JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Missiles of Cuba: Prelude to a Crisis…by Mark Arnold

           

Note:  In this article, the tenth in the series on the causes of the decline of the United States as a nation, we take a closer look at the factors leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. We will see that Kennedy’s predecessor in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower had his own catastrophic run-ins with the national security establishment at the end of his administration in 1960 and how that presaged what Kennedy experienced at the Bay of Pigs and the situations in Laos, Vietnam and Berlin. As the summer of 1962 waned towards fall these same interests in the military and CIA continued to push for a U.S. military intervention in Cuba and events would soon conspire to bring the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war....MA

W

ith the signing of the “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos” in late July of 1962 JFK had been in office exactly a year and a half. Immediately on his plate upon arriving in office in January of ‘61 was the Laotian crisis and within a couple of months the colossal failure of the CIA’s Cuban Brigade at the Bay of Pigs, during which he had defied his military and intelligence establishment’s demands to salvage the Brigade by authorizing the use of  U.S. military force. In the fall of ’61 he had faced and withstood heavy pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA to commit regular U.S. combat forces to both Laos and Vietnam and this was followed almost immediately by the Berlin confrontation where he once again found a way to defuse the situation and keep us out of war.

John F. Kennedy

          You should see a pattern developing here. Even at the expense of alienating himself from his national security establishment, in every instance where Kennedy was seemingly cornered into going to war he bobbed and weaved his way out of it. To the cold warriors of the JCS, CIA and their ilk this made him “soft” on communism and a threat to the nation; likewise to the “defense” contractors of the “military industrial complex”, President Eisenhower’s term to describe the interwoven alliance between the military and national security establishment and the various corporations and companies of the “arms” industry who equip and profit from them. It is worth noting that “military in collusion with industry” is a text book definition of fascism. President Eisenhower, old general that he was, was acutely aware of this, having witnessed the rise of the national security establishment during the eight Cold War years of his administration from 1952 -1960. He had famously warned of its threat in his “farewell to the nation” speech as he was leaving office in January of 1961.

Dwight Eisenhower

          Eisenhower must have felt great empathy for JFK, having himself been seared by these same forces now searing Kennedy. Towards the end of his administration, in late 1959 and 1960, he had made his own effort to defuse the dangerous Cold War with what he was calling his Crusade for Peace. In May of 1960 a summit conference was to be held in Paris with the Soviet Union, the United States, France and England in attendance. This was to be followed up by another Eisenhower/Khrushchev meeting in Moscow later in the year. The theme for these meetings was worldwide peace and harmony and in keeping with this Eisenhower had ordered that all U.S. aerial surveillance flights over communist territory cease and that no regular U.S. military personnel become involved in combat activities, whether covert or overt during the period leading up to the summits.

The U-2 spy plane

          Despite this restriction, on May 1^st 1960 a U.S. U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers took off from Pakistan destined for Norway with a direct flight route over the Soviet Union. (In the days before spy satellites intelligence aerial surveillance was carried out by the top secret U-2, a special high altitude aircraft developed for this express purpose by Lockheed) Powers never made it to Norway. His U-2 was shot down over Russia and the aircraft as well as Powers himself were captured. On noting the U-2 was missing the U.S. national security geniuses calling the shots made an announcement that a weather research aircraft had gone missing and potentially had strayed into Soviet airspace. Noting this false statement, the Soviets countered by announcing that they had captured the U-2, a statement that brought stringent denials from the United States. When the Soviets then produced pictures not only of the plane but of Francis Gary Powers alive and well the U.S. was caught in a lie. Eisenhower was placed in the identical situation Kennedy would find himself in a year later with the Bay of Pigs; having to admit responsibility for a disaster brought about through direct violation of orders issued by the President. The Paris summit meeting and Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace were effectively destroyed.

Francis Gary Powers

          From our perspective today, understanding how the CIA operated, we have to ask the questions: was it really an accident that Powers and his U-2 were sent on their mission across Russia at such a strategic time in violation of Eisenhower’s orders?  Who really gained by the sabotage of Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace? A closer look at the U-2 spy plane program shows that in 1960 it was being run by the same man responsible for the CIA’s Cuban brigade and the man in charge of all CIA covert operations, Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell. It was under his authority that Powers was sent on his mission. The U-2 generally flew at an altitude that rendered it impervious to being shot down. In one of his writings on the subject Fletcher Prouty speculates that it would have been possible to cause the U-2 to reduce altitude into the Soviet “surface to air missile” (SAM) range by the simple expedient of limiting the hydrogen required in the aircraft’s fuel mixture. This would have caused the pilot to have to reduce altitude to keep his engine running and thus be exposed to being shot down. Whether this happened or not, what is certain is that the Powers U-2 incident destroyed Eisenhower’s hopes to defuse the Cold War.

          By mid-summer 1962 JFK was a seasoned veteran at dealing with the duplicity of his own intelligence agency as well as the war mongering efforts of his top military leaders to try and compel his authorization of the use of regular U.S. military forces in the conflicts in Laos, Vietnam and the various strategies to get rid of Castro and re-take Cuba. One such strategy regarding Cuba serves as a particularly extreme example of just what Kennedy was dealing with from his top military people. On March 13^th 1962, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer proposed to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a plan to get rid of Castro that he called Operation Northwoods. Lemnitzer represented the plan as having the full support of all of the Joint Chiefs. Among the things the plan called for were the following:

 

Robert McNamara

1.    Fake attacks on the U.S. base at Guantanamo carried out by the ubiquitous anti-Castro Cubans making it look like they were Castro’s forces attacking.

