The War

 CHAPTER 4 

The War

It was to be the expansion of the United States involvement in the region that precipitated Sihanouk's disappearance. If Sihanouk had been walking a tightrope, then as the interests of the superpowers and the tensions within Vietnam grew, the pole of studied neutrality with which he tried to balance himself and his country shortened; his step, as a result, became less and less steady.

Through 1965 the American advisers and Special Forces, who had, till then, borne the brunt of the American commitment to South Vietnam, were superseded by main-force units and air power committed to military victory over the Viet Cong. The new American strategy in Vietnam began to affect Cambodia almost at once. The commander of United States forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, believed that the infantry's unalterable task was to conduct "Search and Destroy" missions against its enemy. The vast majority of the Vietnamese population live along the eastern coastline of the country and in the Mekong Delta. But Westmoreland's purpose was not so much to create coastal enclaves as to pursue and eliminate the Communists in the intractable Central Highlands, which run like a backbone parallel to the Laotian and Cambodian borders. "Search and Destroy," together with the extensive use of air power, did not protect the people of South Vietnam. It did help to inflict heavy casualties on both sides, and it also encouraged the communists to move westward out of range, thus creating a new dilemms or Sihanouk.

Like most of his compatriots, Sihanouk distrusted and disliked his Vietnamese neighbors. He recognized, however, the power of Hanoi. Although he realized that Cambodia would be far more vulnerable to a united Marxist Vietnam than to a divided nation at war, he believed that he had no alternative to reaching an ambiguous modus vivendi with the Communists. In 1965 he allowed them to come across the ill-defined border and build semi-permanent base camps in areas of the eastern provinces of his country. These "sanctuaries" were to become a source of increasing frustration to Westmoreland.

The American coastal blockade of Vietnam forced the Communists to find new supply routes. At first they began to make more use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail down through Laos, into northeastern Cambodia and so to Vietnam. Then, in 1966 Chou En-lai personally asked Sihanouk to allow supplies to be brought into the port of Sihanoukville. Sihanouk was unhappy with the idea, but he had little alternative. "Two thirds for the Viet Cong, one third for yourself. At that rate one sells oneself," he later complained. From now until 1970 supplies landed at the port were handled by the Cambodian army and a Chinese firm called Haklee. The goods were trucked by night up the "Friendship Highway" that United States aid had built, through Phnom Penh and eastward to the border areas. This transport business and the Communists’ straightforward purchase of food and medicine on the Phnom Penh market were extremely profitable. Members of the royal family and many senior Cambodian army officers—including those who, like Lon Nol, were correctly considered pro-Amican-were involved in the traffic.

Within the United States intelligence establishment there was a sharp dispute over the significance of the Sihanoukville connection. The CIA thought it almost irrelevant; but the military and the Saigon embassy considered it such a vital source of supply for Hanoi and the Viet Cong that it should at all costs be destroyed. (In the first study of the war that Nixon and Kissinger commissioned in 1969, the military estimate of the supplies coming through Sihanoukville was five times as high as that of the CIA. The CIA, as events were to establish, was wrong.)

It was not only the Communists who romped across Cambodia’s borders. The Americans conducted secret forays as well. In Vietnam the U.S. Special Forces and the CIA recruited mercenaries, called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG), from the mountain tribes people and from the Cambodians who had lived in the Mekong Delta since the kingdom of Chenla embraced the whole area. They were under the command of Special Forces Colonel Jonathan "Fred" Ladd, an affable man well known to journalists for his acerbic comments on the way in which Westmoreland was fighting the war. Ladd—who was to play a prominent part in Cambodian events after the fall of Sihanouk—says that among these recruits, known as Khmer Krom, were many members of the Khmer Serei who had signed up both for training and in order to convert others to the anti-Sihanouk cause. Officially the United States always denied any connection at all with the Khmer Serei or its leader, Son Ngoc Thanh. In fact, whenever Thanh wished to visit the CIDG camps spaced along the Cambodian border, he was flown there by U.S. helicopter. "He was used as a recruiter," says William Colby. "This certainly gave him the mark of U.S. approval."

