Shadow Warrior (73 page)

On October 31, 1972, just days before the general election, Kissinger announced that “peace was at hand.” Having been secretly promised up to $7 billion in reparations payments by the United States, the North Vietnamese were ready to sign an accord that would leave Thieu in power. With North Vietnamese troops allowed to hold their positions in the south, however, Thieu would be irrelevant. According to the agreements, sixty days after the guns had stopped firing, all American troops were to be out of Vietnam, with US prisoners of war released sometime during this period. Ironically, the sticking point was Nixon. Seething with resentment at the attention Kissinger was getting as the architect of détente and the herald of peace, Nixon refused to abandon Thieu. He wanted “peace with honor,” and that meant no sellout, he declared. And so peace turned out to be somewhere else than at hand.

The failure of the administration to conclude a cease-fire did nothing to damage Nixon politically, and he went on to defeat Democrat George McGovern in a landslide in the 1972 presidential contest. Following the election, Nixon ordered an additional $1 billion in aid to the South Vietnamese government, giving Thieu, among other things, the fourth-largest air force in the world. At the same time, he warned the South Vietnamese president that if he rejected the best peace agreement that could be obtained, the United States would “seek a settlement with the enemy that serves U.S. interests alone.”
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Then, during the 1972 Christmas holidays, Nixon ordered the most intensive and destructive bombing attacks of the war against North Vietnam. US aircraft dropped 36,000 tons of ordnance, more than the entire total for the period between 1969 and 1972. By December 30, the North Vietnamese had exhausted their stock of surface-to-air missiles. Peace negotiations resumed in Paris on January 8, 1973. Following six days of marathon sessions, the Americans and North Vietnamese signed an agreement that was essentially the same as the one Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator, had worked out the previous year, in October 1972.

By the end of March 1973, the 591 US prisoners of war held by North Vietnam were safely home, and the last American combat troops were gone. In reality, however, the “peace” agreements of 1973 merely established ground rules for the continuation of war in Indochina without direct US participation. The North Vietnamese Army retained control of a strip of territory in South Vietnam along the Laotian border, stretching from Kon Tum Province southward through Pleiku, Darlac, Quang Duc, and Phuoc Long. In this area, which American observers labeled the “Third Vietnam,” the communists set up political shop and began recruiting settlers from areas controlled by the South Vietnamese government. At the same time, the North Vietnamese quietly infiltrated troops and equipment into the south, built a system of modern highways linking the Ho Chi Minh Trail to strategic staging areas, and began work on the 1,000-mile-long pipeline to ensure that its soldiers would have adequate supplies of fuel when it came time to attack.

