CHAPTER X

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The Indochina Agreements

PRESIDENT Johnson’s action on March 21, 1968 in suspending bombing of North Vietnam north of the 20th parallel, renewing his invitation to negotiate, and announcing that he would not be a candidate for re-election presented Hanoi with a considerable dilemma. The dramatic character of this presidential initiative made it difficult to reject, especially since the North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam and the Viet Cong had been badly hurt during the turning back of the Tet offensive, and yet Hanoi’s position was so far apart from Washington’s, both in substance and in the insistence of each side that the other must make the first major move, that the Johnson offer was also very hard to accept.

As early as April 1965, the President had proclaimed that the United States was willing to negotiate without preconditions and to help rebuild North Vietnam after a settlement. The United States used its bombing of North Vietnam and the possibility of its cessation as a lever to induce negotiations; there were eight American bombing “pauses” for this purpose in 1965-67, but Hanoi’s response was mainly to take advantage of them to reinforce and resupply its units in the South. Another American tactic was to promise to hold its troop strength in South Vietnam level if Hanoi would refrain from infiltrating more military units into the South; no formal agreement on this was possible since Hanoi never admitted officially that it had any troops in South Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese precondition for negotiations was that the United States must stop its bombing of the North immediately and unconditionally. In addition, Hanoi demanded that the United States withdraw its forces from Vietnam, refrain from further interference, and accept the ten-point program announced by the National Liberation Front in 1960, which called in essence for the displacement of the Saigon government by a coalition government with National Liberation Front participation and eventual unification of North and South Vietnam.

The Paris Talks

Hanoi nevertheless accepted President Johnson’s offer to negotiate of March 31, 1968, and after some diplomatic maneuvering the negotiations began in Paris in May. The reason was probably a realization by both of the military failure of the Tet offensive and of its psychological impact on the United States, as well as a desire to seek gains through diplomacy before the passing of the elderly and ailing Ho Chi Minh. Hanoi’s position at Paris during the first several months was that the United States must end all bombing of the North, withdraw from the South, and allow a National Liberation Front delegation to join the talks; and North Vietnamese Army units actually withdrew from South Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia during this period, but whether in order to create a better atmosphere for the negotiations is not clear. The initial American position at Paris was essentially that the North Vietnamese Army must withdraw from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and that South Vietnam must be allowed to determine its own political future without outside interference.

In September-October, a secret understanding, whose existence Hanoi was later to deny, was evidently reached.* There was to be a complete American bombing halt (although reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam would continue) on condition that the North Vietnamese Army not violate the Demilitarized Zone (by crossing it) and refrain from attacking South Vietnamese cities. The agreement had to be secret, inasmuch as Hanoi did not admit publicly to having any troops in South Vietnam and insisted on an outwardly unconditional bombing halt. In addition, it was agreed that the Saigon government and the National Liberation Front should be admitted to the talks. Each side, however, agreed with its own junior partner that the latter should be represented by a separate delegation, to give it face, and that the other side’s should be represented only as part of a single delegation. President Thieu was particularly insistent that the National Liberation Front should not be separately represented and withheld his government’s participation in the talks for several weeks, until an agreement was worked out under which all participants used an intentionally ambiguous “our side, your side” formula. Nevertheless, with an eye to the approaching election and a desire to show progress on Vietnam, the Johnson administration suspended all bombing of North Vietnam (south as well as north of the 20th parallel) at the end of October.

President-elect Nixon had considerable to live up to, inasmuch as the President under whom he had served as Vice President had promised an armistice in Korea if elected and had actually achieved one six months after his inauguration. This feat proved impossible to duplicate, although Nixon had indicated during the 1968 campaign that he had an (unspecified) plan to bring peace to Vietnam. In April 1969, after his inauguration, he began to reveal what it was: the United States might withdraw unilaterally—although not necessarily unconditionally—from Vietnam and cover its withdrawal by Vietnamization, meaning the upgrading of the combat capabilities of the South Vietnamese armed forces through better training and equipment.

Although it had strong objections to Vietnamization, the other side apparently sensed an exploitable element of urgency and vulnerability in the President’s position. On May 8 the National Liberation Front proclaimed a new ten-point program making the release of American prisoners of war, an outcome known to be strongly desired in the United States by the administration and the public, conditional on American military withdrawal, and calling for a coalition government in lieu of the existing Saigon government, subsequent elections, a neutral South Vietnam, and ultimate unification with the north. The National Liberation Front evidently assumed that its superior organization and discipline, compared with those of the Saigon government’s following, would enable it to manage and eventually control the fluid situation that implementation of its demands would presumably create. To improve its organizational capabilities and image, the National Liberation Front established what it called the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam in the spring of 1969.

In a major statement of May 14, President Nixon virtually accepted the National Liberation Front’s ten-point program, but with the important qualification that the proposed elections be held under international supervision, presumably in order to remove the onus from the United States if anything went wrong; this condition was unacceptable to the other side. The Communist parties to the negotiations tended to become more obstructive after the death of Ho Chi Minh on September 3, 1969, probably because a major reason for serious negotiating—the desire to enable Ho to see progress toward “liberation” of the South before his death—had been removed. In spite of inevitable discouragement over this situation, the United States proceeded steadily with its troop withdrawal program and its logical concomitant, Viet-namization; during the three-year period beginning in mid-1969, American combat forces in South Vietnam were reduced from half a million almost to zero. This process, being motivated primarily by domestic political and fiscal considerations, was not affected even by the Cambodian crisis of 1970 (see below).

