The Peace

CHAPTER 18

The Peace

IN PARIS on January 27, 1973, one week after Nixon's second inauguration, the United States, the Republic of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam signed an "Agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam." Soon after dawn on the morning of January 29, 1973, the crump of mortars, the whistle of bullets and the whine of artillery shells began to die all over South Vietnam. In the wreckage of the provincial capital of Quang Tri, men on both sides tentatively lifted weary heads from foxholes and gazed silently upon one another.

It was a moving moment, and a short one. Time Magazine named Nixon and Kissinger its Men of the Year, and Newsweek proclaimed "PEACE" on its cover. But while the agreement was certainly an achievement, it was not designed or destined to bestow peace. In Laos a sort of peaceful transfer of power was arranged. In Vietnam casualties remained almost as high as ever over the next two years. During 1972, according to the Pentagon, over 39,000 South Vietnamese soldiers had died in combat; in 1973, the figure would be almost 28,000, and in 1974 over 31,000. In Cambodia the war continued even more dreadfully than before. Given the role that the Cambodians were expressly supposed to play in

H. R. Haldeman later recalled that Nixon "was close to white-tipped in anger when Henry squeezed him aside as Time magazine's Man of the Year. Nixon ended up as part of an unprecedented dual selection, both appropriately carved in stony images."

saving American lives, it would have been unreasonable to have expected the administration to try to find an end to their war before the United States withdrawal from Vietnam was completed. It is less easy to demonstrate why no solution to the war in Cambodia was found after the Paris Agreement. Kissinger’s explanation of why the fighting was continued and even intensified over the next two years needs examination.

The principal purpose of the peace agreement was to extract American uniforms from South and North Vietnam while sustaining President Thieu in office for Kissinger’s “decent interval.” The accord had been made possible by fundamental concessions on each side. Hanoi agreed to allow Thieu to remain in place while elections were arranged. The Americans acknowledged the presence of North Vietnamese troops within South Vietnam. By the middle of 1972 this was a huge concession; altogether, Hanoi had now moved about 145,000 men into the South. It was legitimization of Hanoi’s presence that most enraged Thieu, and it was his understandable resistance that had snatched “peace” from Kissinger’s hand in October 1972.

After Nixon's reelection, United States policy was directed toward inducing the South Vietnamese president to accept the basic terms negotiated. Under the code name "Operation Enhance" the administration shipped an astonishing new armory to Saigon; this made the South Vietnamese air force the fourth largest in the world. Then the White House demonstrated its resolve by the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. Designed partly, in General Haig's words, to "brutalize" the North, the bombing was also intended to assure Thieu that Nixon was prepared to go to considerable lengths to impose and preserve "peace with honor" and to demonstrate the fearsomeness of Presidential "irrationality." One might have thought that Nixon's own "Madman Theory of War" had proved rather ineffective by now, but at the height of this unprecedented bombing campaign the President assured a journalist, Richard Wilson, that he "did not care if the whole world thought he was crazy. If it did, so much the better. The Russians and the Chinese might think they were dealing with a madman."

At the same time Thieu was warned in a series of secret letters from Nixon that there could now be no further argument about his signature; but Nixon promised "to take swift and severe retaliatory action" and to "respond with full force" to any Communist violation of the agreement. His secret commitment was to have an important effect upon Cambodia.

The language of the Paris Agreement placed no real formal obligations on Hanoi or Washington with regard to Cambodia or Laos. Article 20 called on all foreign countries to "put an end to all military activities in Cambodia and Laos, totally withdraw from and refrain from reintroducing into these two countries troops, military advisers and military personnel, armaments, munitions and war material." The internal affairs of each country "shall be settled by the people of each of these countries without foreign interference." But no deadline was given and a secret State Department analysis, entitled "Interpretation of the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam," asserted that the commitment to withdraw was only one of principle; Article 20 "was carefully drafted ... to avoid stating a time or period of time for the implementation of these obligations ..."

During the course of his talks with Le Duc Tho, Kissinger had attempted to obtain an assurance that cease-fires could be arranged in Cambodia and Laos as well as in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were able to give satisfactory assurances on Laos; Hanoi had always dominated the Pathet Lao. In Cambodia, however, no such guarantees could be given, because of the growing tensions between the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. During 1972, when almost all North Vietnamese combat divisions were withdrawn from Cambodia for the offensive in South Vietnam, reports of fairly constant fighting between the allies reached Phnom Penh and Washington. By the end of the year the Khmer Rouge were fielding an army of around 30,000 men, organized in regiments, and were strong enough to hold their own against Lon Nol, with only logistical support from the North Vietnamese. They could now act independently of Hanoi.

