JFK (62 page)

Behind the scenes, the PT-style boats and C-123s were used in late 1963 and 1964. The PT boats landed over-the-beach invasion parties on sabotaged missions, and the C-123s were used in clandestine flights over North Vietnam to drop smaller groups of agents.

A line in the usually circumspect Pentagon Papers tells us a little more than it actually intended to: “Covert operations [as outlined in OPLAN 34A] were carried out by South Vietnamese or hired personnel and supported by U.S. training and logistics efforts.” This brief statement reveals a bit more about how covert operations are mounted.

Such U.S. personnel as Special Forces troops were used to train and equip the teams to be dropped, or put “over the beach.” In general, these teams were believed to have been made up of South Vietnamese natives. However, as the Pentagon Papers item reveals, these teams included “hired personnel”—and therefore, special plans were made to retrieve them and to get them safely back out of hostile territory.

These “hired personnel,” as a category of clandestine operators, still exist. They are stateless people who are highly trained and equipped for special operations. They are far too valuable to expend on minor missions, and they must be kept available for such duties all over the world. They and their families are maintained in special safe areas, and their talents are called upon for covert operations of the greatest importance. The very fact that such key people were used in OPLAN 34A operations underscores how important the highest authorities considered these activities. They were seen as the leverage essential to the gradual but certain escalation of military activities in Indochina after the death of President Kennedy and during the early, and more pliable, days of the Johnson era.

These covert operations against North Vietnam were called, in the words of presidential adviser Walt Rostow, “tit for tat” activities; but with a difference. Usually in a “tit for tat” game, one party hits the other and the second party responds. In the Rostow context, the first party—the United States or South Vietnam—would strike covertly. Then, when the second party hit back, the United States would announce that it had been hit first and that it was legitimate to strike back. Such an action took place in the Gulf of Tonkin and led to the famous “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” that gave the President the authority to “strike back” and to utilize U.S. forces against the North Vietnamese. This was all part of the very clever sequence of events that had been planned as far back as May 1963 and was then implemented in after the death of Kennedy.

On July 30, 1964, “South Vietnamese” PT boats made a midnight attack, including an amphibious commando raid on the Hon Me and Hon Nieu islands just off the coast of North Vietnam above the 19th parallel, north latitude. The North Vietnamese responded by sending their high-speed KOMAR boats after the raiders. The “Swift” PT boats escaped; but the KOMARS spotted the U.S.S.
Maddox
in the vicinity. The
Maddox
claimed that the KOMARS fired torpedoes and that “a bullet fragment was recovered from the destroyer’s superstructure.”

On the night of August 3, 1964, more commando raids were made on the coast of North Vietnam, and the Vinh Sonh radar installation was hit. Because of its importance, this raid was most certainly made by CIA mercenaries. Following it, a claim was made of an intercepted radio transmission saying, “North Vietnamese naval forces had been ordered to attack the patrol” consisting of the
Maddox
and the
Turner Joy.
It was this incident that triggered the action that led to the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964. Plans laid in May 1963 and other related actions had been leading up to this event since November 22, 1963, and the guns of Dallas, and the preparatory steps had been under way since at least March 1964.

In March 1964 the familiar team of McNamara and Taylor made another fact-finding trip to South Vietnam. They returned and made their report to the President and the NSC on March 16. As a result of this report the President approved and signed NSAM #288 on March 17, 1964. By this time, of course, the Kennedy plan for Vietnam had been altered considerably. In their report, McNamara and Taylor said that “the situation in Vietnam was considerably worse than had been realized at the time of the adoption of NSAM #273” on November 26, 1963—not to mention at the time of NSAM #263, which was signed by Kennedy on October 11, 1963.

NSAM #288 said, “We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. . . . Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance. . . . . Thus, purely in terms of foreign policy, the stakes are high.”

This was a far cry from the Kennedy plans of late 1963. The stage was now set for military escalation in Southeast Asia. The level of activity was raised as OPLAN 34A strikes were leveraged in severity and with the response of the KOMARS against the attacks by the PT boats and their mercenary crewmen.

In mid-1964 Ambassador Lodge had resigned to run for the presidency that fall, and he had been replaced in Saigon by none other than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell Taylor. Taylor’s staff was augmented by an old-line State Department veteran, U. Alexis Johnson, and by William Sullivan, who was made executive officer for the diplomatic mission.

At about the same time, Gen. Paul Harkins left his command in Saigon and was replaced by his deputy, Gen. William C. Westmoreland. In Peer de Silva’s well-chosen words, “Thus, these three [McNamara, Taylor, and Westmoreland], as heavenly stars, were to be perfectly aligned to dominate the American government’s policy and strategy in Vietnam in the crucial decision-making years of 1964—1965, a power alignment which I believe proved most unfortunate. Individually courageous, strong, and forceful, in 1964 they came to the wrong war.”

