The Embassy

 CHAPTER 13 

The Embassy

EMBASSIES OFTEN have personalities that reflect not so much their transient staffs as the mission to which they are committed. An embassy is also a coalition. In an American embassy, the ambassador may be a member of the State Department, but he is appointed by the President, and his domain contains State Department officials and also men from the Pentagon, the CIA, the Agency for International Development and others. Inter- and even intra-departmental rivalries in Washington itself are rarely subsumed by the fact that all these persons are now representing their country out of one building in a distant land. But when they are all engaged on a single, agreed mission, the rivalries can be controlled.

No such harmony was possible in Cambodia. The embassy was a short-lived and frantic affair. Created in 1969, it grew like a military Toys in 1970 and 1971, settled into a resigned torpor in 1972, and died in 1975. Its personality throughout the period was split by the fact that no consistent, well-considered policy toward Cambodia ever existed in Washington. Rivalries and disagreements were, if anything, intensified by the time they reached Phnom Penh.

By the end of 1970 Mike Rives’s small house had been discarded, like Rives himself. “Coby” Swank, his successor, moved into a larger building.

Swank is a slim, stylish, mild-mannered man, a traditional and conscientious diplomat of the type that those who despise it would call “strigid.” He had served in Laos in the middle sixties, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk thought highly of him, but his main interest was Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When his appointment to Cambodia was announced his New York Times profile stated, “He has gradually emerged as the acknowledged leader of the group of Soviet specialists in the Foreign Service.” This may have been an overstatement, but he was a competent officer.

Swank did not believe in “making waves” or “throwing off sparks”; he thought more could be done quietly. He liked his instructions to be precise, and he was painstaking in the way he carried them out. Conversely, he did not enjoy acting in either a policy vacuum or a policy morass. He was unsuited to be a proconsul in Indochina, and that was one reason for his being chosen. His low-key diplomatic manners would help reassure the Senate that Cambodia was not to be another Laos, where the ambassador, with the CIA, ran the war.

When he left Washington, Swank was told by Kissinger and Nixon that Lon Nol was to be given everything necessary for his survival. He was not told how far he should intervene in Cambodian politics, but he warned that the American presence must be kept on a "low-profile." Swank understood from both that White House policy was, quite simply, to help Vietnamization. It was a policy that Swank was prepared to implement, but after he had been in Cambodia some time, and as the futility of the war became apparent to him, he began, as diplomats do, to question whether the country that he had been sent to might have interests very different from those of his own. More and more he considered that his country's policy was "essentially a very selfish business." Henry Kissinger destroyed him for his qualms.

Swank was confronted almost at once with disagreements as to how the cause of Vietnamization was to be furthered in Cambodia, and—every ambassador's nightmare—a multiplication of channels of communication. To his surprise he found the American effort had been run almost single-handedly by Fred Ladd. Ladd spoke little French and rarely ventured outside Phnom Penh, but his instincts were good and his relationship with Lon Nol excellent. Every evening they discussed the current action and Ladd tried to persuade the General to rational conduct. Although Ladd had State Department rank, he was still a military man, and outside Cambodia he dealt directly with a small "Cambodian Support Office" on Abrams' staff in Saigon. He also had his direct channel to Haig. Swank knew nothing of that.

Ladd's methods and attitudes were compatible with the White House's desire for a "low profile." But they were not suited to Kissinger's "Strategy Three, Variant Three." When it was adopted, McCain, who was impatient with modest ideas, demanded a large and formal American military presence in Phnom Penh. He had the support of the White House and the Joint Chiefs, though not of Melvin Laird or State.

Although the Cooper-Church amendment outlawed a traditional military advisory group in Cambodia, once Congress formally appropriated funds for military aid to a country (as it did to Cambodia in December 1970, when it passed the Supplemental Appropriation that Laird had demanded) the Pentagon is by law required to monitor it. It has to establish that the recipient actually needs the equipment requested; has the trained personnel to use it; can deploy and maintain it; and does in fact do all of those things in pursuit of military goals that conform with United States policy. Inevitably such requirements plunge American personnel deep into the operational systems of recipient nations, regardless of profiles or any "Nixon Doctrine."