Kissinger, however, apparently persisted in the belief that Hanoi could and would deliver the Khmer Rouge, and during the final round of talks with Le Duc Tho he tried to link a Cambodian cease-fire to the provision of postwar American aid to North Vietnam. Although Kissinger subsequently assured Congress there were no secret clauses to the Paris Agreement, Nixon had, at North Vietnamese insistence, written a secret letter to the North Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong, promising such aid.

On January 23, during the final session of the talks, Kissinger read a unilateral statement on Cambodia into the record. He said that after the agreement took effect on January 29, Lon Nol would suspend all offensive operations, and the United States would halt its bombing of Cambodia. If the other side reciprocated, a de facto cease-fire would come about; if not, "Government forces and the United States Air Force would have to take necessary counter measures." He warned that the bombing of the country would then resume until a cease-fire was achieved.

The next day, at a press conference called to explain the accords, Kissinger declared. "We can say about Cambodia that it is our expectation that a de facto cease-fire will come into being within a period of time relevant to the execution of the agreement."

It is not clear what role Kissinger himself was prepared to take in any Cambodian negotiations at this precise moment. Before and after January 1973, he usually insisted that any Cambodian peace talks—unlike those concerning Vietnam—must take place between "the two parties," and that the United States could not be directly involved. Since each Cambodian side had always explicitly denied that there was any possibility of its negotiating with the other "traitors" (each, indeed, had condemned the leaders of the other side to death) the prospects for such talks were dim. At the same time both Kissinger and Nixon maintained that one of the serious difficulties in negotiation lay in the fact that the other side was divided and had no clear leadership. Kissinger spoke of the "innumerable Cambodian factions."

From Washington's point of view, there was a more fundamental problem. Any cease-fire and negotiated settlement in Cambodia would necessarily involve the replacement of the Lon Nol government by a coalition that at the very least included members of the other side. It could not, therefore, be an ally of President Thieu. Yet Thieu himself and many American officials insisted that the existence of an anti-Communist allied government in Phnom Penh was essential to the survival of South Vietnam. The evidence suggests that while Kissinger was talking publicly about the need for a cease-fire in Cambodia, the administration was doing what it could to shore up Lon Nol.

A few days before the Paris Agreement was signed, Alexander Haig—whose service on the NSC had now won him promotion to full general—flew into Phnom Penh on another of his "stroking missions" and to inform Lon Nol of the terms. (In October 1972 Kissinger had made his only visit ever to Phnom Penh. He stayed two hours. Lon Nol later said he had revealed very little of Washington's plans for Cambodia's future.) Haig promised him more military supplies and, according to a cable from Swank to Rogers, he assured him "of our continuing support, for which the Marshal expressed appreciation." Lon Nol was evidently disturbed by the notion of a cease-fire; Swank soothed him by guaranteeing that "enemy actions of any scope against Cambodia involving a cease-fire in Vietnam would be regarded as a violation of any agreement reached with Hanoi, and I stressed that air power based in Thailand would be deployed on his behalf in case of need." Swank also promised Lon Nol "that he can count on our continued support for equipment and training through our military-assistance program and that its size would depend less on the administration's volition, which is to provide all the assistance the FANK can absorb, than on Congressional attitudes. . . . I referred to the accelerated deliveries of MAP equipment over the last three months and promised him to do whatever we can to continue such deliveries."

Haig was followed by Spiro Agnew, who also assured Lon Nol that Washington was constant and that military aid would continue. Swank cabled Washington that "in and of itself the visit constituted a striking gesture of our continuing interest in sustaining a friendly government in Phnom Penh, and this was doubtless its principal accomplishment." The visits and Swank's promises demonstrate both how little pressure was put on Lon Nol to achieve, let alone observe, a cease-fire and the American attitude to a change in government in Phnom Penh.

However, on January 28, the day before the Paris Agreement took effect, Lon Nol made what passed for the cease-fire offer Kissinger had promised Le Duc Tho. His statement makes clear his refusal to appreciate that a Khmer Communist organization existed and shows how qualified his gesture was:

By virtue of the Geneva Agreements of 1954 we have the right to repossess the parts of our country which have been illegally occupied by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces. To enable them to leave our territory in the shortest possible time, we will order our troops ... to suspend their offensive operations and to establish contacts with the people to ascertain their welfare and to assure their protection. Incidents which might impede their passage or jeopardize their installations will be regarded as actions by intruders who will bear full responsibility for any misfortunes which ensue. We will continue to exercise our right of legitimate self-defense through defensive military operations throughout our territory.

Given that Lon Nol's troops had been on the defensive almost everywhere since the rout of Chenla II in 1971, an offer to cease offensive operations was meaningless. Nonetheless in the next few days the tempo of the fighting did slacken, and Washington ordered the B-52s and tactical aircraft confined to their bases in Guam and Thailand. The respite was brief.