On October 7, 1970, President Nixon made two important concessions by dropping his demands for international supervision of the proposed elections following an agreement and for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam. In May 1971 the United States agreed to complete its withdrawal, which was imminent in any case, in exchange for a cease-fire and the release of American prisoners of war. During this period, and through 1972, there were important although intermittent secret talks, some of them involving Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho, the senior North Vietnamese negotiator, in addition to the open sessions. The United States tended to prefer secret diplomacy, and Hanoi open negotiations, for the same reason: the latter gave Hanoi and the National Liberation Front a propaganda forum. On June 26, 1971, a secret nine-point North Vietnamese proposal, not published down to the present, which contained a rejection of the American statement of the previous month, was presented. On July 1, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam published a seven-point proposal: the United States was to stop its support of the Saigon government, including the Vietnamization program, complete its withdrawal, get its prisoners of war back only when Saigon released its civilian prisoners (including of course alleged Communists), accept a coalition government with National Liberation Front participation and eventual unification, and give reconstruction aid to North and South Vietnam. Hanoi said privately that it preferred that the United States respond to its secret nine-point proposal rather than to the public seven-point proposal and then proceeded to denounce the United States for not replying to the latter.

The fairly rapid development of a new relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the United States following the first Kissinger visit to Peking (July 1971) created a different international climate for the negotiations on Vietnam, but its effect was not immediately obvious. In late January, President Nixon made a new set of public proposals, the most significant of which were probably a reintroduction of the earlier demand for international supervision of the elections to be held in South Vietnam (there was to be no displacement of the Thieu government by a coalition government with National Liberation Front participation prior to the elections, as demanded by the Communist side) and the specification that only “innocent” civilians, presumably not including political prisoners held by the Saigon government, need be released along with American and other military prisoners (an obvious effort to maintain a separation between the release of the two categories, in opposition to the Communist position). This plan was promptly rejected by North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. In February 1972, the Communist side restated the essence of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s seven points, plus a demand that President Thieu resign, by implication after disbanding his armed forces. It may have been partly in an unsuccessful effort to soften Hanoi’s stand somewhat, and as a result of a request by President Nixon at the Peking summit, that Chou En-lai secretly flew to Hanoi early in March.

This condition of deadlock was intolerable for the Nixon administration in 1972, an election year. The Communist side was obviously trying to use its American prisoners of war as its main lever on the United States, and the Nixon administration could not afford to appear to be doing less than the maximum, short of re-escalation of the war, to get the prisoners back. Accordingly, the United States suspended the Paris talks on March 25, 1972, mainly in protest at the Communist stand on the prisoner question. Hanoi for its part evidently believed that it could repeat or improve on its performance of 1968, the previous American election year, by influencing American politics and policy in its own favor through an offensive, and perhaps that it could disrupt President Nixon’s Moscow summit conference planned for May.

The Easter Offensive

Accordingly, at the end of March Hanoi launched virtually its whole army in its so-called Easter offensive against South Vietnam, with the aid of tanks and heavy artillery provided by the Soviet Union. Though it had the advantage of surprise, the offensive began to be stopped and ground down by a combination of increasingly effective South Vietnamese resistance and American air strikes, the latter being conducted mainly by aircraft based in Thailand. Furthermore, the Viet Cong forces, which had been badly weakened in the aftermath of the Tet offensive, proved unable to do anything significant in support of the Easter offensive.

Profoundly angered by the Easter offensive and convinced that it violated the 1968 understanding, President Nixon responded first by massive air strikes in South Vietnam and against North Vietnam and then (beginning on May 8) by mining Haiphong harbor, through which passed most of whatever Soviet equipment for North Vietnam did not move across China by rail, for the first time in the war. On May 8 he repeated his basic proposal calling for completion of the American withdrawal in exchange for the release of American prisoners of war, with political issues to be negotiated later between Saigon and its adversaries. The President knew that his action, taken only two weeks before the scheduled opening of the Moscow summit, posed a powerful challenge to the Soviet Union. He was outraged by the high level of Soviet logistical support for the North Vietnamese Army, and he later claimed to have considered cancelling the Moscow summit; more probably he hoped that the Soviet leadership would not only refrain from cancelling it—something that Moscow was in no position to do, in view of its need for détente with the United States—but would reduce its support for Hanoi and encourage a more conciliatory North Vietnamese attitude at Paris. If this was his calculation, he was to be successful, although both the Soviet Union and China increased their deliveries of military aid to North Vietnam somewhat for a time after May 8, 1972, in spite of the American bombing and mining. He also evidently tried with success to induce Peking to put political pressure on Hanoi; one indication of this was that on Kissinger’s next visit to China, in June 1972, he took a specialist on Vietnamese affairs with him.

During this period secret talks, including some between Kissinger and Politburo member Le Due Tho, were resumed at Paris. As in 1968, Hanoi responded to its military setbacks by reverting to diplomacy before its hand was weakened to the point of ineffectiveness. At first it insisted that the United States must withdraw its forces from Thailand, as well as from Indochina, and it continued to demand the ouster of President Thieu. By September, however, it was no longer insisting on these points, provided Thieu would deal with the National Liberation Front, the change being due according to official American sources to persuasive Soviet and Chinese pressures on North Vietnam.

