“One of these periods fell during the third week in November on the Western calendar. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday of the third week in November-the day of prime danger for him, as predicted by Yu Lung. That he was killed on that day will seem happenstance to you, but it didn’t look that way to Yu Lung or the Truong toe.
“Diem and Nhu were killed on November 1, our time. Kennedy died precisely twenty-one days later, on November 22. Diem’s personal lucky number was seven. Seven times three is twenty-one. Also, in Vietnamese funeral custom, special rites are performed for the dead every seventh day after the day of death. So there was, in the choice of November 22 as the date of the assassination, what one of my agents called ‘an elegance.’
“Now, as to the North Vietnamese intelligence officer, Do Minh Kha, and his daughter. Do is a member of one of the Ngo phais-he and Diem and Nhu were cousins of a sort. Do’s name, by the way, is a nom de révolution; he was born a Ngo. Kinship is a powerful thing in Vietnam. Do Minh Kha may have been a Communist and an enemy intelligence officer, but he was also a blood relation of Diem and Nhu. That would be, in a matter like this one, the more important loyalty.
“Yu Lung’s horoscopes, which predict the time of events, and his geomantic readings, which indicate the best place to do something, showed this about Do: that he should be approached in Vientiane, Laos, in early September. Yu Lung foresaw that the best possible messenger was his daughter, Dao. She’s called by her French name, Nicole, in my report. Dao or Nicole is the child of a woman the Truong toe wanted to marry when he was younger. The mother was killed during the migration of the Catholics out of North Vietnam after Ho Chi Minh took over in 1954. The Truong toe rescued the child and raised her as his own daughter. Therefore Do Minh Kha owed a debt to the Ngos not only out of kinship but also out of gratitude for the way in which they’d cared for his child.
“We knew that Do Minh Kha was in Laos during September. We watched him as a matter of routine; he is a very high-ranking officer and we wanted to know what he was up to. One of my agents, Vuong Van Luong, was among the U.S. assets who were sent to Vientiane to try to find out what Do Minh Kha was doing there. Luong failed to find out, and so did all our other agents. Do just stayed in a house in Vientiane for three days with a beautiful young Vietnamese woman. When nothing more than that happened, we assumed he was shacking up. Luong did manage to take photographs of the girl, coming in and out of the house with Do. The girl wasn’t in our files. We couldn’t identify her. We now know that the girl was not his mistress but his daughter. Do and Nicole met in Vientiane in September for the first time since the girl left Hanoi as a child.
“We weren’t able to wire the house in Vientiane, and it probably wouldn’t have done us much good if we had. Do is too professional to have talked, even to his daughter, in a strange house where there might be listening devices. However, Luong reported that Do and Nicole would go for walks together around the garden of the house in Vientiane. We know now what Nicole asked her father to do. And we know that he agreed.
“Nicole told her father about the family’s plan to kill President Kennedy in revenge for the deaths of Diem and Nhu. She showed him the horoscopes, probably. She asked for his help in the name of the family. They code-named the operation against Kennedy ‘the tears of autumn.’ That phrase, ‘the tears of autumn,’ can be rendered in Vietnamese as a woman’s name, Lê Thu.
“Lê Thu was the death name of Do’s wife. As you saw in the report, the Vietnamese change their names when they die. There was a kind of double poetry, and a good deal of psychology, in the choice of this code name. At first I thought it was a play on the name of Madame Nhu-she’s called Lê Xuan, which means ‘the tears of spring.’
It was autumn in America when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22. The code name had two purposes-Lê Thu because of the guilt it would evoke in Do Minh Kha, who had sent his wife away to be killed. And ‘tears of autumn’ because Kennedy was going to die in autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Lê Thu was not a secure code name-it contains a clue that led me to Do Minh Kha, and through him to everything else. But the family didn’t think that security mattered, because they weren’t going to use the phrase outside the family. What mattered to them was that it gave a name to their collective hatred for Kennedy and for Americans in general.
“What the family needed from Do was precisely what gave us our chance to penetrate the operation. They needed a cutout, a go-between, who could activate Kennedy’s assassin. They couldn’t do it themselves because the assassin could not know, could not be permitted to guess, who he was working for. It was a matter of security-and, more important, a matter of motivation. An assassin being approached by the Vietnamese would know at once who was using him to kill Kennedy. They couldn’t have that. Also, they are realists-they knew that even Oswald probably wouldn’t have done it for a Vietnamese, let alone a South Vietnamese. Oswald would have believed Diem was a Nazi, and his sympathies lay elsewhere.
“So they needed a cutout who was a white man. Do Minh Kha is in charge of the section of North Vietnamese intelligence that handles liaison with other Communist intelligence services. He had debts he could call in. The family didn’t care who killed Kennedy. They didn’t think it mattered who pulled the trigger-Yu Lung had already assured them the assassination attempt would succeed.
“Kennedy’s horoscope gives not only the auspicious time for the assassination, November 22, but also the place, Dallas. Yu Lung had selected that city as the most favorable geomantic location. He drew up a long treatment of geomantic conditions in Dallas. The only limitation he put on success was that the assassin must not fire toward the north or northwest; under the principles of geomancy, these are directions to be avoided. Oswald fired almost due west from the window of the Texas School Depository. I don’t imagine he’d been instructed to do that. It was a coincidence that Kennedy’s car was traveling in a westerly direction.
“They knew Kennedy would be in Dallas on November 22. The American newspapers had reported this fact, and you can be sure that the Vietnamese, in Hanoi and in Saigon, had a complete file of clippings.
“When Do Minh Kha went back to Hanoi after seeing Nicole in Vientiane, he found Manuel Ruiz there. Ruiz was on his way to the Congo to organize a guerrilla force, and he’d come to consult with the world’s leading authorities on guerrilla warfare, the North Vietnamese. Ruiz was surprised that Do knew where he was when I tracked him down in the Congo- of course, Do didn’t know; I was lying to Ruiz-so he probably didn’t tell Do what his target country was.
“However, Do had to tell Ruiz what his target was-John F. Kennedy. Do wanted an assassin for one-time use. Ruiz told him about Oswald. The Cubans had contacted Oswald, on an unwitting basis, when he was in New Orleans during the summer. He’d tried to pass himself off as an expert on guerrilla tactics. The Cuban network in New Orleans informed Ruiz- that was his department. The Cubans assessed Oswald, decided he was a nut and dropped any idea of recuiting him.
“Ruiz didn’t think the Vietnamese had a chance of killing Kennedy, even though Do Minh Kha was absolutely confident the operation would succeed. Ruiz played a game with the Vietnamese. He agreed to approach Oswald and activate him as Kennedy’s assassin. You saw in the report what Ruiz thought of Oswald. But he went ahead, as a favor to Do. The irony is extraordinary: to this day, Ruiz doesn’t know that he was an agent for the Truong toe-he thinks the Kennedy assassination was a North Vietnamese operation.