The sequence of diplomatic and military moves that led to a full-scale resumption of the war is still unclear. One crucial point is that despite the partial nature of Lon Nol's offer, the North Vietnamese did now encourage their Khmer allies to enter into negotiation. At the end of January, Sihanouk publicly declared that the Front was reevaluating its policy. "If the United States is prepared to act in a friendly manner with an independent and nonaligned Cambodia, we are prepared for a rapid reconciliation with Washington," he said. "We are not warmongers. We don't want a bloodbath. We don't want to throw oil on the fire that is now dying out in Indochina."

The Prince ascribed this change to pressure from "our friends," who claimed that the Front's adversaries were "accusing us of bellicosity while peace was being built." He said he hoped he could meet now with Kissinger. Hanoi issued a strong statement endorsing Sihanouk's position. The response from Washington was negative. The White House announced that Kissinger had "no plans" to see Sihanouk during his forthcoming trip to Hanoi and Peking.

The Khmer Rouge were no more cooperative. In Cambodia they launched an attack on Kompong Thom; in Hanoi their representatives apparently insisted to the North Vietnamese and to Sihanouk—who was there for the Tet celebrations—that the struggle would continue. Years later the Khmer Communists explained their refusal to compromise in terms of their historic fear of Vietnam's intention to incorporate Cambodia into an Indochina Federation dominated by Hanoi; the 1954 Geneva Accords did not provide them a reassuring precedent. Publicly, at least, Hanoi now acceded to its ally's demands: on February 7, 1973, a joint communiqué from the North Vietnamese government and Sihanouk's government insisted that in Cambodia the fight would continue. On February 9 the American bombing began in greater intensity than ever before. Within a few months an enormous new aerial campaign had destroyed the old Cambodia forever.

There was a straightforward military explanation for part of the armada—the defense of government enclaves against Communist attack—but at the same time the bombing provided an important piece of theatrical business in the sideshow.

Once again Thieu’s position has to be considered. Nixon’s secret promises of military support undercut any incentive the South Vietnamese might have had to implement the political sections of the Paris Agreement. They provided Thieu with the insurance necessary to continue prosecuting the war. But for clear political reasons there was only one way the Nixon administration could now meet such commitments—by the use of air power.

Bombing had always been integral to "peace with honor"; the planes were to be kept in Indochina after the men had been withdrawn. Now the Paris Agreement proscribed further bombing of North or South Vietnam and, if a cease-fire was reached in Laos or Cambodia, there would, as well. Once a total cease-fire had been installed over all of Indochina it would be necessary for the maintenance of Thieu's secret defense on station in Southeast Asia. If the war lingered in the sideshow, however, then "the firehose" could be given play.

This is not the whole explanation for the extended 1973 bombing of Cambodia. Lon Nol's forces were dependent on air power. Thieu's insurance was, however, an important strategic consideration, and when William Colby was asked to explain why the country was bombarded so ferociously, he replied that after the Peace Agreement "Cambodia was then the only game in town."

New rules were drawn up by General John Vogt, now Commander of the Seventh Air Force, which moved its headquarters to Thailand after the Paris Agreement. On February 8, Kissinger flew to Bangkok summoning the ambassadors from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to explain to them the current situation and his intentions for the future. Emory Swank was told that his embassy was to become the command post for the new aerial war in Cambodia.

Until now the embassy had been a conduit, passing Cambodian requests for bombing strikes on to the Seventh Air Force. From now on, it was to be actively involved in the entire bombing process, selecting, examining, approving and controlling the bombing, passing judgment on all potential targets. This certainly violated the spirit, perhaps the letter, of the Cooper-Church amendment, which specifically forbade American officials in Phnom Penh from giving combat advice. Swank was told that complete secrecy was essential; no one was to know of the embassy’s new duties. Although the general instructions were laid out in a cable from the State Department, William Rogers (who, as Secretary of State, was responsible for everything done by any United States embassy) was not told how fully his subordinates in Phnom Penh were now involved in the bombing.

Swank delegated the day-to-day responsibility to his Deputy Chief of Mission, Thomas Enders. As so often in this war, accidents of personality had a marked effect on the conduct of the war itself.

Thomas Ostrom Enders is six feet eight inches tall, too tall for the U.S. Army, and the most common description given of him is "absolutely brilliant." Unlike many career officials who served there, Enders profited from his time in Cambodia. When he arrived at the end of 1971 his career was set back; when he left in 1974 it was in very good shape.

Enders is from a rich, conservative Connecticut Republican family. He had attended both Harvard and Yale, and at Yale he was a prominent member of one of the select secret societies, Scroll and Key. His stature was officially recognized when he was presented the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize as the outstanding man of his year. He was also a Scholar of the House, a distinction that allowed him to concentrate on a single project instead of course responsibilities. He chose the economy of medieval Morocco.

After Yale he studied for a time at the Sorbonne and then cut short a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard to join the State Department. At first his career flew as high as was to be expected. Not everyone appreciated his cold clinicalism, but if he appeared at times unduly arrogant, it was usually forgiven him because of the intellectual powers everyone said he possessed. In 1970 he was named one of the "ten outstanding young men in government." He was then thirty-nine and already occupied a rather senior post—Deputy Chief of Mission in the embassy in Belgrade. He could look forward to at least a modest ambassadorship on his next assignment and great things in years to come. But then, Tom Enders fell from grace. He and his ambassador, William Leonhart, developed such a dislike for each other that life in the same embassy became intolerable. Junior diplomats recounted how at staff meetings they would sit on each other; eventually Leonhart locked Enders out of his office. Enders was recalled to Washington.

For a time it seemed that the high flier would remain grounded. But Enders was a man with excellent connections and luckier than most. At the end of 1971, Coby Swank agreed to take him as his deputy chief of mission in Phnom Penh. It was a good turn on Swank's part; Enders did not repay him very kindly.

At first Enders was principally concerned with the administration of the embassy, but as the fabric of Cambodian society disintegrated through 1972 he gradually assumed an interest in both the economic management of the country and the conduct of military affairs. When Swank went on home leave in the autumn of 1972 Enders took charge of administering the Nixon Doctrine with a vigor that some in the Political Section of the Embassy, particularly Bill Harben, found distasteful.

It was clear to them that Enders immediately grasped what the White House wanted of Cambodia in a way Swank never did. Although responsible for running war Swarnk refused to act like a proconsul (unlike his counterpart, George McMurtire Godley, in Laos ). He had a genuine concern for the Cambodians.

Swank had supported White House policy in Cambodia so long as it seemed to him necessary for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Once that was accomplished, in early 1973, he became increasingly disillusioned with the failure to secure an end to the war. What he failed to understand was how little the White House was interested in Cambodia for itself. John Negroponte, who, as one of Kissinger's Indochina specialists, was actively involved with the war and the peace talk, says, "I never knew very much about Cambodia. I don't think anyone did. I am a Vietnam expert, and I always thought of Cambodia as just an adjunct to the whole damn thing. I knew what I had to know, but I didn't get involved in the gory details."

Swank's anxiety for Cambodia did not favorably impress Haig or any of the other NSC aides who came out to Phnom Penh. John Bushnell, another of those who defined White House policy, says, "Swank didn't seem to comprehend the White House view that Cambodia was secondary to Vietnam. For him Cambodia was primary. He would ask, 'What do you want me to do? What solution are we going to find for Cambodia?' Kissinger is not very patient and didn't like it." Kissinger wanted an ambassador who would act on his own responsibility without precise instructions. Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's deputy and later his successor as National Security Adviser, says, "We felt Swank's attitudes were not healthy. He was pessimistic and therefore a bad influence on the Lon Nol government. He had a negative attitude towards what we were doing. He didn't put his heart into it." Swank's problem, says John Bushnell, was "he was not an operator, not a can-do sort of guy. We didn't have much confidence in him."

Tom Enders was a "can-do sort of guy," and to his colleagues in the embassy, it seemed that he was not burdened by much interest in the Cambodians. Scowcroft says, "We were delighted with him. He was strong, aggressive, exuded confidence." Bushnell thinks that he "had a much broader perspective than Swank; he understood that Cambodia was secondary to the main problem." He was obviously prepared to fight the war as the White House wished it to be fought. (In June 1972, he wrote a support Lon Nol whatever his inadequacies. (In June 1972, he wrote a telegram to Washington in which he described Lon Nol's rigged election victory as "a step forward for Cambodian democracy.") Within the embassy he gave no support to political officers like Bill Harben, who questoned policy. Harben's convietion that only radical political change, including the promotion of In Tam to power and a concerted attempt to rally deserters from the insurgents, could save the Republic, was dismissed with contempt.

When investigators from Congressional committees or Congress' General Accounting Office appeared, Enders did what he could to block their inquiries. He was openly hostile to and contemptuous of the press (the feeling was reciprocated), and he made a considerable effort to have the Cambodians expel one of the most dogged of the American journalists in Phnom Penh, Sylvania Foa of UPI and Newsweek. He soon became Haig's favorite diplomat in the embassy, and Kissinger was equally impressed. "That sort of man appeals to Dr. Kissinger," said Swank later.

Enders had a natural ally in General Cleland, Mataxis' successor as the Chief of the Military Equipment Delivery Team. Unlike Mataxis, Cleland was a combat soldier; he had commanded a battalion in Vietnam and he possessed both ideas and powers of analysis. Like Enders he was "a can-do sort of guy" and he too abhorred criticism of the war effort, inside or outside the embassy.

After he arrived in Cambodia in early 1972 Cleland had decided that the 1970 plan to create a light-infantry force had been ill conceived. As he pointed out later in his end-of-tour report, such a force had been intended "to combat the 'Khmer insurgents.'" That such "insurgents" might one day evolve into main-force units in their own right, thus requiring a rethinking of the 'light-infantry concept' was a possibility never fully addressed.

That was correct, but the way in which Cleland chose how to address the problem was controversial. He decided that the army must be reorganized from battalions into divisions. Given the poor quality of most of the officer corps, starting with the Chief of Staff, Sosthene Fernandez, and the way in which Lon Nol abused the entire command and staff structure, this was extraordinarily ambitious. Cleland himself wrote later that Lon Nol's conduct made it "difficult if not impossible" for the army to be administered effectively. He realized also that the army's base was a non-technical society that is seriously deficient in technical expertise. And yet he insisted that an even more complicated command structure be imposed upon it.

By the time of the Paris Agreement, Cleland's reorganization plans were under way and, with Enders, he had begun to dominate both the political and the military side of the embassy in a way in which no other military man had yet managed.

Cleland and Enders agreed that the extensive use of American air power in Cambodia was vital. (Cleland described it in his end-of-tour report as "the one sacrosanct absolute" in all American planning.) When control of the bombing was secretly shifted into the embassy in February 1973, an embassy panel, chaired by Enders and containing Cleland, became responsible for bombing strikes in all parts of the country except the eastern Freedom Deal area, which was still a virtual free fire zone. Most requests for strikes came direct from Cambodian army headquarters, but targets could be proposed by the embassy or by the pilots of the American spotter planes. Such targets had to have clearance from the Cambodians but they were rarely, if ever, rejected. As one air attaché, Mark Berent, recalls, "They never plotted anything. We could have given them the coordinates of the palace and they would have said yes."

By now most Cambodian officers considered air power an essential part of any action, however insignificant. Often they refused to move without it. The Cambodian Psychological Warfare Directorate referred to it as "The Garuda of the Legends" and "Magic Arrow," an omen of divine support. Lon Nol seemed to invest it with supernatural powers, and air attachés at the United States embassy spoke with awe of his habit of simply erasing from the map any enemy unit he had ordered bombed.

Cambodian generals took a casual view of the risks to civilians. The attitude was summed up by Sosthene Fernandez, who, despite his ineffectiveness, was about to be promoted to commander in chief. "If a village was suspected of harboring 'VC'," he said, "the government first appealed to the villagers to leave. Then Cambodian Air Force planes strafed around the village to frighten the villagers away from their homes. 'Once they have left the village they come to ask us to bomb it. They themselves come to ask us to destroy everything, because they hate the VC. Of course, the villagers are very sad about their belongings, their houses, their lands; but they want us to bomb everything to drive out the VC. We do all we can to avoid civilian casualties, but one cannot always be certain that all civilians have fled."

Given such statements, the embassy might have been expected to consider Cambodian requests for American strikes carefully. But the maps used by the bombing panel were only 1:50,000 in scale and several years out of date; the embassy had no recent photography to show the location of new settlements in the massive forced migrations that the Khmer Rouge were now imposing on the areas they controlled. Maps of the same scale were being used by United States fighter pilots. According to their own official history (April 1 to June 30, 1973) the pilots of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing actually complained that these maps "lacked sufficient detail and currency to pinpoint suspected enemy locations with some degree of confidence." They asked for up-to-date maps with a scale of 1:5,000—ten times as large. They did not get them.

Inside the embassy, Harben was appalled and now did what others might have done. He cut out, to scale, the "'box" made by a B-52 strike and placed it on his own map. He found that virtually nowhere in central Cambodia could it be placed without "boxing" a village. "I began to get reports of wholesale carnage," he says. "One night a mass of peasants from a village near Saang went out on a funeral procession. They walked straight into a 'box.' Hundreds were slaughtered."

Throughout this period, Congress and the American press appeared to be paralyzed by the scale of Nixon's reelection victory and by the withdrawal of the last American soldiers and POWs from Vietnam. Over and over again, White House janissaries repeated that "the President has a mandate." Members of the cabinet made little attempt to conceal their contempt for the Congressional committees that questioned them. *Nothing demonstrated the attitude of the administration as well as the renewed bombing of Cambodia.

