JFK (42 page)

As described in earlier chapters, Diem had been dependent upon and personally close to Lansdale ever since Diem had returned to the Far East from exile. He had spent a lot of time working out plans with Lansdale during the latter’s lengthy visit to Saigon after Kennedy’s election in late 1960. Diem and his CIA-oriented brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were perplexed by the rapid changes and developments on the banks of the Potomac that so dramatically affected Dulles, Lansdale, and the CIA. Diem became suspicious of the Kennedy administration and its representatives. He was reluctant to accept new faces, new ideas, and a new strategy, despite the fact that he was repeatedly assured that it was all for his own good.

From the middle of 1959, Diem had begun the creation of communelike “Agrovilles” that were planned as small communities in which all essential amenities were provided. As noted, the greatest single factor underlying the serious unrest in the new nation of South Vietnam was the infiltration of more than one million Tonkinese (northern) refugees who had been transported south by U.S. sea and air assets. These people, many of whom came to fill key posts in the Diem government as the years progressed, needed a place to live. In Diem’s mind, these Agrovilles, designed and supported with American funds, were to provide a place to live for as many of these invading strangers as possible.

For many reasons, this plan failed miserably after fewer than twenty-five Agrovilles had been carved out of a no-man’s-land in the destitute countryside. Thus the open-commune Agroville, based on a design concept from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, became the heavily barricaded Strategic Hamlet of 1961 in the Kennedy era. The Strategic Hamlet was designed, out of necessity, to overcome two serious problems: It was engineered as much to keep the settlers in as to provide security for them against attack from the outside by starving bandits, usually called the Vietcong. By 1961, South Vietnam was overrun with displaced, starving natives and by equally displaced and starving Tonkinese.

Viewed from the eye of the maker of Grand Strategy, with his Malthusian incentives, the situation “to engender warfare” in Vietnam could not have been better. As Alberto Moravia wrote in his book
The Red Book and the Great Wall, an Impression of Mao’s China,
“More is consumed in wartime in a day than is consumed in peacetime in a year.”

It is all too easy to forget that this conflict in populous, wealthy (by Asian standards), and placid Indochina had been set in motion back in 1945, when Ho Chi Minh arrived in Hanoi accompanied by his associates from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services
⁶
and armed with American weapons from Okinawa. These were the weapons used by the Vietminh to control much of the region from 1945 to 1954. These same weapons, especially the heavy artillery, had made it possible for them to defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu. At that time, what remained of the $3 billion arms aid the U.S. had provided to the French was added to Ho Chi Minh’s U.S.-supplied arsenal.

By modern standards, the United States had provided a more than adequate arms supply to the man whom it would, after the stage was set, call “the enemy.” During 1962, Michael Forrestal, a senior member of the National Security Council staff and a close friend of Jack Kennedy’s, visited Vietnam with Roger Hilsman from the Department of State. They wrote a report to the President, saying, “The vast bulk of both recruits and supplies come from inside South Vietnam itself.” That was their bureaucratic euphemism for saying that the Vietminh’s weapons were American-made. Of course they were.

Another top-level official stated, “Throughout this time no one had ever found one Chinese rifle or one Soviet weapon used by the Vietcong.” He noted that all weapons taken from the Vietcong (bandits) by the United States were either homemade (mainly crude but effective land mines) or previously acquired from the Diem government or the United States.

It is little wonder that the Diem brothers found the Kennedy administration difficult to accept. The actions of supplying weapons to both sides, on top of the forced movement of more than one million Tonkinese from the north to the south via U.S.-supplied navy vessels and aircraft, constituted “make war” tactics, in the Diems’ eyes.

It was in this climate that the Kennedy administration welcomed the post—Bay of Pigs report from Gen. Maxwell Taylor and his assignment as military adviser to the President in the Kennedy White House. On October 11, 1961, the President directed General Taylor and Walt Rostow, a foreign policy adviser, to travel to Saigon.

Rostow had stated, in the fall of 1961, that it was “now or never” for the United States in Vietnam. Bill Bundy, formerly with the CIA (if “formerly” ever applies to CIA agents) as a Far East expert and, in 1961, deputy secretary of defense, said there was a 70 percent chance to “clean up the situation.” He advised a preemptive strike, an “early and hard-hitting operation.” Neither of these men were military experts. They were just trying to show muscle and daring.

Taylor was a little more patient and, under the guise of a “flood relief” project, recommended that a small number of U.S. servicemen be introduced into Vietnam. Kennedy agreed and in all later public pronouncements referred to them as “support troops.”

Meanwhile, Robert S. McNamara and his former Ford Motor Company “Whiz Kids” were gearing up to get into the act. Everyone wanted to be known as a military expert. McNamara did not have any experience with warfare; he knew little, if anything, about Indochina. He was a precisionist. He liked things to be orderly and to be explained in “case study” detail. One of his first decisions, based upon a preinaugural briefing in the Pentagon, was to order the use of a defoliant spray in Vietnam. He turned this idea, his own, over to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the high-powered organization of technicians that had sprung up in the Pentagon in the wake of the Sputnik surprise, where it came under the wing of an old bureaucratic professional, Bill Godel.

Making use of the postelection hiatus in senior government employee activity, Godel had jumped from the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he had worked under Gen. Graves B. Erskine, USMC (Ret’d), along with Col. Edward G. Lansdale and myself, to the greener pastures of ARPA.

During its first days, this defoliant project was known as Operation Hades; shortly thereafter, it was given the name Ranchhand. No one gave the project much consideration, and the ordinary defoliant used by the railroads was given a try. In the normal course of business, it never occurred to anyone that this defoliant would prove to be dangerous. As was customary with many projects at this time, the Ranchhand project was approved by McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, Robert Kennedy, U. Alexis Johnson, Mike Forrestal, Dick Helms and Maxwell Taylor.

