The Grade School Teacher and the Edsel Genius
By
Larry Engelmann
Richard Baughn began piloting F-105s over North Vietnam in March of 1965 as part of Operation Rolling Thunder. He flew out of Thailand from both Korat and Takhli. During the early days of the operation, he recalled, the North Vietnamese defenses were restricted to automatic weapons and AA, but in a short time American pilots spotted missile sites and heavy gun positions under construction. They sought permission to go after those sites, but the requests were never approved by higher headquarters. This struck the pilots as an ominous oddity. In fact, they all agreed, “it made no damned sense at all to let the North Vietnamese improve their defenses while we were forced to wait and watch knowing full well we would soon be facing them. But that is exactly what happened. The North Vietnamese soon developed a fully integrated radar-controlled gun and missile system, which soon included MIG aircraft,” Baughn recalls.
Once the Air Force began losing more aircraft, higher headquarters declared the missiles sights a high priority target and directed the pilots to knock them out. “Of course,” Baughn says, “this was before we were provided with the essential electronic radar detection and warning systems and adequate weapons to do the job properly. We had to depend on our Mark VII eyeballs for warning and protection. As a result, American losses were unnecessarily high and our results disappointing. It was the most asinine thing I had ever witnessed,” Baughn recalls, “and a criminal waste of American lives.” It didn't take Baughn long to realize the military was not calling the shots in Vietnam. “The decisions were coming from the White House and the civilians in the Department of Defense.
Before the Air Force was turned loose on the defensive systems of the North Vietnamese and before Baughn took command of the 44th Tactical Fighter Squadron in June 1965, he was assigned to the Headquarters, PACAF Standardization and Evaluation Group, which was responsible for monitoring all the flying units in PACAF and members of the Group flew with every unit, including those flying over North Vietnam. It was during this period after flying a number of combat missions with F-105 squadrons at Takhli and Korat that Baughn suggested to USAF headquarters in Saigon that the Air Force obtain radar-jamming pods (QRC-160), which had been tested and developed as part of the F-105 program. The jammers would have helped to protect the planes and pilots from the radar-controlled defenses. Baughn was familiar with the jammer, since he had been Tactical Air Command's and then later the Pacific Air Commands’s operations project officer for the F-105 program during the testing, procurement phase and unit conversions.
But his suggestion was turned down by some staff officer in Saigon, who stated the jamming pods “would be requested when they were needed,” Baughn was told. As it turned out, not until eighteen months later did the Air Force finally get the jammers to the F-105 units in Thailand. During this period many good fighter pilots were needlessly shot down.
Eventually, in the summer of 1966, the F-105 units started receiving the radar, homing and warning (RHAW) equipment for their aircraft, which warned the pilots when the radars were looking at them, told them what kind of radar it was and the general direction of the radar sight in relation to the aircraft. It also provided a warning when the sites were tracking and ready to fire or launch missiles. Without this equipment, pilots never knew the location of the missiles sites or when the missiles would be launched. Some pilots were shot down by missiles without any warning. Consequently, the fighters were forced to fly low, where automatic weapons and small arms shot many aircraft down.
“Without the warning gear you tried to avoid the missiles by flying low, which was deadly, because most people in North Vietnam had guns,” Baughn remembered. “And once we were forced down and they saw our direction of flight, they would start firing where we were about to pass and we had to fly through it. With so many small arms and the high rates of fire of the automatic weapons, they literally set up a wall of lead. Even at very high speeds it was difficult to miss us. If we tried to go above the effective range of these weapons, a guided missile might fly up our tailpipe. And something like that could ruin your whole day. RHAW was a good and relatively simple device and had it been provided sooner many pilots would not have been killed or shot down only to spend years in the hell of a North Vietnamese prison camp.”
In June of 1966 the U.S. Air Force activated a new squadron, the 13th Tactical Fighter Squadron and all of the officers, men, aircraft and equipment in the 44th were assigned to the 13th TFS and sent permanently to Thailand. “None of us were happy about the change. We had flown combat over NVN as the 44th and had tremendous squadron spirit”
As the commander of the 13th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Baughn was also assigned all of the F-100 and F-105 Wild Weasel units located at Korat. The Wild Weasel fighters had two seats and carried a highly trained Electronics Warfare Officer in the back seat to operate the radar warning equipment. In the early summer of 1966, the F-100 WW were operating at night, protecting the B-52 striking targets near the DMZ while the F-105 Weasels protected the F-105 fighters in North Vietnam.