2.   Use of the same friendly Cubans to infiltrate the base and stage sabotage incidents that could then be blamed on Castro.

3.    Lob mortar shells into the Guantanamo base blaming it on Castro.

4.  Stage a “remember the Maine” type incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo harbor complete with fake lists of the dead for publishing in U.S. newspapers and fake funerals. (The USS Maine was the ship sunk in Havana harbor in 1898, supposedly by the Spanish, and which justified the U.S. involvement in the Spanish American War.)

5.    Create a terrorist program in the U.S. that could be blamed on Castro specifically targeting the Cuban exiles in south Florida but even extending to Washington D.C. that involved shooting at and wounding people and even the use of plastic bombs to be exploded at specifically chosen spots.

6.    Simulate or even use a real boatload of Cuban refugees and sink it blaming the incident on Castro.

These and the other steps called for in Operation Northwoods were solely designed to create the conditions needed to justify U.S. regular military intervention in Cuba to oust Castro. Exhibiting great restraint, for he must have privately felt that Lemnitzer had gone off the deep end, three days later Kennedy responded to Op Northwoods by simply stating that he could foresee no circumstances that would justify the use of U.S. military might in Cuba. He had once again rejected the efforts of the Cold Warrior, national security establishment to push the nation to war.

          That did not stop Lemnitzer and his generals from continuing to try however. In another memo to McNamara on April 10^th, 1962 Lemnitzer stated flatly that the Chiefs believed that the Cuban problem had to be resolved in the near future and that it would require the military to do it. They continued to develop and push plans, along with the CIA, for invasions or the pretexts that would justify invasions across the summer of 1962. Seeing that the situation with Lemnitzer was an impossible one Kennedy finally removed him as JCS Chairman in September of ’62 replacing him with General Maxwell Taylor; the man he had used to help investigate the CIA Bay of Pigs failure the year before. Through firing Lemnitzer Kennedy was definitely shaking things up and sending a message but considering the Cold Warrior attitude predominating in his government at the time the action had about as much effect as spitting into the proverbial wind. Before too many more weeks went by in 1962 JFK would see this for himself.

          Meanwhile, 90 miles from the Florida coastline in the island nation of Cuba,

Castro and Khrushchev

Fidel Castro was evaluating his options. Though he had survived the invasion effort at the Bay of Pigs he was under no delusions that this meant the U.S. military and CIA were through trying. He was definitely aware that more plans were being created and considered by the U.S. to deal with him and his Cuban revolution. The effect of this was to force him to the only main option available to him to ensure the defense of his island: Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. Khrushchev wanted to know from Castro what it was he needed to accomplish this defense. Castro replied: “…do whatever is needed to convince the United States that an attack on Cuba is the same as an attack on the Soviet Union.”

          After considering the courses of action available they determined that merely conventional military aid from the Soviets might not be sufficient to deter a U.S. attack, and so it was decided; the Soviet Union would install nuclear missiles in Cuba.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

JFK and the Road to Dallas: Confrontation in Berlin…by Mark Arnold

Germany as divided by Allies following WW II

Note:  Sometime before the close of World War II decisions were made as to how the post war world would look and how the mechanism of conflict and war would continue to be used to direct the affairs of man for the benefit of the unseen decision makers. The immediate consequence of this was what would come to be known as the “Cold War”. Those of you familiar with World War II know that the Soviet Union was our ally in the fight against Nazi Germany. Germany fell to the Allies in May of 1945 and Germany’s ally Japan surrendered in early September of that year following the nuclear devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How could it be, then, that within less than two years the world would be so arrayed that our former ally Russia was now our earnest foe and that conflict would henceforth be carried forward as “freedom and capitalism vs. communism and totalitarianism.” As is the way with such things, what looks to be a spontaneous occurrence actually is rooted in earlier beginnings and causes. We will look at this more deeply in future articles in this series. The important thing to understand for our purposes here is that the conquered German nation was divided into administrative zones under each of the allied victors; the British getting the northwest zone, the French the southwest, the Americans the south and the Russians the northeast. The German capital of Berlin, though located in the Russian zone, was likewise divided with a sector going to each allied nation; the American, French and British sectors eventually comprising what would become known as West Berlin and the Soviet zone becoming East Berlin. From that point on Berlin would become a major focal point of the Cold War and  in 1961 came within an eyelash of triggering World War III…for the full story of how JFK once again averted disaster, with some help from a most unlikely source, please read on.. MA

I

The city of Berlin divided
East (red) and West

t did not take long for Berlin to become one of the first flash points of this new “Cold War”. Plans had been laid before the end of the war as to how Germany would be administered and how it would be divided as described in the note above. What had not been agreed upon was how Germany should proceed economically. As a result there was no coordinated plan for the re-building of Germany or its economic system. France, the U.S. and Britain, therefore, ended up embarking on their own economic strategy for Germany, largely through what was known as the “Marshall Plan”, while the Soviets went their own way with their own plan. The “Marshall Plan”, named after General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army during World War II and U.S. Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, was a program of economic assistance to help re-build war torn Europe and was first proposed by Marshall at a commencement address delivered at Harvard University in 1947. Within a few months the plan was approved by Congress and implemented with Marshall ultimately being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1953) for being the driving force behind it.