In all of 1972 the B-52s had dropped just under 37,000 tons of bombs onto Cambodia. In March 1973 they dropped over 24,000, in April about 35,000 and in May almost 36,000 tons. So with the fighter bombers in 1972 they had loosed 16,513 tons of bombs at their targets. In April 1973 alone, they dropped almost 15,000 tons, and the figure rose monthly to over 19,000 tons in July. In Washington, some questions were asked, but few answers were given. The Pentagon brushed aside reporters, referring them to CINCPAC headquarters in Hawaii “because it’s nearer the action.” One explanation frequently offered was that the strikes were being flown against North Vietnamese lines of communication into South Vietnam. This was not entirely true. Maps from one official secret history of the B-52 campaign that year show that many of the bombs were falling on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia. Another Air Force history states that in March the Joint Chiefs of Staff “increased the scope of air

* The White House revealed its intentions by asserting vastly exaggerated Presidential rights to impound funds already appropriated by Congress and to withhold the testimony of any member of the Executive Branch on grounds of “executive privilege.” On April 10, 1973, the Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, told a joint hearing by Senate Subcommittees that the president could extend this privilege to cover every single federal bureaucrat in the nation; if Congress did not like it then Congress should impeach him.

operations throughout the Khmer Republic to permit strikes against targets posing a potential threat to friendly forces and population centers."

Such studies were not available outside the administration at the time, and at the end of March 1973 the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, William Sullivan, was asked, at a briefing for Senate aides, to justify what had been happening. He laughed and said, "It is interesting you should ask that. I have got a couple of lawyers working on it. I guess what I would say is the reelection of the President." "By that theory," the Washington Post pointed out, "he could level Boston."

By March 1973, the Lon Nol government had reached its nadir. Within Phnom Penh and provincial capitals still held by the government, there was acute disappointment at the failure of the Paris Agreement to have brought more than a four-day lull in the fighting and a one-week halt to the bombing. In Tam, who had been given the task of rallying defectors from the Khmer Rouge, resigned after sixteen days because of the restrictions the government, to Bill Harben's fury, placed upon him. A general strike that closed sixteen industries in Phnom Penh was followed by strikes of teachers and students demanding an end to corruption and inflation. In Phnom Penh food ran short after the Khmer Rouge cut the road to Battambang. Oil ran shorter still, and the United States had to airlift supplies. Faced with another collapse of morale and a high rate of desertion from the army, the government introduced conscription.

The bombing was doing little to improve the government's performance. The secret history of one B-52 unit—the 43rd Strategic Wing—acknowledges that in spite of the raids, “the enemy remained steadfast,” while Lon Nol’s troops continued to decline in effectiveness. As the bombing spread, more and more villagers, pushing carts and carrying bundles or babies on their hips, struggled into the government’s enclaves and into Phnom Penh. In the U.S. embassy there was still no adequate refugee program, and only one man with any responsibility for refugees. Tom Enders’ Italian wife, Gaetana, set up a home for war widows, “The House of Butterflies,” unaware that in Khmer “butterfly” means whore. But those who mocked her had to admit her work was better than nothing—and until well into 1973, not much else was being done. The students and the teachers stayed out on strike, and one of their

* The United States government made its first grant of funds to an international relief agency on December 1, 1972. It was for $50,000 to the International Committee of the Red Cross. And on May 2, 1973, grants of $500,000 each were made to Catholic Relief Services and Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere.

meetings, supposedly guarded by the Gendarmerie, was disrupted by secret-police agents, who flung grenades into their midst. Two students were killed and eight wounded while the Gendarmerie stood idly by. The students accused Lon Nol’s younger brother, Lon Non, of setting up the incident. That same day the lover of one of Sihanouk’s daughters, a former pilot, hijacked an Air Force T-28 fighter-bomber, roared off the runway at Pochen tong airport and swooped down onto the Presidential Palace. He missed Lon Nol, but killed forty-three members of the palace entourage and their families and flew off to the “liberated” areas of the Khmer Rouge.

Lon Nol declared a state of siege, suspended all but the most pro-government newspapers and arrested all the princes and princesses left in town. Prince Sirik Matak, his collaborator in the coup of three years ago and his former prime minister, was placed under house arrest for criticizing the regime. In an interview with The New York Times, Sirik Matak then warned that the regime could not survive, and he said that Sihanouk would win easily in a free election. He appreciated Washington’s reluctance to interfere in Cambodian affairs, but if the White House insisted on continuing to sustain such an unpopular regime, “We will fall to the Communists.”

