JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

On June 3, 1963, ignoring evidence that implicated itself, the CIA reported in Washington “the weight of evidence indicating that government cannon-fire caused the deaths in Hue” on May 8 that had ignited the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam.[78] Ngo Dinh Diem, on the other hand, insisted the deaths “were due to a Viet Cong terrorist grenade.”[79] However, as we have seen, neither the Saigon government nor the Viet Cong possessed the kind of powerful plastic explosives that decapitated the victims at Hue on May 8. It was only the CIA that had such an explosive, as admitted later by Captain Scott, the U.S. military adviser responsible for the bombing.[80] Graham Greene had exposed earlier the CIA’s preoccupation with plastic explosives. In The Quiet American, Greene dramatized the Agency’s use of plastic bombs in Saigon in 1952 to scapegoat the Viet Minh as terrorists. The pattern was repeated in Hue, with Diem the propaganda target. The CIA’s June 3 report blamed Diem for the Hue fatalities, which had in fact polarized him and the Buddhists, discredited his government, and derailed a possible Kennedy–Diem alliance for a negotiated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Both Kennedy and Diem had been outmaneuvered by the CIA.