General George C. Marshall

          In early 1948, as part of their plan, the Western Allies decided to introduce a new currency into their sectors of Germany and Berlin. Since the war had ended Germany had largely been operating on a “chocolate and cigarettes” barter system and a functional currency was vitally needed to get the country going. The Soviets were not brought into the loop on this new currency, however, and so viewed it as a threat. The Russian people and country had suffered greatly at the hands of Germany and the Russian leader Joseph Stalin was not particularly interested in a revitalized German nation. As well, a relatively strong currency in West Germany and Berlin would undermine potentially what the Soviets were doing economically in their sectors in the East. Their response in the spring of 1948 was to start disrupting traffic to and from the portion of Berlin controlled by the Western Allies.

General Lucius Clay

          After several interruptions of traffic and also of electricity and water, in late June, 1948 Stalin finally ordered a full scale blockade of the Western Allied sectors of Berlin, cutting all road and railroad access as well as water routes to and from the city, thus cutting Berlin off from the rest of the world. Stalin was hoping to force the Western Allies to give up on Berlin and leave it to the Soviets. The U.S. Commander in Berlin, General Lucius Clay, responded by ordering what has become known to history as the Berlin Airlift, by which the needed supplies for the western sector of Berlin were airlifted in to the city. The Berlin airlift was a massive operation that went on for nearly a year, peaking in April of 1949 with nearly 1400 flights made to West Berlin delivering 12,000 tons of supplies in a 24 hour period. Witnessing this, in May of 1949 the Soviets finally gave up on the blockade and the Berlin Airlift came to an end. Not so the Cold War stresses and confrontations regarding the city of Berlin, however.

                                                                                                                         

The Berlin Airlift

          I have given you this short history so that you have some of the background to the situation JFK faced in Berlin when he assumed the Presidency in 1961. In the 12 years since the end of the Berlin Airlift the Cold War had intensified into a standoff between two nuclear bomb wielding super powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The battles of the Cold War had been and were being waged mostly covertly in third world nations around the planet in places such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, Laos and Korea. It was a new kind of warfare involving new kinds of tactics employed for the most part by “intelligence” agencies that really were specialists at insurgency, counter insurgency and paramilitary operations; the CIA and its Soviet counterpart the KGB. In Europe the Soviet Union dominated the Eastern part of the continent behind a border known to the U.S. and the West as the Iron Curtain. The Western Allied sector of Berlin, by 1961 simply called West Berlin, located as it was, deep behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany and still controlled by France, the U.S. and Great Britain, was a particularly troublesome area. Always simmering as a crisis, in fall of ’61, while Kennedy was wrestling with the situation in Laos, Berlin suddenly exploded into being the focal point of the Cold War with the two super powers confronting each other there in a deadly game of nuclear “Russian Roulette”.

          The Berlin crisis was precipitated in August of 1961 when Russian Priemier Nikita Khrushchev ordered that a wall be built between Soviet controlled East Berlin and French, U.S. and British controlled West Berlin. East Berliners had been fleeing to the West for some time and Khrushchev wanted to stop the flow. Ironically, shortly after this Kennedy sent as his personal representative to West Berlin retired General Lucius Clay; the same Lucius Clay who had orchestrated the Berlin Airlift 12 years earlier. Almost immediately Clay escalated the crisis by ordering the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin to have his engineers build a duplicate of a section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks equipped with bulldozer attachments then practiced destroying it. General Bruce Clark, the commander of all U.S. forces in Europe, on discovering what Clay was doing ordered it stopped. He challenged Clay to call the President and talk to him about it if he did not like the order. Clay declined to make the call and neither man ever informed Kennedy of Clay’s aborted wall destruction exercises.

The Berlin Wall

          Khrushchev, on the other hand was informed almost instantly of the wall bashing being done by the U.S. tanks in the forest. The exercises were witnessed by Soviet spies who forwarded reports and pictures to Moscow. As a result Khrushchev and his advisers immediately made plans to be ready should the Americans move to take down the wall. That moment came in October when a flap took place over East German refusal to let an American official back into West Berlin through a checkpoint in the wall known as “Checkpoint Charlie”. That was all the prompting Lucius Clay needed. On October 27, ten American bull dozer mounted M-48 tanks made their way to Checkpoint Charlie, only to be confronted almost instantly by ten Soviet tanks that had been waiting in side streets for just such a moment. The Soviets had used their advance notice and prepared well. Soon twenty more Soviet tanks arrived on the scene and the Americans brought up twenty more of their own. For the next sixteen hours the Soviet and American tanks confronted one another almost muzzle to muzzle in a tense standoff.

          I was in 5^th grade at Shorewood Elementary School in Seattle, Washington when all of this was happening in Berlin in October of 1961. I vaguely remember hearing about it on the news and being concerned about the threat of nuclear war. (The Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year is a much clearer memory to me actually.) My childhood fears notwithstanding, most of us in the United States today have no idea how close we came to actual nuclear war as a result of what occurred in Berlin in October ’61. Much later Khrushchev’s foreign affairs advisor, a man named Valentin Falin provided some insight. Falin was beside Khrushchev through the entire crisis. He reports that had the U.S. tanks advanced any further the Soviet tanks would have fired on them and events after that very likely would have escalated out of control. In Berlin in October of 1961 we were that close to disaster.

