Le Duc Tho responded by turning his customary insolence into a new art form. He knew I was bluffing and let me feel it. An exchange at the outset of our talks showed him once again exploiting our domestic divisions:
LE DUC THO: You have given air support to the troops of the Vientiane administration, launching encroaching operations against the regions under the control of the Pathet Lao in violation of the Agreement on Laos.
With regard to Cambodia, you have stepped up very fierce air attacks in Cambodia, and the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are opposed to the air attacks in Cambodia by the Nixon Administration.
KISSINGER: May I recall to the Special Adviser a rule we discussed three years ago that should be enforced? You have been consistently wrong in your assessment. You will be wrong again. But other than that let us not discuss it.
LE DUC THO: Let me finish the first sentence. Considering the bombing of Cambodia as an illegal act, therefore, the Senate and the House of Representatives refuse to appropriate funds to carry out these attacks in Cambodia. I just point out this fact that the stepped up bombing of Cambodia is a wrong deed; not only we are opposed to that but even the American people are opposed to the bombing in Cambodia. This is what I wanted to mention.
KISSINGER: The American people are our problem, not the Special Adviser’s. And if he remembers, he has not always been right in his assessment.
LE DUC THO: Whether I was wrong or right, you are aware of that.
KISSINGER: But we do not need to delay on that. We will continue to other matters.
It was an almost verbatim replay of many exchanges of previous years. The trouble was that both Le Duc Tho and, deep down, I knew that this time he was not wrong. Nixon would not be able to pull another rabbit out of his hat. The military actions we were still carrying out (in Cambodia) were under unprecedented Congressional attack. Our forces capable of intervening — in Thailand and at sea — were being drastically reduced; I was fighting a desperate but losing struggle against the Pentagon’s desire to redeploy air and naval forces out of Southeast Asia in order to devote scarce funds to the procurement of new weapons.
Perhaps I should have called off the negotiation when it became apparent that we would not conduct the air strikes that had been intended to precede it. Unfortunately, our domestic divisions had left us bankrupt. We had nothing much left we could do except negotiate and hope that peaceful pressures — and bluff — might work. We were reduced to relying on naked diplomacy just as our critics had urged. Cancellation of the talks followed by military inaction would merely advertise what Nixon could not admit even to himself: that he was losing the authority to conduct a coherent foreign policy. There was no point making the tragedy explicit. That could only have accelerated the weakness at the center and tempted other international challenges.
So I persisted in the charade with Le Duc Tho, emerging without success but without significant setback. In three negotiating sessions — from May 17 to May 23, June 6 to June 9, and June 12 and 13 — we went through all the provisions of the Paris Agreement, attempting to set new deadlines for implementing provisions where we agreed that there had not been compliance.
We achieved a joint communiqué on June 13 that refined some obligations. But that was shadowboxing. There was no reason why, in the absence of the ability to enforce it, a new accord was any more likely to be observed than the existing one; and it was not. The talks did have an incidental effect — not a happy one, which I will discuss shortly — but the substance of the negotiation was a tour de force of effrontery by Le Duc Tho while I polished a few one-liners.
“It is a contribution to the history of relations among states,” I said, “to find 350 tanks, 300 pieces of long-range artillery and several battalions of anti-aircraft guns and missiles classified as civilian goods not subject to the restrictions of Article 7.” As I mentioned in Chapter II, the North Vietnamese had come up with the ingenious idea that everything that entered South Vietnam outside the international checkpoints was civilian goods by definition, however it looked to us. Le Duc Tho opened his response by saying: “Your intelligence service has been mistaken. I would like to point out your intelligence service sometimes mistakes an elephant for a tank.” I asked him if he was pumping water through his newly built oil pipeline so that the elephants in South Vietnam had enough to drink. Le Duc Tho was quite bland: “You have seen it wrong. But I think you understand also that, militarily speaking, in military operations the PRG must have some reserves. So now if the Saigon Administration continues its military operations, this reserve will be sufficient to cope.”
