The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [113]
“We knew that Do Minh Kha was in Laos during September. We watched him as a matter of routine; he is a very high-ranking officer and we wanted to know what he was up to. One of my agents, Vuong Van Luong, was among the U.S. assets who were sent to Vientiane to try to find out what Do Minh Kha was doing there. Luong failed to find out, and so did all our other agents. Do just stayed in a house in Vientiane for three days with a beautiful young Vietnamese woman. When nothing more than that happened, we assumed he was shacking up. Luong did manage to take photographs of the girl, coming in and out of the house with Do. The girl wasn’t in our files. We couldn’t identify her. We now know that the girl was not his mistress but his daughter. Do and Nicole met in Vientiane in September for the first time since the girl left Hanoi as a child.
“We weren’t able to wire the house in Vientiane, and it probably wouldn’t have done us much good if we had. Do is too professional to have talked, even to his daughter, in a strange house where there might be listening devices. However, Luong reported that Do and Nicole would go for walks together around the garden of the house in Vientiane. We know now what Nicole asked her father to do. And we know that he agreed.
“Nicole told her father about the family’s plan to kill President Kennedy in revenge for the deaths of Diem and Nhu. She showed him the horoscopes, probably. She asked for his help in the name of the family. They code-named the operation against Kennedy ‘the tears of autumn.’ That phrase, ‘the tears of autumn,’ can be rendered in Vietnamese as a woman’s name, Lê Thu.
“Lê Thu was the death name of Do’s wife. As you saw in the report, the Vietnamese change their names when they die. There was a kind of double poetry, and a good deal of psychology, in the choice of this code name. At first I thought it was a play on the name of Madame Nhu—she’s called Lê Xuan, which means ‘the tears of spring.’
It was autumn in America when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22. The code name had two purposes—Lê Thu because of the guilt it would evoke in Do Minh Kha, who had sent his wife away to be killed. And ‘tears of autumn’ because Kennedy was going to die in autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Lê Thu was not a secure code name—it contains a clue that led me to Do Minh Kha, and through him to everything else. But the family didn’t think that security mattered, because they weren’t going to use the phrase outside the family. What mattered to them was that it gave a name to their collective hatred for Kennedy and for Americans in general.
“What the family needed from Do was precisely what gave us our chance to penetrate the operation. They needed a cutout, a go-between, who could activate Kennedy’s assassin. They couldn’t do it themselves because the assassin could not know, could not be permitted to guess, who he was working for. It was a matter of security—and, more important, a matter of motivation. An assassin being approached by the Vietnamese would know at once who was using him to kill Kennedy. They couldn’t have that. Also, they are realists—they knew that even Oswald probably wouldn’t have done it for a Vietnamese, let alone a South Vietnamese. Oswald would have believed Diem was a Nazi, and his sympathies lay elsewhere.
“So they needed a cutout who was a white man. Do Minh Kha is in charge of the section of North Vietnamese intelligence