The Khmer Serei were also recruited into another branch of the Special Forces, the Studies and Operations Group, which was responsible for clandestine reconnaissance and sabotage missions in Cambodia and Laos. Throughout the sixties these Special Forces teams secretly slipped across the Vietnamese border in search of Communist trails, hospitals, bases, villages. (Ethnic Khmers were not supposed to go on the missions into Cambodia.) In 1967, without the knowledge of Congress, these operations were institutionalized under the name Salem House (later changed to Daniel Boone). The teams were allowed to delve up to 30 kilometers inside Cambodia and were authorized to place "sanitized self-destruct antipersonnel" land mines as they went. Their primary purpose was supposed to be intelligence gathering; in 1,835 missions over four years they captured 24 prisoners.

Despite the Salem House forays, and in spite of fairly constant, though haphazard artillery and tactical air attacks across the border, the Vietnamese Communists enjoyed relative security inside Cambodia through the Johnson years. As the failure of "Search and Destroy" became ever more evident, Cambodia became a scapegoat for Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. "No guerrilla war in history was ever won without sanctuaries" was a favorite phrase. Helped by press reporting that was often both careless and gullible, the United States military began by 1968 to build up an image of a Pentagon East and several Fort Braggs just across the ill-defined frontier. No one command headquarters of "COSVN" was ever found, but, as we have seen, in the late sixties air reconnaissance and the Salem House/Daniel Boone missions had identified along the length of the frontier about fifteen areas in which the Communists were thought to have bases.

Some of these were in the wild Northeast, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail emerged from the mountains of Laos. It was a sparsely populated area in which there were only a few settlements of hill people who were in almost constant revolt against Phnom Penh. As the border twists its way southward, the land becomes more fertile and more populous. The territory that the Pentagon called Base Area 353 (the target of the first Breakfast B-52 mission) was in the Fish Hook area, which juts into South Vietnam just north of Tay Ninh (where the cohesive Cao Dai sect had a magnificent temple in which they revered Sun Yat-sen, Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill). The Joint Chiefs considered this "the most important" of the base areas in Cambodia, but they also knew it to be surrounded by Cambodian villages.

Here and farther south, where the bases stretched into the Parrot's Beak—only about forty miles from Saigon—and then down into the thickly reedable waterways of the Mekong Delta, the Vietnamese Communists were in constant touch with the local population. At the beginning their relations were good; they cultivated the bonzes and brought a great deal of commerce. There was a flourishing black market in stolen American supplies all along the more populated areas of the frontier. Rice, C-rations, M-16 rifles, cameras, watches, ammunition and even, it was said, Cadillacs could be bought.

Westmoreland recounts in his memoirs his exasperation that Lyndon Johnson always rejected requests for massive retaliations by air or ground across the frontier. The President was intrigued by Sihanouk—"Everything I hear about the Prince suggests we ought to get on well with him," he told his National Security Council staff early in 1966. He tried to send Averell Harriman to visit Phnom Penh; Sihanouk refused to see him. But under the pressure of the war, which was sharpening the internal political contradictions of Cambodia, the Prince was about to change his policy and move back toward the United States.

Sihanouk's quixotic government had not entirely succeeded. The economic reforms of 1963 had not vitiated the functional corruption in the capital; they had simply introduced the state more enthusiastically into the business. Corruption could have been eliminated only by structural reforms that Sihanouk was not prepared to make. During the period of 1963, with the money supply shrunk, it was only the rich who benefited, and even they found the return on capital invested in villas and import licenses vastly reduced. Minor civil servants, for whom bribes had been an essential supplement to meager salaries, joined the unemployed graduates and the officer corps in bitter resentment of the expulsion of the Americans and the socialization of the economy.

The pressure from the bourgeois—both the middle and the upper—was more voluble than that from the left. The pro-Communist Pracheachon group had been driven underground. Sihanouk had, nonetheless, tried to incorporate left-wing views and personalities into the Sangkum and the cabinet, but after 1963 the flow of disillusioned left-wing intellectuals to Paris and, less often, to the forests had increased. In 1966 Sihanouk allowed the election of a far more conservative government than before, and the following year he authorized his new Prime Minister, General Lon Nol, to repress savagely a peasant revolt in Battambang, a prosperous western province. Sihanouk was badly frightened by the rebellion, and publicly he blamed both Peking and those leftists who remained in the Sangkum for inciting it. In Phnom Penh it was clear to such left-wing former cabinet members as Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim and Hou Youn that the relative tolerance with which the Prince had viewed their activities was ended. By October 1967 they had separately melted away into the forests; many people in Phnom Penh were convinced that Sihanouk’s police had murdered them. In fact, they returned to sight as leading members of the Khmer Rouge after 1970.

From now on, Sihanouk's control over domestic politics diminished. He spent more and more time playing jazz and making melodramatic films; stories about the corruption of his wife, Monique, and her rapacious mother became increasingly scandalous, and the Phnom Penh court degenerated. Sihanouk started a casino to raise money and to pander to the nation's obsession with gambling; he seemed unaware of the extent of the domestic crisis. In his long speeches he enumerated meaningless sets of statistics about primary and secondary education, and ignored the nation's structural malaise.

But Sihanouk's interest in playing the Americans off against the Communists remained consuming. He was distressed by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and was becoming aware that the increasing use by the North Vietnamese of his border areas might provoke stronger American retaliation than the random shelling, bombing and small-unit ground attacks now taking place. At first, the sanctuaries had been tolerable; the personal and the institutional profits that his generals had made out of trade with the Communists had offset patriotic irritation at the way in which the country's neutrality was being abused. But in 1967 massive American operations in “War Zone C,” close to Saigon, pushed more and more Communist troops across the border, and their presence became increasingly irksome. There was almost nothing Sihanouk could do.

His army’s equipment and condition had deteriorated since he rejected American military aid in 1963. A trickle of supplies came from France and the USSR, but much of it was of poor quality or out of date. General Nhiek Thouloung, Sihanouk’s commander in chief, now living in Paris, believes that by the end of the decade only about 11,000 of Cambodia’s 30,000 troops could even hypothetically be called on to fight. Battalions, operating at half strength, were scattered in villages and companies, spreading across the provinces. In the northeast some border posts were prudently set 100 kilometers back from Vietnam. The precise boundaries often were unknown, almost always disputed. In the whole of Mondolkiri province, opposite Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, there was a single battalion of 320 men organized into three companies. If a serious skirmish with the Vietnamese, North or South, occurred, reinforcements would take two or three days to arrive from Phnom Penh, and then the capital would be left virtually undefended.

“We were less effective than the Paris police,” says Nhiek Thouloung. Sihanouk’s solution was to make gestures of friendliness toward Washington. They were reciprocated. First, Jacqueline Kennedy was allowed to make a much-publicized visit to the ruins of Angkor that was claimed, “to fulfill a childhood dream.” Cambodian officials began to drop hints of rapprochement, even of allowing American “hot pursuit” into some sanctuaries. After discussions that took place through Italian ambassadors, who represented American interests in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government agreed to accept American encroachment by NVA use of the border areas. Known by the code name “Vesuvius,” this secret project was intended to provide the Prince with irrefutable evidence of the Communists’ violations of Cambodia’s neutrality that he might use in negotiations with the U.S. The first package was delivered by the Australian Ambassador Noel St. Clair Deschamps in December 1967. A few days later, the American ambassador to New Delhi, Chester Bowles, came to Phnom Penh on an official mission.

Even at the time this was an important initiative, but Bowles's mission subsequently assumed even greater significance; years later the sustained Menu bombing by B-52s would be defended on the grounds that Sihanouk had told Bowles he could not object to it. The State Department's own contemporary account of the visit, written by an officer who accompanied Bowles, together with the ambassador's own reports to Washington, suggest that this is not so. They cannot be used as conclusive evidence, because, before they were declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, certain sections were excised by the State Department. On appeal, some—but not all—of the deleted passages were restored.

Bowles had long been a critic of American involvement in the war, and he arrived in Cambodia well disposed toward Sihanouk. As his plan began its descent toward Phnom Penh, he rehearsed his talking paper for their meeting; the paper makes clear that his mission was to convince the Prince that growing Communist use of the border areas threatened a wider war. If this was, as Washington hoped, to be avoided, then there was “a need to develop measures which are practical and useful to inhibit VC/NVA unauthorized use of Cambodian territory.” The United States was keen to see the International Control Commission—a relic of the 1954 Geneva Agreement—strengthened, but this was not enough. Cambodian forces, though limited, could do rather more, and so might the United States. In this regard, his talking paper continued,

We have noted Cambodian statements on the possibility of U.S. Forces operating in Cambodia to defend themselves against VC/ NVA. 2. We do not regard so-called "hot pursuit" as desirable remedy. 3. If Cambodia, with I.C.C. [International Control Commission] support, can prevent enemy presence, question of U.S. action in Cambodia does not arise. This is what we prefer and what we seek. 4. Present situation may provoke cross border actions such as a) reconnaissance by very limited forces to guard against attacks, b) returning hostile fire from Cambodia, c) tactical maneuvers to defend against hostile enemy action from within Cambodia. 5. There could be no secrecy about such defensive moves by U.S. forces. 6. We have noted possibility (deleted) about U.S. cross border action against VC/NVA forces. 7. We have noted distinction between inhabited and uninhabited areas. 8. Honoring this distinction would depend on effective measures being taken by RKG or ICC in inhabited areas. 9. Wish to re-emphasize that U.S. prefers such actions not be necessary.

