JFK's Forgotten Crisis

Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War

Bruce Riedel

• Editorial: Brookings Institution Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780815727002
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Intelligence & Espionage

Bruce Riedel provides new perspective and insights into Kennedy's forgotten crisis in the most dangerous days of the cold war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis defined the presidency of John F. Kennedy. But during the same week that the world stood transfixed by the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, Kennedy was also consumed by a war that has escaped history's attention, yet still significantly reverberates today: the Sino-Indian conflict.

As well-armed troops from the People's Republic of China surged into Indian-held territory in October 1962, Kennedy ordered an emergency airlift of supplies to the Indian army. He engaged in diplomatic talks that kept the neighboring Pakistanis out of the fighting. The conflict came to an end with a unilateral Chinese cease-fire, relieving Kennedy of a decision to intervene militarily in support of India.

Bruce Riedel, a CIA and National Security Council veteran, provides the first full narrative of this crisis, which played out during the tense negotiations with Moscow over Cuba. He also describes another, nearly forgotten episode of U.S. espionage during the war between India and China: secret U.S. support of Tibetan opposition to Chinese occupation of Tibet. He details how the United States, beginning in 1957, trained and parachuted Tibetan guerrillas into Tibet to fight Chinese military forces. The United States did not abandon this covert support until relations were normalized with China in the 1970s.

Riedel tells this story of war, diplomacy, and covert action with authority and perspective. He draws on newly declassified letters between Kennedy and Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, along with the diaries and memoirs of key players and other sources, to make this the definitive account of JFK's forgotten crisis. This is, Riedel writes, Kennedy's finest hour as you have never read it before.

CHAPTER ONE

IKE AND INDIA, 1950–60

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is hallowed ground in America. In July 1863 it was the scene of a major battle in America's Civil War. The decisive moment in that epic battle came on its third day when the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launched a massive assault on the center of the Union Army of the Potomac. This assault, known as Pickett's Charge, failed disastrously: half the attacking force were wounded or killed, and the rebel army never again invaded the North.

On December 17, 1956, President Dwight David Eisenhower, who owned a farm in Gettysburg, took his houseguest, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to visit the spot from which Pickett's Charge was launched. Then as now a large monument topped with an equestrian statute of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee marks the spot. The two men spent the better part of an hour looking at the site of Pickett's Charge as the president explained the significance of the Civil War to American history, culture, and politics.

Then they returned to Eisenhower's farm just a mile away. In fact, Eisenhower had bought the farm in 1950 because it was close to the battlefield. The original farm house had served as a temporary hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers during the battle. Ike, as he was called, had first visited Gettysburg in 1915 as a West Point military academy cadet. From his living room he could see the ridge where Lee's statue stood in the distance.

Nehru was spending the night at the farm so the two leaders could spend time together in a relaxed private venue.¹ It was a challenging visit; the two men were world-famous leaders, but worlds apart in their thinking. Eisenhower had led the D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944 that defeated Nazi Germany and believed he was engaged in another life-and-death struggle with the communist world in the 1950s. Nehru had been jailed for thirteen years in British prisons in India for fighting for independence from Great Britain. He had led the “Quit India” movement during World War II, seeking to sabotage the British war effort and colonial government, which ultimately helped to bring independence for his country. In the 1950s Nehru was the leader of the nonaligned movement that sought to unite the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa in a neutral bloc during the cold war. At that time the Indian press portrayed America as a hot-tempered imperialist power; the U.S. press portrayed India as soft on communism and weak willed.

Yet as the leaders of the two largest democracies in the world, both Ike and Nehru knew they needed to work together despite their differences, and the trip to Gettysburg was intended to allow time for a quiet and candid exchange of views free from the glare of the press. The president prepared carefully for the event; he had the White House and State Department ascertain Nehru's food and drink preferences, for example. It turned out that the leader of the world's largest Hindu country liked filet mignon and enjoyed an occasional Scotch as long as it was all in private. Nehru's daughter, Indira, accompanied him to the farm and reportedly shared his food preferences.²

By his own admission, Eisenhower was fascinated with India, although in 1956 he had not yet visited the country. He was also fascinated by Nehru, whom he regarded like most Americans at the time as “a somewhat inexplicable and occasionally exasperating personality” because he often seemed to condemn American and British actions more vigorously than he condemned Soviet behavior. ³ In the fall of 1956, for example, Nehru had strongly condemned the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt while more mildly criticizing the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Just before his visit to the United States, Nehru had met with two key visitors in New Delhi in November. First he met with Tibet's new young monarch, the Dalai Lama, who had left his palace in Lhasa to visit India and was considering whether to seek political asylum to escape China's invasion of his homeland. He asked Nehru to raise the issue of China's takeover of Tibet in his subsequent visit with Eisenhower. Nehru's second visitor was the prime minister of China, Zhou Enlai, who urged Nehru to tell the Dalai Lama to return to his palace and pressed India not to interfere in what he called China's internal affairs. The Dalai Lama did return to Tibet in March 1957.⁴

The two leaders spent fourteen hours talking in Gettysburg, and Eisenhower wrote down fourteen pages of notes on the talks when he got back to the White House. In private he found Nehru much more critical of Soviet behavior in Hungary than he had been in public. Nehru was “horrified” at the Soviet invasion and predicted that it “spelled the eventual death knell of international communism, because ‘nationalism is stronger than communism.’”⁵ But Nehru, Eisenhower concluded, would always be tougher on European and American actions, which reminded him of British imperialism, than on Russian and Chinese activities, which were often undertaken in support of anti-imperialist nationalist movements in the developing world.

China was a major topic of their discussions. Nehru pressed Eisenhower to support giving Communist China the seat in the United Nations Security Council that Nationalist China had been given in 1945 at the end of World War II, making it one of the five permanent members of the Council with the right to veto any resolution it did not approve. It was “only logical that any government controlling six hundred million people will sooner or later have to be brought into the council of nations,” Nehru argued. The prime minister dismissed any possibility that China would attack India, given the “fortunate location of the Himalayan mountain chain” on their 1,800 miles of common border. India could not afford the cost of building a defense along this long border: Taking part in an arms race would jeopardize its hopes of development. Better, Nehru concluded, that India stay neutral in the cold war and seek to build friendly ties with China.⁶ Eisenhower, with China's role in the Korean War still fresh in his memory, refused to budge on China and the UN seat. There is no record in the Eisenhower notes of Nehru's raising the Dalai Lama's request for help against China's occupation of Tibet.

Nehru was critical of U.S. arms sales to Pakistan, but he was confident that the two South Asian states could ultimately resolve their differences, including the dispute over Kashmir. He was more critical of Portugal, which still was holding onto its small colony in India at Goa. Because Portugal was a NATO member and an American ally, Nehru pressed Ike to get Lisbon to let go of its vestiges of empire.

The two did not come to agreement on all issues or even on most, but Eisenhower concluded that he “liked Prime Minister Nehru; Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was not easy to understand: few people are, but his was a personality of unusual contradictions.”⁷ The two leaders left the farm with a much better appreciation of each other's point of view and were more inclined to understand each other's position than before. Nehru's preeminent biographer, Stanley Wolpert, later wrote that the “two days of top secret talks helped defuse the world conflagration in late 1956 and turned the tide of Indian-U.S. relations.”⁸ That may be a bit of an exaggeration. The two democracies remained estranged for decades to come, but the summit did at least clear the air between the two leaders.

KOREA

Ike owed his presidency to the Korean War. After twenty years of Democrats in the White House, the war hero Eisenhower was elected on the promise that he would go to Korea to end an unpopular war that Americans were desperate to conclude. The war was the backdrop for U.S. policy and intelligence in Asia in the second half of the twentieth century and is an important place to start in understanding the CIA's role in India and Tibet that shaped Kennedy's forgotten crisis in 1962.

The American intelligence community's experience with the People's Republic of China and North Korea began with a disaster, a catastrophic intelligence failure in 1950 that cost the lives of thousands of Americans. Worse, it was a self-imposed disaster—the result of terrible intelligence management, not the poor collection or analysis of information. To add insult to injury the government of India had warned the United States that disaster loomed, but was ignored.

Mao Zedong formally announced the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949. After decades of civil war and struggle against Japan, Mao restored the unity of China and made himself the unquestioned dictator of the world's most populous nation. It was an amazing triumph both for Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, which had been forced only fifteen years before to abandon most of Chinese territory to its domestic and foreign enemies and to retreat in the famous Long March across 6,000 miles in 370 days to the remote northern province of Yenan in 1934.

A year after the creation of the PRC, Mao made two historic decisions. On October 7, 1950, he sent Chinese troops across the border into Tibet, the remote Himalayan kingdom between China and India that had achieved something close to de facto independence during China's long decline in the nineteenth century. At first the invasion was limited to border areas, but gradually China exerted more and more control over Tibet, as described later.

At the same time Mao made another historic decision: China would enter the Korean War and fight the United States and its United Nations allies for control of the Korean peninsula. The war in Korea had begun on June 25, 1950, when communist North Korea invaded the South. Two days later the UN Security Council agreed to send troops to defend the South; Russia, which at that time was boycotting the Security Council, thus failed to veto the troop deployment. More than twenty nations ultimately contributed troops to the UN fighting force. Mao had not been party to North Korea's plans and was only told of the invasion after the fact. Russia, however, was North Korea's closest partner at the start of the war, and Kim Il Sung, North Korea's communist dictator, did obtain Russian permission to attack. Joseph Stalin, not Mao, was thus the decider.

Within days of crossing the border, the North Koreans routed the southern army and captured the South's capital at Seoul. President Harry Truman decided to send American troops to prevent the complete defeat of the Republic of Korea, ordering his commander in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, to send U.S. troops then stationed in Japan to defend the South. In September MacArthur, a hero of World War II, stopped the North Korean advance and then launched an amphibious attack behind enemy lines at Inchon, which recaptured Seoul and led to the rout of the North Korean army. MacArthur's troops fought with the UN force.

The United States was uncertain about how to proceed after recapturing Seoul. MacArthur wanted to pursue the defeated North Koreans back across the 38th parallel, the prewar border, and march all the way to the Yalu River, Korea's historic border with China. The South Korean government was even more eager to move northward and reunite the country. However, many in Washington and other Western capitals, including London, were more cautious and worried that moving into the North would provoke the Chinese. MacArthur, in control of the troops on the scene, prevailed, taking them on the march to the Yalu.

Mao decided in early October to send his army south across the Yalu River and fight MacArthur's forces. On October 8, 1950, Mao told Kim Il Sung that Chinese troops were on their way and that he had ordered them to cross the Yalu to “repel the invasion launched by the American imperialists and their running dogs.”⁹ The Chinese Communist Forces (or CCF as they were referred to in the war) were commanded by one of Mao's comrades from the Long March, Peng Dehuai, and they secretly moved into North Korea in mid-October. By late November Peng had 400,000 CCF troops in more than thirty divisions in North Korea.¹⁰

The American army in Korea and Japan, the Eighth Army, was poorly prepared for the war. The occupation troops in Japan who were rushed to the Korean front were not combat ready; many of the officers were too old for frontline battlefield conditions. Training was “slipshod and routine.”¹¹ The relatively easy victory over North Korea at Inchon had reinforced a sense of complacency among the commanders and GIs that the war was all but over. MacArthur promised that the troops would be home by Christmas 1950.

Faulty Intelligence

MacArthur had always understood that if you “control intelligence, you control decision making.”¹² He had built an intelligence community in his area of command that listened attentively to what he wanted and gave him intelligence that reinforced his already held views. MacArthur wanted total control of the war and its execution, not second-guessing by his subordinates or outside interference by Washington, especially by the White House and the Pentagon. If his Tokyo command headquarters were solely responsible for collecting and assessing intelligence on the enemy, then MacArthur alone could decide how big the enemy threat was and thus what to do about it.

MacArthur's authority put America's relatively new civilian intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, in an awkward position. It was not permitted to have a representative in Tokyo or participate in preparing intelligence estimates for the Eighth Army. During World War II, MacArthur had done the same thing, excluding the CIA's predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), from his South West Pacific command. MacArthur, who never spent a single night in Korea during the war, preferring to sleep in his headquarters in Japan, wanted no outside intelligence challenger. As one historian of the war wrote later, “Only after the great and catastrophic failure on the whereabouts and intentions of China's armies would the CIA finally be allowed into the region.”¹³

MacArthur's intelligence chief, or G2, was General Charles Willoughby, who had been with his commander since serving in the Philippines in 1939, before World War II. A self-styled admirer of the general, Willoughby later wrote a sycophantic biography of MacArthur that was more than a thousand pages long. He was born in Germany as Karl Weidenbach and styled himself a Prussian, a most unusual role model for an American officer in the wake of two wars against Germany, but one he relished, even occasionally wearing a monocle.¹⁴ He was also an admirer of Spain's fascist military dictator Francisco Franco. One prominent CIA officer in the early 1950s, Frank Wisner, said Willoughby was “all ideology and almost never any facts.”¹⁵

In June 1950 Willoughby assured MacArthur that North Korea would not invade the South, despite alarms raised by then-CIA director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter.¹⁶ In the fall of that year Willoughby's office refused to believe or confirm reports that thousands of CCF troops were in North Korea. Even when Chinese prisoners were captured, Willoughby dismissed them as a few experts or advisers, not as a group of soldiers. The G2 in Tokyo recognized that some Chinese divisions had entered the North, but argued that they were not full-strength combat units. Willoughby “doctored the intelligence in order to permit MacArthur's forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, to the banks of the Yalu,” with no contrary or dissenting voices heard in Tokyo or Washington.¹⁷ The Tokyo estimate of the number of CCF forces in Korea was less than one-tenth the reality.

On October 15, 1950, MacArthur had met with President Truman on Wake Island in the mid-Pacific. The general told the president that the war would be over by Thanksgiving and most troops would be home by Christmas. When Truman asked, “What will be the attitude of Commie China?” MacArthur said it would not intervene. Even if China tried, it could not get more than 50,000 troops across the Yalu River, MacArthur promised, citing his G2's intelligence estimate. In fact, by October 19, 260,000 CCF soldiers had already crossed into Korea.¹⁸

Even the first encounters with Chinese forces on the battlefield did not shake the faulty intelligence estimate. In late October the Eighth Army fought a bitter and costly battle with CCF forces at Unsan in the North. The Americans were routed, but then the Chinese pulled back. They wanted to entice the Eighth Army northward to trap it far from its supply lines and to isolate it near the Chinese frontier. Willoughby dismissed the Unsan battle as unimportant and continued to claim that the Chinese would not intervene in force. So did MacArthur. The Chinese decision to trap an American unit in Unsan, then stop and regroup, would be unerringly similar to the Chinese invasion of India twelve years later in which they used the same tactic—attack, halt, and then attack again—to defeat the Indian army.

MacArthur made one of his lightning-quick trips to Korea from Tokyo on November 24, 1950, telling the U.S. ambassador in Seoul there were only 25,000 Chinese troops in Korea. Then he had his return flight to Tokyo fly along the Yalu River, making possible a personal reconnaissance intended to impress the media. His report to Washington dismissed the danger of Chinese intervention. Three days later Peng's armies struck the American forces as they were driving to the Yalu River.¹⁹

The result was a disaster. The Eighth Army was routed again and its South Korean allies destroyed. Thousands of allied troops died and were wounded. As the British military historian Max Hastings described later, the total disintegration “resembled the collapse of the French in 1940 to the Nazis and the British at Singapore in 1942 to the Japanese.”²⁰ By December 31, 1950, the Americans had been driven 120 miles south back t...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Prologue: At Mount Vernon
• Introduction
• 1: Ike and India, 195060
• 2: Galbraith and India, 1961
• 3: Jackie and India, 1962
• 4: JFK, India, and War
• 5: From JFK to Today
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover