On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  In a strange and unhappy aftermath to the Panikkar affair, I became entangled in controversy with him. Audrey, who also knew Panikkar well, received a disconcerting letter from him when we were living in Saigon, dated February 26, 1951, in which he complained that out of my “vivid imagination” I had attributed “Machiavellian activities” to him, and he asked that I desist. I wrote back denying that I had characterized him in this way. Most unfortunately, Panikkar had seen a published AP photo of himself with a very unfair caption that impugned his character, and he guessed erroneously that I had in some way contributed to it. The historical record shows that Panikkar was correct in every respect in the relay of Zhou Enlai’s warning. I was convinced at the time that the branding of him by the CIA as unreliable was totally wrong and served only to confuse the White House at a most crucial decision-making moment. I never met Panikkar again, but a subsequent letter indicated that he had been mollified by my reply.

  On October 25, 2003, by coincidence on the fifty-third anniversary of the crossing of the Yalu by the Chinese volunteers, I had a private talk in China about the Korean War with Huang Hua, who had been deeply involved at every stage in both the politics and diplomacy of the conflict. The talk took place in Hangzhou at the closely guarded compound known as Wang Village, on the shore of West Lake. Since the days of the Maoist regime, Wang Village has been reserved as a vacation retreat for top Chinese leaders. Audrey and I were overnight guests of Huang Hua and his wife, He Liliang, a former diplomat in the American Department of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

  Huang Hua, then ninety-one years old, shared his recollections with me in one of the luxurious reception rooms of the government hostel. Seated on a couch beside me, he sighed heavily and shuddered when I asked him about the Chinese intervention in the Korean War.

  “The memory is so painful,” Huang Hua said.

  Stalin and Kim Il-sung asked Mao Zedong to support the North Korean invasion of the South. Mao and Zhou Enlai refused. We were not prepared, and we were still recovering from war against the Kuo min-tang and the Japanese. Mao warned Kim Il-sung that he risked having Korea cut apart by a landing of the Americans at Inchon. But he did not pay much attention. When the Americans were advancing north in October, we warned them through the Indian ambassador if they crossed the thirty-eighth parallel we would intervene. When they did cross, we waited until they came up to our border. We asked Stalin for air cover but he refused. He did not want to become directly involved. But we intervened, nevertheless, because we had to show the Americans that they could not come into China.

  Huang Hua pointed out that after the first contacts with U.S. Forces the Chinese troops disengaged. He answered the question which arose then: If MacArthur had not pressed his advance, would the Chinese have returned, nevertheless, to the attack? Huang Hua said that the Chinese had disengaged to give the Americans an opportunity to break off their advance.

  “The war was so terrible,” Huang Hua said, closing his eyes for a moment. “Both China and the United States suffered so much. Even Mao’s own son, Mao Anying, was killed. The commanding general, Peng Dehuai, tried to keep Anying safe. He made him his aide and kept him close at his headquarters. When the American planes bombed the headquarters, Peng Dehuai was in a shelter, but Anying was in the open. He was running to a shelter when he was struck on the left arm and side by napalm. He died of the wound. Our people were afraid to tell Mao of the death of his son. He learned of it only several days later when going through field reports. He was so overcome with grief that he had to lie down.”

  Mao’s son was killed in November when Chinese troops were operating without air cover. The Russian-educated Mao Anying was at Peng Dehuai’s headquarters as an interpreter in the day-to-day contacts with Soviet advisers.

  In making arrangements for Anying to be buried in North Korea, Mao said in a public statement: “In war there must be sacrifice. Without sacrifices there will be no victory. To sacrifice my son or other people’s sons are just the same. There are no parents in the world who do not treasure their children. But please do not feel sad on my behalf because this is something entirely unpredictable.”

  Mao had far more reason than the death of his son to bitterly regret his entry into the Korean conflict. The casualties suffered by American forces were horrific. But on the Chinese and North Korean side, the military casualties have been estimated several times what the United States suffered, mainly as a consequence of air strikes and concentrated artillery bombardment. The Chinese casualties were said to be 132,000 killed, 238,000 wounded, 8,000 missing, and 21,400 taken prisoner.

  Beyond the human toll, the Chinese had other enduring reasons to regret the Korean conflict. Two days after the North Koreans attacked, reversing his hands-off policy, Truman decided to “neutralize” the Taiwan Straits by stationing units of the Seventh Fleet there, frustrating Peking’s plan to “liberate” Taiwan. The status of Taiwan remains an issue in relations between China and the United States. It could reignite as an explosive issue if the island’s government should unilaterally declare its independence. While this seems unlikely with economic ties between the mainland and the island flourishing, Peking has never renounced the possibility of an effort to take Taiwan by force should its policy of peaceful attraction ultimately fail.

