On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  When I returned to the United States in 1951, I went to the State Department and discussed the elephant affair with an assistant secretary of state. I told him that I had been given access to the cables without restrictions, but I had not told the diplomat that I intended to publish the text of the exchanges of cables. The secretary accepted my regrets and said he would lift the reprimand from the diplomat’s personnel file.

  In later years I recalled the story of the elephant in a journalism manual on ethics and in lectures to students at the schools of journalism at Columbia University and the University of Missouri, citing the mistake. The point: When a source provides confidential information which if published will endanger the source, the reporter has an obligation to inform the source of the intention to publish and to protect the source in every ethical manner possible. I also regretted very much what happened to the other victim: the elephant.

  28

  SIHANOUK BESIEGED

  During the early 1960s, I revisited Cambodia several times, and as I wandered through the pleasant byways of Phnom Penh, I would at times recall the funny, tragic “l’affaire du elephant” with nostalgia. It marked for me one of the few periods of cordial relations between Prince Sihanouk and the United States. The relationship thereafter deteriorated into violent confrontation. Unexpectedly, I became directly involved in Prince Sihanouk’s angry exchanges with Washington.

  On August 6, 1965, the New York Times published a United Press dispatch quoting military intelligence sources in Saigon as saying that the North Vietnamese had moved the headquarters of their 325th NVA division from South Vietnam to the extreme northeastern corner of Cambodia to escape bombing by American and South Vietnamese aircraft. The Cambodians denied the report, determined not to allow the United States or the South Vietnamese any pretext for crossing the border in pursuit. At this juncture, an invitation came to me from Prince Sihanouk through the Cambodian ambassador at the United Nations challenging me to check out the report of the presence of the 325th North Vietnamese division by touring the specified border area. It was in a region to which no Western observer had been for years.

  My invitation arrived three months after Sihanouk, breaking diplomatic relations with the United States, had expelled the American military and economic aid missions. The prince acted five days after South Vietnamese planes bombed the Cambodian village of Khum Dar, a hamlet situated in open terrain two miles inside the border. Earlier, Sihanouk had protested repeatedly to Washington about bombing attacks on Cambodian border areas by American and South Vietnamese planes as well as ground incursions by South Vietnamese troops searching for Vietcong and North Vietnamese bases.

  It was well known that Vietcong forces were slipping occasionally into Cambodian frontier areas to evade pursuit or to outflank some South Vietnamese position near the border. It was also evident that it was impossible even for a force twenty times the size of Sihanouk’s army of thirty thousand to close the border entirely to such incursions. But if the report that the 325th Division had moved its headquarters into Cambodia was accurate, it would mean that the North Vietnamese for the first time had established a major operations base there. This would give the South Vietnamese and American forces cause enough for a large-scale cross-border strike.

  I eagerly accepted Sihanouk’s invitation—American correspondents at the time were barred from Cambodia—fully aware that it would be a tricky undertaking laden with propaganda pitfalls. Sihanouk was playing a game on both sides of the political divide. I had learned that Sihanouk, desperate to forestall any spillover of the Vietnam War into his kingdom, was secretly negotiating with the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Vietcong, to obtain a guarantee of the inviolability of his country’s borders. As an inducement he was dangling political recognition of the NLF.

  General Westmoreland, learning of Sihanouk’s invitation, strongly advised me against making the trip, warning that I would be used as a propaganda tool by the Cambodians, who he maintained were concealing Communist use of the border region for strikes into South Vietnam. Unspoken was the general’s uneasiness about the possibility that I might report on the secret CIA and Special Forces reconnaissance missions being undertaken in Cambodia. I rebutted Westmoreland’s advice, arguing that at a minimum it would be useful to survey the terrain features of the border region so as to assess the nature of the strategic problem. Westmoreland then provided me with one of his staff officers to brief me on the locations of suspected Communist operations. In fact, what I was embarking on turned out to be a prelude to the covert American B-52 bombings of suspected Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, which would become a major issue in American politics.

  In Saigon, my American briefing officer paced before a wall map pointing to forests near the Cambodian border where he believed major North Vietnamese and Vietcong bases were located. He traced the possible supply routes from these bases to where the Vietcong guerrillas were operating in South Vietnam. Above the twisting, poorly defined Cambodian border, largely hidden under thick jungle foliage canopy, U.S. reconnaissance planes crammed with electronic gear had been searching ceaselessly for evidence of North Vietnamese and Vietcong activity. The briefing officer quoted his South Vietnamese sources extensively but conceded that American intelligence independently had no hard evidence that there were major North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. I then flew to Phnom Penh and spent my first days there interviewing the British and French military attachés. They told me that they had failed in many investigations to establish that there were major Vietcong or North Vietnamese sanctuaries in the Cambodian border region or that the country was a route for the delivery of equipment and supplies to the Vietcong. They did pinpoint areas for me where there might be such activity but noted that the forested regions were so impenetrable that they could not be sure of what might be going on there.

  On October 4, I was driven with military escort to the coastal town of Sihanoukville, northwest of the Vietnamese border, where my guide turned out to be no less than the Cambodian defense minister, Lieutenant General Lon Nol, who two years later would stage a coup overthrowing Sihanouk as head of state. Lon Nol was waiting for me beside a helicopter in an open field outside the port town. The general spread out maps on which I pointed out areas I wished to visit. These were locations where Western briefing officers and the media had reported Communist activity. We then mapped out an itinerary through the border jungles and set out on a two-day trek by helicopter, jeep, and on foot.

  By helicopter we surveyed the border between Krek and Minot, just to the north of the Parrot’s Beak, which juts into South Vietnam’s Tay Ninh Province. American intelligence officers speculated that the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the unit coordinating North Vietnamese and Vietcong operations in the South, was based in Tay Ninh Province. What was believed to be its key operational area was labeled Zone C, extending from northwest of Saigon to the Cambodian border. The zone was being heavily bombed by American and South Vietnamese planes. I asked Lon Nol to make an unscheduled visit to Krek so that I could travel along Provincial Route Number 22 to a border crossing where American intelligence had received reports of wheel marks indicating Vietcong traffic in and out of Zone C. Our helicopter landed at Krek, and by jeep we drove to the Cambodian army post of Trapeang, about two miles from the frontier. Beyond that point no Western observer was known to have been permitted to go in at least several years. The general, whom I found to be a rather nervous, emotional man, agreed to proceed after he called in an overhead cover of two Cambodian Sky Raider fighter planes, since we were entering an area which was repeatedly bombed and strafed by South Vietnamese planes. The road was passable for another mile and then ended at an old destroyed bridge. Escorted by armed peasant militia, we picked our way across the stream over a temporary footbridge made up of loose tree branches and then followed a foot path through the jungle until we came to the barbed wire fence of a small Cambodian army installation, Poste Smach, sixty yards from the frontie
r. The old Route 22 was not passable beyond, and it was obvious that the tale of fresh wheel marks had no basis. That morning at Poste Smach we heard the sounds of bombs exploding nearby in Zone C. Militiamen at the post told me that it was the fourth such raid by South Vietnamese or American planes in ten days. Later I learned that the bombing we heard that day had been part of the start of a sustained campaign ordered by the Johnson administration in which, from 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties were flown by tactical aircraft dropping 214 tons of bombs along that section of the border.

  At Bo Kheo, in the remote northeastern corner of the border, we made another unscheduled landing at my request, about twenty-five miles from the frontier, beside Provincial Route Number 19. We inspected an airfield which had been described in news agency reports quoting American intelligence sources as a Communist air base. We found the airfield heavily overgrown with brush. It obviously had not been used for years and could not have accommodated the North Vietnamese transport planes which the report said had been spotted landing there. Route 19 was cut and impassable for vehicles where it was shown on maps to cross the jungle-covered border. One intelligence report had said that forty trucks had been spotted on the highway crossing the border. From the air we surveyed the area in which the 325th North Vietnamese division was said to be operating. It was a dense, uninhabited, and trackless forest in the extreme northeastern corner of the border region. We saw no evidence of human activity, and there was no observable trail into the forest. It seemed most unlikely that any sizable military unit could be operating there.

  As we moved along the border, we encountered groups of Vietnamese refugees who had crossed into Cambodia to escape bombing and strafing by American and South Vietnamese aircraft. Near the Cambodia frontier post at Oyadao, I spoke to a Vietnamese rice farmer, named Nguyen Dieu, whose family had fled with seventy-two other families from their village of Thangduc in Pleiku Province, about eight miles from the Cambodian border. A gaunt, fifty-one-year-old peasant, Dieu spoke with more fatalism than rancor about the death of his village and the flight of its thirteen hundred inhabitants after an attack by American jet planes on August 7. For Nguyen Dieu, the war against the Vietcong had been until that day a nebulous happening beyond the horizon of his rice fields, although he had felt the pinch when his two eldest sons were drafted into the South Vietnamese army. Beginning in May, however, Vietcong occasionally came into the village to buy food. The war closed in when the Vietcong emerged in force from the forests in July and besieged Duc Co, two and a half miles west of the village. South Vietnamese troops and a U.S. Special Forces unit were then stationed in the post. To reinforce the besieged post a South Vietnamese paratrooper battalion was dropped into Duc Co. People in Nguyen Dieu’s village could hear the sounds of battle only distantly. Suddenly, in August bombers appeared overhead. “They were bombing villages around Duc Co,” Nguyen said. “Then planes bombed and fired their guns at my village. There were no Vietcong in Thangduc. People were killed. I do not know how many. Everyone began to run into the forest.” Other villagers were killed and wounded in the forest by the planes which followed them bombing and strafing, but Nguyen did not know how many. He said he never saw any Vietcong after the bombing. In the forest, Nguyen gathered his wife and five of his children. Their fourteen-year-old daughter was still missing, but he decided to join the group of families which had elected to go westward to the Cambodian border. Between August 8 and 14, six groups of 73 men, 75 women, and 243 children crossed the frontier into Cambodia. They walked along Route 19, carrying a few household possessions, until it became a footpath into the forest on which they encountered Cambodian border guards. At the time there were reports from Saigon, apparently based on aerial observation, of Vietcong movement across the border. Fleeing refugees may have been mistaken for Vietcong. Near Oyadao, Nguyen Dieu built a lean-to from bamboo and straw to shelter his family and their dog, which followed them from Thangduc. “We do not want to go back until there is peace,” he told me.

  Our circuit along the border bespoke the obvious. As of October 1965, there were no major North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, as I reported in a series of stories to the Times. Vietcong units certainly, as evidenced by what I was told at Oyadao, were ducking in and out of the border region. By observation it also seemed obvious that the bombing strategy being employed along the border would be of limited effectiveness in combating the Vietcong or halting North Vietnamese infiltration. Precise spotting of targets by aerial reconnaissance in the vast forests with their thick canopies of foliage was nigh on impossible. The electronic gear employed was of little help. This is what had impelled the American military to begin deployment of teams of Special Forces and the CIA, usually composed of a mix of American and Vietnamese, to reconnoiter into Cambodia. Over the years in the highly secretive operation more than one thousand such reconnaissance missions were undertaken by teams under the operational code names of “Daniel Boone” and “Silver House.” The team members crossed into Cambodia in civilian clothes and without identification. They were told that if they were captured there would be no negotiation to obtain their release. Families of those killed or captured were told that they were lost in operations on the Vietnamese side of the border. This secrecy was, in part, political so as not to give substance to Sihanouk’s complaints that his border was being violated.

  When I returned to Phnom Penh from the frontier, I was received by Prince Norom Kantol, a courtly, soft-spoken aristocrat who was premier and foreign minister. He vigorously denied that Cambodian territory was being used by the Vietcong and said that the United States shared in responsibility for the hundreds of South Vietnamese incursions. “It is to be feared,” he told me, “that these aggressions must be a prelude to an attack against our country in the near future.” The prince, like other Cambodians I interviewed, was convinced, despite denials by American officials, that an invasion of their country by the South Vietnamese was impending. The worst fears of the Cambodians did come to pass in the next years. When I left Phnom Penh, I knew that Sihanouk and his countrymen would use every means open to them and make any alliance simply to shield their country from any destructive foreign intrusion.

  During my interview with Prince Kantol, he told me that Sihanouk was absent, on a trip to their Communist allies. He had already visited Peking and was en route to Moscow. Kantol was not aware that the trip had resulted in a political disaster and that Sihanouk was on the way home in a state of rage. Upon arrival in Phnom Penh, Sihanouk took to the Cambodian Radio and made a two-hour speech, on October 17, in which he said that the Soviet Union had humiliated him in a manner that was “a virtual provocation for the rupture of relations between the two countries.” He said that his long friendship with Soviet leaders had ended because of their curt cancellation of his scheduled state visit to Moscow. He described how the Soviet ambassador in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, had handed him a note on October 8 that said the Soviet leaders were “very busy” and would be unable to meet him as planned. The Russians offered to allow him to cross Soviet territory on the way to other Communist countries in Eastern Europe and suggested that he arrange another visit to Moscow. The prince said the slight was “absolutely inexcusable and irreparable” and that he had called off his entire Eastern European tour, since he was no longer interested in visiting countries in the Soviet camp.

  The Soviet snub was obviously a payback for the declarations made by Sihanouk in Peking in which he strongly endorsed the foreign policy and ideological positions taken by Mao Zedong contrary to those adopted by the Soviet Union. Sihanouk said that while in Peking he had been promised additional aid, including arms. The fallout with Moscow was costly to Sihanouk. The Russians were the major contributor of aid, particularly for development projects. In professing neutrality, the prince had been using the Soviet Union, and to lesser extent, France, as a counterweight in his relations with China. Sihanouk was now more dependent than ever on China as his principal mentor and ally.

  Afte
r my return to Hong Kong, I received a personal letter from Sihanouk, written in French, dated December 5, 1965, which was indicative of the prince’s continuing frenetic balancing act. He said in part:

  Certainly, the United States should be showing greater understanding of a country like Cambodia, which has succeeded despite American intrigues [aimed at overthrowing its national government] in effectively keeping Communism under control internally. This is what the Administration of your country attempts to do. In fact, through its brutal policy, its lack of understanding of Asian realities, and its support of dictatorial and unpopular regimes, it brings about the contrary effect. It creates Communists where they do not exist and multiplies them where they are not numerous. The breaking of relations between our two countries is not, therefore, a “contradiction,” neither on my part (since I have no reason to reproach myself) nor on the part of the United States, which is less interested in containing Communism than in creating docile allies in its struggle against China.

  The prince referred me to his signed editorial in the Cambodian magazine Kambuja, a copy of which he sent me, in which he accused the Central Intelligence Agency of attempts to topple him from power. Sihanouk was alluding to a failed army coup attempt against him in February 1959. He said of the Johnson administration: “They have failed to understand that if Communism is to be contained they should assist in forging a cordon of states, strong in their nationalist convictions, irreproachably independent and genuinely free; states which have at their hand stubborn intractable leaders, as de Gaulle in France and (I will add without false modesty) Sihanouk in Cambodia.”

  I had already become aware of Sihanouk’s list of heroes simply by strolling through his capital, an attractive prosperous, city of a half million residents. He honored them ceremonially by anointing some of the principal thoroughfares, such as Charles de Gaulle Avenue, Josip Broz Tito Boulevard, and Jawaharlal Nehru Boulevard. Once, taking a walk along the tree-lined streets, I had paused at a small café on the Boulevard of the USSR for a cup of tea and listened to a small string orchestra play the prince’s latest musical composition, the Bolero Twist. I now assumed, after the debacle of his canceled trip to Moscow, that the name of that pleasant boulevard would be changed.