The Secret : Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
The Secret
THE FIRST request was unpretentious. On February 9, 1969, less than a
month after the inauguration of Richard Nixon, General Creighton
Abrams, commander of United States forces in South Vietnam, cabled General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to in-form him that "recent information, developed from photo reconnaissance and a rallier gives us hard intelligence on COSVN HQ facilities in Base
Area 353."
COSVN HQ was the acronym for the elusive headquarters—"Central
Office for South Vietnam"—from which, according to the United States military, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were directing their war effort in South Vietnam. Until then, Abrams remarked, the military had placed COSVN in Laos. Now he was certain the headquarters was much farther south, in one of neutral Cambodia's border states which were being used by the Communists as bases and sanctuaries from the fighting in Vietnam. Abrams wanted to attack it.The area is covered by thick canopy jungle. Source reports there are no concrete structures in this area. Usually reliable sources report that COSVN and COSVN-associated elements consistently remain in the same general area along the border. All our information, generally confirmed by imagery interpretation, provides us with a firm basis for targeting COSVN HQs.
Already Abrams had been instructed by the new administration to discuss United States troop withdrawals with the South Vietnamese. Now he reminded Wheeler that he had predicted a large-scale enemy offensive around Saigon in the near future. An attack on COSVN, he argued, "will have an immediate effect on the offensive and will also have its effect on future military offensives which COSVN may desire to undertake." An appropriate form of assault would be "a short-duration, concentrated B-52 attack of up to 60 sorties, compressing the time interval between strikes to the minimum. This is more than we would normally use to cover a target this size, but in this case, it would be wise to ensure complete destruction."
Abrams seems to have understood some of the implications of this request. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s ruler, had long been trying to keep his country out of the war in Vietnam. Abrams assured Wheeler that "there is little likelihood of involving Cambodian nationals if the target boxes are placed carefully. Total bomber exposure over Cambodian territory would be less than one minute per sortie." (Put another way, sixty sorties would take about one hour.) The general also thought it necessary to point out that "the successful destruction of COSVN HQs in a single blow would, I believe, have a very significant impact on enemy operations throughout South Vietnam." He asked for authority for the attack.
The Joint Chiefs sent Abrams' memo up to Melvin R. Laird, a former Wisconsin Republican Congressman, who was the new Secretary of Defense. Laird passed it to the White House, where it received the immediate attention of the new President and his National Security Affairs adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger.
Two days later General John P. McConnell, the acting chairman in Wheeler's absence, sent a reply that must have cheered Abrams: it indicated that Washington was taking the idea even more seriously than Abrams himself. His request to Wheeler had not been highly classified, but simply headed “Personal for Addressees.” McConnell’s answer, however, was routed so that almost no one but he and Abrams could see it and was plastered with classifications: “Top Secret” — “Sensitive” — “Eyes Only” — “Delivery During Waking Hours” — “Personal for Addressees Eyes Only.”
McConnell told Abrams that his request had been presented to “the highest authority.” In the conventions of cable language, this meant that President Nixon himself had seen it. The President had not rejected the idea; Abrams was told that “this matter will be further considered.”
2. The highest authority desires that this matter be held as closely as possible in all channels and in all agencies which have had access to it.
3.The highest authority also wants your estimate on the number of Cambodian civilians who might become casualties of such an attack.
4. It will not, repeat not, be necessary for you to send a briefing team to Washington. However, it will be important for you to keep me informed on any further developments from your viewpoint. Warm regards.
Despite McConnell's advice, Abrams did send a briefing team to Washington. Two colonels arrived at the Pentagon, and a special breakfast meeting was arranged at which they could explain Abrams' proposals to a number of senior officials. These included Melvin Laird, General Wheeler, Colonel Robert Pursley, Laird's military assistant, and Lieutenant General John Vogt, then the Air Force's Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations. The meeting was also attended by a representative from Dr. Kissinger's National Security Council staff, Colonel Alexander Haig.
Before a final decision was made, the Chiefs cabled Abrams to tell him that he could make tentative plans for launching the strike on the early morning of March 18. He was told of the demands for secrecy and was given a code name for the operation—“Breakfast,” after the Pentagon briefing.
