Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (43 page)

At 7:00 a.m. Washington time, Ambassador Lodge sent a cable from Saigon to the White House describing the death of Diem and Nhu. National Security Council staff aide Michael V. Forrestal handed the message to JFK in the Cabinet Room of the White House as a crisis meeting of the National Security Council was about to begin. Reading the cable, Kennedy “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock on his face,” as described by General Maxwell Taylor who was attending the meeting.
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Even more embarrassing to the United States, Diem was murdered while his wife, Madame Nhu, was in the United States on a speaking tour promoting the interests of her husband’s government.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek, in his 2003 book,
An Unfinished Life
, noted Taylor attributed Kennedy’s reaction to his belief that any change of government in South Vietnam would be carried out without bloodshed. Even more precisely, JFK had specifically ordered the CIA not to assassinate Diem in a coup d’état.
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JFK could not easily dismiss the problem of Diem’s execution. If Diem could be assassinated despite his
orders, JFK knew he, too, could be assassinated. He suspected the same people in the CIA who had disregarded his instructions to Ambassador Lodge were capable of plotting directly against him as well. Trusted JFK advisor Arthur Schlesinger saw JFK shortly after the Diem assassination and found the president to be “somber and shaken.” Insightfully, Schlesinger commented he had not seen JFK so depressed since the Bay of Pigs crisis.
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Instantly on hearing the news Diem and his brother had been killed, JFK realized the instrument of his death was the CIA. If a CIA coup d’état was underway to remove him from office by assassination, what could Jack Kennedy do to prevent it?

On Monday, November 4, 1963, JFK taped a message on the Diem assassination for future historians. “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu,” JFK recorded. “I’d met Diem with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While [Diem] became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.”
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Kennedy believed the $1 million in large denominations that Diem had with him in a briefcase at the time he was murdered was evidence Diem had planned to escape and live comfortably in exile. Kennedy refused to accept the official story Diem had committed suicide by poison, believing instead the military loyal to General Minh had assassinated Diem, at the orders of Minh and with the approval of the CIA. Diem and his brother placed themselves at risk by agreeing to surrender to forces loyal to General Minh. In exchange for the trust Diem and his brother placed in JFK, they were brutally killed. On orders from General Minh, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung assassinated Diem and Nhu with a pistol at point-blank range in an armored personnel carrier, finishing the job off with a bayonet, as Diem and Nhu were en route to a South Vietnam military base and then out of the country.

The Diem murder was especially ironic due to the fact that the CIA positioned Diem to head South Vietnam after the Geneva Agreements of 1954 partitioned Vietnam and after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu.
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Ngo Dinh Diem established his nationalist credentials in the early 1930s when he resigned his position as Vietnam’s Interior Minister.
Living in the United States in the 1950s, he won over key US legislators who began to see him as the best hope for anti-Communist leadership in Vietnam. The CIA had restored the Shah of Iran to his throne in 1953, and in March 1954, just before the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the CIA had engineered a successful military coup against the government of Guatemala, CIA operative Thomas L. Ahern Jr. noted in a secret CIA document, declassified in 2009,
CIA and the House of NGO: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954–63
. By mid-1954 there was ample precedent for the CIA to take a lead role in Vietnam.
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The CIA first crafted a case officer relationship with Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as early as 1952; the next year, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, then-CIA Director Allen Dulles, came to the conclusion that Diem was best suited to be the first president of a non-Communist South Vietnam. On June 18, 1954, at the direct encouragement of the CIA, Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai invited Diem to form a government to replace that of the Francophile courtier Prince Buo Loc.
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“Ngo Dinh Diem’s attractiveness to his first American patrons derived from three qualities: he was a certified anti-Communist nationalist, he was a Roman Catholic and he understood English,” Ahern concluded.
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That the CIA assassinated Diem after having created him was particularly shocking.

While the Diem murder soured JFK on South Vietnam, the removal of Diem had exactly the opposite effect on the CIA. It calculated that the overthrow of Diem committed Washington to Saigon more deeply. “Having had a hand in the coup, America had more responsibility for the South Vietnamese governments that followed Diem,” wrote John Prados, a senior fellow of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
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For JFK, hearing the news on November 2, 1963, was much more immediate of a problem than the impact of the Diem assassination on the progress of the Vietnam War. After the assassination of Diem, JFK found it impossible to dismiss the warning from the Elkins family. Kennedy knew being vice president had humiliated LBJ, but would LBJ go so far as to participate in an assassination plot?

November 2, 1963, was coincidentally the day Chicago police arrested a well-armed Thomas Arthur Vallee on suspicion of planning to assassinate the president.
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After November 2, 1963, the two heavily armed men suspected of conspiring with Vallee had been apprehended, questioned, and released; the other two members of the suspected four-man sniper team vanished. “Higher orders ensured the necessary amnesia. A Treasury Department official ordered Chicago Police Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland to forget his encounter with Thomas Arthur Vallee. The Secret Service Agent in Charge, Maurice Martineau, ordered his Chicago agents to forget their investigation of the four-man sniper team. The Dallas assassination was allowed to happen, unimpeded by the intelligence community’s knowledge of its forerunner,” wrote James W. Douglass in his 2008 best-selling book,
JFK and the Unspeakable
.
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The Secret Service investigation that disrupted the Chicago plot to assassinate JFK should have been used to disrupt the Dallas plot, Douglass argued. Yet, curiously, the intelligence about the Chicago assassination plot never surfaced beyond Chicago.

Kennedy, on being briefed about the danger in Chicago, decided the trip had to be canceled. That some of the potential assassins had escaped was devastating news. So at 10:15 a.m. on November 2, at the last possible moment, White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger announced to the press that JFK had decided to cancel his scheduled visit to Chicago, implying concerns over Vietnam were the reason. The White House never specifically attributed the Diem assassination as the reason for canceling the Chicago trip, nor did the White House make public the intelligence information about the arrest of Thomas Arthur Vallee.

Author James Douglass noted the parallels between the Chicago assassination plot and the assassination in Dallas: “Just as Chicago was the model for Dallas, Saigon was the backdrop for Chicago.”
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Douglass suggested that “[i]f Kennedy had been murdered in Chicago on the day after Diem’s and Nhu’s murders in Saigon, the juxtaposition of the events would have created the perfect formula to be spoon-fed to the public: ‘Kennedy murdered Diem, and got what he deserved.’” It didn’t matter that Chicago failed, reasoned Douglass, because Dallas followed a similar pattern. “From the claims made by a series of CIA officers to the
authors of widely disseminated books and articles, John Kennedy has been convicted in his grave of having tried to kill Fidel Castro, whose supposedly deranged surrogate, Lee Harvey Oswald then retaliated,” Douglass continued. “As a successful Chicago plot would have done, the Dallas plot ended up blaming the victim: ‘Kennedy tried to murder Castro, and got what he deserved.’”
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Kennedy’s problem, Douglass believed, was that he wanted to pursue peace, but that “in his critics’ eyes, made him soft on Communism.”
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Kennedy’s opponents within the US government were resolved that JFK had to be removed. “The absolute end of victory over the evil of Communism justified any means necessary, including the assassination of the president,” Douglass concluded. “The failed plot in Chicago had to be followed by a successful one in Dallas.”

In The
Ends of Power
H. R. Haldeman discusses State Department cables that E. Howard Hunt had in his safe at the White House. The cables apparently linked JFK to the Diem assassination. Haldeman admits there were many indicators along the way that the investigation of the Watergate burglary was only the tip of the iceberg. “In retrospect, I must admit that there were certainly many indications along the way that, had I heeded them, would have at the very least caused me to wonder exactly what was really going on,” Haldeman wrote. “But at the time, I didn’t want to know, and I made no effort to find out.”
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In his testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee, Hunt admitted to forging CIA cables linking JFK to the Diem assassination under questioning from committee counsel Samuel Dash. Hunt established that his analysis of authentic State Department cables indicated “a gap” in the sequence leading up to the Diem assassination. In the segment of Hunt’s testimony presented below, Charles Colson, who served in the White House as special counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973, is exposed as playing a central role in the Watergate cover-up.

Mr. Hunt
: I told him [Charles Colson] that the construction I placed upon the absence of certain cables was that they had been abstracted from the files maintained by the Department of State in chronological fashion and that while there was every reason to believe, on the basis
of an accumulated evidence of the cable documentation, that the Kennedy administration was implicitly, if not explicitly, responsible for the assassination of Diem and his brother-in-law, that there was no hard evidence such as a cable emanating from the White House or a reply coming from Saigon, the Saigon embassy.

Mr. Dash
: What was Mr. Colson’s reaction to your statement and the showing of the cable to him? Did he agree that the cables were sufficient evidence to show any relationship between the Kennedy administration and the assassination of Diem?

Mr. Hunt
: He did.

Mr. Dash
: Did he ask you to do anything?

Mr. Hunt
: He suggested that I might be able to improve upon the record. To create, to fabricate cables that could substitute for the missing chronological cables.

Mr. Dash
: Did you in fact fabricate cables for the purpose of indicating the relationship of the Kennedy administration and the assassination of Diem?

Mr. Hunt
: I did.

Mr. Dash
: Did you show these fabricated cables to Mr. Colson?

Mr. Hunt
: I did.

Mr. Dash
: What was his response to the fabricated cables?

Mr. Hunt
: He indicated to me that he would be probably getting in touch with a member of the media, of the press, to show the cables.
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In establishing the basis for this testimony, Dash had explained to the Senate Watergate Committee that he expected Hunt’s testimony “will show an effort by Mr. Colson to try to discredit the Kennedy administration and therefore the Democratic Party during the election and relating it to the assassination of Premier Diem and for that purpose attempting to bring the Catholic vote away from the Democratic Party, and to show that a Democratic
President had a role in the assassination of a Catholic premier.”
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Hunt further testified that he had given a copy of the forged cables to William Lambert of
Life
magazine, the same Lambert who won a Pulitzer Prize with Wallace Turner when they published a series of articles, discussed in
chapter 5
, revealing the Teamster penetration into the western organized crime mob headed by J. B. Elkins. Lambert was suspicious of the authenticity of the cables, based in large part on the advice from the surviving members of the Elkins family that the document had been falsified and that JFK had nothing to do with ordering the Diem assassination. Lambert never published the cables.

On August 3, 1973, L. Patrick Gray, the former acting director of the FBI, testified to the Senate Watergate Committee that on the evening of June 28, 1972, in a meeting with White House counsel John Dean, H. R. Haldeman, and John Erlichman, counsel and Domestic Affairs assistant to President Nixon, Dean handed to Gray two legal-sized white manila folders that contained copies of classified papers that E. Howard Hunt had been working on while in the White House. Dean explained the files had “national security implications or overtones,” but that they had nothing to do with the Watergate burglary or investigation. “The clear implication of the substance and tone of these remarks was that these two files were to be destroyed, and I interpreted this to be an order from [John Dean] issued in the presence of one of the two top assistants to the President of the United States.”
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Gray further testified that he took these files to his home in Stonington, Connecticut, in late September or early October 1972, and he burned them along with the wrapping paper from Christmas. Before putting the files in the fire, he opened one and saw that it contained what appeared to be copies of “top secret” State Department cables. “I read the first cable,” he testified. “I do not recall the exact language but the text of the cable implicated officials of the Kennedy administration in the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam. I had no reason then to doubt the authenticity of the ‘cable’ and was shaken at what I had read.” He continued to explain he thumbed through the other cables in the file and they appeared to be duplicates of the first cable.
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