The Battle

 CHAPTER 14

The Battle 

The war quickly took on a pattern that changed little during its five years. Communist offensives began with the dry season in January and ended as the monsoons spread the waters over the land in May and June. During the wet seasons the scale of the warfare depended in part on how badly either side had been mauled in the months before.

Within months of the 1970 invasion the Communists had isolated Phnom Penh, gained half the country and over 20 percent of the population. Each year they captured more. It became a war over the lines of communication. Despite the ambitions Kissinger expressed in "Strategy Three, Variant Three," the government controlled only a number of enclaves around Phnom Penh and provincial capitals—Kompong Thom, Kompong Cham, Svay Rieng, Takeo, Kampot, Kompong Som (the renamed port of Sihanoukville), a large area around Battambang in the northwest, and a strip of land between Battambang and Phnom Penh. Apart from Battambang, none was self-sufficient and all depended increasingly on Phnom Penh for rice and other essentials. Lon Nol's troops were engaged principally in trying to keep the roads to them open. As they failed, more and more goods had to be transported first by water and then by air.

For the North Vietnamese too, communications were the key. After the invasion they rebuilt their supply routes into South Vietnam. They came down through southern Laos along the Mekong by water, path road and some then turned straight east into Vietnam, while others curled westward and southward around Phnom Penh, eventually ending in the Mekong Delta. In the northeast, where the North Vietnamese began training Khmer Rouge recruits, some Communist battalions defended these new supply lines while other forces were used to push Lon Nol's troops back toward Phnom Penh and keep them preoccupied with their own survival. For Hanoi, as for Washington, Cambodia was a stalemated war. The aim was not to capture Phnom Penh but to tie down as many South Vietnamese and Cambodian troops as possible while Hanoi pursued its unchanging ends in Vietnam.

Reporters who talked to government soldiers found an air of apathy settling over them through 1971. By the middle of the year it was almost impossible to hear such expressions of patriotic fervor as had been common in 1970; naïveté had been replaced by resignation. "There is too much bonjour everywhere," people would claim, using the popular epithet for corruption. Cambodians of all sorts found the Americans’ attitudes depressing and confusing. They knew that aid to Vietnam was unlimited, and that incomprehensible restrictions were placed on aid to Cambodia although the enemy was the same. "Pourquoi, Monsieur?"

Younger and younger boys were being drafted to fill the ranks of the army. When Australian officers in Vietnam refused to accept one Cambodian unit sent for training because they were only children, an American officer explained: "The little fellas were so anxious to fight that unit commanders didn’t have the heart to turn them down ."

The government soldiers' habit of sticking to the roads was reinforced as they were provided with more and more heavy American equipment. In the early years the majority of actions were small unit skirmishes that took place along or close to the highways. The most fiercely contested points were those where government and Communist lines of communication crossed. There were, to begin with, few grand battles, few single enormous losses, just a constant drain—twenty men killed here, forty wounded there. The fighting was usually brutal and without mercy; neither side took prisoners. One of the lasting photographic images of the war was of a grinning Cambodian soldier with a severed enemy head in either hand. But, to the disappointment of American officials, the army's "kill ratio" was poor; the number of Communists it killed for every loss of its own was as low as that of the worst troops in South Vietnam. The CIA station reported that the army's tactics "tend to be based on a desire to permit enemy attack and to rely on air power and ARVN to inflict casualties."

Individual soldiers often fought very bravely, but their officers were rarely worthy of them. At the same time, very little command or control was exercised over the sprawling new battalions. Poor communication was compounded by traditions of regional autonomy; many battalion commanders acted as if they were feudal chieftains fighting private battles rather than individual commanders in an integrated army engaged in a national war. Ties with Phnom Penh rested on whatever personal loyalty commanders felt for Lon Nol (and he managed to dissipate that fairly fast) rather than on any military traditions or institutions.

Often local commanders saw accommodation with their old neighbors and friends who had chosen Sihanouk—and therefore, at first, Hanoi—as the better part of valor. American arms and ammunition were constantly sold to the other side. The collaboration was especially common in the 3rd Military Region of the country, the section that stretched northwest from Phnom Penh up the Tonle Sap Lake to Thailand and included Battambang and Angkor Wat.