The cable set out in detail the way in which the raids were to be concealed. The planes would be prepared for a normal mission against Vietnam. If the Joint Chiefs sent the signal “Execute repeat Execute Operation Breakfast,” they would then be diverted to attack the Cambodian base area. No announcement would be made. “Due to sensitivity of this operation addressees insure thatpersonnel are informed only on a strict need-to-know basis and at the latest feasible time which permits the operation to be conducted effectively.”
Abrams made the necessary dispositions, and on March 17 Wheeler cabled him: “Strike on COSVN headquarters is approved. Forty-eight sorties will be flown against COSVN headquarters. Twelve strikes will be flown against legitimate targets of your choice in SVN not repeat not near the Cambodian border.” (Emphasis added)
The strikes were to take place almost at once, between three o’clock and seven o’clock on the morning of March 18, unless Abrams received a priority “Red Rocket...” message “Cancel repeat Cancel Operation Breakfast.”
The cable described how the press was to be handled. When the command in Saigon published its daily bombing summary, it should state that, “B-52 missions in six strikes early this morning bombed these targets: QUOTE Enemy activity, base camps, and bunker and tunnel complexes45 kilometers north-east of Tay Ninh City. UNQUOTE. Following the above, list two or more other B-52 targets struck (12 sorties).”
Wheeler continued:
“In the event press inquiries are received following the execution of the Breakfast Plan as to whether or not U.S. B-52s have struck in Cambodia, U.S. spokesman will confirm that B-52s did strike on routine missions adjacent to the Cambodian border but state that press has no details and will look into this question. Should the press persist in its inquiries or in the event of a Cambodian protest confirming U.S. strikes in Cambodia, U.S. spokesman will neither confirm nor deny reports of attacks on Cambodia but state it will be investigated. After delivering a reply to any Cambodian protest, Washington will inform the press that we have apologized and offered compensation.”
Finally, Wheeler reminded Abrams and the B-52 commanders, “Due to the sensitivity of this operation all persons who know of 1 it, who participate.
Many of the B-52s used in Indochina were based at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. The planes had been built in the 1950s as an integral part of the United States' nuclear deterrent, but since 1965 more than a hundred of them had been adapted to carry dozens of conventional 750-lb. bombs in their bellies and under their wings. They were still controlled by Strategic Air Command but were at the disposition of the Commander of U.S. Forces in South Vietnam. Abrams could call upon sixty planes a day. Each plane could carry a load of approximately thirty tons of bombs. Before takeoff, the crews of the B-52s were always briefed on the location of their targets in South Vietnam. After Wheeler's March 17 "Execute Operation Breakfast" order was received, the pilots and navigators of the planes to be diverted were taken aside by their commanding officer and told to expect the ground controllers in Vietnam to give them the coordinates of new targets—they would be bombing Cambodia. That evening the heavily laden planes rumbled off the long runway, rose slowly over the Russian trawlers, which almost always seemed to be on station just off the island, and climbed to 30,000 feet for the monotonous five-hour cruise to Indochina. There was little for the six-man crew to do—except watch for storm clouds over the Philippines and refuel in mid-air—until they were above the South China Sea approaching the dark line of the Vietnamese coast.
The Daniel Boone teams entered Cambodia all along its 500-mile frontier with South Vietnam from the lonely, craggy, impenetrable mountain forests in the north, down to the well-populated and thickly reeded water-ways along the Mekong river. There was a quality of fantasy about the missions. They usually contained two or three Americans and up to ten local mercenaries, often recruited from the hill tribes of the area. All the Americans were volunteers, and they were enjoined to the strictest secrecy: the release they had to sign subjected them to a $10,000 fine and up to ten years' imprisonment for disclosing details of the forays. Because the missions were supposed to be what the Army called "sterile," the Americans either wore uniforms that could not be traced to any American unit or were disguised in the black pajamas of the Viet Cong. They carried what had become by the middle '60s the universal symbol of revolution, the Soviet-designed AK-47 automatic rifle made in China. Deaths were reported to relatives as having occurred "along the border."
These and other precautions helped conceal the work from the American press and the Congress. But black pajamas do not really hide well-fed Caucasians prowling around Southeast Asian jungles. Teams often found that, within two hours of being "inserted" by helicopter (parachutes were not used, because the Americans fell so much faster than the Vietnamese), their opponents had put trackers onto them. Their reconnaissance mission abandoned, they had to flee through the jungle or crawl through the thick fifteen-foot grass, evading their stalkers until they could find a suitable clearing to call helicopter support for rescue.
Randolph Harrison, who saw himself then as a "gung-ho lieutenant," arrived at the Special Forces headquarters in Ban Me Thuot, in the Central Highlands, in August 1968. He was given command of one of the reconnaissance companies, and he made his first mission into Cambodia.
"On November 17, 1968, just after the American people, in the hope of peace, narrowly elected Nixon. At this time there was no consensus within the United States' intelligence establishment on the extent to which the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were using Cambodia as a sanctuary or as a supply route, but Harrison was shocked by the evidence he saw of the enemy's insouciance just across the border from his own camp.
"There were hard-surface roads, those concrete reinforced bunkers. I personally found some abandoned base camps that were acres in size," he said later. "When you get an opportunity to see that blatant an example of their presence there, you scream and beg and do everything you can to get somebody to come in there and blast them." What he and his friends wanted most of all, he said, were B-52 "Arclight" strikes.
"We had been told, as had everybody... that those carpet bombing attacks by B-52s [were] totally devastating, that nothing could survive, and if they had a troop concentration there it would be annihilated." They were enthusiastic when, on the morning of March 18, Major Michael Eiland, the Daniel Boone Operations officer, came up from Saigon to tell them of Operation Breakfast. He ordered a reconnaissance team into Area 353 by helicopter to pick up any possible Communist survivors. "We were told that... if there was anybody still alive out there they would be so stunned that all [we would] have to do [was] walk over and lead him by the arm to the helicopter."
Captain Bill Orthman was chosen to lead this team; he was given a radio operator named Barry Murphy and eleven Vietnamese. All were confident and rather excited. They were flown over the border and landed in rubble and craters. After the helicopters had taken off, the Daniel Boone men moved toward the tree line in search of their dead or dazed enemy. But within moments they were, in Harrison's words, "slaughtered." The B-52 raid had not wiped out all the Communists as the Special Forces men had been promised. Instead, its effect, as Harrison said, had been "the same as taking a beehive the size of a basketball and poking it with a stick. They were mad."zThe Communists fired at them from behind the trees on three sides. Three of the Vietnamese soldiers were immediately hit and Orthman him-self was shot both in the leg and in the stomach. The group split apart and Orthman stumbled toward a bomb crater. Then a C.S. gas grenade in his rucksack burst into flames, searing the flesh off his back and his left arm. Barry Murphy threw himself into another crater and radioed frantically for the helicopters to return. Back at base they heard his call, "This is Bullet We’ve got four wounded and are taking fire from all directions.
We don’t… Oh God! I’m hit! I’m hit! My leg! Ow! I’m…
My back again! I can’t move!” His last scream was indecipherable.
Eventually, one helicopter managed to come back down through the automatic-weapons fire to pick up the survivors. Orthman was saved because a friend jumped out and rushed across the ground to carry him aboard. Three of the Vietnamese made it to the helicopter; Barry Murphy’s body was not recovered.
Despite the setback, another reconnaissance team was immediately ordered to take off for Cambodia to gather “dazed” Viet Cong. Their earlier enthusiasm for the mission was now gone and in a rare breach of discipline, the Daniel Boone men refused. Three of them were arrested.
“You can’t be court-martialed for refusing to violate the neutrality of Cambodia,” Randolph Harrison reassured them. They were not.
As that night fell over Indochina, day was beginning in Washington. In his basement office in the White House, Henry Kissinger was discussing a point of policy with Morton Halperin, a young political scientist who had worked in the Pentagon during the previous administration and was now Kissinger’s assistant for planning.
As the two men were talking, Colonel Alexander Haig came into the room and handed Kissinger a paper. As he read it, Halperin noticed, Kissinger smiled. He turned to Halperin and said that the United States had bombed a base in Cambodia and the first bomb-damage assessment showed that the attack had set off many secondary explosions. What did Halperin think of that? Halperin, who knew nothing of Breakfast, made a noncommittal answer. Kissinger told him that he was placing great trust in him and he must respect the confidence; almost no one else knew about the attack and no one else must know.