McCain continually exploited this requirement, complaining that no one ever told him what the Nixon Doctrine actually meant, and warning day after day that there was no way of knowing what was happening to the equipment Ladd was requesting and receiving. He disturbed Melvin Laird, who foresaw a Congressional uproar if the equipment was being mislaid, and on December 28, 1970, the Secretary’s opposition to military expansion gave way. In the middle of his morning Vietnamization meeting he called Admiral Moorer to tell him to organize a “Military Equipment Delivery Team” for Cambodia. Kissinger concurred, and the State Department's resistance was overridden. On January 8, 1971, Swank received a joint State-Defense cable: “The purpose of this message is to inform alcon of the decision at the highest level to authorize the activation of a Military Equipment Delivery Team (MEDT) type group for Cambodia.” This was “essential to meet the rapidly increasing demand of an expanding military-assistance program for Cambodia.” But “the retention of as low a U.S. profile as possible” was still “equally important.” Only sixteen of the new team’s sixty officers were to live in Phnom Penh; the rest were to remain in Saigon.

Although Cambodia was considered an extension of Vietnam the program was to be controlled not by Abrams but by McCain in Hawaii; this confirmed the Admiral’s proprietary feelings about the new theater. But the choice of the officer to run the team was left to Abrams; he was not anxious to lose one of his better men, and he chose Theodore Mataksis, a one-star general close to retirement.

Matakis and McCain worked well together. McCain’s cables to Laird for more air power, more ammunition, more heavy equipment, more men were so constant and so predictable that Laird’s staff quipped that he had boiler-plate texts ready for every occasion and merely had to insert the date. Matakis was just as keen to build his own empire, and he understood what the White House wanted in Cambodia. It was, he said later, “a holding action. You know, one of those things like a rear guard you drop off. The troika’s going down the road and the wolves are closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it.”

“That was Cambodia?” he was asked.

Yeah," replied Matakis, "of course it's an overstatement but still...

It was, in fact, hardly any exaggeration, and throughout 1971 Matakis and McCain forced increases in the size of their team and Americanized the Cambodian soldiers before they were to be thrown off the troika.

Soon after he won his battle for control in Cambodia, McCain sent several military survey groups from Hawaii to examine the Cambodian armed forces' supply methods, ammunition procedures, equipment distribution, and so on. Their recommendations were expensive and sophisticated. Matakis agreed; the Khmer system just did not "interface" well with American methods. And so, for example, the old requisition forms, printed in French and Khmer, were replaced by standard American forms. Few Cambodian quartermasters spoke English and in desperation the Cambodians devised a Khmer-English form. Matakis's men refused to let the Cambodians use it, on the grounds that they "had no ability to interface carbon paper between the copies." Matakis had an easy solution; Filipino bookkeepers who understood American logistical methods were imported to take over from Khmer quartermasters.

Matakis also overrode Fred Ladd's decision to buy cheap, simple commercial trucks from Australia and ordered more complicated American military trucks with dual fuel systems. The Cambodians had no idea of how to maintain them. Matakis hired Filipino mechanics and asked the Cambodians to reopen an old truck and repair depot at the town of Lovek, twenty-five miles north of Phnom Penh. This depot had been built with United States aid in the early sixties; when the new vehicles were now brought there they were surrounded by acres of American trucks imported ten years before and then junked. Most of the new machines were soon added to the pile.

