by Ian Slater
“Then China is free to keep hitting whatever claim they like?” Baker asked. “Be their own agents provocateurs? Frighten everyone off the islands, then say they’ll have to garrison them with troops for self-protection?”
“Yes.”
Baker shook his head worriedly. “But without proof, I can’t go anywhere with this. We’d have to have proof that—”
The old man was astonished. “But you are an American officer,” he said, as if that explained everything. “If you tell your government what I have told you, surely—”
“They won’t believe it. Or rather, they might believe it but they won’t do anything unless there’s proof positive.”
“But you are an officer. A—”
“I am a grain of sand,” Baker said. “Besides, why should I believe you — with respect. This could be a Vietnamese ploy to attack their own islands in the Paracels to make it look as if the Chinese—”
“But I have told you the truth,” the old man said, his head rising in indignation.
“And where did you get it?” Baker asked.
“From people of my blood — who were offered gold to sail with the pirate junks.”
Baker could see he’d deeply offended the old man. “I’m sorry but — I mean, I’d need proof. Otherwise it’s just another story in a sea of stories that one hears—”
“Dalat!” the old man said. “Near Dalat.” Dalat was a temperate city in the central highlands, and during the Vietnam War there had been an unwritten mutual agreement that it was a no-fire zone. Both sides had used it for R&R in one of the stranger aspects of that long-ago conflict. The weather in Dalat was always good. At the coldest, it would rarely fall below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and at its hottest, wouldn’t rise to much more than 73 degrees. A place of gardens, of tranquility, it would be pleasant to visit if for no other reason.
“What about Dalat?” Baker pressed.
“To show you I am a man of the truth.”
Baker, nonplussed, waited impatiently. It had become cooler, a waist-high mist covering the canal, creeping toward the congestion of sampans and other river craft.
“In Dalat there is an MIA.”
Baker felt his heart thumping. “Where in Dalat?”
“I will tell you if you will tell your government what I have told you.”
“Yes,” Baker said, “I’ll send in a report.”
“The MIA is in a village near Lang Bian Mountain,” the old man said. “North of Dalat The people of Lat village will help if you give them this.” He took a small scrimshawed shark’s tooth pendant from around his neck. “When will you leave?”
Baker gave the old man twenty dollars, to be shared with the go-between. “In the morning.”
Afterward, Baker sent a message to the Pentagon about what the old man had told him concerning the attacks on the oil rigs, but he cautioned that it was only one old man’s story amid so many.
* * *
When morning came, Baker did nothing about the MIA— there was nothing he could do until he got special permission from the Vietnamese. Lam Dong province, in which Dalat was situated in the central highlands over 225 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, had been closed again to United States citizens, who were still being charged by the Vietnamese with covertly supporting the FULRO — Front Unifié de Lutte des Races Opprimés — United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races — guerrillas in the highlands. The CIA had long denied any continuation of funneling arms, but now and then FULRO rebels would stage another ambush or shoot up one of the supposedly secret Vietnamese reeducation camps, which, rumor had it, were still run for some U.S. POWs and MIAs.
In the evening, Baker went down to the canal to talk again to the old man, to get more details, but he was gone. Baker found him near midnight in a sampan that was bumping among the bridge pilings, his throat cut. He guessed the old man had been killed for what he’d known either about Dalat or about the pirates’ attacks in the Paracels and Spratlys.
What Baker hadn’t banked on was the Vietnamese response to the very first attack in the Spratlys, but then again, the Vietnamese had had dealings for a thousand years with the Chinese, and they decided to react immediately rather than let their traditional enemy think he’d gotten a toehold in Vietnamese waters. Hanoi headquarters ordered the Haiphong base to attack, and within the hour, with an efficiency that, after the Vietnam War — or what the Vietnamese had called the Second Indochina War — was among the best response times of any Asian coastal navy, two Soviet-made Osa-class missile craft armed with four surface-to-surface N-2 missiles raced out into the Gulf of Tonkin, ready to attack anything Chinese.
The flag behind each of the missile boats, that of Vietnam, fluttered furiously as the Osas’ bows lifted and the brown water boiled in urgency, the Vietnam missile boats picking up speed, heading southeast to the Chinese-occupied islands in the Paracels. The boats’ crews, however, were under no illusion, for they knew that they were heading toward the People’s Liberation Army’s new navy, which Beijing had boasted was nothing less than “a great wall of iron.”
Ten miles from the nearest Chinese-claimed island in the Paracels, one of the Vietnamese boats’ radar picked up two blips advancing from the east at thirty knots plus: two Chinese Huch’uan-class fast-attack hydrofoil boats. A Vietnamese Osa fired its starboard forward SS-N-2 missile, the Chinese hydrofoil immediately going into a defensive “weave” pattern.
Closer now. the Vietnamese Osa fired a second missile, its backblast on the stern immediately raising the Osa’s sharp bow so that she gained a knot or two. The Vietnamese captain saw one of the Huch’uan-class hydrofoils leap into the air and crash down again, its portside foil shattered along with the midships and cockpit — now a crushed pile of smoking metal.
The Chinese hydrofoil had turned hard astarboard as the orders were given by its skipper to abandon ship. The second Chinese hydrofoil fired its starboard twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedo from its large, corrugated housing, and now its 12.7mm machine-gun stations opened up against the fast-turning Vietnamese boats which, suddenly slowing near the site of the injured and sinking Huch’uan hydrofoil, machine-gunned all those Chinese in the water.
“Great wall of iron!” snorted one of the Vietnamese skippers, motioning toward the detritus of wreckage and bodies. The second Chinese hydrofoil had already fired its torpedoes, but they were easily avoided by simply opening the throttle, allowing the Vietnamese Osas to skid in wide thirty-five-plus-knot semicircles. There was some stray machine-gun fire from the Chinese—12.7mm tracer playing about the Osas, hitting the Monkey Island, or clear-weather bridge, on one of the Vietnamese boats, but doing no more damage than that.
* * *
Hanoi now broadcast to the world via an accommodating CNN that Vietnam had “punished Chinese aggressors” in Vietnamese waters.
In reply, the Chinese vehemently denied that they had violated Vietnamese waters, but stated that “the peace-loving People’s Liberation Navy” had been patrolling, as was its right, within two hundred miles of its coastline, which included the big island of Hainan, and from Hainan it had every right to patrol another two hundred miles, as Hainan was indisputably Chinese territory. Beijing immediately requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions and other disciplinary measures against the “imperialist aggressions of the Republic of Vietnam bandits.”
Vietnam followed suit and asked for U.N. sanctions against China. The fear on both sides of the dispute — and well-founded fear — was that the issue would be ponderously delayed while no action would be taken. In the meantime, both Beijing and Hanoi were accusing each other of violating the other’s zone of ownership. It was a very capitalist argument, as seen by the Wall Street Journal:
In New York today, a U.N. meeting of Southeast Asian and East Asian nations called to decide who owns what in the oil-rich archipelagos of the South China Sea ended in uproar as the Chinese and Vietnamese representatives came to blows over ownership of the disputed
islands.
As well as being rich in oil and natural gas deposits, the islands, the Paracels to the northwest and the Spratlys in the southeast, are also strategically vital to naval and mercantile routes to and from Japan and the United States.
The U.S. State Department is closely monitoring the talks, which it hopes will resume on Monday. Moscow and Tokyo are also watching the talks closely, as the outcome could have serious and wide-ranging geopolitical implications for all island disputes, particularly the so-called “Northern Territories” islands in contention between Russia and Japan.
CHAPTER SIX
Japan
It was 11:55 p.m. — 2355 hours on the clock at the Japanese Intelligence headquarters in Tokyo — and Henry Wray of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sat quietly enjoying a cigarette, something he couldn’t do in Langley, Virginia, because of the strict no-smoking laws. His two Japanese hosts lit up as well. At 11:57 he watched his Japanese counterpart turn up the volume of the Sanyo shortwave receiver. At 11:58 two officers of the JDF, Japanese Defense Force, entered the cork-lined room, bowed to the civilians — four in all — from Japanese intelligence, and took their seats, the red light of the tape machine signaling it had already begun. At precisely twelve midnight the transmission from somewhere in North Korea began — four-digit numbers until 0020, when the code abruptly finished.