In his February 9 cable, Abrams had asked for a single attack to destroy COSVN headquarters. But once the decision had been made in principle that Communist violations of Cambodia's neutrality justified aggressive reciprocal action, it was not difficult to repeat the performance. The first mission had not been discovered by the press, nor had Cambodia protested. Indeed, it would now have been hard for the White House to insist on only one attack: Base Area 353 was, according to Abrams' headquarters, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), only one of fifteen Communist sanctuaries.
Over the next fourteen months 3,630 B-52 raids were flown against suspected Communist bases along different areas of Cambodia's border.Breakfast was followed by "Lunch," Lunch by "Snack," Snack by Dinner," Dinner by "Dessert," Dessert by "Supper," as the program expanded to cover one "sanctuary" after another. Collectively, the operation was known as "Menu."
In 1973, after the bombing was finally discovered, both Nixon and Kissinger maintained, and still maintain, that the secrecy was necessary to protect Sihanouk, who was variously described as"acquiescing in," "approving," "allowing" or even "encouraging" the raids, so long as they were covert. They maintained that the areas were unpopulated and that only Vietnamese Communist troops, legitimate targets, were there. When he was confirmed as Secretary of State in 1973, for example, Kissinger declared that "It was not a bombing of Cambodia, but it was a bombing of North Vietnamese in Cambodia," and "the Prince as a minimum acquiesced in the bombing of unpopulated border areas." In 1976 he stated that "the government concerned [Sihanouk's] never once protested, and indeed told us that if we bombed unpopulated areas they would not notice." In fact, the evidence of Sihanouk's "acquiescence" is at least questionable, and the assertion that no Cambodians lived in these areas not only was untrue, but was known to be untrue at the time. The Joint Chiefs themselves informed the administration as early as April 1969 that many of the sanctuary areas were populated by Cambodians who might be endangered by bombing raids. The White House was to ignore this reservation.
The Chiefs' description of the bases is contained in a memorandum of April 9, 1969, written for the Secretary of Defense, in which they adyo. cated invasion as well as bombing of Cambodia. Its conclusions were based on "Giant Dragon" high-altitude overflights. "Dorsal Fin" lowlevel acrial surveys and the Daniel Boone ground forays, among other evidence. It described the military purpose as well as the nature of each of the fifteen bases they had identified, and went on to estimate the number of Cambodians they contained. The figures are worth considering.
Base Area 353, Breakfast, covered 25 square kilometers and had a total population of approximately 1,640 Cambodians, of whom the Joint Chiefs beckoned 1,000 to be peasants. There were, according to the Chiefs, thirteen Cambodian towns in the area. (Villages would be a more accurate description.)
Base Area 609, Lunch, was north, near the Laotian border, in wig wenntry without any towns. The Chiefs asserted that there were an can mated 198 Cambodians there, all of them peasants.
Base Area 351, "Snack," covered 101 square kilometers and had an estimated population of 383 Cambodians, of whom 303 were considered peasants. Therewas one town in the area.
Base Area 352, "Dinner," had an estimated Cambodian population of 770, of whom 700 were peasants. It also contained one town.
Base Area 350, "Dessert," had an estimated Cambodian population of 120, all of whom were peasants.
The Chiefs believed that all these “sanctuaries” should be attacked. They attempted to estimate how many Cambodians would be killed; they maintained that, as the Cambodians lived apart from the Vietnamese troops, their casualties would be “minimal.” But they conceded that such calculations depended on many variables and were “tenuous at best.” There was no pretense that the raids could occur without danger to the Cambodians—“some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation.” And they agreed that “the surprise effect of attacks could tend to increase casualties, as could the probable lack of protective shelters around Cambodian homes to the extent that exists in South Vietnam.” Cambodian peasants, unlike the Vietnamese, had little experience of being bombed.
Some scruples, however, were brought to bear. Three of the fifteen sanctuaries—base areas 704, 354 and 707, which had “sizeable concentrations of Cambodian civilian or military population” in or around them—were not recommended for attack at all. (The definition of “sizeable” is not known; presumably it was higher than the 1,640 Cambodians living in the Breakfast site, which they had approved.) The Chiefs’ warning seems to have made no difference. Base Area 704 appeared on the White House’s Menu as Supper. In the course of events, 247 B-52 missions were flown against it.