The F-105 WW’s went in ahead of the main strike force to suppress or destroy missile sites with their radar homing missiles, rockets and aircraft cannons. They remained in the target area until the fighters had dropped their bombs and started home. The Wild Weasels were very effective and helped save many lives, but also experienced high losses themselves. Baughn flew about half of his combat missions with his Weasels and the other half with his fighters.
Starting with the arrival of the 13th Tactical Fighter Squadron in June of 1966, the Air Force stepped up operations in NVN and began attacking targets in the high threat area (Hanoi and Haiphong) every day that the weather would permit. “Unfortunately, most of the targets we were permitted to strike were next to worthless,” Baughn said. By now the area around Hanoi and Haiphong were heavily defended by a fully integrated defense system with an extremely high concentration of cannons, automatic weapons, small arms, radar controlled guided missiles and MIGS.
“We were thrown against one of the strongest and most sophisticated defensive system the world had ever seen. We had Wild Weasel support, but for awhile our fighters had very few RHAW sets (one per flight in the beginning) and no jamming pods. Unfortunately, we were still limited to mostly insignificant targets. It was idiotic to attack worthless targets in this heavily defended area,” Baughn continued. “During this time we experienced one of the highest loss rates in air war against NVN, while accomplishing next to nothing. In fact, the loss rate might have been comparable to some of the worst days of the 8th and 15th Air Forces over Germany in World War II.”
There were a number of significant targets in North Vietnam, but most of them had been ordered off limits by the Whitehouse and Department of Defense. Later when they could be attacked, the day and time was specified and if the weather delayed the strike, the target could not be struck until the Whitehouse and DOD approved it again. As a result, the military continued to be left with only insignificant targets to strike in between these times. “Limiting and controlling air strikes in this manner, while suffering extremely high loss rates, made no sense whatsoever.” Baughn continued, “I was 43 years old, had fought in WWII and couldn’t believe that we were wasting such an elite and highly trained force of fighter pilots and electronic warfare officers and their multi-million dollar aircraft on worthless targets. If the American public had known the full story, they would have probably cried for someone’s head or maybe impeachment. During this period of high losses, I couldn’t help but admire the spirit and the motivation of the younger pilots who were getting their first taste of combat.”
To compound the problem, the American mission planners seldom did anything to utilize the element of surprise. The attacks were flown at about the same time each day and followed the same routes in and out. “The North Vietnamese could damn near set their watches by our attack times. Consequently, they were fully prepared and waiting to shoot us out of the sky,” Baughn recalls. “It was very clear to all of us that the grade-school teacher and the Edsel genius [Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara] had succeeded in stifling all imagination.”
“On the way in to the target, MIGS would attack first. Then the missiles drove the USAF fighters down to the lower altitudes where the small arms fire and automatic weapons could cut us to threads. When the fighters pulled up to dive bomb, the heavier anti-aircraft cannons opened fire and filled the sky with flak. Coming off the target, radar guided missiles sometimes joined in with the cannons and automatic weapons followed by more MIGs. Our F-105’s were extremely fast, but could not turn with the very maneuverable MIGs and we had to avoid a turning fight with them, which put us an extreme disadvantage.”
“I had flown P-51s over Germany in World War II, and the Germans had some very heavy concentrations of flak,” Baughn remembers, “but the AA was no heavier than some of the highly defended areas of North Vietnam. When you added the missile factor and the MIGSs to the AA equation it was damned tough.”
Baughn repeated, “We squandered some of the best, most highly trained and motivated fighter pilots and aircrews I have known during my then-twenty-two years as a fighter pilot. I finally told the pilots and Wild Weasel crews in my squadron that we would certainly do everything we were told to do, but no more than that. I told them developing a do-or-die attitude when striking a few suspected fifty-gallon oil drums, ten to fifteen miles outside Hanoi, while an airfield loaded with MIGs was a few miles away and left untouched—didn’t make a damned bit of sense. I kept repeating to my guys not to take any unnecessary chances. I said hit your target, do your job and get the hell out. Even following this advice, we still had about thirty percent of our squadron shot down in a four month period.”
