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, Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson and his advisors reevaluated the ambiguously defined Vietnamese policy of the Kennedy administration and decided to expand our financialmilitary commitment.

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 planned bombing raids. The 64 bombing sorties that followed were limited to one day, so as to not give the appearance of overreaction to the Gulf of Tonkin provocation.

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 personnel. President Johnson has committed to a covert escalation plan which will allow him to introduce an additional 125,000 troops by next summer. Expected North Vietnamese provocations will help him push this troop commitment through Congress. The plan will allow for a large deployment of marines in the winter and spring of '65, and a large influx of army infantry in the summer. Johnson is also committed to sustained bombing raids into North Vietnam. The raids will begin in the late winterearly spring of '65. Again, Agency analysts believe that Johnson will commit to Vietnam for the long haul. The consensus is that he sees Vietnam as a way to establish his anti-Communist credentials to their fullest advantage and use them to counterbalance any political dissension he creates with his liberal domestic reforms.

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 planning to circumvent Premier Diem's anti-opium edict at the time of his death. Since the 11 / 1/63 coup, 1,800 opium dens have reopened in Saigon and 2,500 in the heavily Chinese enclave of Cholon (Cholon is 2.8 miles up the Ben Nghe Channel from Central Saigon). Premier Khanh has established a hands-off policy toward the dens, which will serve us well. It should be noted that Khanh is extremely malleable and beholden to our presence in South Vietnam. He loves American money and will not risk offending even adjunct Agency personnel such as our cadre. He is not a "puppet who pulls his own strings." I doubt if he'll last long, and I doubt that his successor(s) will give us any trouble.

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 personnel runner. I know you're anxious to start funneling money to the Cause, but we're going to accrue large operating expenses incountry and out, and I want to make sure we're cash fluid first. The Agency has a front-company in Australia that will trade Vietnamese piastres for U.S. dollars, and we may be able to utilize a Swiss bank-account system for the laundering of our ultimate profits.

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 personnel. Most ARVNS are highly corruptible and cannot be trusted around saleable narcotics.

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 personnel. Can you pouch me, Vegas to Arlington?

For the Cause,