Would he, I asked, do his utmost to keep all the elephants in North Laos? “When the elephants are hungry and thirsty,” said Le Duc Tho, laughing, “they must look for food and drink!” He denied my charge that Hanoi had systematically violated the Paris accords and I replied: “If it wasn’t systematic I would hate to think what you would do if you did it systematically. If this was accidental, then I hate to think of what you are capable of.” Le Duc Tho insisted that cease-fire violations were secondary issues, because the two sides had much practice in implementing cease-fires on “some festival or national day” (meaning the annual Christmas truces, for example). I sarcastically recalled the Tet offensive: “Except in 1968. A slight problem arose in ’68 when the word didn’t get to all the units of North Vietnamese. . . .”
Le Duc Tho now made observance of the ban against infiltration dependent on the achievement of an effective cease-fire, which in turn Hanoi prevented from coming about. He finally agreed that three specific points of entry for replacement equipment should be designated within fifteen days. He never kept this promise.
Negotiations do not prosper by debating points or sarcastic remarks of the kind we had exchanged; they require a balance of interests and risks. In 1972 we had achieved our objective of preserving an allied government in Saigon because Hanoi could not force the withdrawal of our troops from South Vietnam, because our mining of its harbors was draining its resources, and because our bombing was exhausting its capacity to conduct large-scale offensives. No pressures of any kind were left to us in 1973. I was reduced to finessing at the conference table.
Many was the time, when I tried to pin down Le Duc Tho, that I wished those who urged us to rely on diplomacy and to eschew resort to force could witness what I was experiencing. Le Duc Tho denied, for example, that North Vietnam held any South Vietnamese civilian prisoners. This exchange shows the brazenness that he was capable of when he did not have to worry that we might respond belligerently:
LE DUC THO: As to the civilian prisoners that the Saigon Administration had alleged we are holding, [that] there is a big number of them, . . . in fact this is not true. Because in the PRG region there cannot be conditions to have so many prisoners and jails. Moreover, when we captured them we release them right afterward.
KISSINGER: If you release them right afterward, why do you capture them?
LE DUC THO: Because we have no accommodation to keep them in custody. Also the food is difficult.
KISSINGER: Then why do you bother to capture them?
LE DUC THO: They have committed a crime and therefore we have to capture them. But the question of their food is not easy and moreover, we do not have prisons enough to keep them. The question of food supply for our troops requires a lot of efforts on our part. It is only a pretext they invoke to delay the return of civilian prisoners.
KISSINGER: I must say the Special Adviser never ceases to astonish me. But I always learn. It is a new approach to criminal justice that you arrest people who have committed a crime for the specific purpose of setting them free.
LE DUC THO: There are two jurisdictions. Your jurisdiction is different from ours. You see, in our jurisdiction we capture them, educate them, and release them. As for your jurisdiction, you capture innocent people, you torture them morally and physically. So these are two different jurisdictions. So you are not aware of this.
KISSINGER
: Well, we have had a few prisoners who were aware of your jurisdiction.
North Vietnam’s imperial ambitions, so strenuously disbelieved in our domestic debates, were now flagrant. Article 20 of the Paris Agreement required the removal of all foreign forces from Laos and Cambodia. Le Duc Tho evaded this obligation by repeating the argument already made to me in February in Hanoi, that the implementation of that provision depended on a political settlement in both countries — a point we had rejected during the peace negotiations because no political settlement was remotely in sight in either country. With respect to Laos, we managed to extract yet another written understanding to the effect that a political settlement would be achieved by July 1, 1973. In fact, it took until July 29 to achieve a preliminary agreement, until September 14 to agree on a coalition, and until April 5, 1974, to set up the coalition — without having the slightest effect on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. Over 50,000 North Vietnamese troops remained in Laos until the country was finally overrun and every vestige of independence eliminated in 1975. Most of them remain as an occupation force to this day.
It was over Cambodia that Le Duc Tho outdid himself. As with Laos he insisted on a political settlememt before a troop withdrawal. But the only political settlement he would consider was the elimination of Lon Nol and a complete Communist victory. “So you are saying,” I told Le Duc Tho in exasperation at one point, “we have to kill Lon Nol or he can kill himself?” The implication did not faze Le Duc Tho in the slightest — after all, two years before he had cheerfully proposed the assassination of Thieu and offered his help.11 “You asked me a question,” he answered equably enough, “and I am frankly speaking. I told you my personal views. I am just raising the real situation.”
In other words, only a complete Communist takeover would count as a political settlement. No negotiations were going on, because the Khmer Rouge — the Cambodian Communists — were adamantly opposed, as I shall describe later in the chapter. My suggestion of a negotiation with Sihanouk failed to interest Le Duc Tho, in part no doubt because he could not deliver the Khmer Rouge to it, in part because he considered Sihanouk too much under Chinese influence. But Le Duc Tho must have been looking to the future and reflecting on the fractiousness of his Khmer allies, because he built himself an escape hatch for a Hanoi role in Cambodia even after a Khmer Rouge victory. To do this he had to admit that there were indeed Vietnamese troops in Cambodia. However, according to him they did not come from North Vietnam. They were, Le Duc Tho averred, Cambodian citizens of Vietnamese ethnic background, native to Cambodia and locally recruited. It followed that they were not “foreign” in the meaning of Article 20 of the Paris accords; hence they were not required to leave, even should the Communists win.
All that I could achieve on Cambodia was a joint reaffirmation of Article 20 requiring the withdrawal of foreign troops, to which Hanoi continued to apply its eccentric interpretation. In addition, both North Vietnam and the United States agreed privately to put forward “their best efforts to bring about a peaceful settlement of the Cambodian problem.” This was no more than Hanoi had been willing to pledge at the time of the Paris Agreement, when Le Duc Tho pointed out that Hanoi had little influence over its Cambodian ally. Le Duc Tho also refused our proposal that we jointly work for a cease-fire in Cambodia. Hanoi’s “best efforts” for a settlement consisted of maintaining 40,000 troops on Cambodian soil and supplying arms, training, and logistical support to the murderous Khmer Rouge. Our efforts will be described in the next section.
But the May-June 1973 negotiations in Paris were not without impact. In retrospect, I believe that they contributed marginally to the further demoralization of Saigon. In most respects our disputes with Saigon over the peace talks were a replay of the controversies of 1972. As before, Saigon knew that we were proposing a meeting with Le Duc Tho and gave its approval; it certainly never offered an objection. (It may have well believed that the meeting would follow some American military retaliation against Hanoi’s violations, as we planned, though we never promised explicitly.) I was determined not to repeat the misunderstandings of the previous year. Every draft text was checked with Saigon. A South Vietnamese negotiating team met with me every evening in Paris at our Ambassador’s residence. In the early stages of the negotiation, Saigon offered many helpful suggestions. There was no hint of controversy. Then Saigon’s method of doing battle began to dawn on us. The South Vietnamese negotiating team more and more frequently found itself without instructions. Or else it had received apparently innocuous but lethal instructions. For example, at one point Saigon proposed that the paragraphs in the document be renumbered; all North Vietnamese obligations were to be listed together at the beginning, to be followed by all South Vietnamese obligations. It seemed a weird alteration since the numbers of the paragraphs in the new document exactly paralleled those of the Paris accords — not surprisingly since they specified their implementation.
Nevertheless, I put Saigon’s request forward and received yet another lesson in the convolutions of the Vietnamese mind. Le Duc Tho saw nothing strange in that request. On the contrary he thought it a capital idea. He accepted it, only he proposed reversing the order of Saigon’s proposal, with South Vietnamese obligations stated first and Hanoi’s second. As I pursued the reasoning of my Vietnamese interlocutors it emerged that contrary to every maxim of international law and practice, both groups of Vietnamese seemed to think that the order of the paragraphs would determine the sequence of the performance — at least psychologically. Each side wanted its opposite number to carry out all of its obligations before undertaking any of its own.
