Khrushchev responded by restating his July threat to use nuclear weapons to defend the Castro regime. This time, however, he believed that the threat to Castro was real. The TASS news service released on October 29 a transcript of an interview Khrushchev gave to a Cuban journalist in which he warned the United States not to force him to make good on his “symbolic” threat to use nuclear weapons.133
The tension over the Caribbean lasted another ten days. When John F. Kennedy won a razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon on November 8, the Soviets and Cubans relaxed. The feared preelection attack had not happened.
Whereas Khrushchev could believe he had protected Castro, he was not able to save Lumumba. In November the Soviets lost a crucial diplomatic battle at the UN when the United States successfully lobbied to seat a Congolese delegation led by Kasavubu. The vote went 53–24 (19 abstentions) against the Soviets and their friends, with the margin of victory coming from the former French colonies in West Africa.
When Lumumba learned of Kasavubu’s victory in New York, he looked for an opportunity to rally his own forces. Taking advantage of a thunderstorm, Lumumba escaped from his UN guards on the night of November 27. His flight worried Mobutu and his Western allies. Were Lumumba to reach Stanleyville, where the bulk of his supporters were forming a resistance to Mobutu and Tshombe, he could set up a secessionist government and request Soviet military assistance. While Mobutu’s forces launched a manhunt, the CIA sent a contract killer, a European with a criminal record, to Stanleyville with orders to murder Lumumba. Meanwhile UN headquarters ordered the UN force to step aside and allow events to take their course.
Although Lumumba’s name was well known throughout the Congo, his image was not. As he and his men traveled the seven hundred miles to Stanleyville in a convoy, they were repeatedly stopped by tribesmen who did not believe that this figure in sports shirt was the “savior” Lumumba. “You are a liar. We know Lumumba well. He always wears suits and glasses. But you?” one village headman reportedly said to Lumumba.134 These delays did not worry Lumumba, who took time to give long speeches in the villages along the way. A spectator at one of these speeches tipped off Mobutu’s force, and the hunt narrowed. On December 2 Lumumba was captured in view of a contingent of UN troops from Ghana. When the troops requested permission to rescue Lumumba, New York stuck to its position of neutrality. Lumumba disappeared into Mobutu’s custody.
THE FIRST ELEVEN months of 1960 had taught Khrushchev some hard lessons about the perils of establishing new allies in the third world. He assumed the United States had connived with Hammarskjöld to neutralize Lumumba and had a lot of evidence that Washington was trying to overthrow Castro. There could be no doubt that the administration was at least determined to deny Moscow any and all of these new allies. If Moscow wanted to continue winning new allies, Khrushchev understood that political and economic competition might not be enough. He had to be prepared to take some military risks. Southeast Asia, an area that previously he had left to the Chinese and the North Vietnamese, would be the proving ground for this new form of the strategy of peaceful coexistence.
CHAPTER 13
SOUTHEAST ASIAN TEST
THE COUP OF AUGUST 9, 1960, was a surprise to all but the Second Battalion of the Royal Lao Army and its commander, Kong Le. Kong had duped the United States, the main foreign supporter of the Lao Army, into helping him. A week earlier, at Kong’s request, U.S. military advisers had given the battalion training in a nighttime takeover of the capital. The explanation given by Kong Le and his men was that they needed to know this in case it was ever attempted by the Communist Pathet Lao.
Only twenty-six years old, this young commander professed no wish to be the generalissimo of Laos. Once the coup succeeded, he threw his allegiance behind a former Lao prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, and called for a return to a foreign policy of genuine neutrality. Kong Le was no Communist, but he considered himself an anti-American nationalist. Whereas in Egypt Nasser had initially been able to reconcile a desire for better relations with the United States with strong nationalism, this was more difficult for nationalists in Southeast Asia, where since 1954 the United States had been seen as the principal imperialist power. Kong Le clearly blamed the United States for having brought the Cold War into Lao politics. The major task facing the Laotian people, he said in the months after the coup, was to “drive away the Americans.”1
THE COUP IN LAOS, a country that had never before attracted his attention, fitted a predictable and welcome pattern for Nikita Khrushchev. Once more an anti-imperialist leader had emerged to lead a nationalist movement in the third world. Yet in August 1960 Khrushchev was much too preoccupied with the nationalists in the Congo and Cuba to take much notice of this development in Laos.
