Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  As the CBS employees boarded the plane, Ms. Yen gave Ellis a doleful look, as if to say, “Why don’t you come with us?” Khiem Cat shook his hand and said gravely, “My family thanks you.” Reporter Nguyen waved and shouted, “See you in America, boss!”

  But would he? Ellis knew only that his employees would land at Clark Air Base, but then what? When he asked a crew member about their destination, the man smiled and said, “Disneyland!”

  He was relieved they were escaping but sad that his friendships with them were ending. He returned to an empty office and telexed CBS executive Feders, “Fifty Birds have flown and now working on second crop.” After Hogan confirmed that the plane had landed, he telexed, “All our children made it across the highway safely….They [are] all your wards but they may not surface for a couple of days. Please please we must maintain closed mouth policy that they do not exist…keep the lid on til my pipeline runs dry.”

  He began making runs to Tan Son Nhut with the employees of other news agencies. He persuaded a travel agent to print up phony tickets for domestic flights that he flashed at the MPs. He filled a bus with cameramen and their families, pointed to the cameras dangling around their necks, and said they were flying to the delta to cover a story. The other news agencies padded their lists with household servants, cousins, and grandparents-in-law. He brought them to Tan Son Nhut anyway. If he came with extra people, Delligatti found room for them, sometimes boarding them two to a seat.

  As the North Vietnamese Army neared Saigon, the air force pilots kept their engines running and turned around quickly, and the checkpoint police became more tense and unpredictable. The DAO had bribed their commanders with money and promises of evacuation, but once these officers departed, a more volatile contingent of unbribed junior officers took over. They questioned the manifests and boarded the buses to search for military-aged men, sometimes ordering everyone to disembark for questioning and arbitrarily arresting “deserters.” The harassment was blackmail, a message that they also wanted to escape. Ellis handed out “facilitating fees” in soon-to-be-worthless piastres. During one standoff an MP pointed a revolver at the head of CBS cameraman Mike Marriott and pulled the trigger. There was a click and the gun failed to fire.

  Ellis found himself in what he termed “a dreadful and conscience wrenching position,” forced to make life-and-death decisions because of the promises, encouragement, and inducements that the U.S. government had offered to the South Vietnamese over the years. Casual friends, relatives of relatives of the news agency evacuees, and strangers accosted him in the street and at his hotel. The doormen and bellhops at the Caravelle sold his room number. He took a room at the Majestic and moved between it and another room at the Continental, but businessmen and bureaucrats who had heard his name whispered by friends tracked him down, telephoning at night or banging on his door. They offered him gold, cars, and antiques. An acquaintance mentioned an ivory chess set. The owner of a restaurant he frequented handed him a list of ten people and a large check written on a Paris bank. He took their names but refused the check. Bar girls held out photographs of themselves with the U.S. servicemen who had promised to marry them. Americans begged him to evacuate girlfriends and mistresses. One Vietnamese man burst into his office and demanded nine seats. Leaning across his desk so their noses almost touched, he said, “I no get seats your family will be sad because I come back and shoot you.” He pointed his index finger, cocked his thumb, and said, “Bang!” Another man solemnly handed him a letter promising that if he evacuated him and his twenty-six family members, they would “love you and call our future babies after you name.” Otherwise, he warned, “Viet Cong cut off all my heads.”

  Ellis recognized a man who barged into his room at the Hotel Continental as the officer who provided an English translation of Lieutenant Colonel Hien’s daily ARVN press briefings. The officer demanded seats for himself and Hien. Ellis refused, saying that he could be arrested for assisting in the desertion of a South Vietnamese officer. The officer became agitated and Ellis stalled, promising to check on his seat numbers and suggesting that he return in several days. The officer returned the following evening wearing military fatigues and carrying a sidearm. He demanded eleven seats and threatened “big trouble” if Ellis did not produce them. He sat on the corner of the bed, tapping his foot and unbuckling his belt so that his revolver rested on one knee. The phone rang, breaking the tension. It was the CBS night editor calling with messages from New York. Ellis pretended it was his contact at the embassy promising extra seats and asked the officer to return later. As soon as he left, Ellis alerted Martin, who promised to handle the situation. Hien continued delivering his briefings until the end, spinning fantasies about Communist reversals and ARVN triumphs. A CBS reporter saw him at the embassy on April 29 boarding a helicopter.

  Ellis hated to refuse anyone, and he could not risk someone becoming angry and alerting the police. He equivocated, saying that finding seats was difficult but promising to try, and sometimes Hogan did produce more seats. The extra seats forced Ellis to choose. He filled some with his own special cases and the relatives of the first batch of CBS evacuees whom he had left behind because he had been adhering to Martin’s rule of immediate family only. Before allocating the others, he paced his room at night, struggling with decisions he likened to the thumbs-up or thumbs-down determining the fate of a Roman gladiator. At first, he denied seats to unaccompanied children on the grounds that they would be better off with their parents. But after comparing their parents’ situation to that of adults on a sinking ship desperate to put their children into a scarce lifeboat, he decided that he would do the same for his children and sent them out unaccompanied.

  Martin would later credit him with evacuating 595 people. But because he had padded his lists and crammed extra people onto the buses, Ellis thought that the actual number was closer to 700. After Martin retired to North Carolina, Ellis called to thank him and to admit having padded his lists.

  “Oh, I knew that all along,” Martin said breezily.

  “But if you knew, why on earth didn’t you stop me?”

  “If you were finding room for all those people on those planes, why on earth would I?”

  In Martin’s 1976 congressional testimony he called Ellis one of his “Scarlet Pimpernels.” He recited a couplet from the book—“Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? / That damned, elusive Pimpernel”—and boasted, “My Young Pimpernels did a magnificent job.” He also claimed that he had turned a blind eye to some underground railroads and in some instances had supported and assisted them.

  Martin’s first “Scarlet Pimpernel” operation had involved a Pentagon decision to remove the fuel rods from the nuclear reactor at Dalat University in the Central Highlands. The United States had provided the university with a small reactor to support its medical and agricultural research but not with the expertise to remove its rods from their lead-lined barrels. On March 31, two U.S. Air Force C-130 transports flew to Dalat from a base at Johnston Island in the Pacific. The DAO had devised a fail-safe plan that called for the first plane to land with a contingent of U.S. Navy SEALS and technicians from the Atomic Energy Commission. The second plane was to circle overhead while the SEALS loaded the nuclear rods onto the first one. If the first plane suffered a mechanical failure or was hit by North Vietnamese ordnance, the second would land, collect the rods, and fly them back to Johnston Island. If the first plane accomplished its mission, the second would remain airborne and return without stopping in Saigon. Foreign Service officer Lamar Prosser, the senior U.S. government official in Dalat, protested this arrangement to Martin, saying that if the operation went smoothly, he wanted the second plane to land and evacuate his Vietnamese employees, the director of the institute, its faculty members and their families, and a group of French nuns, flying them all to Saigon.

  Martin took Prosser’s side, but the DAO refused to budge. The quarrel went to the Pentagon, where Sec
retary of Defense Schlesinger supported the DAO. Martin cabled Kissinger that he would deny the first plane clearance to leave Dalat until the second one had landed, collected Prosser’s evacuees, and was airborne. The Pentagon capitulated, and the second plane flew the Vietnamese and the French nuns to Saigon. Martin was so secretive and opaque that his motivations in this and other instances can be hard to discern. The same humane impulses that might explain his willingness to allow Ellis to inflate his numbers may also explain the Prosser incident, or perhaps he was more willing to support an evacuation within South Vietnam’s borders. And he undoubtedly considered the Pentagon’s refusal to fly out Prosser’s people a challenge to his position as the senior U.S. official in South Vietnam.

  By evacuating South Vietnamese civilians employed by the U.S. news agencies, Martin had broken American and South Vietnamese laws. In order to fly Prosser’s people to Saigon, he had defied the Pentagon. He had repeatedly said in cables and at weekly staff meetings that the United States had a moral duty to evacuate endangered South Vietnamese. When someone mentioned evacuating a thousand Vietnamese at a meeting in late March, he had jumped in and said, “Oh, no, we have to have a plan in place to evacuate everyone. Their lives will be in danger in the unlikely event that the country falls. So I want you guys to draw up a plan to evacuate 250,000 people.” Naval attaché Cornelius Carmody thought that taking out 250,000 people was madness and wondered if Martin had “lost it.”

  Martin also broached the subject of an evacuation with Kissinger’s assistant Brent Scowcroft, telling him in an April 7 cable that America “clearly owes protection in case of danger” to about 175,000 Vietnamese, calling the obligation “clear and immediate,” and saying that only a sealift or a “jumbo airlift” could fulfill it. Four days later, on April 11, he promised a delegation representing the U.S. mission’s Vietnamese employees that he would evacuate them and their families and would be the last man out. One day after that, he asked Rear Admiral Hugh Benton, the CINCPAC liaison officer for evacuation matters, to develop a plan to send a million Vietnamese to the United States.

  There were two ways to evacuate large numbers of Vietnamese. The first required a large-scale military intervention during which U.S. troops occupied Tan Son Nhut airport and the port of Vung Tau and loaded evacuees onto American planes and ships. This would risk the lives of American troops and anger Congress. The second possibility, which Martin considered more promising, was that North Vietnam would choose negotiations over a direct assault on the city, leading to weeks or months of talks that would allow ample time to evacuate hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese. But leaving nothing to chance, Martin began casting around for ways to accomplish a large-scale evacuation in the absence of any negotiations. In mid-April he summoned Carmody and asked what he knew about amphibious operations. Carmody replied that he knew a lot because he had previously captained an LST, a vessel designed to land cargo directly onto a beach.

  Martin was ecstatic. “That’s perfect!” he exclaimed. “You know about beaching these ships and stuff?” Carmody replied that he had beached many of them. “Absolutely wonderful! Call a helicopter to come get you and fly you down to Vung Tau and let me know if you think that the beaches down there would be suitable for an amphibious landing. We could get thousands of people off on just one LST.”

  South Vietnamese forces held the port of Vung Tau and the highway connecting it to Saigon, but the Communists controlled much of the surrounding countryside. The Air America operations officer warned Carmody that he would be risking his life by flying low over the beaches. Carmody’s pilot made several low passes anyway, and Carmody saw uniformed North Vietnamese soldiers looking up while shielding their eyes from the sun. When he returned to the embassy an hour later, Eva Kim said, “Oh, the ambassador is just pacing back and forth waiting for you.” Carmody reported that the slope of Vung Tau’s beaches was too gentle for amphibious landings. Martin questioned him closely but finally accepted the bad news.

  Martin had sent Carmody to Vung Tau on April 14, two days after he had ordered General Baughn expelled for making evacuation preparations. The contradiction between these moves indicates the distinction that Martin drew between planning for a theoretical evacuation and making concrete preparations to execute these plans—preparations such as those being made by the DAO’s Special Planning Group. He was therefore willing to send Carmody to Vung Tau to evaluate the possibility of a large-scale sealift of South Vietnamese and willing to send an embassy representative to a meeting to discuss evacuation planning with Brigadier General Baughn and others. But once Baughn appeared to go behind his back and propose measures such as bringing in marine helicopter pilots and a ground security force—measures that Martin believed risked alarming the South Vietnamese, much like painting an H on rooftops—he had expelled him.

  On April 13, The Washington Post ran a front-page profile of Martin highlighting his elusiveness and the contradictions in his nature and policies that baffled some observers. The profile spoke of his “leathery face and unsettling eye” but also described his “bland expression.” It called him a “highly controversial figure” but acknowledged that he had “an almost impossible job.” It mentioned his surprising strategy of pressing businessmen to make long-term investments in South Vietnam, implying that this might explain why some observers, including members of his staff, believed that his “reasoned judgment” had been “impaired” and that he was “as mad as a March hare and just about as elusive.” But it added that others praised him for being “determined and wily.”

  Two days before the Washington Post profile appeared, Martin gave a rare on-camera interview to Garrick Utley of NBC News. Utley had jump-started his career while covering the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s and had returned to witness its death throes. According to his diary, Martin faced the camera with “a riveting stare that defies contradiction.” After Martin said, “I have always believed in the importance of telling the American people the full truth,” Utley wrote that Martin spoke “passionately about the importance of not abandoning South Vietnam.” He compared the mood in the United States to the America First isolationism of the 1930s and offered, Utley said, “the now worn argument that with just a little more perseverance we will one day be able to leave the South Vietnamese on their own, etc., etc.” Martin agreed to speak on background off camera, and Utley noted “a distinct change” in his tone. He was more pessimistic and said he feared that someone in Washington would “push the panic button,” starting a precipitous evacuation of Americans and setting off “a violent reaction.” Utley believed that had Martin been truthful, he would have said something like “I don’t believe this [the perseverance argument] at all. But I say it because I still hope. I do not want to be remembered for going out like this, ending my career as the ambassador who pulled down the American flag over Saigon.”

  Few of Martin’s detractors have painted him as callous or wicked. The evidence that he believed that the United States had a moral responsibility to evacuate endangered Vietnamese is extensive, and unlike some in Washington and Saigon voicing this sentiment, he had proven himself willing to violate American and South Vietnamese immigration regulations to achieve it. On April 19 he responded to a query from Kissinger about evacuating the news agency Vietnamese by cabling, “We are already in business with Brian Ellis and I think the relationships will be wholly satisfactory.” He brushed off Kissinger’s request for more details, saying, “It would be just as well if you didn’t know. I think if you leave it to me we can have all these employees out.” He cautioned that the operation required the deepest secrecy and that if anyone in the media revealed what was happening, “that will have put an automatic block on our ability to remove the rest of them.”

  The day before, he had cabled Kissinger, “It is also beginning increasingly likely to appear that drastic action will be required if we are to have any chance of providing for those Vietnamese who have relied on us,” and
had urged Kissinger to initiate “discussions with the Soviet Union and the PRC” to facilitate “the departure of substantial numbers of Vietnamese who would be endangered and to whom we are most deeply obliged.”

  But although Martin believed that an evacuation was a moral imperative and was willing to assist in the evacuation of certain classes of people, such as the Vietnamese working for the U.S. news agencies and the relatives of U.S. Foreign Service officers, he did not believe that the situation was sufficiently urgent to begin taking concrete steps to prepare for a large-scale evacuation. In early April, he had insisted that the South Vietnamese military could fight the Communists to a standoff and hold Saigon and the delta. Later in the month, when this seemed unlikely, he embraced the notion that the Communists preferred negotiations to a frontal assault on Saigon and that this would lead to a coalition government or, at worst, a slow-motion surrender, providing ample time for evacuating large numbers of South Vietnamese.

  CHAPTER 11

  Playing God

  As Saigon’s mood oscillated between denial, despair, and “palpable fear,” and while Kissinger, Schlesinger, and Martin were debating how many Americans and South Vietnamese to evacuate, the humanitarian mutiny of the “American Schindlers” was proving to be largely immune to interference from the White House or the embassy. There may have been no one more determined to evacuate Vietnamese than Walter Martindale. After Consul General Spear ordered the last Air America flight from Nha Trang restricted to Americans only, Martindale had promised himself not to leave South Vietnam until he had evacuated the rest of his Quang Duc evacuees to Saigon and then to the United States if they so desired. Some were among the 250 evacuees whom Spear had abandoned in Nha Trang airport. They had traveled from there to Cam Ranh Bay, where they joined 40,000 other refugees who were boarding four U.S. freighters chartered by the Military Sealift Command. They were told that their destination was Vung Tau, Saigon’s nearest port, but while they were at sea, the Thieu government ordered them taken to Phu Quoc, a remote teardrop-shaped island off South Vietnam’s west coast known for its peppercorns, pungent fish sauce, and fearsome prisons where France and South Vietnam had incarcerated their most incorrigible Communists. The prisons had closed following the Paris Peace Accords, but the government had decided to reopen them as refugee camps.