The limitations of the huge army the Nixon Doctrine was creating were never made clearer than at the end of 1971 in the battle of Chenla II. This operation, named after the sixth-century kingdom, was an attempt to relieve the besieged town of Kompong Thom, which lies on Route 6, the road to Angkor Wat, northward out of Phnom Penh. The town had been under fairly constant siege since the beginning of the war; the only way in, for men or supplies, was by air. A halfhearted attempt to relieve it, Operation Chenla I, was made at the end of 1970. This second venture was entrusted to Colonel Um Savuth, Commander of the 5th Military Region. He was an astonishing personality, a thin, twisted man who walked with a long white cane, drove his jeep at terrifying speeds, and was nearly always drunk. Early in his military career he had, in a moment of high spirits, ordered a subordinate to place a cat on his head and then, from a considerable distance, shoot the animal off. The subordinate refused. Um Savuth insisted that it was a direct order. The man pulled the trigger and a part of Um Savuth's head was blown away. Ever since, half his body had been paralyzed, and he had to drink quantities of beer and Scotch to kill his constant pain.

The relief expedition was Lon Nol's idea, and as usual he retained daily control over it. When the force set out, the monsoon was full upon the country; low clouds hung over the sky and mists arose from the flooded fields on either side of the road. The water deterred any inclination that Um Savuth might have had to move his men off the exposed, raised surface of the highway and into the comparative cover the padday and the trees afforded.

Company by company, the troops drove and marched up the road, their women and children straggling along behind them as they always did. No one thought to secure the flanks by establishing outposts. No patrols were sent off the road to ascertain the exact dispositions of the North Vietnamese 5th and 7th Divisions, which were based in rubber plantations just to the east. One of the Communists' supply lines from the northeast down to the Cardamom mountains in the southwest of the country crossed Route 6 just south of Kompong Thom, but the Vietnamese did nothing to hinder the army's blithe advance. On October 11 the vanguard reached Kompong Thom and relieved the city with almost no fighting.

Great were the celebrations in Phnom Penh as the government began to rejoice in a famous victory. In Saigon, General Abrams was not so enthusiastic. "They’ve opened a front forty miles long and two feet wide," he complained. At the end of October, the North Vietnamese counterattacked. The thin line of soldiers along the road could do nothing to protect themselves; the men, desperate to protect their families, fled in panic.

Lon Nol paid a visit to the field and, back in Phnom Penh, continued his practice of issuing contradictory and irrelevant orders to Um Savuth. He sent one of his frequent personal letters to Admiral McCain in Honolulu requesting more helicopters and amphibious vehicles: "We have determined that our weakness is attributable to the lack of mobility of our reaction forces... I count on your kind understanding to help me resolve my difficulties and I am sure that you will not hesitate to use all your influence in coming to our aid... Admiral and great friend."

Despite especially intense B-52 attacks coordinated by the American embassy, the North Vietnamese broke the Khmer column between the towns of Baray and Tang Kuok. The troops defending Baray were the First Brigade Group under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ith Suong, considered by many embassy officials to be one of the most incompetent officers in the country. His men had been without pay for three months; their morale was low. As the North Vietnamese approached, they fled through the paddies, abandoning their equipment, including their artillery pieces, which they neglected to spike.

The rout was complete and the losses enormous. No one knows how many men were killed. From the towns of Rumlong and Baray alone, Lon Nol's troops, FANK (Forces Armées Nationales Khmer), lost four tanks, four armored vehicles, one scout car, twenty buses, twenty-one quarter-ton trucks, one 2½-ton truck, two 105-mm. howitzers and hundreds of machine guns. At Kompong Thom itself, they lost 300 men, two armored personnel carriers, eight 2½-ton trucks, four Land Rovers, twenty quarter-ton trucks, eight buses, one bulldozer, one 105-mm. howitzer. Um Savuth later remarked that he was impressed by the North Vietnamese and the extent of the American armaments they carried.

The debacle, which might have shown once and for all that Lon Nol was incapable of performing the ambitious tasks Kissinger had set him, caused panic and political crisis in Phnom Penh. For a time it seemed that the North Vietnamese might decide to roll all the way into the capital. (In fact, they had no wish to do so.) Rumors of coups abounded in cafés and in ministries. Almost everyone with an interest bent the ear of the United States embassy official he knew best. Sơn Ngọc Thành, the leader of the Khmer Serei, who had returned to Phnom Penh, put out the word that it was finally time he became Prime Minister. He had the support of Khý Tang Lim, the Minister of Public Works, who told a member of the U.S. embassy that he himself was planning the coup that would bring Sơn Ngọc Thành finally to power. The embassy reported this news to Washington under the rubric: “WARNING. This information must not be used in any way which risks disclosure of even a portion of the report to any foreign nationals, including officials of the Cambodian Government.”