“All we need now,” Wray said, “is their onetime pad.”
“If that’s what they are using,” his Japanese host replied.
“Hmm… it’s what I’d use,” Wray told them. “You people are so far ahead in computers, I wouldn’t run a network on computer digitization. I’d be afraid you’d descramble it in a couple of weeks.”
“We’ve been trying for months, Mr. Wray.”
“Call me Henry.” He turned to the two officers from the JDF. “How about infiltration of the Chongryun?” It was a large expatriate pro-North Korean organization in Japan that raised millions of yen for Pyongyang. Nearly ten percent of all North Korea’s urgently needed foreign exchange was from Korean workers’ remittances abroad.
“It and others,” the Japanese said. “Problem is, we have no idea how many North Koreans they are broadcasting to.”
Whatever the number of agents listening, the CIA and Japanese Intelligence knew that by now there must be a large organization of illegals, as well as those who had immigrant or visitor worker status, in the pay of Pyongyang. Should hostilities ever break out, either domestically in Japan or between Japan and North Korea, the Chongryun’s association of North Koreans and deep cover agents would come out en masse like ants from a nest to sow confusion aimed particularly at Japanese transport and communication networks.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Chinese invasion of Vietnam began at 0300 hours, the first crossings made on a four-mile front through a marshy area ten miles north of the Vietnamese town of Lang Son and on the left flank at the border town of Dong Dang. All three divisions used in the attack, about 41,000 PLA ChiCom regulars, had already traveled from Nanning in the Chengdu military region by rail to Pingxiang, near the Chinese-Vietnamese border. In the Vietnam War it had been a favorite staging area for NVA regulars to take possession of Chinese-shipped arms and munitions. Now, in this latest chapter of the long border battle between the two countries, Pingxiang once again became the jump-off point for one country’s invasion of the other. The Chinese forces were intent on overrunning the jungle-covered hills before Lang Son and the plains beyond, which ran down to the Red River delta and the Gulf of Tonkin seaport of Haiphong.
The Chinese were asked by the Secretary General of the U.N. “to disengage and withdraw immediately” from the border areas. But China, citing the “pirate actions of the Vietnamese imperialists” against a Chinese-owned oil rig and drill site in the South China Sea, insisted that Vietnam’s actions amounted to nothing less than “an act of war.”
The U.N. Secretary General’s office pointed out to Beijing that in fact both Chinese-U.S. venture sites were not within the two-hundred-mile economic zone of China. China disputed this, replying angrily that several joint Chinese-U.S. ventures in the Paracels were within two hundred miles of the coastline of the big Chinese island of Hainan, and that MV Chical 7, while beyond the two-hundred-mile zone, was historically owned by China, as Chinese fishermen a century ago had been there first to fish and to use the islands and reefs in the South China Sea for repairs and the like. “Furthermore,” a statement from Beijing added, if the “imperialist Vietnamese” did not remove their equipment and men from all the islands in the South China Sea, these would be seized by the PLA, as they “historically belong to the peace-loving Chinese people.”
Hanoi retorted that this “is typical of the warmongering imperialists in Beijing — who arrogantly aggrandize the territories by intimidation and threat”—and that if China did not recall its three divisions back to Chengdu, the Republic of Vietnam would have no alternative but to “repulse the Chinese with all available forces.”
Suddenly the President of the United States and his advisers, with help from the State Department’s China and Vietnam desks, realized an uncomfortable truth — the island dispute was centuries old, “like a fight between neighbors — the Hatfields and McCoys,” the President realized. Who had actually attacked whom was, in the final analysis, irrelevant. What was relevant was that the Chinese claim to own all the islands in the South China Sea was preposterous by any measure, and with the Chinese and Vietnamese on the brink of all-out war, the only consideration was how to stop it before it became general war in the Asian region. Because of this clear and present danger, and the catastrophic effect it would have on the U.S. trade-driven economy, the U.S. might have to intervene, albeit under the auspices of the U.N.