As soon as his first group of officers was in Phnom Penh, Matakis began to insist that he needed more men, and McCain bombarded Laird with cables warning that corrupt Cambodians would continue selling their new equipment to the Communists unless more Army officers could be provided to monitor its "end use." In April, McCain demanded another thirty places in Phnom Penh itself; Swank, mindful of Kissinger's low-profile notions, resisted and would agree only to fifteen. The Admiral was annoyed, and on April 17 he cabled Laird to complain: "Ambassador Phnom Penh apparently has instructions to maintain a low U.S. profile, which being vigorously observed, prevents stationing of sufficient MEDTC personnel in Cambodia to do the job." Under the requirements of the Military Assistance Manual, Matakis's duties in monitoring "end use" could have been interpreted in a flexible manner. But neither McCain nor Matakis had any interest in doing so, and McCain insisted that a decision be made "at the national level" as to whether "low visibility" or "end use" was more important. "Should that determination favor low visibility, the United States must accept that we have no way of knowing the equipment being furnished Cambodia is being used and maintained properly and that significant amounts are not going to the VC/NVA."

The increasing demands of the military coincided with a new debate over America's commitment to Cambodia. The first stage had been the NSC deliberations of April 1970; the second was Decision Memorandum 89. Now another bureaucratic dispute began over military aid for the next fiscal year, 1971–72. Once again Kissinger acceded to military demands.

This is not to suggest that "Stage Two" had ever ended. Kissinger had originally set September 30, 1970, as completion date for NSSM 99. In fact, NSSM 99 dragged on through 1971 as the National Security Council commissioned more and more studies from different agencies and offices, accepting some, sending others back for further review. Laird was convinced that the intention was to exclude State and Pentagon from real.

decisions by tying them up with irrelevant material. He and his staff agreed that the original purpose of NSSM 99 had long since been submerged in paperwork. Laird worried that he would never be able to influence final policy; nothing, he complained, was brought to him for review. How long was NSSM 99 going to last?

Some time yet. More meetings, more papers were arranged and commissioned; by the ninth of April there were six different papers under preparation. Most of them were already overtaken by events, but the White House was pushing the departments to complete them all and was planning to hold Senior Review Group meetings on each of them. Then Kissinger sent out another memo on the action to be taken on NSSM 99. It appalled Laird, who considered that Kissinger was simply ignoring key problems; he complained bitterly to his staff that Kissinger had made no mention of negotiations, redeployment rates, over-all strategy, or how far the original objectives of Vietnamization were being met. Above all Kissinger had completely disregarded the political context of the war and was trying to make policy without considering its impact on Congress, on the public, on the over-all defense effort or on the Administration’s general position. These piecemeal studies were dangerous; they almost always resulted in bad decisions, Laird complained. It was essential to try to look at problems in perspective, he said, otherwise the wrong conclusions were inevitable. He found it disturbing that Kissinger presented ideas to the President in this manner.

Laird attempted to arouse William Rogers, but, to his disappointment, the Secretary of State seemed unable to appreciate how his department were being manipulated by the NSSM process. He did not share Laird’s concern about the number of pointless studies the NSC commissioned. “We should cooperate, because they keep Henry busy and they don’t matter. In the real world they have no impact on policy,” he told Laird. (In fact, of course, it was not Kissinger or his staff, but the specialists in the agencies who were kept busy on work that had “no impact.”) Anyway, said Rogers, the final decisions were always political, so what did the studies matter? Laird’s concerns were lost on Rogers.

On June 7, 1971, Kissinger raised the stakes in Cambodia once again. Decision Memorandum 89 had at least paid lip service to the notion of Cambodian neutrality. Now even the theory of it was abandoned. Kissinger informed a meeting of the Senior Review Group that the United States now had three objectives in Cambodia. First, to retain an anti-North Vietnamese government there. Second, to give the Cambodians enough material, “so that they can deny to the NVA most of the rural Khmer population.” Third, to encourage the army to move onto the offensive against the North Vietnamese. He then sent out a memo asking for a new military-assistance plan that would accomplish all this and more.

Laird and his staff considered Kissinger’s request on June 10, three days before The New York Times began to publish the Pentagon Papers. The memorandum of their meeting shows that Laird’s real concern was with the influence that the Joint Chiefs would be able to bring to bear on the aid decision. The Chiefs were already busily pushing the case of McCain and Mataxis for an expanded team in Phnom Penh. To Laird’s horror, they had now gone so far as to demand that the “team” be increased from 60 to 2,000 officers. To Laird it was obviously absurd, but he was anxious lest the White House give it a sympathetic hearing.

