The War Widens
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e still live with both the convulsions and the myths of 1970 in Indochina. The war engulfed both Laos and Cambodia. In early 1970 the still new Administration wanted nothing so much as to wind down the war. It was met with a deliberate escalation by the North Vietnamese, ingeniously orchestrating movements of armies and American public opinion while we were engaged in secret peace talks. In February there was a North Vietnamese offensive across the Plain of Jars in Laos. In March the North Vietnamese began to break out of the sanctuaries along Cambodia’s frontier with South Vietnam, which they had been occupying without a shred of legality since 1965. They started cutting communications and harassing Phnom Penh with a view to overthrowing the Lon Nol government, which had replaced Sihanouk’s without our knowledge or participation. (Lon Nol was recognized by both the UN and the Soviet Union.)
Yet the inflamed condemnation for the tragedies that ensued fell not on Hanoi but on the United States. In my talks in Paris with North Vietnamese emissary Le Duc Tho, he rejected neutrality for both Cambodia and Laos, and emphasized that it was his people’s destiny not merely to take over South Vietnam but to dominate the whole of Indochina. The boasts were made in secret but the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see. From an inexhaustible national masochism there sprang the folklore that American decisions triggered the Cambodian nightmare, and the myth survives even today when the Vietnamese, without the excuse of American provocation but with barely a whimper of world protest, have finally fulfilled the ambition of conquering the whole of Indochina. In Cambodia a rabble of murderous ideologues appear, it is true, to have been supplanted by an organized Communist state, but it has been done by the same force of alien arms that first attempted to do so in 1970. Hanoi’s insatiable quest for hegemony—not America’s hesitant and ambivalent response—is the root cause of Cambodia’s ordeal.
The military responses we made were much agonized over, and in our view minimal if we were to conduct a retreat that did not become a rout. There were certainly errors, but the persistence of the image of American officials plotting the overthrow of neutralist Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and plunging deeper into war in Laos as well as Cambodia illustrates the prevalence of emotion over reality. The Richard Nixon who on April 30 announced our assault on the Cambodian sanctuaries was the same President who had announced on April 20 the withdrawal of 150,000 troops. The Administration which finally acted to prevent a complete Communist takeover of Cambodia was the same government that had offered the neutralization of Cambodia on April 4—and been contemptuously rebuffed. The paradoxes of Indochina are many and painful. It was Hanoi that was implacable but it was America that reaped the whirlwind, nearly shattering the nerve of the Executive. Each of these interlocked major events requires a separate narrative in this chapter, but it has to begin with the reality of government at the time, which was that at the end of 1969 and the beginning of 1970 we engaged in a major attempt to understand what was happening on the ground in Vietnam—and to talk peace secretly once again with Hanoi. The research work had begun in the fall of 1969 when Elliot Richardson and I set up an interagency committee, the Vietnam Special Studies Group, whose purpose was summed up in a memorandum by me to the President dated September 5, 1969:
Looking back in our experience over the last few years, it is remarkable how frequently officials have let their preconceptions about Vietnam lead them astray even though a careful and objective analysis of readily available facts would have told them differently.
The group met for the first time on October 20. Elliot Richardson, Dave Packard, Richard Helms, and representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency were in attendance. A Working Group, led by Larry Lynn and Bob Sansom of my staff, conducted an intensive study of twelve of the forty-four provinces in South Vietnam to solve the perennial problem of obtaining an accurate assessment of the situation in the countryside, that is, the contest over control of the rural population.
I read over the 100-page paper, covering it with handwritten questions. Why was it, for instance, that in 1965, 1966, and 1967 I was briefed that the South Vietnamese were making progress? What had changed? Did US advisers know what they were looking at? “I have found,” I wrote, “that the most incompetent ones are those most easily satisfied… If you have a lower level of incidents, does this mean you are doing well, or is it the enemy’s deliberate intention? If it’s the latter, is it a signal? How do we know what the infrastructure is that we’ve destroyed?…Everyone says land reform is important. It hasn’t happened, yet we make progress in pacification. How can this be?” After a new draft incorporated answers to these questions I summarized the paper’s conclusions for the President on January 22. Thirty-eight percent of the population of South Vietnam lived in the cities, fairly securely under the authority and protection of the government (especially after the failure of the Tet offensive of 1968 decimated the Viet Cong cadre). But a primary objective of the enemy’s strategy was to gain control of the 62 percent of the people that lived in the countryside, thereby to surround the cities so that they would “fall like ripe fruit.” The conclusion of the study was that since September 1968 the Saigon government’s control of the countryside had risen from 20 to 55 percent; that of the Communists had fallen from 35 to 7 percent. Some four million rural South Vietnamese lived in contested areas, during the day controlled by Saigon, at night by the Viet Cong. We could not be sure that these percentages could be maintained, however, as we continued our troop withdrawals.
The statistics were moderately encouraging, but we also knew that North Vietnam’s confidence was unbroken. Between December 14 and 20, 1969, Hanoi published a series of seven articles by its Defense Minister, General Vo Nguyen Giap, whose main thrust was that a protracted struggle could defeat America’s superior technology. I predicted to the President, in a summary of these articles I sent him on January 7, 1970, that Hanoi would play for time until enough American forces had left to allow it to challenge Saigon’s armed forces on a more equal basis. I summed up my doubts about optimistic reports in mid-January as follows:
(1) The North Vietnamese cannot have fought for 25 years only to call it quits without another major effort. This effort could come in many ways—through attacks on American forces, ARVN [ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, that is, South Vietnamese forces.] forces or local forces. But if they had decided not to make the effort, they would presumably have been more forthcoming with regard to negotiations. [Here the President scribbled: “makes sense.”]
(2) We have not seen proof that ARVN has really improved. It may be that the enemy forces have been hurt rather than that ARVN is significantly better than it was in the past. It could be that when the enemy drew back its main forces and cut down its activity in August and September, perhaps because of our threat in Paris at the beginning of August, they under-estimated the effect this would have on their guerrilla forces.
(3) There could be too much pressure from the top for optimistic reporting...
For these reasons I recommended that the President send my military assistant Alexander Haig and a team of analysts to tour South Vietnam. Between January 19 and 29, 1970, they surveyed nine key provinces and confirmed the results of our Washington studies. They also warned, however, that the rate of improvement had definitely slowed in the last months of 1969: “There is no sign that the enemy has given up… The pressures on the GVN [GVN, or Government of Vietnam, that is, the South Vietnamese government.] resulting from U.S. troop withdrawals may lead to…a deterioration of territorial security force performance and a loss of popular support for the GVN.” Similar conclusions were reached by an independent CIA study that revealed a growing pessimism among South Vietnamese leaders deriving from fear of an overly hasty American withdrawal. When I sent this CIA report to Nixon, he wrote on it: “K—the psychology is enormously important. They must take responsibility if they are ever to gain confidence. We have to take risks on that score.”
To be sure, there were contrary views. Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare credited with devising the strategy that defeated the Communist guerrillas in Malaya, reported after a visit to Vietnam in November 1969 that Saigon held a “winning position” and would be able to maintain it unless the United States withdrew too rapidly and reduced its aid. This report was sent to all departments, and—somewhat in contradiction to their views expressed in the Vietnam Special Studies Group—they endorsed it.
But no amount of study, however objectively or prayerfully conducted, could solve our basic dilemma. An enemy determined on protracted struggle could only be brought to compromise by being confronted by insuperable obstacles on the ground. We could attempt this only by building up the South Vietnamese and blunting every effort Hanoi made to interrupt this buildup. Our strategy was certain to be bitterly contested by a dedicated, vocal, and growing minority of our people. The November 3 speech bought some time for Vietnamization. But time is fickle; we had to use the breathing spell to strengthen ourselves on the ground. Simultaneously, I was determined to probe the prospects for negotiations—the process by which the two sides tested their respective assessments of each other and we sought to shape a settlement from a seemingly intractable stalemate.
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have always believed that the optimum moment for negotiations is when things appear to be going well. To yield to pressures is to invite them; to acquire the reputation for short staying power is to give the other side a powerful incentive for protracting negotiations. When a concession is made voluntarily it provides the greatest incentive for reciprocity. It also provides the best guarantee for staying power. In the negotiations that I conducted I always tried to determine the most reasonable outcome and then get there rapidly in one or two moves. This was derided as a strategy of “preemptive concession” by those who like to make their moves in driblets and at the last moment. But I consider that strategy useful primarily for placating bureaucracies and salving consciences. It impresses novices as a demonstration of toughness. Usually it proves to be self-defeating; shaving the salami encourages the other side to hold on to see what the next concession is likely to be, never sure that one has really reached the rock-bottom position. Thus, in the many negotiations I undertook—with the Vietnamese and others—I favored big steps taken when they were least expected, when there was a minimum of pressure, and creating the presumption that we would stick to that position. I almost always opposed modifications of our negotiating position under duress.
In November 1969 our position seemed the strongest since the beginning of the Nixon Administration. We had withstood a military offensive by Hanoi, as well as the Moratorium; the President had taken his case to the people and received substantial support. Henry Cabot Lodge had resigned as Ambassador to the Paris talks in November for personal reasons. Nixon, to show his displeasure with the slow progress of negotiations, refused to replace him. Hanoi construed this as a signal that we might end the bombing halt which had been tied to the opening of negotiations. Having stonewalled the Paris talks for a year, it now clamored insistently for the appointment of a new senior negotiator. I suggested to Nixon that we might use this period to make another attempt at secret talks. The North Vietnamese could not use the secret Paris channel for propaganda; if they refused to talk it could be used against them if we made it public; and if Hanoi was ready to settle—which I doubted—we would learn of it only in secret talks. In any event, if we were serious we could build a record by which we would be able to demonstrate that Hanoi was the obstacle to negotiations.
Nixon was skeptical of negotiations for a variety of complex reasons. On one level he did not believe that Hanoi would be prepared to settle for any terms we could live with without having suffered major military setbacks; in this he proved to be right. He was in general uneasy about any process of negotiation; he hated to put himself into a position where he might be rebuffed. And for that precise reason he always carefully constructed an excuse for failure. I never went into a negotiation without a written or oral injunction to hang tough and some expression that Nixon did not really expect success. But because Nixon, for all his bravado, genuinely wanted peace, he inevitably fell in with my argument that we owed it to our people to explore the possibility of an honorable settlement, however unlikely the chances, and to establish our record of having done so.
Accordingly, toward the end of November 1969 we asked General Vernon Walters, our defense attaché in Paris, to request a private appointment with Xuan Thuy; it was quickly granted. It was the first time in the Nixon Administration that we approached the North Vietnamese directly without a foreign intermediary. Walters proposed another secret meeting with me. But the North Vietnamese were not ready then. Meticulous planners, they had not yet made up their minds about the full implications of Nixon’s November 3 speech. Or perhaps since Xuan Thuy was not a policymaker, they saw no point in another meeting at his level. Hanoi felt they had first to reestablish the psychological equilibrium by a show of nonconcern.
Whatever the reason, on December 12 General Walters was called to the North Vietnamese compound. Mai Van Bo, North Vietnamese Delegate-General in Paris, proclaimed Hanoi’s unhappiness with the “warlike” speech of November 3 and the President’s refusal to name a senior replacement for Henry Cabot Lodge. He called attention to Hanoi’s proposal at the August meeting, which he described as “both logical and reasonable.” Since we had already rejected that “logical and reasonable” offer before, there was no point, Hanoi said, in a new secret meeting unless we had something new to say.
Exactly one month after Hanoi’s rebuff I persuaded Nixon—with much effort—to authorize another approach. Accordingly, General Walters saw Xuan Thuy on January 14 and suggested a meeting any weekend after February 8, “provided both sides were willing to go beyond the existing framework.” Nixon was still skeptical. “I don’t know what these clowns want to talk about,” he said to me, “but the line we take is either they talk or we are going to sit it out. I don’t feel this is any time for concession.”
Hanoi did not respond for several weeks. But on January 26 we received the first indication that a negotiation might soon get under way. It was announced that Le Duc Tho, a member of the North Vietnamese Politburo (in fact, the fifth man in the hierarchy) and Hanoi’s principal negotiator with Averell Harriman, would attend the forthcoming French Communist Party Congress. Then, on February 16 Walters was called to the North Vietnamese compound and informed that our insolent interlocutors accepted a meeting for February 20 or February 21 and after keeping us waiting for over a month they requested our answer within twelve hours. I have regretted ever since that we accepted the date of February 21, within the deadline. In retrospect, there is little question in my mind that to honor this unreasonable demand gave an unnecessary impression of eagerness; it enabled Hanoi to score one of the psychological points so dear to its heart. It did no lasting damage but it got us off on the wrong foot.
Thus began the secret negotiations between Le Duc Tho and me. Three meetings were held between February 20 and April 4, 1970.
The indefatigable Walters was in his element. If there was anything he enjoyed more than imitating the men for whom he was interpreting, it was arranging clandestine meetings. On a weekend or holiday, to provide better cover, I would leave Andrews Air Force Base near Washington on one of the Presidential fleet of Boeing 707s, accompanied by a secretary and two or three members of my staff. The plane’s manifest indicated that it was one of the periodic training flights to check out itineraries for Presidential travel. It would land at Avord, a French Air Force base near Bourges in central France, where the French based both Mirage fighters and KC-135 tankers, roughly similar in appearance to the Presidential Boeing. My plane would touch down just long enough to let me off; its disappearance from radar tracking would not exceed twenty-five minutes; it would then proceed to Frankfurt’s Rhein-Main Airport with my secretary. My associates and I would have meanwhile transferred to a Mystère-20 executive jet belonging to President Pompidou for the flight to Villacoublay Airport, a field for private airplanes near Paris.
There General Walters would come aboard to greet me, justifiably beaming with pride at his arrangements.[99] He would lead me and my colleagues to an unmarked rented Citroen, a sensitive subject for Walters since at first no official funds were available to reimburse him for the expense of a trip that could not be acknowledged to the Paris Embassy to which he was formally detailed. Walters would usually remind me of this as he drove us to his apartment building in the Neuilly section of Paris, where he smuggled us by elevator from the underground garage to his apartment. As far as his housekeeper was concerned I was a visiting American general named Harold A. Kirschman. We would spend the night there (he lent me his bedroom) and proceed the next day with Walters at the wheel to a house at 11 rue Darthé in Choisy-le-Roi, a lower middle-class neighborhood thirty minutes away on the outskirts of Paris where the secret meetings took place for a year and a half.
This routine went smoothly for two of the three trips, but the March 16 meeting was nearly aborted by a technical malfunction on my flight to Paris. The pilots suddenly noticed that the hydraulic system for the landing gear was not working; it would have to be lowered manually. This, however, would make it impossible to raise it again until the hydraulic fluid was replenished. A landing in Avord was out of the question because the pilots did not know whether a French military base had the equipment for this essential, if minor, repair; even were the equipment available, questions would be raised about the disappearance of a Presidential training flight for such an extended period from all radars tracking it.
The plane would have to go to Rhein-Main Airport in Germany, where, however, no one knew of our impending arrival, much less of our mission or predicament. Since the State Department bureaucracy had not been informed of my trip, there was no way to alert the German authorities that a French plane was coming to pick me up.
Fortunately, Presidential airplanes have superb communications. Tony Lake, then my special assistant, established contact from the airplane with General Walters in Paris—in a radio hookup through Washington. Walters went to the Elysée Palace—the residence of the French President—where Michel Jobert, then Director General of the French Presidency, and President Pompidou himself authorized the French Presidential jet to meet my plane, this time in Frankfurt.
I landed in a dark corner of the Rhein-Main airfield; Pompidou’s jet was already waiting. I do not know to this day under what pretext Walters had obtained a ramp for a Boeing 707 in such an unlikely place. My staff and I transferred rapidly and were airborne again within ten minutes of landing. Walters claimed that West German cooperation was speeded up by their belief, encouraged by him, that the passenger was a secret girlfriend of Pompidou’s.[100] Walters’s flair for the dramatic made many extraordinary things possible, but I have often wondered why he thought the waiting ground personnel could have been fooled about the sex of the passenger.
In any event, Walters saved our March 16 trip with the imagination and tenacity that marked all his superb efforts and once again we were also in debt to Jobert and Pompidou. When Jobert was Foreign Minister later, he and I often crossed swords, but during the Vietnam negotiations he was unfailingly helpful and discreet. As for Pompidou, he never violated our confidence or sought to derive any special benefit from his knowledge; nor did he ask for any return for the many acts of friendship.
The house in Choisy-le-Roi where we met with the North Vietnamese might have belonged to a foreman in one of the factories in the district. On the ground floor there was a small living room connected to an even smaller dining room, which opened into a garden. In the living room two rows of easy chairs, heavily upholstered in red, faced each other. The American group—I, Richard Smyser (my Vietnam expert), Tony Lake, and General Walters—would sit alongside the wall to the left of the door; the North Vietnamese delegation, numbering six, sat along the other wall. There were four or five feet of floor space and eons of perception separating us.
At the first meeting on February 21, 1970, Xuan Thuy greeted me and led me into the living room to meet the man whose conceit it was to use the title of Special Adviser to Xuan Thuy, although as a member of the governing Politburo he outranked him by several levels.
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Special Adviser Le Duc Tho and the First Round of Talks
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E Duc Tho, gray-haired, dignified, invariably wore a black or brown Mao suit. His large luminous eyes only rarely revealed the fanaticism that had induced him as a boy of sixteen to join the anti-French Communist guerrillas. He was always composed; his manners, except on one or two occasions, were impeccable. He always knew what he was about and served his cause with dedication and skill.
It was our misfortune that his cause should be to break the will of the United States and to establish Hanoi’s rule over a country that we sought to defend. Our private banter grew longer as our meetings progressed and some limited human contact developed; it revealed that Le Duc Tho’s profession was revolution, his vocation guerrilla warfare. He could speak eloquently of peace but it was an abstraction alien to any personal experience. He had spent ten years of his life in prisons under the French. In 1973 he showed me around an historical museum in Hanoi, which he admitted sheepishly he had never visited previously. The artifacts of Vietnamese history—assembled, ironically enough, by the French colonial administration—reminded Le Duc Tho not of the glories of Vietnamese culture but of prisons in the cities or towns where they had been excavated. As we walked through the halls I learned a great deal about the relative merits of solitary confinement in various prisons, the way disguises as a peasant can be discovered by the police, and other tips that will prove invaluable should I ever decide to lead a guerrilla struggle in Indochina.
Le Duc Tho had been sustained through his monumentally courageous exertions by a passionate belief in Leninist discipline and faith in the Vietnamese nation. This transformed supreme personal self-assurance into a conviction that it was Vietnam’s destiny to dominate not only Indochina but all of SouthEast Asia. His sense of national superiority made personal hatred of the United States irrelevant; we were simply one of the hordes of foreigners whose congenital ignorance over the centuries had tempted them into Indochina, whence it was Vietnam’s mission to expel them (not, I often thought, without driving them mad first).
Le Duc Tho’s Leninism convinced him that he understood my motivations better than I understood myself. His Vietnamese heritage expressed itself in an obsessive suspicion that he might somehow be tricked; I sometimes suspected that the appearance of being outmaneuvered would bother him more than its reality. When the negotiation finally grew serious after four years it would set him off looking for traps in the most innocent of our proposals. At the outset it led him into lectures, which in time grew tiresome, of his imperviousness to capitalist tricks.
I grew to understand that Le Duc Tho considered negotiations as another battle. Any settlement that deprived Hanoi of final victory was by definition in his eyes a ruse. He was there to wear me down. As the representative of the truth he had no category for compromise. Hanoi’s proposals were put forward as the sole “logical and reasonable” framework for negotiations. The North Vietnamese were “an oppressed people”; in spite of much historical evidence to the contrary he considered them by definition incapable of oppressing others. America bore the entire responsibility for the war. Our proposals to reduce hostilities, by de-escalation or ceasefire—so fashionable among our critics—were seen by Le Duc Tho either as tricks or opportunities to sow confusion. In his view, the sole “reasonable” way to end the fighting was American acceptance of Hanoi’s terms, which were unconditional withdrawal on a fixed deadline and the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. As a spokesman for the “truth,” Le Duc Tho had no category for our method of negotiating; trading concessions seemed to him immoral unless a superior necessity supervened, and until that happened he was prepared to wait us out indefinitely. He seemed concerned to rank favorably in the epic pantheon of Vietnamese struggles; he could not consider as an equal this barbarian from across the sea who thought that eloquent words were a means to deflect the inexorable march of history. Le Duc Tho undoubtedly was of the stuff of which heroes are made. What we grasped only with reluctance—and many at home never understood—is that heroes are such because of monomaniacal determination. They are rarely pleasant men; their rigidity approaches the fanatic; they do not specialize in the qualities required for a negotiated peace.
Luckily for my sanity the full implications of what I was up against did not hit me at that first meeting in the dingy living room in Rue Darthé, or I might have forgone the exercise. At the very least I would have curbed my sense of anticipation—almost of elation—at what I hoped would be the opening move in a dialogue of peace.
Le Duc Tho greeted me in the aloofly polite manner of someone whose superiority is so self-evident that he cannot derogate from it by a show of politeness approaching condescension. He laughed at my jokes, sometimes uproariously, sometimes with the impatience of one who had important business that was being delayed by trivia. He knew what he wanted; he had not suffered in prison for ten years and fought wars for twenty years to be seduced now by what a capitalist fancied to be charm. The meeting on February 21 took place in two sessions. We talked for three hours in the morning; we interrupted to permit General Walters and me to lunch with President Pompidou at his apartment in the He St. Louis to discuss, as I have mentioned, his imminent trip to the United States. We resumed in the late afternoon. Characteristically my interlocutors from Hanoi did not believe in giving away even the most minute procedural point; they did not agree to the afternoon meeting until just as I was leaving to see Pompidou.
Still half believing what was an article of faith among my former academic colleagues, that Hanoi’s lack of trust in our intentions was the principal obstacle to a compromise peace, I opened the morning session with a prepared statement of our commitment to serious negotiations. I stressed that we sought to achieve a settlement which resolved the issues once and for all; we had no wish to repeat the experience of all previous agreements that had been armistices in an endless war. I pointed out that Hanoi’s position had not improved since my meeting with Xuan Thuy in August. President Nixon had demonstrated his public support; the balance of forces on the ground did not warrant Hanoi’s insistence on political predominance. Finally, it was our judgment “that the international situation has complications which may make Vietnam no longer the undivided concern of other countries and may mean that Vietnam will not enjoy the undivided support of countries which now support it”—an unsubtle reference to the Sino-Soviet dispute.