The aircraft assigned to this project had been left over from other projects, and their modification for spraying purposes did not prove difficult. No one had any concern for the consequences of the decision to defoliate. As events showed later, the use of harmful defoliants served little, if any, practical purpose in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, the “enemy” found it useful to burn the dead leaves and flee in the clouds of smoke, so it had more use from their point of view than for regular Vietnamese forces.

During May 1961, McNamara set up a project monitoring system called the Combat Development Test Center (CDTC). This process was characteristic of McNamara and his concept of operation. The objective of the CDTC was to place one office “at the front” in Saigon and the other close to the seat of power, and money, in the Pentagon. They were connected by a direct communication channel. As each problem arose and was identified in Saigon, it was numbered and wired immediately to the Pentagon. Thus, if there was a problem with “the action of the M-16 carbine” in combat, it was given a number in serial order and sent to the Pentagon, where #1156 would be given priority treatment.

Many people, myself included, used to read the lists of the CDTC priority projects every day. One unusual thing about CDTC projects was that their size, complexity, cost, or combat utility made no difference in their serial listing and treatment. All were equal, one after the other.

One day, I read a project that stated: “Elite troops of the Palace Guard are suffering from malnutrition on the Cambodian border.” These “elite troops” were CIA and Filipino trained, and they were normally assigned to the palace to guard President Diem and his family. As part of their training they were getting “field combat” experience on the troubled Cambodian border.

For some reason, they suffered malnutrition while on this duty. Without delay, ARPA, the Pentagon manager of the CDTC project, set up a conference in the Pentagon for nutrition specialists from three leading universities. These specialists were next flown to Hawaii for Indochina briefings, then to Saigon, and thence to the Cambodian border. There they learned that the “elite troops,” for the most part Tonkinese, could not eat the food prepared for them in Saigon and flown to them on the border. It lacked a native sauce that, to the Tonkinese, was essential.

The ARPA team arranged to have the sauce prepared in enormous quantities and, for lack of a better alternative, run through a nearby soft-drink bottling plant. The bottles were packed in wooden crates, airlifted to the border, and paradropped to the starving troops. End of case—almost.

Some months later, I observed a new CDTC project much farther down the numbered list. It read, “Elite troops of the Palace Guard are suffering malnutrition on the Cambodian border.” ARPA handled each case by rote. It called a conference of nutrition experts—in the random process, these were different people—and flew them to Saigon.

In Saigon, they were told about the earlier project and shown the large-scale production facility and bottling plant. All seemed in order. Nevertheless, they asked to be flown to the border. There they found the starving troops. The problem was not difficult to discover.

When the cases of special sauce had been paradropped, the glass bottles were smashed. The troops were not allowed to eat anything for fear of broken glass. There was the problem. Back to Saigon.

Now the experts looked for a cannery. The nearest available one was at the San Miguel brewery in Manila. It was disassembled, flown to Saigon, and reassembled. The special Tonkinese sauce was made in the same vats and then canned at the new facility. This time, when the sauce was air-dropped to the troops, it survived the impact. The team of nutritionists declared the project a success and returned to their separate campuses. ARPA closed the project without ever looking back and turned to the next case. This was how the modern war was being fought in the halls of the Pentagon—“Whiz Kid” style.

Other examples were not so amusing. A Washington lawyer with ready and frequent access to the White House had made a trip to Florida, where he saw some massive machines clearing land in great swaths. As rows of these monster machines moved forward in teams, one beside the other, they chewed up everything in their way and left behind bare ground about as smooth as a tennis court. This lawyer was told that such machines were used in Latin America in the upper Amazon Basin, where they chewed their way through the rain forests, producing pulp for paper manufacture and leaving behind nothing but bare, dead ground.

When he returned from Florida, this quick-thinking lawyer went to see McNamara, after having paid a tactical call on the President, and suggested that an array of these enormous machines, set loose at the noman’s-land of the 17th parallel in Vietnam, could remove everything on the ground and leave nothing but bare earth. He suggested that the bare earth be networked with electronic devices that would permit the instant detection of anything that moved. This became a CDTC project, and before long it became the multi-billion-dollar “electronic battlefield.”

In a similar but more costly deal, another astute planner learned that one of the major problems in Indochina was its lack of ports adequate for seagoing cargo vessels. Through all the early years of the war, almost all supplies delivered by ship had to be off-loaded in the inadequate river port of Saigon, far from the sea. (It is something like the minor port of Alexandria, Virginia, far up the Potomac River near Washington.)

This man rented a large office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington and had a huge replica of the Cam Ranh Bay (Vinh Cam Ranh) area on the coast of Vietnam constructed on a set of large tables. He filled it with water, and it looked like the real thing. It was his idea that the natural, shallow bay could be dredged and that huge plastic bags could be submerged, with weights, and used for the storage of large quantities of gasoline and jet fuel.

The weight of the seawater on these plastic bags would pump the lighter petroleum through pipes to a seaside storage site. His estimate for this project ran to about $2 billion. McNamara and his CDTC people put the project up for bid. A huge consortium of general contractors worked together on the project, and before it was done, that original $2 billion project had multiplied in cost many times over. This was the part of the Vietnam War that was rarely seen and is still seldom realized. After all, the $220 billion direct cost of the war—perhaps an overall cost of $500 billion—had to have been spent somewhere. . . somehow.

The Kennedy team had decided on the priorities. They had learned from the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation that they could not trust the CIA, and they had learned from Gen. Maxwell Taylor that the only way to fight the kind of war they inherited from the CIA in Indochina would be to do it with the kind of paramilitary tactics as waged by the U.S. Army Special Warfare units.