JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 3
There is more truth seeking going on now in Russia than there is in our country. What JFK has brought out is that those who talk most of history have no commitment to it. An essential, historical question raised by JFK has to do not with the “tramps” in Dealy Plaza, not with who might have been firing from the grassy knoll, not with what coalition of Cuban exiles, mobsters, rogue intelligence officers the conspiracy might have been concocted by; but the darker stain on the American ground in the sixties and seventies . . . Vietnam.
It is Vietnam which has become the bloody shirt of American politics, replacing slavery of one hundred years before. Just as we did not resolve, if we ever did, the great battle of slavery until a hundred years after the Civil War, when we passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so it becomes clear that the Vietnam War remains the watershed of our time. And the divisions in our country, among our people, opened up by it seem to get wider and wider with each passing year.
JFK [the movie and the book] suggests that it was Vietnam that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that he became too dangerous, too strong an advocate of changing the course of the Cold War; too clear a proponent of troop withdrawal for those who supported the idea of a war in Vietnam and later came to support the war itself. Was President Kennedy withdrawing from Vietnam? Had he indicated strongly his intention to do so? Had he committed himself firmly against all hawkish advice to the contrary to oppose the entry of U.S. combat troops? The answer to these questions is unequivocally “Yes!”
With this emphasis on the Vietnam policy of President John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone is relying heavily on his adviser, the author of this book, for these little known facts. Colonel Prouty was one of the writers of Kennedy’s NSAM #263, which publicly announced his plan to have one thousand military. men home by Christmas and all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. This book explains those JFK “Vietnam policies” authoritatively and in considerable detail.
As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has attested, President Kennedy signaled his intention to withdraw from Vietnam in a variety of ways and put it firmly on the record with his National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #263 of October 11, 1963. Those who try to say it was no more than a call for a rotation of troops or a gimmick and that the Johnson NSAM #273, issued within a week of the assassination, merely confirmed the policy, ignore the obvious question. If LBJ was merely continuing Kennedy’s policies, why was it necessary to reverse Kennedy’s October NSAM #263?
So the protectors of Vietnam, the new “Wavers” of the bloody shirt, leaped to attack the central premise of JFK. “Oliver Stone is distorting history again,” again they say, even suggesting that John Kennedy was positioning us for a withdrawal from Vietnam, by even suggesting that... that I am distorting history.
But these defenders of history had very little to say five years ago when it was suggested in the motion picture that Mozart had not died peacefully; but had been murdered by a rival and second-rate composer. Where were all of our cultural watchdogs when Peter Shaffer was distorting history with Amadeus?” The answer, of course, is that it wasn’t worth the effort. Eighteenth-century Vienna, after all, is not twentieth century Vietnam. If Mozart was murdered, it would not change one note of that most precious music; but if John Kennedy were killed because he was determined to withdraw from Vietnam and never send combat troops to a Vietnam War, then we must fix the blame for the only lost war in our history, for 56,000 Americans dead, and for an as yet unhealed split in our country and among our people.
I’ve been ridiculed and worse for suggesting the existence of a conspiracy as though only kooks and cranks and extremists suggest the existence of such a thing. But this is the wrong city in which to ridicule people who believe in conspiracies. Is it inconceivable that the President of the United States could sit at the heart of a criminal conspiracy designed to cover up a crime? We know that happened. We would have impeached him for it had he not resigned, just one step ahead. Is it so farfetched to believe in a high-level conspiracy involving the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the air force, and the CIA to bomb a neutral country and then lie about it in military reports to the rest of the country? But it happened, perhaps more than once. Is it inconceivable that the National Security Council leadership, with or without the knowledge of the President of the United States and with the collaboration of the director of Central Intelligence . . . not just a few rogues . . . could be engaged in a massive conspiracy to ship arms to our sworn enemy with the casual hope that a few hostages might be released as a result? But it happened. Does it offend our sense of propriety to suggest that an assistant secretary of state for Latin America might have regularly lied to Congress about raising money abroad to perform things that Congress had forbidden us to do? But that happened! Is it inconceivable that a campaign manager, later to become the director of Central Intelligence, negotiated with a foreign country to keep American hostages imprisoned until after a presidential election, in order to ensure the election of his candidate? We shall see?
But I think, no one thinks it is out of the question anymore. So when JFK suggests that a conspiracy involving elements of a government, people in the CIA, people in the FBI, perhaps people associated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all in the service of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about, might have conspired to kill JFK because he was going sharply to change the direction of American foreign policy, is it not appropriate at least to look there for evidence? What was Allen Dulles really up to in those months? Or Charles Cabell, also fired by JFK; or his brother, Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas in November 1963?
Thomas Jefferson urged on us the notion that when truth can compete in a free marketplace of ideas, it will prevail. There is, as yet, no marketplace of history for the years before the Kennedy assassination and immediately afterward. Let us begin to create one. What I’ve tried to do with this movie is to open a stall in that marketplace of ideas and offer a version of what might have happened as against the competing versions of what we know did not happen and some other possible versions as well.
I’m happy to say, thanks not only to the nine million people who have already seen the movie but to the attitude toward the facts they take with them away from the movie, that our new stall in that marketplace of ideas is doing a very brisk business. And we expect by the time this film is played out in video cassettes, etc., that another fifty million Americans will have a little more information on their history.
I am very proud that JFK has been a part of the momentum to open previously closed files in the matter of the assassination. Congressman Louis Stokes of Ohio, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, has announced his willingness to consider the opening of the files, closed until, you know, the year 2029. And I am hopeful his consideration will ripen into approval. In addition, Judge William Webster, formerly the director of the FBI and of the CIA, has indicated his strong opinion that all of the files—all of the files—House Committee, CIA, and FBI among them, be made public . . . a proposal, I was extremely pleased last weekend to see, endorsed by Senator Edward Kennedy. In the meantime, we are grateful to Congressman Stokes, Congressman Lee Hamilton, Judge Webster, Senator Kennedy, and others who have indicated a willingness to consider opening these files. Now if the army and navy intelligence services will join suit, it is my hope the American people will have the full truth of this assassination.
PREFACE
THE COLD WAR, along with its various politically managed “battlegrounds” has ended, but the mystery lives on. What was going on? Increasingly we have all begun to realize that the legislative creation of the CIA, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the development of rockets and missiles along with the space program and the moon landings, as well as with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, were craftily orchestrated events designed to fill the gap between what mankind has known as conventional warfare and the incalculable impact of all-out nuclear warfa
re. In terms of the military-industrial interests there had to be a demand for their products and there had to be attrition of that materiel. Thus preparation for warfare and some form of warfare had to continue. All this was done while carefully avoiding a nuclear exchange.
On top of this, we have now begun to realize that one of the greatest casualties of the Cold War has been the truth. At no time in the history of mankind has the general public been so misled and so betrayed as it has been by the work of the propaganda merchants of this century and their “historians.” It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “There is properly no history; only biography,” and this may have been said in jest. We have learned, with some frequency, that the biographer himself may have toyed with the truth. Perhaps “autobiography” is a better word for a factually correct history.
This book is a firsthand account of the years since World War II. It carefully documents a major sector of the Cold War from 1943 to 1975 by recognizing the strategically elegant “Saigon Solution” as the long-range plan that was designed and employed by the international power elite to bridge, profitably, that first thirty years, from the end of World War II, on September 2, 1945, to the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975. After that they took advantage of the so-called energy crisis of the seventies and the equally contrived financial crisis of the eighties to make unbelievable sums of money from those valuable sources that must include the global trade in drugs.
There are some readers who are unaccustomed to this age-old concept of the power elite. One of the better characterizations of this idea was written by R. Buckminster Fuller in his important book Critical Path. It reads:
In our comprehensive reviewing of published, academically accepted history we continually explore for the invisible power structure behind the visible kings, prime ministers, czars, emperors, presidents, and other official head men, as well as for the underlying, hidden causes of individual wars and the long, drawn-out campaigns not disclosed by the widely published and popularly accepted causes of these wars.
It goes without saying that few, if any, credible historians are going to be able to name the individuals who comprise such an elite. One point must be clarified. They are not the Bilderburgers, the Trilateralists, or members of the Council for Foreign Relations. Much more is said on this subject in the chapters that follow, and even then we must realize that one of the greatest strengths of this power elite is that they have learned to live anonymously.
There is, in Lord Denning’s book, The Family Story, a most pertinent reference to the words of Winston Churchill during a heavy bomber attack on Rotterdam during World War II. Denning reports that Churchill, during a conversation among friends, made reference to a “High Cabal” that has made us what we are. In that sense, Churchill’s High Cabal equates with Fuller’s “invisible power structure.” For a man in Churchill’s position, and at the war-time peak of his public career, to make reference to a high, or higher, cabal defines the subject. We live under the influence of such a cabal today, whether we realize it or not. This book opens up the subject for a broad and most practical review.
In general, this historical account follows a chronological format, and in so doing it recognizes the enormous significance of the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy and of the coup d’état that replaced that administration as a result.
Portions of this book appeared during 1985—1987 in the magazine Freedom. Oliver Stone became familiar with its “Kennedy assassination”—related material and used some if it in his film JFK. The author worked with Stone as a technical adviser and was portrayed as “Man X,” played by Donald Sutherland. However, the principal theme of the book documents the long-range, strategic planning of the Cold War, begun as early as the Cairo and Teheran “Big Four” Conferences of late November 1943, and how that planning led directly, without a single day’s interval, from the end of World War II, September 2, 1945, to the United States’ involvement in what became the Indochinese war, which began on that same date. These Conference plans also included the Korean war that began five years later, in June 1950.
These facts were confirmed in a speech made by John Foster Dulles before the American Legion Convention in St. Louis, quite coincidently on September 2, 1953, when he confirmed the United States’ involvement in this “desperate struggle’s first eight years in Indochina.” Before that “no win” warfare had ended, not less than $570 billion had been channeled into the coffers of this war-making High Cabal at a cost of 58,000 American lives.
This type of limited warfare was not designed solely for the purpose of making war to make money, as has been the case throughout history for most countries; but it was necessitated by the knowledge, as early as 1943, that the atom bomb would be ready before the end of World War II. As many have recognized, the war did not end until the first of each of the original types of atomic bomb, Implosion and Gun-type, had been given its initial bloodbath public demonstration over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, and only then, did these world-class planners realize that they had made a terrible mistake in funding those nuclear physicists and their industrial backers to produce an atom bomb. From the time of the first use of nuclear weapons until the present, and even more certainly for the future, the atomic bomb demonstrated that effective warfare, as it was known since the dawn of mankind, has ended. The almost timeless era of conventional warfare is over. There will be no more “victorious” wars. There will be moneymaking, meaningless wars. The next real, all-out, and unlimited war will lead to Armageddon on Earth. It will be the last.
Bernard O’Keefe armed the Nagasaki bomb, detonated the 15-megaton BRAVO hydrogen test device in the Pacific, and, before his death, became the chairman of the board of E.G.& G. Inc., one of the nation’s leading high-technology nuclear-support companies. O’Keefe wrote:
The fission-fusion-fission bomb permits unlimited destruction in a small convenient package. The radius of destruction (of such a bomb) is measured not in miles but in hundreds of miles, rendering any civil defense by evacuation useless.
(NOTE: He said “radius.”)
Furthermore, the series of so-called wars since 1945 were never fought to achieve victory. They were waged for dollars, without a true military objective, under the control of civilian leaders, with the generals in a supernumerary role. In fact, the first twenty years of our “desperate struggle” in Indochina were fought under the operational control of agents of either the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) first assisting Ho Chi Minh to establish the independence of Vietnam, and later, when U.S. policy swung around in alignment with the Cold War, to support the French. The few bona fide U.S. Armed Forces generals who were in Vietnam were limited to managing supporting activities, and none of them, at any time, ever served in direct command of combat operations in Indochina. There was always an ambassador, and frequently a CIA agent—under the cover of a general—or both in superior positions. Such is the nature of these new, limited, “make money” wars.
Because of the strategy that continued the moneymaking aspect of warfare and the dilemma created by the advent of the nuclear weapon, no single event of that thirty-year period has been a more serious indictment of the condition of our present government, of our media, and of those of the lawyer-capitalist system, who are in control of both, than the enormity of the “cover story” fabrication about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This situation has prevailed for the past three decades . . . plus. The reason why it has been possible to maintain this enormous “cover story” for decades is that the greater crime committed on November 22, 1963 was that of the coup d’état of the government of the United States. The conspirators took control.
Paramount among the many other reasons for this deplorable condition has been the One World growth of a power elite of international bankers and industrial giants who totally disregard the sovereignty of nations and the individual rights of man. As a result, the history of the Cold War period that began
before the end of World War II has been replete with fantasies. A number of those whom we call “historians” are no more than paid hacks with little or no practical experience, and a fixed agenda. Even the official “History of United States Involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the Present (1968),” popularly known as the Pentagon Papers, contains such amazing propaganda in the chronological record of that period as:
22 Nov 1963
Lodge confers with the President.
Having flown to Washington the day after the conference, Lodge meets with the President and presumably continues the kind of report given in Honolulu. (see, Vol. II, page 223)
That is the Pentagon Papers’ official account of that otherwise momentous day. What possible explanation can there be for the fabrication of that totally untrue bit of official record of the very day that President John F Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a contract murder? This becomes all the more significant when we realize that this official history was directed by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and was compiled and written by members of his staff in the International Security Affairs section, under the task force leadership and direction of Leslie H. Gelb, later editor of the New York Times and now the president of the Council for Foreign Relations.
This massive study, containing countless other fabrications and significant omissions, was officially presented to the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, Clark M. Clifford, on January 15, 1969. Since that time, as later researchers, writers, and college professors have attempted to describe the thirty years of Vietnam War history, they have been misled by this work and by others that are equally false and contrived.