by Tom Bissell
For the United States, the war in Vietnam had three stages. The first (1965-1967) was fighting. The second (1967-1970) was fighting while negotiating. The third (1970-1972) was negotiating while fighting. Between these stages Soviet mediators often offered the United States the necessary political lubrication to move forward to the next, sometimes hindering attempts to negotiate but more often sincerely attempting to help—though, of course, for their own benefit. One might ask why, if they were so interested in negotiations, were the Soviets so ful-somely arming the North Vietnamese? As in the United States, the Soviet Union had its own hard-liners and reactionaries to contend with. The Soviets engaged in differently intended wartime activities in an attempt to cover all possible peacetime contingencies and secure a place for the Soviet Union in the future of a reunified Vietnam. Gaiduk, into whose hands fell a significant amount of Soviet archival material concerning Vietnam, believes that the USSR, however divided, had three goals in Vietnam. The first was that it would—within certain, carefully calibrated limits—provide military and financial aid to North Vietnam. The second was that it would not do anything to endanger detente with the United States (and would reexamine its Vietnam policy as tremors dictated). The third was that it would encourage Hanoi to consider a negotiated settlement, as the Soviets themselves worried endlessly about being pulled directly into the war and moreover believed the North Vietnamese would never win.
With these goals came various wartime stages of Soviet ambition. During the Khrushchev years the prevailing Soviet mood was “overcau-tiousness,” in Gaiduk's words. From 1965 to 1970, the Soviet Union was alternately a garrulous spendthrift happy to be outpacing its rival China but troubled by its fellow superpower's growing anger. From 1970 to 1972, the Soviets were primarily diplomats. Following 1972, when the war no longer posed any danger of direct confrontation with the United States, the Soviets revived their earliest Indochinese ambitions. Such ambition went back many decades. The platform of the Indochinese Communist Party, which was written with Moscow's guidance in the 1930s, held that Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam should be linked together, and, in one scholar's words, envisioned “an Indochinese federation under Vietnamese guidance that would be similar to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” When, decades later, the time had come to fulfill this ambition, the world dialectic was far more complicated than the Comintern had ever dreamed.
As the likelihood of an American war in Vietnam increased in the early 1960s, many Soviet diplomats were pushed to the verge of panic. Virtually no Soviet agreement existed on the Indochina issue. This sentence of Gaiduk's begins to suggest some strange U.S.-Soviet parallelisms: “Soviet leaders had not yet settled on a course of policy. For months to come, the Soviets would improvise a policy toward the war while trying to measure their involvement in the conflict.” Another parallel was ultimate and disastrously determinative: a terror of the People's Republic of China that often obscured the real nature of the war.
Nikita Khrushchev's impatience with the Vietnamese Communists did little to help Soviet fortunes in Vietnam. Despite his claim to support all “liberation wars and popular uprisings,” Khrushchev had publicly advocated Vietnam's peaceful reunification. During his first meeting with the North Vietnamese in the early 1960s, Khrushchev said that a prerequisite for continued Soviet support was that the North Vietnamese tone down their revolutionary rhetoric and maintain an open mind about a negotiated settlement with the United States. The North Vietnamese regarded Khrushchev's proposition as insufficiently revolutionary. At the recent Ninth Plenum in Hanoi, they had concluded that armed struggle was the only solution to the situation in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, Pravda continued to publish articles headlined with sentiment such as “It Is Impossible to Overcome South Vietnam Patriots,” and the Soviets still sent aid, including bundles of the one thing Vietnam's Communists needed most: American dollars.
In 1962, as Mao determined to pursue a more radical and ideologically pure path than the Soviets’, Chinese aid to North Vietnam began to vastly outweigh that of the Soviets. Chinese ideologues ridiculed Khrushchev for his “revisionism” (that is, his denunciation of Stalin) and promised their Vietnamese brothers support against American adventurism. Khrushchev, in turn, tried to impress upon his Asian comrades that the American “paper tiger” Mao spoke of had nuclear fangs. Many Vietnamese Communists jumped on the anti-Soviet bandwagon. The more pro-Soviet Ho Chi Minh—he once complained to a comrade that Mao was too willing to “stand on the mountaintop while the tigers fight”—saw his reticence about a Chinese role in Vietnam's future justified in 1964, when Mao said to a North Vietnamese official, “Your business is my business and my business is your business.” This was shortly before China's Cultural Revolution—the chaos and violence of which would be too much even for the Maoist Truong Chinh—and Mao's clear implication greatly alarmed the Vietnamese.
This recondite state of affairs was rudely shattered in 1964, when the Soviet Union's Central Committee replaced Khrushchev with Leonid Brezhnev as first secretary and Alexei Kosygin as premier (Khrushchev had held both titles) one day before China exploded its first atom bomb. Brezhnev had taken personally the criticism the Soviet Union had received for its hitherto shy involvement in the Vietnam morass. As Gaiduk writes, “Moscow's failure to defend [North Vietnam] might make suspect its ability to protect such regimes as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in a similar encounter with the West.” This was of course exactly analogous to the Joint Chiefs’ fear of what would happen if the United States failed to defend South Vietnam. The Soviets also hoped, as Gaiduk notes, to use Communist Vietnam as a place to base their support of other insurgencies in Malaysia and Thailand. More sensible Soviet policy makers weighed these presumed advantages against the suddenly real danger of accidentally starting World War III, and began pressing North Vietnam to use its influence with the NLF to come to some sort of agreement that would allow the United States a face-saving withdrawal.
After Khrushchev's removal, and the greater Soviet abandonment of his strategy of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States (a strategy hinged upon Khrushchev's belief that the Soviet system would triumph economically), the nature of Soviet support for the North Vietnamese quickly changed from largely propagandistic to overtly military. Brezhnev even opened the first NLF office in Moscow. More important, the USSR pledged to intervene if the United States brought the war into North Vietnam proper (a guarantee China had already made), though there is no evidence that any kind of coordinated response was ever officially drawn up. Kosygin, while visiting Hanoi shortly before the war's 1965 escalation, promised North Vietnam “all necessary assistance if aggressors dare encroach upon [North Vietnam's] independence and sovereignty.” The North Vietnamese pledged in return to behave more respectfully toward the USSR. Some new breeze of militancy seemed to drift from Brezhnev's Kremlin each week, and in one speech the Soviet leader spoke of the willingness of Soviet citizens to travel to Vietnam to fight U.S. imperialism. Although no Soviet “volunteers” were ever sent to Vietnam (other than standard military advisers), the NLF in the war's early years repeatedly asked for volunteers from Socialist countries to fight alongside them. Hanoi, worried of expanding the war any further, was always quick to deny that the NLF needed any volunteers.
By now the Soviets worried less about American advisers in South Vietnam than they did about Chinese advisers in North Vietnam. This was a double swing door. In 1964, China's Zhou Enlai had warned the North Vietnamese that the more the Soviet presence grew in North Vietnam, the more Sino-Vietnamese relations would be endangered. (When Chinese students protested the war in front of the American Embassy in Moscow in March 1965, Soviet policemen beat them.) This competitiveness would prevent the Soviets and Chinese from coming to any sort of agreement about the use of Chinese soil as a conduit for Soviet arms into North Vietnam until the spring of 1965. The first major Soviet war package—radar equipment, rockets, MiG fighter planes (many of them twenty years old)—arrived in No
rth Vietnam at the beginning of 1965, and by summer of the same year the first air defense sites were being built with Soviet help around Hanoi and Haiphong. By 1967, North Vietnam had 7,000 antiaircraft artillery guns. The following year, almost 3,000 Vietnamese—many of them NLF cadre members—were trained in Soviet military institutions. Also in 1965, a Soviet “special group,” which apparently escaped the notice of U.S. intelligence, began working in North Vietnam and, perhaps, South Vietnam. Their duty was to find, analyze, and send back to Moscow parts of downed and destroyed American aircraft and weapons. More than seven hundred such “items” were recovered and shipped back to Moscow. Despite this cooperation, not until 1968 did the USSR's aid to North Vietnam surpass that of China, by which time it was floating the North half a billion dollars a year. China remained the NLF's chief supplier, especially when it came to hard currency, again paid in U.S. dollars. (It is worth noting that the United States spent $150 billion on South Vietnam—seven times as much as China spent in total on North Vietnam and the NLF and three times the wartime Soviet outlay.)
In 1967, the North Vietnamese realized that total military victory over the United States was unlikely and approached Moscow to help them figure out the Americans’ intentions, though not to negotiate for them. The Soviets, in turn, put themselves forward to the United States as a “third party” able to negotiate a “commonsense solution” to the war in Vietnam, even as the war, abetted by Soviet support, reached new levels of intensity. Alexei Kosygin urged the U.S. diplomat Averell Harri-man to tell President lohnson to work through Hanoi directly and negotiate. “The question of Vietnam will never be settled by force,” Kosygin said. “You will only have more bloodshed and, in the end[,] the Vietnamese will finally liberate themselves from dependence on the U.S., as [have] people elsewhere. It would be a blot on the U.S. and the responsibility would inescapably lie on the president who, by force of circumstances, is responsible for all American actions. It seems to me that this would not be in his interest or in the interest of the American people.” A Soviet diplomat in 1968 would be far blunter. The Soviets, the diplomat told his American counterpart, did not wish to cause a complete U.S. withdrawal from the region, despite their aid to North Vietnam: “Don't forget, we face a common enemy in Asia.”
By the late 1960s, the United States continually looked to the Soviets for insight into Hanoi's inner workings; the Soviets often made up opinions at odds with North Vietnamese reality and other times simply shrugged. One reason for this was the scrambled messages the North Vietnamese themselves were sending. They had publicly adopted a somewhat more open tone toward negotiations, but scholars now recognize these gestures as twenty-four-karat propaganda. At the end of 1966, for instance, Le Duan told Zhou Enlai that North Vietnam intended to end the war with “maximal advantages to itself.” A year later Pham Van Dong told the Soviets, “The talks will begin when the Americans have inflicted a defeat on us or when we have inflicted a defeat on them. Everything will be resolved on the battlefield.” When the Soviets pressed upon Dong the desirability of negotiations, Dong only grunted. As the Soviets massaged the North Vietnamese, they also worked on assuaging the United States, with Kosygin telling his U.S. counterpart that the war “was actually helping the Chinese in achieving their very worst designs.” Upon receiving this message President Johnson bucked up. The result was a meeting between Kosygin (speaking for the North Vietnamese) and President Johnson (speaking for a rapidly decreasing percentage of Americans) in Glassboro, New Jersey, in June 1967. (How they arrived at using Glassboro as a meeting point is practically a book in itself.) These talks came closer to forcing a negotiated settlement than ever before, but the results were scuttled by Nixon and Kissinger, working secretly with President Thieu, on the eve of the 1968 U.S. presidential election.
According to Gaiduk, the main reason for this Soviet push was the USSR's fear “of a possible alliance between Washington and Beijing.… Thus Moscow's strategy included, at first glance, contradictory goals: to enlist American aid in solving the domestic problems of the Soviet Union [in the form of economic cooperation], to gain advantages over the United States in international competition, and to prevent the Americans from utilizing Soviet weaknesses.” The North Vietnamese behaved in a manner similar to the Soviets’, which is to say in a manner simultaneously cunning and completely baffling. After they finally agreed among themselves that a negotiated settlement to the war was probably inevitable, they began to plan the Tet Offensive. When the Tet Offensive came to pass, much of America's anger was directed toward the Soviets. What of all the willingness to negotiate the Soviets had spoken of? What the Americans did not know, and what the Soviets did not want to admit, was that the North Vietnamese kept from the Soviets most of their war plans, including those for the Tet Offensive.
The extent to which the Soviets were ever able to influence the fiercely and, at times, counterproductively willful North Vietnamese has been revealed over the years. “Russian diplomats today,” Robert Templer writes, “scoff at the suggestion that they ever had much ideological control in Vietnam.” Other histories find Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko admitting he had “given up” trying to influence Hanoi and one Soviet adviser calling the North Vietnamese “a bunch of stubborn bastards.” Gaiduk himself writes, “The Vietnamese Communists turned out to be unreliable and selfish allies who often caused difficulties for their Soviet comrades.” Just as the United States habitually blamed Moscow for not being able to control the North Vietnamese, the Soviets despaired over the Americans’ inability to control the South Vietnamese, particularly as negotiations grew closer to being fulfilled in 1969 and 1970. As the Saigon regime demanded more and more from the Americans while providing less and less incentive to provide, the North Vietnamese constantly badgered Moscow to send more missiles and equipment, even after Soviet advisers warned them to take better care with what they were given. (The North Vietnamese typically disregarded Soviet advice as to how to store weaponry, and often it was ruined. Other times North Vietnamese soldiers fired antiaircraft missiles without bothering to lock on to their targets, driving more than one Soviet military adviser to the vodka bottle.) In addition, Soviet citizens living in North Vietnam were often poorly treated and lived under constant surveillance. A nasty Soviet humiliation came when it was revealed that Ho Chi Minh had exchanged letters with President Nixon; the Soviets learned of this significant epistolary meeting by reading the newspaper. (Ho's letter was dated seven days before he died. As the historian A. J. Langguth writes, “Kissinger had shrugged off Ho's letter.… Since U.S. intelligence could provide no accurate information about Ho's last months, Nixon concluded that he had controlled the Politburo up to the minute he died.… [Nixon] hoped Ho's successors would understand that he was assuming they were not bound by Ho's response to his letter. But it was those successors who had written it.”)
