Paul Rigby

Um, because he's not a big wuss like you? Say it with flowers, Brendan, you know it makes scents... A little twist on an old axiom..... Slattery will get you nowhere. Thank you..thank you... Chuck Robbins Chuck, Well-intentioned and doubtless, in other contexts, sage words. Two probs: 1.Old Liverpool axiom: If you dish it, be prepared to take it, with interest. 2. Never assume motivation. Always permit the possibility of an ulterior one. Paul

You're equating that to intentional mass murder? Bill Greer lied thru his teeth to the WC, but that doesn't come close to proving he was part of a conspiracy. Non sequitur of the year award - with bouquet - goes to Mr. B, the Artie Fufkin of neo-con apologetics

The sad-sack who spots mobile Asters on Elm gets my vote.

The view of the State v. CIA war in Vietnam embodied in Starnes’ ‘Arrogant’ CIA was to receive powerful corroboration in the pages of The Times, then still the house-organ of the British elite. On Macmillan’s last day in No.10, it offered a succinct summary of the forces in play and what they represented. British historians, it should be noted, have spent over forty years avoiding this and similar meditations on the CIA under Kennedy in the Times 1961-63. More fool them. The capitalisation follows the original. The Times, Tuesday, 8 October 1963, p.13: Second leader An Elusive Agency President Kennedy’s failure to control the political activities of the Central Intelligence Agency has been one of the more disappointing and mysterious aspects of his Administration. It is to be hoped that his belated recall of MR. RICHARDSON, the head of the C.I.A. mission in South Vietnam, is a sign of a new determination to exert the full political control which the agency so badly needs. Few things damage a country more than if its representatives on the spot appear to be at odds with each other. The Cuban fiasco provided a unique opportunity to reassess the role of the C.I.A. The evidence of Laos and South Vietnam is that the opportunity was fumbled. (In Laos two years ago the C.I.A. was still opposing the neutralist coalition some time after PRESIDENT KENNEDY had formally endorsed it.) It is important, however, that the C.I.A. should not become a scapegoat for what are often the sins of the Government. Its involvement with NGO DINH DIEM’S family in Vietnam was encouraged by the absence of clear direction from Washington. The American Government was split over the proper policy for Vietnam, and in the resulting cleavage the State Department went one way and some of the C.I.A., with some of the Pentagon, another. There should have been especially keen vigilance over the C.I.A., for it is well known that many members of its staff are out of sympathy with the basic assumptions of the Administration’s policies, as they were not, on the whole, in the days of MR. DULLES. The difficulty that has always dogged the C.I.A. is that it is basically inimical to American traditions, and the country has been unable to assimilate it. Born out of the shock of Pearl Harbour, it found its present name in 1947. The original intention was that it should confine itself to the collection and evaluation of information, and many think it should return to this pristine state. It outgrew the restrictions almost by accident. The State Department was weak in staff and funds, and American policy demanded methods that were not compatible with normal diplomacy. Gradually MR. JOHN FOSTER DULLES found that he could sometimes act more effectively through his brother ALLEN, then head of the C.I.A., than through his own department. Repeated attempts to subject the agency to Congressional control stumbled on the obvious need for secrecy. Secrecy would disappear in the open arenas of American political life. At the same time the Dulles fraternity inhibited control by the Executive. The result was a new and secret kingdom which combined the collection of information with the formulation and the execution of policy. After the Bay of Pigs PRESIDENT KENNEDY tried to restore the making of policy to the State Department, local authority to his ambassadors, and most operational responsibilities to the Pentagon. He has had some success with these reforms, but not enough. The recent troubles have already revived demands for more Congressional control, and some increase may be possible. In the end, however, only one person is in a position to exert full control, and that is the President himself.

Um, because he's not a big wuss like you? Say it with flowers, Brendan, you know it makes scents...

One man's filet is another man's palate-cleansing sorbet. MV Sorry, Mark, but after that outstanding summary of the meandering thread about, oh, ROFLMAO, or somesuch, this represents an unacceptable dip in quality. Pseud's corner, sir, for the duration.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Chip Berlet is what G.K. Chesterton termed, in The Man Who Was Thursday, a "philosophical policeman." He attacks conspiracy theory and conspiracists in defence of rich people. The latter never engage in such things, you understand. But where Hofstadter attacked de haut en bas, Berlet proceeds de haut en FBI, ADL et al. Try this link for some well-informed and intermittently amusing stuff on his nonsense. He was memorably filleted by the late Ace Hayes in the mid-1990s. You should find Hayes' work among it. www.oilempire.us/berlet.html "The work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists." And in Berlet's case, cure them, courtesy of those kind men and women at the Ford Foundation.

Stephen, God knows if this is germane, but your question reminded me of this curio from the testimony of a Scotsman on Elm, Robert Henderson. Reportedly a Glaswegian WWII veteran holidaying in Dallas. With wife and daughter, took grandson, Roddy, to see presidential motorcade: “I Saw the Kennedy Killing,” The Weekly News (Manchester), 30 November 1963, p.8: “We settled for a spot on Elm Street. There weren’t all that many people around and it was easy to get a place by the kerbside…The President was sitting in the side of the car nearest us…The car stopped momentarily [after first shot – PR]…Then everything seemed to happen at once” “A stray dog wandered into the roadway” before shooting began. After shooting, “The dog that had been wandering about in the road was still there.” A cynic might wonder if this was part of an early - and early abandonned - attempt to explain the stop on Elm. Fortunately, I am not a cynic. Stephen, God knows if this is germane, but your question reminded me of this curio from the testimony of a Scotsman on Elm, Robert Henderson. Reportedly a Glaswegian WWII veteran holidaying in Dallas. With wife and daughter, took grandson, Roddy, to see presidential motorcade: “I Saw the Kennedy Killing,” The Weekly News (Manchester), 30 November 1963, p.8: “We settled for a spot on Elm Street. There weren’t all that many people around and it was easy to get a place by the kerbside…The President was sitting in the side of the car nearest us…The car stopped momentarily [after first shot – PR]…Then everything seemed to happen at once” “A stray dog wandered into the roadway” before shooting began. After shooting, “The dog that had been wandering about in the road was still there.” A cynic might wonder if this was part of an early - and early abandonned - attempt to explain the stop on Elm. Fortunately, I am not a cynic. I remember now why I thought it relevant: Stephen Barber, “President Kennedy Is Assassinated,” Daily Telegraph, Saturday (4 am edition, reprint), 23 November 1963, p.1: “A woman witness, Mrs. Jean Hill, said in a radio interview that the President and Mrs. Kennedy were looking at a dog in the middle of the road, near an underpass, when the shoots rang out. She said: “There were three shots. He grabbed his chest and fell over his seat, and Jackie fell over him.” “Murder Charge Lodged,” Dallas Times Herald, 23 November 1963, p.8: “The President passed directly in front of us on our side of the street,” Mrs. Hill said.

A sidebar on the question of Lodge and his role in Saigon in the period August-November 1963. I thought it might be interesting to see what an identified CIA asset had to say about him more or less contemporaneously. One example was ready to hand, courtesy of Pan & Lyons’ Vietnam Crisis. In that riveting tome, the authors offer an alleged verbatim extract from an interview with Nhu conducted by Suzanne Labin, the French “leftist” who enjoyed the somewhat surprising distinction of being permitted to address Pentagon high-fliers; and of having had at least one book - The Anthill: The Human Condition in Communist China - subsidised by the Agency through its best-known publishing arm, Praeger of New York, in 1960. Labin attributes the following to Nhu: “His political views seemed to be dominated by the fashionable decrees of Linus Pauling in the New York Times, and the neutralist preachings of Walter Lippmann in the New York Herald-Tribune.” Labin goes on to offer the classic Agency line on Lodge’s role, as supposedly recounted unbidden by Nhu, that renowned master of colloquial English: “Lodge never stopped working against us, with the cocksureness that a representative of a colonial power might have evinced, thirty years ago toward protectorate…Lodge does not bother with the normal business of an Ambassador, which would be to galvanize and to strengthen the friendship between our two governments. No, his only care is to intrigue against the legal government to which he has been accredited.” (Stephen Pan & Daniel Lyons, SJ. Vietnam Crisis (NY: Twin Circle Books, 1967 edition, p.117), citing Suzann Labin. Vietnam: An Eyewitness Account (Springfield, VA: Crestwood Books ), 1964, pp.34-35.) Interesting to note that Labin’s 1965 book, Embassies of Subversion (New York: American Afro-Asian Educational Exchange), carried a forward by one Thomas J. Dodd, the same Senator who, as we have seen, attacked Starnes at the CIA’s behest in February 1964. In early March 1963, Dodd had entered a gushing tribute to the CIA asset into the Congressional Record. It went by the modest title "Suzanne Labin: Joan of Arc of Freedom" (Congressional Record, 1963 March 4). You couldn’t make this up. Labin and Daniel Lyons were themselves to collaborate on Twin Circle’s 1968 book, Fifty Years: The USSR vs. The USA. Small world, indeed.

Nathaniel's quote: "Do we discern a parallel to Helms illusiory banishment in the fate of William Harvey in 1962? Harvey was accused by Bobby Kennedy of initiating incendiary attacks around the time of CMC, without the approval of the president. While he did not leave the agency he was banished to Italy, far away from the JM/WAVE CIA Miami station, locus of the anti-Castro action. Yet there are signs that Harvey continued to be involved in Cuba policy without the president knowing about it. Was this banishment merely a ruse to facilitate plausible denial?" [Endquote] Nathaniel, Don't forget to factor in the "apertura a sinistra" factor when considering Harvey's "banishment" to Italy. What better place to sabotage that particular Kennedy initiative? Paul

Young Richardson refers to Starnes as "obscure" -- interesting way to describe a guy who won the Ernie Pyle Award for excellence in military/foreign-affairs journalism in 1962... Cliff, As you rightly imply, Richardson’s abuse of Starnes was puerile stuff. It told the reader much about its author, and nothing whatever about its intended target. To more rewarding things. For readers of this thread interested in examining Starnes’ prize-winning journalism from the summer of 1962, either through the Library of Congress (in person, or through its excellent duplication service) or via inter-library loan, here is useful guide. All items listed are from the Washington Daily News, as held by the LoC. It’s profoundly patriotic stuff, in a style not a million miles away from that of, say, Richard Tregaskis, whose own Vietnam Diary (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963) did well in the period. In a few short years, Starnes’ own flesh and blood was to occupy the uniform he briefly shared billets with in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. For an early journalistic opponent of subsequent U.S. policy in the region, these were to prove dark and fearful years indeed. June, 1962 The Stakes Are High in Vietnam, 11 June 1962, p.27 Viet Nam Frustrations, 12 June 1962, p.19 We Can Be Proud of GIs in Viet Nam, 13 June 1962, p.37 It’ll Be Good to Be With Marines Again, 14 June 1962, p.31 Here Is Where the Cold War Becomes Warm, 15 June 1962, p.33 A Daring Adventure Is About to Begin, 18 June 1962, p.21 It Was a Polished, Expert Performance, 19 June 1962, p.19 Eyes That Would Break Your Heart, 20 June 1962, p.37 A Hot One Near Ben Cat, 21 June 1962, p.29 Family Man in a Nasty Little War, 22 June 1962, p.25 A Nation With a Mess on it’s Hands, 23 June 1962, p.11 Viet Cong Guerillas Are Tough, 25 June 1962, p.25 A Two-Headed Mouse, 26 June 1962, p.17 We Are Seeing a ‘Nutritional Migration,’ 27 June 1962, p.29 The Sweet Old ‘Round Eyes’ Understood, 28 June 1962, p.13 New Coalition Alarms South Viet Namese, 29 June 1962, p.29 U.S. Inches Ahead in Drive to Save South Viet Nam, 30 June 1962, p.12 July, 1962 Enough to Make Anyone’s Liver Start to Bang, 2 July 1962, p.21 Little Girl in Big Job, 3 July 1962, p.15 If You’re Really ‘Au Fait,’ the Game is ‘CIA,’ 4 July 1962, p.15 Anna Wouldn’t Know Siam, 5 July 1962, p.27 Cobras Come With the Rain, 7 July 1962, p.9 An Elephantine Disaster…Well, Almost, 9 July 1962, p.23 ’14 Can Be a Troubled Sort of Age, 11 July 1962, p.29 They Never Learned to Hate, 12 July 1962, p.43 ‘Happy As A Dead Hog in the Sunshine,’ 13 July 1962, p.27 Wolfhound’s Morale Sags, 14 July 1962, p.9 When Reds Will Strike Is Big Thailand Poser, 16 July 1962, p.17 Like Something in a Midway ‘Crazy House…,’ 17 July 1962, p.17 Long Shot Chance in Laos, 18 July 1962, p.31 A Shoeshine Boy Brings Home a Basic Truth, 19 July 1962, p.31 Perhaps a Few ‘Pipes’ Might Have Helped, 20 July 1962, p.29 Made for Mystery, 21 July 1962, p.13 Big Question in Laos, 23 July 1962, p.19 It Has Been a Painful Lesson in Laos, 24 July 1962, p.15 Saga of the Willowy Ton, 25 July 1962, p.37 It Was Like the Taste of Burnt Caramel, 26 July 1962, p.29 A Sense of Foreboding, 28 July 1962, p.11

Debra & Cliff, Apologies for bundling my replies together, but it seemed a sensible measure given the length and nature of the post to follow. First to Debra: I’ve skimmed the links you posted and found much that was new to me, for which many thanks. I won’t comment on the unfamiliar material therein in any detail as I haven’t yet had the time to do it justice. One brief, relatively minor, observation, however. While it was nice to see the cover of Dick’s noirish mystery – And When She Was Bad She Was Murdered (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1950), one of three he dashed off in the period to pay the bills – much the most apposite of his books in this context is his classic 1967 assault on the CIA and liberal illusion, Requiem In Utopia (NY: Trident Press). It’s one of the outstanding spy novels of the decade and I commend it to all. Cliff, second but not least: Later than intended, I at least deal with the question of the bowdlerisation of the Times of Vietnam’s edition of 2 September 1963, as promised in my previous post to you. I begin with a book published in 2005. A picture of its cover features in Debra’s presentation, and she makes reference to its author in the post above. Written by the son of the CIA station chief Starnes named in ‘Arrogant’ CIA Disobeys Orders In Vietnam, My Father The Spy: An Investigative Memoir (NY: HarperCollins) represented a return to an old and mendacious line of Agency attack on the Scripps-Howard man. Here is John H. Richardson fils on the Times of Vietnam’s detailed expose of the thwarted CIA coup of 28/29 August, as posted earlier in this thread. It is to Richardson fils’ credit that he reproduces his father’s acknowledgement of its accuracy. There, honesty ends: “I have a copy of that newspaper, its angry headline spanning the entire front page: CIA FINANCING PLANNED COUP D’ETAT. Although it didn’t actually use my father’s name…” (p.187). Stop right there. It did, as we shall shortly see. The trouble is, the version to be found today in both the Chicago-based Centre for Research Libraries, and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, is not the original. What became of that? Two veteran China Lobby propagandists, Stephen Pan and the Jesuit Daniel Lyons, explained its fate in 1966: “All of the copies of the paper disappeared from the newstands within a few hours…and when 6,000 more copies were reprinted on September 9, they, too, disappeared almost immediately…That night the presses were smashed by unknown forces.” (Vietnam Crisis (NY: Twin Circle Books, second edition, July 1967), p.121). I offer four very different sources, spread across three decades, for my claim that Richardson’s name did appear in the CIA-suppressed original. To begin in the 1970s, with Polish diplomat, and International Control Commission member, Mieczyslaw Maneli: “In the first version of this article, as I learned later, there was even a mention of the high CIA officials who engineered this conspiracy. According to the information I gathered in Saigon, it mentioned the name of Mr. Richardson, allegedly chief of the CIA in South Vietnam, who masterminded the abortive coup. It was allegedly Mme. Nhu who ordered them to drop this name from the article. I had the opportunity in Saigon to read one of the first versions of this article...” (Mieczyslaw Maneli. War of the Vanquished (NY: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 143.) John Prados offered confirmation in his 2001 study of William Colby: “The station chief’s name [Richardson’s] appeared, first in the Times of Vietnam, then in articles in the United States” (Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford UP, March 2003), p.122). We can do even better. Here is Diem-critic Stanley Karnow writing within a month of 'Arrogant' CIA's publication: “All this might have remained secret had not Nhu, learning of the attempt against Diem’s regime, publicized the ‘plot’ by foreign elements.’ Vietnamese newspapers named Richardson as the leader of the operation, and Washington recalled him.” (“U.S. Still Divided On Viet-Nam Aims,” Washington Post, 31 October 1963, p.A20). My final witness is Dick Starnes. In late February 1964, he despatched a Scripps-Howard researcher to the State Department in successful pursuit of copy. There it was, Richardson’s name. He was moved to seek confirmation of its presence as a consequence of the following attack, launched by our old friend Dodd of Connecticut on the Senate floor: “The propaganda campaign against the CIA reached a crescendo during the recent Vietnamese crisis. Last October 4, an article by a correspondent for an American newspaper chain charged that the CIA had been subverting State Department policy in Viet Nam, and that John Richardson, the CIA man in Saigon, had openly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Lodge. The correspondent who wrote this article was guilty of openly identifying a CIA representative abroad, thus reducing his potential usefulness forever. Visiting Congressmen and members of the press may sometimes know the identity of the CIA representative but it has been take for granted that they do not reveal his identity to the public. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first instance in which an American correspondent has been guilty of this flagrant breach of the ethics of security.” Starnes responded to Dodd’s farrago with this tour de force: The Washington Daily News, March 4, 1964, p.35 Over to You, Senator A spirited – if maundering and contradictory – defense of the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in Viet Nam has been uttered by Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D., Conn.). Altho he prudently avoided using my name, Sen. Dodd’s speech unmistakably was an attack upon me for reporting the truth about the CIA’s headlong wilfulness in Viet Nam. The speech was long-winded and tedious, which is par for the course, and it was also essentially untrue. It betrayed a man who either is disingenuous or whose memory has played him false. He complained to the Senate that “baiting the CIA almost seems to have achieved the stature of a popular national pastime.” He cited my dispatches from Saigon last October, and he alluded to two subsequent broadsides against the CIA levelled by “distinguished members of Congress.” He neglected to include in his indictment a well-reasoned attack on the CIA made recently by former President Harry Truman, who repeated and enlarged upon my well-founded charges that the huge espionage apparatus had strayed into operational and policy-making areas where it did not belong. Sen. Dodd’s motives in slighting Mr. Truman is unknown to me, and may well be nothing more than additional evidence of eclectic memory. In his speech, the Senator and erstwhile FBI agent warned that these attacks upon the CIA are “highly dangerous,” and added: “Whether the critics realize it or not, these charges also constitute an attack on the wisdom and integrity of both President Eisenhower and President Kennedy. It is tantamount to accusing them of passively allowing an executive agency to function without control or supervision; and to make foreign policy – in other words, to usurp the President’s own authority. This is patently ridiculous. Neither President would have ever permitted such a thing.” Here regard for historical truth impels one to remind the Senator that he himself repeated strikingly similar charges, “patently ridiculous” or not, less than four years ago. I quote now from a press release issued by the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee for use Sunday, Sept. 11, 1960: “’Cuba was handed to Castro and the communists by a combination of Americans in the same way that China was handed to the communists,’” Senators James O. Eastland (D., Miss.) and Thomas J. Dodd (D., Conn.) said today in releasing the testimony of two former United States Ambassadors.” The two envoys were Earl T. Smith, who was US Ambassador to Havana when Castro rose to power, and Arthur Gardner, his immediate predecessor. Again the press release: “The Senators drew particular attention to this statement of Ambassador Smith. “’We helped overthrow the Batista dictatorship which was pro-American, only to install the Castro dictatorship, which is pro-Russian. According to former Ambassador Smith, the agencies of the United States Government which ‘had a hand in bringing pressure to overthrow the Batista government’ were ‘certain influential people, influential sources in the State Department, lower down echelons in the CIA…” These charges, of course, were not ridiculous. Ambassador Smith is a distinguished financier and public official. He levelled his charges against the CIA in sworn testimony before the Internal Security sub-committee, on Aug. 30, 1960, Sen. Dodd, among others, present. Ambassador Smith enlarged upon his charges in a book (previously quoted here at some length) entitled “The Fourth Floor,” which was published by Random House two years ago. Both his testimony, which was accepted at face value and broadcast by Sen. Dodd, and his book made it plain that the CIA, indeed, had run contrary to American interests, had helped boost Castro into power, had made policy, or attempted to, and, in one instance, had been openly rebellious and insulting toward Ambassador Smith. So much for Sen. Dodd’s own excursion into what I am afraid he would now deride as dangerous CIA baiting. In his speech two weeks ago, Sen. Dodd laid two charges against me. Both are false and dastardly, both are of a piece with the CIA’s record for crude intimidation of reporters who undertake its lunatic growth and hunger for power. CHARGE: A dispatch of mine identified and thus destroyed the usefulness of one John Richardson, the CIA’s then “station chief” in Saigon. TRUTH: Mr. Richardson’s identity and role in Saigon were secrets from no one – except American newspaper readers. He was widely known as the CIA’s chief resident spook in Saigon. It is inconceivable that in a few days digging, I could discover information not long known to Ho Chi Minh’s espionage network. CHARGE: My dispatches violated a gentleman’s agreement to protect the identity of CIA agents. TRUTH: I am party to no agreement to hide facts from American taxpayers and parents when I am sure the enemy knows them. CHARGE: Striking at the CIA is like hitting a man ‘who has his hands tied behind his back…the agency cannot confirm or deny published reports, true or false, favourable or unfavourable. It cannot alibi. It cannot explain. It cannot answer… TRUTH: Baloney. Ask any reporter who has hung one on the CIA’s solid Spode chin. Few editors with guts enough to hire honest reporters have not had plaintive and/or outraged phone calls from CIA Director John McCone and his predecessors. And, indeed, Sen. Dodd’s own apologia disproves him. The voice is Sen. Dodd’s, but I’ve got a powerful hunch the words are Mr. McCone’s. John H. Richardson fils used the CIA’s suppression of the original edition of the Times of Vietnam’s CIA Financing Planned Coup D’Etat to fashion a lie: Starnes’ identification of his father a month later came as a “bombshell” (p.197) that “stunned and dismayed” (p.198) the veteran CIA man who had, of course, as we have seen, been named a mere month earlier by the Times of Vietnam. The revival of this ancient anti-Starnes canard had a distinctly contemporary – and distinctly Mockingbirdish –purpose. Richardson fils parleyed the lie into a piece for the NYT in which he solemnly averred that the fiendish outing of Valerie Plame Wilson had precedent, and that precedent was Starnes’ outing of Richardson’s father way back in 1963 (“The Spy Left Out In The Cold,” NYT, 7 August 2005). “The past telescopes into the future,” one of Richardson pere’s patrons, James Angleton, is famously reported to have observed. The process manifestly runs both ways. As ever, the NYT printed the CIA-serving lie. P.S. Was John H. Richardson really Nhu’s bosom pal, as so many claim? Not according to those aforementioned veteran China lobbyists, Stephen Pan & Daniel Lyons, SJ: "From 1957 to 1960, Diem's brother…co-operated very closely with the representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Saigon…Nhu had good friends with the CIA in Saigon, but the CIA replaced them with men who were unfriendly to him..." (Vietnam Crisis (NY: Twin Circle Publishing Co. Inc, July1966; this edition March 1967), p. 105).

Paul, For what it's worth: An old girl friend of mine is the daughter of a Diem secret police officer. She was 13 at the time of the coup. She's Buddhist, and insists that the Buddhist uprising against Diem in '63 was manufactured by the CIA. She talked about how the little kids would sneak into the temples even when they were surrounded. She told me that Diem was negotiating with Ho Chi Minh to kick the Americans out. I haven't seen anything concrete in the historical record to confirm this, other than fleeting references to un-explained "anti-American" activities by Diem. Paul, have you come across anything in your research to indicate that Diem was secretly negotiating with Ho, and might that have played a part in Harriman coming around to the coup? Cliff, What a fascinating contact to have made! I agree entirely with your ex-girlfriend. To follow, one of the reasons why. Please bear in mind that the version before you is not the original, but a later, bowdlerised simulacrum, a proposition I'll justify tomorrow night, when I've slept off the effects of last night's extra-cold Guinness. I'll return to your question about Nhu's negotiations with Hanoi then, too. The Times of Vietnam, Monday, 2 September 1963, pp.1&6 CIA Financing Planned Coup D’Etat Planned for Aug. 28; Falls Flat, Stillborn Saigon (TVN) – The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was financing a planned coup d’etat scheduled for last Wednesday, reliable foreign sources said yesterday. For some weeks as the Xa Loi anti-government campaign grew, the rumours of coup d’etats became more frequent and abundant. It was well known that the Communists were exploiting the Xa Loi campaign in an effort to topple the Vietnamese Government, and there were constant rumours that C.I.A. was also supporting it. Now as the story comes out, it is revealed that C.I.A. agents in the political section of the U.S. Embassy, the Public Safety Division of U.S.O.M. and the G2 section of M.A.A.G., with the assistance of well-paid military attaches from three other embassies, had prepared a detailed plan for the overthrow of the Vietnamese Government. The C.I.A. plan, it is said, had the blessing of high officials in the “distressed” State Department. It is also said Vietnamese authorities seem to be well aware of C.I.A. efforts to help build the political agitation of the “Buddhist Affair” to a point of popular confusion and hysteria which would be fertile ground for the planned coup d’etat of the unofficially official American organization. Beginning in January of this year, it is reported American secret agency “experts” who successfully engineered the coup d’etats in Turkey, Guatemala, Korea, and failed in Iran and Cuba, began arriving in Vietnam, taking up duties mostly in the U.S. Embassy, U.S.O.M., M.A.A.G., and various official and unofficial installations here. The Vietnamese Government, though seemingly well aware of all this, apparently could not believe such action was possible from allies and at a time with victory so near. Rumours of their activities with student and religious and other private groups and clubs have long flown around the city. During the period in which U.S. Ambassador Nolting was on leave from May to July, the operators became more openly active, showing themselves in person at Xa Loi Pagoda to confer with agitators there. But, certain foreign sources say, the young agent provocateurs showed their hands too brazenly in the attempt to prepare the military coup d’etat and revealed the plot. Naively believing the subjects of their bribes were anti-government, they poured money into the pockets of many, the sources say. The money is now spent from a budget which the U.S. Congress has no authority to audit, an affair which may bring much trouble and shame when the U.S. Congress takes a close look. The sources estimate the sum of money spent to overthrow the Vietnamese Government was between 10 and 21 million dollars. The money was in three banks, it is reported: Bank of America, Hong-Kong-Shanghai Banking Corp., and Bank of Tokyo. U.S. banknotes under 50 dollar denominations were difficult to change on the black market on Saturday, and black market dealers who accepted small notes gives as much as 4 ps. per dollar less than the going rate of 1065 VN for bills of 50 and 100 dollar denominations. By Sunday afternoon some black market currency dealers were refusing to buy dollars but were selling them at 1058 VN to the dollar. The macabre outline of the plot in seven steps bears a sinister resemblance to the Communist tactics: 1) Create unrest and discontent among the masses, provoking “religious”-inspired anti-government sentiment; sow discord among the population. 2) Mobilize youth groups (a function of the C.I.A. agents in U.S.I.S. and U.S.O.M.) particularly the following groups: Boy Scout, Girl Scouts, Buddhist Youth, Buddhist student groups. 3) Buy police, army, labor, and civil servants with three months advance salary and a bonus. 4) Assure government officials that they will be allowed to stay in their present posts if they agree to resign when given the signal. 5) While agitating in the different groups, provoke the government at the same time to commit mistakes such as killing innocent civilians or imprisoning large numbers of particular interest groups such as the youth. 6) When confusion has reached its peak, make sure “representatives” of so-called “representative groups” – e.g., civil servants, army, etc; - present an ultimatum to the President to (a) resign or ( to send his family into exile. 7) If President resigns, a puppet government must be ready to take over – or a “military junta” prepared to take the reigns of government until elections can be held. The 24 million dollar “budget” was earmarked, according to the same sources, as follows: 1) Advance salaries for the army, police and civil servants 2) Bonus for the same 3) Further gratifications for the same if necessary 4) Financing of the “Buddhist” organizations 5) Financing of youth movements such as the “Voluntary Youths” (whose financing to date is reported to have come from “American sources”. 6) Propaganda – including payment for “articles” by foreign correspondents in Vietnam 7) Relief – assumed to mean a contingency fund for miscellaneous or unforeseen expenditures The plan, it is said, was to install a puppet military junta before elections (formerly scheduled for the 31st of August but postponed after martial law was declared). The various and sundry politicians in exile were to be returned to Vietnam to form several political parties and prepare for elections. Nguyen Ton Hoan, at a press conference in New York last week, announced he had a government ready to bring to Vietnam. He is reported to have presented the list to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Pham Huy Co of November 11 fame is reported also to be in the U.S. ready to cash in a change of governments. But, Nguyen Ton Hoan’s list – according to several persons on the list – contains (end of page 1) the names of persons who have never even been consulted to give approval for their inscription on the list. Some weeks ago the Radio Catinat rumor indicated the coup was to come between the 15th and 28th of this month. The Government and Army took action on August 21, but this plan continued, the sources say. The date scheduled for the coup was actually August 28, they report. On August 29 a military intelligence source was quoted in a foreign wire service dispatch as reporting that President Diem would be stopping in Manila on that day – the 29th – en route to exile in a friendly country. Manila journalists were alerted to be at International Airport to see him on the stopover. Meanwhile President Ngo Dinh Diem was visiting marines on the Saigon River. Apparently the source was not alerted to the actual turn of events, or he leaked the “news” prematurely. U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had been due to arrive on August 26. There were unconfirmed reports that the date was postponed to August 29. But, immediately after the August 21 action of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the Army, Lodge received orders to come immediately, arriving in Saigon on August 22. Certain diplomatic sources in Saigon report that essentially the whole diplomatic corps was aware of the plan in general, if not in detail. All were alerted for the hour of 11pm on August 28, they report. But, at the last moment, it was postponed because the Vietnamese knew about it and were organised to face it and to resist to the end – even if it meant fighting in the streets of Saigon. A number of foreign embassy representatives have expressed great concern, the foreign sources say, because they knew a coup attempt would result in bloody chaos in Saigon. President De Gaulle was reported to have been indignant, because he knew the Vietnamese would never give in to such a coup easily and it could only create a situation which would profit the Communists. But it seemed it was only when the CIA agents saw for themselves that the Tu Vu Thanh (Self-Defense Corps of the capital) of the Cong Hoa Youth – street combat specialists – were really organized to face the coup of the day, that they finally postponed their “coup”. They were well aware, whether they reported it to Washington or not, that in the elections of 57 strategic quarters of the capital, the Republican Youth had victories in 54 of the 57 quarters. The new Ambassador has made no public declarations since his arrival, but has conferred with President Ngo Dinh Diem and with Counsellor Ngo Dinh Nhu. The Ambassador is faced with a most explosive and delicate situation, which some observers believe may turn out to have been as big a debacle as the Cuban affair. The State Department, they judge, has cut the rug from under Lodge’s feet by speaking so precipitously to “deplore” the Vietnamese Government for action which has proven to have been an extremely wise move. If State Dept. had maintained silence until Lodge had time to send away the agent provocateurs among his personnel here and “fix things up” with the Vietnamese Government before the State Department took an open public position on the actions of August 21, it could have saved much face for itself. But apparently the CIA operators had so greatly misjudged the popularity and strength of the Ngo Dinh Diem Government that Washington was convinced there was going to be a change of government here. In the meantime, the U.S. public – through foreign press reports based on U.S. “intelligence” assessments, was readied to accept the planned term of events. Ambassador Nolting’s and General Harkins’ statements of optimism and support have for some months been discredited and toned down by the U.S. press here, often with quotes from junior officers who disagreed with their chiefs. The CIA crowd has obviously prepared well to undercut any sound Lodge policy which develop as they undercut that of Nolting. Since the monstrous flub – realising at last that they do not have the Vietnamese people with them – the agitation and plotting continues all the same, both foreign and Vietnamese sources say. In an effort to revive the “religious” character of the crisis, there is now a reported plan underfoot to murder the Thich Thien Hoa newly appointed head of the Buddhist group; Cao Hoal Sang of the Cao Dai sect; and several leaders of the Hoa Hao sects. Next step would be the assassination of Monsigneur Ngo Dinh Thuc himself which the plotters would term a “reprisal” of non-Catholic patriots. The Archbishop is indeed feared for his well-known fearlessness and dynamism. As for Counsellor and Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the plotters want only exile for them for the time being, because they know well that if they were murdered it would provoke a bloodbath of reprisals. A threatening side-issue in the pumped-up “religious” affair is reported to be a campaign to encourage the Highlanders – trained by U.S. Special Forces – to desert the national cause. “Intelligence” sources have for some time been telling the press that “Who controls the Highlands, controls Vietnam.” The CIA group which is reported to have complete control of U.S.I.S., is said to have gone “underground” and to be clandestinely calling on the Armed Forces of the Republic to demonstrate and to provoke the several-times postponed coup d’etat. As late as Saturday evening, AFRS radio station was broadcasting 30 second spot lectures on such subjects as “majority rule” and explaining in a sarcastic tone that majority rule meant “respect” for the activities of “minorities”. On Sunday, one agent said angrily “Nhu won the first round. But just wait for the second round.” Said one Vietnamese government official – “The U.S. press summaries get to Xa Lol two days earlier than I could get them. I can only think of one source for their information.” As things appear, the plotters momentarily seem to have abandoned the idea of a coup d’etat, but still cling to the purpose of creating unrest under whatever label they can ????, counting on diplomatic immunity to go on untouched in their activities to topple the Government. The State Department, now faced with an embarrassing dilemma created by gross errors of assessment of the situation here, has the choice of doing an about face or losing plenty of face – and maybe both. The millions of Americans who believe in the freedom and national integrity their government preaches are in for a big disillusionment if their government does not soon denounce the sinister cynics who almost turned Vietnam over to the Communists. And some observers on the scene are wondering whether the whole fiasco is a desperate effort of those who helped to lose Cuba for the Free World to try to recoup their loss of face by taking control of Vietnam in time to proclaim her victory as their own. But this is not the American way, as American citizens have been brought up to understand it. And, once revealed, the American people will without any doubt turn their wrath for this fiasco on those who have betrayed their ideals. The U.S. Congress – watchdog of the American dream – is still there. And they are not likely to accept lightly the betrayals of all the ideals of which they are the guardians – among the most precious of which is self-determination of peoples in freedom. There is one more factor in Vietnam’s favor. U.S. Congressmen are also political realists, and it won’t take long for most of them to see the realities of the situation in Vietnam once the facts are placed before them.[/indent] Debra, Many thanks for the links. I do not find the idea of Lodge being Starnes' source inconceivable: As I confessed earlier in this thread, I genuinely don't know who it was. As for the rest of your post, I disagree fundamentally. Before doing so, however, I owe you the basic courtesy of scrutinizing and digesting your work. There is, perhaps, much I could learn from it. I'll do that tomorrow night when I have regained the feeling in my outer extremities, fingers in particular. Best wishes, Paul

Cliff, Again, many thanks for the apposite links. On the matter of Harriman’s attitude to Diem’s government. I would be more persuaded by a detailed account, preferably buttressed by contemporaneous sources, explaining the alleged transformation of Harriman’s view in the course of the summer of 1963. As matters stand, we find utterly conflicting evidence and, to the best of my limited knowledge, no remotely adequate account of why the man who negotiated peace for Laos suddenly turned hawk over Vietnam. Moreover, it is only on Vietnam, and Vietnam alone, we are invited to believe, that Harriman found himself allied to the CIA, an organisation that loathed his long-since modified views on Russia, his work on the test ban treaty, and his support for an opening to mainland China; and, let us not forget, had actively sought to sabotage the Geneva settlement on Laos. You see the full oddity of what we are routinely invited to believe. Note, too, the distribution and type of sources for the two conflicting accounts of Harriman’s attitude to Diem. The contemporaneous public record, certainly up to March 1963, finds Harriman determinedly resisting pressure to dump Diem. The official, governmental record, by contrast, released many years later and with the new orthodoxy firmly in place, offers a complete reversal, a reversal which purportedly takes place a matter of months after. This aforementioned orthodoxy, portraying Harriman as Vietnam hawk, is characterised by a number of striking omissions. First and most revealingly, it invites us to forget the inconvenient fact that attempts to assassinate President Diem began no later than 1957, the year in which Time magazine – yes, that old Agency harridan yet again – denounced Diem as a pinko neutralist with a distinctly under-developed zeal for zapping his fellow-countrymen in the service of Cold War anti-communism. In November 1960, well before Harriman had regained influence or power in White House counsels, the CIA tried to oust Diem in a smaller version of the military putsch that succeeded three years later. The bombing of the presidential palace in 1962 occurred well before Harriman’s alleged switch to pro-coup, anti-Diemism. However, let us permit for one moment that Harriman was indeed a hawkish opponent of Diem. In that case, and further assuming that Harriman or proxy was the administration insider-source for Starnes’ ‘Arrogant’ CIA, we are faced with the absurd position of Harriman seeking not merely to quieten anti-Diem reporters in this period, but leaking savagely to discredit a Saigon CIA chief, John H. Richardson, who, as the record shows, was entirely in favour of overthrowing Diem no later than August 28/29, 1963.

Mark, A valuable posting and a fitting tribute to an uncommonly prescient political scientist. To think that he wrote this before the composition of the Presidential Commission of enquiry was known - it's incredible. I mean, a committe of enquiry nominally presided over by a man who had interned large numbers of American citizens for possession of Japanese surnames, reporting to a President haunted by the menace of "yellow dwarves," and populated by such towering intellects as Gerald Ford and, well, all the rest of them! And the report, what a triumph of reason supported by,er, public money...thank goodness Hofstadter never critiqued that. We'd have died laughing.

Good to see this matter aired - better still, in a thread of its own, bringing together as many instances of the CIA-Time/Life relationship as possible!

VICTOR LASKY. J.F.K: The Man & The Myth (New York: Dell, 1977), p. 2: "Actually, this work is no bitter castigation, as some critics have averred. The writer did not ‘hate’ the late President, as others have claimed. In fact, the writer had liked the President" (from Lasky's self-penned Preface, dated March 1966)... JAMES CRITCHLOW. Radio Hole-In-The-Head. Radio Liberty: An Insider's Story Of Cold War Broadcasting (Washington D.C.: American University Press, 1995), pp. 79-80: "Unknown to us in Munich, the New York office had hired a rotund, cigar-chomping journalist named Victor Lasky to do publicity for the radio…Lasky came from the same left-wing background as Boris Shub (he had once been editor of the New Leader) but had veered sharply to the right…Although on the RL payroll, he also worked for other public relations clients, one of them the unsavoury Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo…(p. 80) After a brief stay at RL, Lasky left and wrote the best-selling JFK: The Man & The Myth. His hatred of the Kennedys was almost pathological…"

Paul, This is proving to be a fruitful line of inquiry... How much misery would the world have been spared had Averell Harriman NOT facilitated "regime change" in Tehran and Saigon? Cliff, I’ve not read Kinzer’s book, but I will add it to the list. I look forward, among many other things, to his doubtless frank acknowledgement of the CIA’s initial support for Mossadegh. (The Agency even got one of its favourite mouthpieces, Time, to make him man of the year for 1951.) I find the brief Kennedy recorded extract much more problematic. Was Harriman really in favour of ditching Diem? Here’s the last public word on Diem from Harriman that I have been able to find. I readily concede my search was not exhaustive. If you – or anyone else reading this - can do better, please don’t hesitate. I’d be genuinely interested in seeing material of a later vintage: "Diem is being criticized in the cities, but the battle is fought in the villages. And what they need is security. Our surveys show that this is what they want…President Diem is a determined fighter; he is deeply interested in democratizing his regime." [source: Bernard Fall. The Two Viet-Nams: A Political & Military Analysis (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), p.473, note 31: The Harriman quote is taken from a “panel discussion between Under Secretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Senator Claiborne Pell, and Richard Dudman over WAMU, Washington, D.C., March 8, 1963.”] Well, perhaps Harriman’s disillusionment with Diem grew as 1963 unfolded. And yet… Throughout 1963, that much lauded gaggle of reporters – Halberstam, Sheehan, Browne, Arnett et al – had campaigned vigorously, and none too scrupulously, for Diem’s overthrow. Why, then, if Harriman was indeed also such an enthusiastic supporter of the same end, do we find Arnett writing that Harriman “had complained to the editors of the New York Times about the coverage, and was contemplating complaining to AP and UPI” [Live From The Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad: 35 Years in the World’s War Zones, London: Corgi, 1995, p.93]. From the context, incidentally, Arnett places Harriman’s protest in September 1963. This makes no sense if the conventional wisdom – and the Presidential recording - is true or interpreted conventionally. Unless, that is, there is evidence that Harriman changed his mind in favour of a coup post-September 1963, in which case that redeems one point only to sacrifice another: Harriman could thus not have been the prime mover of the notorious August 24 cable. Then again, one could argue that Harriman was so outraged at the quality of the claque’s prose that he felt compelled to act in defence of fine writing. This is not quite as facetious as it reads, at least, not to any one remotely familiar with the work of Halberstam in particular. Or perhaps Harriman was in favour of a very different coup to the one orchestrated by the CIA. Any evidence for that? Oddly, there is. Here’s the Times (the London one) in late August 1963. Writing of the thwarted CIA coup attempt of August 28/29, the anonymous Times hack had this to say: “One novel aspect of this American intervention was that much of it was quite open, if tentative and oblique. If the Central Intelligence Agency is looking for a creature of its own the search is probably not directly connected with the efforts of the White House and the State Department” (“Gen. De Gaulle Offers Aid To S. Vietnam,” 30 August 1963, p.8). And then we turn back to Richard Starnes. In response to ‘Arrogant’ CIA, the Agency unleashed a fearsome barrage by way of riposte. Much of it is to be found in the pages of its most cherished (and slavish) media asset, the New York Times. Among the contributors manifestly co-ordinated to chip away at different aspects of Starnes’ immensely courageous report, we find, yes, David Halberstam, and Malcolm W. Browne. Here’s Halberstam doing what he did best - regurgitating a CIA hand-out. Note the extravagant reliance on unnamed “sources” and other variants on the same essential euphemism. He meant “CIA.” New York Times, Friday, 4 October 1963, pp.1 & 4 Lodge And C.I.A. Differ on Policy Ambassador and Agency’s Chief in Saigon Clash on Conduct of the War By David Halberstam Saigon, South Vietnam, Oct. 3 – Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the head of Central Intelligence Agency operations in Saigon do not agree on United States policy for Vietnam. The Ambassador would be happier with a new C.I.A. chief. [The present C.I.A. chief in Saigon is believed to be John Richardson.] This is not a problem of personalities. What is involved is in part the traditional relationship, sometimes of rivalry, between the State Department and the C.I.A. In part it involves the problem of whether the C.I.A. should be primarily a straight intelligence network, or have operative functions; whether there should be separate chiefs for intelligence and operations. It is believed here that Mr. Lodge feels that when a man is assigned to an important and, in this case, difficult operative function, the requirements of that post conflict with the objectivity and disinterest required of an intelligence chief. There is no evidence that the C.I.A. chief has directly countermanded any orders by the Ambassador. Assertions that he has are denied in all quarters here. Rather, even amid the current controversy, it is acknowledged that the C.I.A. chief, for more than a year, has carried out the extremely difficult and taxing job of working closely with Ngo Dinh Nhu. In this aspect of his duties he has done a superior job, say the other members of the mission. It is the basic contradiction between this role and that of an intelligence chief that is at stake. Informants here say Mr. Lodge has told Washington he wants a new chief, and that the C.I.A. is fighting back hard. The matter is believed now resting with the White House. It is believed here that Mr. Lodge and the C.I.A. chief see this war effort in somewhat different lights. Likewise, they see the proper function of a C.I.A. chief in different lights. It is also true that in recent weeks in Saigon, as a major re-evaluation of United States policy has been taking place, the American mission here has tended to become the theater, on a small scale, of the traditional conflict in Washington of the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. Part of the present struggle over the C.I.A. chief is believed to have a parallel in a struggle by Mr. Lodge against Maj. General Paul D. Harkins to establish himself as the real as well as the nominal head of the American mission here. At the moment, some sources say, there is a growing effort to make the C.I.A. the scapegoat for the unhappy events of the last six weeks. When Government forces raided Buddhist pagodas on Aug. 21 the C.I.A. seemed confused about what was going on. There followed the demand by Washington that Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife be pushed out of the Government, defiance of that demand by Ngo Dinh Diem, and Washington’s decision to go along with the regime. Some persistent enemies of the intelligence agency are accused of using recent events as an opportunity to voice their bitterness against the agency. Many persons in Saigon contend that in general intelligence operatives here are at the highest caliber, and say they have played vital roles in some of the most successful programs of the complicated counter-insurgency machinery. undefined

Paul, certainty is indeed elusive in this case, but I couldn't resist poking a little fun at myself by saying I was "100% certain" about Harkins, after spending 7 years being "certain" it was Taylor. Minor error! I spent the better part of three decades believing I lived in a democracy. Cliff, Whether intended or not, your reply had the useful effect of making me take a closer look at any potential Starnes-Harriman link. In a March 1962 column, Starnes revisited an old foreign assignment, a reminiscence prompted by the death of Abolghassem Kashani, “a procurer of political murder, a dedicated hater of the West, and formerly right bower to ex-President Mossadegh” (“A Precious Old Cutthroat Has Departed,” The Washington Daily News, 23 March 1962, p.23). Starnes had interviewed Kashani in the course of a mid-1951 visit to Iran. In July 1951, according to Rudy Abramson’s biography, Spanning the Century (NY: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1992), Averell Harriman had visited Teheran for talks with Mossadegh, an initiative the CIA appears to have striven to wreck or curtail by the timely “discovery” of an alleged assassination plot, reportedly originating in Paris among Iranian Communists, targeting Harriman. The old bruiser appears to have treated the Agency’s concoction, delivered at some unearthly hour for heightened dramatic effect, with the contempt it deserved. The CIA had first championed Mossadegh as a useful instrument for prising British fingers from control of Iranian oil. It was no more than a bargaining move, however, the prelude to a piece of deal-cutting with MI6 that saw both collaborate on Mossadegh’s ouster. The subsequent agreement was not a restoration of the status quo ante, but instead a means of ensuring MI6/British oil interests had a stake in the new, American dispensation, and thus little incentive to engage in destabilisation work of their own. More germanely, had the visits of reporter and presidential emissary coincided or overlapped in Teheran in 1951? Did Starnes’ despatches from Iran give evidence of Harrimanian briefings? I don’t know: I lack a detailed chron of Harriman’s career; and I’ve not seen any of Dick’s journalism from that early a period. We may safely assume the CIA investigated both with maniacal thoroughness. All this duly noted, there remain compelling grounds for dismissing any notion of Starnes as a Harriman client. Starnes was touring south-east Asia, Laos included, as Harriman’s pursuit of a peace deal over Laos concluded. The reporter’s initial reaction to the Geneva settlement produced some of his most uncompromising and unprepossessing Cold War boilerplate. Four of Starnes’ July 1962 despatches dwelt upon its likely import and failings. All are from the Washington Daily News versions: “Long Shot Chance in Laos,” 18 July 1962, p.31; “Big Question in Laos,” 23 July 1962, p.19; “It Has Been a Painful Lesson in Laos,” 24 July 1962, p.15; and “A Sense of Foreboding,” 28 July 1962, p.11. The latter contained the following: “In numbed disbelief one learns that W. Averell Harriman, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, has returned from Geneva proclaiming that the agreement on Laos is a “good” one – one that will work if Khrushchev keeps his word, as Mr. Harriman says he believes he will. Thus another fable is added to the dangerous mythology that is the foundation for much of what passes for American policy in Southeast Asia. The Geneva agreement on Laos is of the same sorry lineage as the accord establishing (and, mark well, “policing” with an international control commission) the boundary between North and South Vietnam. To believe, as Mr. Harriman says he believes, that the Geneva agreement is good and has a chance of working, one must ignore the history of communist conquest in Indochina, and one must forsake all logic as well.” It finished with an uncharacteristically McCarthyite/China Lobby flourish: “Is all this artful stagecraft being done so that six months or a year hence, when Laos is an overtly communist state, when South Vietnam can no longer be saved, when Thailand may herself have begun the dance of death, that our State Department can point to this place and say, ‘Who could have foreseen this? We had every reason to believe the Geneva agreement on Laos would work.’ If indeed this is the rationale for the happy-talk we now hear regarding Laos, then we are confronted with a historical conspiracy containing the seeds of unbounded mischief. For the truth is that the Geneva Pact on Laos is not a good agreement, that it can’t and won’t work, that it may well mark the turning point at which all Southeast Asia was lost to the free world.” In a column later that year, “Laos Is Lost to the Reds,” 13 October 1962, p.10, Starnes used the Cuban missile crisis as a stick with which to beat the Geneva accord: “The truth is that the Administration tried to hold Laos by running a bluff. It seems unlikely now, when it has been shown that we will not even fight to keep a Soviet base 90 miles from our shores in Cuba, but little more than a year ago there were a lot of otherwise intelligent people who believed President Kennedy would go to war to keep Laos from falling to communism. Mr. Kennedy meant that people should have believed this. ‘No one should doubt our resolution,’ he told the nation on March 23, 1961. If attacks against Laos continued, he warned, ‘those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response.’” So much for Starnes as a Harriman groupie – unless we posit an unlikely, elaborate plan of deception – or Kennedy idolater. It was this background, as Arthur Krock explicitly acknowledged, that gave “’Arrogant’ CIA Disobeys In Viet Nam” and its author such potent credibility. By the late spring of the following year, however, Starnes had accepted the deal and saw its essential (military) merit. In “We Cannot Hold Onto Laos,” The Washington Daily News, 26 April 1963, p.33, he wrote: “ Mr. Kennedy and his military advisors have digested an expensive and sobering lesson in Laotian geography and culture. The Royal Laotian Army, which we equipped and tried to train, again and again showed all the instinct for combat of a troop of septuagenarian bird-watchers. They were not a match for the hard, dedicated forces of the Pathet Lao, and likely never will be… This cheerless reality sharply reduces the options, to use a word much esteemed in the White House, available to American policy makers. Is Laos worth what it would take in American men to hold it? The answer here is a resounding and unequivocal no. Not even the most star-happy buck general in the Pentagon would choose to garrison Laos, much less to fight a war there. It is clear that present American policy in Southeast Asia is one imposed by the hard facts, and not one that is the product of wishful thinking. We cannot in any realistic sense hold Laos; we must let it go.” Military realism had reared its head in Starnes’ despatches from Vietnam in 1962. In “The Stakes Are High in Viet Nam,” Washington Daily News, 11 June 1962, p.27, we find a direct precedent for this shift in judgement. Note Starnes’ pointed refusal to join in the then, as now, fashionable sport of French baiting: “ The Viet Cong (communist guerillas control much of this country. At night they dominate all but the biggest population centers and highways. The Vee Cees, as they are universally called here, are well-trained, hardy, resourceful and dedicated communists. It is anybody’s guess how many are operating in Southern Viet Nam now, but an educated estimate might be 23,000 “hard core” troops, plus uncounted thousands of villagers who have been terrorized or otherwise persuaded into serving as porters, spies, support forces. The French, never lightly regarded as warriors, tried position warfare, tanks and fighter aircraft. They ended at Dien Bien Phu, resoundingly beaten. For the Red irregulars the war never ended. The communists went thru the motions of “agreement” at Geneva to divide Viet Nam into northern (communist) and southern (free), but they never stopped infiltrating, fighting, extending their control and influence over huge areas of south Viet Nam. No one in Saigon is foolish enough to deny that they have been tremendously successful. They have been so successful that the sounds of mortar fire are not uncommon in the outskirts of the city; so successful that the whole economy of the country is paralysed; so successful that in large areas they have set up provincial administrations and levy taxes. They have been so successful that it is by no means certain that even the tremendous United States commitment can tip the balance.” As to Seven Days In May, I think we're confronted with nothing less than a proleptic red-herring, a fictional prophecy designed to prepare a population for an event - and utterly misdirect it as to the who and the how. I mean, the Secret Service as Kennedy's loyal protector? Right, that's plausible. Knebel was a disseminator of CIA guff before the event; and zealous defender of the official whitewash after it.

Excellent, thank you. Russell appears to have been the Scripps-Howard exec who dished out appointments and assignments at the CIA's behest, certainly in the late 50s and early 60s.

James, 1. What was Operation Siren? 2. And any idea if a Scripps-Howard exec called Oland D. Russell was OSS?

Paul, you are a GREAT researcher! There is no need to ask Mr. Starnes a question he cannot answer -- I think all the answers are in his article. For years I have speculated that the "very high American official...who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy" HAD to be CJCS Taylor. I was wrong. Ah, the hubris of unfounded certainty. Now I'm 100% sure it was the Boston-born Harkins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_D._Harkins Reading Mr. Starnes original article is relevatory. HUGE. I agree with you that W. Averill Harriman was behind this leak, and I will so speculate along those lines. I posit the Boston-born Henry Cabot Lodge was one of Starnes MANY anonymous sources, along with Gen. Harkins. I think Lodge and all the other anonymous "officials" and "officers" were using the same playbook sent in by Harriman to Lodge by way of Boston-born McGeorge Bundy. The Yankees were cutting the Cowboys off at the pass. More discussion to follow. Much more. Please send my regards to Mr. Starnes -- any chance he'd join the Forum? Cliff, I wish could offer certainty on the subject of who told what to whom and when. I know precious little about Harkins, other than that he a) is much maligned; and seems to have taken the US constitution seriously. (You know, those trivial bits about the status of the Presidency and treason.) I find it impossible not to speculate that a) is a direct consequence of . The history of the period has, after all, been written by the winners. If you have anything on Harkins that might shed light on the matter, please enlighten me. As I mentioned earlier, Harriman has long seemed to me the obvious candidate because of his work on the Laos settlement in 1962. Seemingly alone of JFK's senior people, here was a hard-nosed political and bureaucratic infighter who was not afraid to take on the Agency, hitting it hard and repeatedly. In class-obsessed elite America, he had the money, social status and connections to pull rank and not fear the consequences: Angleton never made Skull and Bones, and had to rest content with smearing Harriman as a Sov agent. Did Starnes know Harriman? Highly likely, as H. was Governor of New York for a large part of the period that Starnes was managing editor of the New York World-Telegram & Sun. I've looked at six years-worth of Starnes' journalistic output, but all of the years fall outside of Harriman's tenure as Governor. Perhaps a study of the years 1955-1958 would yield clues. There are none that I've observed in the period 1960-1965, save one.

Cliff, I follow your train of reasoning regarding the identity of Starnes' major source, and can't fault its logic. I do, however, rather prefer Harriman or a member of his circle. I have no evidence for that conclusion other than the Laotian precedent, to which I'll return at a later date. Many moons ago, when I first contacted Dick, I asked the obvious, inevitable question about the identity of his high-ranking source. His reply was polite, and to the point. I paraphrase: I promised not to, and I won't, ever. Had I been a better researcher, I might - should - have revisited the issue. But I wasn't, and I've so enjoyed the resultant friendship that I leave that task to others. I will certainly contact him for you and let you know the upshot. Nathaniel, You're right, the timidity of today's reportage is depressing and contemptible! It would interesting to see a thread that offered as much possible on the extent of Kennedy's attempts to curtail and control the CIA. I have the distinct feeling we have only scratched the surface so far.

“The most important consequence of the Cold War remains the least discussed. How and why American democracy died lies beyond the scope of this introductory essay. It is enough to note that the CIA revolt against the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – the single event which did more than any other to hasten its end – was, quite contrary to over forty years of censorship and deceit, both publicly anticipated and publicly opposed. No American journalist worked more bravely to thwart the anticipated revolt than Scripps-Howard’s Richard Starnes. His ‘reward’ was effectively to become a non-person, not just in the work of mainstream fellow-journalists and historians, but also that of nominally oppositional Kennedy assassination writers. It could have been worse: John J. McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, sought his instant dismissal; while others within the agency doubtless had more drastic punishment in mind, almost certainly of the kind meted out to CBS’ George Polk fifteen years earlier. This time, shrewder agency minds prevailed. Senator Dodd was given a speech to read by the CIA denouncing Starnes in everything but name. William F. Buckley, Jr., suddenly occupied an adjacent column. In short, Starnes was allowed to live, even as his Scripps-Howard career was put under overt and intense CIA scrutiny - and quietly, systematically, withered on the Mockingbird vine.” From “Light on a Dry Shadow,” the preface to ‘Arrogant’ CIA: The Selected Scripps-Howard Journalism of Richard T. Starnes, 1960-1965 (provisionally scheduled for self-publication in November 2006). As far as I am aware, the remarkable example below of what Claud Cockburn called “preventative journalism” has never appeared in its entirety anywhere on the internet. Instead, readers have had to make do with the next-day riposte of the NYT’s Arthur Krock. The latter, it should be noted, was a veteran CIA-mouthpiece and messenger boy. Dick Starnes was 85 on July 4, 2006. He remains, in bucolic retirement, a wonderfully fluent and witty writer; and as good a friend as any Englishman could wish for. I dedicate the despatch’s web debut to Judy Mann, in affectionate remembrance. The Washington Daily News, Wednesday, October 2, 1963, p.3 'SPOOKS' MAKE LIFE MISERABLE FOR AMBASSADOR LODGE 'Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam SAIGON, Oct.2 - The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power. Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, according to a high United States source here. In one of these instances the CIA frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington because the agency disagreed with it. This led to a dramatic confrontation between Mr. Lodge and John Richardson, chief of the huge CIA apparatus here. Mr. Lodge failed to move Mr. Richardson, and the dispute was bucked back to Washington. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Chief John A. McCone were unable to resolve the conflict, and the matter is now reported to be awaiting settlement by President Kennedy. It is one of the developments expected to be covered in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's report to Mr. Kennedy. Others Critical, Too Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA. "If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically. ("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.) CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis. An American field officer with a distinguished combat career speaks angrily about "that man at headquarters in Saigon wearing a colonel's uniform." He means the man is a CIA agent, and he can't understand what he is doing at U.S. military headquarters here, unless it is spying on other Americans. Another American officer, talking about the CIA, acidly commented: "You'd think they'd have learned something from Cuba but apparently they didn't." Few Know CIA Strength Few people other than Mr. Richardson and his close aides know the actual CIA strength here, but a widely used figure is 600. Many are clandestine agents known only to a few of their fellow spooks. Even Mr. Richardson is a man about whom it is difficult to learn much in Saigon. He is said to be a former OSS officer, and to have served with distinction in the CIA in the Philippines. A surprising number of the spooks are known to be involved in their ghostly trade and some make no secret of it. "There are a number of spooks in the U.S. Information Service, in the U.S. Operations mission, in every aspect of American official and commercial life here, " one official - presumably a non-spook - said. "They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone," he added. Coupled with the ubiquitous secret police of Ngo Dinh Nhu, a surfeit of spooks has given Saigon an oppressive police state atmosphere. The Nhu-Richardson relationship is a subject of lively speculation. The CIA continues to pay the special forces which conducted brutal raids on Buddhist temples last Aug. 21, altho in fairness it should be pointed out that the CIA is paying these goons for the war against communist guerillas, not Buddhist bonzes (priests). Hand Over Millions Nevertheless, on the first of every month, the CIA dutifully hands over a quarter million American dollars to pay these special forces. Whatever else it buys, it doesn't buy any solid information on what the special forces are up to. The Aug. 21 raids caught top U.S. officials here and in Washington flat-footed. Nhu ordered the special forces to crush the Buddhist priests, but the CIA wasn't let in on the secret. (Some CIA button men now say they warned their superiors what was coming up, but in any event the warning of harsh repression was never passed to top officials here or in Washington.) Consequently, Washington reacted unsurely to the crisis. Top officials here and at home were outraged at the news the CIA was paying the temple raiders, but the CIA continued the payments. It may not be a direct subsidy for a religious war against the country's Buddhist majority, but it comes close to that. And for every State Department aide here who will tell you, "Dammit, the CIA is supposed to gather information, not make policy, but policy-making is what they're doing here," there are military officers who scream over the way the spooks dabble in military operations. A Typical Example For example, highly trained trail watchers are an important part of the effort to end Viet Cong infiltration from across the Laos and Cambodia borders. But if the trailer watchers spot incoming Viet Congs, they report it to the CIA in Saigon, and in the fullness of time, the spooks may tell the military. One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer. Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the U.S. Government - and answerable to neither. There is naturally the highest interest here as to whether Mr. McNamara will persuade Mr. Kennedy something ought to be done about it.

I am 43, married, with three daughters. I live in Southport and work - for a warehousing and distribution company - in Liverpool. I am currently working on an introductory essay to a book-length selection of the journalism of Scripps-Howard's Richard T. Starnes. It should be completed by November 2008.