It was an accurate prediction of inevitable defeat and an unexceptional assessment of the revival of Sihanouk's popularity. Desire for the Prince's return was barely concealed now; almost nothing of the urban contempt in 1970 remained. Rumors of coups were to be heard in every café and every camp in the capital. There were few American diplomats or military men who were not approached by their Cambodian contacts and asked discreetly about Washington's attitude to a change in government. One group called "The Free Patriotic Khmers" petitioned the embassy to protest the "neo-Hitlerism" of Lon Nol and to beg President Nixon to act quickly to change the government. But Lon Nol was still the White House choice, and after the bombing incident Nixon sent him a telegram "to renew our expression of admiration for the Khmer people's courage and steadfastness under your leadership."

A few days later William Porter, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, spoke of the "large degree of political stability in Cambodia under the leadership of Lon Nol." The embassy received instructions from Washington; any journalist who asked about the political situation was to be informed that Lon Nol represented the majority of the Cambodian people. The notion was greeted with derision by correspondents, and relations between the press and the embassy deteriorated further. “We were torn apart by the press,” says Harben, “because our line was so ridiculous.”

Kissinger was more sanguine. In a background briefing to Richard Valeriani of NBC news he remarked, “We can’t go around bashing our allies . . . If you replace a government then you’re responsible for its successor and we’ve just been through that in Vietnam. We didn’t go through the agony of getting out of Vietnam in order to get reinvolved in South East Asia.” Alexander Haig left on another mission to Phnom Penh. His over-all task was to sustain policy. Lon Nol was offered a trip to the United States for medical treatment, but he was to be bolstered, not replaced. Haig had some success. He persuaded the Marshal that his younger brother Lon Non ought to go on an extended tour of the United States. William Harben, who had just been reassigned to Washington, accompanied him. Harben’s Political Section was merged with the Political Military Section so that political reporting from the embassy was further restricted.

Haig also induced Lon Nol to form a more “representative” government by effecting a rapprochement with Sirik Matak, and reuniting the men of the 1970 coup into a four-man ruling council. For a few weeks brave new promises of responsible, collegial government were made, but they soon lapsed. Neither Lon Nol nor the White House was seriously interested in change. Lon Nol refused to relinquish any control of the army. Gradually the other members of the Council—Sirik Matak, In Tam, Cheng Heng—fell away. As Harben later put it, “As soon as Washington was distracted elsewhere, Lon Nol, with the usual [United States] army backing, resumed his dictatorship, and the Americans acquiesced again.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent its seasoned Indochina investigators, James Lowenstein and Richard Moose, to Phnom Penh once again. They were appalled: “We found it generally agreed among all observers that the political, military and economic performance of the Lon Nol government had reached an all-time low. Furthermore, it was our impression that the feeling of apathy and futility on the part of government officials was so profound that it obscured any sense of crisis, which, by any Western standards, they should have felt, given the facts of the situation.”

The way the embassy, and in particular Enders, dealt with them is instructive. Moose and Lowenstein were anxious to discover the nature and the extent of the bombing. They found neither Swank nor Enders helpful. What they could not have known was that while their visit was being arranged, Enders had proposed to State that if they asked about the bombing they simply be told that the Defense Attaché’s office screened requests from FANK and transmitted them to the Seventh Air Force in Thailand. If they were to ask whether the embassy recommended targeting, they should reply that it shared certain intelligence that sometimes entered into the Cambodian decision to request strikes. Enders’ cable proposed that any questions about numbers of targets or bomb-damage assessment be referred to Washington or CINCPAC. These parameters, described as the “essential elements,” were approved by State. Both Swank and Enders subsequently referred to their "special instructions" on how to deal with the investigators, though those “instructions” had originated in the embassy.

Even the “instructions” were at first ignored. To begin with, Moose and Lowenstein reported, “We were told that the embassy possessed only limited information regarding tactical air operations and the locations of B-52 strikes.” However, an air attaché told them that he had much more information, which he was forbidden to divulge to them. Then, on a cheap transistor radio belonging to the UPI and Newsweek correspondent Sylvana Foa, the two men heard embassy personnel giving bombing instructions directly to United States warplanes. When they confronted Swank, he referred to Washington's "instructions"; this was the first that Moose and Lowenstein knew of any restrictions on what they could know. They cabled Senator Stuart Symington to complain. Symington spoke to William Rogers, who said that he knew nothing about it. Then Moose and Lowenstein were told a little more—that American spotter planes were radioing ground requests for airstrikes direct to the embassy and that the embassy “validated” every strike request in order to “minimize unnecessary collateral civilian damage.” This was still a good deal less than the truth.

Enders’ attitude was summarized in another cable warning the State Department that Moose and Lowenstein could be expected to assert a new degree of United States involvement in Cambodia “backed up by detail to the extent we make it available.” Rogers ignored this caution and sent two aides over to the Pentagon to try to discover just what was happening in the Phnom Penh embassy. Only then did Rogers learn the full extent to which Enders had been controlling the bombing. He sent an angry cable to Swank, ordering him to brief Moose and Lowenstein fully.