In the autumn of 1974, Hanoi settled on a strategy that called for a series of offensives during 1975 to further weaken the ARVN, followed by a final assault and a call for popular uprising in South Vietnam the following year. The CIA reported as much to Washington and the US Mission in Saigon, that is, that there would be a rising level of violence in 1975 and a final push in 1976. In December 1974, main force units of the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong regional units attacked Phuoc Long, northeast of Saigon. Within three weeks, the communists had routed the ARVN defenders and captured large stockpiles of fuel and ammunition. Hanoi then held its collective breath, waiting to see if there would be a response, but no B-52 strikes or any hint of US ground activity materialized. Apparently, the Americans would not come to the rescue of South Vietnam. The CIA subsequently reported that it had evidence that “Hanoi regarded Phuoc Long as a test case for the Russian notion that we would not react to an offensive.” The Russians, of course, had gotten that notion from none other than Henry Kissinger and passed it along to the North Vietnamese leadership.
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From January through February 1975, the communists continued to marshal their forces, and then on March 10, General Van Tien Dung attacked Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands. The city fell within two days. Encouraged, he ordered assaults on Pleiku and Kon Tum in hopes of securing control of the Highlands before the end of the dry season. At this
point, Thieu made a fateful decision. Meeting secretly with his top military commanders at Cam Ranh Bay on March 14, he ordered them to withdraw from Kon Tum and Pleiku immediately. The ARVN was to prepare new defensive positions along South Vietnam's demographic frontier stretching along an arc northeastward from Saigon to Danang and Hue. Unfortunately, ARVN units in the Highlands had not prepared for a retreat, and the North Vietnamese Army had cut the main transportation routes. Strung out along country roads and paths, the South Vietnamese soldiers became sitting ducks for North Vietnamese artillery and tanks, which proceeded to indiscriminately shell them along with civilian refugees fleeing south. The withdrawal turned into a rout. Thieu's decision cost the government six provinces, at least two divisions, and “the confidence of his army and people,” as historian George Herring put it. On March 18, Brent Scowcroft wrote to President Ford, “Unless the present trends are reversed, within the next few months the very existence of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam will be at stake. . . . The ultimate outcome is hardly in doubt.”
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On March 26, Hue fell without a fight, and General Ngo Quang Truong, commander of Military Region IV, positioned his troops and artillery north of Danang for a last-ditch defense. The loss of Hue was particularly galling for South Vietnam's intelligentsia. “To think of South Vietnam without Hue,” mourned a doctor in Saigon, “is to think of a body without a heart.” Meanwhile, Danang, South Vietnam's second-largest city, became jammed with more than a million refugees who had fled in the wake of the North Vietnamese advance.
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On March 28, the US National Security Council commenced daily meetings on the situation in Southeast Asia. Each of these began with a briefing by Bill Colby. Three themes reappeared in the DCI's reports: the need for political and military decisions to be driven by current intelligence, his belief in the success of the pacification/counterinsurgency program, and his ongoing concern for the Vietnamese who were at risk for having worked for the US Mission, particularly for the CIA. At the March 28 meeting, he reported that Danang would not be able to hold out for more than a week or two. Colby observed with satisfaction that although “the refugees are placing a big burden on the government . . . it is interesting to note that they are all fleeing toward the government. That shows clearly how they really feel about the Communists.” Incredibly, the DCI still believed
that amid the chaos and bloodshed in South Vietnam, the average citizen was concerned with choosing sides. The refugees, the vast majority of whom had never cared about ideology, had nowhere else to flee but southward because of the battle lines. Colby remained a true believer to the end.
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The immediate question was what to do about Danang. “There have been terrible mob scenes, both at the airport where they stormed loading aircraft and at the port where they jammed aboard ships,” Colby reported. “Some of the military have even shot their way on to the ships.”
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The US Mission chartered three Boeing 727s to ferry at-risk Vietnamese out of the beleaguered city. Meanwhile, Danang was running out of food, and sanitation facilities could not keep up with demand, causing a sickly, pervasive stench. Young women in soiled
ao dai
(long, sheathlike dresses, usually a pristine white) lined the streets begging for a place to sleep. Residents charged refugees $2 for a drink of water. One company of ARVN soldiers forced its way onto a plane, in the process trampling old men and women as well as children. The mobs finally became so dangerous that flights from the airport had to be suspended. Colby's focus for the moment was what to do about CIA people trapped in the city. Some of his colleagues, Kissinger in particular, warned against a “premature” evacuation of Americans lest it lead to a complete collapse of law and order. But Colby, after consulting with Chief of Station Tom Polgar, decided that Danang had reached the end of the line and ordered Agency personnel out. It was not an order that would be easy to follow.