* * *
The Chinese attack south on Dong Dang with two divisions was led by General Wei. The other prong — an attack of one division, thirteen thousand men, on Lang Son — was led by General Wang. The assault on Dong Dang was made up almost exclusively of infantry brigades with one armored division leading the thrust south down the Pingxiang-Dong Dang road and railway. The road ran more or less parallel with the rail tracks, allowing Wei to move twice as many troops as would have been the norm on the road alone. Once Dong Dang fell, it was hoped by Wei that Wang’s forces on his left flank coming down east of him from Zhilang in China to Lang Son in Vietnam, a distance of about thirty miles, would be able to quickly sever the rail line running south from Lang Son to Hanoi, eighty miles away, thus cutting off the rail line the Vietnamese Army would need to rush reinforcements to the north. But the Vietnamese Army, already having explosive charges set at Ban Re, seventy-three miles north of Hanoi, blew both the rail line and the road at Ban Re. This prevented the ChiComs from capitalizing on their sudden attack south of the border and halted General Wang’s troops before they could press the attack farther south toward Hanoi.
* * *
To the north of Ban Re, at Dong Dang, General Wei had better luck, being able to reach the Na Ann junction, thirteen miles west from Dong Dang. There, Wei’s infantry and armored battalion, equipped with T-59s — upgunned T-55s— managed to sever two roads, the one leading northwest from Na Ann junction to Quinh Son and Na Nien, the other running south to Phu Lang Thuong, thirty miles northeast of Hanoi, the Chinese-Vietnamese border itself barely a hundred miles from Hanoi.
The two prongs of this 41,000-strong Chinese pincer attack, however, were not so much strategic as tactical in design. The Chinese did not intend to stay, but merely to shell and destroy as much of Lang Son and Dong Dang as they could — as they had in 1979—and then withdraw. It was, in short, meant to be a military punishment for what the Chinese were calling “blatant unprecedented Vietnamese attacks” against the Chical drill ships in the Paracels and Spratlys. In any event, neither General Wei nor Wang wanted to penetrate much farther south. As it was, they lost over four hundred casualties to minefields the Vietnamese had laid down after China’s 1979 incursions.
&n
bsp; Vietnamese forces, despite the fast Chinese attack, reacted swiftly. From the Vietnamese garrison at Na Sam, seven miles northwest of Dong Dang, and from Loc Binh, twelve miles southeast of Lang Son, a two-pronged counterattack was launched by four regular infantry divisions well seeded with “Viet Cong” veterans who as young men had fought in the south against the Americans during the Vietnam War. Wei’s and Wang’s forces, in danger of encirclement, began to withdraw, but by Day Four after the initial Chinese invasion, the Vietnamese troops had cut off the Chinese retreat from Na Ann and Lang Son. Only those ChiComs from Dong Dang were able to withdraw with only light casualties.
Beijing had only two options now: to give up those infantry battalions of Wei and Wang that had been surrounded and thus trapped by the Vietnamese regulars, or to send in more Chinese troops to release them, Beijing realizing that the defeat of their incursion would be a singular loss of face in a part of the world where “face,” and therefore the nation’s standing in Southeast Asia — indeed, throughout all Asia — was at stake. Accordingly, Beijing ordered an all-out invasion, not merely to rescue their embattled infantry divisions, but to widen the war and gain a buffer zone of territory, militarily shortening the distance between Hanoi and the old border from a hundred miles to something much closer. If this was achieved, then in the future any Vietnamese hostility aimed at China could be quickly punished by massive retaliation against what was hoped would be a much closer target, namely Hanoi, which might in turn be ringed by Chinese-planted minefields and surface-to-surface missile batteries.
Meanwhile, the Vietnamese raced to reinforce the border zone between and around Dong Dang and Lang Son.