.Following this incident Sylvana Foa was expelled by the Cambodian government. Cambodian officials said that the initiative came from Enders. Enders later admitted to the Foreign Relations Committee that he considered her stories "tendentious," and had told Cambodian officials that her presence was not what their government or his government needed.and pointing out that he had been unaware of any “special procedures” used by the embassy to coordinate air strikes until informed by the Pentagon “a few minutes ago.”

Enders later argued that State knew the details and that he made no attempt to conceal the embassy role. Swank acknowledges the deception, and he regrets it. “I think it can be explained only on the basis of the extreme sensitivity of our mission, and Washington itself, to Congressional criticism. The whole history of the U.S. in Cambodia is of conflict between the legislature and executive. It was one of the tragedies of the situation. We were always trying to work between them.”

The Moose-Lowenstein report was released by a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee at the end of April. Senator Symington, concluding that the embassy's activities were “illegal,” called for hearings. The State Department was compelled to fashion a defense of the bombing-control operation, and it was Rogers who had to present it. But attention was diverted. As he drove up Capitol Hill on the morning of April 30, an aide said to him, “This will be hot.”

“No,” replied Rogers. “The President is about to make a statement which will far overshadow this.”

That evening Nixon announced that H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had resigned after the first revelations about Watergate.

The legal arguments were important. The justification for bombing Cambodia had been to protect Americans in Vietnam. Since October 1970, the Congress had included in every military appropriation bill a proviso expressly forbidding bombing in Cambodia except for that purpose. By the end of March 1973, there were no American troops left in Indochina. Still, the bombing of Cambodia increased. The administration now based its case on Article 20 of the Paris Agreement. Rogers now claimed that American withdrawal from Vietnam did not affect the situation in Cambodia, and that Article 20 legalized the bombing “until such time as a cease-fire could be brought into effect.”

Such an argument was unpersuasive. Article 20 did not call for a cease-fire, and it did not give any of the signatories unilateral authority to enforce any settlement in Cambodia. As we know, a secret State Department analysis of the Article stressed that it was carefully worded to be only in agreement in principle. No public mention was made of that nuance. Furthermore, Article 20 applied only to those parties that had signed the Paris Agreement; no Cambodians were among them. Since the obligation on “foreign countries” was to withdraw troops and end all military activities The absence of a cease-fire in Cambodia could not properly be cited as authority for continued United States involvement.

The memorandum also asserted that the bombing was justified because of the presence of North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia threatening the right of self-determination in Vietnam. This argument was weakened by the fact that the Paris Agreement had countenanced the continued presence of “approximately 145,000” North Vietnamese soldiers in South Vietnam. The memorandum also ignored the fact that on March 2, Rogers had signed the Declaration of the International Conference on Vietnam, which pledged the signatories, if the Agreement were violated, to consult “either individually or jointly . . . with the other parties to this Act with a view to determining necessary remedial measures.”

The logic of the administration's position was that the President could involve the country in war whenever he determined that an executive agreement had been violated. It ignored the fact that, even if the United States did have the authority under international law to retaliate against any North Vietnamese breach of the accord, this did not supply the President with a constitutional right to do so. In effect, the administration was justifying the bombing as an extension of the Vietnam War; it was to help prevent the imposition of a Communist government on South Vietnam. Rogers claimed that to stop it now would imply “a Constitution that contains an automatic self-destruct mechanism designed to destroy what has been so painfully achieved.” In fact, all that the Constitution required was that the President ask for Congressional authority to bomb Cambodia in order to prevent the Communist takeover of Vietnam, if that were indeed its purpose. Instead, the White House merely insisted on its right to continue the campaign.

Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson asserted that despite the fact that over the years Congress had stated that aid to Cambodia “shall not be construed as a commitment by the United States to its defense,” the Lon Nol government was now an American “ally.” This assertion provoked Senator George McGovern to comment that it was “a fascinating question of law how a country which has refused protection under a treaty (SEATO), a country whose defense by the United States is prohibited by law, nonetheless qualifies as an ‘ally.’” He pointed out that Cambodia was obviously “a super ally,” since Lon Nol’s “request” for bombing was taken by the White House as conferring the authority for it, whatever the attitude of Congress.

This was the situation at the end of April 1973, and there is no reason to suppose that the administration intended to shift its attitude or that Congress could, without unusual pressures, have affected it. But then, as the White House abuses of power were revealed, as officials from Nixon and Kissinger on down became more obviously involved, Congress found the will to reassert itself. As an attempt was being made in the courts to have the bombing declared illegal, the legislature finally managed to restrain the President and to accomplish what Nixon and Kissinger had failed to achieve—an end to direct American military involvement in Indochina.