Sirik Matak, the acting prime minister and Cheng Heng, the head of state, tried to persuade Lon Nol to abdicate some of his power. Members of his general staff begged him to relinquish over-all command. He refused them all. The embassy, as usual, tried to pretend supreme unconcern or ignorance of the politics and the démarches. But Swank cabled Washington, "At issue are not only Lon Nol's highly personal and arbitrary methods of operation but very possibly the future of his government should Sirik Matak and others choose to resign. The dilemma which Sirik Matak and these contenders face, however, is that none of them would appear to be a politically viable substitute for Lon Nol, with all his faults."

Swank's cable found its way into the hands of the columnist Jack Anderson, who published it on December 17. (A second Swank cable, which Anderson published on January 11, 1972, criticized Lon Nol's "haphazard, out-of-channel and ill-coordinated conduct of military operations." This sort of publicity was not what the White House had in mind when it demanded a "low profile" by the embassy in Cambodia. Swank was rebuked from Washington, and his relationship to Lon Nol, never close, was not improved. The incident led him to be even more cautious in committing any criticisms to paper, and he became still more circumspect with the press.

Nonetheless, his reprimand was less severe than it might have been. The White House was preoccupied with a more important leak, which eventually helped to reveal one effect Kissinger's conduct of foreign affairs had in Washington and the nature of his relationship with the Joint Chiefs.

Ever since Kissinger had refused Laird's January 1969 request to close the Liaison Office between the Chiefs and the NSC, it had been used, as Laird had feared, to strengthen their relationship at his expense. Kissinger later said that the officer in charge of it "would sometimes give us some advance information of what the Joint Chiefs were considering." In fact, according to J. Fred Buzhardt, the Pentagon's General Counsel, who investigated the matter for Laird, the Chairman would actually send Kissinger the drafts of memoranda he was writing to Laird so that Kissinger could revise them, if he wished, to his own advantage.

But although Kissinger flattered and used the Chiefs on some matters, he was less forthcoming on others, like SALT, where their views did not coincide. So the Chiefs began to use the Liaison Office not only to bypass Laird but also to spy on Kissinger. Navy Yeoman Charles Radford worked in the Liaison Office through 1970 and 1971. He later testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that his superior, Admiral "Robbie" Robinson (who had since died) had told him to try to obtain any NSC documents that might interest the Chiefs and that Kissinger's staff might not provide.

One of Radford's most important tasks was to obtain the agenda of NSC meetings in advance. When Kissinger wanted the Chiefs to be well prepared, these documents and Kissinger's own talking papers were easily obtained. But if Kissinger wished the Chiefs to be at a disadvantage, the papers had to be secured surreptitiously. Radford frequently rifled the "burn bags" in which the day's rubbish was accumulated for safe destruction. In December 1970, he accompanied Alexander Haig, as stenographer, to Saigon and Phnom Penh for one of Haig's "stroking missions." Radford testified that he was ordered to obtain anything of interest to the Chiefs—talk of troop cuts, agreements between the White House and Thieu, meetings with Swank, assurances to Lon Nol. By making himself extra photocopies of documents whenever possible and by rifling Haig's briefcase, Radford came back with an impressive haul. His boss seemed well pleased. The performance was repeated on another Haig trip to Vietnam and Cambodia in March 1971.

Radford's greatest haul came in July 1971, when he accompanied Kissinger on a trip to Asia. During his visit to Pakistan, Kissinger slipped away and made his historic secret flight to Peking. Then, when the whole party flew back from Islamabad to the United States, Radford rummaged through the burn bags in the plane and through Kissinger's briefcase. He read as much as he could of the transcript of Kissinger's meeting with Chou En-lai. Quite apart from that, he recalled, he obtained about 150 different documents on the trip.

All went well for Radford and his superiors until December 14, 1971, when Jack Anderson published an account of an NSC meeting on the Indo-Pakistan war in which Kissinger had stressed that United States policy was to pretend neutrality but actually to "tilt" toward Pakistan. The leak caused a furor in the White House, and John Ehrlichman assigned the White House Plumbers the task of tracing it. This investigative team had been set up following Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers and their publication in The New York Times in June 1971. It was led jointly by Egil Krogh, from Ehrlichman's staff, and David Young, Kissinger's former appointments secretary; they employed Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. In September the Plumbers had burgled the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in an unsuccessful attempt to find material damaging to Ellsberg. Now they were ordered to place more wiretaps. Egil Krogh refused; he was removed from the team. David Young did as he was told. Four wiretaps were applied, and officials were polygraphed.

Admiral Robert Welander, who had replaced Robinson as Radford's superior, was convinced the leak must have come from Radford. He confessed to Haig what Radford had been doing. Radford himself denied the leak but admitted the spying. When Kissinger heard this, he was, he claimed later, “outraged” and “beside myself ... precisely because the relationship with the Joint Chiefs had been so close.” But J. Fred Buzhardt says, “Henry was very good at showing outrage when it was needed. He was really concerned because it had been a two-way street.” In his sworn testimony Radford also maintained this.

Documents show that one of Kissinger’s first reactions was to denounce Alexander Haig, whose links to the Army were strong and whose rise to a position of great influence on the NSC staff, in good part through his day-to-day handling of Cambodia, Kissinger now seemed to resent. Some of the internecine flavor of the affair appears through Ehrlichman’s handwriten notes of a meeting wit Haldeman and Nixon on December 23 :

Talk to HAK

Not to be brot up w P

E handling w A/G

P knows bec of rel w/ JCS...

K tell Bob what to do re the channel

Will proséc. Yeoman, Admiral.

Dont let K blame Haig.

Ehrlichman tried to have Welander sign a prefabricated confession that he had spied on the National Security Council. The Admiral refused. Then, instead of being prosecuted, he and Radford were merely transferred in silence. Despite his "outrage" and despite the fact that the affair went to the heart of his conduct of foreign policy, Kissinger later claimed he knew nothing of the investigation, had "no personal knowledge of any wiretaps," did not know whether any act of treason had been committed, and had no idea why the two men were treated so leniently.

This insouciance may not be characteristic, but it is consistent with the general attitude Kissinger has always publicly taken toward the Plumbers; he claimed constantly that he knew absolutely nothing about them or about Young's work until the operation became public during the Watergate disclosures of 1973. However, there are apparent problems in this statement of ignorance. Evidence exists to show that it was principally Kissinger's concern at the publication of the Pentagon Papers that led to the Plumbers' creation in the first place. Other documents show that David Young did remain in touch with Kissinger after he took up his new task. And the then British ambassador recalls that when he commented unfavorably to Kissinger on the "leaks" of 1971, Kissinger replied, mystifyingly, "Don't worry, we have the Plumbers onto that." Kissinger also listened to a taped interview conducted by Young and read his report on the affair. In 1974, Kissinger admitted this in sworn testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Eventually the manner in which David Young investigated the affair

• " Kissinger's concern is very evident in the handwritten notes John Ehrlichman took during meetings with the President to discuss the publication of the Papers. These notes appear in Book IV of the House Judiciary Committee's Statement of Information on the impeachment of President Nixon. In a July 30, 1971, memo to Ehrlichman, Krogh and Young, the Plumbers, wrote: "We have asked Mr. Snyser for an opinion (for Henry A. Kissinger) on the relationship of timing between October South Vietnamese elections and the political exploitation of the Democrats' involvement in the 1963 coup against Diem became part of the evidence accumulated by the House Judiciary Committee for the impeachment of President Nixon for abuse of power. Once again the conduct of foreign affairs was responsible for domestic malpractice.

In December 1971 publicity and indictment were a long way off. At that time the only action Kissinger took was to close down the Liaison Office. He did not, he said later, allow the incident to affect his warm relationship with the Chiefs. They continued to collaborate well, particularly on Vietnam and on Cambodia.

The Chiefs agreed with the National Security Council staff that Swank's misgivings about Lon Nol's ability to lead the country—published by Anderson—had to be played down. This is not to say that Swank's analysis was considered incorrect. It was confirmed by an American government psychiatrist, a colonel in the U.S. Army, who was sent to examine Lon Nol's mental condition in December 1971. A few months later, one of the papers generated by National Security Study Memorandum 152 noted that the psychiatrist

found no significant deviations in his [Lon Nol’s] cognitive functions [but] observations by his close associates indicate his mental faculties have deteriorated markedly as a result of his February 1971 stroke...available medical data indicate that Lon Nol has extensive vascular disease involving one or more intracranial vessels. It should be noted that even before his stroke Lon Nol was reported to be a vague and unstructured individual....Medical opinion is that it is reasonable to predict that within the next six to eighteen months there may be clinical manifestations either as a stroke which could be incapacitating or fatal, or a deterioration of his emotional stability, cognitive functioning and physical stamina.

This was the man into whose hands the United States was entrusting Cambodia. An explanation was offered by the President:

[The] aid program for Cambodia is, in my opinion, probably the best investment in foreign assistance that the United States has made in my lifetime. The Cambodians, a people, seven million only, neutralists previously, untrained, are tying down 40,000 North Vietnamese regulars. If those North Vietnamese weren’t in Cambodia they’d be over killing Americans....The dollars we send to Cambodia saves [sic] American lives and help us to bring Americans home.