On October 8, Hanoi secretly made what was to prove to be its decisive concession. While still insisting on American withdrawal and the simultaneous release of all prisoners (not merely American prisoners of war), it dropped its demand for a full-fledged coalition government with National Liberation Front participation, in succession to the Saigon government, in favor of a vaguely defined “administrative structure” to be known as the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, which was to operate on the basis of unanimity, in other words with a veto for any member. Hanoi had taken a step that could be interpreted as meeting the American demand for a separation of the military from the political issues, the former to be settled first and mainly between North Vietnam and the United States, the latter to be settled later between Saigon and the National Liberation Front. More precisely, the release of American prisoners of war, although still tied to Saigon’s release of its civilian prisoners, was no longer linked to American cooperation in the National Liberation Front’s political program through the setting up of a coalition government. It appeared for a time that an agreement could be signed by the end of October.

“Peace Is at Hand”

President Nixon was searching in effect for a way to complete the American military disengagement from the war (apart from the Vietnamization program) and to secure the release of American prisoners of war without involving the United States in the settlement of political issues, and without necessarily giving the Saigon government more than what was then known as a “decent interval” between the American withdrawal and its own possible (but not inevitable) collapse. Furthermore, the President was obviously eager for some diplomatic success at Paris, especially on the prisoner of war issue, to which he could point before the election, even though he was not prepared to ensure the signing of an agreement by election day by capitulating to Hanoi on the still contentious prisoner of war question and producing an explosion of American public wrath when the terms became known. His solution was to have Kissinger hold an important and dramatic press conference on October 26, in which he said that peace was “at hand” and minimized the remaining obstacles to its achievement. Ignoring a simultaneous public statement by Hanoi indicating that all prisoners must be released at the same time, as well as a statement by North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong eight days earlier making the same point and saying that the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord would be in effect a coalition government, Kissinger insisted that “the return of our prisoners is not conditional on the disposition of Vietnamese prisoners in Vietnamese jails on both sides of the conflict.”

Kissinger dealt with another crucial question, that of Saigon’s attitude on the progress toward an agreement that the United States and North Vietnam had made, not through misstatement but through vagueness. Within the next several days it became clear that President Thieu had an independent and dissenting opinion. He was still insisting on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, something that was no longer an issue between Hanoi and Washington; he claimed their number to be 300,000, whereas the official American estimate was 145,000. He considered Hanoi’s refusal to withdraw from the South as a refusal to recognize the Demilitarized Zone, and hence the existence of South Vietnam as a separate de facto state. He regarded the proposed National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, quite reasonably in view of Pham Van Dong’s statement, as a disguised coalition government. He wanted agreements on Laos and Cambodia to be signed simultaneously with any agreement on South Vietnam, in view of their direct relevance to the Vietnamese conflict. While not necessarily disagreeing with these points, Kissinger told Thieu that the United States would sign an agreement even if Saigon did not. In fact, however, the United States did not feel itself in a position to do so, probably because of the unfavorable impression that would be created at home and abroad by the spectacle of the United States taking action on the Saigon government’s fate over its explicit objections.

Furthermore, no matter what had been said just before the election Nixon and Kissinger knew of course that they were not yet in agreement with Hanoi. In addition to the issues already, mentioned, there was the fact that in October 1972 Hanoi had moved a great deal of material into South Vietnam, presumably in order to enable its forces there to take as much territory as possible during whatever time remained before the signing of an agreement and the beginning of a cease-fire. Presumably as a result, at least in part, of President Thieu’s vigorously expressed views, the American attitude hardened and shifted from the “decent interval” approach to that of genuinely giving the Saigon government a “decent chance” for survival, short of reinvolving the United States in the political aspects of the struggle any further, even if this meant taking action against North Vietnam.

The last straw was a new set of demands presented by Hanoi on December 12, which included a refusal to recognize the Demilitarized Zone as a de facto border and an effort to ensure that the international machinery for supervising the cease-fire should be weak and should not be in place when the cease-fire went into effect. On December 16, Kissinger held a press conference at which he reported gloomily on the difficulties that the negotiations had encountered since the October 26 press conference, while still stating, contrary to the public record, that Hanoi had agreed in October to separate the release of the American prisoners of war from that of other prisoners. He admitted that Saigon had raised objections, especially to the idea of North Vietnamese troops remaining in South Vietnam, after a cease-fire, but insisted that they would not be decisive: “. . . no other party will have a @@@@@veto over our actions.” He was careful to throw the primary blame for what he portrayed as the current deadlock on Hanoi, not on Saigon. Kissinger gave no hint of the next American move; the reasons may have gone beyond normal security, since there is some suspicion that he was opposed to that move.

It turned out to be a heavy bombing campaign against North Vietnam from December 18 to 29. This controversial step produced significant results, not only through its direct impact on Hanoi but also apparently because it led to further Chinese pressures on the North Vietnamese to moderate their position, rather than on the United States. Peking’s reasoning apparently was that continuation of the war in Vietnam at the existing level would increase Hanoi’s dependence on the Soviet Union (for military equipment in particular) and therefore Soviet influence on Hanoi, would jeopardize the Sino-American détente, and would enhance the prospects for ultimate North Vietnamese control over the whole of Indochina. Chinese pressure may have taken the form of a threat to cut off Peking’s own aid to North Vietnam and to interrupt the flow of Soviet aid for Hanoi moving across China by rail.