A second Wild Weasel unit stationed at Tahkli in Thailand lost all ten of their aircraft in just a few months. Takhli’s WW crews seemed to be unnecessarily aggressive, which resulted in their high losses. Consequently Tahkli’s remaining WW crews came to Korat to fly with Baughn’s squadron until they could get more aircraft and crews at Tahkli.
During this time while we were experiencing some of the highest losses of the war, Baughn says, the media reported the existence of ammunition and bomb shortages, which was denied by DOD. But, Baughn recalls. “We did in fact have severe bomb and ammo shortages. So now we had to fight without electronic jamming pods, were short on RHAW equipment and didn’t have bombs that would do the job. But we were still sent into high threat areas to strike useless targets with weapons that, in some cases, would do little more than chip paint.”
Like many professional fighter pilots, Baughn initially believed he and his fellow fliers were fighting for a worthwhile cause. “But it did not take long for me to become disenchanted with this ridiculous operation. The tight amateurish control by the Whitehouse and DOD civilians resulted in more empty chairs at the squadron dinner table each night, while the agonizing letters to the families back home increased. The aircrews were well aware of the idiotic control, but they never once refused to go on a mission.”
“President Johnson and Secretary McNamara had been warned by General LeMay and Admiral Sharp that Johnson’s and McNamara’s very limited and piecemeal air attack plan against worthless North Vietnamese targets would never persuade, intimidate or produce meaningful results. But LeMay’s and Sharp’s advice was completely ignored. Johnson and McNamara were more interested in sending little signals like they used in the Washington political arena. They didn’t seem to realize they had a proven and determined adversary who was familiar with their ways,” Baughn continued. “Johnson and McNamara never came close to unleashing the full power of the Air Force and Naval Air,” Baughn said. “And I would never suggest the use of nuclear weapons. After only few weeks when their feeble air effort produced very little, the Whitehouse, DOD and other airpower detractors were quick to complain about airpower’s limitations and ineffectiveness. (These same half-baked complaints about the ineffectiveness of airpower continue today—even after airpower won the war in Kosovo, without any boots on the ground and airpower gave the ground forces a 100 hour cake walk in the first Iraq war). The priority was shifted to the ground war in SVN and the buildup of ground forces accelerated. Not until December 1972, when President Nixon turned the airmen loose, did the Vietnamese feel the full force of what the US Air Force and Navy were capable, which immediately brought the North Vietnamese to the peace table—when nothing else would.”
Baughn said, “While we were fighting our politically imposed timid air war up north, there were endless rumors and reports about graft and corruption in South Vietnam and the shakiness of their military. “The South Vietnamese government,” Baughn says, “was reported, by our buddies fighting in that area, to be a house of straw that could never stand by itself.” Baughn often thought about the time in 1962 when he was stationed at Headquarters Pacific Air Forces at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. General Emmett "Rosie" O'Donnell, who was the commanding general of PACAF, was being briefed on the situation in South Vietnam. The briefing officer was referring to a map of South Vietnam that was all red except for the areas around some of the cities. The red depicted the Viet Cong controlled areas and the white represented the side the Americans were supporting. After a while, General O'Donnell asked, "What the hell are we doing there? It appears to me that the issue has already been decided."
Concerning the combat and bombing restraints, Baughn says, “We had so many that the pilots said, ‘With one more it will be illegal to take off on a combat mission.’ We spent about as much time memorizing restraints as we did on the more important combat items. The North Vietnamese wisely took advantage of the target restrictions, such as placing defenses in some of our prohibited areas. So in addition to all of the restraints, our government provided havens for the enemy defenses from which they could safely shoot at us.”
“Most pilots knew they were placing their lives on the line for practically nothing and doing it with their hands tied behind their backs,” Baughn says. “I think it was a testimonial to the American fighter pilots and WW crews that they never once refused to go on a mission. You can probably count on one hand the number of countries in the world today where the military would accept such a flawed and asinine military policy. The U.S. can be damned proud of the discipline and the dedication of our Navy and Air Force pilots and EWOs who fought over North Vietnam.”
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
General Richard Baughn, 2
The End of the Golden Chain
By
Larry Engelmann
General Richard Baughn believes that the U.S. set the South Vietnamese up for eventual defeat by teaching them our expensive ways. Then, when Congress dug in its heels on the budget, some Americans kept promising the Vietnamese that more aid would come, while they told Congress the South’s ability to continue would be in jeopardy without more money. Baughn says, “The Vietnamese monitored these discussions very closely and maybe the only people we convinced that continued fighting was not possible with the lower budget were the South Vietnamese themselves. Had we had some South Vietnamese belt tightening before or starting with General Murray's request to the Ambassador, they would have been better conditioned and better postured for the change. (And it’s important to repeat that there was a great deal of evidence that the south always had more of everything than the north during most of the war. They needed more than money).
“I still cannot forget General Rosie O'Donnell's very perceptive comments in 1962. The North Vietnamese were always much more determined than the South Vietnamese and that’s why we had to keep increasing US troop levels to 500,000.”
It was really unfortunate, Baughn believes, that all of the equipment and supplies went for naught during the last days of the war. As it turned out, the DAO Army Division reported that at least 95,000 short tons of ammunition were left behind in MR 1 and MR 2 and was captured by the advancing North Vietnamese Army. And he recalls, another 20 to 30 thousand short tons were held off the coast and never delivered. During some of the extremely heavy fighting in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese used about 60 to 70 thousand short tons per month. So without more supplies they still had about two months of ammunition even under heaviest of combat conditions. But President Thieu's misguided actions forfeited the use of large quantities of ammunition and other military fighting hardware. Baughn strongly suspects that South Vietnam's supplies could have been even larger than those cited above.
There were highly-visible waste at the DAO and other agencies that could have been eliminated to set an example of belt tightening that might have influenced the Vietnamese and led them to see clearly that “the end of the golden chain was near.” One of the most visible of these was the number of staff cars and drivers assigned to individuals. “I had a staff car, an overweight, bullet-proof Chevrolet with a driver who was on 24 hour dispatch. In addition to that, I had six servants. The high number of servants for senior officers had started years earlier. Originally in my quarters there had been five assigned, but my predecessor hired a temporary maid when one of the regular maids had a baby. When the regular maid returned my predecessor didn't have the heart to let the temporary maid go.”
“The pay of these servants had gotten way out of hand by Vietnamese standards. The head maid who worked for General John Murray and later for General Homer Smith had a higher salary than General Cao Van Vien, the Chief of Staff for entire the South Vietnamese military forces. This may sound minor, but these facts were well known by the Vietnamese and I’m certain left them with the idea there was no end to the generous support of the United States. The Americans should have set the example by cutting waste and it should have started at the top in to be effective.”
When Baughn arrived the entire DAO was working seven days a week and most of the work days exceeded the normal eight hours. With only about 50 military people the bulk of the American work force were civilians. They had to be paid time and a half for overtime. In addition, many received a monthly bonus as an inducement to work in South Vietnam. “When you tallied their monthly pay and overtime,” Baughn says, “Although General Murray, General Smith and myself were in charge of DAO we far from the top wage earners in the DAO.” Baughn points out that a reduction in the DAO 40 to 50 million dollar budget would have been small in relation to the total aid budget, but a few million could have been easily saved.
Colonel Richard McMahon's July 1974 end-of-tour report for the DAO also covered in detail what he believed to be overstaffing through the American Mission. McMahon said the DAO was only paying lip service to the objective of turning things over to the Vietnamese. He cited cases where one agency might reduce their work force; the people would then quickly be rehired by another agency. He said it was a case of "Let's find a job for good old Charlie." He pointed out that in some cases American numbers had been increased. McMahon said, “My observations in the DAO did not indicate this was an agency that was trying to eliminate itself. It appeared to be flourishing.”
McMahon also said that many of the contractors hired to train and assist the Vietnamese were not interested in working themselves out of high-paying jobs. He said most of the employees had "vested interests." They were married to Vietnamese and they wanted to live in Vietnam. With their high incomes and the low cost of living in South Vietnam, they could maintain a very high standard of living.”
Overstaffing in the provinces was yet another example of waste of the taxpayer's money, according to McMahon. Citing a case where six different agencies of the American government had one or two representatives in each of the four regions and most of them were collecting the same or similar information. He believed that two good people, with proper supervision, could have done the same job as well if not better. He said that a few of the more candid DAO representatives had admitted to working no more than two or three hours a day. Of course, they wouldn't admit this to their bosses. Naturally, the bosses voiced strong disagreement with McMahon, but, Baughn says, “I sincerely believe he was absolutely correct.”
McMahon presented an excellent case for eliminating the entire Attache Office in the Embassy to which he and four or five other senior officers were assigned. He pointed out the Chief of the DAO was the military man the ambassador talked to and McMahon said that his office had been allowed to go its own way with little if any guidance from the Embassy. “If my memory serves me correctly,” Baughn says, “the replacement group of officers in the Embassy's Attache Office agreed with McMahon.”
McMahon maintained that the large DAO intelligence staff and field representatives could be cut back by relying more on the CIA. He said, “The CIA appeared to be very objective and the overall quality of their information was outstanding.” McMahon wrote that with the exception of NSA assets and aerial photography, all intelligence came from the same source--the Vietnamese themselves. He said that a few of the more dedicated and experienced Americans in the field were able to make valuable assessments of their information, but they were rare exceptions.
“Colonel McMahon sent his report to me and to General Murray. General Murray was very upset by it because McMahon had not brought these comments to him earlier,” Baughn said. Baughn was not sure what action Murray took as a result of the end-of-tour report, but some time after Murray departed, Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, who was placed in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency called Baughn about it. He asked Baughn if he had seen the report and wanted to know his reaction to it. Baughn told him he had read it very carefully and then passed it to General Murray. Baughn told Graham of Murray's reaction. He said that based on his own observations to date, the report was very objective, had foundation and that Baughn had not found anything in it with which he could disagree. Baughn also said that some of the agencies that McMahon was pointing the finger at would probably disagree strongly with it. That was the last time McMahon's report was ever mentioned to Baughn.
Changing the subject, Baughn recalls an interesting incident that occurred within a week of his arrival in Vietnam. General Murray asked him to sit in for him at the Mission Council Meeting, which was the Ambassador's staff meeting with the heads of the agencies. When the Ambassador arrived and saw Baughn, he immediately introduced Baughn as his very good friend. He said that they had served in Thailand together. Baughn said he was taken aback since he’d had never met Martin before. “I had heard his name mentioned when I was flying combat over North Vietnam from Thailand,” Baughn says, “but I had never seen the man.”
Baughn later mentioned this to Murray. Murray just smiled and said that the Ambassador was a master at dividing and conquering. "You have just had some distance put between you and the other agency heads and everyone else. They'll figure you're too close to the Ambassador and they will be very careful in what they say to you."
Baughn received a warning at the Pentagon as to how the State Department jealously guarded its prerogatives where the U.S. military was concerned. Since South Vietnam was run mostly by former military men, there was a natural tendency for them to be more at ease and open with the American military. “But after the US fighting forces had departed in 1973, the State Department wanted no mistake to be made about who was in charge,” Baughn recalls. “Martin, of course, was a natural for following this policy. But Martin did not limit it to just the military—he maintained an iron fist control over all of the other agencies in the U.S. Mission.”
One of the functions assigned directly to Baughn when he arrived in Vietnam was Operations and Plans. During his review of the plans he came across a document entitled "Evacuation Plan." Colonel Paul Siegmund, USMC, was in charge of the plans office and was with Baughn during this review. In paging through the Evacuation Plan Baughn noticed that one of the assumptions was that the Vietnamese military would provide the security, in most instances, if the Americans were ever to evacuate. The first thought that came to Baughn’s mind was, "Why would we want to evacuate if the South Vietnamese are in control of the situation?"
He asked Colonel Siegmund about this and, as Baughn recalls, he said that there were a number of inconsistencies in that document. Colonel Siegmund indicated that attempts to make changes and improvements were never received with much enthusiasm at the Embassy. The reason given for not changing was that” it might alarm the Vietnamese!” Baughn thought that if Martin was so concerned about alarming or panicking the Vietnamese, “then it appeared that withholding corrections to glaring flaws in the evacuation document was very incongruous. The prudent and logical thing would have been to modify the evacuation document as we identified problems requiring changes during a period of relative calm. As it turned out, several of the major flaws were not acted upon until a week or so before the final evacuation of Saigon.”
Baughn also noticed Embassy estimates of how many people -- Americans along with third-country nationals -- would be evacuated. The estimates were low, especially regarding loyal Vietnamese. The estimates also centered on Saigon and its environs and did not include people who were located throughout the rest of country. Of course, later it was found that the embassy estimates were far too small. “Unless we had some kind of idea of the total number of people to be evacuated from the provinces, as well as firm estimates of the numbers and locations of people around Saigon—then we did not in fact have a plan—but only a concept,” Baughn says. Colonel Siegmund, agreed and he tried to rectify this deficiency, but to no avail. Colonel Siegmund never received the necessary cooperation from the Embassy before completing his tour in March of 1975. Since the Consul Generals located in the various Military Regions were the only ones with the authority and the capability to determine the numbers of Americans in their areas, Baughn says, “we needed the Embassy's full cooperation. Again, the reason given for the lack of cooperation was that it would probably alarm the Vietnamese.”
“Until sometime in April of 1975, we had for the most an evacuation concept but no evacuation plan—and the omissions made it a highly flawed concept,” Baughn said. “We knew how the evacuation should be handled, but without a valid head count and knowledge of where these people were located, we could not turn the concept into a final plan. In addition, we were never allowed to plan a worst-case situation where security would become a problem, although this would more than likely be the situation if an evacuation became necessary.”
As Baughn recalls, there was very little consideration made for evacuating the loyal Vietnamese employees—the ones who had performed so ably in very sensitive jobs for the U.S. Government. Had any serious attempt been made to address this problem, he says, old Vietnam hands would certainly have highlighted the problem of trying to evacuate Vietnamese without their families.
In November of 1974, Colonel Bud Day, USAF, and Commander John McCain, USN, both former Vietnam POWs, came to Vietnam on official visit. They were briefed by the Embassy on the Vietnam situation and, as usual, were given the story that everything was going well. Colonel Day and Baughn had been acquainted for a long time and so they dined together during Day’s visit. During the course of the dinner the two men discussed how the war was going for South Vietnam. Day said to Baughn that he was happy to hear that they were doing so well. Baughn then gave his version of how they were doing -- a version that followed more along the lines of what the DAO had been reporting, which pointed out that the morale of the South Vietnamese was dangerously low, corruption was taking a huge toll and degrading their fighting capability and the balance was shifting dramatically in favor of the North Vietnamese. “Needless to say, Day was shocked,” Baughn remembers.
“I also told him that the people who were working on the MIA problem in Vietnam were not getting full support from the Embassy and that this had been upsetting me for some time. The US MIA people were denied one of their most effective tools—access to the press. The Embassy would not grant them the freedom they needed with the press when significant information that should have gone out. This was just another indication of Martin's press paranoia,” he observed.
On March 26, 1975, Baughn invited the Deputy Commander of the Vietnamese Air Force to accompany him on a visit to the Phan Rang Air Base, where General Pham Ngoc Sang, the 6th Air Division Commander from Pleiku had just escaped to after the SVN Army had cut and run from MR II without warning. “When we arrived, general Sang met us and immediately asked if he could get some supplies of bombs, fuel to fight the communists. He was mad as hell at the Vietnamese Army because they had evacuated Pleiku and never told him or his people anything about it. He said, “The Vietnamese Army had cut and run and left the highlands without a fight. They just ran away with no enemy in sight and never told any of us in the Air Force they were leaving.” Sang wanted to fight and ask us to help him get some army troops to protect his base while he bombed and attacked the communist forces. There was no doubt about his and his forces willingness to fight and it came as a breath of fresh air after so many stories of the South Vietnamese Army. We visited his airman and their families and they voiced their utter and complete contempt for the Vietnamese Army.
