JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (69 page)

Berkeley Moyland was phoned back by an official in the Treasury Department (with jurisdiction over the Secret Service) who committed him to the absolute silence on the matter that he almost took to his grave. The Treasury Department official gave the police officer stringent orders. He said: “Don’t write anything about it. Don’t tell anybody about it. Just forget about it.”
[183]
Nevertheless, in his final years, Moyland did finally tell the story to his son, who in turn shared it with me in an interview thirty years later.

Unlike the story of Dallas, Berkeley Moyland’s forbidden story had a peaceful conclusion. Lieutenant Moyland and Thomas Vallee met one more time at the cafeteria, under more relaxed circumstances—“just to shoot the bull,” Moyland said.
[184]

Finally, the retired officer said, ending the story to his son, he received a message in the mail some time later that he believed came from Thomas Arthur Vallee. It was a greeting card that said “thank you.” The card bore no signature. Yet Moyland felt certain it came from the disturbed but grateful man he had cautioned over breakfast and then turned in to the Secret Service.
[185]

Thanks to the intervention of Berkeley Moyland and the unidentified “Lee,” Thomas Arthur Vallee was spared the shame of being identified in the public’s mind as President Kennedy’s assassin. He was arrested on a pretext two and a half hours before Kennedy’s scheduled arrival in Chicago. However, as the Chicago Secret Service knew, with only that much time to go before the president’s plane was due to touch down at O’Hare Airport, they still had the responsibility of finding two of the four snipers who remained at large on the streets.

At 4:30 p.m. on Friday, November 1, as rebel military units were encircling the Gia Long Presidential Palace in Saigon, President Diem phoned Ambassador Lodge. When their conversation was over, Lodge reported it in a Flash Telegram to the State Department that was passed to the CIA, the White House, and the Secretary of Defense:

Diem: “Some units have made a rebellion and I want to know: What is the attitude of the U.S.?”

Lodge: “I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you. I have heard the shooting, but am not acquainted with all the facts. [Lodge was in fact receiving Conein’s regular reports from the coup command post at Joint General Staff headquarters.] Also it is 4:30 a.m. in Washington and the U.S. Government cannot possibly have a view.” [As Lodge knew, CIA, State, White House, and Defense officials were very much awake at that hour in Washington reading his and Conein’s reports on the coup they had facilitated.]

Diem: “But you must have some general ideas. After all, I am a Chief of State. I have tried to do my duty. I want to do now what duty and good sense require. I believe in duty above all.”

Lodge: “You have certainly done your duty. As I told you only this morning, I admire your courage and your great contributions to your country. No one can take away from you the credit for all you have done. Now I am worried about your physical safety. I have a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your brother safe conduct out of the country if you resign. Had you heard this?”

Diem: “No. [Then after a pause, as Diem realized from Lodge’s words that the U.S. ambassador was in close contact with coup leaders.] You have my telephone number.”

Lodge: “Yes. If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.”

Diem: “I am trying to re-establish order.”
[186]

The rebel troops bombarded the presidential guard barracks and the Gia Long Palace through the night. At 3:30 Saturday morning, the generals ordered an assault to overwhelm Diem’s loyalist guards.

CIA agent Lucien Conein was beside the generals at Joint General Staff headquarters. He continued to act as their adviser. They had alerted him a few hours before the coup. Conein had at the generals’ request brought “all available money” to the coup headquarters from the CIA’s operational funds, $42,000 worth of piastres—“for food for the rebel troops,” as Conein said,
[187]
and perhaps, as Lodge had said, “to buy off potential opposition.”
[188]
Conein also brought with him a special voice radio “to relay information about the coup to the [Saigon] station and other CIA officers cut into his net.”
[189]
In addition, the generals had set up for him a direct telephone line to the U.S. Embassy. Conein was at the hub of a coup communications system extending from the generals’ command post to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and to the Situation Room in the White House. The CIA’s coup adviser, Lucien Conein, was totally wired to apply covert power from afar.
[190]
He and the generals knew the “advice” he was relaying to them from elsewhere could never be attributed to its ultimate sources.

Two of Conein’s sources of recommendations to the generals were in the White House Situation Room. There in the early morning hours of November 1, while the president was sleeping upstairs, McGeorge Bundy and Roger Hilsman were poring over Conein’s blow-by-blow account of the coup. Already looking ahead, they cabled the Saigon Embassy that if the coup should be successful, the generals should justify it publicly by saying that “Nhu was dickering with the Communists to betray the anti-Communist cause. High value of this argument should be emphasized to them at earliest opportunity.”
[191]
The embassy relayed the message through Conein, then cabled back to Bundy and Hilsman, “Point has been made to the generals.”
[192]

Bundy’s and Hilsman’s recommendations, which the generals followed after the coup, put another obstacle in the way of Kennedy’s withdrawal policy. That anyone might do in Vietnam what Kennedy had already done in Laos was being characterized by Kennedy’s own advisers as a betrayal of the anti-communist cause, to be used as the reasonable public justification for a coup d’état in Saigon. Bundy and Hilsman were making it more difficult for Kennedy to negotiate a way out of Vietnam. Moreover, a similar case for “betrayal of the anti-Communist cause” could already be made against JFK to justify a Washington coup.

