JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (60 page)

[
170
]. Blair,
Lodge in Vietnam,
pp. 21, 165 note 49.

[
171
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 634.

[
172
]. Reeves,
President Kennedy: Profile of Power
, p. 563, p. 744 note for p. 563.

[
173
]. Kai Bird,
The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 254.

[
174
]. William J. Rust,
Kennedy in Vietnam
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), p. 119.

[
175
].
FRUS
,
1961-1963,
vol. III, p. 645.

[
176
]. Rust,
Kennedy in Vietnam,
p. 110. Colonel Lucien Conein’s CIA expertise included a working knowledge of the CIA’s staple in covert operations, plastic explosives. One of Conein’s covert action scenarios was designed for the Hanoi mansion where he was living in 1954 when the French withdrew from Vietnam. Assuming that a Communist Party official would soon take over the house, Conein filled the refrigerator with plastic explosives. He then wired them with an electric detonator, so that when the refrigerator was plugged in, the explosion would obliterate not only the house but most of the neighborhood. Conein’s plot was interrupted by the U.S. consul in Hanoi, who ordered that the CIA’s huge plastic bomb be dismantled.

[
177
].
FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume IV, Vietnam, August-December 1963
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), p. 16.

[
178
]. Ibid., p. 20.

[
179
]. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

[
180
]. Ibid., pp. 38-39.

[
181
]. Ibid., p. 105.

[
182
]. Ibid., p. 107.

[
183
]. Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 187. Cf. Roger Hilsman,
To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Delta, 1967), p. 488, where Hilsman states: “The Acting Director of CIA also went over the draft, and he too decided to approve without disturbing his chief’s vacation—adding the comment that the time had clearly come to take a stand.” Hilsman revealed that Helms responded enthusiastically to the opportunity for what was in effect a CIA-State united front on the telegram (with McCone out of the loop): “Helms phoned me immediately after signing the cable to say that it was about time the United States tried to do something about the situation caused by Brother Nhu.” Helms knew McCone did not agree with the coup that the cable encouraged. Roger Hilsman, “McNamara’s War—Against the Truth: A Review Essay,”
Political Science Quarterly
(Spring 1996), p. 157.

William Colby, former Saigon station chief who would become the CIA director in 1973, wrote misleadingly about Helms’s approval of the August 24 telegram: “I later heard that Helms, who was the Agency’s duty officer that day, had seen the message and cleared it, regarding it as a policy rather than an intelligence matter, in which the Agency thus had no formal role.” William Colby,
Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 210. Colby seems to be trying to avoid the implications of Helms’s clearance. Helms simply had no problem clearing his own freedom as Deputy Director of Plans to guide and follow (through his agent Lucien Conein) a coup in South Vietnam.

When McCone was informed personally by Colby about the August 24 telegram (on a special trip Colby made to McCone’s California home), he returned quickly to Washington to voice his anger at the State officers’ manipulation of the decision-making process. Colby,
Honorable Men
, p. 210; Powers,
Man Who Kept the Secrets
, p. 187. But there is no record of McCone having confronted his deputy, Richard Helms, for a more obvious usurpation of his own authority as DCI.

[
184
]. Torbert Macdonald background from Herbert S. Parmet,
Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Dial Press, 1980), pp. 45-48, 352.

[
185
]. Seymour M. Hersh,
The Dark Side of Camelot
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), p. 433.

[
186
]. Herbert S. Parmet,
JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Dial Press, 1983), pp. 335, 390 endnotes 50 and 51.

[
187
]. Ibid., p. 335.

[
188
]. Joe Croken interview by Seymour Hersh,
Dark Side of Camelot
, p. 432. Unlike Eleanore Carney and Torbert Macdonald, Jr., Joe Croken was not told about the message Macdonald was delivering to Diem. Ibid.

[
189
]. Herbert S. Parmet’s handwritten notes from interview with Michael V. Forrestal, February 17, 1981.

[
190
]. Parmet,
JFK
, p. 335.

[
191
]. Ibid. Colonel Edward Lansdale, Diem’s CIA adviser when he took power in 1954, told Daniel Ellsberg a story about another possible JFK mission to Diem—which Lansdale said he turned down. Lansdale said that in late September 1963, in a private meeting between President Kennedy, Lansdale, and Robert McNamara, Kennedy “said he wanted [Lansdale] to go over to try to influence Diem to send his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu out of the country, along with his wife Madame Nhu. He asked if Lansdale was willing to go, with that mission. Lansdale said yes.

“Then Kennedy said to him, ‘But if that didn’t work out, or I changed my mind and decided that we had to get rid of Diem himself, would you be able to go along with that?’”

Lansdale told Ellsberg he thought Kennedy meant Diem’s assassination, so he responded, “No, Mr. President. I couldn’t do that. Diem is my friend.”

Lansdale said the president “seemed to understand his response and didn’t say anything unfriendly or express disappointment. But the discussion was over.” Unpublished memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, “Edward G. Lansdale Story File,” October 24, 2000.

Lansdale may have misunderstood what Kennedy meant. One can also question Lansdale’s reliability as a witness to the truth.

As a CIA operative, Colonel Edward Lansdale was responsible for securing Saigon for the beginning of Diem’s rule in June 1954. He did so by employing General Trinh Minh The, the same CIA-sponsored warlord whose terrorist bombing with plastic explosives in Saigon two years earlier was exposed in Graham Greene’s novel,
The Quiet American
. Because the title character’s role in the plot corresponds to Lansdale’s covert activities in Saigon and his employment of Trinh Minh The, Lansdale has long been identified as the prototype for the Quiet American. H. Bruce Franklin, “Our Man in Saigon,”
The Nation
(February 3, 2003), p. 44.

Although Greene denied Lansdale was his model, Lansdale did all he could for the CIA to destroy the truth of
The
Quiet American
in its first film version. When Joseph Mankiewicz bought the novel’s movie rights in 1956, Lansdale wrote the director a letter, assuring him that no “more than one or two Vietnamese now alive know the real truth of the matter [of Trinh Minh The’s terrorist bombing and his claiming credit for it on the radio], and they certainly aren’t going to tell it to anyone.” Therefore, Lansdale urged, Mankiewicz should “just go right ahead and let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all, even to faking the radio broadcast.” Following Lansdale’s lead, Mankiewicz returned to the CIA’s scapegoat scenario but in an altered Graham Greene context, depicting the Communists as the bombers, the Quiet American as an innocent hero, and the narrator Fowler as “a writhing, loathsome and self-loathing stand-in for Graham Greene.” Franklin, “Our Man in Saigon,” p. 44.

[
192
].
WCH
, vol. 11, p. 396. See also transcript of Ruth Paine’s testimony before the Orleans Parish Grand Jury, April 18, 1968, pp. 2-4.

[
193
].
WCH
, vol. 9, p. 258.

[
194
]. Ibid., p. 257.

[
195
].
WCH
, vol. 2, p. 436.

[
196
].
WCH
, vol. 9, p. 258.

[
197
]. Ibid.

[
198
]. Edward Jay Epstein,
The Assassination Chronicles
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), pp. 559, 564.

[
199
]. Ibid., pp. 559, 566.

[
200
]. Ibid., p. 567.

[
201
].
Appendix to Hearings before the HSCA
, vol. 12, pp. 56-57.

[
202
]. J. Edgar Hoover Letter to J. Lee Rankin, October 23, 1964. FBI Record Number 124-10147-10006. Agency File Number 105-126128-1ST NR 120.

[
203
].
WCH
, vol. 2, p. 385.

[
204
]. Ibid.

[
205
]. Bruce Campbell Adamson,
Oswald’s Closest Friend: The George de Mohrenschildt Story
, 11 volumes (Aptos, Calif.: self-published, 1993, 1995), vol. 6, pp. l, 31. William Kelly, “Arthur Young and Ruth Forbes Young—the Crux of the Matter,” Conference Abstract, Coalition on Political Assassinations,
Opening the Files: JFK, MLK, RFK
; Washington, D.C., October 18-20, 1996.