Quote:
Originally Posted by clive milne
And here's a name you probably haven't heard before: Lyman Lemnitzer, chair of the joint chiefs of staff.
... Proposed a false flag operation against the Cuban government called Operation Northwoods...
You can see it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods |
Hi Clive,
One of the people featured on the Wikipedia page you cited is
Edward
Lansdale.
Now I can tell you a little about Lansdale because he is such an interesting
character and plays a key behind-the-scenes role in the history of
South-East Asia during the Cold War.
There is a wonderful book by an author named Neil Sheehan called
"A Bright Shining Lie" that won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize that provides
a history of the Vietnam War, told by way of an 800+ page biography
about an American officer by the name of Vann.
Sheehan writes about Lansdale in this book.
Lansdale was an officer in the US military, which is to say he was
an OSS/CIA agent with the front of a US military officer.
In the early 1950's, Lansdale was in the Philippines and he successfully
guided a Filipino leader in a campaign to crush Communist rebels
in the countryside and jungles.
Not an easy thing to do.
For his successes he was sent to Vietnam in the early 1950's to see
if he could pull off the same trick there.
One of the first things he did was to find a politician who he could
orchestrate into the position of President.
The individual needed to be determined and staunchly anti-communist
but someone who could still be controlled.
He found the right man in one
Ngo Dinh Diem. Through Lansdale's
coaching and some classic CIA black-ops, Diem rose to power.
Lansdale went to Washington and commended Diem as being "our
man" and Washington sanctioned his rise to President, even if it meant
rigging a plebiscite here and there.
Lansdale would spend many evenings with Diem at the Presidential Palace
in Saigon advising him on politics and power plays.
But like many politicians, Diem's primary ambition was Diem.
When Kennedy became President, Lansdale met with him and praised
the merits of Diem.
But as the Communist insurgency grew, suspicions grew in Washington
as to whether Diem was the right person to quell it.
Diem, like Kennedy, was a Catholic. But many of Diem's policies were
persecuting Buddhists and this was not going down well in the United
States or the rest of the world.
When Buddhist monks started to set themselves on fire,
Diem's wife,
Madame Nhu, who was a beautiful but diabolical "Dragon Lady", famously
quipped, "
If the Buddhists want to have another barbecue, I will be glad
to supply the gasoline."
Kennedy sent a couple of envoys to Vietnam to find out what was going on.
When one reported that everything was fine and the other reported it was
not, Kennedy asked them if they had gone to the same country.
The difference, they explained, was that one had visited in the cities,
where everything was fine, but the other, who had visited the rural areas
reported that the Communist insurgency was out of hand.
When some of the South Vietnamese generals reported to the US
Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, that they were planning a coup,
Lodge secretly reported it to Washington.
Lodge was of the opinion that Diem should go.
But Kennedy was supposedly not in favour of a coup, thinking it could
make things worse.
Lodge instructed the coup leaders that they were on their own.
But they launched the coup anyway.
Surrounded, Diem telephoned Lodge and asked for advice. Lodge said,
look, I can help protect you and your brother physically but you have
to resign.
Diem wouldn't have anything to do with it and he and his brother
made their escape via a secret passage.
But the generals knew where to find them, gathered them up and shot
both in the back of a van.
When another of Diem's brothers approached Lodge for protection, Lodge
put him on a US military aircraft that he said would take him to the
Philippines. Instead, it landed elsewhere in South Vietnam where he was
executed on arrival.
Lodge had figured that Diem and the brothers were going to be a liability
as long as they were alive.
Lansdale by this stage was a Brigadier General and had been assigned a
post with the CIA in Washington to try and look at ways to kill Castro.
But Lansdale's old friend, Diem, was now dead.
A few weeks later Kennedy himself was assassinated.
A famous snapshot taken in Dallas of the police
escorting some hobos they rounded up after the shooting shows the back
of a passer-by walking in the opposite direction.
Despite the fact that the face of this individual can't be seen, many who
knew Lansdale well claimed they recognized him as the individual.
See
https://www.prouty.org/photos.html
This would then give rise to conspiracy theories that Lansdale and
possibly the CIA had some involvement in Kennedy's death.
Some would claim it was retribution for the Diem assassination or
the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba.
Lansdale later returned to Vietnam but by then the war had got even bigger
than him and his role then appears to have become marginalized.
But during the 50's and early 60's, Sheehan described him in his book as
"the attending physician at the birth of South Vietnam".
