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A 12-man "Military Revolutionary Council" took over and then succumbed to internal squabbles. Concurrent with this, riots swept the south and steady streams of Viet Cong infiltrated from the north. ARVN troops deserted in large numbers. Concurrent with this, Ke
General Nguyen Khanh toppled the "Military Revolutionary Council" on 1/28/64. ("Bloodless" describes it best. The other generals abdicated and returned to their military fiefdoms.) Concurrently, the Viet Cong stepped up its southern incursion, defeating the ARVN in several encounters and staging a series of terrorist attacks in Saigon, including the bombing of a movie theater, where three Americans were killed. Throughout early '64, the Viet Cong forces doubled to 170,000 (mostly recruited in the south) with a commensurate improvement in their ordnance: Red Chinese and Soviet-supplied AK-47s, mortars and rocket launchers.
Secretary McNamara visited Vietnam in March and toured the south in a propaganda effort to bolster Premier Khanh. McNamara returned to Washington. He proposed and secured President Johnson's approval of an "action memorandum." The memorandum called for increased financial aid, to provide the ARVN with more aircraft and other ordnance. Premier Khanh was allowed to stage cross-border raids against Communist strongholds in Laos and to study the feasibility of possible incursions into Cambodia to interdict Viet Cong supply routes. Pentagon specialists started pinpointing North Vietnamese targets for U.S. bombing raids.
Ambassador Lodge resigned to pursue a career in domestic politics. President Johnson appointed General William C. Westmoreland as Commander of the U.S. Military Advisory Group (MACV) in Vietnam. Westmoreland remains committed to a greatly expanded American presence. There is now a formidable U.S. contingent in the south, among them servicemen, accountants, doctors, mechanics and sundry others involved in dispensing the $500,000,000 that Johnson has pledged in fiscal '64 aid. Much of the U.S. donated food, weaponry, medicine, gasoline and fertilizer has ended up on the black market. The U.S. presence in South Vietnam is rapidly becoming the foundation of the South Vietnamese economy.
Johnson has approved a covert plan called "OPLAN 34-A," which calls for larger incursions north of the 17th parallel, an expanded propaganda effort and covert ops to intercept Communist ships delivering material to the Viet Cong in the south. The Gulf of Tonkin incident (8/1-8/3/64, wherein two U.S. destroyers were fired upon by Communist seacraft and returned said fire) was largely a staged and improvised event that Johnson capitalized upon to get congressional sanction for pla
As of this (10/16/64) date, there are just under 25,000 "advisors" in Vietnam, and the bulk of them are, in fact, combat troops. These troops are Army Special Forces, Airborne Rangers and support perso
This overall escalation should serve to cloak our in-country activities. Opium and its derivatives have fueled the Vietnamese economy going back to its early French-colonial days. Intelligence units of the French Army ran the opium trade and managed most of the opium dens in Saigon and Cholon from '51 to '54. The opium traffic has financed dozens of coups and coup attempts, and the late Ngo Dinh Nhu was pla
The crop source for our potential merchandise is situated in Laos, near the Vietnamese border. The fields near Ba Na Key are rich in the limestone soil component that poppy bulbs thrive on, and dozens of large-scale farms are situated there. Ba Na Key is close to the North Vietnamese border, which invalidates it for our purposes. A strip of acreage further south, near Saravan, is limestone-rich and accessible to the South Vietnamese border. Several poppy camps are situated near Saravan. They are run by Laotian "Warlords" who employ "Armies" of overseers, who work "Cliques" of Laotian/Vietnamese "Slaves," who harvest the bulbs. I've been grooming an English-speaking Laotian named Tran Lao Dinh, and my plan is to have you and Tran purchase or somehow co-opt the services of the Laotian warlords.
The standard procedure is to refine the poppy sap into a morphine-base that can be further refined into heroin. My goal would be to accomplish that at the farm(s) and ship the base to your chemist's lab in Saigon. We could fly it or move it by PT boat, which would require a pilot-navigator familiar with Vietnamese waterways. The standard way to move morphine-base out of Vietnam is via freighter to Europe and China. That's counterproductive in our case. We need your chemist to refine it in-country, in order to reduce the bulk size and render it easier to ship to Las Vegas. Please think of a way we can courier the finished product stateside, and limit our exposure on both ends.
Some closing thoughts.
Remember, I'm in this with six other agents, and we're Stage-1 Covert, with no Agency sanction. You'll meet the other men on a need-to-know basis. You're the operations boss and I'm the perso
Let me stress this now. No morphine-base or fully refined merchandise should be allowed to slip into the hands of the U.S. military-for accountability's sake-or into the hands of ARVN perso
I think you'll like my end of the cadre. I've co-opted an Army 1st Lt. named Preston Chaffee. He's a language whiz, Airbornecertified and an all-around good scout. He's my projected liaison to the ARVNs, the Saigon politicos and Premier Khanh.
I need to assess your projected plans and vet your chosen perso
For the Cause,