On January 8-9, 1973, a few days after the resumption of the negotiations at Paris, Hanoi made some important concessions that the United States chose to interpret publicly as a return to what, according to the official American version, had been agreed on the previous October. According to Kissinger at another press conference held on January 24, 1973, these North Vietnamese concessions consisted of strengthening of the machinery for supervising the cease-fire, elimination of the term “administrative structure” so that the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord looked less like a coalition government, a commitment to respect the Demilitarized Zone to the extent of not infiltrating troops across it, a clear separation of the release of American prisoners of war from that of other prisoners (the official American position was that agreement had been reached on this point the previous October but had broken down in December), and a few other less substantive concessions. President Thieu’s objections, apart from the futile one to the continuing presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam, were met at least in part by some of these concessions, as well as by official American optimism than an agreement on Laos, although probably not on Cambodia, @@@@@would be reached shortly; in fact, in order to ensure this the United States was prepared to put heavy pressures on the Royal Laotian Government, of a kind to be discussed later.

The South Vietnam Agreement, January 1973

On the basis of this forward step an agreement was actually signed at Paris on January 23; it was to go into effect on January 27. The problem of each side’s negative attitude toward the other’s junior partner was handled by having the two parties on one side sign on a single sheet, and the parties on the other side sign on a separate sheet. The agreement, in its major articles, provided that a cease-fire should go into effect and that all foreign troops on Saigon’s side should withdraw within sixty days. Further foreign troops were not to be introduced on either side (the question of whether North Vietnamese troops should be regarded as foreign was left vague; indeed their presence in South Vietnam was not mentioned in the agreement). Military equipment could be brought into South Vietnam only at levels and in types sufficient to replace equipment present before the cease-fire but no longer serviceable. All prisoners of war and foreign civilian prisoners were to be released at a rate paralleling the American withdrawal, and the release of Vietnamese civilian prisoners was to be negotiated between Saigon and the National Liberation Front.

The latter two parties were to create, as soon as practicable, the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, which was to be composed of three equal “segments”; these were not identified but were presumably to consist of one representing the Saigon government, one representing the National Liberation Front, and one composed equally of “neutrals” nominated by one side and “neutrals” nominated by the other side. The Council was to be subject to the principle of “unanimity” (i.e., the veto) and was to organize “free and democratic general elections” to decide South Vietnam’s political future. The two South Vietnamese parties were to negotiate a reduction of their armed forces. The Demilitarized Zone was to be “respected,” in the sense already indicated, even though it was specified as only a provisional boundary.

An International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) was to be created to police the cease-fire; its membership was not specified, but it was generally known to be likely to consist of Canada, Indonesia, Poland, and Hungary. As with earlier such bodies in Indochina, its official reports and recommendations would have to be adopted unanimously. The actual implementation of the cease-fire would be the responsibility of a Four-Party Joint Military Commission, which after the American withdrawal would become a Two-Party Joint Military Commission, representing only Saigon and the National Liberation Front, through the elimination of the American and North Vietnamese delegations. There was to be no foreign military activity, including by implication movement of military personnel and material into South Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, although no date was specified on which this provision was to go into effect; thus the only way in which Hanoi could legally send war material into South Vietnam was across the Demilitarized Zone under the supervision of the ICCS, and, of course, at replacement levels only. The United States was to help reconstruct North Vietnam, as well as the rest of Indochina. The United States was to remove the mines it had sown in North Vietnamese waters.

The published Paris agreement was allegedly accompanied by no secret agreements, but plausible reports indicated the existence of one to the effect that North Vietnam would remove 100,000 of its troops from South Vietnam provided Saigon reduced its forces by an equal number; if there was such an understanding, it had to be secret, for the obvious reason that Hanoi still would not admit publicly and formally to having any troops at all in South Vietnam.

Kissinger visited Hanoi from February 10 to 13, mainly to discuss the implementation of the Paris agreement, which was going none too well. He then visited Peking, partly no doubt in an effort to encourage a cooperative Chinese attitude at the international conference that was to convene shortly at Paris to lend its dignity to the agreement worked out in January. The release of prisoners of war on both sides, including American prisoners of war, was lagging behind the American military withdrawal, which was virtually complete. Hanoi was evidently trying to get the United States to put pressure on the Saigon government to release its civilian prisoners. Hanoi was continuing military activities in Laos and Cambodia and according to official American charges was not only failing to reduce its troop strength in South Vietnam but was actually reinforcing it. None of the Vietnamese parties was cooperating in the Four-Party Joint Military Commission or with the ICCS, which was having difficulty getting into position. There had been virtually no progress toward implementation of the political aspects of the Paris agreement.

The twelve-party conference on Vietnam (consisting of representatives of the five major powers, the four members of the ICCS, and the three Vietnamese parties, as well as United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim), which met at Paris from February 26 to March 2, inevitably did more than ratify the four-party agreement already reached. In addition to doing that, it listened to strong Canadian reservations about the probable effectiveness of the ICCS and a powerful and dramatic American demand that Hanoi stop violating the cease-fire and delaying the release of the one hundred forty-odd remaining American prisoners of war. After Hanoi had promised to release them promptly, an agreement was signed that endorsed the January 27 agreement, expressed the signatories’ interest in being kept informed by the parties most directly involved about progress toward implementing the January 27 agreement, and pledged the signatories to respect the independence and neutrality of Cambodia and Laos.

In several significant respects, the 1973 agreement was less favorable to a Saigon government than the 1954 agreement had been. During those two decades North Vietnam had freed itself of formal international constraints on its behavior at home (such as the importation of foreign weapons) and of one on its behavior in South Vietnam: it now had the implicit right to keep troops there. Unlike the earlier one, the 1973 agreement dealt only with South Vietnam, not with North Vietnam, let alone Laos and Cambodia (apart from the vague provisions forbidding foreign military activity on their territory). An obvious example is that whereas the 1954 agreement had provided for an ICCS in each of the three Indochina countries, including both halves of Vietnam, the 1973 agreement provided for one in South Vietnam only. Whereas the 1954 agreement had called for the regrouping of all Communist forces in Vietnam north of the Demilitarized Zone, the 1973 agreement made no reference to the presence of North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam, much less to any obligation for them to withdraw. The official American view was, or was claimed to be, that these forces could not be supplied at a level adequate to maintain them as an effective fighting force without violating the agreement, or in other words without resupplying them through Laos and Cambodia as well as across the Demilitarized Zone. The obvious and plausible alternative possibility, that Hanoi might prefer to violate the agreement to the extent necessary to maintain the effectiveness of its forces in the South, was not discussed publicly in official American circles.

The Nixon administration claimed that the war in Vietnam was over (the President began to speak of it in the past tense), and that “peace with honor” had been brought to both Vietnam and the United States. This of course was official nonsense for public consumption. What actually happened was that the United States had ended its own direct participation in the war (apart from Vietnamization), something essentially not very difficult to achieve since it was also desired by the Communist side, had gotten its prisoners back, and had left the Saigon government intact while consigning its ultimate fate to the outcome of its interaction, political it was hoped but very likely military as well, with its Communist adversaries. Events progressively punctured a myth, widely believed by the American public and tacitly encouraged by the administration, that “Only Hanoi Knows” (to quote a frequently displayed bumper sticker) about the fate of American military personnel missing in action and not listed by Hanoi as prisoners. In reality, there is every reason to believe that Hanoi was not secretly hoarding some, let alone all, of them for some bargaining purpose, and that all or most of them had died under circumstances that would never be known.

Implementation of the Agreement

Developments during the first several months following the signing of the Paris agreements provided little basis for optimism. Canada, reluctant from the beginning to serve on the ICCS because of its previous experience in similar roles in Indochina, agreed only under strong American pressure but soon became disgusted with the violations of the cease-fire, especially Hanoi’s, and with the obstructive behavior of the two Communist members of the ICCS, and withdrew at the end of July; it was replaced by Iran. In talks in Paris and Saigon beginning in late March 1973, the Saigon government and the National Liberation Front agreed on virtually nothing and made no significant progress toward resolving their political differences. Neither side released its military or civilian prisoners (apart from American prisoners of war). Saigon continued to insist, without success, on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops and on the formation of the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord and the holding of elections in the near future, while its military superiority to and political advantages over the National Liberation Front continued to exist, whereas the National Liberation Front wanted to postpone these steps so as to have time to improve its position.

The United States, an unhappy observer unwilling to reintroduce its ground forces and reluctant to resume air strikes, was concerned over the ineffectiveness of the cease-fire, continued North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam, North Vietnamese military activity in Laos and Cambodia, and the improper functioning of the ICCS and the Two-Party Joint Military Commission. Hanoi had its own grievances, including the continuation of American reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam, American slowness in mine-sweeping, and the delay in beginning American economic aid to North Vietnam, a commitment that was unpopular even among doves in the United States.

From these issues came a supplementary agreement, signed by the four parties principally involved at Paris, on June 13, 1973, and sometimes jocularly known as Son of Cease-fire. Its main provisions were that the cease-fire should be observed and the supervisory machinery made to work, that the United States should cease aerial reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam, that the United States should resume its mine-sweeping operations and complete them within thirty days, that the Demilitarized Zone should be used (implicitly by North Vietnam) only for supplies and only at replacement levels, that all prisoners should be released within thirty days, that the two south Vietnamese parties should proceed to implement, the political aspects of the January 27 agreement, that the latter’s provisions regarding Laos and Cambodia should be observed, and that negotiations on American economic aid to North Vietnam should be resumed. Clearly these items of agreement, if taken at face value without regard to the probability of implementation, were a mixed bag; some favored the Communist side, others the non-Communist side. But in practical terms this agreement was subject to the same operating principle as the earlier agreements on Indochina: observance and compliance by the non-Communist Indochinese governments and their allies, especially the United States, were relatively easy to observe and in many cases to enforce; observation and enforcement were much more difficult, and violations much easier and therefore more probable, on the Communist side. And an enormous weight of evidence indicated that Hanoi had by no means given up its determination to control South Vietnam, sooner or later and by one means or another.

Conflict and Agreement in Laos

Hanoi’s interest in Laos was mainly its utility as a military supply route to South Vietnam, but this was not the only significant aspect of the Laotian question. The beginning of the Paris talks on Vietnam in 1968 stimulated an increased interest on the part of Laotian Premier Souvanna Phouma in reactivating the tripartite coalition composed of neutrals like himself, representatives of the leftist Pathet Lao, and “rightists,” that had been created in 1962 but from which the Pathet Lao had soon withdrawn. This objective came somewhat closer after the United States stopped bombing North Vietnam at the end of October 1968, but increased its air attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos; Hanoi became interested in conciliating Souvanna Phouma in order to get him to put pressure on the United States to stop the bombing in Laos, in exchange for which Hanoi claimed to be willing to withdraw its 60-70,000 troops from eastern Laos. Souvanna Phouma was reluctant to see the end of American bombing, however, presumably because it was conducted not only against the North Vietnamese convoys moving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail but in support of Laotian government forces (including the United States Central Intelligence Agency-supported Clandestine Army composed of Meo irregulars led by General Vang Pao and a force of Thai “volunteers” that grew to 20,000 men by 1972) fighting North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao units in other parts of Laos.

The Pathet Lao for its part insisted on an American bombing halt as a precondition for talks with Souvanna Phouma. In addition, it demanded in its Five Points, published in March 1970, that all other forms of American intervention in Laos also cease, that Laos be neutralized (i.e., free of foreign interference and alignments of any kind) as called for by the 1962 agreement, that general elections be held, that a provisional coalition government be established in the meantime (not the tripartite government created in 1962, but one in which the Pathet Lao would control half the seats and from which the “rightists” would be virtually excluded), and that the zones controlled by the two sides should be reunited through consultations. Souvanna Phouma accepted the points as a basis for discussion in July 1972. His hand was very much weakened by the powerful American interest in withdrawing from Laos as well as Vietnam and by a North Vietnamese build-up in southern Laos intended to replace the “sanctuaries” in Cambodia that had been lost as a result of the crisis of the spring of 1970 (see below). In February-March 1971, in an unsuccessful effort to cope with this problem, South Vietnamese troops made an incursion into southern Laos; the United States provided air support but no ground forces such as it had sent into Cambodia a year earlier, part of the reason for the difference being a desire not to jeopardize the developing Sino-American détente as the Cambodian intervention had threatened to do.

Negotiations between Souvanna Phouma’s Royal Laotian Government and the Pathet Lao began on October 17, 1972. The basic positions were that Souvanna Phouma wanted the North Vietnamese out, and the 1962 government restored, whereas the Pathet Lao wanted the United States out, American bombing stopped, and a coalition government along the lines already indicated set up; the Pathet Lao evidently hoped for a formula that would enable its North Vietnamese patrons to maintain their unadmitted presence in the highland areas. During these negotiations, the Royal Laotian Government had the diplomatic support, behind the scenes, of the United States and China; the Pathet Lao had that of North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. But in January 1973, as the United States and North Vietnam moved rapidly toward an agreement on South Vietnam, it became clear that they wanted one on Laos as well; Hanoi was reported to have agreed secretly to withdraw virtually all of its troops from Laos following an agreement between Souvana Phouma and the Pathet Lao (but not automatically following the signing of the Paris agreement on South Vietnam).

Under this pressure the pace of the negotiations in Laos was intensified, but the two sides were not under equal pressure. The United States was eager to see an agreement signed that would enable it to stop bombing in Laos before the convening of the twelve-party conference on Vietnam on February 26; in mid-February it applied the most intense diplomatic pressures to Souvanna Phouma and the “rightists” and warned them that the bombing would stop by February 25. They had little choice but to yield, in view of the indispensability of American aid and support to their survival.

The result was an agreement, signed on February 20, that was a virtual capitulation to the Pathet Lao. The Royal Laotian Government was referred to in the text as the Vientiane Government, the Pathet Lao as the Patriotic Forces. The two principal cities, Vientiane (the administrative capital) and Luang Prabang (the royal capital), were to be “neutralized,” meaning that the Pathet Lao was to be allowed to station troops in them. A coalition government, composed equally of Souvanna Phouma’s supporters and Pathet Lao representatives, with no provision for “rightists” except as part of Souvanna Phouma’s following, was to be set up within thirty days. Within sixty days after the formation of the coalition government all foreign troops were to withdraw; the North Vietnamese were implied but not named, whereas the Americans and Thai were named. The agreement, which as a whole bore a rather close resemblance to the Pathet Lao’s Five Points, included a cease-fire that was to go into effect on February 22.

The heavy fighting that had been going on in previous weeks, with the Communist side generally on the offensive, as each side tried to improve its position prior to the cease-fire, continued after February 22 in violation of the cease-fire. The United States resumed bombing for one day (February 23) in southern Laos but discontinued it so as not to complicate its position at the Paris conference. It later bombed for another day (April 16) in northern Laos. Partly for this reason, and partly because of continued American pressures on the “rightists,” some of whom tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Souvanna Phouma in August, the fighting slackened fairly steadily and was virtually over by the end of the year. All but 3,000 of the Thai “volunteers” were withdrawn by August 1973.

In the meantime the emphasis of the continuing struggle came to rest on the implementation of the political provisions of the February 20 agreement. The Pathet Lao proved argumentative and obstructive, perhaps because it was short of personnel qualified to assume ministerial posts under the projected coalition government, but more fundamentally because it wanted to put off the date on which the North Vietnamese troops would be obligated to leave Laos. In addition to his problem with the Pathet Lao, Souvanna Phouma was under continued pressure from the “rightists,” some of whom were in his government, and who were opposed to the political provisions of the February 20 agreement. Negotiations between Souvanna Phouma and the Pathet Lao began in March, however, under American and Soviet diplomatic pressure. In April the Pathet Lao agreed that the other side should hold the vital portfolios of Interior and Defense (as well as others) in the projected coalition government, while the Pathet Lao should be allotted (among others) the somewhat less sensitive Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Finance. This concession was less important than it might appear, given the nature of the Pathet Lao’s current concerns as just indicated. An agreement on the composition of the coalition government, as well as another political matter, was reached in late July 1973 but not signed until September 14, as a result of various disagreements.

Even then implementation, as well as the beginning of the sixty-day period for the withdrawal of foreign troops, was held up by a dispute over the size, stationing, and functioning of the Pathet Lao contingents in the two capital cities. This was reached, at least on paper, on January 7, 1974, and in early April 1974 a coalition government was installed at last. During the following months the Pathet Lao’s superior organization and dynamism, its newly gained presence in the two capitals, and the incompetence of the “rightists” enabled the Pathet Lao to make rapid political progress toward control of the government. Declining health on the part of Souvanna Phouma and delays in the North Vietnamese withdrawal made the situation all the more serious.