Averell Harriman told the Soviets in 1969 that the United States was “quite willing” to allow North Vietnam to remain Communist. All the United States wanted was to allow the people of South Vietnam to choose their own government. The Soviets had no problem with this. China did. When the talks began in Paris that would ultimately remove the United States from the war, China refused to participate in or even acknowledge them and meanwhile worked to frustrate all Soviet aims in North Vietnam. Incidents of “agitation” by Chinese soldiers against Soviet border patrols increased sharply. Most infuriating to the North Vietnamese, China increased its aid to the NLF and publicly proclaimed that a compromise between the United States and North Vietnam would be a “serious failure and a large loss for the Vietnamese people.” The Soviets accurately believed that China opposed the growing mood of negotiation because the longer the war in Vietnam went on, the greater the chance the United States and the Soviet Union would come into direct confrontation.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's policy of detente—which enabled the United States to ensure its wholly separate cooperation with the Soviet Union and China—complicat
ed every party's already byzan-tine understanding of the war. As Kissinger himself argued, detente would allow economic assistance between the United States and the Soviet Union, encourage arms reduction, and provide further impetus for Soviet efforts to encourage the North Vietnamese to allow an “honorable” American withdrawal from Vietnam. The war in Vietnam thus began as a bloody division between the USSR and the United States and gradually became a bandage. But again the Soviets were trapped by their own pretension as the leader of the world's revolutionary movements. Nixon once stunned the Soviet ambassador by saying that U.S.-Soviet relations depended on the Soviets’ willingness “to do something in Vietnam.” Nixon and Kissinger could not believe, and Nixon went to his grave refusing to believe, that the Soviets simply could not bend North Vietnam to their will. Kissinger: “On about ten occasions in 1969, in my monthly meetings with [Soviet Ambassador to the United States Ana-toly] Dobrynin I tried to enlist Soviet cooperation to help end the war in Vietnam. Dobrynin was always evasive. He denied that the Soviet Union had any interest in continuing the war … [but] he never came up with a concrete proposal to end the war.” There was little Dobrynin could propose, much less do. As one Soviet report summed up North Vietnam's position: “[D]o not spoil or aggravate relations with the Soviet Union, but do not draw closer to it with complete confidence.” It is hard to believe that Nixon and Kissinger could not understand the limitations of Soviet influence as they repeatedly wandered in the same frustrating circles with South Vietnam's President Thieu.
As Nixon and Kissinger's triangulation policy of detente took shape in the early 1970s, all affected parties worked to spin its results to their advantage. The KGB attempted to create problems between the United States and China by simultaneously feeding damaging information to both nations’ intelligence services. When the Chinese politely asked for approval to meet with Nixon in Beijing, the North Vietnamese refused to give it. China went forward anyway. The North Vietnamese, already ninjas in their own form of triangulation, responded to U.S. overtures to the Soviets and Chinese by launching the Easter Offensive of 1972, which occurred on the eve of the U.S.-Soviet summit and one month after the U.S.-China summit. North Vietnam's first hope was that the offensive would cause a break in the growing friendliness between the United States and its Communist adversaries. Its second hope was that the offensive would succeed in gaining North Vietnam a clear military advantage, since it was obvious that the closer the United States drew to the Soviets and the Chinese, the quicker North Vietnam would be forced to the negotiation table. They nearly succeeded in the first and failed badly in the second.