US tanks at "Checkpoint Charlie"

          On getting the reports of what was occurring in Berlin an alarmed Kennedy employed a back channel communication line that he and Khrushchev had decided to set up at their Vienna summit earlier in the year. (The line was to be private and unofficial, bypassing the customary state to state formalities. Khrushchev had first used the line in September ‘61 prior to JFKs first address to the United Nations to express hope that he and Kennedy could set up a summit to address the tensions building regarding Berlin. Kennedy had responded that he would be open to the summit but first wanted a Soviet demonstration of good faith regarding the agreements made on Laos at the Vienna summit in June. The Kennedy/Khrushchev back channel line involved a message delivered by a trusted aide to a trusted aide. For Kennedy, in the case described above, that aide was his Press Secretary Pierre Sallinger. For the Berlin Crisis it was Robert Kennedy) JFK had his brother Robert deliver a message to Soviet press attaché Georgi Bolshakov for relay to Khrushchev. The message said that if the Russians would withdraw their tanks within 24 hours the Americans would do the same 30 minutes later. Kennedy then ordered Lucius Clay to prepare to carry out the American side of the withdrawal. The next morning the Soviet tanks withdrew followed shortly by the Americans and the Berlin Crisis came to a close.

             By a whisker JFK had once again averted war.

          The crisis in Berlin was resolved for the moment, but a question remains: why did Khrushchev trust that Kennedy would do as he promised in withdrawing the U.S. tanks if the Russians withdrew their tanks first? Why did he not insist that the Americans withdraw first? The answer to this is grasped when one realizes that Khrushchev apparently understood that Kennedy, if anything, was under more pressure from his military and intelligence people than he (Khrushchev) was. Because of their secret communication in September and because of JFK’s subsequent address at the U.N. which spoke hopefully of peace, Khrushchev thought he and Kennedy had been making progress on Berlin. He strongly suspected, therefore, that in Berlin, as well as other crisis zones, JFK was being undermined. By withdrawing first he gave Kennedy the “out” he needed to defuse the crisis.

          Khrushchev, as we shall see, was tragically and uncannily accurate in his assessment that Kennedy was being undermined.

         

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

JFK and the Road to Dallas: Laos…The “Vietnam” That Never Was…by Mark Arnold

Note: In this installment, the eighth in the series on the causes of the decline of the United States as a nation, we explore President John F. Kennedy’s handling of the crisis in Laos from the Bay of Pigs debacle in April of 1961 to the Geneva “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos” in July of 1962. It is important to keep several things in mind as you read this. First, our premise at the outset of the series was that JFK’s assassination represented a huge turning point for the United States as a nation; a shift away from the policies of peaceful co-existence and ending the Cold War that Kennedy was pursuing, and toward a policy of confrontation and war as planned by the CIA and its Secret Team of intelligence, military and corporate alliances otherwise known as the “military industrial complex”. Second, keep in mind the real question to be answered regarding Kennedy’s assassination is not if there was a conspiracy involved; the real question is why was he killed? It is the answer to this question that we are illuminating with this part of our series and particularly in describing Kennedy’s handling of Laos. Through his actions JFK prevented Laos from becoming our first “Vietnam” in Southeast Asia; instead causing it to become the “Vietnam” that never was…MA

        

F

ollowing the Bay of Pigs, in late April 1961, a wiser and less naïve John F. Kennedy refocused his attention on the crisis in Laos. He had just successfully resisted his top military and CIA advisors in refusing to send U.S. forces to salvage the CIA’s Cuban brigade and now the same men who had misled him about Cuba were telling him that unless the United States intervened militarily in Laos that country would be lost to the communists. By the end of April the Joint Chiefs of Staff was recommending that JFK commit 140,000 troops to salvage the situation in the small Southeast Asian country.

          With the Bay of Pigs debacle fresh in his mind, Kennedy was understandably suspicious. On April 28^th, in a meeting with the Chiefs, he asked them pointed questions about the data they were presenting him, exposing holes in their logic and conclusions. The Chief of Staff of the United States Navy, Admiral Arleigh Burke told Kennedy that at some point in Southeast Asia the U.S. would need to “…throw enough in to win…the works.” Army general George Decker agreed with Burke but went even further. Decker said, “If we go in, we should go in to win, and that means bombing Hanoi, China and maybe even using nuclear weapons.” At another meeting Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer echoed Decker in stating, “If we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory.” When Lemnitzer made that statement JFK said nothing and just looked at him. Then he ended the meeting. His trust in the advice of his top military advisors was shot. To his aide Arthur Schlesinger he stated, “If it hadn’t been for Cuba, we might be about to intervene in Laos…I might have taken this advice seriously.”

General Lyman Lemnitzer

          On May 11^th, 1961 the Russians, the Americans and 12 other nations met in Geneva, Switzerland on the subject of Laos while the civil war was raging in that small country. This was the international conference Kennedy had called for in March. As noted in an earlier article (please see “The Crisis in Laos”, the 6^th installment of the series) Kennedy had already come out for a neutralist government in Laos free from the domination of foreign nations. This decision placed him at direct odds with the CIA which had assisted General Phoumi Nosavan in overthrowing the neutralist government of Prince Souvanna Phouma sometime earlier and were still assisting Nosavan at the time the Geneva Convention on Laos took place. It was the coup against Phouma which had sparked the latest round of civil war in Laos with Phouma and his half brother Prince Souphanouvong of the communist Pathet Lao allied against General Nosavan’s forces assisted by the CIA.

          Against this backdrop of Laotian civil war and the ongoing meetings in Geneva, JFK and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev prepared for a summit meeting in Vienna, to be held on June 3^rd and 4^th, 1961. At the summit Kennedy had to push Khrushchev to get him to agree on the subject of a neutral government for Laos. Khrushchev pointed out that Kennedy well knew that “…it had been the U.S. government that had overthrown Souvanna Phouma”, in Laos. (You will recall that Phouma’s government was already neutral) To this Kennedy responded by saying “Speaking frankly, U.S. policy in that region has not always been wise.” He then reiterated that the desire of the U.S now was for a neutral and independent Laos. The irony of JFK’s position not lost on him, Khrushchev pointed out that Kennedy had “…stated the Soviet policy and called it your own.” JFK’s cold warrior critics in his own government certainly would have agreed with that assessment and were not happy about it. Nevertheless, having finally established a point of agreement with the Soviets that Laos should be neutral and independent, Kennedy contacted Averell Harriman, the U.S. representative at the Geneva talks, and told him flatly, “…I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”  Twice in the space of three months, first at the Bay of Pigs and now with Laos, Kennedy had taken actions directly counter to those his national security establishment was trying to manipulate him in to.

Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna 

                                                                                               

          The immediate effect of JFK’s Laos neutrality strategy on the military and intelligence people surrounding him was twofold. First, it deepened the schism that already existed between them and the President as a result of Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs. Second, it caused them to start to shift their focus and attention to Laos’s neighbor to the east, the divided nation of Vietnam. Though the CIA would continue to support, train and equip General Phoumi Nosavan and the military would continue to supply him with advisors, it was beginning to look like Kennedy would never allow Laos to become the major Cold War confrontation the Agency and Pentagon wanted it to be. From their view, due to Kennedy’s neutralist commitment, Laos was on the way to being a lost cause.

          Vietnam was another matter however. Unlike Laos, which pre-existed U.S. involvement there, South Vietnam and its President Ngo Dinh Diem existed and were in power solely because of CIA and therefore U.S. support. Diem assumed the Presidency of South Vietnam in 1955 with much assistance from Ed Lansdale and the CIA. The 1956 election called for by the Geneva accords of 1954, when the country was temporarily divided along the 17^th parallel, never could have been ignored by Diem without this CIA/US support; the superior forces of the Vietminh simply would have come south, overrun the country and Vietnam would be united. Because Diem’s administration relied so much on U.S. support, he was quite taken aback by JFK’s neutralist strategy in Laos and he considered it a threat to his government. What if Kennedy should decide he wanted a neutral South Vietnam?

          In an effort to reassure Diem, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson to South Vietnam in May of 1961. On the same trip Johnson visited a number of other Asian allies such as Nationalist China (Taiwan), Thailand and Pakistan. His report to Kennedy following the trip presented a bleak picture of the ripple effect of Kennedy’s neutral policy on Laos; the regimes of these other nations, according to Johnson, were feeling the same way Diem was in South Vietnam. In closing his report to the President, Johnson summed things up this way:

          “The fundamental decision required of the United States—and time is of the greatest importance—is whether we are to attempt to meet the challenge of Communist expansion now in Southeast Asia by a major effort in support of the forces of freedom in the area or throw in the towel.”

Lyndon Johnson

Kennedy’s neutral stance on Laos and his refusal to commit to anything more than CIA and military advisor support to Laos and South Vietnam was being challenged not just by his intelligence and military chiefs but by his own Vice President.

          Despite the pressure from his own government, in Kennedy’s mind he and Khrushchev had resolved the Laotian crisis when they agreed at the June summit on the idea of a neutral Laos. In reality significant problems remained, however. Throughout the summer and into the fall of 1961 the negotiations between the various parties in Geneva dragged on and by August these problems were becoming clearer to the President. First, the Pathet Lao continued to control things in much of Laos militarily and were posing a real threat to just win the civil war outright over the CIA backed Phoumi Nosavan’s forces, which would have obviated the need for continued negotiations toward a neutral Laos. The second problem was that the insurgency in South Vietnam was increasing and guerilla attacks becoming more frequent. A supply and transport route had developed from North Vietnam through eastern Laos to South Vietnam by which men and equipment were being transferred to the guerillas in the south. This route was what would become known as the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”. The use of this trail by North Vietnam was becoming a sticking point in the Laos negotiations. In addition the CIA and Joint Chiefs were now demanding JFK send regular military troops into Vietnam to quell the increasing uprisings there as well as continuing to demand troops for Laos to support Nosavan so as to prevent what looked to be likely victory for the Pathet Lao.

Hi Chi Minh Trail

          Once again between a rock and the proverbial hard place, JFK was looking at difficult options no matter which direction he turned. Keep in mind the fact that Kennedy, like almost all American politicians of the day, had long since bought the central premise of the Cold War, that it was a battle between the forces of freedom, represented by the U.S., and the monolithic communist threat. In late summer of ’61 he had not yet rejected that premise and so found himself walking a very thin line. Having observed the French and not wanting that fate for his country he was opposed to committing regular U.S. military beyond equipment and advisors, yet faced with the threat of losing Laos outright to the communists as well as potentially Vietnam, he felt he had to do something. Kennedy responded to this dilemma at the end of August by backtracking a bit on his “neutral Laos” commitment and raising the total of advisors approved for Laos to 500 while authorizing the CIA to train and equip 2,000 more members of the “Hmong” (pronounced “moong’) tribe to assist in the fight against the communists. (The “Hmongs” were an indigenous people from the Laotian highlands. Nine thousand of the tribe were already involved in the CIA’s covert army and the addition now made eleven thousand; eventually the number would reach 30,000)

          Finally, in October 1961, there was at last a breakthrough in Geneva when the major Laotian factions represented there agreed to the concept of a neutral, provisional government with Souvanna Phouma as its prime minister. The language of the agreement also stipulated that Laos could not be used by neighboring states for their purposes, which meant that North Vietnam would not be able to use the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” as they had been. The Soviet Union agreed to take on the role of policing the compliance of the communist groups and nations at the conference to the agreement. The hopeful aspect of this accord to Kennedy was soon compromised by other factors that arose, however. The Soviets really had no power over North Vietnam or the Pathet Lao and had no way, really, of enforcing their compliance. Also, the communist nations insisted on the right to approve the movements of the International Control Commission in inspecting compliance to the agreement. (The International Control Commission was set up as an independent group with 3 members, 1 from communist Poland, 1 from anti-communist Canada and 1 from neutral India as an additional means of inspecting and enforcing compliance) The Russians, North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao would not compromise on this point and in the final agreement this effectively eliminated the ICC as any kind of policing agency.

Averell Harriman

          Due to the intractability of the communist nations Kennedy authorized Harriman to compromise on the ICC point and the negotiations moved forward. It would be another 8 months before, on July 23^rd 1962 the United States, the Soviet Union and 12 other nations all signed the “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos” in Geneva, Switzerland. Across those eight months the CIA with their support of Phoumi Nosavan and their “covert” Hmong army did their best to ensure that the fragile negotiations would never result in an agreement. In early 1962 Nosavan tried to provoke an international incident with the Pathet Lao by reinforcing a garrison called “Nam Tha” that was only 15 miles from the Chinese border and very close to Pathet Lao held territory. He then tried to provoke an attack from the Pathet Lao which, while succeeding in causing a few firefights, did not result in the hoped for attack. Nevertheless the CIA and Nosavan, pulling an old page from Ed Lansdale’s CIA playbook, staged a retreat from Nam Tha across the Mekong River into Thailand, claiming they were under Pathet Lao attack; an attack which did not, in fact, really exist. Their intention was to once again try and force JFK’s hand in sending troops to Laos to counter the Pathet Lao threat and thus destroy the negotiations.

          The machinations of the CIA and Nosavan with regard to the Nam Tha ploy were apparently an open secret to much of the rest of the world. The Times of London reported on the situation as follows: 

“CIA agents had deliberately opposed the official American objective of trying to establish a neutral government, had encouraged Phoumi in his reinforcement of Nam Tha, and had negatived the heavy financial pressure brought by the Kennedy administration upon Phoumi by subventions from its own budget…The General apparently was quite outspoken, and made it known that he could disregard the American embassy and the military advisory group because he was in communication with other American agencies.”

With the report from the Times as well as his own reports Kennedy must have understood what the CIA was up to in Laos. Though he responded to the pressure brought about from the Nam Tha incident by stationing American troops in the neighboring country of Thailand and having contingency plans drawn up to intervene in Laos should it become necessary, he once again stopped short of committing American troops to the civil war torn nation. His true understanding of what occurred at Nam Tha was indicated by another action he took on the matter; the transferring of the closest CIA officer to Phoumi Nosavan, a man named Jack Hazey.

       From the beginning of his administration through to the Geneva neutrality declaration on Laos in July of ’62, JFK had negotiated a minefield largely laid for him by his own CIA with complicity from his own military men designed to force him to intervene in Laos with regular U.S. forces. Through the actions he took he side stepped them every step of the way, thus ensuring that Laos did not become the quagmire that Vietnam came to be, and instead became, for the United States, the “Vietnam” that never was. 

           Knowing all this now, one is compelled to wonder…what would have happened in Vietnam had John F. Kennedy lived?

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Hidden Story of the Bay of Pigs…by Mark Arnold

Map of Cuba showing location
of the Bay of Pigs

Note: Suppose you were a newly elected President and during your transitional briefings you were told by the outgoing President and your intelligence and national security agencies of an operation that had been in the making for a year. The operation involved thousands of anti- Castro Cubans being trained and equipped to invade Cuba and re-take it from Castro, who himself had led a revolt a couple years earlier successfully overthrowing the corrupt, U.S. supported dictator Batista and setting up his own communist style regime on the island 90 miles from the coast of Florida. You are being told that the operation, despite its size, is a covert one that can be plausibly denied by the United States. You are also told that its chances for success are very high and that when the Cuban people see a successful rebellion starting against Castro they will rise up against him as well. You are as opposed to communism as the men briefing you but you are also aware that in supporting this operation the United States is technically violating international law and should regular U.S. military become involved you for sure are. You also know it violates other U.S. laws and rules. Nevertheless, the greater good prevails, and you go along with it and when the time comes to approve the tactical plan for the “covert” invasion to take place you do so, with the repeated stipulation no regular U.S. military be involved. Then the reports start coming in. Something has gone horribly wrong. The invading brigade is trapped on the beaches of Cuba and being cut to pieces. Your intelligence and military people are suddenly telling you that you must intervene NOW with the U.S. military or the invasion will fail. The choice presented is to violate law, both domestic and international, and the sovereignty of another nation even worse than you already are, knowing full well the duty of the Executive branch of U.S. government is to enforce the law, or to become known as the President responsible for the worst cold war disaster in the nation’s history. Those are your options…what do you do?

          In this blog I am presenting the hidden story of the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, the ramifications of which are still felt today. To help you here are the meanings to a few terms used in the article: “Operation Zapata” was the CIA’s code name for the Bay of Pigs operation. The “B-26” airplane was a twin engine, intermediate range bomber used in WW II. The Defense Dept OK’d the use of a number of these planes by the CIA for this operation. “Sterilized” simply means the equipment, in this case the B-26es, had all their identifying markings and serial numbers removed to ensure plausible deniability for the U.S. The “T-33” was a jet fighter built by Lockheed in the late 1940s. At the time of the Bay of Pigs Castro’s air force consisted of 10 T-33s, 7 of which were destroyed on the ground by the CIA B-26es in a pre-invasion attack on April 15. At the time of the invasion two days later Castro had three T-33s left. Now... to the hidden story of Operation Zapata and why the CIA's Cuban brigade failed...MA

A

The B-26 bomber

T about 1:00 AM on Monday, April 17^th, 1961 a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force was sleeping at his home in Virginia when he was awakened by a phone call. Over the sound of running airplane engines on the other end of the line the Colonel recognized the voice; an old friend was calling from Nicaragua. The friend was very upset. He told the Colonel that the dawn airstrike that was to have been launched to support the 1400 strong anti-Castro Cuban brigade about to hit the beaches at the Bay of Pigs had been delayed. An order had been received to hold the planes. He went on to tell the Colonel that anything later than a 2 AM departure by the sterilized B-26es carrying out the strike would mean they would not be able to arrive by dawn when the brigade’s beach assault was scheduled. As a result Castro’s remaining air force of 3 ancient T-33s would not be destroyed on the ground as per the plan approved by President Kennedy on April 16th when he gave final authorization for the assault. The T-33s would be alerted when the brigade landed, would be free to take off unopposed and would attack the brigade and its supply ships from the air.

T-33 Jet Fighter

          The friend on the phone with the Colonel was the CIA commander at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, where the sterilized B-26es were based. He urged the Colonel to call General Charles Cabell, the CIA’s Deputy Director, at the Operation Zapata office and demand the immediate release of the B-26es.The CIA commander told the Colonel that the Cubans piloting the B-26es were so eager to depart that they would leave without orders to do so if the commander just got on his bike and disappeared for a few minutes. Later both the commander and the Colonel wished he had done just that.

                                                                                                       

General Cabell

          Hanging up the phone the Colonel looked at his watch. There was less than an hour until 2 AM. He called General Cabell but was unable to reach him. Cabell’s senior, CIA Director Allen Dulles was out of the country and also unreachable. The Colonel, knowing that Kennedy had approved the airstrikes as a vital part of the plan, then called the Zapata office again and suggested that the B-26es be released on Kennedy’s orders. He was told that the situation was being run by the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy, Deputy Director CIA Charles Cabell and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The Colonel knew that unless the B-26es were allowed to leave very soon the anti-Castro brigade would be defeated and the entire plan would fail. Yet he could find no one willing to make the phone call to his friend to authorize the release of the planes, even though it was exactly per Kennedy’s wishes that it be done. As a result the 3 antiquated jets of Castro’s air force controlled the skies over the brigade’s landing zone, sank the brigade’s supply ships, raked the brigade on the beach with gunfire and shot down 16 B-26es that did finally arrive late on the scene. The B-26 was no match for a T-33 in the air.

Navy Admiral
Arleigh Burke

          As it was becoming obvious that the CIA’s Cuban brigade was failing in its objectives, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff prevailed on Kennedy to intervene with U.S. military support to save it. In an emergency meeting called just before midnight on April 17^th Kennedy, along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, The Chief of Staff of the Navy Arleigh Burke and The CIA’s Richard Bissell. The CIA and military people requested the meeting to pressure JFK to authorize the use of U.S. Navy jets and a destroyer to help the brigade overcome Castro’s forces. Bissel made an impassioned plea to the President for assistance from the military. Kennedy reminded them that all along he had stated he would not use regular U.S. military in such operations. The meeting became heated with Burke becoming angry. Kennedy, however, still held his ground.

          The CIA and the Chiefs had JFK between a rock and a very hard place; he either authorized the use of the military to save the operation or the brigade would fail and he would appear to be responsible for the worst U.S. Cold War disaster to that point in time. They thought Kennedy would go along. They were wrong. Kennedy knew that the use of the U.S. military to invade another nation with whom we were not at war violated international law. He also knew that the CIA was already in violation of its founding law, the National Security Act, by engaging in paramilitary operations in the first place and that earlier National Security Council directives forbade the use of regular U.S. military forces for such operations in peacetime. Because of these things, and probably because he sensed he was being trapped into this escalation, Kennedy refused to authorize U.S. military intervention to save the Cuban brigade. Two days later some 1100 of the CIA’s brigade surrendered to Castro’s forces and the disaster that was the Bay of Pigs became President John Kennedy’s first experience at trusting the CIA. It was a lesson he would never forget.

                                                                                                           

L. Fletcher Prouty

          The Colonel who took the phone call from the CIA officer in Nicaragua and tried in vain to find a responsible party to release the B-26es was none other than L. Fletcher Prouty. He is the author of two books that lay open how the CIA operates as well as expose much of its history in covert operations. The books are “The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World” and “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy”. For 9 years, from 1954 to 1963, Prouty served as Focal Point officer for contacts between the CIA and the Department of Defense on matters pertaining to military support for the CIA’s Special Operations. (“Special Operations” is a CIA euphemism for its covert and often paramilitary operations, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion) His job as Focal Point officer included briefing people such as the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as other Defense Dept officials on the money, materiel and military requirements for the various CIA operations planned around the world in order to gain their support for the Agency’s operations. Though he represented the CIA in these briefings, Prouty was not CIA himself, but a career Air Force pilot and officer. As such he never took the Agency security oath. During these years Prouty’s duties took him to over 60 nations, as well as CIA stations and covert operations the world over. Because of the post he held Prouty’s knowledge of the CIA, how it operates and what it did is extensive and he is uniquely qualified to report on circumstances such as the Bay of Pigs scenario described above. As in the Bay of Pigs operation, he often was present at and therefore observing what he describes in his books.

          Following the Bay of Pigs disaster, as Prouty reports in “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy”, Kennedy took public responsibility for the failure of the CIA’s Cuban brigade. Privately, however, he felt he had been misled and lied to by the CIA. He had approved a plan calling for airstrikes to take out the weak Cuban air force on the ground but someone had delayed the strikes thus causing the failure of the mission. He then was heavily pressured to allow the use of regular military forces to salvage the CIA’s brigade, something he successfully resisted. It was almost as if the B-26es were deliberately delayed to force Kennedy’s hand in allowing the use of the regular military in the operation.

          To get to the bottom of what occurred, on April 22, 1961 Kennedy appointed a 4 person group to look into the matter. The group consisted of CIA Director Allen Dulles, Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Arleigh Burke, Army General Maxwell Taylor and JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Over the next seven weeks the group met, interviewing key witnesses and participants in operation Zapata. Every evening after the meetings Robert Kennedy would see his brother and report on the day’s findings. On June 13 General Taylor submitted the group’s findings to the President in the form of a long letter. It was following this report that JFK fired the Director and Deputy Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles and General Charles Cabell as well as the Deputy Director for Plans and the CIA official directly running Zapata, Richard Bissell. Shortly Kennedy followed that up with National Security Action Memorandum #55 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff which I described in an earlier blog. In NSAM #55 Kennedy told the Chiefs that he held them as responsible for advice during cold war operations as he would if the country were at war; a direct effort to depower the CIA of its covert operation capabilities. With all this understood, the pressures Kennedy was under and the threat he represented to the intelligence community and the war planners perhaps becomes a bit clearer. Kennedy did not fall for the trap during the Bay of Pigs and refused to use regular military to salvage the Cuban Brigade. But that didn’t mean that those opposing him in the military industrial complex and the secret team were through trying, as we shall see.

          There is one last peculiar aspect to the whole Bay of Pigs affair that bears mentioning. After the special group investigating the Bay of Pigs filed its report with the President as to the causes of the debacle, the report itself vanished and for many years its whereabouts was unknown. Many doubted the existence of the report in the first place. Then in 1979 an author named Peter Wyden published a book called “Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story”. In his book Wyden makes frequent mention of the special group’s report to the point where it was obvious that he had access to it in writing the book. Suddenly the long missing report had surfaced. Around the same time Wyden’s book was published Kennedy’s former Special Assistant McGeorge Bundy published an article on the op-ed page of the New York Times called “The Brigade’s My Fault”. Fletcher Prouty speculates that Bundy had obviously read Wyden’s book and now felt the need to cover his tracks. According to Prouty, who possessed one of the few copies of the “long thought missing” report, in paragraph 43 the report states:

“At about 9:30 PM on April 16, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President, telephoned General Charles C. Cabell of CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes of the following morning should not be launched until they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead.”

McGeorge Bundy

It was Bundy who had placed the phone call delaying the air strikes that in turn had caused the failure of operation Zapata and 18 years after the fact the proof had surfaced in the form of the report. Obviously in using the word “Brigade” in the title of his article Bundy is referring to the CIA’s Bay of Pigs brigade. Yet the article he wrote for the New York Times, despite its title, says nothing about the Cuban brigade and instead deals with the Cuban Missile Crisis which took place a year and half later. Who knows what Bundy had in mind in writing such a confusing article but it certainly wasn’t to step up and be responsible for the failure of the Cuban brigade as the article’s title would seem to indicate.

          Also, the question of whether or not the CIA was planning all along on trying to force President Kennedy into allowing the use of U.S regular armed forces in operation Zapata was clarified with the discovery in 2005 of a CIA document dated November 15, 1960. The document states the conclusion that the invasion was “unachievable except as joint Agency/DOD action.” (DOD means Dept of Defense). The Agency was aware all along that the invasion by the Cuban brigade alone would likely fail and did their best to trap JFK into agreeing to use the regular military to ensure its success.

          They severely misestimated their man.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved