FROM JOHN NEWMAN'S "Into the Storm"
SPECIAL - John Newman has permitted JFKCountercoup to post his end chapter 15 of "Into the Storm" - Volume 3 of his ground breaking multi-volume study of the assassination of President Kennedy, and the "intermission" before continuing the quest in Volume 4.
This is copyrighted material, do not copy, paste or quote at length without the permission of the author.
As John Newman writes in the Introduction to this book, "Any standard - i.e., open-minded - examination of the events in Volume II and IV is encumbered by a labyrinth of deceptive information. The inaccurate and false clutter must first be succinctly identified and processed, and then disposed of, before the task of assembling the true sequence of events can begin....And so I found myself struggling for months on end trying to peer through the fog created by Yuri Nosenko, Samuel Halpern, and Antonio Veciana. Their stories are fraught with deception and inaccuracies. And so, I have resorted to putting their accounts under an electron microscope. In the end, I arrived at an intermission - a dark zone between the events that took place leading up to the summer of 1962 and what they portended for the rest of the Kennedy presidency. And I chose....to share my findings in Volume III without knowing how things will turn out in Volumes IV and, if necessary, beyond......"
INTERMISSION:
THE WINDS OF WAR
At
the precisemoment President Kennedy launched Operation Mongoose—on 3 November
1961—official Washington was already in an uproar over the report General
Taylor had made that same day recommending that 8,000 U.S. combat troops be
deployed in South Vietnam (see JFK and Vietnam, 2017 edition,
Chapter Seven). Taylor had just returned
from a mission to Vietnam for which the president had instructed him not to come back with a recommendation
for U.S. military intervention. Kennedy
was so shocked by Taylor’s recommendation that he tried, unsuccessfully, to
suppress it by recalling copies of the final report.[i]
Taylor’s recommendation to send combat troops was a very closely held secret.
The
fact that the president tried to suppress a recommendation to send combat
troops to Vietnam on the same day that he launched Operation Mongoose tells us
a lot about how he would react to a similar recommendation to send American
combat troops into Cuba. No record of
the 3 November meeting that launched Mongoose has ever been found.[ii] However, the decisions reached that day were
summarized in a 30 November 1961 memorandum from the president to his senior
cabinet members, as well as General Taylor and General Lansdale. Kennedy told
his subordinates to “go ahead” with the project to “overthrow” the Castro
regime.[iii]
Lansdale
made use of that presidential memorandum in a report he authored on 20 February
1962.[iv] But Lansdale’s report was remanded six days
later by the Special Group (Augmented—SGA) because he had asked if the
president would approve U.S. military intervention in Cuba. I mentioned that key SGA meeting in Chapter
Fourteen and promised to revisit it here.
Before I do that, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that
eight days before the president gave the “go ahead” for Mongoose on 30 November
1961, he had overruled a recommendation by Secretary McNamara, Secretary Rusk,
the Joint Chiefs and General Taylor, for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. Etched in stone in NSAM-111 on 22 November
1961, that was the defining decision on Vietnam during Kennedy’s
presidency. It was promulgated two years
to the day before his assassination.
The Battle Between
General Lemnitzer and President Kennedy Over War in Vietnam
The
key NSC meeting leading up to President Kennedy’s decision against intervention
in Vietnam occurred on November 15, 1961.
During that meeting, a caustic and revealing exchange took place between
JCS Chairman General Lemnitzer and the president. When Kennedy asked for the justification for
sending U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, this heated moment took place:
Lemnitzer replied that the world would be divided in
the area of Southeast Asia on the sea, in the air and in communications. He said communist conquest would deal a
severe blow to freedom and extend communism to a great portion of the
world. The president asked how he could justify the proposed courses of
action in Vietnam while at the same time ignoring Cuba. General Lemnitzer hastened to add that the JCS feel that even at this point the
United States should go into Cuba.[v]
This passage was a
dramatic illustration of the degree to which the president had become isolated
from the cold warriors demanding full U.S. intervention in Vietnam and Cuba. It foreshadowed the uncompromising conflict
that erupted three months later over Lemnitzer’s proposal for full U.S.
military intervention in Cuba.
In
the days immediately after Thanksgiving—26-29 November—Kennedy purged the Vietnam
hawks in the State Department (see JFK and Vietnam, 2017 edition,
Chapter Seven). At the same time, as I
mentioned before, when the president fired DCI Allen Dulles and replaced him
with John McCone, he warned the new DCI, “We want to welcome you here and to
say that you are now living on the bull’s-eye, and I welcome you to that spot.”[vi]
The
lesson from the president’s climactic Vietnam decision was this: Kennedy
turned down combat troops, not when the decision was clouded by ambiguities and
contradictions in the reports from the battlefield, but when the battle was
unequivocally desperate, when all concerned agreed that Vietnam’s fate hung in
the balance, and when his principal advisors told him that vital U.S. interests
in the region and the world were at stake.
But
the chiefs in the Pentagon remained frustrated with the president’s
decision. Air Force Chief of Staff
General LeMay was particularly dismayed.
He later claimed that none of the Joint Chiefs at the time believed the
president’s Vietnam program was “anything except some diplomatic fiddling
around” with a little more aid.[vii] On 13 January 1962, General Lemnitzer
authored his most strongly worded warning yet that his recommendation to send U.S. military
combat forces to Vietnam had to be considered again, and asked Defense
Secretary McNamara to send it on to the president.[viii] McNamara did this, along with his own comment
that he did not endorse it.[ix]
In
an emphatic and foreboding lecture to the president, Lemnitzer said that
failure to heed his recommendation would lead to “communist domination of all
of the Southeast Asian mainland.”
Singapore and Malaysia would be lost as the Indonesian archipelago came
under “Soviet domination.” Control of
the eastern access to the Indian Ocean would be lost and India would be
“outflanked.” Australia and New Zealand
would be threatened, and the American bases in the Philippines and Japan would
be lost.
Given
Kennedy’s repeated refusals to intervene in Vietnam, Lemnitzer’s memo bordered
on insubordination. His
the-sky-is-falling memorandum rebuked the president for his “failure” to send
in U.S. combat troops. Lemnitzer added
impudently that this “will merely extend the date when such action must be
taken and will make our ultimate task proportionately more difficult.” The message to Kennedy was clear: We told you
a year ago to send combat troops, but you didn’t listen. If you fail to listen when your program falls
apart, we’ll do it anyway.
And,
as we know from the subsequent history of events, they did do it anyway.
The Battle Between
General Lemnitzer and President Kennedy Over War in Cuba
The
battle over U.S. intervention in Vietnam was the context for Lansdale’s 28
January 1962 submission of his “sensitive” Task 33 false-flag operation to
create a pretext for U.S. intervention in Cuba.
As I mentioned in Chapter Fourteen, Lansdale took a surprising step
forward on the path to U.S. intervention in his 20 February report titled “The
Cuba Project.”[x] Lansdale’s report began with this sentence:
In keeping with the spirit of the presidential
memorandum of 30 November 1961, the U.S. will help the people of Cuba overthrow the communist regime from within
Cuba and institute a new government with which the U.S. can live in peace. [Emphasis added]
That statement was
essentially true. The president’s
memorandum was simpler: “We will use our available assets to go ahead with the
discussed project in order to help Cuba
overthrow the communist regime.”[xi]
But Lansdale’s report ended with a question that was
completely at odds with presidential policy:
If
the conditions and assets permitting a revolt are achieved in Cuba, and if U.S. help is required to sustain this
condition, will the U.S. respond promptly
with military force to aid the Cuban revolt? …An early decision is required. [Emphasis
added]
Of course, Lansdale
knew that the president had barred U.S. military intervention from being
considered in the Mongoose operation.
So, why had Lansdale become the stalking horse for a proposal
specifically opposed by the president?
There can only be one answer: just as Lansdale had cast his lot with the
chiefs on intervention in Vietnam back in the spring of 1961, now he was once
again casting his lot with them on intervention—this time in Cuba. While the president would keep Lansdale
around for a while longer, that episode effectively ended his usefulness to the
Kennedy brothers. Lansdale’s embrace of
U.S. military intervention in Cuba ensured that he would never be rewarded with
his coveted prize—an assignment to Vietnam as a special U.S. advisor to
President Diem.
As
I mentioned in Chapter Fourteen, the Kennedy brothers had seen the false-flag
pretext for U.S. military intervention in Lansdale’s 18 January
memorandum. Two days later, Lansdale’s
20 February report went even further by asking if the president would agree to
U.S. intervention to save a Cuban revolt.
It is likely the Kennedys understood that Lemnitzer was behind
Lansdale’s switch to an intervention track.
And so, the brothers conducted countermeasures by using a key 26
February SGA meeting to 1) restrict Lansdale’s future mission to “short-range actions”
to acquire “hard intelligence” about Cuba, and 2) order the deletion of
Lansdale’s reference to the president’s memorandum in his (Lansdale’s) 20
February paper. The message was
unmistakable: Lansdale’s question about intervening militarily to save a Cuban
revolt was decidedly not “in keeping
with the spirit” of the president’s memorandum.
The
Kennedy brothers knew that clipping Lansdale’s wings was only the beginning of
the battle that was about to unfold. If
the false-flag pretext was only Lansdale’s idea, then there was nothing more to
worry about. But the brothers intended
to force the real snake in the grass out into the open. And General Lemnitzer had no qualms about
stepping to the front of the line.
Not
surprisingly, Lemnitzer had already
swung into action in the Pentagon. A
later (13 March 1962) memorandum traced the evolution of the activity Lemnitzer
assigned to his Joint Staff.[xii] By the time of Lansdale’s 18 January
false-flag pretext proposal, Lemnitzer had already placed his chief of covert
action, General Craig, in charge of a working group of five officers—from the
Joint Staff’s J-5 plans and policy component—on a full-time basis. After Lansdale’s 18 January recommendation,
Lemnitzer enlarged Craig’s working group by “the addition of full-time
representatives of the Joint Staff’s J-1 (manpower and personnel), J-2
(intelligence), J-3 (operations), J-4 (logistics), and representatives from the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Lemnitzer was ahead of his skis at this point.
While neither of the Kennedy brothers was physically
present at the crucial 26 February SGA meeting, their interests were well
represented. The presence of the
president’s security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, and Defense Secretary McNamara,
along with his deputy, Roswell Gilpatrick, was sufficient to apply the brakes
on Lansdale’s future duties. Lansdale
was there to witness the first step on his journey toward impotence. That surprise undoubtedly pleased William
Harvey—who was also a witness to Lansdale’s falling star—but he was hardly
oblivious to the worrisome implications.
Little did Harvey suspect at the time that Lansdale’s last act, at the
height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would be to dismantle his own (Harvey’s)
CIA fiefdom on the orders of Robert Kennedy.
In Chapter Fourteen I mentioned that there was a lot more
than met the eye taking place during that seminal February SGA meeting. The unseen hand of the Kennedy brothers was
responsible for the use of a bureaucratic trick
the president had fashioned after the Bay of Pigs failure. The participants at the SGA meeting were
informed about several “papers for higher authority” that had to be drafted
“before the coming weekend”—i.e. in four days.
There were two key papers. The
first paper was to plan for the maximum use of Cuban resources, while
recognizing that final success will
require decisive U.S. military intervention. The second paper was to plan for the
development of Cuban resources to facilitate,
support, and justify that intervention.
On the surface, the guidance for these two “papers”
appeared to be an approval for what Lansdale (on behalf of Lemnitzer) had
proposed on 18 January and 20 February.
But those instructions were a bureaucratic sleight of hand. Officials
who had experience trying to convince President Kennedy to approve something he
did not support were used to being told to go write a paper and get back to
him. In this case, only one paper was drafted afterward, and it
was written on 5 March by General Taylor with slight revisions by McGeorge
Bundy and DCI McCone. The first two lines were identical, word-for-word, with
the language used in the guidance from the 26 February SGA meeting.[xiii]
The formula used at that meeting on behalf of the Kennedys
was not a direct affront to Lemnitzer’s plans for war in Cuba. But the reprimand of Lansdale put the ball
firmly in Lemnitzer’s court. He
understood what he had to do. And so,
Lemnitzer put his Operation Northwoods on the table two weeks later, on 13
March. In Chapter Fourteen, I discussed
the morally depraved details of Lemnitzer’s plan—sinking an American ship,
attacking Miami, Washington and other American cities, and blaming it all on
Cuba.
Three days later, Kennedy and Lemnitzer met face-to
face with, perhaps, a half dozen other officers. It is very difficult to find a
formal memo of the discussion in that meeting.We
do have a brief handwritten note authored by Deputy Under Secretary of State U.
Alexis Johnson who witnessed the event:
The president also expressed skepticism that, in so far as can now be foreseen, circumstances will arise thatwould justify
and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action. It was clearly understood no decision was
expressed or implied approving the use of such forces although contingency
planning would proceed.[xiv]
[Emphasis added]
Here, as a career U.S. Army officer, I am compelled to
speak my mind. I speak for myself and will leave other
officers of the American Armed Forces to their own counsel in this matter. General Lemnitzer betrayed his country and
his oath of office to protect and defend its constitution. U.S. Army Major General Joseph Alexander
McChristian, perhaps the finest Army intelligence officer ever to wear the
uniform, was once asked what it means to lie about the enemy in a time of war. He spoke for what is in my heart when he
replied, “It jeopardizes not only the
lives of the soldiers on the battlefield, but also the future liberty of your
people at home.”[xv]
******************************
As
the moment of maximum danger in the Cuban Missile Crisis approached, the
president finally got around to firing Lemnitzer. On 1 October 1962, Kennedy installed General Maxwell
Taylor as the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The choice of Taylor, as events turned out,
was a very bad mistake.Taylor would end up working secretly with other senior
officers to subvert President Kennedy’s order to begin the withdrawal of U.S.
military advisors from Vietnam.
The ship of the brothers Kennedy was sailing headlong into
the winds of war. Though they might
still stop it in Cuba, war was coming nonetheless. The miraculous conclusion of the Cuban
Missile Crisis would be short-lived. It
was only an intermission—much like the passing eye of a huge hurricane.
At
the moment, for me—save for the steadily building hatred for the Kennedy
brothers and the metamorphosing CIAplots to assassinate Castro—what lies on the
other side of that intermission is mostly dark.
But a saying John Kennedy was wont to quote comes to mind:
Except
the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain. [Psalm 127:1]
—Remarks
prepared [undelivered] for speech at the Trade Mart
Dallas, Texas, 22 November 1963
[i]
Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 169.
[ii]
11/3/61, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 270, Editorial Note.
[iii]
11/30/61, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 278, Memorandum from President
Kennedy.
[iv]
2/20/62, Lansdale report on “The Cuba Project”; RIF 145-10001-10003.
[v]
Notes on National Security Council Meeting 15, November 1961, LBJ Library, VP
Security File, Box 4.
[vi]
Kennedy, remarks at the swearing in of John McCone, CIA, November 29, 1961, Public
Papers, 1961, p. 490.
[vii].LeMay
interview with Belden, March 29, 1972, in Air Force History, p. 91.
[viii]PP,
DOD ed., Book 12, pp. 448-54.
[ix]
Ibid., p. 447.
[x]
2/20/62, Lansdale Report, “The Cuba Project”; RIF 145-10001-10003.
[xi]
11/30/61, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 278, Memorandum from President
Kennedy.
[xii]
3/13/62, DOD/JCS memorandum, “Consolidated Status Report” for the Special Group
(Augmented). Note: This important
memorandum may never see the light of day.
I discovered extracts from it in the Church Committee Index Card
collection that I copied at NARA at a very early date after the passage of the
JFK Assassination Records and Collection Act was passed in 1992. I have made back-up copies for safe keeping
of these valuable records (in secure locations) which contain more than a
thousand index cards on important meetings of the Special Group and the
National Security Council. When the
current Trump administration has finished whatever they decide to do pursuant
to mandated full release of JFK records, we will take action to approach NARA
and the JFK Presidential Library to ensure that what I have copied from this
SSCIA Index Card collection will be available to researchers.
[xiii]3/14/62,
FRUS,
Vol. X, Cuba, Document 314, Guidelines for Operation Mongoose.
[xiv]
Ibid.
1 comment:
thank you.
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