Conflict without an Agreement in Cambodia

At the end of 1973 there was no prospect of an early agreement for the third of the troubled countries of Indochina, Cambodia. In part this was because the war had come to Cambodia relatively late. Down to the mid-1960s, its able and energetic, although temperamental, chief of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was remarkably successful in providing charismatic leadership for his people and in maintaining a precarious independence and neutrality for his country by conciliating China as a counterweight to his most feared neighbor, North Vietnam, and by counting on the United States to restrain his other two dangerous neighbors, South Vietnam and Thailand.

After the mid-1960’s the seemingly happy situation began to come unstuck. Sihanouk’s personalismo, the corruption in his entourage, and the weak condition of the Cambodian economy increasingly antagonized other leading political figures, intellectuals, and students. The intensification of the war in Vietnam worsened Sihanouk’s relations with the United States and made him more vulnerable to North Vietnamese pressures. In 1964 he began to allow North Vietnam to establish sanctuaries, or base areas, on Cambodian territory near the South Vietnamese border in order to support Viet Cong operations in the Mekong Delta, and to maintain a so-called Sihanouk Trail connecting southern Laos and the Delta area across Cambodia. In return, he and other leading figures, including some of those who were later to overthrow him, received a substantial subsidy from Hanoi. In addition, Sihanouk permitted Chinese ships to land military and other supplies secretly along the Cambodian coast, two-thirds of them going to the Viet Cong in the Delta and one-third to the Cambodian Army.

In 1969 the North Vietnamese began to strengthen and fortify their Cambodian sanctuaries heavily, probably in order to improve their usefulness as bases for operations in the Delta aimed at exploiting the forthcoming American withdrawal. This move evoked a secret American bombing campaign against the sanctuaries. Four years later there was to be an open disagreement between Sihanouk and the United States government as to whether he had protested against the bombing in 1969; whatever the truth of this, there is no doubt that he protested publicly and vigorously against the growing North Vietnamese violations of Cambodian neutrality, which were now too flagrant to be concealed or ignored and were becoming the targets of much Cambodian public criticism.

As a logical outgrowth of this criticism by Sihanouk and others, and perhaps on his instructions, riotous demonstrations against North Vietnam and other Communist countries began in Phnom Penh on March 12, 1970, while the Prince was out of the country. The demonstrations escalated rapidly into racially motivated attacks on and massacres of the sizable Vietnamese community in Cambodia, most of whose members were not pro-Communist. The Cambodian government, carried away by the heady atmosphere of the moment, gave the North Vietnamese a 48-hour ultimatum to abandon the sanctuaries and withdraw from Cambodia and actually expected this order to be obeyed, which of course it was not. Sihanouk’s political rivals and public critics soon took charge of the demonstrations and turned them against him. The Prince for his part hoped, but vainly, to persuade the Soviet Union and China to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia and in this way to score a success that would restore his rapidly eroding political position at home. He was voted out of office by a unanimous vote of the National Assembly on March 18. It is worth emphasizing that neither the United States government as a whole nor the Central Intelligence Agency in particular played any significant part in his downfall. The new Cambodian government, in which Marshal Lon Nol was the leading figure, closed its ports and coastline to further shipments of arms for the Viet Cong from China. For several weeks Peking negotiated secretly with Lon Nol, its purpose being to persuade him to allow the shipments just mentioned and the North Vietnamese sanctuaries to continue in return for diplomatic recognition and a subsidy. Whatever Lon Nol’s real attitude toward this proposal was, the course of events left him no effective choice but to become an American rather than a Chinese client.

Late in March, the North Vietnamese troops in the sanctuaries began to move out from them into the interior of Cambodia, probably for one or more of several purposes: to deter further Cambodian atrocities against the Vietnamese community, to support and strengthen the Cambodian revolutionary left (the so-called Khmer Rouge), to protect and strengthen the sanctuaries for future use against the Delta, to put pressure on the Lon Nol government to leave the sanctuaries alone and reopen the coastal route, and perhaps to overthrow it. Except for the first, all these actual or possible objectives were alarming to the United States government, although any major American military intervention in Cambodia could be defended before the bar of American public opinion only on the ground that it was necessary to cope with an increased threat to the Delta that might delay the American withdrawal and endanger both American lives and the success of the Vietnamization program. This accordingly was the line that President Nixon took when he announced on April 30 that American and South Vietnamese ground units, with American air support of course, were entering Cambodia in an operation confined to the sanctuary area and to a duration of two months. In addition, President Nixon appeared to believe that a failure to act in Cambodia would undermine American “credibility,” especially in the eyes of the Communist powers. This view was entirely consistent with his well-known tendency to act, or react, vigorously in situations that he regarded as crises. And indeed action had to be taken promptly before the Lon Nol government collapsed and while sufficient American troops were still in South Vietnam if it was to be taken at all.

