He had reached a similar conclusion in October, when he and Sergeant Thong, his former interpreter, had traveled to the province in the delta where he had served with the U.S. Agency for International Development during 1971. Passengers on their bus were shocked to see an American traveling unarmed, and the bus stopped at roadblocks that had not existed in 1971. The headman at McBride’s former town was so uncomfortable having him and Thong stay overnight that they continued on to a “showcase hamlet” that McBride had formerly shown to visiting dignitaries. The village headman offered them his hut but refused to join them. The Communists were everywhere, he warned, waiting to take over. He handed McBride some flash grenades and said, “If they come for you, throw them and run.” In a report describing his trip, McBride wrote that a district deemed 80 percent secure in 1971 had become “a hollow eggshell waiting to be cracked.” His report moved through the ranks of the embassy’s political officers, and he assumed that Ambassador Martin read it. (“He read everything to learn what we were saying rather than what the Vietnamese were saying.”) Before McBride had left Washington for Saigon, the State Department’s South Vietnam desk officer had warned him that Ambassador Martin regarded pessimistic reporting as disloyal and defeatist and routinely censored it. But the good news, he said, was that Washington knew Martin was peddling a fantasy—of a thriving South Vietnam deserving American assistance—so McBride should avoid sticking out his neck to challenge him. As the desk officer had predicted, McBride’s report never made it past Martin’s desk. He had stuck out his neck for nothing.
While McBride was revisiting his former province and warning of the deteriorating security situation, and while North Vietnam was preparing its Phuoc Long blitzkrieg, diplomat Ken Moorefield, a West Point graduate and Vietnam War veteran, was serving as military reports officer at the U.S. consulate in Nha Trang, a pleasant seaside town 250 miles northeast of Saigon. His job involved gathering reports from South Vietnamese sources and U.S. provincial representatives stationed throughout the Central Highlands and the coastal strip constituting Military Region II, and condensing them into a summary for the embassy. In the fall of 1974, he had warned that the Communists’ network of all-weather roads along the border with Laos and Cambodia meant that North Vietnam could quickly concentrate its forces, threatening ARVN bases at Kontum, Pleiku, and Ban Me Thuot, a strategic crossroads in the Central Highlands whose capture could provide a launching pad for a drive to the coast that would cut South Vietnam in two. He also reported that a North Vietnamese POW had identified Ban Me Thuot as a likely target. He returned to Saigon in December convinced that the North was preparing a major offensive in the Central Highlands, commencing with an attack on Ban Me Thuot.
Several months after Moorefield sounded the alarm, and a month after Phuoc Long fell, CIA chief of station Thomas Polgar visited the CIA base at Bien Hoa, a small city fifteen miles northeast of Saigon. Polgar had been an undercover agent in Nazi-occupied Europe and a legendary spymaster at the CIA’s famed Berlin Station in the 1950s. Instead of the suave, swashbuckling James Bond that his résumé promised, he was a rotund middle-aged Hungarian émigré with thick black-rimmed glasses who spoke in a Central European accent thicker than Henry Kissinger’s. He had recently sent Ambassador Martin a memorandum predicting that “the Vietnamese Communists are not going to risk that which they have in an ‘all or nothing’ gamble of another general offensive.” His briefing to the agents gathered in the recreation room at the CIA’s Bien Hoa base hewed to that line. “I want you to know that everything is going OK,” he told them. “We don’t see any major problems in 1975. Our reading is that the situation is under control.” The agents stared at him in disbelief. All winter they had been warning Saigon and Washington that a Communist offensive was imminent. They had reported that North Vietnamese soldiers were removing camouflage from tanks in a nearby rubber plantation, Russian SAM anti-aircraft missiles were coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and their three most trustworthy double agents—Goldmother, Grandpa, and Duc Hue Tiger—were saying that three additional North Vietnamese Army divisions had arrived in the region. According to one agent, they found Polgar’s pep talk “incredibly demoralizing.”
In February, Polgar sent his chief analyst “Terry Balls” (an alias) to Can Tho to brief the thirty CIA agents stationed in the Mekong delta. After hanging maps and charts in a conference room at the consulate, Balls told the agents that despite losing Phuoc Long, South Vietnam had a bright future and would hold elections in October. An agent interrupted and said, “If you attend elections in October you’re going to be the only American here, because we’re on the way out.” Another added, “That may be what’s going on in the rest of the country, but it sure as hell isn’t what’s going on down here.”
Balls assured them that there would be work in the delta for “generations of case officers” and that there were factors at work not apparent to field agents that involved tacit understandings between North and South Vietnam. When he described a recent Communist attack as insignificant, an agent retorted that he had just flown over the battlefield and seen plenty of corpses. Others protested that they had been reporting Communist infiltration for over a year but Saigon had buried their accounts. When he insisted that there was “no question” that South Vietnam would survive, the deputy base commander shouted, “That’s bullshit!”
Balls shrugged and said, “Guys, I’m just quoting the party line.”
CIA agent James Parker was the only American official stationed in a province where the Communists controlled most of the countryside. He thought that Balls’s claim that North and South Vietnam could coexist was a fantasy and that no reasonable person could believe that North Vietnam would stop short of a complete victory. When he ran into Balls at the bar of the CIA club afterward, he told him that there was no way that the North would negotiate. Balls gave him a strange look and turned away.
CHAPTER 2
Walter Martindale’s Convoy
Consular officer Walter Martindale was the only U.S. government official remaining in Quang Duc, a remote province in the Central Highlands bordering Cambodia to the west and Phuoc Long to the south. He became concerned for the future of what he had taken to calling “my country” during the winter of 1975 as the skirmishing in Quang Duc became more frequent and ferocious. After hearing that the government’s intelligence services had lost an entire North Vietnamese division, he flew over a river near Gia Nghia, the provincial capital, and saw North Vietnamese Army engineers moving large rocks into the water to create a bridge for armored vehicles and heavy equipment. Fearing an all-out attack, he urged the province’s civilian and military leaders to respond forcefully to Communist incursions, telling them, “If we don’t show we can fight, we’ll lose our whole country overnight.” After his Montagnard agents reported a well-equipped NVA division moving into the Central Highlands, he evacuated schoolchildren, pregnant women, hospital patients, and selected members of his Vietnamese staff south to Bao Loc, a town just over the border in Lam Dong province. He described the ominous developments in Quang Duc in reports that he sent by courier to the embassy, where they were ignored.
The fighting in Quang Duc province concerned U.S. consul general Moncrieff Spear, and on March 9 he ordered Martindale to report to the consulate in Nha Trang. Martindale refused, saying that as the last American official in Gia Nghia he was being closely watched and his departure would trigger a panic. The next day the North Vietnamese Army attacked Ban Me Thuot, the strategic provincial capital a hundred miles north of Gia Nghia that Ken Moorefield and Bill Bell had identified as a likely target.
Tom Glenn, who headed the National Security Agency (NSA) detachment in South Vietnam, had also predicted an attack on Ban Me Thuot. He was only thirty-six but looked younger. He supervised forty-three American cryptologists and provided advice and assistance to General “Tran” (a pseudonym), his South Vietnamese counterpart who commanded South Vietnam’s twenty-seven
-hundred-man cryptology unit, the Directorate General for Technical Security (DGTS). A hard-knocks childhood that had included his attorney father being jailed for embezzlement and leaving the family destitute, a paper route in a dodgy Oakland neighborhood, and paying his way through Berkeley by pumping gas had toughened and matured Glenn. After he graduated first in his class in Vietnamese at army language school, the army had seconded him to the NSA, and he had spent most of the next thirteen years in South Vietnam, becoming so fluent that Vietnamese speaking to him on the telephone assumed he was a native. His civil service ranking made him the equivalent of an army general, placing him on equal footing with CIA station chief Polgar. But despite his seniority, skills, and experience, the embassy and the South Vietnamese Army undervalued or dismissed his warnings. At the beginning of March his signals intelligence (SIGINT) indicated a Communist strike on Ban Me Thuot.
On March 9 he and General Tran made an inspection tour of DGTS cryptology units in the north of the country. While stopping at Pleiku in the Central Highlands, they warned the commander of Military Region II, Major General Pham Van Phu, that their SIGINT indicated an impending Communist attack on Ban Me Thuot. Only a million of South Vietnam’s twenty million inhabitants lived in the Central Highlands. Half were Montagnards, and their loyalty to the Thieu government was tenuous. The region’s steep valleys, dense forests, and thick fogs favored attackers over defenders, and Thieu’s insistence that his armed forces defend every province had spread them thin. Phu needed to anticipate a Communist attack and send reinforcements to a probable target, a strategy requiring accurate intelligence on enemy troop movements. He nevertheless dismissed Glenn’s SIGINT as the result of clever Communist diversionary tactics and argued that Pleiku was a more important prize than Ban Me Thuot because it was his headquarters and he was there.
Glenn and Tran continued to Ban Me Thuot, where they landed on a ridge overlooking the town. North Vietnamese Army units had already started attacking ARVN outposts on its periphery. As Tran was inspecting his troops, Glenn watched Communist shells hit an ARVN position in the valley. The next day, twenty-four hours after General Phu had dismissed Glenn’s warning, and only days after Bill Bell had alerted South Vietnamese and American intelligence operatives to the half-sawed-through trees near the Santilli plantation, North Vietnamese tanks knocked those trees over while spearheading a blitzkrieg that hurled twenty-five thousand troops against Ban Me Thuot’s twelve hundred defenders.
For South Vietnam, the battle was the full catastrophe. Its pilots dropped bombs from ten thousand feet to avoid anti-aircraft batteries and hit the ARVN command post. Some Montagnard troops switched sides, and some ARVN soldiers deserted after their officers fled the battlefield in helicopters. General Phu airlifted in reinforcements who discarded their uniforms and scattered to find their families. Within two days most of Ban Me Thuot’s defenders had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner or had deserted. The Communists also captured U.S. provincial representative Paul Struharik and the twenty Americans and third-country nationals who had taken refuge in his compound.
For days the U.S. embassy and Washington remained unaware of what had happened at Ban Me Thuot and what it meant. As South Vietnamese resistance was collapsing, Kissinger sent President Ford a memorandum from British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson without comment, an indication that he subscribed to its conclusions or at least considered them worthy of the president’s eye. On the strength of having devised the strategy that had enabled Britain to defeat Communist guerrillas in Malaya during the 1950s, Thompson had become Washington’s favorite counterinsurgency expert. Nixon had named him a special adviser on Vietnam, and Kissinger had praised him as “one of the leading experts on Southeast Asia.”
Thompson had just returned from a twelve-day tour through Vietnam and Cambodia. He wrote in his memorandum that “Hanoi’s intention is probably more directed at the collapse of South Vietnam, not its conquest….There will be no major offensive on the 1972 scale during 1975.” (In his memoir, Our Great Spring Victory, North Vietnamese general Van Tien Dung stated that in October 1974 the Politburo had decided to launch a major offensive during the 1975 dry season aimed at total victory.) Thompson declared, “There is no alternative to Thieu and no sign that his political position is crumbling.” (Thieu would resign six weeks later.) Thompson insisted that “the ARVN soldier is superior to and is still fighting better than the enemy” and that “South Vietnam has played its part in a manner unsurpassed in history” and was “ready to continue fighting” even in the absence of further support from the United States. (Before the end of the month, South Vietnam’s forces would have surrendered all of their nation’s northern provinces without mounting a significant defensive battle.)
U.S. secretary of defense James Schlesinger was as clueless as Thompson. During a cabinet meeting on March 12, he reported that ARVN troops in the Central Highlands were “holding fairly well” and called the military situation “basically a stalemate.” It was almost midnight in Saigon when he said this, and the battle for Ban Me Thuot was finished, as was South Vietnam. At least that was the conclusion of Parker Borg and Al Adams, experienced Vietnam hands who were special assistants to Henry Kissinger and to his executive secretary Lawrence Eagleburger, respectively. After hearing about the battle, they looked at each other and said, “That’s it. That’s the end. If [South] Vietnam is going to let a city like Ban Me Thuot fall, the rest can’t be far behind.”
In September 1973, Kissinger had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The Vietnam War is behind us.” By March 10, 1975, it was apparently behind him. He had not visited South Vietnam since 1972 and was focused on settling the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ban Me Thuot fell as he was shuttling between Middle Eastern capitals. A March 12 memorandum from National Security Council staffer William Stearman titled “Ominous Developments in Vietnam” must have been an unwelcome distraction. Stearman predicted that although the coming Communist offensive promised to be “extremely intense,” intelligence sources believed it would be “a prelude to a new round of negotiations designed to achieve an implementation of the Paris Accords on North Vietnamese terms,” and that North Vietnam would “make its gains in the spring and early summer and then offer a cease-fire.”
President Thieu was under no illusions about what the Communists wanted, or what Ban Me Thuot meant. On March 11, he summoned his chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem, and his national security adviser, Lieutenant General Dang Van Quang, to the only conference room in Independence Palace believed free from CIA bugs. He announced that he was adopting the “light at the top, heavy at the bottom” strategy recommended by Brigadier General Ted Serong, the retired Australian officer who had become his unofficial military adviser. Serong’s plan called for withdrawing South Vietnam’s armed forces from its northern provinces while holding coastal enclaves at Hue, the nation’s spiritual and intellectual capital, and Da Nang, its second-largest city. Abandoning half of South Vietnam to save its richer southern provinces assumed an army with the tactical skills to execute a retreat under fire, a challenging maneuver for even the best armed forces. Although adopting Serong’s strategy would be the most important decision Thieu would make during his eight-year presidency, he made it without consulting the United States. The CIA claimed to have “access” to Prime Minister Khiem and General Quang, but neither told Polgar about a decision that would jeopardize the lives of CIA agents and other Americans in the provinces that Thieu intended to abandon.
On March 14, Thieu flew to the former U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay to inform General Phu of his decision. Thieu often spoke elliptically and appeared to issue Phu two contradictory orders: retake Ban Me Thuot with the troops at hand (an impossibility), and withdraw his forces to the coast from Pleiku and elsewhere in the Central Highlands without notifying civilians, local defense forces, or the Americans. Thieu was sufficiently vague that everyone left the meeting un
sure which territories he wanted Phu to abandon. Phu and his staff believed that he had ordered them to withdraw to the coast, an impression furthered by General Vien, who had suggested that Phu surprise the Communists by retreating down Route 7B, an abandoned logging road snaking through 135 miles of rough terrain. During the flight back to Pleiku, Phu told his staff that his career was over and South Vietnam was lost. Then he burst into tears. He had fought in the French colonial army, and after almost dying of tuberculosis in a Communist POW camp, he had vowed never to be taken prisoner again. To minimize the chance of this occurring, he persuaded Thieu to promote Colonel Pham Van Tat to brigadier general so he could lead the retreat down Route 7B while Phu and his staff flew to Nha Trang.
The next day, March 15, Thieu met with U.S. deputy chief of mission Wolfgang Lehmann, the senior American diplomat in South Vietnam while Ambassador Martin was on home leave. Instead of informing Lehmann that Phu was withdrawing, Thieu told him that the battle to retake Ban Me Thuot would be “hard” and “last a long time.” Lehmann cabled Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft that he believed that Thieu would “use the Ban Me Thuot battlefield as an occasion to destroy major enemy units” and a lengthy battle could be expected. General Vien also neglected to mention Phu’s withdrawal during a meeting with Major General Homer Smith, the defense attaché and senior U.S. military officer in South Vietnam.
Honorable Exit Page 4
