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John F. Kennedy & the Ascendancy of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine by Ryan Van Koughnett a Thesis Presented to the Universi

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John F. Kennedy & the Ascendancy of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine by Ryan Van Koughnett a Thesis Presented to the Universi John F. Kennedy & the Ascendancy of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine by Ryan Van Koughnett A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in History Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2018 © Ryan Van Koughnett 2018 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii The formation of a coherent counterinsurgency policy in the United States is often attributed to the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Indeed, through his own personal fascination and promotion of the subject, Kennedy infused funding and expertise into a steadily expanding counterinsurgency apparatus. However, American counterinsurgency doctrine was implanted deeply within military and intelligence institutions and government bureaucracy long before the Camelot era. American conquest by counterinsurgency has a long legacy. The Founding Fathers for Kennedy (to whom this tradition belongs) were Andrew Jackson, William Sherman, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. As this study argues, periods of American expansion have always been based on the principles of anti-civilian warfare. The history of the United States is one of expansion and primitive accumulation – a process facilitated by methods promoted by presidents spanning the last two centuries. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Hunt, Dr. Sbardellati, and Dr. Walker for taking the time to read over this manuscript. Since my re-entry to university, Dr. Andrew Hunt has been especially helpful as a receptive and encouraging adviser. Thank you for remembering me from undergraduate studies some twenty years ago! Your constant advocacy on my behalf gave me the confidence to believe that what I am doing is worth the effort. This project could never have been completed without the ongoing support of my family. To my parents for instilling in me the power of knowledge and words over money and guns. To my partner, Elena: thank you for accepting the fact that I am either reading or writing most of the time. You always ground me when my head is too far gone in the clouds. To my daughters, Carina and Annika: for you I fight for a world of peace and not war. May your generation know a reality free of genocide, pillage, and exploitation. For the many people in life who assured me that war is an unavoidable part of human nature: I say so too is love. And to the dreamers who seek an end to the terrible criminal violence of war: may the future be yours. I would also like to respectfully acknowledge that I live, work, and raise my family on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. As a benefactor of colonial war, I have a personal responsibility to engage in the process of altering the relationship between the people and the land of Turtle Island. iv Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………… page 1 Part I – Frontiers Old & New: Counterinsurgency as an American Method of War Chapter I – The Roman Empire and Homo Sacer……………………………………………. page 6 Chapter II – Counterinsurgency Warfare and the Colonization of America…….. page 11 Chapter III – A Global Empire in the American Century…………………………………… page 30 Chapter IV – Camelot, Modernization Theory & the Special Group on Counterinsurgency ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. page 35 Chapter V – Hidden Figures of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine……………………. page 46 Chapter VI – Modernization as Counterinsurgency………………………………………… page 61 Part II – America’s Praetorian Guard: The Rise of Militarized Political Police Chapter VII – Historical Role of Police and Prisons in the United States…………. page 70 Chapter VIII – America’s Colonial Laboratories of Counterinsurgency Experimentation ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. page 91 Chapter IX – The CIA, the Police & the Campus: Counterinsurgency as Social Engineering ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. page 105 Part III – U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Practice: Innovations in Global Terrorism JFK Redux: Fires Before Phoenix/intro…………………………………………………………….. page 121 Chapter X – Guatemala……………………………………………………………………………………. page 123 Chapter XI – Peru…………………………………………………………………………………………….. page 130 Chapter XII – Brazil………………………………………………………………………………………….. page 137 Chapter XIII – Guyana……………………………………………………………………………………… page 146 Chapter XIV – Thailand……………………………………………………………………………………. page 153 The Legacy of Kennedy’s Counterinsurgency Ambition/conclusion………………….. page 161 v The most basic strategy of any counterintelligence program is to confuse the enemy and have them believing what you want them to believe. But also it has another aspect to it, the aspect that we know as terrorism – intimidation and violence, making examples of leaders, making examples of people who resist. The United States government perfected these techniques in Southeast Asia against the people’s movement in Vietnam. Many of the police professionals who would later lead the war of suppression against FALN and Black Liberation Army went on year-long sabbaticals to Vietnam to be trained in the Phoenix program…the Phoenix program was a program carried out by the CIA, and its objective was to root out the infrastructure and the cadres and troops of the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet-Cong. They killed over 50,000 people in this effort, many of whom were tortured and most of whom were murdered in their sleep, much like Fred Hampton. - Black Panther Party & Black Liberation Army member, Dhoruba bin Wahad *FALN was Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriquena. Fred Hampton was leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party. vi Introduction The formulation of Kennedy-era counterinsurgency policy (1961-1963) has been the subject of much research, discussion, debate and disagreement. While supporters of the Kennedy administration tend to downplay the role of counterinsurgency in foreign policy planning, those who do acknowledge Camelot’s preeminent focus on counterrevolution almost unanimously describe the effort as either ineffectual or an outright disaster. Other popular narratives have been woven out of this mixture of denial on one side, and outright condemnation on the other. Foremost among them, is the mythology that John F. Kennedy was the initiator and main proponent of American counterinsurgency doctrine. The traditional analysis of the Kennedy counterinsurgency era does not suffice for several reasons. Counterinsurgency, by many accounts, appears to be a constant factor throughout recorded human history. American counterinsurgency doctrine, despite widely accepted misconceptions, did not begin with the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, or the various assassination plots against Fidel Castro, or even the secret wars in Laos and clandestine actions against North Vietnam. Long before these interventions were counterinsurgency operations in Greece, Guatemala and Iran. Even further into the past we find American counterinsurgency in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Panama. Retreat into the 19th century, and we find clear examples of counterinsurgency warfare during the subjugation of the Lakota Sioux, the defeat of the Southern Confederacy, the hundred-year war against the Seminole, and President Andrew Jackson’s Indigenous removal policies. In fact, as historian John Grenier argues, Americans practiced counterinsurgency long before they were even considered a nation. 1 The idea that Kennedy’s “foray” into counterinsurgency was a policy disaster is also an unfounded belief, a dogma that tends to operate in the service of the American policymakers who continue to use counterinsurgency tactics to this day. One should ask: if President Kennedy’s counterinsurgency ambitions were foolhardy, misguided, and impossible to implement, then why does the American military-intelligence establishment continually promote, advance, fund, and deploy these techniques around the world? While many consider the intervention in Laos a failure, others may see the success of the clandestine war and the funding scheme centered on CIA criminal alliances with Hmong opium traffickers. After all, many of the same CIA agents and government personnel who participated in the Air America operation out of Laos and Thailand were the same individuals who made similar alliances with Colombian drug lords to fund the Contra Wars during the Reagan administration. Were these counterinsurgency operations a failure? Today, it is safe to assume there is no threat of insurgency to be found in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala. Yet, by all accounts, the American Empire remains. What will be proposed in the following pages is that the distortion of the Kennedy counterinsurgency legacy is in fact inherent to the propaganda and value systems of our current so-called “post-ideological” world. The illusion of counterinsurgency as an historical aberration, unique somehow to the Camelot era, also fits into wider narratives focusing on the nature and intent of American imperialism. The mystery of JFK’s assassination also conforms to this paradigm, in that his murder is perceived as an unfortunate result of the uncontrollable momentum unleashed by Kennedy’s own counterinsurgency obsession. The result of
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