Because of Nixon’s repeated insistence on total secrecy, few senior officials were told about Menu. The Secretary of the Air Force, Dr. Robert Seamans, was kept in ignorance; since he is not in the chain of command, this was not illegal, but General Wheeler later said that, if necessary, he would have lied to him and denied that the raids were taking place. The Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General John Ryan, was not informed; nor were the Cambodian desk officers on Abrams’ intelligence arm in Saigon, the Office of Strategic Research and Analysis. Nor were Congressional committees, whose duty it is to recommend appropriations and thus enable the Congress to fulfill its constitutional function of authorizing and funding war, was notified that the President had decided to carry war into a third country, whose neutrality the United States professed to respect. Instead, only a few sympathetic members of Congress.
who had no constitutional authority to approve this extension of war, were quietly informed.
But if Congress and the public were easily kept in ignorance, the official record-keeping system required more sophisticated treatment. The Pentagon's computers demanded, for purposes of logistics, a complete record of hours flown, fuel expended, ordnance dropped, spare parts procured. In response to Nixon's demands for total and unassailable secrecy, the military devised an ingenious system that the Joint Chiefs liked to describe as "dual reporting."
Whether they flew from Guam, from Okinawa, or from Thailand, most B-52 missions over South Vietnam were guided to their targets by the “Skyspot” ground radar controllers at one of four radar sites in the country. The controllers received details—known as the “frag”—of the proposed strike after it had been approved in Washington. From the “frag,” they calculated the range and bearing of the target from the radar site and the altitude, airspeed and ballistics of the bomb load. They then guided the planes down a narrow radar beam to target.
After missions were completed, B-52 crews reported what primary or secondary explosions they had seen to their debriefing officer at base, and the ground controllers sent their own poststrike reports to Saigon. Both reports entered the Pentagon computers and the official history of the war.
The procedures for Menu were modeled on Operation Breakfast. After a normal briefing on targets in Vietnam, the pilots and navigators of the planes that were to be diverted that night were told privately to expect the ground controllers to direct them to drop their bombs on a set of coordinates that were different from those they had just received. It was not a wide diversion; the South Vietnamese cover targets were usually selected so that the planes could simply fly another few kilometers beyond, until they were over the Cambodian target.
Major Hal Knight of Memphis was, for much of 1969, supervisor of the radar crews for the region of Vietnam that lay between Saigon and the Cambodian border. Every afternoon before a Menu mission, a special Strategic Air Command courier flight came to Bien Hoa airbase, where he worked, and he was handed a plain manila envelope containing an ordinary poststrike report form on which target coordinates had already been filled in. He locked it in his desk until evening and then, when the shift had assembled, gave the coordinates to his radar crew. They fed them through their Olivetti 101 computers to produce the details of the final bombing run for the new Cambodian target. These were called to the navigators when the B-52s arrived on station overhead in the early-morning dark.
After the bombs were released, the plane's radio operator—who was not supposed to know of the diversion—called his base by high-frequency radio to say that the mission had been accomplished. At base, the intelligence division, which also knew nothing of the change, entered the original South Vietnamese coordinates on the poststrike report. When the crews landed and were debriefed they were asked routine questions about malfunction, bomb damage and weather. The pilots and navigators were to make no mention of the new target—they had, after all, been forewarned, so it did not really count as a diversion.
At Bien Hoa itself Knight was under instructions to gather up every scrap of paper and tape with which the bombing had been plotted and lock them in his desk until daybreak. Only then (his superiors were afraid that pieces of paper might be dropped in the dark) was he to take the documents to an incinerator behind the hut and very carefully burn them. He was then to call a Saigon number he had been given—it was at Strategic Air Command Advanced Echelon—in order to tell the unidentified man who answered the telephone that "the ball game is over." The normal poststrike reports from the radar site were filled out with the coordinates of the original South Vietnamese cover target and sent, in the ordinary way, to Saigon by security mail. The night's mission over Cambodia entered the records as having taken place in Vietnam. The bombing was not merely concealed; the official, secret records showed that it had never happened.
The system worked well by the book, but it took no account of the attitudes of the men who were expected to implement it. Hal Knight, for example, accepted the military logic of bombing Cambodia but intensely disliked this procedure. Strategic Air Command is responsible for the nation's nuclear defense, and falsification of its reporting process was, for him, alarming; Knight had been trained to believe that accurate reporting was "pretty near sacred." He was especially concerned that he was violating Article 107 of the Military Code of Justice, which provides that anyone "who, with intent to deceive, signs any false record, return, regulation, order or other official document, knowing the same to be false ... shall be punished as a court martial may direct."
Red tape protects as well as restricts, and Knight feared that the institutional safeguards and controls that are integral to the maintenance of
discipline and of a loyal, law-abiding army were being discarded. He did not know at what level the bombing had been authorized or whom these unprecedented procedures were supposed to deceive; but he did appreciate, to his dismay, that the practice gave him horrifying license.
A normal target was known to many people at the radar site, to the entire B-52 crew, to the intelligence unit at the plane's base and to dozens of Pentagon officials; a Menu mission was known only to him and a few others. There was nothing to stop him from choosing the coordinates of a town in South Vietnam or Cambodia and having it bombed. Indeed, "if someone could have punched the right number into the right spot they could have had us bombing China," he observed later.
Knight discussed the falsification with other radar operators on other sites; they too found it hard to explain. If confidentiality were so important, why not simply raise the classification from "Secret" to "Top Secret"? He asked his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Patterson, about it; he was told not to do so.
"So I said, well, what is the purpose of it?"
Patterson replied, "Well, the purpose is to hide these raids."
"Who from?" asked Knight.
He was apparently told, "Well, I guess the Foreign Relations Committee."
The Foreign Relations Committee did not find out about the unauthorized and illegal extension of the war into a neutral country until 1973, when Knight himself wrote to Congress to complain. But even under the restrictions imposed, the campaign was, to paraphrase Dean Rusk, known to the President, two members of the NSC, a couple of State Department officials, and three hundred colonels in the Pentagon.
One evening soon after the raids began, the pilot of a Forward Air Control plane (FAC), which guided fighter bombers to their targets in South Vietnam, was sitting outside his hooch at An Loc, a few miles from the Cambodian border. "We saw beacons going overhead to the West," said Captain Gerald Greven later. "We saw the flames in the distance and the trembling of the ground from what appeared to be B-52 strikes." He was surprised, because he knew of no targets in that area. The next morning he flew to find the craters, and "to my astonishment they were on the West side of the river separating the borders of South Vietnam and Cambodia."
Greven was impressed by the amount of destruction the raids had caused, but puzzled. "I went back to my commander and he said he had no knowledge of the strike and why it had taken place." He spoke to the regional commander for the Forward Air Controllers—"he also declared to have no knowledge." He then went on to Air Support headquarters at Bien Hoa and spoke to the commanding officer. "I was told, with a slight smile, that obviously my 'maps were in error.' Greven correctly took that to mean that he "did not have a need to know." He asked no more questions. But eventually he, too, contacted Congress.
William Beecher was The New York Times Pentagon correspondent, a diligent reporter. After Nixon’s victory in November 1968, Beecher asked his contacts in the Defense Department how they would advise the new President to extricate American troops from Vietnam. He was told that one possible way of “buying time” would be to bomb the sanctuaries. Beecher noted this hypothesis and by April 1969 began to suspect that it was being carried out. The Pentagon was reporting its bombing strikes in South Vietnam near the Cambodian border, but he knew that no targets were there. And, despite the special “security precautions,” information began to leak almost at once. On March 26, one week after the Breakfast mission, The New York Times reported briefly but accurately that Abrams had requested B-52 strikes against the sanctuaries. Ronald Ziegler, the White House Press Secretary, was quoted as giving a “qualified denial” to the reports. “He said that to his knowledge no request had reached the President’s desk.” This story was followed by comments—in U.S. News & World Report and by columnist C. L. Sulzberger in The New York Times—urging that Nixon do what he had in fact already begun. But only Beecher took the trouble to follow the obvious lead that any “qualified denial” offers. He revisited those to whom he had talked at the end of 1968, and on May 9 he revealed in the Times that “American B-52 bombers have raided several Viet Cong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia for the first time, according to Nixon Administration sources, but Cambodia has not made any protest.”
Beecher wrote that the bombing had started because of the increase in supplies reaching South Vietnam by sea and through Cambodia, supplies that “never have to run any sort of bombing gauntlet before they enter South Vietnam.” He claimed that Prince Sihanouk had dropped hints that he would not oppose American pursuit of Communist forces which he was himself unable to dislodge. Perhaps most important, Beecher stated that the bombing was intended “to signal” Hanoi that the Nixon administration while pressing for peace in Paris, is willing to take some military risks avoided by the previous Administration ... to demonstrate that the Nixon Administration is different and tougher."
