The War Conspiracy

JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War

Peter Dale Scott

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781628735642
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Peter Dale Scott examines the many ways in which war policy has been driven by "accidents" and other events in the field, in some cases despite moves toward peace that were directed by presidents. This book explores the "deep politics" that exerts a profound but too-little-understood effect on national policy outside the control of traditional democratic processes.
An important analysis into the causes of war and the long-lasting effects that major events in American history can have on foreign and military policies, The War Conspiracy is a must-read book for students of American history and foreign policy, and anyone interested in the ways that domestic tragedies can be used to manipulate the country's direction.
First published in 1972, this edition of The War Conspiracy is fully updated for the twenty-first century and includes two lengthy additional essays, one on the transition in Vietnam policy in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and the other discussing the many parallels between that 1963 event and the attacks of 9/11.

Civil Air Transport (Chinese Nationalist). CAT is a commercial airline engaged in scheduled and non-scheduled air operations throughout the Far East, with headquarters and large maintenance facilities located in Taiwan. CAT, a CIA proprietary, provides air logistical support under commercial cover to most CIA and other US Government agencies’ requirements… During the past ten years, it has had some notable achievements, including support of the Chinese Nationalist withdrawal from the mainland, air drop support to the French at Dien Bien Phu, complete logistical and tactical air support for the [1958] Indonesian operation, airlifts of refugees from North Vietnam, more than 200 overflights of Mainland China and Tibet, and extensive air support in Laos during the current crisis….

Lansdale memorandum, July 1961, in The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971)

Chapter One

CAT/Air America: 1950-70¹

Overview, 2008:

In this chapter I have greatly expanded upon what I wrote in 1969 about how the U.S., via its CIA proprietary airline, first began, in Laos, to fight what eventually became a second Indochina War (1959-1975). I have done so for two reasons, one historical, one very contemporary.

The historical reason is that, as David Kaiser has written, “The real roots of the Vietnam War lie in the policies the Eisenhower administration adopted toward Southeast Asia after 1954;” and the chief of these were the policies in Laos which, almost unilaterally, “created a serious crisis” for the incoming Kennedy administration to deal with.²

In 1969, working from public sources, I attached the blame for a foolishly aggressive and delusional policy in Laos on CIA and Pentagon hawks, some of whom were hoping against government policy to provoke a war with mainland China.

Now that a declassified version of internal State Department records has been released, we learn how little opposition there was to these policies at the highest level -- even from the supposedly irenic Ike who in 1954 had refrained from supporting with atomic weapons the the lost French cause in Indochina.

The following astute conclusion of David Anderson, with respect to Vietnam, remains equally true if for the word “Vietnam” we substitute “Laos:”

The Eisenhower administration was both the creator and the captive of an illusion in Vietnam. A combination of factors – cold war bipolarism and paranoia, the arrogance of power, cultural aand racial chauvinism – blinded U.S. leaders to social, political, historical and military realities in Vietnam….Eisenhower’s foreign policy may have been astute in some areas….but in Vietnam…the administration oversimplified and overcommitted….The trap snapped on America in 1963.³

The root illusion was to think that the brilliant success of the Marshall Plan in restoring the economies of Europe could be replicated in Vietnam and Laos to “build” nations that had not previously existed. In Laos the illusion of progress in this respect was just as “phony” (to quote Anderson again) as in Vietnam, and for the same reasons: funds earmarked for development were diverted into military priorities, corruption, and perks for the governing class.⁴ In both countries, furthermore, the chief cause of corruption, and of political squabbling to control it, was the opium traffic. In the case of Laos, the corruption and military deformation of a peace-loving Buddhist nation was further enhanced (as in the fall of 1969) by reliance on distorted (or totally false) “intelligence.”

My contemporary reason for focusing on this period is because of the extent to which we see these illusions resurrected. The Dulles brothers’ campaign against neutralism, in which “those who would not stand with the United States were viewed as standing against it,”⁵ strikes a tone of naïve arrogance which is now heard again from high places. Those who think that we can achieve a “regime change” in Iraq should be required to study the disastrous and counter-effective results of the militant U.S. efforts in 1959-60 to achieve “regime change” in Laos, a far smaller and weaker country.

These similarities should be apparent to any objective observer. Another, less easily recognized, is from the realm of deep politics not usually mentioned. The U.S., in Afghanistan in 2002, replaced the anti-drug Taliban with a new regime some of whose members have a history as drug traffickers. In Laos, in 1959-60, the U.S. did something distressingly similar.

We have reasons also to look at the special interests (notably those allied with Nationalist China and the KMT) which pushed for the delusional policies of 1959-60. But we cannot just blame on special interests a paranoia, and a delusion of grandeur, which afflicted the administration as a whole.

Our focus here is neither on Richard Nixon, nor even on the airline CAT/Air America, but on the deeper forces (such as the CIA, KMT and China Lobby) that underlay both. It is important to understand why the CIA moved so relentlessly to replace the legal government of Souvanna Phouma in Laos with a group of drug-trafficking generals. True, this derived from the Dulles brothers’ campaign against neutralism.⁶ The U.S. strategy of subversion practiced against Souvanna Phouma in Laos was much like that practiced against Sihanouk in Cambodia, and more conspicuously against Sukarno in Indonesia, where CAT pilots were also involved.⁷

But there is an instructive difference between what happened in Laos and what happened in Cambodia and Indonesia. Cambodia and particularly Indonesia were countries of interest to U.S. oil companies, and both Sihanouk and Sukarno (unlike Souvanna Phouma) had recognized the government of mainland China. Yet the U.S. effort against Sihanouk was desultory, and was essentially called off in July 1960.⁸ Likewise the major campaign in Indonesia was only half-heartedly supported, and then swiftly abandoned after a CAT pilot was captured.

Laos in contrast was a country with few proven resources (other than tin). Yet the “Laotian crisis,” a thing of little substance, continued to vex both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations for years.⁹ How could this be?

The answer I think is twofold. First, Laos bordered with China and North Vietnam. In the early 1950s the U.S. strategy of containment had been directed towards isolating China from the largely urban Chinese populations scattered around the shores of the South China Sea. In the later 1950s talk of a “forward strategy” focused attention increasingly (and some would say absurdly) on the poorly defined and poorly defended Laotian border.

Reports of alleged communist incursions across this border, based on systematic exaggeration of minimal events, were repeatedly used by the U.S. Joint Chiefs to urge the introduction into Laos of U.S. troops, armed with tactical atomic weapons.¹⁰ Such a confrontation in Laos served the interests of those who hoped to provoke a U.S. war with the PRC government in Beijing.

The second reason, closely related, is that CIA-backed conspiratorial intrigues to gain control of the Laotian government were also de facto struggles to consolidate control of Laotian opium. The defense of obscure villages on the Laotian-Chinese border led to contracts for a former CAT representative, William Bird, to construct airstrips which were soon used to fly out Hmong opium.¹¹ In this way the Hmong opium production of northeastern Laos could be denied to the Communist Pathet Lao, even as the latter took over the lowlands of the area from 1959 to 1964.¹²

This was not a trivial matter. Laotian opium production, concentrated in the northeast, was in the order of 50 to 100 tons a year, and constituted “the country’s most valuable export.”¹³ In retrospect, it appears that CIA efforts in Laos were focused on denying this opium to the Pathet Lao, and possibly on securing it for support of the drug trafficking generals which twice, in 1959 and again in 1960, it helped install in power.

The key to this support from 1959 on was the ostensibly Chinese Nationalist civilian airline CAT, which actually in part a CIA proprietary. In the same year 1959 the CIA firm CAT Inc. (once owned by Chiang Kai-shek’s friend General Claire Chennault) was renamed Air America.

Nixon, the Chennaults, Air America, and the China Lobby

This chapter opens with an understated account (sanitized by the lawyers at Ramparts) of the conspiratorial and possibly illegal plotting in 1968 by presidential candidate Richard Nixon to extend the Vietnam War.¹⁴ Just before the election, with General Chennault’s widow Anna as an intermediary, Nixon persuaded the head of the Saigon regime to refuse to participate in the Paris peace talks arranged by President Johnson. Nixon’s intrigue helped secure his election, and also fruitlessly increased the losses of both Vietnamese and American lives.

This chapter explored the background of this conspiratorial link between Nixon and the Chennault circle.¹⁵ It noted that in 1959 and 1960 critical authorizations for CAT in Laos were made when Eisenhower was outside Washington.¹⁶ Later chapters will talk of Nixon’s repeated visits to Asia after 1960, on at least one occasion with a representative of oil-drilling interests.¹⁷

Nixon’s extraordinary career is not easily summarized. It is however relevant that it was aided financially by four groups with a common stake in the Far East: organized crime, the China Lobby, oilmen, and possibly the CIA.¹⁸ In 1970 I was unaware of Nixon’s deep and incriminating financial connections to the mob- and CIA-linked Castle Bank in the Bahamas, a creation of Paul Helliwell who will emerge in this book as a chief architect of the CIA-drug connection in the Far East.¹⁹

As mentioned in the Foreword, I came in time to enlarge my view of the deep political forces pressing for our involvement in Indochina. But as this chapter relates, Chennault, his airline CAT, and his supporting circle of Tom Corcoran, William Pawley, Whiting Willauer, etc., played important roles in projecting a forward U.S. presence into the Third World. This was true both of support for KMT forces and allies (in Taiwan, Burma, Thailand, Korea, Laos, and Vietnam), and also in the covert U.S. interventions against the governments of first Guatemala and then Cuba. I should have commented also on the role of Paul Helliwell and Richard Nixon in these same events, notably with Pawley and Willauer in preparing for the Bay of Pigs.²⁰

Nixon was of course a man of political skills and complexities not reducible to the wishes of those who financed his rise to power. The fact remains that for two decades after World War Two, the expansion of U.S. power into the Third World was achieved under presidents who spent much of their time resisting the forces pressing for this expansion. Until 1967 Nixon consistently, whether in office or out, was a leading spokesman for these same forces.

Two murky questions about Nixon’s extraordinary career remain unanswered. The first is the extent to campaign contributions from abroad (including Asia) affected Nixon’s policies and career.²¹ The second is whether, as recently charged, Nixon’s early career, leading up to his use of inside knowledge in the Hiss case, was bolstered by secret and possibly conspiratorial contacts with the Dulles brothers and the fledgling CIA.²²

In the closing days of the 1968 presidential campaign, the Democrats made an eleventh-hour bid for the presidency through a White House announcement that all bombing in North Vietnam was being stopped and that serious peace negotiations were about to begin. This move was apparently torpedoed within thirty hours by President Thieu of South Vietnam who publicly rejected the coming negotiations. Three days later, the Democratic candidate lost to Richard Nixon by a narrow margin.

After the election, it was revealed that a major Nixon fund-raiser and supporter had engaged in elaborate machinations in Saigon (including false assurances that Nixon would not enter into such negotiations if elected) to sabotage the Democrats’ plan. It was also revealed tha...