From harassment Saigon graduated to specific objections, some of surpassing pettiness, in which, moreover, it shifted its stand whenever we seemed about to accept its point of view. But these maneuvers, if maddening to us at the time, were not mere mischief. Saigon’s concerns were better founded than its presentation of them. It was in a mortal struggle for survival. Its enemy had violated every key provision of the Agreement without being penalized. The very fact that a negotiation was taking place at all between the United States and Hanoi, as if their actions were of equal moral significance, tended to weaken Saigon’s legal position, not to speak of its morale. Much more was involved than hurt pride.
A good example is the constant friction over the treatment of Viet Cong liaison officers assigned to the Two-Party Joint Military Commission and stationed in various district towns; they were virtually under South Vietnamese house arrest. We suggested moving the officers of the commission and the liaison officers away from towns to the demarcation line in the jungle between the two areas of control, where in fact they were supposed to function. Moving them from populated areas was sensible from our point of view. But it touched a raw nerve with South Vietnam. It ran up against the reality that it would clearly separate South Vietnam into two areas of control, however minimal the Viet Cong area, disproving Saigon’s claim to undisputed sovereignty. This is why Le Duc Tho readily accepted the idea.
Saigon was successful in making the point that its views counted; it brought about a number of changes in already agreed clauses. It won its point about the location of the Two-Party Joint Military Commission as well as its demand to be signatory of the final text. But no adjustment of clauses could alter the underlying reality. It was well summed up by Deputy Assistant Secretary William Sullivan, whom I had sent to Saigon during a break in negotiations to consult with Thieu:
Essentially, what is dawning on them is that a territorial division of the country, even if it means a PRG retreat from the political contest, is a pretty definitive action. If, as they fear, it may be coupled with a Communist controlled Cambodia, they realize this could lead to a military balance in which they have a precious narrow patrimony threatened from well developed base areas in an impregnable cordillera.
Nor was Thieu wrong when he wrote to Nixon on June 6 that Hanoi, instead of being punished for violating a solemn agreement, was only being asked to sign a
nother one:
We are the victims of aggression. The Communist aggressors have systematically violated the Agreements. However, while they suffer no “violent reactions” from our side, as they have been warned, they now want to enjoy unilaterally all the gains from the Communiqué.
The crux was that the new joint communiqué of June 13, like the original Agreement, depended on the willingness to enforce it. That was being eroded in Vietnam by the declining American aid and the demoralization induced by our evident passivity. And it was draining away in the United States under the combined impact of war-weariness and domestic crises finally culminating in an act of Congress legally banning all American military actions in Indochina. The impetus for that last nail in the coffin came from a debate over that unhappiest of countries: Cambodia.
Cambodia: A Certain Hypocrisy
NO country has endured such a succession of miseries as Cambodia in the last decade. Invaded and partially occupied by its North Vietnamese enemy in 1965, bombed by America after 1969, devastated by a civil war whose victors practiced genocide on their own compatriots, reinvaded by North Vietnam in 1978 and racked yet again by guerrilla warfare, it has enjoyed neither peace nor order for nearly two decades. Little more than half its people have survived the exactions of its Communist rulers and the starvation in the wake of Hanoi’s uncertain conquest.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that Cambodia’s fate has induced a certain amnesia about its antecedents; but Cambodia has also come to have a special place in the history of hypocrisy. It is one thing to have opposed, at the time, the measures the Nixon Administration considered necessary to help Cambodia, thereby to preserve South Vietnam. I can understand the fears there were then in the passions of the moment that America might get “bogged down” in Cambodia as it had in Vietnam. That represents an honorable difference of judgment and I do not seek to stir the embers of those debates. We have all learned from them. But it is another matter when the tragic sequence of events produces among critics not sober second thoughts, not revulsion against the mass killings by the Cambodian Communists, not anger at North Vietnam’s unending aggressiveness, but a campaign to shift the indictment for all those Communist misdeeds to those who tried to save Cambodia and spare it the horrors that befell it.
Years of Upheaval Page 50