  20

  GENEVA ACCORDS

  PARTITION OF VIETNAM

  After the collapse of the talks at the Geneva Conference on Korea in June 1954, I stayed on to cover the Indochina phase of the conference. Suddenly, in the most startling manner, I was thrust into the role of player as well as reporter in the negotiations on the future of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Once again, Huang Hua was the prime mover in propelling me into extraordinary events. On the morning of July 18, there was a telephone call from one of his aides. Huang Hua would like to see me immediately. The call came at a moment when there was apprehension at the conference that the Indochina conflict might become a wider war involving the major powers.

  In Indochina, French Union forces were collapsing under the onslaught of Ho Chi Minh’s divisions, which had been newly trained by the Chinese and supplied with modern weapons. The great French fort at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded by some 49,000 Viet Minh and on the verge of being overrun. France itself, its people recoiling violently from the war in which French Union troops had suffered 172,000 casualties, was caught up in a paralyzing political crisis. Pierre Mendès-France had become prime minister on June 18 with the promise that he would end the war by July 20 or resign. In his negotiations in Geneva with China, the Soviet Union, and Ho Chi Minh’s delegation, Mendès-France had little bargaining power other than the threat of military intervention in Indochina by the United States. The Communist delegations at Geneva were aware that the United States was contemplating such intervention.

  President Eisenhower had secretly reviewed, as recorded in the Pentagon Papers, the option of an air strike by two hundred navy planes in support of the Dien Bien Phu garrison. Thereafter, another plan was contemplated for intervention by navy and air force planes. The planes would carry out their strikes from bases in Vietnam which would be protected by the deployment of American ground forces. At one point aircraft carriers carrying nuclear weapons stationed off the Vietnamese coast were put on alert.

  Attempting to dissuade the administration from intervention, John F. Kennedy stated in the Senate: “For the United States to intervene unilaterally and to send troops into the most difficult terrain in the world, with the Chinese able to pour in unlimited manpower, would mean that we would face a situation which would be far more difficult than even that we encountered in Korea.” He reiterated the view that he had expressed shortly after his visit to Saigon in 1951 that he saw no hope for a Vietnam solution until the French granted the Vietnamese their independence.

  On April 25, when Eisenhower was still undecided as to whether he could accept Dulles’s recommendation that American forces be sent to the relief of Dien Bien Phu, Walter Bedell Smith, the American del
egate at the conference, said to Chester Ronning privately: “No American boys are going to get bogged down in the jungles of Vietnam except over my dead body.” On May 7, when Dien Bien Phu fell, President Eisenhower and Dulles were still discussing whether to urge the French to grant “genuine freedom” to its client Indochinese states as a condition for American military intervention. On May 20, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a memorandum to the Defense Department, commented: “From the point of view of the United States, with reference to the Far East as a whole, Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. Armed Forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities.”

  On June 15, Eisenhower finally scrubbed plans for intervention, but the possibility that American forces might be committed was kept alive before the delegations at Geneva to provide the Western powers with added leverage in negotiating a settlement. It was a tactic successful to the point of persuading Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Premier Zhou Enlai to nudge Pham Van Dong, head of Ho Chi Minh’s delegation, toward compromise. Molotov knew that the United States had consulted with Britain and France on taking “united action” in Indochina. If American forces intervened, there was the possibility of a collision with the Chinese that might result in the Soviet Union being drawn into the conflict. Nikita Khrushchev was said to have expressed apprehension that the United States might mount a nuclear strike in Indochina and ignite a world war. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, head of the British delegation, was skillfully playing the role in negotiations with Molotov and Zhou Enlai of being the moderate statesman who was seeking a compromise that would deter the United States from military intervention.

  When I went to meet Huang Hua in his hotel room, I did not realize that a high-stakes game was about to be played out among the great powers that afternoon which would shape the future of Indochina. I found Huang Hua agitated and eager to talk. We discussed the status of the conference negotiations for two hours, and it soon became obvious that the Chinese wanted to use me as an intermediary to get a quick message to the American delegation before the afternoon negotiating session, which had been summoned by Molotov. From what I gathered from Huang Hua, the Chinese believed that Dulles had instructed Bedell Smith to block an agreement at the meeting and that he had also persuaded Mendès-France to stiffen Western terms so that they would be unacceptable to the Viet Minh. The Chinese were plainly worried that the United States was preparing for military intervention in Indochina. Once again, they felt, their country might be drawn into combat with the United States, as in Korea, at a time when they were intent on devoting their resources to economic reconstruction. Like the Russians, they were also fearful that the United States might employ nuclear weapons. The Communist delegations were not aware that Dulles and Mendès-France at a meeting in Paris on July 14 had reached a secret agreement which fundamentally altered the stakes in the bargaining. Bedell Smith, who had been recalled, was to be sent back to Geneva, not to block an agreement as the Chinese feared, but with instructions to accommodate the negotiating position of the United States to a settlement based on the partition of Vietnam.

  In the hope of reaching an agreement that afternoon, Huang Hua wanted me to convey the Chinese terms for an agreement to the American delegation even if I would do it in the form of a dispatch to the Associated Press. He was employing this device out of desperation because Dulles had barred any bilateral contacts between the Chinese and American delegations in the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Immediately after our meeting, I wrote and filed my dispatch and at the same time gave a copy to the American delegation. I reported that the Chinese were prepared to sign an agreement, already approved in principle by Britain and France, based on the partition of Vietnam. I quoted Huang Hua as saying that a cease-fire agreement could be reached two days hence—when the deadline would expire for Mendès-France to either end the war or resign— if the Western powers would accept one “crucial” condition. “They must accept the barring of all foreign military bases from Indochina and keep the three member states out of any military bloc,” Huang Hua said. “Refusal to join in such a guarantee could seriously deter a final settlement. On other important points in the negotiations we are in agreement or close to it. We are hopeful and believe there is time to reach a settlement by July 20.”

  The Chinese knew that the United States and France were consulting on the organization of a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and concerned that South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would be embraced in the pact and afford American base areas for possible future operations against China. “These efforts,” Huang Hua said, “are a threat to any possible Indochina agreement. Success or failure of the Geneva Conference may depend on the attitude of the American delegation in this regard.” Huang Hua also asked for the stamp of American approval on any settlement. “We believe that the U.S. as a member of the conference should and is obligated to subscribe to and guarantee any settlement,” he said. But he did not rule out an agreement if U.S. approval was not forthcoming. This was a crucial concession on the part of the Chinese, since Dulles in his secret understanding with Mendès-France had committed the United States only to “respect” the pact, but not to be a signatory.

  Prior to the afternoon session of the conference, Bedell Smith cabled the text of my dispatch to Dulles, as noted in the Pentagon Papers, describing its contents as “extremely significant.” He reported that it had been provided in advance and that it “apparently represents the official Chinese Communist position and was given Topping in order that we would become aware of it.” Bedell Smith added that he thought it particularly significant because he believed Molotov wished to force the resignation of Mendès-France and “place on the shoulders of the U.S. responsibility for failure of the Geneva Conference and the fall of the French government if this occurs.” Bedell Smith also reported on the background of my meeting with Huang Hua, which I had provided in the knowledge that Huang Hua was amenable, since he wished to have the quotes in my dispatch accepted as authoritative. When the conference resumed that afternoon, an agreement was sealed which was essentially in keeping with the understanding reached between Dulles and Mendès-France in Paris and in accordance with what Huang Hua had stipulated in his meeting with me. The United States did not join in the “Final Declaration,” Dulles having balked at adherence to terms of the agreement which implied recognition of Communist sovereignty in regions of Vietnam. But a unilateral statement was issued by Bedell Smith associating the United States with the accords, specifically in bringing about the restoration of peace in Indochina and attainment by Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam of full independence. The statement in effect satisfied the Chinese condition that the United States subscribes to the accords.

  After the signing of the Geneva Accords on July 21, I attended a champagne celebration given by the Chinese. Huang Hua introduced me to his colleagues as the author of the dispatch that had conveyed the Chinese position to the American delegation. It was an occasion for celebration by all parties to the accords, except very notably the Viet Minh delegation. Chinese and Soviet concerns had been met at the sacrifice of Viet Minh interests. When Ho Chi Minh sent Pham Van Dong, his foreign minister, to the Geneva Conference, his forces had already seized effective control of three-quarters of Vietnam, and French defenses in the rest of the country were collapsing. The price to the Viet Minh of winning these gains had been perhaps a half million casualties. In applying the coup de grâce to the French forces at Dien Bien Phu alone, the Viet Minh suffered 7,900 dead and 15,000 wounded. Now Ho Chi Minh was denied the victory in eight years of war because his allies, China and the Soviet Union, had backed off under the threat of American military intervention that might bring on a wider war.

  In the course of the negotiations, the Viet Minh had been prodded into making major concessions. The Viet Minh had insisted at first on immediate national elections under Vietnamese supervision, which would have cert
ainly brought them political control over the entire country. Instead they were compelled to accept a delay of two years and international supervision of elections. In the interim they were required to accept partition at the seventeenth parallel instead of, as they demanded, at the thirteenth parallel, which conformed more closely to the existing military dispositions. The Viet Minh no doubt had every reason to believe, as did Zhou Enlai and Molotov, that all of Vietnam would fall to them within two years. In that sense, the Viet Minh leadership was placated, although members of their delegation did complain privately to me that they had been cheated and expressed doubt that national elections would be held as scheduled in 1956. In fact, when the time arrived for the national plebiscite on reunification stipulated in the Geneva Accords, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had become premier of the Saigon government after the conclusion of the conference, refused to go through with it. He said a free vote was impossible in North Vietnam and held that South Vietnam was not bound by the accords, since they had not been signed by its government. Although the United States had pledged to respect the pact, Washington gave tacit support to the position taken by Diem. The feeling of Pham Van Dong that they had been cheated in 1954 explains in part their stubbornness years later in the negotiations in Paris with the United States on a Vietnam peace settlement. It also explains the reluctance of the Soviet Union and China to intervene to facilitate a settlement in response to American requests as well as the resistance of the North Vietnamese to any party acting on their behalf.