When Bowles met Sihanouk, the Prince immediately began to criticize America’s presence in Vietnam. He could not understand why the United States was attacking North Vietnam and other small countries while avoiding confrontation with Moscow and Peking, who were really to blame for the conflict. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, yet American intervention was pushing him into China’s arms. He asserted that Cambodia had to maintain good relations with the Vietnamese Communists because the future of Southeast Asia was “red.” But he wanted to keep the Vietnamese out of Cambodian territory, and he hoped the Control Commission would get off the cocktail circuit and into the border area. He asked that the United States continue to inform him about VC/NVA presence in Eastern Cambodia.

At the end of the discussion Bowles emphasized that the United States had “absolutely no desire” to carry out military operations in Cambodia. “We prefer that other measures be taken to prevent VC/NVA use of Cambodian territory,” he told the Prince. Sihanouk, according to the State Department report, “rejoined by saying he understood why we did not wish to become involved in military operations on Cambodian soil.”

Sihanouk asked that Washington publicly recognize Cambodia’s borders, promising Bowles that when relations were restored the United States military attaché would be free to roam the country and see anything he wished. Later in the visit, Prime Minister Son San returned to this theme. According to the State Department memo, “He wanted the U.S. to offer a guarantee against U.S. bombing or firing on Cambodian villages and frontier posts. General Nhiek Tioulung joined in, citing statistics on the number of killed and wounded in the U.S./SVN provoked incidents. Ambassador Bowles again assured the Cambodian delegation that the United States had no aggressive intentions. He acknowledged, however, that, given the prevailing situation, accidents might occasionally occur.”

Whether Sihanouk actually told Bowles that the United States was free to bomb the sanctuaries cannot be definitely determined from the sanitized State Department papers, and Bowles himself was too ill to give an interview when this book was written. Charles Meyer, Sihanouk’s long-time French aide, recalls that the Prince did tell Bowles that just as he could not prevent the Vietnamese from usurping Cambodian territory, so he could not object to the United States attacking them there. But Meyer insists—and this is crucial—that Sihanouk meant to allow only isolated small-scale attacks, not a vast B-52 campaign along the length of the border. “There was no question of B-52s,” Meyer says.

Certainly neither Bowles nor those who were with him seem to have believed that the achievement of the visit was to allow the United States to extend the war into Cambodia. The State Department report notes that by the end of the visit the Bowles party believed that “there seemed little doubt that on the Cambodian side fears of ‘hot pursuit’ had been allayed.” The Americans, for their part, sensed that a catastrophic widening of the war had been averted and that the Bowles mission had succeeded in overcoming many of the problems which had embittered United States-Cambodian relations.

Bowles cabled his own analysis to Washington on his return to New Delhi; it was astute. “I came away deeply convinced, as on previous visits to Cambodia, that Sihanouk's decisions and attitudes, however bizarre, are shaped by intense and deeply rooted nationalism in which ideology has little or no part.” He also considered that the talks represented a very important shift of Cambodia's foreign policy toward the United States; he was all in favor of trying to find a formula by which Washington could give Cambodia the public assurances on the borders that Sihanouk required, without unduly offending the Thais or Vietnamese.

Bowles wrote that he was “fully conscious of mercurial and unpredictable characteristics of the Prince. In any dealings with Cambodia we must expect sudden switches and caustic and unfair criticism. However, we should not let Sihanouk’s imtemperate... outbursts deter us from the main business at hand: to keep Cambodia neutral, to keep the Viet Cong and NVA out of this small but important country.”

After Bowles's visit, the Vietnamese Communists launched their February 1968 Tet offensive in South Vietnam. Sihanouk appears to have been more impressed by the casualties the Communists sustained than by the political impact within the United States. In March he sent a letter to Le Monde in which he complained that Peking and Hanoi were conspiring to overthrow him. “It is perfectly clear that Asian communism does not permit us any longer to remain neutral,” he wrote. Elsewhere he publicly affirmed—as he had said to Bowles—that he was ready to restore relations with Washington if only the Americans would recognize the inviolability of Cambodia's existing borders.

The Prince's attempts at rapprochement caused a furious debate in the State Department. Chester Bowles and Arthur Goldberg, Ambassador to the U.N., both urged that the United States recognize Cambodia's borders.

*The State Department's contemporary, eyewitness summary on “hot pursuit” should be compared with Kissinger's statements on the same matter. For example, in a written response to questions submitted by Senator Harold Hughes at the time of Kissinger's confirmation as Secretary of State in September 1973, Kissinger wrote, under oath, “In a January 10, 1968, meeting with U.S. emissary Chester Bowles, Sihanouk stated that he did not want any North Vietnamese in Cambodia, and further stated that while he could not say officially, he urged the United States to retaliate against these North Vietnamese forces with ‘hot pursuit’ or bombing in the unpopulated border areas of Cambodia.”

On March 18, Bowles sent Secretary of State Dean Rusk a cable saying that restored relations would help, “both in terms of improving our understanding of what is going on in that country and in reversing a deteriorating trend in our whole relationship with South East Asia.” Many diplomats tend to defend the interests of the country to which they are accredited, and Bowles's proposal was attacked, as he knew it would be, by the embassies in both Saigon and Bangkok. In Saigon Robert Komer, a deputy ambassador, wrote an angry memo to his superior, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker; his language is revealing of the way many American diplomats thought Sihanouk should be treated. “We want to make Sihanouk nervous rather than give him reason to believe we are moving his way. That can come later if the preliminary softening process works. Hence, why not actively enter the lists against Bowles by filing a demurrer?” Bunker followed this advice. Dean Rusk decided, nonetheless, to go ahead with exploratory talks. The Saigon embassy went on complaining.

Throughout the year the United States continued to provide Sihanouk with Vesuvius packages detailing Communist violations of Cambodian neutrality; but, to the disgust of the embassy in Saigon and the Joint Chiefs in Washington, the Cambodians took little action. They lacked the means. In September Eugene Black came to Phnom Penh as the personal envoy of Lyndon Johnson on another conciliatory visit. He told the new Prime Minister, Penn Nouth, of American concern. Penn Nouth replied that he would speak “with brutal frankness” and, according to Black's report, he assured the American party that Cambodia was even more uneasy about the North Vietnamese than the United States government, that the Khmers had historical reasons to distrust all Vietnamese. (He also complained about continued United States support for the Khmer Serei, and one of Black’s entourage, General Charles Corcoran, denied brazenly that there was any such thing.)

That was where matters rested in early 1969, when Nixon and Kissinger entered the White House and General Abrams sent his request for permission to bomb Base Area 353. Talks had begun but were not completed because of Sihanouk's domestic position had deteriorated because of the war and to satisfy middle-class aspirations. But he was still in power, and the vast majority of his people were at peace.

Sihanouk's role has been examined critically here because an understanding of Cambodia is not helped by idealizing his role. His shortcoming must, however, be related to the context. By the beginning of 1969, Vietnam and Laos were torn apart by war, their people driven into camps, their societies already irrevocably destroyed. Thailand had endured no fighting, but it too had been corrupted by the commerce of war and now, under a repressive military dictatorship, served as a "hand-based aircraft carrier" for the B-52 bombers that daily pounded the grounds of its Indochinese neighbors. Only Cambodia was unsullied. Her neutrality was vulnerable and abused by all parties to the conflict, particularly by the Vietnamese Communists, but the policy had managed to allow the vast majority of her people to live around their pagodas, work their fields and fish their streams. There was, in 1969, a small insurgent movement, the Khmer Rouge, numbering about four thousand. It was able to hit isolated military posts and assassinate village officials, but it had no prospects of success. The honest illusion of plenty, peace and security was enough to convince most of the population. For this, almost all credit—save that which was due to the relative self-restraint displayed by Lyndon Johnson—must go to Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Despite his many failures, domestic and foreign, he alone had seen how the Cambodian people could be protected, and he alone had accomplished it.

It was not enough. The White House was now occupied by men who were prepared to take risks that Johnson had rejected and to ignore limits that he had recognized.