Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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-50-Eisenhower administration. Now this wasn'ttrue throughout the administration at all,but there was a considerable group of peoplewho were in various executive slots justdown the second and third level who had beenthrough the . . . [Interruption]O'BRIEN: Well, Laos, as I understand it, is, with the impact of thecountry. Now, how do you look on the trainingof the Laotian army in late 1960--'59, '60--some of the activities of the Agency in Laos,as well as the army and through the PEO[Programs Evaluation Office] office and thingslike this? Is this the kind of thing that youenvision in terms of--I hate to use the term"nation building"--helping a country to helpitself, in helping people to help themselves?LANSDALE: Yes, as long as in the modern world the leadersof the country will think in terms of as largea military establishment as they can affordin a country. And they do this without anyadvice from anybody. This is just a natural,
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-51-self-preservation type of an impulse on their part. Then my thought is: They will be doing this. Then let's make the military establishment serve the country in a much bigger way than merely toting guns around and guarding borders. It's usually the organization that is nationwide, and there might not be any other organization that's nationwide in the country, such as agriculture, even the administrative structure that usually comes under the department or ministry of the Interior won't really have the manpower, the communications, and so forth, that the military forces do. So, given that, why not then get the military to start doing constructive things around and making full use of the manpower that you have anyhow. Have them be good military men as the very first requisite of this, but, given that, there's still energy and personnel, involved in that who have a lot of man-hours left over that could do other things, and essentially, this is what I was trying to get the American advisory missions
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-52-to do--not only the military advisory missions,but when other agencies would get in and beworking on these things, to themselves becomeinterested in the military doing such things,and aiding and abetting, including economicprojects and educational work and so on.O'BRIEN: Well, in this Laotian deterioration that takesplace, you know the competing people there--Phoumi [Nosavan Vongbichit] and Souvannah Phouma andall--how do you read that in 1960 just priorto the administration coming in? Do youHow do you see Phoumi; how do you seeSouvannah Phouma, as people? First of all;have you met them at any time?LANSDALE: Yes, yes, yes, I didn't know them well at all.I'd met them usually at formal gatheringsof one kind or another. The main thing thatI saw in Laos in the way of political stabilityactually stemmed out of the king of Laos thiswas the only unifying political force thatexisted there in the minds of all of the variousLao leaders whom I'd met. So when the othersstarted splitting and opposing one another, I
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-53-had already felt that our best bet was to turn to the king and force him to--or, not force, but to encourage him to taking the leadership role that would be the one thing acceptable to all these leaders. Instead of that, we were starting to become *parts-in partisan* ourselves there and playing off one guy against another, and Americans aren't good at that game. We have many Americans who think they are, but this, I think, is a little too foreign to our nature and we fell in love with the factions and people, almost unconscious of the fact that we were doing that. The paratroop leader there . . .O'BRIEN: Kong Le?LANSDALE: . . .Yes, Yeah, who kicked over a revolt, had spent the night before his coup with a group of American friends, and there wasn't a damn one of them that knew that he was going to have a coup in the morning. This type of a thing. I just found inconceivable. People get nervous and sort of absent-minded about what's happening at the time when they're planning an action
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-54-like that the next morning, and somebody thereamong the Americans should have been sensitiveenough to have said, "Well, aren't you feelingwell for something, you know, and had gottensome feeling on it. But this sort of gettingin bed with people socially and saying, He'sa good fellow," and "he's my friend," and excusingeverything is a common blindness, and this hadworried me in Laos quite a bit.O'BRIEN: Well, I get the impression from reading ofthis period that there really is some lackof coordination in the various efforts thatare there in other words, the ambassador isnot completely privy to what the Agency isdoing, and the Agency is not completely privyto what DOD is doing through the PEO office.Do you get that feeling? Maybe in regard[John F.]to the Parsons-Irwin-Reilly mission thatgoes out there, do you get any feeling over thatat all?LANDSALE: Yes, I'm trying to recall. . . We hit acrisis at that point, and the group that wentout--Parsons was on home leave, and we had a
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-55-meeting in the Pentagon in the secretary of Defenses office, and there were a mob of people there. There were--I can't quite recall now what prompted the meeting, but there was a crisis of some sort in Laos. And the JCS gave a briefing, that's right, as part of the thing, and it was on the Pathet Lao positioning, and they suddenly discovered that there were passes over the mountains that had some importance to the Ho Chi Minh trail, and this great discovery was being lectured on at this meeting. And at the time, the Secretary of Defense--I think, I wonder, that might have been [Thomas] Gates [Jr.] at the time-might have been, but whoever it was asked if I had a comment to make, and I said, "Take a look at that map that the JCS was showing us of Pathet Lao and the other situations on the thing" and I said, "it should tell everybody here just one thing. You've got an ambassador who is on home leave here he doesn't belong here he belongs out in Vientiane right this moment, and the rest of
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-56-you who are asking questions ought to havepeople out there with him who would tell youimmediately and take a first-hand look."And the a I remember Irwin was pickedright on the spot to go immediately, and saidto me on the side, "You and your big mouthyou know" [Laughter]O'BRIEN:Well, did you get involved in any of themeetings on Laos after the Kennedy adminis-tration comes in, and some of the jockeyingthat goes around?LANSDALE:Some of them, yes. I can't quite recallwhich meetings they were at the time. I wasin on some of the questions of the support of the Meos, the guerrilla forces.O'BRIEN:Well, how did you see in terms of a strategyfor the area? There is, as I read it, thereseems to be some various strategies proposed;one is, you know, going down the full roadbehind Phoumi and supporting Phoumi, andanother is the panhandle strategy--I've neverbeen able to quite understand what the pan-handle strategy was--that you know, rings
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-57-a bell.LANSDALE: Hmm, yeah well, hmm, my memory isn't too good on this thing. There was some talk at the time, there's high country across the Bolovens Plateau and so forth down in the south, and there was talk at the time of that being the dominant area, and what we should do was to make use of that and the high ground in Vietnam and so on, across into Thailand, and ensure that that state stayed in noncommunist hands.O'BRIEN: Well, there's also suggested in the Laotian crisis as early as 1961, the use of strategic bombing on supply routes, and even, as I understand it, to Hanoi, as early as that, and interdicting some of the supply lines, as well as the suggestion that subsequently in 1962 does become a reality the dropping of the SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] plan five, as I understand it. How did you feel about the Laotian crisis at that point, in terms of a strategy or a direction at which should work?
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-58-LANSDALE: Well, I had wanted the Laotians to defend their country, and I was all for the work with the Meos and Maoists and so on of doing it.Once it left that and started involving us Vietnamese or us, on bombing or anything else, I felt that the cost of saving some real estate would be too high to ever engage in, and on the bombing, I felt that as long as you had all of the communication with the people means in the hands of communist leaders such as in North Vietnam and then Hanoi where this was pushing, that anything overt such as aerial bombing that would then permit them to use that as a unifying force psychologically with the people would be dead wrong. I used to remind them of what [Winston] Churchill had done with the German bombing of Britain, and just on radio with the people, and here were leaders with complete access to radio and working with the people, and it would have a reverse effect, as far as trying to stop the ambitions and aims and so forth of the North Vietnamese, who after all, the guys organizing
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-59-the Pathet Lao and pushing on into the area.I felt that more could be done with thearmed forces of Laos themselves in makingthem more able to stand up for themselvesand defend their country. But if it couldn't,I couldn't see an intervention of any sortin there. Morally, we'd have been on a moralground then to turn around and start usingsome international moral pressure, through thepress and so forth, to sort of shame the NorthVietnamese out of their attempts. I'm agreat believer in exposing things to bringsuch pressure.O'BRIEN: Well, how do you see the relationship of Vietnamand Laos at that point, or do you?LANSDALE: Oh, yes. The passes and the Ho Chi Minh trailin bringing things down was one of the keythings on this. But again, there was eventalk at the time of taking Vietnamese troopsin there, secretly and using them upto try and stop that, and I was opposed tothat I didn't want to see intervention likethat from the outside.
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-60-O'BRIEN: Well, when does some of the covert activity, interms of the use of some of the Montagnards yards-in interdicting those supply lines in Laos, you know, from Vietnam, start? Is that going on in the late Eisenhower administration, or does it begin in the Kennedy administration?LANSDALE: I think it was the Kennedy administration there had been a little of it, or there had been talk of it,in the Eisenhower administration. There had been thoughts along that line by the top Vietnamese leaders-1955-1956-and I remember President Diem's brother, went to-in his older brother-went into Laos and about '55 or maybe '56, and had come up with a scheme very similar to that at the time. He had talked about the mountain people of Laos being akin to the mountain people of Vietnam, and wouldn't it be good to get some of our mountain people in with them, and together they could be trained.O'BRIEN: Yes, well, you're in Vietnam in the middle of the fifties, and then you go back in 1960 in the late Eisenhower administration. What's
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-61-changed, or has anything?LANSDALE: Oh, a great deal. Excuse me. [Interruption]O'BRIEN: What changes do you find?LANSDALE: Well, the main change was in a growing isolation from reality of the constituency of thePresident of Vietnam, a repression of, you might say, a loyal opposition or a noncommunist. opposition to him in political terms. There were professionally some among the military that was taking the Vietnamese military apart from their people more than it had been when I had left, because I had gotten them working very closely with a number of projects and a growing isolation of the American embassy in particular, but including some of the American agencies, from the Vietnamese officialdom, and taking a very strange form of concentrating on gossip essentially--gossip as much as fact--about oh, what the-hell-is-the word-I'm-trying to think of, of misdeeds
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-62-Vietnameseand so forth by public officials orpeople connected with the regime in Vietnamso that the information-gathering processof the United States there was devoting anexorbitant amount of time on sort of nitpickingon the people that were in power. In the rela-tionships, such as the ambassador with thepresident of the country, the ambassadorwould go into details of malfeasance in officeand so forth, or mishandling of funds by theVietnamese on an internal matter, and thepresident would have to correct him and say,"you don't have all the facts," and the ambass-ador would say, "Yes, I do, too." This to mewas very poor. I felt that we had someAmericans that were close enough to the topofficials of the Vietnamese (who weren'tpresent in the country always), who shouldbe brought there and told, "Look, we under-stand these guys are doing something wrong.
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-63-Can you go in and get them to start doing things right, as a friend of theirs?" rather than going and trying to scold them and something and getting the backs up of people, and they'd figure, "Well, these damn nosey Americans only got half the facts, and since they don't understand us that well, the hell with them. We aren't going to do what they wanto" I just felt that we weren't playing a very wise ballgame there at the time, on the American side. I also felt that Diem was paying too much attention to similar types of his own people, his intelligence people, who (in turn) were in turn telling him what the Americans were doing too damn much, or were bringing in alarming news about his own subjects--and particularly political oppositionists--and I suspect, manufacturing cases against them so that they could take actions and he, in turn, was getting too much
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-64-secondhand from people, and this tended to isolate him more, Since his main intelli--gence officer was his brother, [Ngo Dinh] Nhu, who was an ambitious person, too. I felt thatit was a poor arrangement on the Vietnameseside. I personally urged Diem at the timeto get in touch with some of his opposition,and at which point he asked me where I hadbeen at certain times of the day during myvisit there and I said, "I was talking toyour opposition, and I'm not going to tellyou who it was or where I was, but just themere fact that you know that shows that youwere having me trailed around and you knowI'm a friend of your country's, and I'mtrying to help all of you succeed here, andyou happen to be the elected leader, and youjolly well better start reflecting what yourpeople desire, and if you spend your timeand money and efforts and so forth watching
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-65-a guy like me, I'm sure you're doing a lotmore for someone else you really suspectandO BRIEN: How would he react to something like this?LANSDALE: Listen, I was told by a number of peoplethat I was about the only one that reallyever talked to him in this manner, and hewould listen and at the time, one of thepeople most critical of him was his vice-president, and I went over and saw the vice-president, whose name was [Nguyen Ngoc] Tho,and Tho immediately started telling me thatthe president had spies all over his officeand in his staff and as he was telling methis, one of the clerks was serving us tea,and I said, "Is this guy one of the president'sspies?" and he said, "Probably, I think so."[Laughter] Maybe he'll go back and reportto him,this one. I said, "When was the last timeyou two talked to each other?" Well, it had
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-64-secondhand from people, and this tended to isolate him more, Since his main intelligence officer was his brother, [Ngo Dinh] Nhu, who was an ambitious person, too. I felt that it was a poor arrangement on the Vietnameseside. I personally urged Diem at the time to get in touch with some of his opposition, and at which point he asked me where I had been at certain times of the day during my visit there and I said, I was talking to your opposition, and I'm not going to tell you who it wa's or where I was, but just the mere fact that you know that shows that you were having me trailed around and you know I'm a friend of your country's,and I'm trying to help all of you succeed here, and you happen to be the elected leader, and you jolly well better start reflecting what your people desire, and if you spend your time and money and efforts and so forth watching
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-65-a guy like me, I'm sure you're doing a lot more for someone else you really suspect.O BRIEN: How would he react to something like this?LANSDALE: Listen, I was told by a number of people that I was about the only one that really ever talked to him in this manner, and he would listen and at the time, one of the people most critical of him was his vice-president, and I went over and saw the vice-president, whose name was [Nguyen Ngoc] Tho, and Tho immediately started telling me that the president had spies all over his office and in his staff and as he was telling me this, one of the clerks was serving us tea, and I said, "Is this guy one of the president's spies?" and he said, "Probably, I think so."[Laughter] Maybe he'll go back and report to him,this one. I said "When was the last time you two talked to each other?" Well, it had
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-66-been months, so I went back to Diem, and I jumped him. I said, "You've got a vice-president who you've made responsible for all the economic development of the country, and I know that you consider that very important. You haven't talked to him for a long time, and I forced him to tell me when he'd done it last, so I said, "Well, pick up the telephone and call him over here your first free time, and you sit down and have a long talk with him." So he did it. He picked up the phone, and I got the two of them together again. He was really out of touch. He promised me at the time to get in touch with some of the political opposition, he swore up and down "well, he wasn't oppressing anyone, and I said, You don't know what your own police are doing, then, and I gave him the list of names of people who were in prison, who had been arrested at midnight and pulled out of their homes and
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-67-so on and he promised to look into theircases immediately and do something aboutito And I said, "I've gotten this frompeople who in the opposition to you, but Idon't know whether you've gotten any reports."He said he'd never heard of these cases,and I think he was telling the truth. Hehad no reason to dissemble with me at allon these things.O'BRIEN: Well, why is this? Is it the development ofan independent bureaucracy, or is there adegree of U.S. influence on, let's say, theNhu intelligence knew.LANSDALE: There was probably some. I think bythat time the Vietnamese intelligence wasway beyond any control by U.S. intelligence,who initially had been helping it, and Diem'sbother Nhu was really--really had the bit inhis teeth and was his own man. And I suspect,initially, he was really trying to serve his
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-68-brother, and he was doing it by trying to get the goods on everybody working for his brother throughout, the government and anybody opposed to his brother and the intelligence people, picking it up, discovered that if they brought in bad news about some guy that the brother didn't like, he'd pay them and believe it. So I'm sure that there was a lot of manufactured evidence in the intelligence take that was coming in and I don't think the Americans were screening any of that type of information because it went right into the palace, and there was a big room behind the president's office that had many files and was the main personnel dossier type of file place.O'BRIEN: Well, you're critical of the MAAG [Military Assistance Advisory Group] operation there. What's wrong with it, in the late 50'sLANSDALE: Well, I felt that MAAG under "hanging" Sam [[Samuel T.) Williams in the late 50's was
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-69-an/unusually well-run American military operation. There were some unusual things being done that made it so. One of them was one of the best ideas I've ever bumped into. 9General Williams brought over the chief of staff of the Vietnamese army whenever the American advisors who at that time were out in the countryside, but at fairly high levels, and were running training camps more than advising on operations or anything.--But when they would come in once a month for a weekend in Saigon, Williams would get the Vietnamese Chief of Staff to come in and talk to them. The Vietnamese chief of staff at that time was General [Tran Van] Don. Don was quite diplomatic, but had a way of being candid in his remarks and not having them hurt too much when they were told. He would leave out so on, but he would tell these Americans what
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-70-their Vietnamese counterparts in the Viet-namese army and so forth thought of them, andtheir work, and their advice, and the reactionsthroughout the armed forces to them. Thiswas the one part of the monthly gatheringswith Americans around that everybody wouldstop dozing off or thinking of something elseand would sit up and pay attention becausethey were the subject of the talk, of course.This was a very healthy thing.O'BRIEN: Yes, I can feel it I would be oLANSDALE: : because even though it was tough diplo-matically, the most sordid truth, world thehardest facts would come out in theAnd then Williams himself had been inVietnam a long enough time by then--I forgethow long; it may be three years at the time,four years--so that when he moved around theVietnamese army, it wasn't only just the topstaff officers and commanders who would bewith him, but I noticed in a visit there--I
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-71-think it was '59--that sergeants and juniorlieutenants and so on would come up and talk9to him and I'd moved in close enough toeavesdrop on some of the conversations, and;Λ.these were personal problems, family problems,and financial problems and so forth thatوindividuals had and this was a very unusual199relationship for an American to have. Andsince the American was also running ourterenghout,advisory effort too, I just figured that thisΛconstant feeding and contact with the echelonsof Vietnamese military that were down belowthe big wheels was again a very healthyinfluence that was constantly at work withhim. So that he would know very well what:9:was going on in places. Some of these problems--personal problems--would actually involve themilitary work that was going forward, peoplegriping that something was wrong and so on.and they were doing this out of a friendship,=
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-72-and he was not to tell on their bosses or anything, but usually personal worries and concern that *wastage* or something going wrong would affect them. Later they moved in an educator--a military educator--[Paul D.] Harkins, and.O'BRIEN: Well, [Lt. Gen. Lionel C.] McGarr comes in there before that, doesn't he?LANSDALE: McGarr. It was McGarr, yes, you're right. It was before Harkins. McGarr. And McGarr built up a staff to work on counter insurgency and probably put together the best staff that studies on counter-insurgency than any American military men have ever done.O'BRIEN: Is that right?LANSDALE: He got American military men who had been guerrilla leaders in the Philippines, for example, in World War II, and in Burma and so on, and in Europe, and switched most of his work over into compiling "How to Do it" manuals, but I've never seen the finished