Spycraft - Melton [160]
In response to the two reports, President Ford issued Executive Order 11905 that contained the provision: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Subsequently, a revised 1981 Executive Order 12333 governing intelligence activities reaffirmed the prohibition: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” The EO added that “no agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order,” language that explicitly prohibited “indirect participation” in assassination.
Serious public discussion of assassination as a U.S. policy option ended with these Executive Orders but it would be rekindled after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. A December 2001 Newsweek poll found that 65 percent of those surveyed supported assassination of al-Qaeda leaders. The dramatic change in public opinion likely reflects the contrast between the potential danger perceived from Castro and the reality that al-Qaeda, a non-state organization, carried out attacks on American cities, airlines, and civilians. Even in that environment, however, it remains unlikely the U.S. public would support authorized covert assassination operations against the head of a recognized foreign government.
CHAPTER 17
War by Any Other Name
We had a war going, but nobody knew.
—OTS officer in Vietnam, 1962
TSD officer Pat Jameson was sitting on a hard bench in Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport in 1962 studying the aircraft traffic as he waited for another Agency officer’s flight to arrive. A Pan American plane landed for refueling and Jameson watched as a group of American tourists disembarked. Walking across the tarmac through the glare of the Southeast Asian sun, they made their way to the promising shade of the drab building, eager to see what exotic souvenirs the ramshackle terminal might hold.
Perhaps drawn by an American, or at least Western face, one of the tourists approached Jameson. “I hear there’s a war going on down here, is that right?” the tourist asked Jameson casually, as if he were inquiring about the weather in some distant city.
Jameson nodded toward a corner of the tarmac. “Look out there. You see that? There’s a bunch of people being taken from that plane to ambulances,” he said. “And there’s some new guys with fatigue creases in their pants getting on that same plane to go up-country to replace those dead and injured ones. That’s the story that we’re living with here.”
“God, I never knew that!” the tourist exclaimed as he stared at the scene.
More than forty years later, Jameson reflected on a scene he remembered vividly, “We had a war going, but nobody knew.”
That a tourist on a brief layover was unaware of the situation in Vietnam was not surprising. For most of the American public in 1962, Vietnam was an obscure and distant country of little consequence. Seemingly just another former European colony in turmoil, news of Vietnam’s problems was usually confined to the back pages of the morning paper. The French Indochina War of the early 1950s had been largely forgotten or ignored outside of foreign affairs wonks at the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon.
For those concerned about Vietnam’s history and future, 1954 was the year keenly remembered. That spring