JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (67 page)

Yet Diem was in fact preparing to back away from just such acts, as shown by his government’s surprising reception of the UN Fact-Finding Mission. Nevertheless, he refused to serve unconditionally the imperial interests of the government Lodge represented. He might even kick it out of Vietnam, as Lodge feared. Diem was refusing to be a Vietnamese servant obedient to Lodge’s wishes. That is why he told Lodge that the Vietnamese people could do odd things if they were resentful (an attitude Diem had increasingly in common with Ho Chi Minh)—which Lodge again failed to understand. He thought Diem could only have meant all along that he would not give in, not that there was something deeper at stake.

Even in Lodge’s own description of their conversation, it was Diem who spoke more to the point. Diem said bluntly, “The CIA is intriguing against the Government of Vietnam.”

Lodge, who was directing the CIA’s communications with the generals plotting against Diem, said in response (presumably with a straight face): “Give me proof of improper action by any employee of the U.S. Government and I will see that he leaves Vietnam.”
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Lodge concluded, in his report to Rusk, that the conversation with Diem, taken by itself, “does not offer much hope that [his viewpoint] is going to change.”
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Nor, more momentously, did the conversation offer much hope that Lodge was going to change his viewpoint on Diem. That would have required a radical change of heart for Lodge. For the coup he had striven to bring into being was now about to begin.

On Wednesday, October 30, the four generals who were plotting together, Minh, Don, Dinh, and Khiem, met secretly at a private club in Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese quarter. The generals then made their final decision to go ahead with the coup against Diem that would begin two days later.
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Also on October 30, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge wired the State Department that, contrary to what President Kennedy was saying, Lodge did “not think we have the power to delay or discourage a coup. [General] Don has made it clear many times that this is a Vietnamese affair. It is theoretically possible for us to turn over the information which has been given to us in confidence to Diem and this would undoubtedly stop the coup and would make traitors out of us.”
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For Lodge to imagine his becoming “a traitor” only to the coup leaders, and not Diem, he apparently had become already in his mind an ambassador to the generals.

Lodge was explicitly rejecting Kennedy’s statement at a White House meeting the day before: “We can discourage a coup in ways other than telling Diem of the rebel Generals’ plans. What we say to the coup Generals can be crucial short of revealing their plans to Diem.”
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Bundy wired Kennedy’s position to Lodge.
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Kennedy was insisting on his prerogative to block a coup by intervening with the generals. Lodge, as the man who would have to do the intervening, was claiming it would be futile to try. Yet only two days before, Lodge reported that General Don had sought him out at the Saigon airport to get confirmation that the CIA’s Lucien Conein “was authorized to speak for me [and the U.S. government].”
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The nervous generals needed last-minute reassurance that the United States would not thwart them—as Kennedy was telling Lodge he still might do, in spite of Lodge’s counterarguments that it couldn’t be done.

The generals were also acutely aware that Kennedy had already committed himself to a total withdrawal from Vietnam by the end of 1965. They were even using JFK’s withdrawal order as a reason for their coup. Lodge reported that General Don “stated flatly [at the airport] the only way to win before the Americans leave in 1965 was to change the present regime.”
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On a more practical note, Lodge told the State Department: “As to requests from the Generals, they may well have need of funds at the last moment with which to buy off potential opposition. To the extent that these funds can be passed discreetly, I believe we should furnish them . . .”
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At the same time as the generals were confirming their plot in Saigon, the FBI was discovering a plot to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago three days later—within hours of the time Diem would be assassinated.

On Wednesday, October 30, the agents at the Chicago Secret Service office were told of the Chicago plot by Special Agent in Charge Maurice Martineau. Abraham Bolden was one of the agents present. Bolden had left the White House detail voluntarily two years before in protest against the poor security being given the president. Bolden would now suffer for bearing witness to the Chicago plot against Kennedy.

I know former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. Between 1998 and 2004, I interviewed him on seven distinct visits to his South Side Chicago home.
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I hope my brief narration can do justice to the story of Abraham Bolden—and of his wife, Barbara Louise Bolden, who at the age of seventy died at home from an asthma attack on December 27, 2005.
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With the help of their faith, the love of their family and friends, and the writings of a few supportive researchers, Abraham and Barbara Bolden survived truthfully for decades the retaliation of a systemic evil that goes beyond the imagination of most Americans.
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Special Agent in Charge Martineau’s startling announcement to his Chicago Secret Service agents about a plot against Kennedy came in the context of their preparations for the president’s arrival at O’Hare Airport three days later on Saturday, November 2, at 11:40 a.m.
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On Saturday afternoon, JFK was scheduled to attend the Army–Air Force football game at Soldier Field. At 9:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, Martineau told the agents the FBI had learned from an informant that four snipers planned to shoot Kennedy with high-powered rifles. Their ambush was set to happen along the route of the presidential motorcade, as it came in from O’Hare down the Northwest Expressway and into the Loop on Saturday morning.
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The FBI had said “the suspects were rightwing para-military fanatics.” The assassination “would probably be attempted at one of the Northwest Expressway overpasses.” They knew this from an informant named “Lee.”
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Who was the informant named “Lee”? Could it have been Lee Harvey Oswald? We will return to that question.

