Major General Victor H. Krulak of the U.S. Marines, along with a committee of experts asked to advise on the Vietnam War, submitted a recommendation to U.S. President Johnson for a three-phase series of covert actions against North Vietnam. Phase I, for February to May, called for propaganda dissemination and “20 destructive undertakings… designed to result in substantial destruction, economic loss and harassment”, and a second and third phase of increasing magnitude.
U.S. President Johnson is sent a report prepared by Major General Victor H. Krulak, USMC, Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities for the Joint Chiefs of Staff; as directed by Defense Secretary McNamara, Krulak and his staff have outlined an elaborate series of clandestine operations against North Vietnam “to result in substantial destruction, economic loss and harassment.” Known as Oplan 34A, it will go into effect on 1 February, and calls for a three-pronged attack. The first involves a mixture of operations such as flights by U-2 spy planes over North Vietnam, kidnapping North Vietnamese for intelligence gathering, parachuting sabotage and psychological-warfare teams into North Vietnam, commando raids to blow up rail and highway bridges, and bombarding North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT boats; these operations are controlled in Saigon (although approved in Washington) by the chief of the U.S. MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam), through its Studies and Observations Group, but most of the participants are to be South Vietnamese or Asian mercenaries.
The second element of Oplan 34A’s war involves bombing raids by T-28s in Laos against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces there; although bearing Laotian Air Force markings, the 25-40 U.S.-supplied planes are mostly manned by Thai and Air America pilots (Air America being the ‘private’ airline run by the CIA); photographic intelligence for the bombing raids will be gathered by regular U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy jets, a reconnaissance operation code-named Yankee Team. The third prong consists of U.S. Navy destroyer patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin, both as a show of force and to collect intelligence on North Vietnamese coastal defenses and warning radar (useful to raiding parties or planes involved in other Oplan 34A activities); these destroyer patrols are code-named DeSoto Mission, and have been conducted for years off the Soviet Union, China and North Korea.
The ARVN captured a large arms cache in the Mekong Delta, including weapons manufactured in China. United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk said this proved that North Vietnam was supplying the Viet Cong.
Failed assassination attempt on President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. A police constable on guard outside the residence of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, fired five gunshots at him in an assassination attempt. Seth Ametwee invaded The Flagstaff House in Accra and missed with his first shot. Nkrumah’s bodyguard, Salifu Dagarti, shielded the President with his body and was mortally wounded. It marked the sixth attempt on Nkrumah’s life since he came to power in 1957.
Cyprus tonight agreed to take part in a London conference to solve the dispute between the Greek and Turkish community on the Mediterranean island. The conference was proposed by Britain, Greece, and Turkey. These three nations will take part along with representatives of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
The Cyprus government’s agreement was announced as Duncan Sandys, the British commonwealth secretary, flew back to Britain after his peace-making mission here. Sandys spent most of the day conferring with Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus, and representatives of the hostile factions. The British minister made no statement before leaving. The Cyprus government announcement said that after the opening session of the conference “a committee will be set up of representatives of Greek and Turkish Cypriots, under British chairmanship, to work on the whole constitution problem and treaties of guarantee and alliance.”
Makarios has said he would like to abrogate these basic treaties through the proper channels. Britain, Greece, and Turkey are responsible, under the 1960 treaty granting Cyprus independence, for safeguarding the constitution and territorial integrity of the former British island colony. Fears of changes in the constitution, which guaranteed Turkish Cypriot minority rights, sparked two weeks of violence that has taken 200 lives.
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk says the United States must explore every means for lessening world tensions after the gains made in east-west relations in 1963. He adds that this country must maintain its defenses and bolster weak but friendly nations with military and economic aid.
The Soviet Union delivered a long note to the United States and apparently every other country today proposing the renunciation of force in all territorial disputes. The State Department said it had been informed that all countries, communist as well as noncommunist, had received copies of the Russian proposal. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who received the document this morning from the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, declined to comment until he had been able to study a translation of the proposal. Other officials said the 20-page note required careful analysis before the administration could react or respond. Ambassador Dobrynin indicated that Moscow would make the note public soon. It was described by Dobrynin as a “personal message” to President Johnson, but American officials said it actually was a general circular similar to notes delivered in other capitals.
Premier Fidel Castro blames President Johnson for what he says was a Christmas Eve attack on a Cuban patrol boat by the Central Intelligence Agency. He also asks for diplomatic and trade relations with the United States on his own terms.
The flow of West Berliners through the communist wall is building to a climax. East Germans are scheduled to close the barrier to intercity traffic at midnight Sunday. At least 200,000 West Berliners are expected to visit East Berlin Saturday.
In the GDR, new ID cards are issued with the words “Citizen of the German Democratic Republic” printed on them.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arrived in Poland on an unofficial visit, the Polish Press agency reported tonight. Khrushchev, accompanied by the Communist party chief of Byelorussia, K. T. Mazurov, was greeted at Warsaw’s Gdansk railway station by Wladyslaw Gomulka and other top Polish party and government officials. After a short stop, the train carrying the Russian guests left for the Olsztyn (Allenstein) region in northeastern Poland, with Gomulka, Polish Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz, politburo members Ignacy Loga-Sowinski and Zenon Kliszko, and Polish Defense Minister Marian Spychalski aboard.
Pope Paul VI retires for spiritual meditation in the Vatican palace in preparation for tomorrow’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land. As the pope and church officials who will accompany him prayed in St. Matilda’s chapel, preparations were under way in Jerusalem for his arrival.
President Johnson is convinced, White House sources said today, that the massive burden of the federal budget is “stagnating traditional liberalism” as represented by such government programs as medical care for the aged. The President was described as concerned that with the budget already at an all-time record level, so-called liberal social welfare and economic programs are neglected or stalled because Congress is reluctant to vote new expenditures. A key objective of the chief executive’s current government economy effort is reducing nonessential federal spending so that more funds will become available for what he calls “human needs,” such as better education and housing and medical care for those unable to afford it.
The President, according to associates, concedes that increasingly larger spending budgets are inevitable because of the population growth and demand for additional federal programs, but at the same time he believes the fiscal burden can be kept under control by effecting economies. The White House informants disclosed Johnson’s views on fiscal and legislative matters today on the basis of discussions with him since he took office six weeks ago. The chief executive, who has been spending the Christmas-New Year holidays at his Texas ranch west of Austin, will send the federal budget for fiscal 1965 to Congress this month.
House hearings on bills to provide medical care for the aged will be resumed January 20. Rep. Wilbur D. Mills (D-Arkansas), Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, has scheduled more than 70 witnesses to testify during the four-day hearings. Included will be spokesmen for some of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country.
Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Arizona) will announce his intention to seek the Republican Presidential nomination. The announcement will be made tomorrow in his native Phoenix, but the senator has confided his decision to intimates. The front runner for the Republican nomination is a reluctant candidate. Although he has not sought the nomination, he feels he cannot disappoint his many supporters in the rank and file of the party. Still, he has had to wrestle with himself in arriving at his decision, because he harbors misgivings about his ability to occupy the White House. “I’ve never done anything to get the nomination, and yet all of a sudden everyone wants to thrust it on me,” he said recently. “And doggone it, I’m not even sure that I’ve got the brains to be President of the United States.”
In recent months the senator has confided to close friends that he has been wondering whether he has the courage to do the things he has said he would do if he were in the White House. It is most unusual for a candidate to harbor such doubts until after he gets elected, and then he usually dismisses them from his mind. However, Goldwater is not a usual candidate. He has frequently expressed surprise that he has attracted such support.
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York resumes his quest tomorrow for the Republican Presidential nomination with one eye cocked toward far-off Arizona. The governor is returning to New Hampshire’s political battleground on the very day that Senator Barry Goldwater is scheduled to announce in Phoenix, Arizona, whether he, too, will seek the nomination. Rockefeller has already entered New Hampshire’s first-in-the nation Presidential primary March 10. His backers indicated today that they still look upon Goldwater as the governor’s No. 1 opponent.
Ex-Governor Hugh Gregg, the Rockefeller campaign chairman here, issued a renewed challenge for Goldwater to meet Rockefeller in a series of public debates. He said he was doing so “on the eve of Senator Goldwater’s long-delayed decision to announce his candidacy.” Rockefeller’s visit will be the third he has made to New Hampshire since he announced his candidacy, and the first since he imposed a political moratorium after the assassination of President Kennedy November 22. He is scheduled to fly from New York City to Pease Air Force Base at Portsmouth, where he will deliver what his aides have called “a major address” before a Young Republican club dinner Friday night.
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota has topped a national poll of Democratic county chairmen as the party’s choice for the Vice Presidential nomination.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warns of the dangers of a communist youth movement in the United States in his year-end report to the attorney general. Hoover says that in October, “Communist Party delegates met in Chicago to lay the groundwork for a new national youth organization aimed at what the party describes as a drift toward the left among young people.”
Three men held in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. are indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges which carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. The three men, John William Irwin, 42; Barry Worthington Keenan, 23; and Joseph Clyde Amsler, 23, will be arraigned Monday. It is reported that the kidnaping victim testified at the secret hearing, though United States Attorney Francis Whelan took extreme precautions to prevent reporters from identifying witnesses.
Postmaster General John A. Gronouski, conferring with President Johnson in Austin, Texas, discloses plans for eliminating 5,000 jobs and cutting the department’s budget by 100 million dollars. Robert C. Weaver, federal housing administrator, also lays his plans before the President. They include a “significantly expanded” home building program.
A U.S. Air Force C-124 Globemaster cargo plane with nine people on board disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean, on its way to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu from Wake Island. Another pilot, flying on the same route, said that he had heard a distinct S.O.S. signal that would have transmitted automatically from the plane and the rafts.
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics will move today to make it more difficult for addicts to obtain Percodan.
A January thaw brought widespread relief from a blustery winter storm that heaped ice and record snows on large areas of the South and East.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 766.08 (+3.13).
Born:
Pernell Whitaker, American boxer (Olympic gold, 1984; undisputed world lightweight 1990-1992), in Norfolk, Virginia.
Chris Welp, German NBA center (Philadelphia 76ers, San Antonio Spurs, Golden State Warriors), in Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony, West Germany (d. 2015).
Colby Ward, MLB pitcher (Cleveland Indians), in Lansing, Michigan.
Christopher John Gray, English Anglican priest who was murdered in front of his own vicarage, in Portsmouth, England, United Kingdom (d. 1996)
History Diaries 