In early January 1966, I covered the three-day state visit of Charles de Gaulle to Cambodia. I was one of several reporters in the large entourage accompanying the president. The occasion provided Sihanouk with what he regarded as his greatest moment of glory. It was also an occasion when the United States was offered an opportunity, which it did not exploit, to open peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. In a speech delivered before more than 100,000 people in Phnom Penh’s National Sports Stadium, the French president appealed to the United States to withdraw its forces from Vietnam. He said that the Vietnam conflict was threatening world peace and was “increasingly coming closer to China” and becoming “increasingly provocative in the eyes of the Soviet Union.” He said the opening of peace negotiations depended upon acceptance by the United States of an advance commitment “to repatriate its forces within a suitable and determined period.” De Gaulle spoke after meeting with Nguyen Thuong, chief of North Vietnam’s diplomatic mission in Cambodia, in the Palais Khemarin within the Palais Royal compound where the president was staying. His diplomatic aides took other soundings with envoys of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. The French diplomats told me later that Hanoi might find withdrawal during a period of two years from the issuance of such declaration by the United States as an acceptable basis for the opening of peace negotiations.
In his speech in the Sports Stadium, de Gaulle, erect in a tan summer uniform, spoke with sweeping gestures to an audience of thousands, which cheered him wildly. Seated on a bench behind the rostrum, I followed his remarks in the official text and noted that he rarely departed from it, although he hardly glanced at his own copy. In a voice laden with emotion, after citing the friendship of France and the United States over two centuries, he urged Washington to follow the example he set in withdrawing from rebellious Algeria, France’s former colony, saying: “In view of the power, wealth and influence at present attained by the United States, the act of renouncing[,] in its turn, a distant expedition once it appears unprofitable and unjustifiable[,] and of substituting for it an international arrangement organizing the peace and development of an important region of the world, will not, in the final analysis, involve anything that could injure its pride, interfere with its ideals and jeopardize its interests.” The French president’s emotional appeal did not move the Johnson administration.
From Phnom Penh I traveled with de Gaulle to Angkor. To celebrate the visit of his hero, Sihanouk transformed the temple enclave into a fantasy of light and sound, his Royal Ballet performing before the great temple. Upon leaving Cambodia, de Gaulle rendered homage to Sihanouk for his struggle to safeguard the territorial integrity of his country and its neutrality. Sihanouk, however, found in the next year that those twin goals were incompatible.
In 1967, in one of his ideological swings, after years of bitter animosity, Sihanouk turned once again to the United States. The situation on the ground had changed radically, and there was no longer any doubt that the North Vietnamese were infiltrating into Cambodia and had in alliance with the Khmer Rouge occupied large areas of the country, particularly in the northeast. Increasingly concerned, looking everywhere for help, the prince made overtures to the United States. In October 1967 he invited Jacqueline Kennedy to visit the temples at Angkor. I presumed he withdrew or apologized to her for his public remark uttered during one of his rages against the United States professing that he did not intend to mourn the death of her assassinated husband. Shortly afterward, Lyndon Johnson, hoping that Sihanouk would join in ridding his country of the Vietnamese Communists, messaged Sihanouk to the effect that Chester Bowles, the American ambassador to India, was available for a visit to Phnom Penh. Bowles had made a point of retaining good relations with Sihanouk. He had remained outspoken in his admiration of Sihanouk’s independent spirit and his struggle to safeguard the neutrality and integrity of his kingdom. In 1962 he had visited the Cambodian capital and had been treated most cordially by Sihanouk. The prince responded to Johnson by extending a warm invitation to Bowles, and in January 1968 the ambassador flew from New Delhi to Phnom Penh. Sihanouk was not aware that his invitation was putting into motion a top-secret operation that would be code-named “Vesuvius.”
Just prior to Bowles’s departure for Phnom Penh, under the tightest security, a group of American officials and military left Saigon on two T-39 light aircraft for New Delhi to brief the ambassador on violations of the Cambodian border by the Vietnamese Communists. The group, led by Philip Habib, a veteran State Department negotiator, included Lieutenant General William de Pugh, the chief of army operations in Vietnam, and two military intelligence officers, Lieutenant Colonel William White and Major James W. Reid. White and Reid carried with them briefing papers containing information collected in Cambodia by the Daniel Boone and Silver House teams in their cross-border forays. The papers also included data from air reconnaissance and radio intercepts, transcripts of interrogations of Vietcong deserters, and intelligence information gathered from the French rubber planter community.
Meeting with Sihanouk in Phnom Penh, Bowles displayed the maps and briefing books submitted to him in New Delhi by the Habib intelligence team. He proposed that whenever a bombing strike was to be made against North Vietnamese or Vietcong targets in the Cambodian border regions, the prince would be provided in advance with a data packet on the target area so that the prince could clear his people out of harm’s way. Sihanouk agreed in strict confidence to receive what became known as the “Vesuvius Packets.” But he specified that bombing must be restricted to areas uninhabited by Cambodians such as those in the northeast and asked for a guarantee that there would be no more American or South Vietnamese ground incursions. Bowles replied he could only convey the request on cessation of the ground incursions to President Johnson. It was a request never honored, but nevertheless, Vesuvius went forward in utmost secrecy.
Years later I was given the secret details of the Vesuvius operation by James Reid, a member of Habib’s team, now a retired colonel of the U.S. Army Intelligence. Although the most junior member of the Habib mission, the young Major Reid became a key player in the unfolding Vesuvius operation. Reid was ideally suited for his clandestine assignment. He was fluent in French and while a Princeton exchange student at the Ecole de Sciences Politiques in Paris had gained a working knowledge of Vietnamese. When I met Reid, a tall, intense man, he was authoring elaborately illustrated art books and travel guides. He was a distinguished lecturer in cultural programs aboard cruise ships. The prize possession in his home in Hartsdale, New York, which was stunningly decorated with ancient and modern art objects, was an eighteenth-century bronze drum of Cambodia’s Kha Hill tribesmen ferried discreetly to him out of Phnom Penh by the Australian military attaché.
Reid described to me for the first time the delivery and preparation of the Vesuvius Packets, to which he contributed information from his excellent French planter sources. One of the first of the packets, which were assembled in Vietnam by the intelligence wing of the MACV, contained information that the Vietcong had established a hospital hidden in the Cambodia border area to care for their troops wounded in Vietnam. Since the United States had no diplomatic relations with Cambodia, delivery of the packets required intermediaries. Reid would deliver the packets to a contact at the American Embassy in Saigon. The ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, in turn would pass them to the Australian ambassador, Noel St. Clair Deschamps, who would fly to Phnom Penh and deliver them personally to Sihanouk. The Australians were then representing the United States in the Cambodian capital. Prior to the Bowles mission, Deschamps had already delivered information to Sihanouk on Communist violations of the border.
Reid’s most important intelligence coup was made possible by his contacts in the French community, notably rubber tree planters. When Reid first raised the question of cooperation with the French, General West more land replied caustically: “Do you really believe we can rely on the French after what’s happened here in the last 100 years?” But onc
e persuaded by Reid, Westmoreland agreed in return for intelligence information provided by the planters to desist from the practice of cutting back plantation rubber trees beside trails which might serve as concealment for Vietcong ambushers. The arrangement enabled Reid to solve a puzzle bedeviling American intelligence.
It was known that food and medicine were being trucked at night from Sihanoukville, the Canadian port neighboring the Vietnamese border, with the connivance of Sihanouk and Cambodian army officers, to the Communist units operating in the border areas. Many of the supplies destined for the Communists were being unloaded from ships flying the flags of neutral countries such as Panama. But American agents could find no evidence that weapons or munitions were being unloaded and transported, particularly the devastating 122-mm rockets, bearing Chinese factory markings, used to bombard targets in South Vietnam. How were they being delivered?
This is Reid’s story, told to me at his Hartsdale home, of how the puzzle was solved:
I was invited to dinner in Saigon by the Marquis de la Garde, to whom I had been introduced by friends in Paris. I was in worn field fatigues— what a startling contrast to the elegant French. My dinner partner was Marie Georges Sauvezon, a charming, cultured French woman. She was the publisher in Saigon of the excellent French daily newspaper, le Journal d’Extreme Orient. At the dinner, Madame Sauvezon suggested that I come to her apartment the next day for drinks. “There would be,” she said, “someone there with very interesting information.”
At her apartment the next day, Marie introduced me to a rubber planter. His plantation was on the coast near Ha Tien, virtually on the Vietnamese border. He told me that one night he awoke at about 3 A.M. suffering from a headache. He went out on the terrace of his villa which was on a hill overlooking the coast. There was a full moon, and he made out movements near the beach. Intrigued, he dressed, went down, and walked several hundred yards along the hill where he was able to get a clearer view. What he saw astounded him. For there, stretching out to sea for hundreds of feet was a long line of coolies standing up to their waists in water, which was barely three feet deep in that area. Out beyond, in deeper water where the sea bed dropped sharply, was a large cargo ship, and from it a small boat was transporting weapons—apparently rock-ets—to the head of the human line. The first person on the line shouldered the rocket, handed it to his neighbor, and so on until it reached the shore. Apparently from that beach the weapons were transported across the border. Surveillance of the coast was tightened thereafter.
Reid left Vietnam in July 1968 for his next assignment, to attend Stanford University for advanced studies on South America before serving there as a military attaché. Prior to leaving he was presented with the Legion of Merit for “outstanding meritorious services” by General Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam. The Vesuvius operation continued after his departure, although it is highly dubious that in making his compact with Bowles Sihanouk would have agreed to the magnitude of the massive B-52 bombings which ensued.
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THE B-52 BOMBINGS
On the morning of March 18, 1969, Cambodia was shaken by sixty B-52 carpet bombings, forty-eight in the border region and twelve farther inland. The previous bombings by American tactical aircraft, which had been carried out intermittently since 1965, had failed to rid the Cambodian border region of North Vietnamese and Vietcong bases and safe havens. Communist cross-border raids had been very costly to South Vietnamese and American forces. President Nixon in response ordered the deployment of the long-range B-52s, which carried huge bomb loads, for strikes at areas where the Communist units were thought to be based. While the bombing by tactical aircraft had struck narrowly at suspected targets, the carpet bombing by the B-52s now devastated entire localities. The principal intended target was COSVN, believed to be the mobile command and control headquarters for Communist operations in South Vietnam.
In the first B-52 bombing foray, the pilots reported, from altitudes of about thirty thousand feet, that they had observed explosions which could have been ammunition and fuel depots. When a Daniel Boone reconnaissance team, of two Americans and eleven Vietnamese, landed by helicopter in an area where COSVN was thought to be operating, the team came under heavy fire, indicating that the carpet bombing had been less than totally effective. Five members of the team were killed and the leader wounded. The survivors were picked up by another helicopter in a hasty evacuation. COSVN—possibly consisting, in my view, of not much more than radios and maps in knapsacks carried by sandal-shod bearers moving from straw-thatched hut to hut—continued to be an elusive target.
The B-52 bombings were carried out covertly. The secrecy was such that William Rogers, the secretary of state, was excluded from the “need-to-know list” of American officials. On March 26 the New York Times reported that B-52 raids on Cambodia’s Svay Rieng Province had been under consideration at the request of General Creighton Abrams, who the previous June had replaced Westmoreland. I was then supervising the Indochina coverage as foreign editor of the Times. The short article also stated that there were high State Department officials strongly opposed to the bombing. Among them were members of Henry Kissinger’s own staff: Anthony Lake, who had served in Vietnam, Roger Morris, and William Watts. Eventually, the three resigned in protest. When questioned by a Times reporter, the presidential press secretary, Ronald Zeigler, said he knew of no such Abrams request reaching the president’s desk. In fact, such a proposal had been made by Abrams to the Pentagon, which had then been referred to the White House. The bombings were staged after American intelligence officials thought they had pinpointed the location of COSVN in the Cambodian mid-border region, to the northwest of Saigon, west of An Loc, which had been designated as Base Area 353 and dubbed the Fishhook. Targets were selected on a basis of information received from a Vietcong deserter and aerial photographs.
The Times broke the story of the bombings on May 9, in a front-page article by William Beecher, the military correspondent in the Washington bureau. He reported that “American B-52 bombers in recent weeks have raided several Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia for the first time, according to Nixon Administration sources, but Cambodia has not made any protest.” Beecher reported that “Cambodian authorities were cooperating with American and South Vietnamese military men at the border, often giving them information on Vietcong and North Vietnamese movements.” Evidently, the Vesuvius compact in some form was still operative, although the bombing had been extended from northeastern Cambodia to inhabited areas in the south in violation of the condition which Sihanouk contended he laid down at his 1968 meeting with Bowles. With an estimated fifty thousand North Vietnamese and their Khmer Rouge allies now in occupation of possibly one-third of Cambodia, Sihanouk, frantically looking westward for help, apparently was amenable to the bombing. Four months after the first B-52 bombing raid, Sihanouk restored diplomatic relations with the United States. In exchange he received a pledge that the United States would “respect Cambodia’s independence and sovereignty within the present territorial borders.” Yet still playing both sides against the middle in his struggle to preserve the integrity of his country, Sihanouk retained covert relations with Hanoi, hoping to limit North Vietnamese infiltration of Cambodian territory.
Beecher’s exclusive story on the bombings did not at first raise a great furor. It was, however, one of a series of news breaks traceable to government leaks that spurred Kissinger into ordering FBI wiretaps as a means of identifying the sources. Four journalists and thirteen government officials became the targets of the wiretaps. As to just how he obtained his story, Beecher broke a silence of thirty-six years when he spoke to a Harvard seminar in 2006. Reasoning that B-52 bombings had been carried out in Laos and in Vietnam along the Cambodian border, he laid out speculative scenarios for similar attacks against Communist base areas within Cambodia and presented them for comment to White House and State Department officials. H
e pieced together his story from what they told him and more substantively from what they would not deny. Commenting on Henry Kissinger’s contention that the bombing operation was kept secret to safeguard American lives, Beecher observed during his seminar: “From whom was it secret? Not from the North Vietnamese on whose heads the bombs were falling. Not from officials of the Cambodian and South Vietnamese governments. It was a secret only from the Congress and the American public.”
In January 1970, Sihanouk left Phnom Penh, accompanied by his wife, Monique, for a cure at a clinic on the French Riviera. He went from there on to Moscow to mend relations with the Soviet leaders, disrupted after their earlier snub of him. In his absence, in early March, Lon Nol, the defense chief, acting in tandem with Prince Sirik Matak, issued an ultimatum to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong infiltrators: Leave Cambodia or face attack. He also rallied anti-Vietnamese demonstrations across the country. Demonstrators destroyed the Vietcong and North Vietnamese diplomatic missions in Phnom Penh. Prince Sirik Matak shut down the smuggling from Sihanoukville of food, medicines, and other supplies to Vietnamese Communist units in the border areas, which had been carried on with the connivance of Cambodian army officers. Sihanouk had agreed to this smuggling operation, dubbed by American officers as the “Sihanouk Trail,” in 1966 at the request of Premier Zhou Enlai when the American blockade of the Vietnamese coast and bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail were impeding deliveries by the Communists to their units in South Vietnam. Prince Matak then joined with Lon Nol in signing a decree ousting Sihanouk from power. The conspirators, who were in close touch with the sympathetic U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, cited Sihanouk’s toleration of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese bases as one of the reasons for the coup.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 35