General Tran Van Don in his circumspect memoir of the Saigon coup reveals another, more urgent mandate that CIA operative Conein passed on to the generals. When General Don told Conein that he suspected the Ngo brothers might no longer be in the presidential palace, Conein said to him with irritation, “Diem and Nhu must be found at any cost.”
[193]

Diem and Nhu had escaped from the palace in the Friday night darkness, eluding the soldiers surrounding the grounds. They were then driven by an aide to Cholon, where a Chinese businessman gave them overnight refuge in his home.
[194]
It was from Cholon on Saturday morning that Ngo Dinh Diem made his last phone call to Henry Cabot Lodge. In his descriptions of the coup over the years, Lodge never mentioned his Saturday morning call from Diem. The two men’s final exchange was revealed by Lodge’s chief aide, Mike Dunn, in an interview in 1986, the year after Lodge’s death.
[195]

Diem had decided to take seriously the ambassador’s parting words to him Friday afternoon: “If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.” Diem did so Saturday morning.

“That morning,” Mike Dunn said, “Diem asked [in his call] if there was something we could do. Lodge put the phone down and went to check on something. I held the line open . . . Lodge told Diem he would offer them asylum and do what he could for them. I wanted to go over—in fact, I asked Lodge if I could go over and take them out. I said, ‘Because they are going to kill them.’ Told him that right flat out.”
[196]

Dunn thought if Lodge had forced the issue by sending him over to bring Diem and Nhu out of Cholon, their lives would have been saved—as the man whom Lodge represented, President Kennedy, wanted to happen.

But Lodge said to Dunn, “We can’t. We just can’t get that involved.”
[197]

Lucien Conein has said in an interview of his own that Diem also made three final calls to the generals on Saturday, ultimately surrendering and “requesting only safe conduct to the airport and departure from Vietnam.”
[198]
Conein said he then called the CIA station. The CIA told him “it would take twenty-four hours to get a plane with sufficient range to fly the brothers nonstop to a country of asylum.”
[199]
The CIA had made no plans to evacuate Diem and Nhu to avoid their assassinations. Nor, according to the CIA, did the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam have a plane available then with sufficient range to fly Diem and Nhu to asylum, although a plane had apparently been standing by to fly Lodge to Washington. The Ngo brothers would have to remain in Saigon while the generals decided their fate. It did not take long for that to happen.

At 8:00 a.m. Saturday, Diem and Nhu left the house in Cholon to go to a nearby Catholic church. It was All Souls Day. Although the early morning Mass had ended, the brothers were able to receive communion from a priest shortly before a convoy of two armed jeeps and an armored personnel carrier pulled up in front of the church.

After learning the Ngos’ location, General Minh had sent a team of five men to pick them up. Two of the men in the personnel carrier were Major Duong Hieu Nghia, a member of the Dai Viet party that was especially hostile to Diem,
[200]
and Minh’s personal bodyguard, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, described as a professional assassin who had killed forty people.
[201]

Diem and Nhu were standing on the church steps. From what Lodge and the generals had told him on the phone, Diem thought he was being taken to the airport for a flight to another country. He asked if he could go by the palace to pick up some of his things. The officers said their orders were to take him at once to military headquarters.
[202]

As Diem and Nhu were led to the armored personnel carrier, they expressed surprise that they wouldn’t be riding in a car. According to a witness, “Nhu protested that it was unseemly for the president to travel in that fashion.”
[203]
They were shown how to climb down the hatch into the semidarkness of the armored vehicle. Captain Nhung went down with them. He tied their hands behind their backs. Major Nghia remained over them in the turret with his submachine gun. The convoy took off.

When the vehicles arrived at 8:30 at Joint General Staff headquarters, the hatch of the personnel carrier was opened. Diem and Nhu were dead. Both men had been “shot in the nape of the neck,” according to Lodge’s report two days later.
[204]
Nhu had also been stabbed in the chest and shot many times in the back.
[205]
Years later, two of the officers in the convoy described the assassinations of Diem and Nhu: “Nghia shot point-blank at them with his submachine gun, while Captain Nhung . . . sprayed them with bullets before using a knife on them.”
[206]

On Saturday, November 2, at 9:35 a.m., President Kennedy held a meeting at the White House with his principal advisers on Vietnam. As the meeting began, the fate of Diem and Nhu was unknown. Michael Forrestal walked in with a telegram. He handed it to the president. It was from Lodge. The message was that “Diem and Nhu were both dead, and the coup leaders were claiming their deaths to be suicide.”
[207]
But Kennedy knew they must have been murdered. General Maxwell Taylor, who was sitting with the president at the cabinet table, has described JFK’s reaction:

“Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diem must never suffer more than exile and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.”
[208]

After he learned of Diem’s and Nhu’s deaths, Kennedy was “somber and shaken,” according to Arthur Schlesinger, who “had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs.”
[209]

As in the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy accepted responsibility for the terrible consequences of decisions he had questioned, but not enough. In the case of the coup, he had submitted to the pressures for the August 24 telegram and the downward path that followed, while trying to persuade Lodge to negotiate with Diem, and Diem to change course in time. Both had refused to cooperate. He had sent Torby Macdonald to Saigon to appeal personally to Diem to save his life. Diem had again been unresponsive. When Diem did finally say in effect to Kennedy through Lodge on the morning of November 1, “Tell us what you want and we’ll do it,”
[210]
it was the eleventh hour before the coup. Lodge’s delayed transmission of Diem’s conciliatory message to Kennedy made certain that JFK would receive it too late.

Kennedy knew many, if not all, of the backstage maneuvers that kept him from reaching Diem in time, and Diem from reaching him. But he also knew he should never have agreed to the August 24 telegram in the first place. And he knew he could have thrown his whole weight against a coup from the beginning, as he had not. He had gone along with the push for a coup, while dragging his feet and seeking a way out of it. He accepted responsibility for consequences he had struggled to avoid, but in the end not enough—the deaths of Diem and Nhu.