It would be hard to set the stage for that crucial period better than CIA Station Chief Peer de Silva has done it:

De Silva added, “The principle of fighting the big war, the big action in Vietnam, had thus been established. This doctrine, and the decisions later issuing from it, led inescapably to April 1975 and American defeat. ”

The important thing to realize from de Silva’s words is that General Taylor gave these orders to Westmoreland in December 1963—only one month after Kennedy’s death, less than one month after Johnson had signed the rather tentative document NSAM #273, and more than seven months before President Johnson was to ask Congress for the authority to use the armed forces of the United States in a war in Southeast Asia.

What did Gen. Maxwell Taylor know, in December 1963, about “the big war” that caused him to make such a statement? At that time, the United States had 15,914 military personnel in South Vietnam, of whom fewer than 2,000 were “military advisers.” The others were helicopter maintenance crewmen, supply personnel, and the like. Did Maxwell Taylor actually visualize the action in Vietnam as being similar to that which had confronted the Allied forces under General Eisenhower in Europe in 1944? Did General Taylor actually equate the black-pajama-clad “Vietcong” with the battle-trained armed forces of Nazi Germany? What kind of orders was he giving General Westmoreland? What did he expect the warfare in Indochina to become? More important, Taylor’s orders to Westmoreland came at a time when not one single American soldier was serving in Southeast Asia under the operational command and control of a U.S. military officer. How, then, could he have seen it as “a big war”?

These are questions that trail behind the train of events that led both to the death of Pres. John F. Kennedy and to the subsequent escalation of the American military intervention in Indochina. There can be no question that there were those who wanted the fighting to develop and to become the war that General Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described to Westmoreland in December 1963 as “big.” After all,
³
they had done so much to assure it would be.

In his monumental book
Law and the Indo-China War
, John Norton Moore, professor of law and director of the graduate program at the University of Virginia School of Law, discusses several of the variables of the quality of the general community’s minimum public order decisions as they pertain to the conflict in Southeast Asia and to warfare in general.

He cites, as the first of the several facts of interdependence that establish common interests in every global interaction, “the accelerating rate of population growth, along with the pluralization of both functional and territorial groups. . . . ”

Any study of the armed conflicts that have taken place during this century reveals that for whatever stated reason or excuse a particular war may have been waged, one of its most glaring results has been the wholesale murder of millions of noncombatants, such as occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1945 and 1980. Another inevitable finding would be that in addition to these genocidal murders, there have been numerous examples of the forced movement and relocation of additional millions of natives from their traditional homelands and communities to other, generally inhospitable locations. Such movements inevitably lead to the destruction of their ancient way of life and its irreplaceable social values.

The result of these actions—which have been carried out during this century both by “the West” and by “the Communists”—has often been the devastation of ancient homelands that had never been touched by warfare—at least not modern warfare, with its vast means of destruction.

The terrible 1968 massacre of more than three hundred women and children at Song My (My Lai) in Vietnam serves as no more than a minor example of the type of warfare that has overwhelmed such rural communities. As a result of the “mere gook” syndrome that prevailed in Vietnam, the enemy was frequently declared to be “anyone who ran,” “anyone of either sex,” “anyone of any age,” or “anyone armed or unarmed.”

Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, who had so much to do with the early years in Indochina, frequently regaled his associates in the Pentagon with stories of “enemy agents” who had been placed in helicopters to be flown to headquarters for interrogation. En route, “to let them know we meant business,” one or two who had refused to talk would be thrown out of the helicopter, “to teach the others a lesson.” Such murders were of little consequence to those warriors, as My Lai and the movie
Platoon
confirm.

These accounts from the earlier days of the war would be far surpassed by the record of the CIA’s Phoenix program, which was designed to destroy and wipe out the Vietnamese rural structure, on the assumption that it was the mainstay of the “Vietcong.” In open congressional testimony, William Colby, the CIA’s top man in the Phoenix program, claimed, with some pride, that they had eliminated about sixty thousand “authentic Vietcong agents.” These Vietnamese were “neutralized” without benefit of trial or of the rules of warfare governing the treatment of prisoners. They were simply “eliminated.”

In a war where “body count” seemed to be the primary objective of the fighting forces, one must not lose sight of the great significance of underlying factors that establish a climate of legitimacy for murder, or “neutralization.” In fact, these underlying beliefs serve to promote genocide. For example, there are many people in this world who believe it is not only “all right” but essential to reduce the total human population, and to reduce it by any means. This conviction, which stems from the work of the British East India Company’s chief economist at the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Malthus, pervades certain elements of our global society. Malthusianism is a deeper motivational factor than the more popularly recognized ideological confrontations.

When it is “their turn,” the Soviets have performed these common genocidal functions as well as “the West” has. Witness the slaughter of millions of noncombatants in Afghanistan and the forced movement of no fewer than 6 million Afghan natives from their ancient homeland over the great passes to Pakistan.

The U.S. Department of State’s Office of Population Affairs has stated:

The above conditions merge together into a demand for war—any kind of war, anywhere. This is the root concept, and the overall excuse, for an entire series of wars in Third World countries since 1945. Because of the Malthusian belief in the need for population control, the murder, by warfare, of countless millions of noncombatants is “lawfully” justified. This has been true quite recently, and it is why such wars are certain to break out before long in the heavily populated continents of Africa and Latin America.