His staff had complained to Laird that the Chiefs’ ambitions for Cambodia were identical with those they used to have for Vietnam. One memorandum to the Secretary said, “The question arises: what have we learned in the meantime?” More frightening still was that the White House appeared to accept so much of what the Chiefs had to say. The NSC, Laird grumbled, seemed to think that all the problems of Cambodia could be solved by pumping in more and more men and equipment. From now on, he insisted on June 10, all the studies prepared by the Chiefs must be submitted to him before they went on to the White House. “Let’s keep ahead of the power curve and not let the NSC staff push us too fast,” he said.

As Laird feared, the Chiefs responded to Kissinger's request with ambitious swiftness. They submitted a plan for the Cambodian army to be increased to 220,000 men, for a paramilitary force of 143,000, for a larger United States training program in South Vietnam, a pacification and counterinsurgency effort, and another increase in Mataxis' team, this time to 1,003. It would cost $350 million for the next year; and they claimed it would enable Lon Nol to move into northeast Cambodia against the enemy.

The plan ignored the fact that only 15,000 Communist troops had easily tied down 150,000 government soldiers. It also ignored the spirit of the letter of the Cooper-Church amendment and the economic impact on Cambodia of such an increase in the army. (The Office of International Security Affairs in the Pentagon noted that altogether the plan was a marked change in the character of the U.S. program, which "probably stretches the legal constraints that apply to Cambodia.") The State Department and AID calculated that Cambodian inflation would soar to at least 34 percent if the Chiefs had their way. Higher if, as the Chiefs also wished, economic aid was diverted into military hardware.

To meet these and other objections, the Chiefs produced a revised plan The 220,000 men army remained but, at a stroke, they had cut the cost from $350 million to $275 million. How had this 21 percent saving been achieved? Simply by cutting back the ammunition that the United States would provide to the new Cambodian troops. The Chiefs still ignored the impact of this plan on the Cambodian economy.

The discussions stretched out to Indochina and to General Mataxis, who was still based in Saigon. He took the opportunity to demand that he now be allowed to move with a still bigger staff into Phnom Penh itself. The State Department attempted to show that the position of Fred Ladd would be absurd if Mataxis did so and that Mataxis was incompetent anyway; Swank, however, did not argue strongly for Ladd—his inclination, he says now, was to let the military have the resources they needed. The White House agreed. Just one year after Kissinger and Haig had pressed Ladd to take the post, he was dropped, and although he remained for some time in Phnom Penh, he lost almost all of his original influence. On July 1, 1971, Kissinger sent a memo to Laird and Rogers to say that Nixon had agreed that Mataxis' team in Phnom Penh should be raised to fifty, with another sixty-three back in Saigon. Mataxis, who had just been passed over for promotion to major general, was allowed to move to Phnom Penh himself. The State Department sent Swank a list of ready-made answers to give at a press conference, to show how delighted he was. Once again the expansionists were carrying the day. In Washington, members of the Senior Review Group then received a memo from Kissinger (signed by Haig) confirming that the National Security Council had agreed to the Joint Chiefs' main proposal. The Cambodian army was to be increased to 220,000 by January 1973. The troika gathered speed, but the wolves were never left behind.

By now the militarization of policy was well under way both at home and abroad. The National Security Council's relationship with the Chiefs was never closer (by the end of the year it was damaged to some degree by the revelation that the Chiefs had been spying on Kissinger), and somewhat to Kissinger's discomfiture, Haig was in the ascendant on the NSC itself, importing other officers to serve with him. In Phnom Penh a new prefabricated building was put up to house Mataxis' empire. Every other person on the embassy staff was now a military man. One of the embattled diplomats later complained that "Swank was just the doorkeeper to a Pentagon whorehouse." Apart from Mataxis' men, there was also a large military attaché's office. Its role needs to be examined briefly, because it contributed to the internal entanglements of the embassy. Defense attachés are employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, an organization with serious difficulties. It is supposed to provide intelligence and analysis for both the Chief and the Secretary; but, as we have seen, the two often disagreed. Furthermore, it has usually been staffed either by officers on short tours whose analyses tend to reflect the biases and budgetary requests of their own services, or by aging colonels who have been put out to pasture. When Lieutenant General Donald Bennett took it over in 1969, he immediately sacked thirty-eight attachés for incompetence; many marginal cases, like Colonel William Pietsch in Phnom Penh, remained. After his summary removal in 1970, he was replaced by Colonel Harry Amos.

A member of the class of ’46 from West Point, Amos had served in Phnom Penh in the early sixties. He was a meticulous, rather taciturn soldier nearing the end of his career, and he liked the Cambodians. But from the beginning he advocated large-scale military aid to Cambodia. He disagreed with Ladd’s proposals for minimum unconventional support and agreed with the Chiefs that the Cambodian army should be built into as large and fully equipped a fighting force as possible.

Amos took the secondary, diplomatic function of his office seriously and appointed one of his most gifted subordinates, Captain Peter Piazza, as his “Protocol Officer.” Piazza was a good intelligence officer, and his analyses of the Cambodian army’s problems were excellent. But he found himself spending time arranging cocktail parties where the attachés indulged in low-grade spying on each other and he had to translate the Soviet attaché’s bad jokes. To cheer himself up, Piazza adapted a Gilbert and Sullivan song to describe his predicament:

I am the very model of an Officer of Protocol,

I know the social graces, I drink anything that’s potable.

I smile at the Ambassador with unctuous insincerity,

I sneer at lower ranks as if my presence were a charity.

Although I’m just a captain, at my job I’m very serious.

When making seat arrangements, I’ve authority imperious.

In short, in matters sociable, promotable, and potable

I am the very model of an Officer of Protocol.

The principal task of the attachés was to travel to the various fronts of the war and report daily on the state of the fighting. This they did diligently. But one of the serious problems they and Mataxis’ men, who

inspected "end-use" of equipment, faced was the Congressional prohibition on giving combat advice to the Cambodians. The line between reporting and advising was often impossible to draw. Certainly it was impossible for most Cambodian officers to comprehend. They tended not unreasonably to assume that the Americans were in Cambodia to help them. The arcane constraints of American politics and legislation were not persuasive to an ill-trained Khmer captain under enemy fire in a bunker along Route Five.

Amos' attachés were on the whole disciplined, and some, like Piazza and Major Alan Armstrong, who served two tours during the war, were gifted soldiers. They contrasted well with the Mataxis team. Members of the team tended to behave as a military "in" group; hardly any of them spoke French, their tours were very short, and few had any understanding of the country. Their conduct was often raucous, and they accepted girls from Cambodian officers. They offered advice; they tended to tolerate military corruption. By his own admission Mataxis was generous both in the way he interpreted Congressional restrictions and in the manner he treated commanders who padded their payrolls at United States expense. "I had been long enough in Asia to consider corruption part of life, unlike some of those pristine young guys from State," he said later. In very serious cases he used to intervene, telling the Cambodians, "We don't want to upset the embassy, do we?"

Swank did his best to restrain Mataxis and to limit the visits of his team members to the field. But the General, aware of his backing in Hawaii and Washington, was cavalier; he ignored Swank's instructions if he disagreed with them and, so that Swank should not see his cables, he flew them to Saigon for dispatch to Washington or Hawaii. Today Mataxis makes no secret of his contempt for Swank, whose main concern, he says, was to avoid getting a bad press.

In fact, very few stories about the extraordinary factionalism of the embassy surfaced in the press. Partly this was because everyone, from Swank down, was conscious of the intense displeasure with which the White House read revealing reports from Cambodia and so was cautious with journalists. But it was also because the media in general treated the war as the administration did—as a sideshow. Most journalists loved Phnom Penh, but few American or European papers had full-time correspondents there. Their Saigon correspondents paid occasional visits; for the rest of the time they relied on stringers. Many of these worked extremely hard (they wrote far more than their editors wanted to publish), but, as well as often being antiwar, they were usually also young, inexperienced

and poorly paid. As a group they appealed little to American embassy officials, and there was scant contact, let alone socializing, between them. Many journalists spent their evenings in Madame Chantal’s delightful opium parlor. French and other diplomats would join them; it was an excellent place to relax, to gossip, and to try to forget the sadness of this war, but American embassy staff were not allowed to go there.

It was hard to gather information from other sources. In Vietnam, reporters were recognized officially and given access and superb transport facilities. In Cambodia, the United States embassy claimed that there was nothing they could do, that everything was run by the Khmers. Privately, embassy officials urged that the Khmers not help reporters, and even deny them seats on helicopters or military planes. In at least one case, an embassy official asked the Cambodian government to expel an American reporter. To travel by taxi to the fighting was extremely dangerous, because the roads were always being cut, if only for short periods, by the Communists. Very few reporters who were captured ever returned; altogether, during the war twenty-one Western and Japanese journalists were lost. It was very inhibiting, and it helps to explain why so few of Amos’ or Mataxis’ men were ever discovered giving combat advice on the battlefield. Once, reporters out in the field did come across Amos himself with a group of Cambodian officers; they were poring over a map spread on the hood of a jeep. When Amos saw them he tried to disguise himself by speaking French. But Alabama accents are hard to conceal.

It was only after Mataxis won his battle with Ladd that any mention of the feud appeared in the press. The first story, in September 1971, was written by Craig Whitney, The New York Times Saigon correspondent. It was followed by a stronger and substantially accurate account in Newsweek, written by its stringer, Sylvana Foa, after talks with Ladd and others. Her story suggested that Swank was “knuckling under” to pressure to increase the military establishment, and that Ladd was being eclipsed by Mataxis.

She quoted one embassy official as saying that one reason for the buildup was that officers displaced from Saigon by Vietnamization were anxious for new work—“These men are worried about their careers and you don’t become a general sitting behind a desk in Washington.” She also suggested that some of Mataxis’ men were directly advising Cambodian troops.

The only serious error in the article was the suggestion that the outcome of the battle was yet to be decided. Mataxis had, in fact, already won. But the White House was said to be furious, and Swank also reacted angrily, cabling Rogers to give him "the background on the reprehensible and indeed, vicious story" that Foa had written. He charged that her editors had shown her Whitney's article and that "she was in effect given instructions to exploit this theme." She had talked to Fred Ladd and other officials socially and had attended two of Swank's "backgrounders," but "nothing in these contacts or backgrounders furnished a basis for the quotations attributed by Newsweek to embassy of U.S. officials."

Swank suggested that her material, "itself probably a composite of inaccuracies, was further edited and embellished in Washington or New York." He asked the State Department to deny that there were any rifts in the embassy and claimed that since July "We now have here what in old-fashioned language has been called a fine team spirit." This was not so, and Foa was correct to state that embassy officials gave advice to combat troops; it was often unavoidable. (Indeed a few days before her piece appeared, an indiscretion by Admiral McCain had caused a short flap in the Pentagon. He had cabled to suggest that more "U.S. advisors" should be sent to the country. When rebuked for using the term so openly, he offered to withdraw the cable formally. He was told by Laird's office that this would only draw attention to it and instead he should call the field and order all copies destroyed.)

The State Department declined to rebut Foa’s story, but Swank wrote to her and to Newsweek to complain. The magazine published the Ambassador’s rebuttal and noted that the magazine stood by their story. The affair lingered and reinforced the mutual distrust between embassy and the press corps, which had begun with Joseph Kraft’s story about Colonel Pietsch in June 1970 and had gradually hardened. Reporting of the war continued to be a sporadic affair and, at least until 1973, the embassy was able to proceed sheltered, as the White House wished it to be, from fully informed criticism.

It was not only the press who were hampered in their work. When the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent teams to report on the war, the embassy was encouraged by Washington to make their work as difficult as possible and to withhold all information they could possibly manage. The Joint Chiefs were able to suppress one 1971 House report that they considered, rightly, critical. It has still not been published.