The following day, the landlady at a boarding house on the North Side independently provided further information. Four men were renting rooms from her. She had seen four rifles with telescopic sights in one of the men’s rooms, together with a newspaper sketch of the president’s route. She phoned the FBI.
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The FBI told Martineau everything was now up to the Secret Service. James Rowley, head of the Secret Service in Washington, confirmed to Martineau that J. Edgar Hoover had passed the buck. It was the Secret Service’s jurisdiction. The FBI would do nothing to investigate or stop the plot against Kennedy.
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Martineau set up a twenty-four-hour surveillance of the men’s boarding house. He passed out to his agents four photos of the men allegedly involved in the plot.
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The stakeout reached a quick climax on Thursday night, October 31, at the same time as halfway around the world rebel tanks and troops were preparing to move through the streets of Saigon toward the presidential palace.

In Chicago, Secret Service agent J. Lloyd Stocks in his car spotted two of the suspects driving. Stocks followed them. When the men drove into an alley behind their rooming house, Stocks did, too. He discovered too late that the alley was a dead end. The men had turned their car around and were on their way back out. They squeezed past Stocks’s car at an unfortunate moment for the agent—just as his car radio blared out a message from Martineau.
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The startled men looked his way, then drove off quickly. Stocks reported back to Martineau with chagrin that he’d blown the surveillance.
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Martineau ordered that the two men be taken into custody immediately. They were seized and brought to the Secret Service headquarters early Friday morning. Through the early morning hours, J. Lloyd Stocks questioned one of the two men, while his fellow agent Robert Motto questioned the other. The two suspects, who have remained anonymous to this day, stonewalled the questions.
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In the meantime, their two reported collaborators remained at large. President Kennedy was due to arrive the next day for his motorcade through the streets of Chicago.

In Saigon on Friday morning, November l, Ambassador Lodge and Admiral Harry Felt, Commander in Chief of the Pacific, met with President Diem, as rebel troops were gathering outside the city. Lodge noticed that Diem spoke to them “with unusual directness.”
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Lodge did not reciprocate the directness.

Felt took note of a particular exchange between Diem and Lodge (that could be seen in retrospect as having happened three hours before the coup began):

Diem said, “I know there is going to be a coup, but I don’t know who is going to do it.”

Lodge not only knew there was going to be a coup but also who was going to do it. He reassured Diem by saying, “I don’t think there is anything to worry about.”
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When Felt had departed, Diem spoke with Lodge for another fifteen minutes. Diem had asked Lodge in advance to spend this time alone with him. After Lodge heard Diem once again make a series of charges against the United States, the ambassador got up to go. This was the last moment for Diem to speak his mind. He knew that a coup was imminent (that he hoped to survive). He also knew Lodge was scheduled to leave that weekend on a trip to Washington to consult with President Kennedy. As Lodge stood up, Diem spoke up:

“Please tell President Kennedy that I am a good and a frank ally, that I would rather be frank and settle questions now than talk about them after we have lost everything.”

In his report to the State Department, Lodge added here parenthetically, “This looked like a reference to a possible coup,” then continued quoting Diem’s parting words to him:

“Tell President Kennedy that I take all his suggestions very seriously and wish to carry them out but it is a question of timing.”
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This was the response from Diem that Kennedy had been waiting for, and Lodge recognized it. In his comment on Diem’s statement, Lodge cabled: “If U.S. wants to make a package deal, I would think we were in a position to do it. The conditions of my return [to Washington] could be propitious for it. In effect he said: Tell us what you want and we’ll do it.”
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A milestone had been reached. Diem had finally responded to Kennedy in a hopeful way through a reluctant ambassador, and Lodge had conveyed the message to Washington with a supportive comment.

However, Lodge buried Diem’s message to Kennedy near the end of his report. Moreover, he did not send the report on his breakthrough conversation with Diem until 3:00 p.m., an hour and a half after the coup had started. He also chose to send this critical cable by the slowest possible process rather than “Critical Flash,” which would have given it immediate attention in Washington. As a result of Lodge’s slow writing and transmission of Diem’s urgent message to Kennedy, it did not arrive at the State Department until hours after the rebel generals had laid siege to the presidential palace.
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It was too late.

If President Kennedy had been assassinated in Chicago on November 2 rather than Dallas on November 22, Lee Harvey Oswald would probably be unknown to us today. Instead Thomas Arthur Vallee would have likely become notorious as the president’s presumed assassin. For in the Chicago plot to kill Kennedy, Thomas Arthur Vallee was chosen for the same scapegoat role that Lee Harvey Oswald would play three weeks later in Dallas.

While most of the Chicago Secret Service agents were scrambling to locate and arrest all four members of the sniper team before the president’s Saturday, November 2, arrival, two agents were acting on another threat. The Secret Service office had also received a tip that Thomas Arthur Vallee, an alienated ex-Marine, had threatened to kill Kennedy in Chicago.

Thomas Arthur Vallee was quickly identified from intelligence sources as an ex-Marine who was a “disaffiliated member of the John Birch Society,”
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a far right organization obsessed with Communist subversion in the United States. Vallee was also described as a loner, a paranoid schizophrenic, and a gun collector. He fit perfectly the “lone nut” profile that would later be used to characterize ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.

The two Secret Service agents surveilling Vallee broke into his rented North Side room in his absence. They found an M-1 rifle, a carbine rifle, and twenty-five hundred rounds of ammunition. The agents had seen enough. On Friday, November 1, they phoned Chicago Police Department captain Robert Linsky, requesting twenty-four-hour surveillance on Vallee and reportedly asking that he be “gotten off the street.”
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