From a strictly military point of view the operation, which was terminated on schedule, was a considerable success, and it probably contributed at least indirectly to the survival of the Lon Nol government; in 1971 President Nixon was to refer to it as the “purest example” of the Nixon Doctrine in action. On the other hand, the political costs of the operation were high. There was a loud outcry on American campuses and elsewhere, and Congress passed on June 30 the Cooper-Church Amendment prohibiting the future expenditure of government funds on American military operations in Cambodia beyond those announced on April 30 (this restriction was by no means fully observed in practice, however); the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 was repealed at the same time. There was a great deal of opposition to the Cambodian operation within the executive branch, including the State and Defense Departments. The operation jeopardized the developing Sino-American détente, at least for a time; Peking cancelled a Sino-American ambassadorial conversation scheduled for May 20, and on that date Mao Tse-tung issued a personal statement denouncing the United States with ringing revolutionary rhetoric. South Vietnamese troops took revenge on the Cambodians through looting and massacring. Lon Nol, although probably rescued by the United States and certainly dependent on it, proved almost completely incompetent and refused to share authority with a much abler rival, Sirik Matak, whom the United States preferred to him. All in all, some alternative to the course actually adopted by President Nixon might have been preferable, such as negotiating at least a conditional return of Prince Sihanouk and discouraging Phnom Penh from seeking confrontation with the North Vietnamese.

In 1970-72, North Vietnamese forces expanded their holdings rapidly in northern and eastern Cambodia and presided over the emergence for the first time of the Khmer Rouge as an effective fighting force operating under the label of FUNK (an acronym for Cambodian National United Front). In the meantime, Sihanouk, snubbed by the Russians, had taken refuge as a state guest in Peking, where he was well treated with an eye to his possible political usefulness, as early as March 1970. Much as Peking saw him as its best political handle on the Cambodian situation, so he saw as his best strategy close cooperation with the FUNK, even though its leaders had been in revolt against him until very recently. To symbolize this hoped-for cooperation, not only between Sihanouk and the FUNK but on a larger scale as well, Peking sponsored a “summit conference of the Indochinese peoples,” which was held on April 24-25, 1970, apparently at Canton, and at which not only Sihanouk but representatives of the FUNK, the Pathet Lao, the National Liberation Front, and North Vietnam were present. From this conference and negotiations occurring at the same time there emerged the so-called Cambodian Royal Government of National Union (GRUNK), whose nominal leadership was Sihanouk and his entourage in Peking, but whose real strength lay with the FUNK in Cambodia itself. Peking recognized the GRUNK on May 5; Moscow maintained diplomatic relations with the Lon Nol government. As the FUNK grew in strength, direct North Vietnamese influence on it and activity in its behalf tended to decline; Sihanouk admitted that he expected the FUNK’s victory to lead to a Communist Cambodia over which he would not preside. In the meantime, he did his best to maintain some semblance of influence and authority. In the spring of 1973 he claimed to have just visited FUNK-controlled territory in Cambodia. Later in the year he moved his personal headquarters to Canton, probably in order to be nearer home and to appear less obviously under Peking’s influence at a time when the United Nations was considering a Chinese move to substitute his government for that of Lon Nol in the United Nations; the move was defeated. His entourage mostly moved to Cambodia and merged with the FUNK.

Nevertheless, Sihanouk’s international influence tended to grow as no settlement materialized, and as the United States became increasingly eager to have one and to get Peking to use its good offices with the FUNK, through Sihanouk, to that end. In October, the Soviet Union withdrew its diplomatic mission from Phnom Penh, although without formally breaking with the Lon Nol government or recognizing Sihanouk’s. Sihanouk was adamant in his refusal to negotiate with Lon Nol, or at least for a time with the United States. He insisted on termination of American support for Lon Nol, including bombing. Lon Nol for his part refused to negotiate with Sihanouk, or to consider a settlement that would partition Cambodia.

Nevertheless, under American pressure and the impact of the Paris agreement on Vietnam, the Lon Nol government agreed early in 1973 to begin negotiations with non-Communist and nongovernmental groups for a coalition government with them and for a Council of National Reconciliation. Phnom Penh conceded in principle that Communists could run in a future general election. In July, it began to propose negotiations with the FUNK itself, a cease-fire, withdrawal of all foreign troops, and “national reconciliation.”

By that time Phnom Penh’s position was being weakened by the prospect of reduced American support in a critical field. There were a number of congressional efforts to stop American air strikes in Cambodia, and on June 29 President Nixon felt compelled to agree to a cutoff of the bombing on August 15; until that date, it continued full blast, rather than being tapered off so as to wean the Cambodian Army away from undue dependence on it. The end of the bombing created alarm in Phnom Penh and Saigon, but it seems to have made Sihanouk more interested in negotiating with the United States. It also led the United States to increase its moral support and political advice to the Lon Nol government, whose collapse would have made nonsense of President Nixon’s claim that his Cambodian intervention was a shining example of the Nixon Doctrine in action. The Kissinger visit to China of mid-November 1973 produced no visible progress toward a Cambodian settlement.

Later in the year Chinese and North Vietnamese military aid for the FUNK tapered off considerably, to the point where Sihanouk complained publicly about the trend. Peking was interested in preserving its détente with the United States and was simultaneously reducing its military aid shipments to North Vietnam. Hanoi for its part was concerned over the decline in the volume of arms it was receiving and was apparently husbanding what it had for use against its most important target, South Vietnam. The declining involvement of the external powers (apart from the United States) in the war in Cambodia did not put an end to it, however. On the contrary, it continued with great ferocity, although inconclusively. At least one discouraged foreign observer remarked that he saw no reason why it could not go on forever. The alternative possibility of some sort of agreement, if not necessarily a genuine settlement, fortunately could not be ruled out either.

* Cf. Peter A. Poole, The United States and Indochina from FDR to Nixon (Hinsdale, 111.: Dryden Press, 1973), pp. 200-201.