AS A MEMBER of the U.S. House and Senate, John F. Kennedy was an experienced politician. As the son of the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s during the days just before the start of World War II, he was made privy to the ways of foreign policy and to the world of big business. He was the son of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America. But as the newly elected President of the United States, he discovered that he had to start all over again. The stakes in the game played at the White House were much higher and more complex than those in any of his previous endeavors, and the flow of events during the closing months of the Eisenhower era had not made his task any easier.
Eisenhower’s repeated illnesses, perhaps his age, and particularly the heartache he suffered as a result of the collapse of his dream of a meaningful “Crusade for Peace”1 created a “lame duck” period of deeper than usual dimensions. A counterinsurgency plan for Indochina had been set in motion, and the buildup of the army’s Special Warfare program at Fort Bragg had gotten under way.
On the big business side, proponents of the U.S. Air Force’s “Everest” Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) aircraft development project were rushing plans to have that selection made before the pro-business Eisenhower team left Washington. In 1960, the TFX was visualized as the biggest single aircraft procurement order ever placed—running as high as $6 billion.
At the same time, life seemed relatively quiet in Vietnam as the principal skirmishes, both military and political, took place in nearby Laos. All of these pent-up pressure points exploded after Kennedy’s inauguration and proceeded to overwhelm his new and relatively inexperienced administration.
Barely one week after taking office, Kennedy received a personal report from Col. Edward G. Lansdale, the CIA’s longtime and most important Southeast Asia agent, regarding his recent trip to Saigon. Lansdale also offered a second briefing on the counterinsurgency plan for Indochina. Later, Kennedy approved the counterinsurgency plan, which expanded South Vietnamese forces at a rather leisurely pace.
This plan provided South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem with the financial support for a twenty-thousand increase in his army (then standing at one-hundred fifty-thousand men) as well as support for his counterguerrilla force, then known as the Civil Guard.2
Between January and May 1961, the new President was kept busy with, among other things, the anti-Castro project, which had grown in the hands of CIA opportunists from a cycle of sporadic para-drop raids on Cuba to a full-blown, over-the-beach invasion plan. According to the invasion plan approved by President Kennedy, Castro would have had no combat aircraft remaining by dawn on the morning of the invasion.
However, a key bomber strike that was supposed to destroy the last three aircraft on the ground was called off. This strike had been approved by President Kennedy only the afternoon before the landing. The delay of this mission was found by the Cuban Study Group to be the primary cause of the failure of the invasion.3
Deeply angered by this CIA disaster, Kennedy set up a unique Cuban Study Group to discover what had happened to cause the failure and to make plans for the future actions of his administration in the Cold War arena. This group left its mark on the nascent Kennedy administration. During its tenure, Jack and Bobby Kennedy made up their minds that Allen Dulles, along with other top-level CIA staff, must go.4 As a result of the study-group experience, Bobby Kennedy, a military neophyte, became enchanted with the experienced, educated, and sophisticated Gen. Maxwell Taylor.5
Each evening after returning from the Pentagon, where he had witnessed General Taylor’s masterful control of the investigation of the Bay of Pigs operation and his development of paramilitary plans, Bobby Kennedy would discuss all of that information, augmented by Taylor’s ideas of Army Special Warfare, with his brother and other close advisers.
Concurrently, the President had asked Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, “to work up a program for saving Vietnam.” Lansdale became executive director of Gilpatric’s Vietnam task force and assumed the role of governmentwide coordinator and manager of the concept of counterinsurgency.
This development only seemed fitting, since it was Lansdale, his friend Gen. Richard Stilwell, and their close army and CIA associates who had done so much to launch this new Cold War military doctrine during the Eisenhower period (much of it as we have seen, derived from elements of the teachings of Chairman Mao Tse-tung).
In his own autobiography, In The Midst of Wars, Ed Lansdale writes about his own wealth of knowledge and depth of experience with the works and teachings of Mao Tse-tung:
I arrived in Washington in late January [1953] and made the rounds of talks with policy-makers.
I found myself quoting Mao Tse-tung to them, from one of his lectures to military officers in a Yenan cave classroom early in World War II. Mao had said: “There are often military elements who care for only military affairs but not politics. Such one-track-minded officers, ignoring the interconnection between politics and military affairs, must be made to understand the correct relationship between the two. All military actions are means to achieve political objectives, while military action itself is a manifested form of politics”
I would note that it didn’t matter that Mao had cribbed his lectures from Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Lenin. Asian Communist doctrine currently was heeding Mao’s words in its warfare, and we, on our side, had to learn to be more flexible in meeting it.
You will recall the many excerpts from the special White House committee report of May 1959 entitled “Training Under the Mutual Security Program” that are included in chapter 12. That report was written by General Lansdale and General Stilwell. They cited references to the teachings of Chairman Mao and recommended them as a pattern for the new armies they visualized “in the Third World.” In this connection, one must keep in mind that when one teaches such policy for another country, he is likely to be convinced that it would work and do well in his own country also. This is the great lesson of our review of this report and of the reminder how important the Communist teaching of Mao Tse-tung has become in American military doctrine and training. It could be used here.
Because a major objective of this book is to analyze the events that brought about the murder of John F. Kennedy and the seizure of power in this country at that time, it may be well to note that in the eight-page index of Lansdale’s book there are six references to Mao Tse-tung—and not one single mention of John F. Kennedy.
By May 3, 1961, the extremely flexible Kennedy administration had changed horses in midstream. The Gilpatric-Lansdale draft for Vietnam of late April was shelved, and a newer State Department draft of May 3 (presumably written by George Ball) was approved by the President. Lansdale’s Defense Department recommendations were eliminated completely, and Fritz Nolting, a man with close CIA ties (if not himself actually a full-fledged CIA agent), had become ambassador to Saigon. Lansdale’s star had been eclipsed, and the Dulles-Cabell-Bissell team was fading fast as Gen. Maxwell Taylor became man of the hour in the Kennedys’ eyes.
By the end of May 1961, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was in Saigon to conduct a fact-finding mission and to deliver a letter from President Kennedy to Ngo Dinh Diem. Johnson had been authorized to raise the matter of stationing U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Diem did not want them at that time; the Diem government had other things on its mind.
As described in earlier chapters, Diem had been dependent upon and personally close to Lansdale ever since Diem had returned to the Far East from exile. He had spent a lot of time working out plans with Lansdale during the latter’s lengthy visit to Saigon after Kennedy’s election in late 1960. Diem and his CIA-oriented brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were perplexed by the rapid changes and developments on the banks of the Potomac that so dramatically affected Dulles, Lansdale, and the CIA. Diem became suspicious of the Kennedy administration and its representatives. He was reluctant to accept new faces, new ideas, and a new strategy, despite the fact that he was repeatedly assured that it was all for his own good.
From the middle of 1959, Diem had begun the creation of communelike “Agrovilles” that were planned as small communities in which all essential amenities were provided. As noted, the greatest single factor underlying the serious unrest in the new nation of South Vietnam was the infiltration of more than one million Tonkinese (northern) refugees who had been transported south by U.S. sea and air assets. These people, many of whom came to fill key posts in the Diem government as the years progressed, needed a place to live. In Diem’s mind, these Agrovilles, designed and supported with American funds, were to provide a place to live for as many of these invading strangers as possible.
For many reasons, this plan failed miserably after fewer than twenty-five Agrovilles had been carved out of a no-man’s-land in the destitute countryside. Thus the open-commune Agroville, based on a design concept from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, became the heavily barricaded Strategic Hamlet of 1961 in the Kennedy era. The Strategic Hamlet was designed, out of necessity, to overcome two serious problems: It was engineered as much to keep the settlers in as to provide security for them against attack from the outside by starving bandits, usually called the Vietcong. By 1961, South Vietnam was overrun with displaced, starving natives and by equally displaced and starving Tonkinese.
Viewed from the eye of the maker of Grand Strategy, with his Malthusian incentives, the situation “to engender warfare” in Vietnam could not have been better. As Alberto Moravia wrote in his book The Red Book and the Great Wall, an Impression of Mao’s China, “More is consumed in wartime in a day than is consumed in peacetime in a year.”
It is all too easy to forget that this conflict in populous, wealthy (by Asian standards), and placid Indochina had been set in motion back in 1945, when Ho Chi Minh arrived in Hanoi accompanied by his associates from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services6 and armed with American weapons from Okinawa. These were the weapons used by the Vietminh to control much of the region from 1945 to 1954. These same weapons, especially the heavy artillery, had made it possible for them to defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu. At that time, what remained of the $3 billion arms aid the U.S. had provided to the French was added to Ho Chi Minh’s U.S.-supplied arsenal.
By modern standards, the United States had provided a more than adequate arms supply to the man whom it would, after the stage was set, call “the enemy.” During 1962, Michael Forrestal, a senior member of the National Security Council staff and a close friend of Jack Kennedy’s, visited Vietnam with Roger Hilsman from the Department of State. They wrote a report to the President, saying, “The vast bulk of both recruits and supplies come from inside South Vietnam itself.” That was their bureaucratic euphemism for saying that the Vietminh’s weapons were American-made. Of course they were.
Another top-level official stated, “Throughout this time no one had ever found one Chinese rifle or one Soviet weapon used by the Vietcong.” He noted that all weapons taken from the Vietcong (bandits) by the United States were either homemade (mainly crude but effective land mines) or previously acquired from the Diem government or the United States.
It is little wonder that the Diem brothers found the Kennedy administration difficult to accept. The actions of supplying weapons to both sides, on top of the forced movement of more than one million Tonkinese from the north to the south via U.S.-supplied navy vessels and aircraft, constituted “make war” tactics, in the Diems’ eyes.
It was in this climate that the Kennedy administration welcomed the post—Bay of Pigs report from Gen. Maxwell Taylor and his assignment as military adviser to the President in the Kennedy White House. On October 11, 1961, the President directed General Taylor and Walt Rostow, a foreign policy adviser, to travel to Saigon.
Rostow had stated, in the fall of 1961, that it was “now or never” for the United States in Vietnam. Bill Bundy, formerly with the CIA (if “formerly” ever applies to CIA agents) as a Far East expert and, in 1961, deputy secretary of defense, said there was a 70 percent chance to “clean up the situation.” He advised a preemptive strike, an “early and hard-hitting operation.” Neither of these men were military experts. They were just trying to show muscle and daring.
Taylor was a little more patient and, under the guise of a “flood relief” project, recommended that a small number of U.S. servicemen be introduced into Vietnam. Kennedy agreed and in all later public pronouncements referred to them as “support troops.”
Meanwhile, Robert S. McNamara and his former Ford Motor Company “Whiz Kids” were gearing up to get into the act. Everyone wanted to be known as a military expert. McNamara did not have any experience with warfare; he knew little, if anything, about Indochina. He was a precisionist. He liked things to be orderly and to be explained in “case study” detail. One of his first decisions, based upon a preinaugural briefing in the Pentagon, was to order the use of a defoliant spray in Vietnam. He turned this idea, his own, over to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the high-powered organization of technicians that had sprung up in the Pentagon in the wake of the Sputnik surprise, where it came under the wing of an old bureaucratic professional, Bill Godel.
Making use of the postelection hiatus in senior government employee activity, Godel had jumped from the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he had worked under Gen. Graves B. Erskine, USMC (Ret’d), along with Col. Edward G. Lansdale and myself, to the greener pastures of ARPA.
During its first days, this defoliant project was known as Operation Hades; shortly thereafter, it was given the name Ranchhand. No one gave the project much consideration, and the ordinary defoliant used by the railroads was given a try. In the normal course of business, it never occurred to anyone that this defoliant would prove to be dangerous. As was customary with many projects at this time, the Ranchhand project was approved by McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, Robert Kennedy, U. Alexis Johnson, Mike Forrestal, Dick Helms and Maxwell Taylor.
The aircraft assigned to this project had been left over from other projects, and their modification for spraying purposes did not prove difficult. No one had any concern for the consequences of the decision to defoliate. As events showed later, the use of harmful defoliants served little, if any, practical purpose in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, the “enemy” found it useful to burn the dead leaves and flee in the clouds of smoke, so it had more use from their point of view than for regular Vietnamese forces.
During May 1961, McNamara set up a project monitoring system called the Combat Development Test Center (CDTC). This process was characteristic of McNamara and his concept of operation. The objective of the CDTC was to place one office “at the front” in Saigon and the other close to the seat of power, and money, in the Pentagon. They were connected by a direct communication channel. As each problem arose and was identified in Saigon, it was numbered and wired immediately to the Pentagon. Thus, if there was a problem with “the action of the M-16 carbine” in combat, it was given a number in serial order and sent to the Pentagon, where #1156 would be given priority treatment.
Many people, myself included, used to read the lists of the CDTC priority projects every day. One unusual thing about CDTC projects was that their size, complexity, cost, or combat utility made no difference in their serial listing and treatment. All were equal, one after the other.
One day, I read a project that stated: “Elite troops of the Palace Guard are suffering from malnutrition on the Cambodian border.” These “elite troops” were CIA and Filipino trained, and they were normally assigned to the palace to guard President Diem and his family. As part of their training they were getting “field combat” experience on the troubled Cambodian border.
For some reason, they suffered malnutrition while on this duty. Without delay, ARPA, the Pentagon manager of the CDTC project, set up a conference in the Pentagon for nutrition specialists from three leading universities. These specialists were next flown to Hawaii for Indochina briefings, then to Saigon, and thence to the Cambodian border. There they learned that the “elite troops,” for the most part Tonkinese, could not eat the food prepared for them in Saigon and flown to them on the border. It lacked a native sauce that, to the Tonkinese, was essential.
The ARPA team arranged to have the sauce prepared in enormous quantities and, for lack of a better alternative, run through a nearby soft-drink bottling plant. The bottles were packed in wooden crates, airlifted to the border, and paradropped to the starving troops. End of case—almost.
Some months later, I observed a new CDTC project much farther down the numbered list. It read, “Elite troops of the Palace Guard are suffering malnutrition on the Cambodian border.” ARPA handled each case by rote. It called a conference of nutrition experts—in the random process, these were different people—and flew them to Saigon.
In Saigon, they were told about the earlier project and shown the large-scale production facility and bottling plant. All seemed in order. Nevertheless, they asked to be flown to the border. There they found the starving troops. The problem was not difficult to discover.
When the cases of special sauce had been paradropped, the glass bottles were smashed. The troops were not allowed to eat anything for fear of broken glass. There was the problem. Back to Saigon.
Now the experts looked for a cannery. The nearest available one was at the San Miguel brewery in Manila. It was disassembled, flown to Saigon, and reassembled. The special Tonkinese sauce was made in the same vats and then canned at the new facility. This time, when the sauce was air-dropped to the troops, it survived the impact. The team of nutritionists declared the project a success and returned to their separate campuses. ARPA closed the project without ever looking back and turned to the next case. This was how the modern war was being fought in the halls of the Pentagon—“Whiz Kid” style.
Other examples were not so amusing. A Washington lawyer with ready and frequent access to the White House had made a trip to Florida, where he saw some massive machines clearing land in great swaths. As rows of these monster machines moved forward in teams, one beside the other, they chewed up everything in their way and left behind bare ground about as smooth as a tennis court. This lawyer was told that such machines were used in Latin America in the upper Amazon Basin, where they chewed their way through the rain forests, producing pulp for paper manufacture and leaving behind nothing but bare, dead ground.
When he returned from Florida, this quick-thinking lawyer went to see McNamara, after having paid a tactical call on the President, and suggested that an array of these enormous machines, set loose at the noman’s-land of the 17th parallel in Vietnam, could remove everything on the ground and leave nothing but bare earth. He suggested that the bare earth be networked with electronic devices that would permit the instant detection of anything that moved. This became a CDTC project, and before long it became the multi-billion-dollar “electronic battlefield.”
In a similar but more costly deal, another astute planner learned that one of the major problems in Indochina was its lack of ports adequate for seagoing cargo vessels. Through all the early years of the war, almost all supplies delivered by ship had to be off-loaded in the inadequate river port of Saigon, far from the sea. (It is something like the minor port of Alexandria, Virginia, far up the Potomac River near Washington.)
This man rented a large office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington and had a huge replica of the Cam Ranh Bay (Vinh Cam Ranh) area on the coast of Vietnam constructed on a set of large tables. He filled it with water, and it looked like the real thing. It was his idea that the natural, shallow bay could be dredged and that huge plastic bags could be submerged, with weights, and used for the storage of large quantities of gasoline and jet fuel.
The weight of the seawater on these plastic bags would pump the lighter petroleum through pipes to a seaside storage site. His estimate for this project ran to about $2 billion. McNamara and his CDTC people put the project up for bid. A huge consortium of general contractors worked together on the project, and before it was done, that original $2 billion project had multiplied in cost many times over. This was the part of the Vietnam War that was rarely seen and is still seldom realized. After all, the $220 billion direct cost of the war—perhaps an overall cost of $500 billion—had to have been spent somewhere. . . somehow.
The Kennedy team had decided on the priorities. They had learned from the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation that they could not trust the CIA, and they had learned from Gen. Maxwell Taylor that the only way to fight the kind of war they inherited from the CIA in Indochina would be to do it with the kind of paramilitary tactics as waged by the U.S. Army Special Warfare units.
Because all earlier U.S. Special Forces troops had been serving in South Vietnam under the operational control of the CIA, Gen. Maxwell Taylor had proposed in his letter to President Kennedy on June 13, 1961, that National Security Action Memoranda #55, #56, and #57 become the basis of a new order of things. Kennedy had agreed without delay, and by late 1961 he had installed General Taylor in the White House as his special military adviser.
Not long after that, Taylor and Rostow made their trip to Saigon and returned with their proposal to introduce U.S. “support troops” into Vietnam under the cover of a “flood relief” action. Kennedy approved of this modest recommendation, and a new era was begun—one based upon an even greater change in Washington.
Allen Dulles, Gen. C.P. Cabell, and Dick Bissell were out. Ed Lansdale’s star was in eclipse, and a new internal battle was under way in the murky halls of the windowless Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. The fight began with the establishment of the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities and the arrival of its boss, Maj. Gen. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak of the U.S. Marines.
Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the man to whom National Security Action Memorandum #55 had been addressed and delivered, made sure that all of the service chiefs had had an opportunity to read and study these unique presidential papers and then ordered them to be securely filed. Lemnitzer and his close friend Gen. David M. Shoup of the U.S. Marine Corps were traditional soldiers. They had never been “Cold Warriors” or Cold War enthusiasts. Nor were they proponents of an Asian ground war.
It bothered Lemnitzer not at all to observe that Kennedy had created the office of “military adviser to the President” and had placed Taylor in that office. By the end of 1962, General Lemnitzer was on his way to the NATO command in Europe, while Kennedy, Taylor, and all the others had become mired in the quicksands of Southeast Asia.
When President John F. Kennedy published National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28, 1961, “Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations,” he directed the Joint Chiefs to “present the military viewpoint in government councils.” This did not work. The U.S. military establishment was neither designed nor prepared to engage in peacetime covert operations, nor did it wish to be. As a result, this type of activity remained with the CIA by default.
The CIA, however, is no more prepared to wage clandestine warfare than is the military establishment, except for one point: The CIA is always able to incite an incident sufficient to require U.S. action and involvement. The CIA can do this because it has, or is able to create, intelligence assets. The CIA is the first agency of the government to make contact with “rebel” or “insurgent” parties.
CIA spooks prowl the bars and meeting places of other countries in search of just such information. One may overhear, or participate in, a conversation with some natives who are making derogatory remarks about the government in power, as Contra leaders did in the case of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega.
The agent races to his “back-channel” communication system,7 reports directly to his boss in CIA headquarters, and then is urged to obtain more information and to broaden his sources; this is why the agent was sent there in the first place. So he gets more information, even if he has to encourage or generate it. This leads to the beginning of a clandestine operation. It is a reaction process, not a planned affair.
At this point, we recall National Security Action Memorandum #57, “Responsibility for Paramilitary Operations,” wherein it states: “A paramilitary operation. . . may be undertaken in support of an existing government friendly to the United States [as in the case of El Salvador] or in support of a rebel group seeking to overthrow a government hostile to us,” as in Nicaragua.
Those lines were written by Gen. Maxwell Taylor in his post-Bay of Pigs investigation letter to President Kennedy on June 13, 1961. They have always been the doctrine of the CIA and its close allies in the Army Special Warfare program.
With few if any changes, they were also the basis of the doctrine being promulgated by Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, the key policy official for plans regarding paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.
In the same memorandum, there is an important but little-noticed definition that plays directly into the hands of the CIA, even though Kennedy was attempting to refocus this type of activity onto the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said, “Small operations will often fall completely within the normal capability of one agency; the large ones may affect State, Defense, CIA, USIA [United States Information Agency], and possibly other departments and agencies.” What this says and what it means are clear enough. How it is applied becomes the problem.
All clandestine operations begin “small.” Thus, the proposed operation, when presented to the National Security Council for a decision, was sent to the CIA, because the operation was seen to be “small.” But no operation can remain “small” once the CIA begins to pour into the fray tens of millions of dollars and the tremendous military assets of the United States.
Over the years, the CIA has developed an efficient system of obtaining military equipment, manpower, overseas base facilities, and all the rest, ostensibly on a reimbursable basis, in order to carry out covert activities. The reimbursement is made by transferring hidden CIA funds in the Department of Defense accounts to DOD, thereby repaying all “out-of-pocket” expenses of the military. This complex but effective system has been in effect since 1949. For example, in Indonesia in 1958, the CIA was able, quite easily, to support a rebel force of more than forty thousand troops by using U.S. military assets. So what is “small”? And if it is not “small,” if it has got large enough to be transferred to the Department of Defense, how will that be done? How can anyone rescue the situation after it has got out of hand?
At what point should U.S. military forces be prepared, for example, to enter into paramilitary action in Nicaragua or Africa? It is an old military axiom that “as soon as the blood of the first soldier is shed on foreign soil the nation is at war.” The activities in Nicaragua were “small” when they began after the ouster of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The CIA mined a harbor. It supported antigovernment Contra rebels. It spent $20 million for related purposes. Before long, it had spent another $27 million and eventually went on to spend more than $100 million.
Inevitably, this action in Nicaragua would cross the line from “small” to “large.” Inevitably, American blood would be shed, and inevitably regular military forces would be called in to bail the Contras out, just as they were called into Vietnam in 1965 after the CIA and the OSS had worked there for two decades to escalate that conflict.
There are two enormous problems with this method of handling such activities:
“Reaction,” by definition, implies the lack of a plan and of an objective. This was the single greatest strategic failure of the Vietnam conflict. The United States had no reasonable military objective; it simply reacted to the situation it found there.
A false definition of the problem is the greatest failing of American administrations and explains why such adventures are rarely, if ever, successful and productive. Any military activity instigated as no more than a reaction to some minor event lacks the element of strategic planning that is needed to attain an objective.
The Third World or less-developed countries were poorly defined. Despite decades of propaganda that would have had us believe they lived in either the “Communist” or “pro-West” sphere, they were not dedicated members of the bipolar “Us or Them” political scheme.
The distinguishing feature of these smaller countries is that they are not broad-range manufacturers or producers. They do not make typewriters, radios or televisions, coffeepots, fabric, automobiles and trucks, etc. Their biggest business, as a nation, is the import-export business. Therefore, much of their national revenue is derived from customs fees, and much of their private wealth is derived from individual franchises for Coca-Cola, Ford automobiles, Singer sewing machines, and so forth. They are totally dependent upon such imports and exports.
In such an economy, the ins, regardless of politics, control these lucrative franchises, and the outs do not. This creates friction. It is based on pure economics and greed and has nothing to do with communism or capitalism.
Therefore, if the ins solicit franchises from businesses in the United States, they are called friendly and pro-Western. If they turn to other sources, they are designated the enemy. If they are the enemy, we have labeled them Communists.
The leaders of the Contras, who used to serve Somoza in Nicaragua, wanted their valuable U.S. franchises back. For this they were willing to kill. For this the CIA helped them kill. The CIA supported them because it supports U.S. business.
This may be an oversimplification, but only to a degree. The basic motivations are always the same. Money lies at the root—in the scenario above, the enormous amounts spent on military matériel for the Contras and for the follow-on U.S. troops provided more than adequate incentive for those who intended to make war in Nicaragua.
In Vietnam the money spent amounted to more than $220 billion. This is why an in-depth recapitulation of the Vietnam era is important in shedding light on the events of today. We have seen it all before. And we have had to pay for it all before, not only with dollars, but with the lives of 58,000 Americans who never returned from that tragic conflict.