At a conference in Geneva in 1954 the Soviet Union, along with China, Great Britain, and the United States, had formally dismantled the French Empire in Indochina. Vietnam was split in half pending a general election that never happened. Meanwhile Laos and Cambodia were given their independence. Laos, the “land of a million elephants,” had no more than three million people. Poor, landlocked, and with no important economic resources, it had significance solely because of its location. Sandwiched between Vietnam in the east, China in the north, Cambodia in the south, and Thailand in the west, Laos became a contested borderland as North Vietnam vied for unity with South Vietnam and Thailand sought to prevent Communist influence from penetrating further into the interior of Southeast Asia.
Much to the disappointment of Moscow’s Asian allies, in his five years at the helm Khrushchev had shown very little interest in the successor states of the former Indochina. It was not that he had an aversion to Southeast Asia. He had visited Burma and even Indonesia but had never bothered to stop in North Vietnam, let alone landlocked Laos.2 Khrushchev was physically uncomfortable in the tropics. “I found the climate almost unbearably hot, damp, and sticky,” he later said about his trip to Indonesia. “I felt like I was in a sauna the whole time. My underwear stuck to my body, and it was almost impossible to breathe.”3 But it wasn’t the weather that kept him from Hanoi or Vientiane. Indeed, he had made a second trip to Southeast Asia in early 1960. His discomfort stemmed from Vietnamese politics.
Khrushchev liked and respected the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. “I’ve met many people in the course of my political career,” he recalled in his memoirs, “but Ho Chi Minh impressed me in a very special way. Religious people used to talk about the holy apostles. Well, by the way he lived and by the way he impressed other people, Ho Chi Minh was like one of those ‘holy apostles.’ He was an apostle of the Revolution.”4 Ho remained friendly to the Soviet Union until his death in 1969, and he visited Moscow a number of times while Khrushchev was in power. But as the Vietnamese leader grew older, Moscow found itself at odds with the next generation of leaders, who tended to share Beijing’s views on Khrushchev and the revolutionary potential in Southeast Asia.
As was the case in China, the Vietnamese leadership had become suspicious of Khrushchev during the Twentieth Party Congress, especially after his introduction of the doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Initially, the Vietnamese had supported the doctrine. Anastas Mikoyan, the first Presidium member to visit North Vietnam, went to Hanoi in 1956 and discovered that so long as Ho was in control, support for the policy was secure.5 But Ho entered a form of semiretirement in 1958. Vietnamese newspapers began calling him Uncle Ho, and he restricted his official functions to giving advice, mainly on foreign policy. By 1959 North Vietnam had embarked on a more revolutionary path. At the Fifteenth Plenum of the Vietnamese Communist Party, the Vietnamese replaced peaceful coexistence with a strategy to achieve unification: “The fundamental path of development for the revolution in South Vietnam is that of violent struggle.”6
For Moscow Laos was indistinguishable from the Vietnamese problem. The leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the North Vietnamese, identified the political future of Laos with their own struggle for the reunification of
Vietnam under Hanoi. Before 1945 there had been a single Communist Party of Indochina under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. The Vietnamese formed not only the leadership of the Communist Party but most of the rank and file as well. As Moscow well knew, there was not much of an indigenous Lao Communist Party. Nationalist feeling in that country centered on the king of Laos. Vietnamese comrades, however, pushed ahead with creating a Lao party after Geneva. As the Vietnamese admitted to the Soviets, most of the members of the Lao party in the beginning were in fact Vietnamese.7
Moscow had provided little assistance to the People’s Party of Laos, or Pathet Lao, since its foundation in March 1955. Although led by a dedicated Communist, Prince Souphanouvong, who enjoyed the support of the Vietnamese and the Chinese, the Pathet Lao was too small and politically unimportant to warrant any great investment by Moscow. Instead Khrushchev chose to demonstrate Moscow’s commitment to his policy of patient, political transition by dealing with Souphanouvong’s half brother, a dedicated neutralist, the Laotian prime minister Souvanna Phouma.