On the same visit Baughn also went to Nha Trang where the MR II headquarters was located, “to see if any of the command elements were still there.” He had been there a few months earlier and it had been a bustling place. “But now I didn’t see a single person. It was like a ghost town and reminded me of the movie Gunga Din when Cary Grant, Victor McLaughlan and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., entered a recently deserted outpost and village.” Nha Trang was occupied by the NVN a few days later.
When Baughn got back to Saigon he immediately called General Tran Dinh Tho, the Chief of Operations for the JGS, and told him about General Sang and the situation at Phan Rang. “I urged Tho to get some ground forces up there to secure the base, because the army had already evacuated. I also asked him to help arrange to get food and supplies in so the Vietnamese Air Force could fight. I told him that I was going to request some airlift supplies from the U.S. Air Force as well. I felt this might be the spot where the South Vietnamese could hold—but only if they moved fast. My airlift request to the U.S. Air Force was turned down right away. But the Vietnamese did get some army troops and supplies up there. Phan Rang held out until April 16th. General Sang was captured on that day.”
Baughn also briefed General Homer Smith – the Defense Attaché -- regarding his trip to Phan Rang and told him about the South Vietnamese Army “bugging out for no reason at all when the Air Division was ready to fight.” General Smith informed the JGS about the situation. But their eventual support proved to be too little too late.
Somewhere around the time the situation in MR-1 was showing signs of falling apart, an army general from General John J. Burns's Seventh Air Force headquarters visited General Tran Dinh Tho, the Chief of Operations for the Joint General Staff and reported that based on his discussions with Tho, the JGS had a good plan for defending MR-1 and Da Nang. The US Army general was very confident that they could regroup and hold. “It was really a laughable story in view of our minute-by-minute reports coming from Da Nang,” Baughn says. This same general had been trying to computerize the war for some time and one of his findings stated that the South Vietnamese were losing the battles but winning the war. About this time, Admiral Gayler came to Saigon – “Ambassador Martin was still back in the United States and the same Army general came to give Admiral Gayler the computer analysis of the present fighting. DAO intelligence personnel voiced their concerns about the briefing, but the general persisted. It did not take Admiral Gayler long to detect the flaws.”
The SVN military collapse in MR-1 and the resulting evacuation effort in Da Nang appeared to be spawning fears throughout South Vietnam. “Word of the Da Nang situation was spreading fast and many Vietnamese felt betrayed, with signs of anti-Americanism starting to appear. I worried that bringing all of the refugees south might result in more panic and I doubted the ability of the South Vietnamese government to handle the refugees in the face of other security problems.”
Baughn recommended in a letter to the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM,) since the Ambassador was still back in the States, that the uncontrolled mass evacuation be stopped. It was suggested that if the US were to assist in evacuating anyone from the northern Military Regions it should be military units that could be regrouped and used to defend the rest of the country. At the time Baughn said, “It appeared we were just reacting to situations rather than organizing an effort to salvage some of the fighting forces to defend against the NVN.” Baughn showed General Smith his letter. Smith had many things on his mind and his reaction was polite, Baughn recalls, but he was cool to the suggestion. “I don't know what he did with my letter. I retained a copy in my personal files. Later on Smith wrote in one of his end-of-tour reports words to the effect that he thought the refugee evacuation might not have been in the best interests of South Vietnam.
Baughn met the French Army Attache shortly after the attache was assigned to Saigon during the summer of 1974. He was a paratrooper who had fought in Vietnam and had been at Dien Bien Phu. Baughn asked him to give his appraisal of the situation after he had been in country for six months. “I believe it was around January or February of 1975,” Baughn recalls. “The French officer briefed me that South Vietnam had more than enough ammunition, hardware and supplies to fight the war, but lacked the most essential element of a good military organization—the will to win. He also emphasized their weak senior commanders and rampant corruption,” Baughn remembers.