The revelation aroused no public interest. Four years later, this same account was to cause at least a short-lived uproar and spark demands for impeachment, but at the time it had little obvious effect. There was no press follow-up, and no members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee or the Appropriations Committee voiced concern. In Key Biscayne, however, where Nixon committees voiced concern, the article provoked reactions that verged on hysteria.
After reading the story with Nixon, Kissinger spent much of his morning on the telephone with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. According to Hoover’s detailed memoranda of the conversations, Kissinger asked him, in his first call at 10:35 A.M., to make "a major effort to find out where [the story] came from." A half hour later Kissinger telephoned again to say that while the FBI was about it they should try to find the sources of previous Beecher stories as well. Hoover replied that he would call back the next day with any information they had managed to gather. But within two hours Kissinger was on the line again, this time to ask Hoover to be sure he was discreet "so no stories will get out." Just how the Director liked being told how to protect his beloved FBI is not recorded, but Hoover assured Kissinger that discretion would be maintained; he decided, he said, not to contact Beecher directly but to try to divine the source of the story from other reporters.
That afternoon, relaxing by the swimming pool with other members of the National Security Council staff, Kissinger invited his aide Morton Halperin to walk with him down the beach. Strolling along the sand, Kissinger told him of the great concern he felt over the Beecher leak. Halperin knew Kissinger well; they had been together at Harvard. He recalls that Kissinger assured him of his personal trust in him but re- minded him that there were others in the Nixon administration who were suspicious of Halperin’s New York and Harvard background and the fact that he had worked in McNamara’s Pentagon. It was he who was sus- pected of leaking to Beecher. Halperin replied that he could not have been the source; after all, it was only by chance (and Kissinger’s indiscre- tion) that he knew anything about the bombing. Kissinger apparently agreed that this was so, but said that he was under great pressure from other members of the administration and the White House.
Kissinger now proposed an ingenious way of justifying his confidence in Halperin to the others, so that he could not possibly be held responsible
for any future leaks; Kissinger suggested that he be taken off the distribution list for highly classified material. Then, when a leak next occurred, he would be above suspicion and also retroactively cleared.
Halperin did not find the arrangement amusing; he had been dealing with classified materials for years and had never been asked to prove his loyalty. But Kissinger was such an old friend and presented his case with such charm and solicitousness, Halperin recalls, that he agreed to the proposal.
Kissinger and Hoover talked once more that day. At 5:05 P.M. the FBI director telephoned to report his progress. To judge by Hoover's memo, it was a bizarre conversation.
Hoover told Kissinger that Beecher "frequented" the Pentagon press office (hardly a surprising piece of information, in view of the fact that he was a Pentagon correspondent). There were still many pro-Kennedy people in the Pentagon, Hoover remarked, and they all fed Beecher with information. But on this occasion he was convinced that Morton Halperin was the culprit. According to FBI files, Halperin believed the United States had "erred in the Vietnam commitment"; moreover, the Canadian Mounted Police had discovered that he was on the mailing list of a Communist publication, "Problems of Peace and Socialism." Both Halperin and Beecher were members of the "Harvard clique" (as, of course, was Kissinger), and it was clear where the blame must lie. At the end of his memo Hoover noted, in words which resonate down the years, "Dr. Kissinger said he appreciated this very much and he hoped I would follow it up as far as we can take it, and they will destroy whoever did this if we find him, no matter where he is."
That same afternoon the FBI placed a wiretap on Halperin's home in Bethesda, a bedroom suburb of Washington. This tap was immediately followed by others. In important, specific detail, these taps infringed the limits of the law. They marked the first of the domestic abuses of power now known as Watergate.
Night after night through the summer, fall and winter of 1969 and into the early months of 1970 the eight-engined planes passed west over South Vietnam and on to Cambodia. Peasants were killed—no one knows how many—and Communist logistics were somewhat disrupted. To avoid the attacks, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong pushed their sanctuaries and supply bases deeper into the country, and the area that the B-52s bombarded expanded as the year passed. The war spread.
*For a brief statement of the law, see footnote to p. 107.*
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