Moscow had first dealt with Souvanna in 1956. In response to his call for a neutral Laos foreign policy, the Soviets had tried to establish diplomatic relations in the summer of 1956. Representations were made to the Laotian government through its representative in Bangkok.8 An exchange of notes ensued, with both sides indicating an interest in negotiating the establishment of diplomatic relations. The matter went so far that Moscow sent a formal recognition of the independence and sovereignty of the country.9 A week after this message, Soviet tanks entered Budapest. Then the discussion abruptly stopped. From November 1956 through July 1957 the Laotians exhibited diplomatic cold feet.
When the dialogue resumed from the Laotian side, Vientiane suggested the establishment of relations but resisted letting the Soviets establish an embassy in the country. Pleading the inability to afford an embassy in Moscow and wishing to avoid an unequal diplomatic relationship, the Laotians suggested that the Soviets accredit their ambassador in Paris as ambassador to Moscow. The Soviets agreed and proposed that their ambassador in Cambodia act as the Soviet representative to Laos as well. Moscow produced a joint communiqué, and then again there was silence from Laos. This silence lasted three years.
The United States had watched the Soviet-Laotian negotiations with concern and worried about Souvanna Phouma’s politics. In 1957, Souvanna and Souphanouvong had signed a public agreement permitting the political wing of the Pathet Lao, the Neo Lao Hak Sat, to participate in the general elections in 1958. The administration opted not to wait to ratify the result. Shortly after the election, in which several Communist deputies were elected and brought into Souvanna’s cabinet, a U.S.-backed political faction forced his resignation and formed a right-wing government.
The emergence of Kong Le and the restoration of Souvanna in August 1960 provided Khrushchev with a second opportunity to show the Chinese and the Vietnamese that working with progressives and neutrals could bring about the peaceful transformation of Laos into a socialist country. One of the new government’s first acts was to resume the stalled negotiations with Moscow over diplomatic recognition. In September the Souvanna government informed Moscow through the Soviet ambassador in Cambodia that it wished to conclude the negotiations on diplomatic relations.10
ALTHOUGH MOSCOW’S allies in the region considered Kong Le’s mutiny a mixed blessing, they were pleased to see that this might bring Moscow and its financial resources into the region. The North Vietnamese offered themselves to the Russians as tutors to understand the players in Laos. Hanoi was not unhappy that Moscow quickly restarted the diplomatic negotiations with Souvanna that had stalled in 1957. But the Vietnamese wanted the Soviets to understand that at best, Souvanna was a temporary solution. As an anti-Communist neutralist he was very dangerous from Hanoi’s perspective because he would place limits on efforts by Communists within his own country to take control. North Vietnam’s ambassador to Beijing warned his Soviet counterpart that Souvanna was “just like [Burmese Prime Minister] U Nu and [Cambodia’s King] Sihanouk in his anticommunist leanings.”11 They told Moscow that he was “unstable.”
The Vietnamese hoped the mutiny would finally stir Moscow to show some real interest in their protégé, the Pathet Lao. Hanoi seemed to have hopes of tapping the Soviet Union as a source of assistance to the Pathet Lao. In the past Moscow had refrained from providing any significant amount of assistance to the Communist forces in Laos.12 Hanoi was not shy to take credit for the fact that a Laotian Communist movement existed at all. “The Vietnamese have played the leading role in the revolutionary struggle of the Indochinese people,” the North Vietnamese bragged to Moscow. Ho Chi Minh had been agitating for revolution as far back as the Versailles Conference that ended World War I. In Laos there had been no revolutionary movement to speak of between 1930 and 1945. It was only after the August 1945 revolution in Vietnam that a Laotian nationalist movement developed. With the help of the Vietnamese the Pathet Lao had emerged as an independent army fighting the French. “This army, which grew and strengthened, had many Vietnamese members who helped in the organization of political work and the preparation of cadres,” said Chan Ti Bin, a North Vietnamese official sent to explain the realities of Laos to the Soviets.13 Meanwhile a people’s party, established along Marxist-Leninist lines, had developed on the basis of a united front organization, known as the People’s Patriotic Front of Laos, the Neo Lao Hak Sat.
