stagnation. The urban areas of the Soviet Union, it was contemplated, would be devastated, and transportation and communications would be totally disrupted. The daily activities of the surviving population would be at a standstill, with no voice of leadership from the Kremlin; the survivors would be on their own. War Plans forecast that the first nation that could introduce, by airlift, its military forces into this shocked and devastated area and that could reestablish law and order, along with a new political and economic system, would seal victory.

For this purpose, the newly established CIA was brought into the war-planning activity and visualized as a fourth force in wartime. The CIA was asked to oversee the development of these special activities in peacetime and to manage their operation in time of war. Similarly, the air force was ordered to create a huge, global air transport system that could be rapidly augmented at the outbreak of war by CRAF (Civil Reserve Air Fleet) aircraft from the airlines. This huge air armada would airlift the army and essential supplies into enemy zones that had been specifically avoided by nuclear strikes to be sanctuaries and rallying zones following the nuclear deluge.

Those army “Special Forces” units, created for this purpose to work with the CIA and its “stay-behind” assets, would begin to create a government that would include a new economic and political system. As the lead element of these forces, the U.S. Army was directed to create, in peacetime, a Special Warfare section, to train Special Forces; and, once it had trained them, to disperse them to strategic locations around the world. The CIA had been directed to do everything possible to establish networks of foreign agents, in peacetime, far behind the borders of potential enemy countries. With the outbreak of war, the CIA would activate these “stay-behind” networks in preparation for the arrival of U.S. armed forces.

The air force created Air Re-supply and Communications (ARC) Wings, vast flying organizations trained and equipped to work with the army’s Special Forces and the CIA. These ARC Wings possessed airborne printing facilities that could be operated in flight. They were able to make areawide blanket leaflet drops to provide the psychological-warfare edge and the communications substitute required to reorganize a stunned and disorganized populace. This was the grandiose plan that emerged out of the merger of the World War II atomic bomb and “Civil Affairs and Military Government” experiences of World War II. On reflection, it is amazing to see how these two widely divergent concepts became a Grand Strategy war plan; and how then, by adding the superlative ingredient of elements of the Mao doctrine, they were shaped expertly to become the Cold War doctrine and the tactics of the Vietnam era, among other applications. For example, this planning was behind the “Strategic Hamlet” concept that will be described later.

It is even more fascinating to see how all this has been shaped in the hands of later administrations and applied as a main theme of the military action concept of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet with all this development, there was one thing lacking. This new doctrine needed eyes and ears and, if possible, reliable contacts within the denied areas of Soviet, or other potential-enemy, territory.

The relatively new CIA, concentrating for the most part on its mission of intelligence, had none of the bases, military equipment, manpower, storage sites, etc., required for such a task. Faced with this dilemma—it sorely wanted to be the Fourth Force, but did not possess the wherewithal to pull it off—the CIA made a characteristically clever and self-serving decision.

The agency placed the burden of support right back on the military system. As the years passed, the CIA amassed enormous stockpiles of War Plans-authorized equipment in warehouses, ostensibly to await either a military exercise to flex its muscles or the real thing. This is the way the CIA got its toe in the door to flesh out its early clandestine operations.

It is an old military truism that “if you have the weapons, they will be used,” and, indeed, as the years rolled by, these weapons were used, by the CIA.

These two strategic concepts, one gleaned from the China of Mao Tse-tung and the other arising out of the wartime devastation of Europe, began to merge with the nuclear reality. American military officers with Asian experience began to soak up the European concept of Civic Action and Special Warfare. This change of direction became the central theme of the warfare in Indochina during the 1960s and 1970s and later became the dominant theme of President Reagan’s military policy, as evidenced in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East.

In earlier days, such “Peacetime Operations” were secret, and every attempt was made to keep them that way. Today they are called “covert,” but they are as overt as the attacks on Libya, and they are, of course, readily attributable to the United States. This situation marks the end of the principle that honored national sovereignty among the family of nations. By 1958, senior military officers at the Army War College heard lectures on these subjects presented by the new breed of U.S. military strategist. An excerpt from one such lecture given by Edward G. Lansdale follows: