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- [00:00]
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- [01:40]
Podcast Announcer
Spy Talk, a podcast at the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, national security and military operations.
- [01:50]
Jeff Stein
Hi there, I'm Jeff Stein.
- [01:51]
Michael Isagoff
I'm Michael Isagoff.
- [01:53]
Karen Greenberg
And I'm Karen Greenberg.
- [01:54]
Jeff Stein
Welcome to another edition of the Spy Talk podcast. Glad you can be with us. Well, I'm going to start with a good news story, light hearted intelligence news. A Texas man tried repeatedly to sneak into the CIA. After two warnings at the front gate, he came back again a third time and they, they finally arrested him. So that's a good news story.
- [02:16]
Michael Isagoff
But he didn't have any weapons.
- [02:18]
Jeff Stein
He didn't have any weapons. He's just trying to drive in,
- [02:23]
Michael Isagoff
as we all have at times.
- [02:25]
Jeff Stein
Anyway, they caught him, so yeah, that's good. Just like they caused the gunman at the Hill.
- [02:29]
Michael Isagoff
Well, good to know they're still security
- [02:33]
Jeff Stein
protecting. Well, they should be. After a number of people were shot up, a couple died. An attack at the CIA gate back in January 1993. And that was a sort of self motivated jihadi who then drove to National Airport or Dulles Airport and got a plane, flew back to Pakistan. So now again was a less than a decade before the 911 attacks. But speaking of 911 in Al Qaeda, about a good news, bad news story is that rebels in Mali, in Western Africa have ousted the remnants of Russia's Wagner group or Wagner Group who were helping maintain a corrupt regime in power. The bad news is that they're Al Qaeda. And Mali has for a thousand years been a crossroads of culture and language and philosophy. It's a big gold producer and they are threatening to take the capital. And that's not good.
- [03:42]
Michael Isagoff
Are they Al Qaeda or isis?
- [03:45]
Jeff Stein
Al Qaeda is what I read this morning.
- [03:47]
Karen Greenberg
They're Al Qaeda affiliated.
- [03:49]
Jeff Stein
Affiliated.
- [03:50]
Karen Greenberg
Okay. Which is different than Al Qaeda led, I suppose. No, and I'm not really sure about the strength of Al Qaeda these days. I think this group, these, these couple of groups actually that have coalesced in Mali. You know, the jihadist presence in Africa is longstanding. Predates 911 predates, aren't paying attention to it. And so it's, it's actually, I mean, I know we're kind of surprised to see this back in the headlines, but if you'd been paying attention, this has been coming for a while. And it's not the only place that we're seeing a kind of whether it's the Taliban in Afghan or whether it's in Syria where we're seeing kind of the efforts of jihadists come to some kind of fruition in ways that we need to pay attention.
- [04:32]
Jeff Stein
Yeah.
- [04:32]
Michael Isagoff
Well, I just want to add one small point. If it is indeed Al Qaeda, it's worth mentioning, as I wrote in Spy Talk a few weeks ago, that the head of Al Qaeda, the de facto leader, is in Iran and has been for years. Saif Al Adel. We don't hear much about him, but in United nations reports, reports and other reports from people who track this, they say he's still there, he's still active, he's still dispatching folks, terrorists around the world to stir up trouble.
- [05:10]
Jeff Stein
But as Karen suggested is absolutely true. They have this affiliate, has its own local objectives. But a very interesting guy who's running this rebel group, by the way, is a former rock and roller, Marlboro smoking, whiskey sipping rock and roller who fronted a band that played in Europe and played in the US So and then he got the religion, he met a guy, you know, who turned him around and, and you know, this endemic horrible corruption that affects everyone's lives in Mali. So, you know, we, again, we call this an affiliate. We don't know how much they've adopted the original ideas of Al Qaeda and whether they would use Mali as a base to attack Europe and us yet to be seen. But I just thought it was worth, worth noting because a lot of people weren't paying attention to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan back in the 1990s, and, and look what happened. What else is going on? We have this Comey case,
- [06:23]
Karen Greenberg
you know,
- [06:23]
Jeff Stein
back in court in this flimsy indictment. We have the Iran situation ongoing. Former CIA director Bill Burns was a longtime Middle Eastern hand at the State Department, sort of gave a tutorial to Trump, so to speak, and in the New York Times last week, and which he counsels that, you know, these peace agreements take a long time. You just don't fly in with Coffin and Kushner and expect to wrap up a deal in which they're demanding the complete surrender of Iran in a weekend. So that ain't going to happen. And I, I, I don't see Trump as having a, a lot of patience, but I don't know how he gets out of this. His, you know, his poll numbers are just in the toilet or deeper in the toilet. When he took office, he was at 47% approval, and I read today it's down to, what, 34%. Those are horrible numbers. He doesn't appear to give a damn about Republican chances in the midterms. He's thinking about his ballroom anyway.
- [07:35]
Michael Isagoff
Well, if you read this new piece in Atlantic magazine, Trump no longer even bothers to compare himself to US Presidents Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. He looks at himself as a world historical figure along the lines of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon. And if you view yourself through that lens, you know, who cares about poll numbers? Who cares how the Republicans go do in the midterms? You know, you're transforming. You're changing the world.
- [08:12]
Jeff Stein
Yeah. You care about your Arc de Triomphe, your ballroom slapping, your name on the Kennedy center, the Institute of Peace, et cetera.
- [08:25]
Michael Isagoff
And the only other thing he cares about is vengeance against his critics. Hence the indictment this week, which, if I gotta say on its face, it seems like one of the flimsiest indictments I've ever seen. There's no details in there that back up its claim that when Comey put on Instagram a photograph of seashells saying 8647, he intended that as a, to promote violence against the president.
- [08:59]
Karen Greenberg
No, but I think the message is, and this is the same message we're seeing on the international sphere as well, which is that I don't give up. Right. I don't care what the law says. I don't care what the process says. I go after what I want to go after, and I don't need to. To take these other things into. Sorry. Into consideration. And I just think it's. I mean, we tend. I feel like when we focus on the, you know, arch that he wants to build or the golden stuff or the ballroom, that what we're missing is, you know, because that all does have a humorous side to it that we can make fun of, that we're really missing. The larger. Which I know you guys aren't, but just in general, the larger destructive capacity of what is going on and particularly in terms of this war that, that we are now in the middle of, without any sense of what the. Where the exit is or what the path to.
- [09:55]
Jeff Stein
I'm not missing that at all. And one of the things I worry about, which I worried about last month when he seemed to be backed into a corner and he was talking about erasing their civilization, I thought, my God, this guy wants to drop a nuke on Iran. And my fears of that resided, you know, as the negotiations started and blah, blah, blah, talk, talk. But now I see him in a. In a corner and I wonder if. If you're out of his, you know, he's. He's an emotionally unstable. Yeah, yeah. Will we try to nuke Iran?
- [10:33]
Karen Greenberg
Well, that's what. So the Hegseth hearing yesterday and today, actually, if you. If you look at how the. The questions he was answer, answering and the way he answered them, you know, why did we go to war? What was the reason for this war? Over and over again, he said the same thing. It wasn't about the nuclear reality, although that mattered. It wasn't about other political issues. It was about the fact that they had nuclear ambition. And he kept focusing on the word ambition as opposed to, you know, what was buried underground, opposed to what had been destroyed, as opposed to what could be contributed by other countries, any of that. It was the actual fact of wanting to have a nuclear capacity.
- [11:19]
Jeff Stein
But then they kept saying that, you know, it was imminent.
- [11:23]
Karen Greenberg
No, but that's what I'm saying. So the idea of imminence when you're talking about ambition, it was clear yesterday that the original reasons, whether it was regime change or an imminent threat, were not really part of how they're explaining this war now, which really gets to the heart of how do you negotiate when you don't even have an understanding of what it is you wanted out of this war or why you started this war. You know, we keep blaming them for the diplomatic problems, but what about our diplomatic problems? What exactly do we want? And how do we define the proof that you no longer have nuclear ambition? I found that sort of a new wrinkle to.
- [12:00]
Michael Isagoff
By the way, Hegseth actually made some news in his Senate hearing today. He was being pressed by Senator Kaine about the War Powers Resolution which was set to expire. What I think tonight or tomorrow?
- [12:16]
Karen Greenberg
Tomorrow.
- [12:17]
Michael Isagoff
Tomorrow. Okay. Friday. And Hegset says no, no, no, that doesn't matter because once the ceasefire began, then the plug is pulled. There's no longer, the clock is no longer ticking and you know, with the ceasefire.
- [12:33]
Karen Greenberg
So this is a new interpretation.
- [12:36]
Michael Isagoff
Yeah, I had not heard that before. Creative lawyering by somebody in the Pentagon or the White House, we don't know. But that's how they're going to get out of the, the War Powers Resolution. But Jeff, we got a, we got a great guest. We do this episode. Yes, we do. And, and it's a really fascinating historical subject.
- [13:03]
Jeff Stein
This resonates today.
- [13:05]
Michael Isagoff
Yeah, that which was the ill considered reasons for today. Yes.
- [13:08]
Jeff Stein
Offhand decision, you might say, to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, particularly the President and his brother who ran the secret police.
- [13:22]
Michael Isagoff
And a coup that took place under John F. Kennedy's watch. And on again, off again encouragement, which is a really, really fascinating subject to explore. Jack Cheevers, veteran journalist, who we'll be talking to in a moment, has done unbelievable research. His book is like nearly 700 pages. He's culled through a mountain of declassified documents, memoirs, and has really told a very gripping story about one of the most momentous events of the Vietnam era and one that hasn't gotten as much attention as many of the stuff that took place later under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
- [14:09]
Jeff Stein
The book is called Kennedy's Coup, A White House Plot, A Saigon Murder and America's Descent into Vietnam. And this happens to be the day in 1975 that North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon and the war was over. So after this break, we'll be back with Jack Shivers.
- [14:37]
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- [17:38]
Jeff Stein
Shaq Cheevers, welcome to Spy Talk. You have written a very lively, compelling, I might say account of one of the most consequential and yet haphazard foreign policy decisions in American history set the scene for us as this drama unfolds in the summer of 1963.
- [18:03]
Jack Cheevers
Well, President Kennedy was just a few months away from, from being assassinated in that summer. And he was juggling a, a number of issues. Among them, what to do about the situation in Vietnam. And in Vietnam, the President, Ngo Dinh Diem, was facing two big problems. One was an increasingly dangerous insurgency by the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas. And the other was a, also an increasingly dangerous national uprising by the Buddhists in South Vietnam. And they were significant because they represented about 70% of the population. Diem was an ardent Catholic, but he was in charge of a largely Buddhist country. The Buddhists had a number of grievances against his government and they were pressing a set of demands. He was dragging his feet on, on meeting those demands. And there are a number of incidents that took place in, in 63, which I guess we can get to later on that, that, that did very, very much damaged his reputation in the United States, made him look like a religious bigot who was persecuting the Buddhist majority in South Vietnam. And that in turn put pressure on President Kennedy because he was a big supporter of Diem. He had launched a major program of military and economic assistance to South Vietnam at the end of 1961. And he was starting to come in for a lot of criticism from the press and from Congress that summer because of his support of cm.
- [19:45]
Jeff Stein
It was interesting that, you know, I found it so ironic as I, as I read your book, that we were losing faith in the South Vietnamese government because they were violating the civil rights of Buddhists. That hasn't been a concern of the United States for very long, even when they mouth pies about the Iranians. So in that summer, Kennedy. Everyone seems distracted. Kennedy's going up to Hyannis a lot. His key advisors are all on vacation and yet. And, and a mid level or a senior level State Department bureaucrat writes a cable that will change the course of history, right?
- [20:36]
Jack Cheevers
And that was a gentleman by the name of Roger Hillsman, who at the time was the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. And he felt that Zim was becoming too much of a, of a burden for the United States too, too much of an embarrassment. And he wanted to put some distance between the United States and Zim, the President of South Vietnam. So he came into his office on A summer Saturday, it was in August, August 24, and he came into his office at the State Department. He sat down and wrote what became known as the Green Light cable. And it was a set of instructions to Henry Cabot. Lodge was the brand new U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He'd only been there for about two days when this cable arrived. And the cable made a lot of different points. But the bottom line was that Lodge was instructed to start looking around for alternative leadership in South Vietnam, to start thinking of ways that Diem might be pushed out and also to reach out to South South Vietnam's generals who were already plotting to overthrow Diem and tell them that if the South Vietnamese government suddenly collapsed and the generals were in charge, they would continue to receive full military and economic support from the United States.
- [22:05]
Michael Isagoff
So Jack, I found this so fascinating. These days when we think of coups, US sponsored or engineered coups, we think of the CIA in the 1950s, Iran, Guatemala, but in this case it was actually liberals who were pushing the idea of a coup to depose Diem. And one of the most fascinating, startling things is you point out that the idea to Kennedy first comes from of all people, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's ambassador to India, you know, one of the foremost liberal intellectuals of the day, Harvard professor and all. And he's telling Kennedy in late 1961, Diem may have to go, you may have to go, and military may have to take over because that's the only way to save Vietnam. Talk about the arguments that were being made by moderate to liberal Democrats pushing Kennedy about the idea of deposing this longstanding US ally.
- [23:21]
Jack Cheevers
Well, the whole issue of what to do about CM really divided Kennedy's advisors. And as you point out, most of them were liberal to moderate to liberal Democrats. One of them was Averill Harriman, who had been a governor, Democratic governor of New York, and at that time was one of the two undersecretaries of state. Dean Rusk, of course, was a pretty liberal Democrat from Georgia and so forth. And they divided into two camps, a pro and con camp. The, the, the, the con camp said that Zam was just becoming too much of a liability to the United States. He was too repressive to continue to receive united American support and we needed to find somebody else to run the country. And the, the pro camp, the people who supported Zam, thought that he was one of the best, if not the best leader in South Southeast Asia, that he was in fact winning the war against, against the Viet Cong, and that, yeah, he was a bit of an authoritarian, but maybe that's what a country like South Vietnam needed to hold it together. South Vietnam was at that point less than a decade old. It had been created as sort of a rump state by the Geneva Agreements in 1954 that divided Vietnam in half. North under the communists and Ho Chi Minh in the south, which was an independent non communist nation under, under zm. So yeah, I mean, it caused a big rift in the, in the liberal White House.
- [24:53]
Narrator/Host
Right.
- [24:53]
Jeff Stein
And it was.
- [24:54]
Michael Isagoff
And the CIA leadership, John McCone, William Colby, were against the idea of a coup. They were adamantly anti coup.
- [25:05]
Jack Cheevers
Yeah, yeah, they, they, they both felt that, that CM was a good leader, that he was winning the war and just leave him alone. He had these problems with the Buddhist, but he would figure it out in his own way how to resolve it. And the United States should just keep, you know, its hands off and let him do his thing.
- [25:26]
Jeff Stein
Well, one of the problems was that they didn't have anybody lined up to take his place. They were just talking to a gaggle of generals. But they didn't have one guy who was actually going to step in.
- [25:38]
Jack Cheevers
No, they didn't have ever replacement. Which is one of the remarkable things about this coup. You know, why would you move forward with regime change when there was no backup regime? The generals had promised a couple of times that they would, if they took over, they would turn over power to a civilian government. And when they did take over, when they did topple Diem, they did exactly the opposite. They formed a junta and installed a military government.
- [26:05]
Karen Greenberg
Jack, can I ask a question? In reading your book, which is just fascinating because of all the details in it and the narrative sort of push of it. I'm just wondering what you think the actual lesson is here in your book that's new in terms of was it negligence? Was it not really understanding what the green light message would cause? Was it a question of just the United States, of not really having their act together in terms of understanding consequences? What exactly is your takeaway from what the United States and Kennedy in particular, because that's where we're focused, did wrong and didn't foresee?
- [26:51]
Jack Cheevers
I think, Karen, it's all of the above. I mean, it's, it's the laundry list of things you just went through. You summarized it very well. I, I think the bottom line was that, that Kennedy was negligent. He wasn't paying a lot of attention to Vietnam at the time, and suddenly it blew up in his face with this Buddhist crisis in, in South Vietnam. That, that made one his, one of his closest allies look like an intolerant, oppressive religious bigot. What the interesting thing about Kenny, I didn't know this about Kennedy, but he was secretly taping his conversations in the, in the Oval Office as well as the, the Cabinet Room where a lot of these discussions on Vietnam were held. And you can, you know, you can call the tapes are, are publicly available through the Kennedy Library. You can call them up on your laptop and listen to them. And they're fascinating. I listened to a lot of them. And it's the two things struck me about, about these discussions. And this is just Kennedy and his closest advisors. That'd be Dean Rust, the Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary John McConnell, the CIA Director Hillsman Michael Forstall, who was the Vietnam, Vietnam specialist on the National Security Council at the time, and others in the room. But basically his closest foreign policy and defense advisors were in this group. And what struck me was the, the, the superficiality of the discussion. You know, if you're talking about knocking over a foreign government which by the way, has been a staunch ally of the United States since its inception, you should at least have some concept of what's going to replace it. I mean, what is the post coup government, do you think? What is the post government going to look, look like? I mean, who's going to run the country? Is it going to be more effective at winning the war against the, against the Viet Cong? Is it going to be inclined to make democratic reforms that Washington has been pushing for nearly a decade in South Vietnam? And a lot of those issues were discussed in very superficial terms, if they were discussed at all. The other thing that struck me is it was about Kennedy's particular focus, which was very narrow, very myopic. His big concern, and he raises this question over and over in these discussions, is do the rebel generals have the military strength to overthrow Diem's loyalists if it comes to fighting in the streets of Saigon? He asked this question repeatedly throughout the summer and fall of, of 1963. And I think what was in the back of his mind, he never says this explicitly, but I think he was very concerned about having a repeat of the be Pigs debacle. And I'm sure everybody on this, on this podcast remembers this is the attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in 1961 and topple Castro, where, you know, the, the invaders were basically all killed or captured on the beaches by Castro's forces. A huge embarrassment right at the beginning of Kennedy's administration in April of 1960. 1, and I'm sure he didn't want to repeat that. And he actually says he tells his aides on a couple of occasions that the worst outcome here would be failure. Even the appearance of indecision is better than failure. And if we're going to do this, it has to succeed.
- [30:13]
Jeff Stein
One of the most interesting characters in the book is Lou Cunin, who is the French born, I think Corsican. Wasn't he agent of the CIA who was the go between with the generals? Tell us a little bit about him.
- [30:32]
Jack Cheevers
Well, I, I agree with you, Michael. He's my favorite character too. He was actually, he was born in Paris and he was shipped to Kansas as a, as a young boy. His, his dad died and, and he went to live in Kansas with his mother's sister. Uh, his mother was impoverished uh, in Paris and she shipped him to Kansas, uh, to, to be raised with her sister and uh, her American husband. And, and so he grew up there and went through the Great Depression in Kansas. And when the war broke out in, in Europe, he enlisted in the French army initially, and then his unit was overrun very quickly by, by the German army on the Belgian front. And he later enlisted in the American army. So he's probably one of a very few number of people actually served in both armies during the war. Toward the end of the war he was recruited into the, the famous Office of Strategic Services, the oss, which was basically, it was well trained agents who were parachuted behind the lines in, in France to, to fight with the resistance forces against the German army. Toward the very end of the war he was transferred to China and he fought with the, against the Japanese army which was occupying Vietnam at that time.
- [31:58]
Jeff Stein
I think he even knew Ho Chi Minh or worked with Ho Chi Minh, who was our ally against the Japanese.
- [32:05]
Jack Cheevers
Yeah, he said that he, he had a long conversation with Ho Chi Minh at one point and, and Ho was so persuasive that, that Conan was tempted to join the Viet Minh army himself. But he went on to do other things, other covert activities in the, in the, in the late 40s and in the 50s. He wound up in Saigon in the mid-50s working under another famous CIA agent named Edward Lansdale. Lansdale was in charge of a group of agents who were sent to South Vietnam in the mid-50s basically to do everything they could to prop up Zim's fledgling government and everything they could do to damage Ho's fledgling government in the north. So they did all sorts of black operations. One of the goofiest was they went in and poured contaminants into the fuel oil for a Hanoi bus company and managed to knock themselves out with the chemicals they were using. But they did some serious things too. Lansdale's group, for instance, after the Geneva accord split the country in half, There was a 300 day window where people could move freely between north and South Vietnam. And that triggered this enormous outbreak pouring of refugees from North Vietnam, most of them Catholics and Buddhists, were afraid that the communists were going to.
- [33:29]
Jeff Stein
Including the Zems.
- [33:31]
Jack Cheevers
Yeah, yeah. And they were afraid that their, their religion was the communists wouldn't let them practice their religion or they were going to seize their property or their businesses. And Conan and Lansdale took advantage of that. They went into South Vietnam, excuse me, North Vietnam, and did all sorts of things to encourage people to immigrate to the South. They, they handed out flyers saying that Chinese soldiers, that ho was allowing Chinese soldiers to come into North Vietnam and rape women. That the, you know, the US was going to wait for everybody to leave Hanoi and that was going to drop atomic bombs on Hanoi. And I'm sure that added to the panic of all these people trying to get out of the North. And then the period we're talking about, 1963, he wound up as the, as the main conduit between the generals who are plotting the Coup and the U.S. embassy. And the reason for that was that the generals didn't trust the Americans. They did trust Blue Conan because they knew him from the war years. A lot of them had been, you know, junior officers in the French colonial army when, when Conan arrived as part of the oss and they were friends, they went out drinking together, they went out nightclubbing together. And when push came to shove, the generals insisted that Conan was the only person they would talk to in terms of their coup. And they didn't even tell him very much about what they were doing.
- [34:53]
Michael Isagoff
I want to take this back to, to Kennedy a bit because, you know, you rightly focus on the Hillsman Green Light memo, which is a, you know, just unbelievable story, gets approved without any interagency review. Everybody else is away the weekend that Kennedy hastily signs off on from Hyannis port, and that's August 24th. But nine days earlier, Kennedy has that fateful meeting with Lodge in the Oval Office that he secretly tapes. And he's clearly open already to the idea of a coup. One of the things he says is, the time may come we're going to have to do something about Diem. And then later he says, and it's all in your hands, Ambassador Lodge. I'LL let you take care of it. So he's basically set the tone for everything that's going to follow right there.
- [35:52]
Jack Cheevers
Exactly. I mean, it. Clearly he was thinking about getting rid of Zim even before the green light cable was drafted. And the upshot of that was when Lodge arrived, he was eager to get rolling with the coup. I mean, he, he, that was, he devoted a lot of energy to that. He was fully supportive of that. And he, he remained one of the main spearheads of the American involvement in the coup throughout the fall of 63.
- [36:19]
Jeff Stein
Right.
- [36:20]
Michael Isagoff
And then Kennedy, after signing off on the Hillsman memo, then is plagued with doubts and reservations and doesn't know if he's done the right thing. Yeah, but never countermands the original Hillsman coup.
- [36:38]
Jack Cheevers
Right. And, and you can see that throughout the meetings in the, in the summer fall over this issue. I think that, you know, he realized that the green light cable was a mistake. He realized that it was drafted very precipitously. It was sent with, sent out to Saigon with not enough, you know, senior review as it should have received. As you pointed out, everybody was out of town that that weekend in Washington was just, you know, summer Saturday in August. McNamara was climbing mountains in Wyoming. Rusk was up in New York to see a Yankees game and attend some UN sessions. John McCone was yachting in Puget Sound. Kennedy himself was in, you know, with his fit was his family at Squaw island in Massachusetts. And as another side note, Kennedy had just lost a son. His, his, his son Patrick had just died after about two or three days of life in, in the first week of, I think it was August 9th of 63. So they were mourning the loss of their son as well, on top of everything else. So Kennedy knew that the cable had gone out too fast without not enough review. And that was brought home to him when he called a meeting about it the following Monday when everybody, everybody was back in town and McNamara started voicing concerns. His brother Bobby started voicing concerns. McCone started voicing concerns. And that fed his doubts throughout this whole period. But as you say, he never put the brakes on it. He continued.
- [38:10]
Michael Isagoff
And why is that? Why did he not countermand the earlier cable after hearing from all his advisors who were arguing against it?
- [38:24]
Jack Cheevers
Well, don't forget, for all the people who were arguing against it, there were people arguing for was very much a seesaw battle. These two camps were almost equally weighted. And I think, you know, Kennedy, like most politicians, wants to keep his options open to the last minute. And I think he he naively felt that he could. He could stop this thing even at the last minute. I think what was in his head was the idea he wasn't going to turn the generals over to Diem. They were. He was just going to go to the generals and say, look, we changed our mind about this. We want you to get behind zm. If you, if you overthrow him, we're going to cut off all American aid. I think that was what was in the back of his mind. He could do that at any point. In fact, right up to the very eve of the coup, he actually said that to Lodge, and Lodge came back, Lodge much more pragmatic about this whole thing and said, you know, Mr. President, you. This is a Vietnam, a South Vietnamese operation. You don't have that kind of power. This is something the generals have organized. They're going to carry it out with their people. They're gambling their lives on this thing. If this, if they fail, they're going to all wind up at the end of a rope or with a bullet hole in the back of their head, and you just don't have the power at this point to stop it.
- [39:44]
Jeff Stein
Jack, this is fascinating, and I have a number of more questions, and I'm sure Karen and Mike do also, but we have to take a short break to thank our sponsors and let them give their message. Okay, we're back. Karen, you wanted to ask about the role of the press in Vietnam, and particularly the New York Times. DAVID Halberstam.
- [40:08]
Karen Greenberg
Well, no, I. Actually, it's about. I want to ask about the media in particular, because I think that's one of the most interesting things that you've unearthed in this book, is just that whether it's Sheehan or Halberstam or others, the way in which they played such a significant role, the way you tell it in terms of what happened with Diem, with Kennedy, with the larger conflagration. And can you just talk about that and how you assess their role, not, you know, the role they play, but also how you evaluate it?
- [40:36]
Jack Cheevers
Yeah, that's. That's a good question, Karen. I mean, remember that the land, the media landscape in the early 60s was very different from what it is today. The media landscape in the early 60s was basically the three television networks, the New York Times, and then everybody else. And so if the story, if a story turned up in the New York Times, it sort of set the. The news agenda for the rest of the media in this country. It was much more of a kind of a monoculture than it is today with, you know, social media and blogs and, and podcasts and all sorts of other media outlets. Very different, much less fragmented, much more unified. So the journalists who were in Saigon at the time, I think had a much, much more influence not only over American public opinion, but in terms of how they were perceived by policymakers in, in Washington. So you had the New York, you had David Halberstam from the New York Times and Neil Sheehan who represented United Press International. You had Malcolm Brown who represented the Associated Press. Peter Arnett also worked for the AP at that time. Those just, those three organizations had an enormous impact on public opinion in the United States. It was on the front page of the New York Times. Everybody from Kennedy on down in Washington read the story. If Neil Sheehan or Malcolm Brown put a story out on the wire services, that story turned up in hundreds of newspapers across this country, small, medium and large newspapers. So these guys had a big, they had a big impact on what was going on and there was great trust
- [42:17]
Jeff Stein
in, in these reporters and these outfits back then.
- [42:21]
Jack Cheevers
Absolutely. The mitigating factor was that at that time not a lot of people were paying attention to Vietnam. It was kind of a dis, you know, a thundercloud on a distant horizon. In terms of the public, the general public in Washington, they were paying attention to it because it was costing a lot of money and it was starting to cost American lives as well. It was very controversial and becoming increasingly so. Anyways, the Halberstam, Sheehan, Brown, they, I think they arrived in, in, in Vietnam with very conventional Cold War views. They were very supportive of a non communist government and it's existential struggle against these communist guerrillas. But as time went on, they began to see problems with Jim and his government, the way he was running his government. They began to, to see that the U.S. advisory and Assistance Program wasn't working as it intended. The Viet Cong were starting to, to figure out counter tactics to deal with all the new American weapons technology that was being delivered to the South Vietnamese Army. And they started writing those stories. And Kennedy for one, I mean, he would read, you know, five or six newspapers a day. He used to be a reporter himself. In fact, early in his career he covered the founding in the United nations, in San Francisco for the Hearst Syndicate. He liked reporters. Some of his closest friends were reporters. He was very close friends with Ben Bradley, the future editor of the Washington Post. And when they wrote things, he took it seriously and he knew that other people took it seriously too. And he didn't like the criticism and most of what was coming out of these reporters in Vietnam was pretty critical. And it became, it became more critical, especially as Diem was trying to cope with the Buddhist crisis and not doing a very good job. So, you know, Kennedy's reading these stories, everybody in Congress is reading these stories and people are starting to ask why are we supporting this guy so strongly? He doesn't deserve support.
- [44:21]
Jeff Stein
I also think it's important to point out something that these guys in Washington, they didn't know anything about Vietnam really, but Halberstam and Sheehan and others, they were going out with the troops into the field and seeing how poorly the ARVIN as we call them, the Republic, the Vietnamese Army, South Vietnamese army, that they weren't performing well and that the com. That the communists were making inroads in the villages, they saw it with their own eyes. So they weren't in, in today's environment, there would be bloggers in New York or Washington or California, you know, reading other people and dispensing their opinions. These guys were actually in combat and they were seeing what was going on. And so that wasn't that they had critical opinions, that their reporting was showing that the official story was a lie.
- [45:19]
Jack Cheevers
Right. And, and they're in there. The sources were American combat advisors in the field with, with the South Vietnamese Army. They were foreign service officers attached to the U. S. Embassy in Saigon who, you know, these guys were circulating through Vietnam themselves all the time and picked up a lot of information. So yeah, I mean, they weren't just, you know, this was, as you point out, this wasn't somebody's opinion. They were basing their reporting on facts.
- [45:48]
Michael Isagoff
A couple of nuggets in your book on this score. First of all, Kennedy constantly groused about Halberstam in that meeting with Lodge. He's complaining about Halberstam stories, and then he meets later with Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, and he tries to get Sulzberger to yankee Halverstam to take him out of Vietnam. Which I thought was, you know, kind of heavy handed pressure on the news media from a, from a US President. But the other nugget which I found fascinating is as you write, the New York Herald Tribune sends another reporter, Marguerite Higgins, to Vietnam who does a long series contradicting everything Halberstam has written. And the Times editors start to give Halberstam a hard time. Why are you not finding what Higgins is finding? Why are you constantly writing the opposite?
- [46:49]
Jack Cheevers
Yeah, absolutely. And I found that fascinating too. Just as there was a split in the government over whether or not to support ZM or were we winning the war or losing the war? There was a split in the press. There were kind of two different wings of the press. There were people who were, like Marguerite Higgins, who were, were pretty supportive of the ZAM government and, and U.S. policies there. And then there were people who were, who were pretty critical of it, like Calverst Ham and Sheehan and, and Malcolm Brown. And even today, people are still arguing about, you know, what was the role of the press in the Vietnam War. Did the press lose the Vietnam War and so forth and so on. And you know, what these guys did in the early 60s, Halberstam and Sheehan and, and, and, and Brown made them among the best known war correspondents of all time. American war correspondents. The, and the reporters who followed them to Vietnam later in the war, I think took them as models about how to report. And the, the bottom line for them was be skeptical of everything that, that the government says. Be skeptical of everything that the military says. Check everything as much as you can. Malcolm Brown, actually, he was in charge of the AP bureau in Saigon. He, he advised the younger reporters to, to actually count enemy bodies on the battlefields to, you know, to make sure that the, the government wasn't, wasn't inflating the, the, the, the numbers of people killed.
- [48:23]
Jeff Stein
I have to ask to play devil's advocate here, is there something to that idea that the press put such pressure on the Kennedy administration and subsequent administrations, lbj, Nixon, such negative. Shed such a negative light on Vietnam that they got sort of on a roll. And it was. And sort of the entire press or a great deal of the press or the most influential reporters sort of all bought into it and got on that train. Is there anything to that at all?
- [48:56]
Jack Cheevers
Well, I mean, people certainly argued that at the time. There were conservative newspaper columnists who made that exact argument that, that the, the press's negative coverage was misleading Kennedy, was causing him to make bad policy decisions. You know, I personally, I don't think. I think the people who lose wars are not the people who cover the wars. They're the people who direct policy on, on the people who decide to go to war and decide to carry out the war and execute the war, not people who cover the war. And you know, I mean, to use one of many examples, you know, when, when morally safer from, from CBS News is filming a US Soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese thatched hut with his cigarette lighter and burning it to the ground, and all the, the people who live there are sitting around crying helplessly. Is that, I mean, Is the press damaging the war effort or is the press presenting realistic picture of the war effort?
- [49:57]
Jeff Stein
I just want to interject briefly and I know Karen has a follow up question. I regularly have lunch with an old CIA hand from Vietnam and I mentioned recently our last lunch, I said, you know, I was in Vietnam for three weeks and I could see it was a loser. And he said, I was in Saigon for three minutes and I knew it was a loser. Anyway, Karen, from the point of view
- [50:26]
Karen Greenberg
of historian, the revisionist aspects of this book are kind of interesting. Right? So taking the focus off of Johnson to some extent, putting it onto Kennedy, do you see this as having revisionists rethinking the JFK presidency, particularly in terms of his foreign affairs? As you say, he has the Bay of Pigs in the back of his mind the whole time. No, I'm not gonna repeat, I'm not gonna repeat. I'm not gonna fail. And then this. What, what. How do you think this fits into the general legacy of JFK and how we understand him as students of history?
- [51:03]
Jack Cheevers
I should put my bias out there up front. I mean, I grew up outside Boston, I'm Irish Catholic. When the Kennedys were gods to us, they weren't just heroes, they were gods to us. In many cases they still are. And I still think John Kennedy was a pretty good president. But I think that he has a very mixed record on foreign affairs. This coup is certainly not his finest hour. He did have his finest hour in dealing with the Cuban missile crisis. He negotiated an amazing diplomatic breakthrough with the Soviet Union on, on nuclear weapons and restricting atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons toward the end of his presidency. You know, you can go back and forth on a lot of things. He, you know, the military was advising him early in his presidency to send troops into Laos, which he resisted because he thought it was a horrible place to try and fight a war. I happen to agree with him about that, but I think it was very much a mixed bag in terms of foreign affairs, his presidency.
- [52:05]
Michael Isagoff
So let's complete the loop of this story and go to the events of early November 1963 in Saigon and tell us what happens to Diem and his brother Nu, who was the head of the secret police and perhaps the most feared man in Vietnam. Just walk us through what happened and then I want to get to the reaction in Washington.
- [52:36]
Jack Cheevers
Well, the, the coup went forward and it started on the afternoon of November 1st when the Rebels laid siege to Zemt palace in, in Saigon. They brought in tanks, artillery, infantrymen, marines, and they started attacking the palace at the time Zim and, and his brother Nu, who was head of the secret police, as well as the South Vietnamese Special Forces, were both in the palace. And the siege went on all day into the night. Finally, the, The. The rebels sent in more ground troops and they, they, they entered the grounds early in the morning of November 2nd. They started going through the palace and Zam and New were gone. And it seems that, I mean, they'd slipped out of the palace the night before. They had somehow managed to elude the, you know, the encirclement of the rebel troops of the palace. They got into a car and they drove into the Chinese section of Sargon known as Colon. And they spent the night with an old ally of theirs. And the next morning, Zamit spent the night calling around to various military commanders, trying to line up support, trying to bring in loyalist forces into Saigon to repel the rebels. And he discovered that there were no more loyal forces. Everybody was on the rebel side at that point. Eighteen of the 19 South Vietnamese generals had joined the rebellion. So he got in touch with them, agreed to surrender. Both him and his brother knew. They went to a Catholic church in Golan, and the general sent a small convoy out there that included the leader, the. The rebel leader's bodyguard. The rebel leader was a general by the name popularly known as Big Min because he's unusually tall for a Vietnamese. And they took, they, they found Salmon New. They put him in the back of an armored personnel carrier and then just murdered them. And I mean, they didn't just murder them, they just viciously slaughtered these guys. New was bayoneted more than 30 times. Both men were shot. And when the army personnel carry got back to the general's headquarters, they opened the door and there are these two bloody bodies. So, of course, the word quickly got back to Washington that this had happened. And Kennedy was in a meeting at the White House of the National Security Council when somebody came in with a news dispatch. And according to Maxwell Taylor, General Maxwell Taylor, one of his. His aides, Kennedy had a look of shock and dismay on his face that Taylor had never seen before. He jumped up and rushed out of the room. And he later was by himself in the, in the Oval Office, and he started dictating into a dictaphone the events, you know, during the coup and said that he felt that the United States bore a large degree of responsibility for what happened.
- [55:51]
Michael Isagoff
We have that tape. Before we get to it, though, the coda to the Maxwell Taylor account of Kennedy shock in his face, rushing out of the National Security Council Meeting horrified by what he's just learned. And Taylor said, what did he expect? Which I thought was pretty telling. But let's, we've got a tape, an excerpt from that dictapel tape that Kennedy made for his diary shortly after the brutal murders that he had responsibility for. Let's, let's listen to it.
- [56:34]
Narrator/Host
I feel that we must bear deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup period. In my judgment that why I was badly drafted should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given my consent to it without a roundtable conference in which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that balance in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along the course to which he was in any case inclined.
- [57:18]
Michael Isagoff
So he's still kind of blaming Lodge a bit there, although he's taking responsibility.
- [57:27]
Jack Cheevers
Yeah. And as someone mentioned earlier, he had basically delegated Lodge to decide whether or not, you know, the US should, should back the coup. Lodge was the guy on the ground. That made sense to some extent. But you know, the, the flip side of that was that he was, he was abrogating his responsibility as the commander chief.
- [57:49]
Jeff Stein
And there's an interesting passage also in your book that is parallels what, what happened with LBJ in Vietnam is that Kennedy said, well, you know, this is a loser. We're, we're going to get out of here, but I have to do it in my second term. Lbj, as you know, he thought war was kind of a loser himself, but he couldn't, you know, get out in 1964. He said, well, I'll do it in the next administration. And the can was kicked down the road and of course, the casualties kept mounting up.
- [58:24]
Jack Cheevers
Right. And, and, and yeah, and I'll leave that to the psychoanalyst to speculate on the differences between Kennedy's personality and Johnson's personality. But I think Kenny was, he's, he was much more wary of US military entanglements abroad than Johnson was. I think he was more experienced in foreign affairs than Johnson. And I think the. Johnson had some sort of deep set psychological need to prove himself as commander in chief. You know, he told his aides very early on that, you know, I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war, so go out and win this war. And Kenny's attitude toward the end of his life was, we, we need to get out of this place. We, this is a bad place to be fighting.
- [59:08]
Michael Isagoff
And he was, can I just break in on that? Because you know, there has been this longstanding debate among historians what would Kennedy have done if he had lived? And certainly you include a lot of comments that he made about his desire to get out. But I should point out, number one, he said a lot of contradictory things about Vietnam. And his very last speech he was set to give on November 22, 1963 at the Dallas trademark, he talks about the global clash with international communism that requires unflagging U.S. support. He lists South Vietnam as first among the nine foreign countries on the front lines of that war. And then he says our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task. Reducing our efforts to train, equip and assist their armies can only encourage communist penetration. So that was his last words. Never spoken, but that was the last words he planned to say about Vietnam. And you know, it does raise the question. Yeah, his instinct was to get out, but he was trapped by the Cold War consensus and, you know, political realities. I mean, is it clear to you that Kennedy, had he lived, would have taken a different course than Lyndon Johnson did?
- [60:40]
Jack Cheevers
I think Kennedy, Kennedy was a master politician. I think he understood that he could, he could maintain what the US Was doing, which was supplying dollars and, and guns to the South Vietnamese indefinitely. You know, he, he, he said publicly that, you know, this is South Vietnam's war to win or lose. This is not America's war to win or lose. You know, as you point out, Michael, I mean, he was a staunch anti Communist. You know, his famous inaugural speech were going to bear any burden to, you know, push back the communist tide. But when it came down to sending US Combat troops, particularly into Asia, I think he was really a, a charter member of the Never Again club, you know, the group of Americans who decided that the Korean War had been such a nightmare that we would never ever, we should never ever get involved in another, another land war in, in Asia. I think he understood the difficulties of fighting in that kind of environment, and he didn't want to do it. What would have happened in 64 and 65 when, particularly when Ho Chi Minh started infiltrating regular North Vietnamese soldiers into the south and, and which to me was a dramatic escalation of the war. What Kennedy would have done in those circumstances, that's anyone's guess, but he announced at the, you know, at the end of, of 63, he was going to start pulling US combat advisors out of South Vietnam. But I think his idea was, we can do that. We can Stop spilling our blood there. But we'll still maintain our military and economic support. We'll keep these guys as alive as long as we can without sending our own people in there. And after that, who knows what would have happened? That's pure speculation.
- [62:34]
Michael Isagoff
I, I Good point. I, I should just add one more is Johnson keeps all of Kennedy's main advisors on when he assumes the presidency, all of whom are Hawks. McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, they're all pro defend the South Vietnamese at all costs. And if Kennedy still had those same advisors telling him him what they later would tell Johnson, you have to wonder how that would have played out. But in any case, I just want to say it's a really fascinating book, a great read. It opens a lot of doors that I think people haven't walked through in quite some time.
- [63:26]
Karen Greenberg
Jack, can I just follow up with something which you can just say you don't want to think about this, but, but I'm sorry, it's a long list today. Yeah, but, but, you know, we just watched Pete Hegseth testify before Congress and use the word quagmire and refer among our, you know, mistakes, one way or another to Vietnam. And my question is, when you're looking at today and what's happening right now with this war in Iran, the way the decisions are being made, the way the President is acting and reacting, do you have any thoughts about lessons that we should have learned that we didn't learn or, or any other ways in which just where you've been and your historical mindset says I've seen that before or I haven't seen that before, or I wish I'd seen that before. Any of any of those.
- [64:21]
Jack Cheevers
Well, I mean, sure, we could talk about this all the rest of the
- [64:24]
Michael Isagoff
day, but, well, we're wrapping up here, Jack.
- [64:29]
Jack Cheevers
My main thought is, I mean, wars are dangerous. They're very, very dangerous. You're getting involved in a war and good luck. You have no idea how it's going to turn out. Just no matter how much money you have, no matter how many troops you have, it's tricky business and you go south very, very quickly despite the best laid plans. And in more than a few cases, we have not had the best laid plans. I think we went into Iraq with no idea of how we were going to try to govern that country once we occupied it. What Trump is doing in Iran seems really chaotic to me. It seems like they, they didn't think it through very well. I think it seems like, you know, they had no idea that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, even though, you know, experts have been predicting that for years. You know, people can be very impulsive. You know, even, even the people we elect are the highest, the highest office in the land. And that's why it's so important to elect people who are experienced, who are surrounded by, by good advisors and who have stable personalities and above all, want to avoid a war if it's, if it's, if it's at all possible.
- [65:46]
Jeff Stein
Well, on that happy note, Jack, it's great to have you on the show. It's, it's, it's interesting how this event in November 1963 continues to resonate in American foreign policy. And I suppose, you know, you're not the first to come along and write about Vietnam, certainly, or, or even Kennedy and, and zm. But I think you must have been motivated, at least in part, saying, here, here's something we can learn from a review with some new information about how things can go wrong when you don't really know what you're doing and you don't have an orderly interagency and expert consult on these momentous decisions. So thanks for coming on the show, Jack, and I. I wish you the best of luck with this book, and I hope it gains a wide audience. And that's it for this week's Spy Talk. Be sure to check out our complete podcast archive on Apple or wherever you get your podcast. And if you haven't already, do Check out the SpyTalk Co news site on Substack, where we offer steady diet of scoops and original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy and military operations. Just Google Spy Talk, you'll quickly find your way there. This edition of the Spy Talk podcast was smoothly produced, as always by Kanai and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media. That's it. See you around. I'm Jeff Stein.
- [67:27]
Michael Isagoff
I'm Michael Zigoff.
- [67:28]
Karen Greenberg
I'm Karen Greenberg.
- [67:29]
Jeff Stein
Thanks for listening.
- [67:31]
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Jack Cheevers
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Jack Cheevers
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Jeff Stein
We're here for substance.
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Join me Brian Caram Every week as we cut through the noise and get straight to it, this is Just Ask the Question where curiosity will lead us to the facts.
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Jack Cheevers
and remember, when you want answers, all
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