The Vietnamese tried to stoke Khrushchev’s competitive urges by detailing how much money the United States was devoting to the small kingdom. Hanoi estimated that between 1955 and 1960, Washington provided $169.6 million. Most of this money went to pay the salaries of the Lao military and the civil servants of the Royal Lao government. During this period the Lao Army grew from twenty-five thousand to thirty-two thousand with a militia of five thousand. There were one thousand French soldiers stationed in Sena and another detachment of four hundred military advisers with the Lao Army under a French lieutenant general.
An excellent barometer of Khrushchev’s lack of interest in Laos was that unlike the Congo, nothing about events in the Asian country was important enough to interrupt his games of shuffleboard aboard the steamer that was taking him to the opening of the General Assembly session in September 1960. It is impossible to know for sure, but this may have been studied indifference. Khrushchev was increasingly concerned about the Chinese, who seemed to be standing behind the more militant Vietnamese.
That summer Khrushchev’s relations with China deteriorated further. There was nothing new about Sino-Soviet tensions. Relations between the countries had been steadily worsening since 1956, and time had failed to heal the wounds caused by Khrushchev’s drive for destalinization and peaceful coexistence. As the years passed, Mao increasingly saw himself as the victim of Khrushchev’s efforts to improve relations with the West. When Khrushchev temporarily discarded his policy of applying pressure on the Western powers over the status of Berlin in mid-1959, the Chinese were told that Moscow could no longer proceed with helping Beijing build its own nuclear bomb, as it had promised in October 1957. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which informed its Chinese counterpart of the cancellation, could not have made the link to détente any clearer. “[I]t is possible that the efforts by socialist countries to strive for peace and the relaxation of international tensions would be jeopardized,” the Soviet party explained, if this agreement were to continue and the West found out.14 Khrushchev’s visit to Beijing in September 1959, coming right on the heels of his triumphant trip to the United States, did not help matters. Bubbling over with optimism about the potential for better relations with Washington, Khrushchev managed to enrage his Chinese hosts, who had invited him to participate in a commemoration of the victory of the Chinese Revolution.15
In the summer of 1960 for the first time the strain seemed to have caused a visible tear. The Chinese and Soviet delegates traded insults at the Third Congress of the Romanian Communist Party in Bucharest in June 1960.
That was enough for Khrushchev. “We took great care never to offend China until the Chinese actually started to crucify us,” Khrushchev later recalled. “And when they did start to crucify us—well, I’m no Jesus Christ, and I didn’t have to turn the other cheek.”16 In July 1960 the Soviets announced that they would be withdrawing all their advisers from China. Diplomatic relations continued between the Communist giants, but fraternal relations seemed to be at an end.
UNLIKE THE KREMLIN, the White House took Laos seriously as an area of Cold War conflict. The Eisenhower administration had not liked Souvanna in the 1950s, seeing his neutrality as far left–leaning, and it still did not like him. In the first days after the coup Washington hoped for Kong Le’s removal and the preservation of the dependable anti-Soviet policies of the U.S.-supported Prince Somsanith government. This did not happen. Kong Le announced a provisional government of forty men, which included the chieftains of the Pathet Lao. He had hoped to include Lao’s former prime ministers, Souvanna Phouma and Boun Oum, but they declined, preferring to wait for a decision by the National Assembly. In short order, the Lao Assembly passed a vote of nonconfidence, dissolving the Somsanith government. The king nominated Souvanna Phouma as prime minister, and on August 17, 1960, Kong Le transferred power to him.
With this political failure in Vientiane, the administration was divided over what to do next. The U.S. ambassador, Winthrop Brown, believed that the United States had to compete for Souvanna’s support. Washington had to be prepared to offer him a wide range of political, military, and economic assistance in return for a pledge that he would not establish relations with Hanoi, Beijing, or Moscow and that he would not repeat the mistake of 1958 by bringing members of the Pathet Lao into his cabinet. The State and Defense department were more concerned about preserving the Royal Lao Army as a viable force first to contain and then to destroy the Pathet Lao. Washington’s favorite, General Phoumi Nosavan, commanded this army, and he was already mounting operations against Pathet Lao villages in the northern province while the Americans were debating one another.17
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