There was a retired U.S. Air Force colonel Baughn had known in the past who had married a wealthy Vietnamese woman. “She was half French with a lot of money and good political connections,” Baughn said. They were living in Saigon and shortly after Baughn’s arrival in April, 1974, Baughn asked the colonel and his wife how long they thought South Vietnam could hold out against North Vietnam. The colonel's wife answered without hesitation, that they would hold out no more than one year. Her husband nodded his head in agreement.
Many of the military people assigned to the DAO could see the end of South Vietnam coming in January, 1975, when Phuoc Long Province fell to the North Vietnamese, Baughn says, “Others had seen it coming for a longer time. After the central highlands debacle in March 1975 a few more doubters became believers and by the time of the Da Nang panic all doubters admitted that the light at the end of the tunnel was all but out.”
Despite Ambassador Martin's refusal to do update the evacuation plan because he thought it would alarm the Vietnamese, he sent a sizable amount of his "personal valuables" back with General Fred Weyand, who was returning to the United States in early April. General Weyand had reviewed the situation and was going to brief the President on how many American troops would be required to stabilize the situation. Baughn’s Vietnamese maid asked the next morning, after General Weyand had left, when the Americans were leaving. When asked why she wanted to know, she said that the word was spreading that Ambassador had sent a lot of his valuable things back to the States with General Weyand. Many Americans were also discussing it.
“During this period many of the Embassies of other countries started sending their people home. There were other events taking place that were highly visible to the Vietnamese, all of which pointed toward the eventual evacuation.”
On April 1, 1975, CINCPAC sent a message to the DAO stating that the fall of South Vietnam appeared to be imminent and could happen in as soon as five days. They called for a massive reduction in American personnel as soon as possible and outlined other appropriate actions. General Smith requested that Baughn take the action on this message and Baughn assembled the senior military division heads in the DAO that afternoon. He also requested Colonel Wahle and Colonel McCurdy from the Attache Office in the Embassy, since they had been involved with the recent Embassy evacuation actions. He asked Colonel Wahle to chair a brainstorming meeting to come up with a list of actions that the DAO should take in support of CINCPAC's plans and guidance.
Colonel Wahle’s group worked most of the night developing plans for sea, fixed-wing air and helicopter evacuation techniques for covertly moving people. They recommended actions that the DAO could take immediately on its own and others for the Embassy. On the next day -- April 2nd -- the recommendations were given to General Smith and to Admirals Benton and Oberg. Baughn remembers that” without exception, everyone present agreed with the plans and recommendations.” The same afternoon, Wolfgang Lehman, the Deputy Chief of Mission, was briefed and he agreed that the alert status of the fleet and of the Air Force troop carrier forces should be upgraded and he approved of the holding of two to four MSC ships at Newport for possible sea evacuation. He deferred to Martin concerning a recommendation to order dependents and nonessentials out of the country. Martin turned that suggestion down. Although Baughn and others had discussed withdrawal of some high-value equipment and aircraft, they never brought up the subject because “we simply had to concentrate on people first.”
That afternoon General Smith put Baughn in charge of the evacuation for the DAO and Baughn selected Colonel Wahle as his assistant. Smith also assigned Baughn some young officers to act as a special planning group and to assist in making preparations for security relative to the evacuation of the DAO. “I think it is fair to say that no single group of individuals did more than these young officers in eventually making the evacuation work,” Baughn says. “They were involved in all phases of planning and occasionally they would ask about taking some action that might be too overt for the Embassy. One case I recall was preparing new helicopter landing pads on the roofs of some buildings in Saigon. My response to Colonel Wahle was to do it. I told him to do whatever was required to make the evacuation successful.” It was about this time that Colonel Elmer Graham, a superior army communications officer, suggested that we obtain some satellite communications since we had only communication cables that could be easily cut. I gave him the go ahead and within a week we had satellite communications capability. Colonel Graham was a doer and this was typical of his work.
Baughn was able to determine for the first time how many Americans and third-country nationals were located in Saigon. As I recall, he says, “this was around the 7th or 8th of April and the figure was about seven thousand, which was much higher than the Embassy had been estimating. At last we had one of the critical pieces of information for developing the evacuation plan, but had no idea of how many loyal Vietnamese to evacuate.
The next week was a hectic one, filled with meetings and with frustration, