And while Weyand was in the air, CIA director William Colby predicted at a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) that government forces in Da Nang might hold out for two weeks (the city fell a day and a half later), and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who was more realistic about Thieu’s prospects, ordered the U.S. military to prepare to execute an evacuation. Kissinger meanwhile told reporters that South Vietnam’s fate lay in the hands of the U.S. Congress and that the Paris Peace Accords had been “negotiated on the assumption that the United States would continue economic and military aid to South Vietnam.” He framed the issue as “an elementary question of what kind of a people we are,” and of whether Americans would “deliberately destroy an ally by withholding aid from it in its moment of extremity,” declaring, “We cannot abandon friends in one part of the world without jeopardizing the security of friends everywhere.” He was offering the same rationale for U.S. involvement in the war that Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had—that the United States had to support South Vietnam to prove itself a reliable Cold War ally.
Before landing at Tan Son Nhut, Martin invited David Kennerly, Foreign Service officer Ken Quinn, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Erich von Marbod to stay at his residence. He knew that Kennerly was close to Ford and had to assume that his verbal report to the president might be more influential than Weyand’s written one. Quinn was currently serving on the staff of Kissinger’s National Security Council, and Martin also assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that he would be writing his own report for Kissinger. Martin had shown little interest in Quinn while he was serving as vice-consul in a provincial capital in the Mekong delta, but that had changed once he learned that Quinn was leaving to join the staff of the NSC. He had attended Quinn’s wedding to his Vietnamese fiancée and had invited him to a private meeting at the embassy during which he had leaned back in his chair and while staring at the ceiling had delivered a rambling soliloquy about the war and the “mattress mice” at the State Department who were undermining him. After several minutes he lost his train of thought and drifted off. Quinn left unnerved.
Shortly before leaving on the Weyand mission, Quinn had joined a clandestine group of young Foreign Service officers who had started meeting over lunch in the State Department cafeteria or in empty offices. They had all served tours in Vietnam and made Vietnamese friends. They believed that South Vietnam was doomed and that the embassy’s evacuation planning was inadequate. Quinn had lobbied to be included on the Weyand mission so he could help to organize the evacuation of his wife’s relatives and encourage diplomats at the embassy to form a similar group that could coordinate its operations with the State Department cafeteria cabal.
Martin’s third houseguest, Erich von Marbod, was the Pentagon’s logistics expert for Vietnam, a legendary figure known as Mr. Military Assistance who enjoyed the confidence of Secretary of Defense Schlesinger and was skilled at moving equipment rapidly to trouble spots. The previous summer, Senator John Stennis, the powerful head of the Armed Services Committee, had asked Schlesinger to dispatch a trusted subordinate to South Vietnam to estimate how much assistance the Thieu government really needed. Schlesinger had sent von Marbod, who had concluded that the $1.4 billion that Martin and other Thieu supporters were requesting was excessive. Despite disagreeing on this issue, von Marbod liked Martin, saying later, “He was a friend of mine. I was a guest in his home. I drank his liquor. I held Nit Noy [his poodle]; I knew his wife, Dottie, and his daughter Janet. And I thought we were good friends, but obviously at the very end our relationship changed.” This end was now five weeks away.
CHAPTER 4
Designated Fall Guy
When the Weyand mission landed at Tan Son Nhut at 3:00 a.m. on March 28, the runways of this once busy military and civilian airfield were deserted and its buildings dark. As passengers lined up to disembark, Martin pushed ahead of Weyand, explaining that because he was President Ford’s representative to South Vietnam, protocol demanded that he disembark first. Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehmann and CIA chief of station Thomas Polgar met him at the foot of the stairs. The week before, Polgar had cabled CIA headquarters complaining that the embassy had become “a rudderless ship” in Martin’s absence and that Lehmann and other senior personnel had not grasped the implications of losing the Central Highlands and were wasting time debating improvements to the recreation center and overtime pay for Vietnamese employees.
When Polgar informed Martin that the situation in Da Nang was ominous, Martin brushed him off, saying that in his experience people always exaggerated how bad things were in Vietnam and were always proved wrong. Polgar pulled Quinn aside and urged him to persuade Martin that this time the situation really was ominous.
Lehmann accompanied Martin to his residence and briefed him for an hour. He reported that Thieu had lost the Central Highlands, South Vietnamese armed forces in Military Region I had disintegrated, and the Communists were poised to take Da Nang. Martin said he would catch a few hours’ sleep before flying to Da Nang to assess the situation. Lehmann told him that would be impossible. Mobs had run amok at the airport there the day before, pummeling Consul General Al Francis and ending the U.S. airlift.
Several hours later Martin arrived at the embassy. He was jet-lagged and sleepless, but his optimism remained undiminished. He told a CIA officer who had just escaped from Da Nang that he planned to fly there that afternoon. According to a CIA report of their conversation, “Only strenuous argument persuaded him [Martin] that he could not land at an airfield controlled by the NVA [North Vietnamese Army].” Another CIA agent overheard one embassy employee telling another, “He [Martin] thinks Da Nang will be retaken. He’s insane.”
Theresa Tull had been sleeping on the couch in Martin’s office while monitoring developments in Da Nang. She thought that Martin was in “Never, Never Land” and arranged to meet with Joe Bennett, who headed the political section. Bennett was a Martin acolyte but had struck her as realistic and comfortable working with a female officer. Gathering up her courage, she said, “Joe, it’s over. This place can’t last….South Vietnam can’t hold with I Corps [General Truong’s command] gone….I don’t give it thirty days.”
He replied, “I’m afraid you’re right,” but she wondered if he had the courage to tell Martin that.
She ran into David Kennerly, who announced he was flying to Da Nang that afternoon and said Martin had promised him a plane.
“You can’t go there,” she said quickly. “It’s finished.”
NSA chief Tom Glenn, who had predicted the attack on Ban Me Thuot and had almost been trapped there, came to Martin’s office to brief him on the SIGINT intercepts indicating that North Vietnamese units were heading toward Saigon. He explained that the Communists would soon be in position to attack the city and requested Martin’s approval to begin evacuating his forty-three American employees and their dependents. He added that he was also concerned for the safety of the twenty-seven hundred South Vietnamese working for the Directorate General for Technical Security (DGTS), South Vietnam’s equivalent of the American National Security Agency.
Martin dismissed Glenn’s intelligence as “gloom and doom” and Communist deception. He said that the NSA employees were “mission-essential” and that their departure would demoralize the DGTS. Glenn replied that the situation in Saigon could deteriorate faster than anyone anticipated, trapping his cryptologists. He offered to stay until the end with two communications specialists if Martin would permit the others to leave. “Calm down,” Martin said, as if dealing with an excitable child. “I’ve got things under control. Let me handle it.”
Glenn alerted the director of the NSA, General Lew Allen Jr., that because of Martin’s intransigence the American cryptologists risked becoming Communist prisoners. Allen cabled back, “Close down the operation and get everyone out before someone gets killed.” Glenn sent forty-one of his
American employees and their dependents out of the country on bogus vacations, unmerited home leave, and sham business trips. He lent his Tan Son Nhut base pass to his Vietnamese driver so that the man could put his family on a flight. He filled the trunk of his black Ford sedan with Vietnamese friends and drove it through to Tan Son Nhut without being stopped because it had diplomatic plates. He tried to persuade a close friend in the army to evacuate his family, but the man’s wife refused to leave without him, and he refused to desert his men. When Glenn asked him what he would do when Communist tanks rolled into Saigon, he said, “I will shoot my three children and I will shoot my wife, then I will shoot myself.” He did not escape, and for decades Glenn has wondered if he carried out his threat.
Fred Thomas was serving as embassy duty officer during the week Martin returned. He read all the incoming and outgoing cables, including those from the consulate in Da Nang, and thought that Martin was “paying no attention to reality” and “off in his own dream world.” On March 28, Martin’s first day back, Thomas attended a meeting of the embassy evacuation committee called by its chairman, air attaché Gavin McCurdy. He had expected to find McCurdy’s office jammed, but the CIA, AID, USIS, and the embassy’s administrative and security departments had not sent representatives, leaving Thomas, McCurdy, and army attaché Chuck Wahle the only ones in attendance. After McCurdy reported that Martin had refused to meet with them to discuss the committee’s plans, Thomas suggested enlisting Major General Homer Smith and the military. Wahle called Smith, and the three saw him at the DAO that afternoon. After listening to their criticisms of Martin, Smith proposed evacuating nonofficial Americans and their dependents on the air force transports that were delivering military supplies to Tan Son Nhut. Thomas later called it “the beginning of the evacuation of Vietnam.” Two days later at Easter lunch, Wahle took Thomas aside and said, “Get your wife and children out of here as fast as you can. This thing is not going to last much longer.”
But many in Washington thought it would. During a meeting of the National Security Council on March 28, CIA director William Colby predicted that Thieu would hold Saigon and the delta until 1976. Kissinger defended Thieu, calling his army’s retreats “strategic” and arguing that he had ordered them “because he was not getting enough support from the United States” and needed to conserve his military’s dwindling supplies. Deputy Secretary of Defense William Clements shot back that if that had been Thieu’s goal, it had been a spectacular failure because his army was about to abandon $200 million in arms and equipment in Da Nang. Kissinger responded by praising Thieu, the architect of the war’s greatest debacle, as “far and away the most capable of all Vietnamese leaders” and someone who “holds things together.”
That same afternoon Martin summoned Foreign Service officer Don Hays and two Americans serving in the DAO and CIA to his office and accused them of evacuating South Vietnamese to Clark Air Base in the Philippines on U.S. Air Force transport planes, thereby violating the laws of the United States, South Vietnam, and the Philippines. Their shenanigans had come to his attention when President Ferdinand Marcos complained to U.S. ambassador to the Philippines William Sullivan about illegal Vietnamese immigrants arriving in his country. Martin told the three they were “fired” and must immediately leave South Vietnam. The DAO and CIA employees complied, but Hays simply returned to his office in the embassy’s finance department and went back to work.
Hays was a physically imposing man, a rugby player and former paratrooper who stood out in any gathering, but because he was also the youngest, lowest-paid, and most junior Foreign Service officer in the largest U.S. mission in the world, he thought that he could fade into the woodwork. He had decided to defy Martin because he was afraid of what might happen to his driver and household staff and the fifty-two Vietnamese employees in his department if he left. Who else would evacuate them? he asked himself. Who else would tell his maid, who had two sons in the military and refused to leave without them, “Steal everything in this house, and tell the VC that you worked for a pig and had to lick his boots”? Who else would help the crotchety old Vietnamese man in the budget section who had told Hays when he signed pay vouchers for the clandestine DAO evacuation, “Don, you do what you’ve got to do and I’ll cover for you.”
Hays had always been something of a rebel, and joining the Foreign Service had not changed that. His father was on the West Point faculty, and they had had the customary generation gap arguments: Hays had his doubts about the war, and his father supported it. Hays had enlisted in the army anyway and had gone to Vietnam as a combat infantryman. Meanwhile, his father had changed his mind and wrote to him saying, “This war is a lost cause. I don’t want to lose you so make sure you don’t put yourself in harm’s way.” Hays replied that he had just transferred to the 101st Airborne so that advice had come a little late. He had the usual late-1960s Vietnam experience: fragging, racial tension, and soldiers refusing to join risky patrols who told him, “Sarge, I’m just not going to go.” He thought that his men were bait, sent out in small groups to draw out the enemy so they could be bombed. By the time he returned to the United States, he had become, he said, “very cynical, very upset, and very angry,” but also very much in love with his wife, whom he had met in New Zealand during his first R&R (rest and recuperation) trip. He volunteered for a second tour so he could return on another R&R and marry her. He attended college in Santa Barbara and graduate school at Georgetown University, where he met Ken Moorefield. After entering the Foreign Service, he asked for Seville but got Saigon and arrived during the summer of 1974.
His job as embassy paymaster had ensnared him in the evacuation scheme. After Ban Me Thuot fell, embassy security officer Marvin Garrett had invited him to a late-night barbecue at the recreation center along with representatives from other U.S. agencies. They were all concerned that unless they began evacuating their Vietnamese employees, the embassy might suddenly pull out Americans and leave the Vietnamese behind. Garrett said they could not count on Martin doing anything and proposed sending some of the embassy’s Vietnamese employees and their families to the Philippines on the underground railroad that Andy Gembara and Colonel LeGro were running through the DAO. Garrett asked Hays to sign vouchers so that Vietnamese evacuees could receive their severance pay before flying there. Hays understood that he was participating in a conspiracy to violate the immigration regulations of three nations, including his own, but agreed anyway. Martin did not suspect Garrett of being involved in the scheme and later complained to him about Hays and the others usurping his authority. When Garrett admitted having known about the operation, Martin asked why he had not alerted him. “Sir, I’m ready to follow any orders you give,” Garrett replied. “But why don’t you give any?” It was a cheeky response but one that the brash and larger-than-life Garrett could pull off.
* * *
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Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehmann’s remarks to the American Chamber of Commerce in Saigon on March 28 bore no resemblance to the pessimistic briefing that he had given Martin earlier that morning. He told chamber members that Thieu’s “light at the top” strategy was “wise,” ARVN resistance was “stiffening,” the retreats were over, the government would mount an “aggressive defense” of Saigon, and a successful assault on the city was “inconceivable.” He implored them not to demoralize the South Vietnamese by evacuating their American staff and dependents and called the loss of the northern provinces “a blessing in disguise” because it had resulted in a more easily defendable and economically viable South Vietnam. There was stifled laughter when he insisted that there had never been a better time to invest in the next Asian economic powerhouse and suggested that they increase their investments in South Vietnam and urge their friends and associates to do likewise. Martin would later call remarks like Lehmann’s part of a calculated “theater” aimed at preventing panic and boosting morale. But some embassy officials must have believed in their own “thea
ter”; why else would they spend hours discussing the construction of a 550-room Hyatt Regency hotel and conference center?
While Lehmann was lecturing the American Chamber of Commerce, a fireplug-shaped middle-aged man wearing a Panama hat modeled on the one Clark Gable had worn in Gone with the Wind burst into Martin’s office demanding to know why Martin was refusing to see him, shouting, “I can get in to see popes, heads of state, generals!”
This was Martin’s introduction to Ed Daly, the perpetually inebriated, publicity-mad multimillionaire who had turned two World War II surplus transport planes into World Airways, a successful charter airline based in Oakland, California. He was a genuine, albeit erratic, humanitarian with a fondness for enterprises involving children, servicemen, refugees, and Vietnam. He supported half a dozen South Vietnamese orphanages, had launched a scheme to bring twenty-five thousand servicemen home from Vietnam for furloughs, donated several million of his $200 million fortune to programs for disadvantaged youths in Oakland, and had airlifted ten thousand Hungarian refugees to the United States after their nation’s failed 1956 anti-Communist revolution. He described himself as “Wyatt Earp with airplanes.”
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