Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Bell and Summers noticed that the Communists had augmented their customary program of humiliations. Instead of eating lunch at the usual hotel, they were told that they would be eating at the Thong Nhat Hotel, a term meaning “reunification” in Vietnamese. Bell noticed that sacks of rice had been placed throughout the lobby where the delegations could see them. Their labels said “donated by the people of China,” a reminder to the South Vietnamese of who had the more generous ally.

  The rumors that Thieu’s resignation had paved the way for a coalition government had led Bell and Summers to anticipate important deliberations with North Vietnamese officials. But after an uneventful lunch their hosts announced that the liaison meeting had been canceled and drove Bell and Summers to the airport through streets filled with celebrating crowds. Bell noticed that Colonel Tu and other senior cadre were not returning to Saigon.

  After the plane reached cruising altitude, Major Huyen, now the highest-ranking member of the North Vietnamese delegation, approached Summers and Bell. After some small talk about the weather, his demeanor abruptly changed. He raised his voice, snapped to attention, and emphasized every word. Summers recognized a Communist “teaching point,” the moment when a junior official communicated a series of prepared remarks.

  Huyen asked Summers and Bell to relay three points to the White House: the United States had three days to “dismantle and remove” the Defense Attaché Office; the U.S. delegation to the JMT should remain in Saigon and continue working on POW/MIA issues; and, he said, “the American Embassy shall be allowed to work out its future with the new government in Saigon.”

  Bell and Summers agreed that although Huyen had been vague about the composition of this “new government,” he had been specific about the fact that the DAO had to leave and that the U.S. JMT delegation should stay. To pass the time during the remainder of the flight, Bell borrowed a copy of Stars and Stripes from a crewman. The front page carried a photograph of the pilot of the Babylift plane that had crashed, killing Bell’s wife and son. An accompanying article contained an eyewitness description of the crash site. It mentioned that the pages of a Donald Duck comic book had “flipped in the breeze.” Bell spent the rest of the flight staring into space.

  Bell and Summers believed that the Communists had presented them with the terms for the withdrawal of U.S. personnel from South Vietnam, but Martin saw Huyen’s conditions differently. He seemed unconcerned that the Communists had given the United States three days to dismantle the DAO, seizing instead on the fact that they had asked the American JMT delegation to remain and had invited the embassy to “work out its future” with the new government. He took Huyen’s statement as proof that Kissinger’s approach to the Soviet Union was working and that Brezhnev had persuaded Hanoi not to attack Saigon. He apparently did not wonder why, if the Communists were serious about a cease-fire and political solution, they had used the liaison flight to evacuate the senior cadre who would be the obvious people to engage in these negotiations.

  Bell recognized Huyen’s terms for what they were: an ultimatum laying out what the United States must do prior to a Communist victory. He resumed spiriting Vietnamese into Tan Son Nhut and onto planes, work that now seemed even more urgent and timely. Back at the DAO, Summers ran into Erich von Marbod, who had just arrived on his mission to prevent the Communists from capturing the South Vietnamese Air Force. He told von Marbod that the Hanoi trip had been such a “screwed up situation” that he could have given the Communists a nuclear ultimatum and they would have believed him.

  “Then why didn’t you?” von Marbod asked, a question Summers took as being “only half in jest.”

  Summers called Colonel Clint Granger, an army buddy serving on the National Security Council, and said that he was appalled at having been sent to Hanoi without any negotiating instructions. He told Granger that he would be returning to Hanoi on the Friday, May 2, liaison flight, adding, “For God’s sake, give me some guidance on what to talk about.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Richard Armitage’s Courageous Silence

  After Thieu’s resignation North Vietnam’s army slowed its advance, encouraging Washington and the embassy to anticipate a slow-motion surrender at the bargaining table. Government troops still held the road to Vung Tau, the post office delivered mail, newspapers published, and bureaucrats showed up for work. Residents of Saigon saw artillery flashes on the horizon and heard distant shell fire, but that was all. It was believed that because ICCS inspectors from Poland and Hungary lived in Saigon, and because North Vietnamese and PRG officials were based at Tan Son Nhut, the Communists would not shell the city. This notion vanished in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 27, when North Vietnamese gunners fired Soviet-built 122 mm rockets into densely populated neighborhoods, killing ten civilians and igniting a firestorm that destroyed five hundred homes in the Chinese neighborhood of Cholon. One rocket hit the top floor of the Hotel Majestic, a grand old colonial building on the riverfront, killing an employee and destroying the penthouse suite that the government had been remodeling to serve as a venue for the anticipated negotiations. The suspicion that Hanoi might have been signaling a lack of interest in such negotiations by hitting the suite was countered by the fact that rockets are imprecise weapons and that one had almost killed the Polish ambassador who lived one floor below the penthouse. His spokesman condemned the rocket as “the work of a misguided person” and exclaimed, “Why, our ambassador was asleep on the fourth floor!”

  Communist artillery spotters meanwhile were infiltrating the refugee columns entering the city. Some ARVN soldiers became suspicious when an officer wearing an unfamiliar insignia was confused by the price of coffee in a café near Tan Son Nhut. Under questioning by MPs, he admitted being sent to target South Vietnam’s Joint General Staff. JMT linguist Stuart Herrington lived nearby, and the incident convinced him that an all-out attack was imminent. He was the evacuation captain for a building with sixty apartments that had been occupied by Americans but were now home to their guards and servants. He had a master key and walked through the building after the rocket attack, making a head count and reassuring everyone. A maid and her three sons had installed themselves in the home of her former employer, a man she called “my fiancé.” Herrington had seen him in a line of evacuees at Tan Son Nhut and winced when she said that he was flying her to the United States and marrying her. The next day Herrington threw a blanket over her and her sons and smuggled them into Tan Son Nhut. One of her fiancé’s American co-workers was on her flight and was so disgusted that he gave her the man’s address and telephone number in the States, despite knowing that he was married.

  North Vietnamese troops resumed their advance on Saigon after the rocket attack. Some tied down South Vietnamese forces on the perimeter; others headed for the center down Route 1, the divided highway connecting Bien Hoa to Saigon. ARVN ranger and airborne units mounted a defense that was all the more courageous and inexplicable given that many of their senior officers had fled. One junior officer told a reporter, “We, the young ones, are expected to keep fighting. But how can we fight when there are no generals to lead us anymore?” An enlisted man said, “If our officers stay with us next time we will fight the Communists. Otherwise, we will surrender.”

  North Vietnamese troops made repeated attempts to take the Newport Bridge, only to have South Vietnamese soldiers, sailors, and combat police push them back. As they were mounting their heroic defense, deserters were looting the Seamen’s Club. Communist commandos attacked an ARVN communications center on the southern outskirts of Saigon, and several Americans at the DAO had breakdowns and were medically evacuated. A U.S. Army engineer drank himself into oblivion and was locked up. Embassies burned files, ashes fell on downtown streets, a man stabbed himself to death on the steps of the National Assembly, and Ambassador Martin appeared on South Vietnamese television on April 27 to deny that he was evacuating American personnel. His skin was gray, the
texture of parchment. Speaking in a ponderous voice, he said, “I, the American ambassador, am not going to run away in the middle of the night. Any of you can come to my home and see that I have not packed my bags. I give you my word.” He called Major General Smith afterward and said, “We’ll be here until July or August,” adding, “I’m not at liberty to tell you how I know that.” He was so convincing that Smith flew his wife back from Thailand.

  Martin cabled Kissinger on April 27, “It may also be possible a few more rockets will be launched this evening. It is [however] the unanimous opinion of senior personnel here that there will be no direct or serious attack on Saigon.” George McArthur echoed Martin’s assessment in a Los Angeles Times article datelined the same day, writing, “It appears evident—since almost all analysts concede that Hanoi probably has the strength to take Saigon within 48 hours—that the North Vietnamese are willing to negotiate their way into the city. Therefore, the analysts see the fresh ground attacks as merely a tactic to tighten the Communist ring around the capital and not the start of a major offensive.”

  Tom Glenn, the young cryptologist who headed the National Security Agency station in South Vietnam, had predicted the North’s attack on Ban Me Thuot and the current offensive against Saigon. He certainly belonged to the U.S. government’s “senior personnel.” Yet contrary to what Martin had told Kissinger, Glenn had warned him on April 27 that his signals intelligence showed Hanoi preparing to attack Saigon.

  Two days before delivering his warning to Martin, Glenn had heard a knock on his office door at the DAO and had looked through the peephole to see Colonel Al Gray, who commanded the U.S. Marines ground security force that would protect Tan Son Nhut during an evacuation. Glenn had met Gray in the late 1960s, when they were both running around South Vietnam with radios and antennas while intercepting Communist communications. He almost had not recognized Gray because he was wearing an aloha shirt, shorts, and flip-flops to comply with Martin’s insistence that he and his men wear civilian clothes while in Saigon. During the next several days Glenn had watched as Gray and his men prepared the DAO for a siege and evacuation. They filled drums with gasoline, wired them together, and stationed them along the perimeter fence. They transformed the parking lot into a helicopter landing zone by driving the remaining cars, including Glenn’s Japanese compact, into the side of a building, and then smashing them together so that they occupied as little space as possible. They drove the larger cars, including Glenn’s Ford, onto the tennis courts, using them as battering rams to demolish the nets, fences, and poles. The urgency and single-mindedness of their preparations reflected a pessimism that equaled Glenn’s.

  By the time Glenn met Martin on April 27, he was desperate to persuade him to launch an evacuation. He and his two communicators had been living in their offices at the DAO, sleeping fitfully, and surviving on cigarettes, black coffee, and a diet of mustard, relish, and canned Vienna sausages scrounged from a hotel bar. He was feverish, suffering from a chronic cough, finding it hard to focus his eyes, and beginning to hallucinate. Martin, too, was on the verge of a collapse and plagued by a severe case of bronchitis that had turned into pneumonia.

  Glenn told Martin that intercepts of North Vietnamese communications showed that the Communists had surrounded Saigon with sixteen to eighteen divisions and that some enemy units were two kilometers from Tan Son Nhut. Their assault would start within several days, he said, commencing with a rocket and artillery bombardment of Tan Son Nhut.

  Martin dismissed Glenn’s signals intercepts as part of a Communist deception campaign orchestrated to intimidate South Vietnam’s government into accepting a disadvantageous political solution. Throwing an arm around his shoulder, he said, “Young man, when you’re older you’ll understand these things better.”

  Glenn hurried to Tom Polgar’s office and delivered the same briefing. Polgar showed him a cable that Martin had just sent to Washington reporting that the Communists’ skillful use of “communications deception” had duped some in Saigon into believing an attack was imminent.

  “What evidence does Martin have to support this?” Glenn asked.

  Polgar ignored the question and said, “I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne—vintage your choice—that we’ll both be here at our desks this time next year.”

  “I finally understood what was going on,” Glenn wrote later. “The embassy was a victim of what sociologists now call groupthink syndrome—firm ideology, immune to fact, shared by all members of a coterie. The ambassador, and therefore his subordinates, could not countenance the prospect of a communist South Vietnam and therefore dismissed evidence of the coming disaster.”

  A day after wagering Glenn a bottle of champagne (a wager he would never settle), Polgar became less confident that the next year would find him in Saigon. French ambassador Jean-Marie Mérillon reported that the Communist JMT delegations had refused to commit to negotiating with General Minh if he assumed the presidency, and a member of Poland’s ICCS delegation warned him that the time for negotiations had passed and withdrew his offer to serve as an intermediary.

  Polgar began hedging his bets. During a meeting in Martin’s office on the morning of April 28, he supported embassy security officer Marvin Garrett’s request to cut down the giant tamarind tree in the embassy parking lot so that helicopters could land there.

  “There is no way, Tom, that I’m going to have that tree brought down until it’s apparent that we’ve lost every one of our options,” Martin said. “If we’ve got to leave, we’re going to do it with dignity.” He walked over to his window and exclaimed while staring down at the visa seekers and supplicants gathered outside the gate, “For God’s sake, look at that crowd below! Don’t you see that once that tree falls, so does America’s prestige? I have given these people my word that we will not run away in the middle of the night. I have told them to come to my home and see that I am not packed and ready to leave. Don’t you understand that once that tree falls the word will go out that the Americans have cut down their biggest tree so that helicopters can land and take away the ambassador?”

  “Listen to reason, Graham,” Polgar implored. “If we have to pull the plug those big choppers are going to have no place to land if that tree is still there. Simple as that. If that tree doesn’t go a lot of our people are going to get trapped and maybe some of them are going to get killed.”

  Polgar ordered his agents to trim the tree’s rear branches so it would be easier to fell when the time came but would appear unchanged when Martin looked out his window the following morning.

  * * *

  —

  The CIA’s Can Tho base chief, Jim Delaney, had sent agent Glenn Rounsevell to Saigon on April 27 to check on the fifty key indigenous personnel whom he had had sent there expecting that the embassy would evacuate them. After serving in the delta for three years, Rounsevell knew most of the KIP and wanted to make sure they escaped. He had spent two Cold War decades with the agency while becoming increasingly cynical about the Vietnam War—a cynicism that President Ford had reinforced with his remark at Tulane that the war was “finished as far as America is concerned.” Upon hearing this, Rounsevell had thought, “Wait a minute, if the war is finished, then what am I doing here working with a South Vietnamese colonel to erect a high-security fence to discourage infiltrators?” The next day, a Vietnamese Air Force major had asked him, “So why did we fight this war, then? Why all the bloodshed?” Rounsevell had no answer.

  Rounsevell checked in to the CIA’s Saigon hostel, the Duc Hotel. Vietnamese wandered through the lobby at all hours, clutching one of Major General Smith’s affidavits and searching for an American to sign it. Rounsevell put his name to dozens. A pretty teenager said, “I’ll do anything, anything, if you’ll help get me and my family out.” He scrawled his signature on her affidavit and asked for nothing.

  He discovered that few of his Can Tho people had made it onto the embassy eva
cuation lists and that those who had were moving further down them as cooks, barbers, and girlfriends sponsored by Americans living in Saigon advanced. His friends in the embassy reported that Polgar and Martin were insisting that an evacuation would be unnecessary because North Vietnam preferred negotiations and that Martin was walking around in a daze, high on the amphetamines he was taking for his illnesses.

  Rounsevell delivered a dispiriting report to CIA base chief Delaney that reinforced Delaney’s determination to evacuate his American agents and Vietnamese KIP by helicopter. He asked Rounsevell to arrange for a U.S. Navy ship with a helipad to be stationed offshore so it could receive the Can Tho KIP. Rounsevell raised the subject with Rear Admiral Benton, who said, “You’re the first guy who’s given me a straight request. Where do you want it?”

  Jacobson heard about Rounsevell’s request and alerted McNamara, who immediately grounded every Air America helicopter in the delta. Jacobson summoned Rounsevell to his office and accused him of going behind McNamara’s back.

  “Saigon’s going to fall in two days,” Rounsevell said. “Poof. Gone. It’s now or never. We’re just trying to do in the delta what you’re doing here—getting people out while we can.”

  Back in Can Tho, McNamara and Delaney traded accusations of bad faith that ended with McNamara shouting that Delaney was fired. Lehmann and Jacobson brokered a truce. McNamara agreed to permit a helicopter evacuation of the CIA’s KIP provided that Air America scattered its landing zones across the surrounding countryside and that helicopters flew directly out to sea and low enough to avoid South Vietnamese radar. In exchange, Delaney agreed to send his American agents out on McNamara’s LCMs. The fact that their greatest source of friction involved the best way to evacuate their American and Vietnamese employees reflects well on both men.