I then made two new points: that the United States was prepared to withdraw all its forces and retain no bases in Vietnam; and that in arranging for mutual withdrawal we did not insist that North Vietnamese troops be placed on the same legal basis as American forces. We sought a practical, not a theoretical, end to the war, I said. We did not insist that Hanoi formally announce its withdrawal so long as it in fact took place. On this basis I proposed that we set aside propaganda and work out some agreed principles. These could then be fleshed out in the plenary sessions at Avenue Kléber; we were prepared to send a new senior negotiator to Paris to complete an agreement.
Since Le Duc Tho was technically only “Special Adviser” to Hanoi’s Paris delegation, Xuan Thuy as formal head of the delegation made the first response. He could not bring himself to forgo such an opportunity to impress his superior with his rhetorical skill (the content had obviously been worked out in advance). He insisted that before any negotiations the United States would have to set a deadline for unilateral withdrawal. The negotiations would then concern the modalities of our retreat; they could not affect its timing. North Vietnam’s sole reciprocal obligation would be not to shoot at our men as they boarded their ships and aircraft to depart. The fighting against South Vietnam would continue until the Saigon government was overthrown; there was no mention of the release of our prisoners of war. Continuing its insistence on denying the significance of any American gesture, Xuan Thuy dismissed the announced departure of over 100,000 troops as “withdrawal by driblets.” Our reduction of B-52 sorties by 25 percent and the change in military orders that severely curtailed offensive operations by American forces did not prevent an absurd allegation that we were escalating the war.
In the afternoon it was Le Duc Tho’s turn. He began by challenging my assessment that events had moved in our favor since August. “Only when we have a correct assessment of the balance of forces,” said Le Duc Tho in his role as Leninist schoolmaster, “can we have a correct solution.” He revealed the importance Hanoi attached to our public opinion by giving it pride of place in his presentation. He denied that Nixon’s public standing had improved, citing a Gallup Poll which showed that the number of Americans favoring immediate withdrawal had risen from 21 to 35 percent. This, however, was “only” public opinion. “In addition, I have seen many statements by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by the Democratic Party, by Mr. Clifford, which have demanded the total withdrawal of American forces, the change of Thieu-Ky-Khiem, [Tran Thien Khiem, who had replaced Tran Van Huong as Prime Minister of South Vietnam.] and the appointment of a successor to Ambassador Lodge.” I replied sharply that I would listen to no further propositions from Hanoi regarding American public opinion; Le Duc Tho was there to negotiate the Vietnamese position. Painful as I found our domestic dissent, I did not think it compatible with our dignity to debate it with an adversary. It took several meetings to get that point across and I never succeeded totally.
Le Duc Tho next attacked our military assessment. He cut to the heart of the dilemma of Vietnamization. All too acutely, he pointed out that our strategy was to withdraw enough forces to make the war bearable for the American people while simultaneously strengthening the Saigon forces so that they could stand on their own. He then asked the question that was also tormenting me: “Before, there were over a million U.S. and puppet troops, and you failed. How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting? Now, with only U.S. support, how can you win?”
From this analysis, Le Duc Tho’s conclusions followed inexorably. He insisted that military and political problems be dealt with simultaneously—a position from which he never deviated until October 1972. According to Le Duc Tho, the only military subject for discussion was the unconditional liquidation of our involvement. The six-month deadline for withdrawal proposed by the NLF was fixed and would run regardless of other agreements. However, even if we withdrew, Hanoi would stop fighting only if there were a political settlement. This, in Le Duc Tho’s view, presupposed the removal of the “warlike” President Thieu, Vice President Ky, and Prime Minister Khiem and the creation of a coalition government composed of three groups: those members of the “Saigon Administration” (without Thieu, Ky, and Khiem) who genuinely stood for “peace, independence and neutrality”; neutral forces who met the same criteria; and the Communist NLF. The NLF would determine who stood for “peace, independence and neutrality.” This coalition government, loaded as it was in Hanoi’s favor, was not, however, the final word. With one-third of it composed of Communists, with the remainder approved by the Communists, with all anti-Communist leaders barred, it was then to negotiate with the fully armed NLF for a definitive solution. Tho comforted me that this generous scheme would open hopeful prospects: “If you show goodwill and serious intent, a settlement will come quickly.”
At the meeting on March 16 I tried another approach. I proposed to Le Duc Tho that neither side exert military pressure in Vietnam or in “related” countries during the negotiations—in other words a mutual de-escalation of military operations throughout Indochina. This was contemptuously rejected with a pedantic lecture that every war had its high points with which it was impossible to interfere. At the April 4 meeting I repeated the proposal. Once again the North Vietnamese spurned it without any exploration whatsoever. On March 16 I also put on the table a precise monthly schedule of total American withdrawal over a sixteen-month period. The North Vietnamese said it was unacceptable because it differed from the proposal of twelve months in the President’s November 3 speech. (I had used sixteen months because it was the only precise schedule that existed in the Pentagon and reflected the technical assessment of how long it would take us to withdraw our 400,000 remaining men and their equipment.) When I explained that the schedule was illustrative only and that the deadline would of course be made to coincide with Presidential pronouncements, it was rejected because Hanoi supported the “correct and logical” deadline of six months put forward by the NLF. Our schedule was defective, in Le Duc Tho’s view, because it would start to run only after the agreement was completed, while Hanoi wanted us to withdraw unconditionally on a schedule unrelated to any other issue. Furthermore, Le Duc Tho refused to discuss any political solution that preserved any leading member of the South Vietnamese government; he derided our proposal for mixed electoral commissions, including members of the Viet Cong, which we proposed as a fair means to supervise free elections. We were being offered terms for surrender, not a negotiation in any normal sense.
At the April 4 meeting Xuan Thuy summed up Hanoi’s objections to our position. The deadline was “wrong” because it was longer than their demand of six months and depended on the settlement of other issues; mutual withdrawal was unacceptable; no settlement was possible as long as Thieu, Ky, and Khiem and other leaders “opposed to peace, independence and neutrality” remained in office; our delegation in Paris still lacked a senior replacement for Lodge. My suggestions that we explore ways to organize a fair political contest were answered with the unyielding response that only the overthrow of the Saigon government could solve the political question.
The most vitriolic comments were, however, reserved for Laos, where a North Vietnamese offensive had just been launched, and Cambodia. Le Duc Tho accused us of escalating the war in Laos. When I replied that one good test of who was doing what to whom was to see which side was advancing, Le Duc Tho argued that we had “provoked” the North Vietnamese offensive and that the fighting was being conducted by Laotian forces in any event. (This caused me to comment that it was remarkable how well the Pathet Lao spoke Vietnamese.) As for Cambodia, Le Duc Tho was aroused and implacable, ridiculing my offer for its neutralization. The war in Indochina had become one, he insisted, and would be fought to the finish on that basis. I will discuss Laos and Cambodia later in this chapter.
In short, Hanoi’s position as it emerged in the three meetings with Le Duc Tho was peremptory and unyielding. The North Vietnamese rejected a schedule of mutual withdrawal, de-escalation, the neutralization of Cambodia, or a mixed electoral commission for South Vietnam. Le Duc Tho’s idea of a negotiation was to put forward his unilateral demands. Their essence was for the United States to withdraw on a deadline so short that the collapse of Saigon would be inevitable. On the way out we were being asked to dismantle an allied government and establish an alternative whose composition would be prescribed by Hanoi and whose only role even then would be to negotiate final terms with Hanoi’s front. When I asked Le Duc Tho whether his political program expressed a preference or a condition, he said flatly: “This is a condition.” It was a condition to which Hanoi stuck resolutely until the fall of 1972.
The first series of secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho ended with his statement that unless we changed our position, there was nothing more to discuss. [Typical of the never-never land of the public debate was an article that appeared the day after my first meeting with Le Duc Tho in the Philadelphia Bulletin. Its author, Roger Hilsman, had been Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs during the period of our initial involvement in Vietnam. He claimed that the President was “rebuffing a communist offer of a more-or-less immediate Vietnam peace on terms that many Americans might find perfectly acceptable.” Hilsman claimed to be supported in his view by a number of experts, including Averell Harriman. On the basis of an exegesis of Hanoi’s Delphic declarations, Hilsman and his associates professed to have discovered the following peace offer:
No election but an old-fashioned political deal setting up a coalition government including representatives of all political factions, Communist and non-Communist;
Although their propaganda still calls for immediate total withdrawal of American troops, privately they have indicated the withdrawal could be phased over two or three years;
Postponement of the reunification of North and South Vietnam for a period of between five and ten years;
International guarantees of the territorial integrity of Laos and Cambodia.
Hanoi, of course, had explicitly rejected each of these points.]
In going over the record with the perspective of time, I am astonished by my own extraordinarily sanguine reporting. This was partly due to my desire to keep the channel alive. Aware of Nixon’s skepticism, I fell into the trap of many negotiators of becoming an advocate of my own negotiation. No damage was done, because Hanoi never gave us the opportunity to make a concrete decision. Another reason for our optimism was that we were still relative innocents about the theological subtleties of Hanoi’s unrelenting psychological warfare. For example, I reported to Nixon after the March 16 meeting that Hanoi had hinted at a willingness to discuss mutual withdrawal. In fact, as became evident at the next meeting, Le Duc Tho had actually insisted that Hanoi would discuss the role of its own forces only after our withdrawal and solely with the coalition government in Saigon whose composition it insisted on controlling.
The record leaves no doubt that we were looking for excuses to make the negotiations succeed, not to fail. Far from being determined on a military solution as our critics never tired of alleging, we went out of our way to give the benefit of every doubt to the pursuit of a negotiated settlement. Nixon shared this positive attitude despite his greater pessimism. And he was willing to run risks. In preparation for my March meeting I wrote to him on February 27:
The positions we develop should be reasonable enough to be attractive, but strong enough so we would not have to back away from them in another more conventional negotiating channel if this one should break down… The lack of an agreed position with the GVN will require you to make decisions on our position which could, if later revealed, embroil us in difficulties with Saigon. This is risky, but I see no other way to proceed if we are to maintain momentum and secrecy.
Nixon wrote into the margin next to the last sentence: “OK—will do.”
Nor can Thieu be fairly charged with being an obstacle—except in the special sense that Hanoi objected to his existence. I cabled full reports after every session by backchannel to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon, to brief President Thieu. Thieu interposed no objections to either procedure or substance. Only slowly and toward the very end of the process did we come to understand that Thieu did not really agree with our positions. In the beginning he calculated that they would never be accepted and that acquiescence was his way of keeping our support for the conduct of the war.
One unhappy consequence of the secret talks was to sharpen the compartmentalization of knowledge, which was such a bane of the Nixon Administration. Rogers was not told of them until well into 1971. Since David Bruce was briefed after he became head of our Paris delegation in July 1970 and Bunker was always kept up to date, we had the curious result that these ambassadors knew more than their nominal chief. Laird was never formally told, though I am sure that he had adequate information about who was using the planes under his control and the likely reason. It was a poor system and even though I operated it I think it is one that ought never to be emulated. Nixon’s distrust of his Cabinet members exaggerated their already strong self-will. Partly through ignorance, partly because they felt no commitment to policies they had not shaped, they consistently cut across our initiatives or challenged our strategies that had been clearly articulated.
The first round of negotiations with Le Duc Tho collapsed because diplomacy always reflects some balance of forces and Le Duc Tho’s assessment was not so wrong. His sense of public opinion in America—and especially of the leadership groups he had identified—was quite accurate. The dilemmas of Vietnamization were real. The lack of discipline in the American bureaucracy meant that the philosophical disagreements within the Executive Branch were showing through. In these circumstances Le Duc Tho could see no reason to modify his demands for unconditional withdrawal and the overthrow of the Saigon government. He would see none until two and a half years later, when the military situation left him no other choice.
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I |
n the NorthWest corner of Indochina, wedged between mountain ranges and the plain of the Mekong River, the tribes and peoples of Laos, ruled by a Buddhist king, led a peaceful existence for centuries, essentially unaffected by the wars and struggles of their more bellicose neighbors. In the nineteenth century Laos was conquered by the French without recorded resistance and then governed by them from Hanoi along with the rest of Indochina.
By one of history’s little ironies, those struggling for independence sometimes inherit the imperial pretensions of their former colonial rulers. Thus the Leninist masters of Hanoi saw themselves as the natural heirs of all that had been ruled by France from the very headquarters they were now occupying. There had been previous efforts by Vietnam to dominate Laos and Cambodia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries;[101] now there was added a proclivity to emulate the scale of French colonial rule. After the 1954 Geneva Agreement, which ended the French presence, the peace-loving peoples of Laos had the misfortune of being astride convenient routes by which North Vietnam could invade the South while bypassing the Demilitarized Zone set up by that agreement.[102]
From the beginning the Pathet Lao (the Laotian Communists, dominated by Hanoi) retained control over two NorthEast provinces where the writ of the government in Vientiane never ran. By 1961 a three-cornered civil war was raging between the Pathet Lao in the NorthEast, neutralist forces in the center of the country on the fabled Plain of Jars, and a rightist group along the Mekong River bordering Thailand. (There is a map of Laos above.) By 1961, over 6,000 North Vietnamese troops were involved. The conflict became sufficiently grave for President Kennedy to warn at a news conference on March 23, 1961: “Laos is far away from America, but the world is small… The security of all SouthEast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence.” In May 1961 negotiations over the future of Laos opened in Geneva. Like all negotiations with Hanoi, they proved protracted; pursuing its normal tactic, Hanoi maintained military pressure until President Kennedy sent 5,000 US Marines to neighboring Thailand in May 1962. Within two months of that show of force, a new Geneva Agreement was signed by fourteen nations, including North Vietnam and the USSR, providing for neutralization of Laos. Accepting the Soviet and North Vietnamese proposal, the United States agreed to the withdrawal of all foreign military personnel and to a coalition government, headed by the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma, in which all three factions would be represented.
North Vietnam flouted the accords from the day they were signed. All 666 American military personnel in Laos departed through international checkpoints; of the 6,000 North Vietnamese in the country only forty (yes, forty) left through the checkpoints; the thousands remained.
In April 1963 the precarious coalition split apart. Fighting soon resumed. Southern Laos was in effect annexed by the North Vietnamese army, which constructed there an intricate system of infiltration routes into South Vietnam—the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By 1970 over half a million North Vietnamese troops had moved South along these paths. The number of North Vietnamese troops stationed in Laos had risen to 67,000—ten times the number that in 1961-1962 had precipitated a major crisis under President Kennedy.
Starting in the mid-Sixties, the United States found itself extending increasing support to Premier Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist leader whom we had originally opposed but who had been recognized as the leader by all sides in the 1962 Geneva Accords. Our purpose was to maintain a neutralist government and also to secure Souvanna’s acquiescence in our efforts to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We gave financial assistance to the Royal Laotian Army, to some irregular forces of Meo tribesmen led by General Vang Pao, and from time to time to Thai volunteers operating in Laos. Most of this was occasionally reported in the press; by 1970 all of it was known to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of a number of classified hearings conducted by Senator Stuart Symington. But the US government made no formal acknowledgment, so as to avoid giving Hanoi a pretext to compound its massive violations of the Geneva Accords by taking over all of Laos.
This history is of some importance because early in 1970 Laos briefly became the focal point of our Indochina concerns and domestic debate. A North Vietnamese offensive was threatening to overrun Northern Laos. Domestic critics used the occasion to cry havoc about the danger that we might slide into another “open-ended” commitment in Indochina without noticing it.
Hanoi was fighting essentially two wars in Laos, though both for the same objective of hegemony in Indochina. In the South, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was Hanoi’s link to the battlefield of South Vietnam. In Northern Laos, Hanoi supported the Pathet Lao but it was restrained, we thought, by fear of American or Thai response. It had sought to maintain just enough pressure on the Laotian army to prevent it from consolidating itself as an instrument of authority; it would be dealt with after victory in South Vietnam. We did not, for our part, seek to disturb this uneasy equilibrium. No American administration could possibly desire a war in a country like Laos. It would not make sense to expand the conflict into Laos, except for the minimum required for our own protection, when we were busy withdrawing troops from South Vietnam. It was this position that the North Vietnamese disturbed in late January 1970 when they suddenly sent 13,000 reinforcements and a great deal of extra equipment to the Plain of Jars, where the neutralists were holding back the Pathet Lao. That threatened Souvanna, and our relations with him; if he abandoned his acquiescence in the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi’s logistic problem would be greatly eased, exposing us in South Vietnam to growing peril. Worse, if the North Vietnamese troops reached the Mekong, the war would lose its point for Thailand. Bangkok would then be under pressure along the hundreds of miles of the river dividing a plain without any other obstacles. We would almost certainly be denied use of the Thai airbases, essential for our B-52 and tactical air operations in Vietnam.
On January 23, an enemy offensive imminent, our Ambassador in Laos, G. McMurtrie Godley, requested B-52 strikes against a major North Vietnamese concentration containing, it was believed, 4,000 troops; it would have been the first use of B-52S in Northern Laos. This inspired a stately bureaucratic minuet in Washington that told much about the state of mind of our government. We were caught between officials seeking to protect the American forces for which they felt a responsibility and a merciless Congressional onslaught that rattled these officials in their deliberations.
I scheduled a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG) for January 26 to consider Godley’s request. Two hours before the meeting Mel Laird told me that he favored using B-52s against that target; on the other hand he did not want it discussed in an interagency forum for fear of leaks. Laird urged approval in the same channels as the secret strikes in Cambodia. This was why, he told me, he had instructed his representatives on the WSAG to recommend against the use of B-52s in Northern Laos even though he favored it. The record of the meeting thus would show Pentagon opposition whatever Laird’s personal view; the President would take the heat for the decision. One hour before the meeting Bill Rogers called to tell me that he was against using B-52s in Northern Laos and that he had Laird on his side. I mumbled some doubts about this claim but suggested a meeting of the three of us with the President. Unfortunately, the President chose this moment to go into seclusion at Camp David to prepare his first veto message, rejecting a welfare appropriations bill. As was his habit on such occasions he would not accept telephone calls, even from me. By the time he was again available all the principals were on record with some statement protecting themselves against all possible developments.
I therefore started around the track again—this time with General Earle Wheeler. I asked him whether the target of which Laird had spoken could be attacked with tactical aircraft rather than B-52s. (For some reason, tactical air strikes seemed to provoke less of an outcry than B-52s.) Wheeler informed me that it was being attacked by tactical aircraft but these could not compare in effectiveness with B-52s. When I went back to Laird he stressed that the concentration of 4,000 enemy troops would soon disperse; it was the best target for B-52S since he had become Secretary of Defense. On the other hand, he said, he would not be offended if it were turned down. I concluded that it was too late to obtain a consensus on this particular target but promised to get a clear-cut Presidential decision on the principle.
On February 12 the long-feared North Vietnamese offensive finally broke on the Plain of Jars. The next day, Premier Souvanna Phouma made a formal request for B-52 strikes—the first of several. By February 16 the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao had driven government forces from most of the high ground that dominates the approaches to the Plain. The President called a meeting for the afternoon of February 16 with Laird, Acting Secretary of State Richardson, Helms, Admiral Moorer (Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), and me. I recommended that the President authorize B-52 strikes if the enemy advanced beyond Muong Soui, the farthest point of Communist penetration before the government offensive of the previous summer. The President agreed. The Communists were beyond Muong Soui within twenty-four hours. An attack with three B-52s was launched on the evening of February 18. It had taken a month of discussion, a major North Vietnamese offensive, and the near collapse of the Laotian front to induce exactly one B-52 strike. I do not know to this day whether Laird favored or opposed the action; his stand was compatible with both positions. Wheeler was consistently in favor. Rogers moved from opposition to indifference.
But one B-52 strike was enough to trigger the domestic outcry. The very next day, February 19, the New York Times reported that B-52s had been diverted from South Vietnam to attack North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces in Northern Laos. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Frank Church wasted no time in deploring the involvement of American planes and pilots in Laos; they made no reference to the North Vietnamese offensive. Senator Mike Mansfield, also without mentioning the continuing North Vietnamese onslaught, scored American “escalation” on February 21. Reports appeared of “armed Americans in civilian clothes” supporting the Laotian command.[103] On February 25, Senators Mathias, Mansfield, Gore, Symington, Cooper, and Percy attacked Administration “secrecy” over what they termed a “deepening U.S. involvement.” Senators Gore and Mansfield on February 25 demanded publication of secret testimony taken by their subcommittee in October on US involvement. Senator Symington sent a letter to Secretary Rogers urging that Ambassador Godley be brought back from Laos to testify. On February 27 the Wall Street Journal halfheartedly supported the use of B-52s but warned against further escalation. The Washington Post on March 2 weighed in with a stinging editorial entitled “Laos: The Same Old Shell Game.”
This was the culmination of a campaign extending over many months in the Senate and in the media to get at the “truth” in Laos. The issue was not to obtain the facts—they were widely known—but to induce the government to confirm them publicly, which was quite a different matter. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had substantially full knowledge from its staff investigations as well as from its classified hearings. Similarly, the media had given the public a reasonably accurate picture. The issue for us was to what extent an official acknowledgment of our operations in Laos would wreck what was left of the 1962 Accords, give Hanoi a pretext for further stepping up its aggression in Northern Laos, and fuel even more passionate controversy at home.
Our role in Laos had been “secret” in three administrations of two parties precisely because each President wanted to keep it limited. To spell out the limits publicly was as dangerous to this strategy as to spell out the extent of our involvement. We were being pressed to do both. From the critics’ point of view the issue was useful for a challenge to the whole Vietnam enterprise. Some would even have considered it a bonus if a collapse in Laos had led to a collapse in Vietnam. They wanted not facts but ammunition.
Despite these hazards we came to the conclusion that some formal statement of our policy and intentions in Laos was required. The reasoning that led to this conclusion was somewhat Byzantine. Laird wanted a public statement to head off State Department leaks making him the fall guy; for this objective to be realized, the explanation had to come from anywhere but the Defense Department. Rogers opposed a State Department briefing for the same reason; he had no desire to mount the barricades over Laos. He suggested declassifying the secret State Department testimony that had already been given before the Symington subcommittee. Symington had behaved honorably. In those far-off years, secrets conveyed were still sacrosanct in many Congressional committees; Symington would not release classified information without the consent of the Administration. But if the Administration had given its consent it would have undercut the practice and principle of classified hearings. In the future, all that would be needed to force secret testimony into the public domain would be the generation of a public controversy; it would be a perpetual temptation to an unfriendly committee to structure the secret presentations so as to generate maximum adverse publicity and then compel disclosure.
I explained the issue in a memorandum for the President:
The real issue in Laos is entirely related to Vietnam:
- There is no question but that the North Vietnamese can overrun Laos at any point in time that they care to, providing they are willing to pay the political and psychological costs of upsetting the 1962 Accords.
- Should North Vietnam overrun Laos, our whole bargaining with respect to the Vietnam conflict would be undermined. In fact, if North Vietnamese military operations in Laos succeed to the point that Souvanna believes he must succumb to their influence in order to survive, we could then anticipate that he would refuse to permit us to continue our interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and thus our military operations in South Vietnam would be catastrophically damaged.
- These are the fundamental considerations with all the rest amounting to balderdash….
- State regards the release of the Symington Subcommittee testimony as being the simplest way to do this. We might kill two birds with one stone: placate Symington, Fulbright, et al, and show the public what we are really doing.
- On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the release of the sensitive parts of the testimony will placate the Senators. They know what is going on in Laos, and why. The executive sessions have given them all this…
- Releasing the testimony would help North Vietnam to document its case that we are violating the Geneva Accords, without admitting that it is violating them, and thus seriously undermine the real basis for our action.
It would also make it more difficult for the Soviets to preserve their present relatively friendly posture towards the RLG [Royal Laotian Government]…
- Furthermore, by giving in on Laos, the Administration’s stand on not releasing sensitive parts of the proceedings would be eroded with respect to other countries. We might be opening a real Pandora’s box of problems for ourselves, not only domestically, but in our relations with other countries. Our good faith in preserving the sanctity of international agreements could no longer be trusted, and the usefulness of the diplomats who negotiated them would be compromised. I am particularly concerned over the reaction of the Thai, who already question our commitment to them.
An NSC meeting on February 27 dealt with our public position on Laos. The decision, to the enormous relief of the Cabinet members, was that a statement would be prepared by the NSC staff and issued by the White House. Why I agreed to a procedure that would put the White House in the direct line of fire on every factual dispute—whether it was bureaucratic inexperience or simply exhaustion with endless attempts to pass the buck—is impossible to determine at this late date. Whatever the reason, the NSC staff quickly began to draft a public statement explaining our involvement in Laos. To avoid its appearing excessively defensive, I cast it in the form of a new proposal to the two co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference, Britain and the Soviet Union, to convene a conference of signatories of the 1962 Accords to develop new guarantees for the neutrality of Laos. I had no illusion that this would happen. Neither London nor Moscow was eager to expose itself on this issue.
The statement, published on March 6, was a full and candid account of American involvement and the reasons for secrecy since the Kennedy Administration. But it generated a major controversy because of one inaccuracy, produced in part by the agencies’ being less than meticulous about supplying my staff with all the details (since they would not be taking the heat), in part by an honest bureaucratic bungle. Nixon had felt that the best way to prove that no Americans were involved in ground combat in Laos was to emphasize that none had been killed in such activities. “No one cares about B-52 strikes in Laos. But people worry about our boys there,” Nixon had told me after the NSC meeting. Winston Lord, my new special assistant—who was to become one of my closest friends—was in charge of drafting the statement. He and others scrupulously checked with the departments. They were given the impression that the only hesitation over an assertion that no US personnel had died in Laos related to some casualties among American reconnaissance teams that had sporadically entered Southern Laos from Vietnam to observe and if possible harass infiltration on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (code-named “Operation Prairie Fire”). Since these activities were clearly related to the war in Vietnam and had nothing to do with the battles in Northern Laos, we thought we could sustain a sentence to the effect that “no American stationed in Laos has ever been killed in ground combat operations.”
Making a flat statement of fact on matters extending over nearly a decade is a certain sign of inexperience. One can never be sure what facts are stacked away in the recesses of the bureaucracy that will suddenly appear. I soon was to be given a lesson in the perils of being too categorical.
After the statement was issued on March 6, the bureaucracy suddenly began leaking to the press what it had not been able to bring itself to inform the President—that some very few Americans stationed in Laos, civilians and military personnel not in combat, had in fact been killed by random fire over the previous nine years. The White House was forced to acknowledge on March 8 that it now had information from the Defense Department that six civilians and one army captain who “was not engaged in combat operations” had been killed in Laos since the beginning of 1969. An average of about four American civilians had been killed in Laos in each of the preceding five years. On March 10, the Department of Defense helpfully announced that American military men serving in Laos had been entitled to “hostile fire pay” since January 1, 1966. Subsequent inquiry into who was responsible for the errors produced the unstartling conclusion that it was the result of a series of misunderstandings and a failure of communication. Lord did a postmortem, retracing the drafting process and the discussions between Defense and the NSC staff; it does not reflect the agony this brilliant and honorable man underwent in what were his first few weeks in the thankless job of being my special assistant.
Nixon was furious at what he considered a failure of my vaunted staff; for a week I could not get an appointment to see him. I took full responsibility. On March 9 I wrote to Laird, with a copy to the President:
Dear Mel:
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I want you to know that your recollection is correct. Your staff lined out the phrase about no American combat deaths twice. I was under the misapprehension that this was a result of PRAIRIE FIRE and therefore adjusted the statement to take account of that. However, it is the duty of my office to prevent mistakes like this, and I wanted you to know that you bear no responsibility.
Warm regards,
Henry A. Kissinger
Naturally, the press and Congress were indignant at what was called—on the basis of four-to-five noncombat deaths a year—a confirmed American military involvement in Laos. Public debate focused on the new “credibility gap” rather than on the underlying reality—that American involvement in Laos was demonstrably minimal and that North Vietnam was engaged in an offensive.
The situation in Laos soon took another grave turn. The Communist advance reached the Long Thieng area, the last stronghold before the capital of Vientiane. It also threatened the headquarters of Vang Pao, the leader of the Meo tribesmen who were resisting Communist domination. With a Communist advance to the Mekong imminent, Thailand offered to send volunteers to Long Thieng if the Laotian government asked for them. This proposal was strenuously resisted by the State Department and received only lukewarm support from other agencies at two WSAG meetings. After we received a formal request from both the Laotian and Thai governments, the President overruled the agencies. He was convinced and I agreed that to refuse the offer would raise doubts in Thailand about our commitment to its defense and might panic Souvanna. On March 26 I told the WSAG of the President’s decision.
The Laotian government launched a counteroffensive on March 27, aided by the Thai volunteers. Their intervention was decisive. On March 31 Laos government forces recaptured nearby Sam Thong; its airfield was soon back in use and our planes began ferrying supplies. North Vietnamese forces pulled back from the Long Thieng area the next day.
The Laos crisis thus subsided for the rest of the year; the political and military equilibrium in Northern Laos was maintained. But the split within our government had been dramatized; and so corrosively untrusting was our opposition that we were accused of provoking what we sought to resist and were suspected of organizing the sequel—a coup in neighboring Cambodia. The facts were very different.
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F |
or nearly thirty years the political life of Cambodia had been synonymous with the tempestuous career and personality of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Crowned King in 1941 at the age of eighteen, he abdicated the throne in 1955 to play an active political role as Prime Minister; in June 1960, by unanimous vote of the Cambodian National Assembly, he was elevated to chief of state. It was Sihanouk who had guided the kingdom of Cambodia to independence from France in 1953, shaped its political institutions, and dominated its policies.
In leading his country Sihanouk skillfully walked a tightrope between East and West in global politics, between the Soviet Union and China in the emerging Communist schism, between the opposing sides in the battle over Vietnam, and between right and left in his own country. Voluble, erratic, fun-loving-”mercurial” is the word usually used—he dexterously kept his country a haven of peace amid the bloody wars that ravaged the rest of Indochina. Finally—suddenly—in 1970, the nimble tightrope walker slipped and fell, and thus doomed his people to a hell far worse than even their neighbors had endured.
On January 7, 1970, Prince Sihanouk, with his wife Monique and a retinue of eleven, left their capital, Phnom Penh, for a two-month vacation at a clinic in Grasse on the French Riviera. It was his custom to “take the cure” there every two years to ease the discomfort of what he called his “obesity, blood disease, and albuminuria.” In his absence his government was left in the hands of his own chosen leaders: Chairman of the National Assembly Cheng Heng (who became acting head of state); Prime Minister Lon Nol (whom Sihanouk had appointed in August 1969 and praised in September as “the only person I could trust because of his faithfulness to the Throne and Nation”); [Lon Nol was also Sihanouk’s representative to China’s National Day celebrations in Peking on October 1, 1969, standing on Tien An Men with Mao Tse-tung.] and Sirik Matak, First Deputy Prime Minister.
Relations between Sihanouk and his own government were not always smooth. Leftist elements had been discredited and expelled by Sihanouk in prior years (the leaders of the Communist Khmer Rouge had, in fact, been condemned to death in absentia). There were some differences with the Lon Nol-Sirik Matak Cabinet over Sihanouk’s economic policies, his inability to rid the country of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces occupying Cambodia’s Eastern regions, the corruption of his entourage, and his unpopular decision to open a state casino in Phnom Penh. But none of these squabbles seemed critical enough in January 1970 to impede his departure for the South of France.
The United States had even less premonition of trouble. We had restored diplomatic relations in July 1969, as described earlier, and had a small mission headed by chargé d’affaires Lloyd Rives. There had been no US military or economic assistance program in Cambodia since Sihanouk canceled it in 1963. And, largely at Senator Mansfield’s insistence, no CIA personnel were assigned to Phnom Penh after the restoration of diplomatic relations. In January, February, and into the first half of March 1970, the highest levels of the United States government were preoccupied with the burgeoning crisis in Laos and the related acrimony at home. On March 17 I lunched with Marshall Green and William Sullivan of the State Department’s East Asian Bureau; our discussions focused on China, Vietnam, and Laos; the record suggests that Cambodia was not even touched upon.
From the American point of view the precarious political balance in neutral Cambodia under Sihanouk’s skillful, if unpredictable, tutelage was the best attainable situation. To be sure, Hanoi’s use of Cambodian territory for launching military operations against our forces, in flagrant disregard of international law, was a continuing danger. But here too a certain equilibrium had been established. Sihanouk had acquiesced in, if not encouraged, our air operations against these sanctuaries; we desisted from ground operations across the border; Hanoi continued to use the sanctuaries, if at a higher cost. And we had some idea of how precarious the internal balance in Cambodia was. When President Nixon met with President Thieu in Saigon on July 30, 1969, Thieu cautioned prophetically that if the balance in Cambodia were upset by the overthrow of Sihanouk, the Communists would win in the end:
The President [Nixon] asked for his views of Sihanouk. President Thieu replied that while Sihanouk is bad, we don’t want to have something worse. He added that there are only two groups in Cambodia who can overthrow Sihanouk, the military or the Communists; the military are weak and ineffectual and it is more likely to be the Communists who would succeed. Even if the military moved against Sihanouk, he felt that the Communists would eventually take over. What Sihanouk does or can do depends very largely on what happens in Vietnam. Cambodia is a weak country and if Sihanouk were overthrown, or if we encouraged his overthrow, it is highly likely the Communists will take over.
We agreed with this assessment. Cambodia’s tragedy was that its internal stresses finally upset the delicate equilibrium that Sihanouk had struggled to maintain, unleashing precisely the forces which Thieu had foreseen. The precipitating issue was the Communist sanctuaries from which the North Vietnamese had tormented our forces. These increasingly aroused the nationalist outrage of Cambodians, who over the centuries have seen successive Vietnamese rulers colonize their ancestral lands; indeed, the area around Saigon was taken by Vietnamese from Cambodians only in the early nineteenth century. Had French occupation not supervened, it is quite possible that all of Cambodia would have suffered that fate. The antipathy of Cambodians for all Vietnamese has ancient roots. Sihanouk’s inability to dislodge the feared North Vietnamese from Cambodian soil undermined his position with every passing month.
Sihanouk’s public statements of the period leave no doubt as to whom he considered the threat to his country’s independence. Repeatedly and publicly he protested North Vietnamese “aggression” and infringement of Cambodia’s sovereignty. In June 1969—three months after the secret bombing started—he had complained at a press conference that Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province was “practically North Vietnamese territory,” and that “Viet Minh” (North Vietnamese) and Viet Cong forces had heavily infiltrated into Svay Rieng province. In the October 1969 issue of Sangkum, a journal of which Sihanouk was editor, an article entitled “The Implantation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese along Our Borders” protested the North Vietnamese occupation at length; a map showed the location of 35,000 to 40,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops occupying Cambodian territory (not unhelpful to our intelligence). In a signed article in the December 1969 issue, Sihanouk went so far as to pay tribute to the American role in Vietnam. He argued that “in all honesty and objectivity,” the presence of American forces in SouthEast Asia established a regional balance of power that permitted small nations like Cambodia “to be respected, if not courted, by the European and even Asian Socialist camps.” America’s Asian allies could not compensate for a withdrawal of American power by turning toward the Communists because, wrote Sihanouk, like a bird before a serpent, “the bird, gentle or not, always ends up by being swallowed up.” Sihanouk concluded his article with a ringing endorsement of the Nixon Doctrine:
It is possible and even probable that the new Nixon Doctrine which foresees not having American troops intervene… may enter into effect… But, they [the Americans] will be obliged in their own interest to support the popular nationalists in their resistance against the new imperialism, that of Asiatic Communism… If the US brings aid without conditions and without physical intervention… they will certainly have more hope of seeing the flood of Communism contained than if they assume this task with their own soldiers. In effect, they would thus contribute to cutting the wings from the subversive propaganda of Communism, which calls the nation to rebellion, and to the “liberation of the nation” when the region is “occupied” by foreign forces. . . .
I sent excerpts from this article to Nixon on February 12, 1970. On his instructions, I also sent the full text to Senator Mansfield on February 23.
Sihanouk had no doubt of which side had committed the fundamental aggression in Indochina. For example, in November 1969 the Viet Cong had fired on a US Special Forces camp in Vietnam from Cambodian territory; retaliatory—and publicized—American air attacks were said to have killed some twenty-five Cambodians. Sihanouk had protested this to the United States; our policy was to pay compensation. Nevertheless, in a speech on December 15, Sihanouk placed the responsibility for this incident on the North Vietnamese:
Who triggered the Dak Dam incident? It was the Viet Cong who fired at the Americans from our territory. When the Americans got hit, they became angry and bombed us. Then the Viet Cong and the Viet Minh fled, and only Khmer inhabitants were left to become victims. That is the whole story. . . .
The big Red powers who claim to be our friends, the European Reds at the United Nations, have forbidden us to complain to the United Nations…
Sihanouk told his audience that he would not break diplomatic relations with the United States again, as some were urging, because if he did so, “we’ll have to do the same thing with the Viet Minh and Viet Cong, because they still continue to commit aggression against our territory even after we established diplomatic relations with them.”
On February 22, 1970, toward the end of his vacation in France, Sihanouk announced that on his way home in March he intended to visit the Soviet Union and China, “those great, friendly countries,” to enlist their support to reduce or eliminate the North Vietnamese presence in his country.
But for the first time in his career Sihanouk lost his grip on events. On March 8, villagers in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province demonstrated against North Vietnamese occupation. On March 11, twenty thousand young Cambodians sacked the embassies of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in Phnom Penh. (The Cambodian government clearly had a hand in organizing the demonstrations.) The two houses of the Cambodian Parliament held a special joint session and requested the government to reaffirm Cambodia’s neutrality and to defend the national territory. The Parliament urged an expansion of the Cambodian army, which Sihanouk had kept deliberately weak because he feared that it might move against him.
From Paris, Sihanouk sent a public cablegram to his mother, the Dowager Queen, in Phnom Penh denouncing “certain personalities” in his government who were trying to “throw our country into the arms of an imperialist capitalist power.” He announced his intention to return to Phnom Penh immediately “to address the nation and the army and ask them to make their choice.” In an interview while still in Paris, Sihanouk warned the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong that they had a choice between respecting Cambodia’s neutrality and seeing a pro-American faction take over his government.[104] For reasons never fully explained, he hesitated in Paris, however, and the kettle in Phnom Penh began to boil over. On March 12 Deputy Prime Minister Sirik Matak announced suspension of a trade agreement with the Viet Cong and the expansion of the Cambodian army by ten thousand men. New anti-Vietnamese riots took place in Phnom Penh with attacks on shops and churches of the Vietnamese community. On March 13, the Cambodian Foreign Ministry announced that it had notified the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies that all Vietnamese Communist armed forces were to leave Cambodian territory by dawn on March 15, 1970—two days later.
The same day, March 13, Sihanouk made his single most fateful decision. He left Paris, not to return to Phnom Penh as he had announced two days before, but to carry out his scheduled visit to Moscow. Attempting to regain the initiative on the issue of primary concern to his public, he announced in Paris: “I am going to Moscow and Peking to ask them to curb the activities of the Viet Cong and Viet Minh in my country.” He reprinted a letter he had written in Agence Khmer Presse that he would fight “against the Communist Vietnamese who, taking advantage of the military situation, infiltrate and settle our territory.” Despite his earlier intention to return quickly to Phnom Penh, despite Soviet President Podgorny’s advice to fly home the next day, Sihanouk spent five crucial days in Moscow haggling over military aid—in a last-ditch effort to placate his military, who were chafing at being cut off from all new equipment. Even then, he headed not for Phnom Penh but for Peking. In his own account Sihanouk asserts rather defensively that he “needed more time to watch developments in Phnom Penh”;[105] at several points he claims that Lon Nol and Sirik Matak would have blocked any attempt to return. But it was not until March 18 that his own legislature dropped him and only then were the airports closed. Sihanouk learned that he had been deposed from Prime Minister Kosygin on the ride to Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. He was stunned. For none of his aides had had the courage to tell him that earlier that day the ninety-two-strong Cambodian National Assembly and Council of the Kingdom, in another special joint session, had voted unanimously to remove him as chief of state.
Sihanouk arrived in Peking to be hugged by Premier Chou En-lai and feted by the Chinese as if nothing had changed; Chou assured him that China still regarded him as chief of state. In Phnom Penh, meanwhile, the Cambodian Parliament named Cheng Heng, whom Sihanouk had left behind in his place, as interim—instead of acting—chief of state. It was not a military “coup” in the classic sense; it was Sihanouk’s own government without Sihanouk.
One account of Sihanouk’s behavior came to me months later from Jean Sainteny. I met with Sainteny in his Paris apartment on September 27, 1970, before a meeting with the North Vietnamese. He revealed that he had lunched with Sihanouk in Paris on the very day that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies in Phnom Penh had been attacked (March 11). At that point Sihanouk planned to go back immediately—in which case Sainteny was convinced he would not have been deposed. Sainteny was convinced that Sihanouk changed his mind partly because of Princess Monique’s desire to visit their children, who were students in Prague and Peking. Another reason, I believe, was that Sihanouk was overconfident; he could not believe his rule was in danger from the men who, after all, owed their office to him. He also hoped that Moscow would help him placate his military, by both military aid and pressure on Hanoi to leave Cambodia. Finally (as Sihanouk later told me), he had received a cable from his mother in Phnom Penh warning him that it was dangerous to return.
Any attempt to assess the blame for propelling Cambodia into the maelstrom of bloody conflict must begin here. For Lon Nol and Sirik Matak, the crucial step was their act of bravado to take up the popular battle against the hated—and far superior—forces of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. For Sihanouk, the crucial step was his week of hesitation, because what Lon Nol and Sirik Matak feared, and Podgorny advised, the United States also believed and preferred: that Sihanouk’s bold reentry into Phnom Penh to face down his opponents would have turned the tide of events and was in everybody’s best interest. Once returned to power, Sihanouk could have resumed his balancing role from his traditional position, which I described to Nixon on April 21 as one of “placing himself deliberately on the extreme left wing of the right wing.” We would almost certainly have cooperated with this effort. By March 20 events were racing out of control.
The role of the United States through these events was hardly as purposeful as some imagine, or as effectual as others pretend. Preoccupied with Laos for the first three months of the year, and with no intelligence personnel in Phnom Penh, we found our perceptions lagging far behind events. We neither encouraged Sihanouk’s overthrow nor knew about it in advance. We did not even grasp its significance for many weeks. My own ignorance of what was going on is reflected in two memoranda to Nixon. Though he received daily summaries of key events, I did not send forward a longer analysis of the first (March 11) demonstrations against Sihanouk until March 17, a week’s delay that indicates that Cambodia was scarcely a high priority concern. Even more striking is my suggestion in that analysis that it all could have been an elaborate trick by Sihanouk:
Given the sharp competition between Sirik Matak and Sihanouk, it is possible that Sirik wanted to present Sihanouk with a fait accompli, or to challenge him to a test on grounds where Sirik Matak’s position would be popular. On the other hand, nobody has challenged Sihanouk so directly in years, and it is quite possible that this is an elaborate maneuver, to permit Sihanouk to call for Soviet and Chinese cooperation in urging the VC/NVA [Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army.] to leave, on the grounds that he will fall and be replaced by a “rightist” leader if the VC/NVA stay in Cambodia.
The recent behavior of Sihanouk and the RKG [Royal Khmer Government] would fit either thesis—i.e., that this is a collusive gambit; or that Sihanouk in fact faces a challenge from Sirik Matak and Lon Nol.
The motivations of the principal actors in Phnom Penh were quite obscure to me, not least because Lon Nol had been among those profiting from the smuggling trade with the very Communist forces that his government now challenged. On March 19 in another memorandum to the President, I still thought Sihanouk might attempt to return to Phnom Penh and put some of the pieces back together:
Lon Nol has heretofore been content to be Number Two, but this appears to be a straight power challenge. In popular anger against Vietnamese Communist incursions, he has found a good issue to challenge Sihanouk (and the Army fanned up that anger), but Lon Nol’s dealings with the Communists do not suggest that he is a fervent anti-Communist or anti-Vietnamese patriot.
Future Choices. This situation will probably move in one of three ways:
- A Lon Nol/Sirik Matak-dominated new Government supported by the Army, with little popular support and forced to buy popularity with anti-Vietnamese slogans and economic progress.
- A shaky compromise akin to the barons’ truce with King John in 1215, permitting Sihanouk to come back as Chief of State but with much limited powers. This would be an unstable situation, as Sihanouk maneuvered, probably successfully, to outflank and eliminate his challengers.
- A Sihanouk victory, by turning the Army against Lon Nol.
The Implications for Foreign Policy and for Us. Khmer nationalism has [been] aroused against the Vietnamese Communist occupation. Any future government will probably have to be more circumspect and covert about its cooperation with the Vietnamese. Lon Nol has chosen this issue, and he will need to be able to demonstrate publicly that he is taking action against the Vietnamese occupation. Similarly, Sihanouk will not for some time open himself to the charge of being “soft on the Vietnamese.”
This will create serious problems for the VC/NVA, which will have considerable reason to take a more hostile line toward Cambodia.
None of my reports to the President discussed any US intelligence involvement or expressed any particular pleasure at the coup. Nor was CIA reporting more prescient, doubtless in part because the Agency had been banned from Phnom Penh. It was not until March 18—the day of Sihanouk’s ouster—that a CIA report was circulated in Washington. Its burden: that the Lon Nol-encouraged riots were a precursor to a coup against Sihanouk if Sihanouk refused to go along with an anti-Hanoi policy. The information had been acquired the week before from an Asian businessman not otherwise identified. The delay in distributing this report and the CIA’s failure to predict the overthrow of Sihanouk were later the subject of an investigation by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I do not recall any document predicting the coup that came to my attention before the event, and I have not unearthed one in my papers. Of charges of intelligence failure, it should be remembered that the leader against whom it was directed had a far greater incentive to know the truth in his country, and he failed to anticipate the plot.
On March 20 Nixon and I discussed a forthcoming press conference by him. I recommended that he not comment on Cambodia beyond urging respect for Cambodian neutrality. Nixon agreed, adding that Sihanouk “may come back and take it over again.” At the news conference, which took place on March 21, Nixon called the situation in Cambodia “unpredictable” and “fluid” and expressed hope that the North Vietnamese would respect Cambodia’s neutrality. He repeated publicly what he had told me privately, that he still expected Sihanouk to return to Phnom Penh:
… we have, as you note, established relations on a temporary basis with the government which has been selected by the Parliament and will continue to deal with that government as long as it appears to be the government of the nation. I think any speculation with regard to which way this government is going to turn, what will happen to Prince Sihanouk when he returns, would both be premature and not helpful [emphasis added].
Our priorities were reflected in a meeting of the WSAG on March 19 called to discuss Laos and Cambodia; most of the discussion concerned Laos. My staff’s briefing papers for me showed as much concern for the Columbia Eagle, an American ship impounded by the Cambodians after two sailors mutinied and diverted it to Sihanoukville, as for the long-range implications of the coup. On the political situation they regarded the outcome as uncertain and still left open the possibility of Sihanouk’s return. My briefing paper asked a key question: “Does the presumably more pro-Western orientation of Lon Nol make up for the assumption that Sihanouk’s departure may lead to increased instability?”
However, ignorance did not protect us against the necessity of decision. Not surprisingly, the Executive Branch was even more divided over Cambodia than it had been over Laos. Nixon from the first was in favor of a more active policy. Next to the passage in my memorandum of March 17 informing him of Lon Nol’s plans to expand the Cambodian army by 10,000 men, Nixon wrote: “Let’s get a plan to aid the new government on this goal.” I had not yet acted on this note when Nixon returned my memorandum of March 19 informing him of Sihanouk’s overthrow with the following note: “I want Helms to develop and implement a plan for maximum assistance to pro-US elements in Cambodia. Don’t put this out to 303 [The 303 Committee, by then renamed the 40 Committee, was the interagency committee supervising covert intelligence activities.] or the bureaucracy. Handle like our [Menu] air strike.” Haig conveyed the President’s request directly to Helms on March 22 and I set up a meeting with Helms for March 23.
Helms’s reply was largely procedural. He argued that the CIA could make few realistic recommendations unless permitted to open a station (the CIA term for a resident office) in Phnom Penh. He outlined possible actions ranging from clandestine airlifting to obtaining international support for Lon Nol, but implied that the Agency could not put forward a concrete proposal until it had better information. The President therefore decided to let CIA set up a station in Phnom Penh. This proved no simple matter, for the State Department fought it bitterly, partly out of fear of what Mansfield would do to it in Congress. On April 1, while I was away on vacation—another sure indication that I did not consider the situation critical—the President called Rogers and Helms into the Oval Office and conveyed his order that a CIA office be opened in Phnom Penh immediately.
Nevertheless, whether because Nixon was elliptical as he often was in his face-to-face meetings with Rogers, or because State felt strongly enough to ignore a direct order, the President’s wishes were simply not carried out. On April 2, the next day, CIA nominated an officer and a communicator to move into Phnom Penh. But Rogers called Helms and said that he did not believe this was wise but agreed to look into the communications problem. There was further delay while the State Department decided whether to make a formal request to the Cambodian government. On April 7, charge Lloyd Rives went to see a low-level Cambodian official; this maximized the likelihood of a refusal or at least of a delay. To the evident dismay of the East Asian Bureau, interim permission was granted on the spot, with the promise of an official notification in a short time. The Department insisted on waiting for the official reply, and in another delaying tactic recommended that the communications equipment be flown in by commercial rather than military aircraft.
By April 16, fifteen days after a direct Presidential order, neither CIA officer nor communicator nor equipment had yet moved. While Nixon hated giving direct orders, he could be brutal if sufficiently aroused. He called in Helms, his deputy General Cushman, Haig, and me (back from vacation) to register his outrage at the procrastination and defiance of his instruction. As a sign of his displeasure, no State Department representative was invited to the meeting. Nixon gave a twenty-four-hour deadline for introducing a CIA officer and communicator. He added a vindictive slap at State. Since State had protested that the small size of our Embassy was one of the obstacles, Nixon ordered one State Department official to leave Phnom Penh to make room.
Once again we beheld one of the wonders of the modern state, the relative inability of leaders to dominate their bureaucracy or to cut short its powers of endless exegesis. The twenty-four-hour period was consumed in further dithering. It was a full week before another Presidential explosion finally brought results. The reduction of Embassy personnel was never implemented because events overtook the Presidential directive.
Until the middle of April, therefore, our capability to monitor or influence the situation in Cambodia was severely limited. By then, however, the issue was no longer a quarrel between Cambodian factions, the success of either of which would have been compatible with our own interests. For in the last days of March Sihanouk made his second fateful decision. Ensconced in Peking (with which we had no contact of any kind at that stage), Sihanouk threw in his lot with Hanoi and turned violently against the United States. On March 20—two days after he was deposed—he effectively declared war on the new government. He issued a statement calling for a national referendum and denouncing his removal as “absolutely illegal.” He blamed the “turbulence” in Cambodia on CIA collusion with the “traitorous group” that had deposed him; he defended the North Vietnamese in Cambodia on the ground that they were “resisting American imperialism.” The next day, Sihanouk vowed a struggle “until victory or death” against the new government, which he denounced as “stooges of American imperialists.” Henceforth, Sihanouk’s return would have meant not a restoration of neutralism but the victory of his new Communist patrons, whom he had lost all capacity to control.
In retaliation, the Cambodian National Assembly on March 21 voted to arrest Sihanouk and to charge him with treason if he returned. Newspapers and broadcasts in Phnom Penh were filled with lurid accounts of his corrupt personal life and attacks on his years of leadership. On March 22, after three days of avoiding direct comment on Cambodian events, North Vietnam labeled Cambodia’s new leaders a “pro-American ultra-rightist group.” The authoritative Hanoi party newspaper Nhan Dan claimed that Sihanouk’s ouster had been engineered by the United States and affirmed that “our people fully support the struggle of the Cambodian people” against the new leadership. On March 23, Sihanouk in a five-point statement promised formation of a “liberation army” and “national united front,” lauding the anti-US struggle of the Communist Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.
In early April the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces began making good their pledge of “support.” Communist forces left their base areas and started penetrating deep into Cambodia to overthrow the new government. By April 3, the North Vietnamese began attacking Cambodian forces in Svay Rieng province. By April 10 Cambodian troops were forced to evacuate border positions in the Parrot’s Beak area. Communists started to harass Mekong River traffic. By April 16, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops launched raids on the capital of Takeo province South of Phnom Penh. Thus did the war begin in Cambodia, weeks before any American action.
At the same time, Sihanouk on April 2 denounced the United States as “the principal and sole culprit responsible for the war and political instability in the three countries of Indochina.” On April 3 he appealed to his compatriots to take to the jungles and join the “resistance zones already there.” On April 4 Premier Chou En-lai, while on a visit to North Korea, formally endorsed Sihanouk’s resistance movement. On April 14 Radio Peking reported the formal establishment on April 6 of the provisional committee of Sihanouk’s “national united front” in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province. In short, by the middle of April, before we had undertaken any significant action, Sihanouk had irrevocably joined forces with the Communists, the Communists had dedicated themselves to the overthrow of the Phnom Penh government, and North Vietnamese units were attacking deep inside Cambodia.
Le Duc Tho’s behavior in the secret talks removed any doubt that Hanoi had formally linked Cambodia to its war in Vietnam. He emphasized Hanoi’s intention to overthrow the Phnom Penh government, to replace it with personnel acceptable to Hanoi, and to use Cambodia as a base for operations in Vietnam. At the secret meeting of March 16—two days before Sihanouk was deposed—Le Duc Tho accused us of having organized the riots in Phnom Penh five days earlier, a charge I vigorously denied. I considered Le Duc Tho’s hot-tempered assertions sufficiently worrying to report to the President: “Their remarks on Cambodia were troublesome and may indicate increased pressure there.”
Fears about Hanoi’s overall intentions could only be reinforced by the sudden military “high point” in South Vietnam, which broke the lull that had lasted since September. On March 31, while negotiations with Le Duc Tho were still going on and in the face of our offer of de-escalation, the North Vietnamese launched scores of attacks throughout South Vietnam. American dead for the week were 138, nearly double the previous week’s total.
This set the stage for our climactic Paris meeting of April 4. Le Duc Tho blamed us once again for the upheaval in Cambodia and effectively declared war on the new Cambodian government:
You thought you could use a group of military reactionaries to overthrow Norodom Sihanouk and it would be all over. It is too simple thinking. It is precisely your actions there which make the whole people of Cambodia fight against the agents of the U.S. They have responded to the appeal of Prince Sihanouk and the National Front of Cambodia. The Khmer people have stood up with all their strength to defend freedom and neutrality.
I rebutted his charges emphatically but futilely:
I despair of convincing the Special Adviser that we had nothing to do with what happened in Phnom Penh, although I am flattered of the high opinion he has of our intelligence services. If they knew I was here, I would tell them of this high opinion.
Again, there is a simple test. Who has troops in Cambodia? Not the U S. I am impressed again with the linguistic ability of the people of the Indochinese peninsula. We discovered that the Pathet Lao speak Vietnamese, and now we find the same phenomenon in Cambodia.
We have shown great restraint vis-à-vis the bases you maintain in Cambodia and which you use in attacking our forces in Vietnam. . . .
I stressed to Le Duc Tho that the United States sought no expansion of the war. To achieve this goal I proposed to discuss immediately specific steps to assure the neutrality of Cambodia:
We are prepared to discuss immediately concrete and specific measures to guarantee the neutrality of Cambodia and to make absolutely certain it does not become a pawn in any international conflict. We are willing to do this bilaterally with you or in an international framework… We shall be prepared to entertain reasonable propositions to guarantee that Laos and Cambodia—especially Cambodia, as it is a new problem—remain neutral.
But Le Duc Tho dismissed any suggestion of neutralization or of an international conference. The conflicts in Indochina had now become one, he asserted; he would not even discuss confining the war to Vietnam. Cambodia had become a theater of operations and Hanoi would brook no discussion about maintaining its neutrality. Over three weeks before our actions, Le Duc Tho said:
The three peoples of Indochina—the Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer people—have had traditional unity in the fight against colonialism. This cannot be broken by you. Now, faced with the extension of the war to Cambodia by the U S., the three peoples will continue to fight to have victory, no matter how great the sacrifices may be.
According to Le Duc Tho there could be no formal agreement on the neutralization of Cambodia. Instead, the regime that had seized power in Phnom Penh had to be overthrown: “We do not recognize the Lon Nol-Matak government. We support the Five Points of Norodom Sihanouk. We are convinced that so long as the Lon Nol-Matak government remains in Cambodia, then the Cambodian question cannot be settled.”
In Cambodia, as in Vietnam, we were now faced with the proposition that the only key to peace was the overthrow of the established government (which most nations, including the Soviet Union, continued to recognize). A spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General U Thant declared on April 6 that the United Nations would “deal with the authorities which effectively have control of the situation in Cambodia,” in effect recognizing the Lon Nol government.
In Cambodia, as in Vietnam, there was a refusal of negotiations and a deliberate expansion of the war by Hanoi. In Cambodia, as in Vietnam, Hanoi would discuss only the seizure of total power. Hence, the situation in Cambodia had been transformed fundamentally. Three weeks earlier, we would on the whole have preferred that Sihanouk remain in office. Now, if he returned through the military pressures of Hanoi and as its instrument, all of Cambodia would become an enemy sanctuary; the supply route through Sihanoukville would grow doubly menacing. Our nightmare, as a staff planning paper pointed out on April I, was of “a communist-dominated Sihanouk government providing a secure sanctuary and logistics base for the VC/NVA.”
The first official Cambodian request for US military assistance came as we gradually and reluctantly perceived the impossibility of Cambodia’s neutrality, due to Hanoi’s insistence on Communist domination of all of Cambodia. On the evening of April 9 Commandant Lon Non, Lon Nol’s younger brother and commander of the Phnom Penh gendarmerie , requested a meeting with an Embassy official. Lon Non spoke of the expansion of the Cambodian army from 35,000 to more than 60,000 men; there was an immediate need for 100,000 to 150,000 weapons, and ultimately for 200,000 to 250,000, including ammunition.
Our charge, Lloyd Rives, considered these quantities exaggerated and the need impossible to assess, since no breakdown was given as to types desired. To Washington Rives recommended “serious consideration of supplying weapons through a third party or parties, if such can be found.” Lon Non’s request was considered at first in intelligence channels because we still were eager to avoid direct intervention. Delivering arms clandestinely would avoid giving Hanoi a pretext for an all-out assault, and it also placed an inherent limit on the amount we could supply. The consensus was that American military forces and American arms should stay out of Cambodia. Our principal interest, it was agreed, was to prevent Cambodia’s use as a supply base for Vietnam. We were even prepared to accept a degree of accommodation between Lon Nol and the Viet Cong if this proved essential to the survival of the Cambodian government. We sought to arrange military assistance through third parties as Rives had recommended. It was decided to instruct Rives to establish a private channel to the Cambodian government; to approach France to encourage more French assistance to Cambodia; to explore other possible intermediaries; and to have the Defense Department ascertain what captured Communist arms and ammunition were available in South Vietnam for transfer to the (hitherto Communist-equipped) Cambodian army. No American military assistance was authorized.
Rives carried out these instructions with selective exuberance, in harmony with the East Asian Bureau’s passionate dedication to a version of Cambodian neutrality more stringent than that of Cambodia’s government (and totally rejected by Hanoi). He turned the offer to be helpful through third parties into a disquisition on American reluctance to involve itself directly. He suggested to the Cambodian Foreign Minister that France would be the logical source of military supplies, and reported back with approval the Foreign Minister’s reply that in view of the reluctance of the United States to become involved, the Cambodian government would maintain only minimum contact with the United States Embassy.
The Communists were not showing similar restraint. On April 13 a Cambodian military outpost in Kampot province near the South Vietnamese border was overrun. On April 13 and 14 several Cambodian military positions in Takeo province South of Phnom Penh were captured. The Cambodian government reported on April 14 an attack by “several hundred” Viet Cong on Koh Rocar, Prey Veng province, about twenty-five miles to the NorthEast of Phnom Penh. On April 15, a Cambodian post at Sre Khtum in Mondolkiri province fell to the North Vietnamese, leaving the town of O Rang, farther East on Route 131, cut off. Also on April 15, a military outpost at Krek in Kompong Cham province was taken by the Communists, denying Cambodians access to the provincial capital of Mimot, astride Route 7. On April 16 the provincial capital of Takeo was attacked by Vietnamese Communist forces, who were repulsed. But on April 16 they overran the town of Tuk Meas in Kampot province. The same day a small enemy force attacked an outpost North of Kratie and also attacked the town of Chhlong South of the provincial capital (see the map above). The strategy was clearly to cut off Phnom Penh from the provinces and to bring about the collapse of Lon Nol.
Premier Lon Nol declared in a broadcast on April 14 that “because of the gravity of the situation, it is deemed necessary to accept from this moment on all unconditional foreign aid from all sources.” He accused the Communists of mounting “an escalation of systematic acts of aggression.” When I brought this to the President’s attention, Nixon said he was determined not to let the new Cambodian government collapse under Communist pressure. I called a meeting of the WSAG for April 14. The WSAG’s composition was essentially the same as the earlier forum, but more staff personnel were permitted to attend and its documents were handled in formal channels. The shift reflected that the problem of Cambodia had grown beyond the intelligence framework. A major policy decision was likely to be required in the near future.
The committee might be new, but the participants had not changed their reluctance to see America involve itself. I asked the WSAG to recommend a level and type of military aid that would provide psychological reassurance to Lon Nol without furnishing a pretext for an even stronger offensive by Hanoi. The consensus was to send up to 3,000 captured Communist AK-47 rifles from South Vietnamese stocks and, to maintain our dissociation, to have them delivered through South Vietnamese channels. Everyone, including myself, agreed that it was “premature” to provide American M-1 rifles. For that very reason I reported to the WSAG that the President was not yet prepared to approve the delivery of 1,000-man packs of American equipment (CIA packages of hand weapons that were occasionally supplied to friendly forces on a covert basis). There was no discussion of heavier equipment. The State Department was reluctant to deliver even medical supplies overtly; it was finally agreed that the choice of their mode of delivery should be left to the Cambodians. In short, three weeks after the North Vietnamese had left their sanctuaries and were seeking to isolate Phnom Penh, the United States made available exactly 3,000 captured rifles delivered clandestinely. We gave no other aid.
The next day the Cambodian government submitted a request for military and economic assistance to expand their army to 200,000 men. This request clearly went beyond the framework of existing policy; it also far exceeded what in our judgment Cambodia could absorb. Another WSAG meeting was held on April 15. It was decided that rather than start a formal US arms supply line we would channel $5 million to Cambodia through a friendly government (which we would then reimburse); Cambodia would thus have funds to buy its own arms on the open market. The sum was of course symbolic; it corresponded in no way to Cambodian needs, much less to Cambodian requests. It can hardly be called an heroic or urgent response to the pleas of a government on whose soil thousands of North Vietnamese were systematically undermining its authority, killing its citizens, and annexing its territory.
For by now the pattern of outside aggression was patent. North Vietnamese forces were attacking all over Cambodia, concentrating especially on provincial capitals and communications to and from Phnom Penh.
Against this backdrop of mounting North Vietnamese menace and his own growing frustration, the President took a personal hand in speeding aid to Cambodia. At a meeting with Helms and Cushman on April 16 called primarily to establish the CIA station in Phnom Penh, Nixon ordered delivery of the 1,000-man packs I had rejected at his instruction forty-eight hours earlier. A few days later he doubled the contingency fund approved by the WSAG to $10 million. In fact, none of these instructions could be implemented before they were overtaken by more escalation from Hanoi and Nixon’s decision two weeks later to move against the sanctuaries.
There was a brief flurry of hope first. Yakov Malik, the Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN, suggested at a news conference on April 16 that “only a new Geneva Conference could bring a new solution and relax the tension on the Indochina peninsula.” A Soviet call for a new Geneva Conference was a sensational event; it was bound to suggest parallels to the ending of the Korean War; it was analyzed solemnly by the US government and received massive media attention. We would have been most eager to explore it. I considered it practically impossible that Malik could have spoken without Hanoi’s prior knowledge—especially as Le Duc Tho was at that moment in Moscow. I gave the President the following possible explanations:
- The North Vietnamese position is weaker than our intelligence reports have indicated, and Hanoi is particularly worried about yet another long war in Cambodia. It needs a breathing spell. It may then try to suspend the conference after it has gained some respite. (Both the 1954 and 1961-62 conferences were interrupted for periods of varying length).
- After the break-down of all valid contacts in Paris, Hanoi feels that it needs some forum to deal with us seriously. Also, it may want to deal seriously with the GVN, which it can do more easily in a larger framework.
- Any talk of a Geneva Conference (even if no conference is in the offing) would restrain our retaliation against any new military measures Hanoi might take. (But we doubt that the Soviets would let themselves be used this way when they have some serious business with us in Vienna [i.e., SALT].)
But before we could return a reply, Malik on April 18 retracted his “proposal.” He did so with the cold-bloodedness of Soviet diplomats long practiced in sudden reversals that are then presented as the logical essence of orthodoxy. Malik suddenly and without explanation asserted that a Geneva Conference would be unrealistic and that “the Americans have to get out of Vietnam before anything much can happen.” The negotiating route was slammed shut once again. There was to be no conference; the precondition for negotiations remained unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam.
Nixon’s irritation at the slow pace of our reaction continued to mount. Reading one report of a Viet Cong base in some mountain area deep inside Cambodia, he ordered a B-52 strike within two hours. This proved somewhat impractical because it would have taken more than two hours for the B-52s to get there and because the report was not confirmed; also because of the undesirable symbolism of a B-52 attack deep inside Cambodia before other fundamental decisions. Nixon urged a psychological warfare campaign to tie Sihanouk to the Communists and to dramatize US support for Lon Nol. He had an exalted view of the CIA’s capacity for “black propaganda” and even more of its impact. This approach, too, was rapidly overtaken by events.
By the middle of April, then, over a month after the Cambodian coup, the United States had barely lifted a finger. We had as yet given no military aid, no intelligence support, and had only formalistic contacts with the new government. The coup itself had come without warning; its consequences threatened not only the freedom of Cambodia but our entire position in Vietnam. Instead of a strip of isolated sanctuaries close to the Vietnamese border we would, after the collapse of the Lon Nol government, confront all of Cambodia as a Communist base, stretching 600 miles along the border of South Vietnam and with short lines of supply from the sea. Vietnamization and American withdrawal would then come unstuck. So we were being driven toward support of Lon Nol hesitantly, reluctantly, in response to the evolving circumstances in Cambodia which we could neither forecast nor control, and with a series of half measures that always lagged behind the rapidly deteriorating situation. Of all the parties that made crucial decisions in that period—Hanoi, Lon Nol, Sihanouk, and the United States—we had the least freedom of choice. The record leaves no doubt that the North Vietnamese, also caught by surprise by the March coup, bear the heaviest responsibility for events in Cambodia. Their illegal and arrogant occupation of Cambodian territory had torn apart the fragile unity of Sihanouk’s neutralist country; they created the Khmer Rouge as a force against Sihanouk well before his overthrow; they used him to give credence to that tiny band when he went into exile. On April 4 Le Duc Tho had rejected discussion not only of a cease-fire anywhere in Indochina, but of any scheme for the neutrality of Cambodia. It was they, not we, who had decided on a fight to the finish on the bleeding body of a small neutralist kingdom which wanted only to be left alone.
Cambodia’s agony, then, unfolded with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The Communists were determined on total victory; Sihanouk’s wounded pride caused him to make common cause with his erstwhile mortal enemies; and we were by then on the way out of Indochina and losing our power to control events.
But before the die was finally cast there was a brief interlude, during which to maintain our position in Vietnam we had to take another unilateral step toward weakening it; it was time for a new troop withdrawal decision.