On the 29th, the CIA personnel and consulate staff members still in Danang made their way to the port and boarded a tugboat, the Australian-owned
Osceola
. At one point, a sampan carrying South Vietnamese Marine deserters tried to board the tug by force but was repelled. The harbor was filled with barges, sailboats, sampans, and anything else that would float, carrying thousands of refugees who were without food or water. The captain of the
Osceola
radioed a freighter, the
Pioneer Commander
, and arranged a rendezvous so the Americans could be offloaded and taken to Saigon. The tugboat approached the vessel only to discover South Vietnamese Marine deserters, perhaps five hundred of them, already on board, busy robbing refugees alighting from a barge or knifing or shooting those who resisted. The Americans forced their way onto the ship and joined forces with the captain, whose armed sailors still controlled the bridge and engine room.
The CIA officers helped repel an attack on the bridge by renegade troops, but looting and raping continued throughout the night on the decks below. The next day, mercifully, the
Pioneer Commander
reached Saigon. On March 30, Danang fell to the North Vietnamese Army. The US rescue operation had extracted fifty thousand refugees from the city, but many Vietnamese who had worked for the US Consulate were left behind. All that remained of South Vietnam was Saigon and the delta to the south.
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Ford gave no serious thought to employing US air and naval power. He did ask Congress for $722 million in emergency aid for Thieu's beleaguered forces, arguing that this could stabilize the situation and lead to negotiations that would keep a remnant of South Vietnam alive. During the final, bitter debate that ensued, opponents of the bill pointed out that Thieu had already abandoned more equipment in Military Regions 1 and 2 than the $722 million could buy.

If Ford and Kissinger were playing to the galleries and making a record for history, Ambassador Graham Martin seemed to have actually believed that the South Vietnamese government and the ARVN were still viable and that South Vietnam could survive. He refused to accept the fall of Danang. When Polgar took an Agency officer just evacuated from the city in to report, the ambassador rejected his account and announced that he was going to go and see for himself. He was finally dissuaded by the fact that there would be nowhere to land, the airport being in North Vietnamese hands. Martin had convinced himself that the antiwar sentiment in the United States and Congress's accompanying unwillingness to appropriate more money for South Vietnam was the product of a media conspiracy. The ambassador was ranting about “a massive deception campaign” involving the
New York Times
, Polgar reported to Colby.
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Following the ARVN's withdrawal from the Highlands, Ford had created a Special Actions Group, including representatives from State, Defense, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs, with Kissinger in the chair, to oversee the deepening crisis. By the first week in April, the Khmer Rouge (the Cambodian communists) had moved into Phnom Penh; meanwhile, the last American personnel were being airlifted out of the country in Operation Eagle Pull. On the morning of April 2, Kissinger met with his inner circle before convening the larger body. Why won't the ARVN stand and fight? he asked. Because they had been repeatedly ordered to withdraw, and the withdrawals had turned into routs, the military chiefs replied. Philip Habib, a career
diplomat and former member of the US Mission in Saigon, pointed out that at a certain point South Vietnamese soldiers had become concerned primarily with protecting their families. Habib remarked that the CIA reports on the situation in South Vietnam had been quite good. Kissinger disagreed. “On whose side is Colby in this?” he asked. “I don't know what you mean by ‘whose side.'” Habib replied. “I think Colby is one of those who is tremendously disappointed at what he sees happening. I don't think he anticipated that the ARVN would cave the way it did.”
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The Special Actions Group convened that afternoon. “Okay, we just have to be prepared for the collapse of the South within the next three months,” Kissinger declared. Three weeks would be more accurate, Colby interjected. The talk then turned to evacuation. “Tell Graham Martin to give us a list of those South Vietnamese we need to get out of the country,” Kissinger instructed Habib. It could reach a million people, a participant observed, involving as it did not only relatives of Americans but the tens of thousands of people who had worked for the United States in some capacity. Colby said, “We're getting rumors and rumbles about some move to oust Thieu. Some of these rumbles indicate a military move, some of them indicate a move from other quarters like the Buddhists and politicians.”

“Do you expect Thieu to survive?” Kissinger asked. Colby responded that it would “be very close.” Kissinger said, “It really doesn't make any difference whether Thieu survives or not. . . . We can save nothing at this point.”

“Nothing but lives,” Colby interjected.

“How?” Kissinger asked.

Colby replied, “Talk to the North Vietnamese. Offer up Thieu for a negotiated release of people.” Kissinger did not reply.
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