CORRESPONDENCE

To the Editor:

In his recent thoughtful review of my book, “The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam” (Book Review, April 23), Fredrik Logevall leveled three criticisms that are mistaken and misconstrue what I have written.

First, he writes that my contention--that President Kennedy was a key figure in advocating the covert war against North Vietnam--is based on “slight evidence, mostly one or two fleeting remarks made by Kennedy during a policy discussion in late January 1961.” He further claims that I do not “come close to demonstrating that JFK was obsessed with implementing such action against Hanoi or that he was angered by the inaction of underlings.”

Here are the facts that I cite to demonstrate how JFK set in motion one of the largest covert operations executed by Washington in the Cold War. These facts are hardly “slight” or only “one or two fleeting remarks.”

At a Jan. 28, 1961, National Security Council meeting Kennedy heard bad news. The Hanoi-backed Viet Cong were closing in, and unless circumstances changed, the Saigon government was sure to fall. What could be done to convince Hanoi to stop supporting the VC? Kennedy asked whether guerrilla operations could be mounted inside North Vietnam. Allen Dulles, the CIA director, explained that limited efforts were underway.

It was a marginal program. Kennedy was not impressed with it and stated he “want[ed] guerrillas to operate in the North.” Just a week in the White House, JFK decided to put Hanoi on notice that there was a price to pay for subverting South Vietnam. Two could play that game, and he instructed the CIA to get moving. This was hardly a “fleeting remark,” as Logevall writes, but a direct order. However, the agency doubted it could be done. North Vietnam, where secret police forces abounded, was too tough a nut to crack.

In March 1961, JFK asked how things were progressing. He discovered that little had been done. Not happy, JFK hit the CIA with National Security Action Memorandum 28, ordering it to respond to the “President’s instructions that we make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam territory.” NSAM 28 is hardly “slight evidence” or a “fleeting remark.” It is a major presidential directive and an important indicator of how Kennedy cajoled and coerced the agency to pick up the pace. And there is more.

The CIA’s response, according to one operative, was “very modest--a small program.” Why, given White House pressure? Because, he explained, Bill Colby, who was in charge of CIA operations in Saigon, wanted to constrain covert action against the North in order to save resources needed for operations in the South. Colby told me this when I interviewed him. He also described insistent White House pressure to do more.

By the end of 1962, Kennedy had enough of the CIA. He turned the covert war over to the Pentagon. Declassified records cited in the book give three reasons for his decision. The first was JFK’s commitment “to prevent communist domination of South Vietnam and to expand the intensity of the allied effort.” The second focused on “the need for a concerted, joint effort against North Vietnam in covert paramilitary actions.” Only the military could do so, he believed. The third reason highlighted Kennedy’s exasperation over “the relative ineffectiveness of the CIA’s covert program against North Vietnam.”

Kennedy chose the military because he believed Special Forces could raise the heat on Hanoi. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted nothing to do with it and resisted. To thwart the chiefs, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara became Kennedy’s action officer for escalating the secret war. The president had given the mission to the Defense Department, and McNamara intended to execute it.

If JFK was in a hurry to step up the covert war, so was McNamara. Walt Rostow, a senior Kennedy administration official that I interviewed, put it this way: “McNamara strongly backed President Kennedy, who wanted covert action out of CIA’s hands.” McNamara argued in 1963 that the CIA had “an inadequate level of activity” and that “[a] truly effective program would require the commitment of military assets.”

Because of Joint Chiefs Chairman Max Taylor’s delaying tactics, it took most of 1963 to complete Operational Plan 34A. It was provocative, an elaborate program of covert operations. Through it the White House hoped to “bring sufficient pressure to bear on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to cause the leadership to reevaluate and cease its aggressive policy.”

It had taken nearly three years to produce the plan JFK wanted. OPLAN 34A “contained a total of 72 [categories of] actions, which if implemented over a 12-month period, would produce a total of 2,062 separate operations.” And if that were not enough, operations would be “progressively escalated.” The facts cited here are hardly “slight” or only “one or two fleeting remarks,” as Logevall proposed in his review. Rather, they are the moves of a president committed to executing covert war against North Vietnam throughout his presidency.

Logevall also challenges my argument that Hanoi worried about the covert operations directed against it, particularly during late 1967 and 1968. He claims that I “do not convince.” Admittedly, I do not have massive evidence. Several approaches to Vietnamese officials in Washington and two visits to Hanoi yielded little. Those officials contacted refused to discuss the matter, at least officially. In fact, in a letter from the International Relations Department of Vietnam’s Ministry of the Interior, Director General Bui Hoan claims that “we haven’t had time and conditions to consider [and] assess the above-mentioned [covert] operations.” To the contrary, one official told me off the record that such studies had been conducted but were classified.

Still, in the book I was able to cite important evidence of Hanoi’s steps to counter the secret war. For example, in 1968 it mounted a major counterespionage effort inside its borders to track down agents and spies. This included new training procedures at all levels of North Vietnam’s internal security apparatus. All available means of communications were likewise used by Hanoi to warn its population of spies in their midst. Further, Hanoi enacted tough decrees with harsher penalties, including execution, for counterrevolutionary activities. Coastal defenses were strengthened to counter covert maritime operations.

Washington’s secret war also involved operations against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Cross-border covert reconnaissance teams were sent onto the trail in Laos and Cambodia to identify targets and call in airstrikes. I argue that Hanoi took these actions seriously, basing my conclusions, in part, on interviews with the U.S. Army officers responsible for executing them.

Logevall discounts this evidence, asserting that these men were in no “position to have known Hanoi’s thinking.” True enough. But they were in a position to feel the impact of Hanoi’s countermeasures. What they report, which is backed up by declassified documents cited in the book, is an extensive effort to neutralize these covert recon operations.

North Vietnam established a sophisticated security system that included more than 25,000 soldiers to defend its command posts, storage facilities, troop base camps and sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Additionally, it deployed soldiers at numerous points along the border to look for the helicopters inserting these 12-man recon teams and to report their movements. Spotters were also assigned to watch likely recon team landing zones. Offensively, in addition to regular troops, North Vietnam developed special operations forces to track and kill recon team members, especially Americans. Bounties were paid for the latter.

Finally, Logevall takes issue with my conclusion that the secret war could have had more of an impact had it not been for “Washington higher-ups continually blunting the promising efforts of the secret warriors.” Logevall asks--”How promising were they? Not very, it seems.” Actually, I argue that in addition to Washington-imposed constraints, their own missteps and Hanoi’s countermeasures blunted the efforts of the secret warriors. Still, my analysis suggests, as noted above, that they were having an impact on Hanoi by 1968 and could have been more effective.

Richard Shultz

Medford, Mass.

Fredrik Logevall replies:

I appreciate Richard Shultz’s effort to correct what he sees as my inaccurate portrayal of his arguments and the evidence he cites to support them, particularly regarding John F. Kennedy’s attitude toward covert operations against Hanoi. His letter, however, serves largely to buttress my point, in that he reproduces in it essentially all the evidence he has for the claim that Kennedy from the outset was determined to step up quickly and drastically those operations. Even this evidence proves upon closer inspection to be problematic.

Consider the Jan. 28, 1961 White House meeting to which Shultz attaches such importance (pace Shultz, it was not technically a meeting of the National Security Council). We have two accounts of this meeting. The first makes no reference to the president saying anything about covert action against North Vietnam; the second, cited by Shultz, has JFK saying he wants guerrillas to operate in the North and twice asking those assembled about the feasibility of such action. That’s it.

In the context of a lengthy meeting that dealt only briefly with this particular issue, these seem to be, yes, fleeting remarks that tell us little about Kennedy’s actual intentions. On what basis does Shultz conclude from this account that Kennedy here gave the CIA a “direct order” to get moving on the secret war?

Or take NSAM 28, the other chief example cited in the letter. In his book Shultz cites no source for his claims (repeated in his letter) that Kennedy in early March 1961 asked how things were progressing and expressed unhappiness with the lack of action. Moreover, Shultz misquotes the NSAM. Contrary to his book and his letter, the document refers to guerrilla operations not in “North Vietnam territory” but in “Viet-Minh territory,” a much more ambiguous phrase in view of the heavy guerrilla activity in the South.

Nor is the document, which runs to a mere six lines, an “important indicator” of how the president “cajoled and coerced the agency to pick up the pace”; the memo merely asks the director of the CIA and the secretary of defense to report “as soon as feasible your views on what actions might be undertaken in the near future and what steps might be taken to expand operations in the longer future.” This hardly amounts to a “major presidential directive.”

I also stand by my assertion that Shultz fails to demonstrate that Hanoi became greatly concerned about the covert operations against it and that those operations never held much promise of success. He is correct in saying that the book attributes part of the reason for the failure of the program to the missteps of the secret warriors themselves; the point, however, is that even absent those missteps, the program was never likely to yield much.