JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (66 page)

Recognizing that Lodge was as much of a challenge as Diem, Kennedy conceded to his stubborn ambassador the unbudging position of silence he had staked out but expressed the hope Lodge would be ready to communicate with Diem when necessary:

“Your policy toward the [Government of Vietnam] of cool correctness in order to make Diem come to you is correct. You should continue it. However, we realize it may not work and that at some later time you may have to go to Diem to ensure he understands over-all US policy.”
[100]

Kennedy’s instructions to Lodge, wired through Secretary of State Dean Rusk, recognized that Diem’s brother and sister-in-law were the primary obstacles to reform in the South Vietnamese government. Any specific reforms were “apt to have little impact without dramatic symbolic move which convinces Vietnamese that reforms are real. As practical matter this can only be achieved by some feasible reduction in influence of Nhus, who are—justifiably or not—a symbol of authoritarianism.”

Lodge responded to the president’s instructions with objections. He wired back to Rusk that “‘restriction on role of Nhus’ seems unrealistic . . . we cannot remove the Nhus by nonviolent means against their will.”
[101]

The ambassador saw absolutely no hope of negotiating a resolution of the political crisis with Diem: “the only thing which the U.S. really wants—the removal of or restriction on the Nhus—is out of the question.”
[102]

However, there was in fact something more fundamental that most of the U.S. government, and Lodge in particular, wanted from Diem. Lodge devoted the bulk of his October 7 telegram to documenting the most basic reason why he thought Diem and his dominant brother had in any case to be removed from power. It was not the Buddhist crisis but something more worrisome: “Nhu says in effect that he can and would like to get along without the Americans. He only wants some helicopter units and some money. But he definitely does not want American military personnel who, he says, are absolutely incapable of fighting a guerrilla war.”
[103]

The bottom line for Lodge was that Diem and Nhu were dangerously close to doing what they had been threatening to do for months—asking the U.S. government to withdraw its forces from Vietnam.

Lodge concluded his rebuttal to Kennedy by making an ominous connection between a withdrawal request and a coup: “we should consider a request to withdraw as a growing possibility. The beginning of withdrawal might trigger off a coup.”
[104]

Lodge had Kennedy in a corner. At the very moment when Kennedy was quietly ordering the beginning of his own U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, Lodge was warning him that the request for a withdrawal by Diem and Nhu could trigger a coup in Saigon that Lodge was facilitating.

Only five days before Lodge’s telegram,
Washington Daily News
reporter Richard Starnes’s alarming article on the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” in Vietnam had appeared. Starnes had cited a “very high American official” in Saigon who “likened the CIA’s growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.”
[105]
President Kennedy had read Starnes’s article closely. He was so disturbed by it that he brought it up in the October 2 meeting of the National Security Council, asking the NSC members, “What should we say [in a public statement] about the news story attacking CIA which appeared in today’s
Washington Daily
News
?”
[106]
Kennedy decided to say nothing about the article,
[107]
but it had shaken him. Starnes had also cited an unnamed U.S. official who spoke of a possible CIA coup in Washington. The official had said prophetically, the month before John Kennedy’s assassination, “If the United States ever experiences a
Seven Days in
May
[the novel envisioning a military takeover of the U.S. government], it will come from the CIA, and not the Pentagon.”
[108]
In the light of Lodge’s telegram five days later, the president may have wondered if Starnes’s unnamed U.S. official in Saigon who gave that warning was Henry Cabot Lodge.

Did Lodge’s cable warning Kennedy that the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal might trigger a Saigon coup carry overtones of a Washington coup as well?

In his efforts to gain control of his own government on a Vietnam policy, Kennedy found himself in another struggle with the Central Intelligence Agency. When he was checkmated by a CIA front, AID, Kennedy was experiencing one effect of the way in which the CIA had established its invisible control over Vietnam. In that particular case, Kennedy could see what was going on. He knew AID was a CIA front.

However, there were other, less-visible CIA fronts. Richard Starnes had revealed further examples of the CIA’s takeover in Vietnam in the article JFK had read. From the president’s raising the article to the National Security Council, we know how seriously he took Starnes’s following description of the CIA in Vietnam:

“CIA ‘spooks’ (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis.

“An American field officer with a distinguished combat career speaks angrily about ‘that man at headquarters in Saigon wearing a colonel’s uniform.’ He means the man is a CIA agent, and he can’t understand what he is doing at U.S. military headquarters here, unless it is spying on other Americans . . .

“Few people other than [Saigon station chief John] Richardson and his close aides know the actual CIA strength here, but a widely used figure is 600. Many are clandestine agents known only to a few of their fellow spooks . . .

“‘There are spooks in the U.S. Information Service, in the U.S. Operations mission, in every aspect of American official and commercial life here,’ one official—presumably a non-spook—said.

“‘They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone,’ he added.”
[109]

How had the CIA managed to place undercover agents in every branch of the American government in Saigon by the fall of 1963?

The answer opens a door to understanding the murder of John F. Kennedy, because the process whereby the CIA took over Vietnam was part of a broader problem JFK faced in Washington. While the president struggled to push his newly found politics of peace past the anti-communist priorities of the CIA, that creature from the depths of the Cold War kept sprouting new arms to stop him. As in Vietnam, the CIA had agents operating in other branches of the government. Those extended arms of the agency acted to forward its policies and frustrate Kennedy’s, as in the case of AID’s suspension of the Commodity Import Program, thereby setting up a coup. J. Edgar Hoover knew the CIA had infiltrated the FBI’s decision making as well, making it possible for the CIA to cancel the FBI’s FLASH on Oswald at a critical moment in October, setting up the assassination of Kennedy. How had the CIA’s covert arms been grafted onto these other parts of the government?

One man in a position to watch the arms of the CIA proliferate was Colonel Fletcher Prouty. He ran the office that did the proliferating. In 1955, Air Force Headquarters ordered Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a career Army and Air Force officer since World War II, to set up a Pentagon office to provide military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA. Thus Prouty became director of the Pentagon’s “Focal Point Office for the CIA.”
[110]

CIA Director Allen Dulles was its actual creator. In the fifties, Dulles needed military support for his covert campaigns to undermine opposing nations in the Cold War. Moreover, Dulles wanted subterranean secrecy and autonomy for his projects, even from the members of his own government. Prouty’s job was to provide Pentagon support and deep cover for the CIA beneath the different branches of Washington’s bureaucracy. Dulles dictated the method Prouty was to follow.

“I want a focal point,” Dulles said. “I want an office that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But the system will not be aware of what initiated the request—they’ll think it came from the Secretary of Defense. They won’t realize it came from the Director of Central Intelligence.”
[111]

Dulles got Prouty to create a network of subordinate focal point offices in the armed services, then throughout the entire U.S. government. Each office that Prouty set up was put under a “cleared” CIA employee. That person took orders directly from the CIA but functioned under the cover of his particular office and branch of government. Such “breeding,” Prouty said decades later in an interview, resulted in a web of covert CIA representatives “in the State Department, in the FAA, in the Customs Service, in the Treasury, in the FBI and all around through the government—up in the White House . . . Then we began to assign people there who, those agencies thought, were from the Defense Department. But they actually were people that we put there from the CIA.”
[112]

The consequence in the early 1960s, when Kennedy became president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through the entire U.S. government. It was accountable to no one except the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms became this invisible government’s immediate commander. No one except a tight inner circle of the CIA even knew of the existence of this top-secret intelligence network, much less the identity of its deep-cover bureaucrats. These CIA “focal points,” as Dulles called them, constituted a powerful, unseen government within the government. Its Dulles-appointed members would act quickly, with total obedience, when called on by the CIA to assist its covert operations.

As the son of an ambassador to Britain and from his many years in the House and Senate, John Kennedy had come to understand the kind of power he would face as a changing president, trying to march to the beat of a different drummer. However, in his struggles with the CIA, Kennedy had no one to tell him just how extensive the agency’s Cold War power had become beneath the surface of the U.S. government, including almost certainly members of his own White House staff. In his final months, JFK knew he was being blocked by an enemy within. However, he was surrounded by more representatives of that enemy than he could have known.

On October 24, coup plotter General Tran Van Don informed Lucien Conein that the Saigon coup was imminent. It would take place no later than November 2.
[113]
Conein and the CIA passed the word to Lodge, and Lodge to the State Department.

On the same day, the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission to South Vietnam was welcomed to Saigon by President Ngo Dinh Diem for its investigation into the Buddhist crisis.
[114]
The UN Mission would still be in Vietnam collecting information at the time of Diem’s assassination the following week.
[115]

Also on October 24, President Diem invited Ambassador Lodge to spend the day with him three days later. Apparently Diem wanted to talk. Lodge accepted the invitation.
[116]

The State Department in a telegram encouraged Lodge in his upcoming dialogue with Diem: “Diem’s invitation to you may mean that he has finally decided to come to you . . . As you know, we wish to miss no opportunity to test prospect of constructive changes by Diem.”
[117]

Lodge’s October 27 talk with Diem turned into another confrontation. Lodge reported back to Dean Rusk what he had told the South Vietnamese president on behalf of the United States: “We do not wish to be put in the extremely embarrassing position of condoning totalitarian acts which are against our traditions and ideals.”
[118]

“Repeatedly,” Lodge reported, “I asked him, ‘What do you propose to do for us?’ His reply several times was either a blank stare or change of subject or the statement: ‘je ne vais pas servir’ which makes no sense. He must have meant to say ‘ceder’ rather than ‘servir’, meaning: ‘I will not give in.’ He warned that the Vietnamese people were strange people and could do odd things if they were resentful.”
[119]

Lodge was fluent in French. Diem’s repeated statement, “Je ne vais pas servir,” “I will not serve,” made no sense to Lodge not because he didn’t understand the language but because he didn’t understand Diem. From Diem’s point of view, he was refusing in principle to
serve
American interests—what he thought the patrician American statesman, Henry Cabot Lodge, was ordering him to do. To Lodge’s incessant question, “What do you propose to do for us?” Diem’s very genuine response was: “I will not serve.” He was not going to bow and scrape in front of the Americans.

Lodge was convinced that Diem was “simply unbelievably stubborn,” as he told Rusk earlier in his report. Lodge was like a Southern landowner dismissing a nonconforming black sharecropper as “stubborn.” So Lodge thought Diem must have meant to say, “I will not give in,” rather than “I will not serve.” Stubbornness, not principle, was what Lodge was prepared to deal with in terms of the “chicken” metaphor, or head-on crash scenario, that he was following in his strategy toward Diem. He thought the United States’ client ruler was being “simply, unbelievably stubborn” in not backing down from “totalitarian acts which are against our traditions and ideals.”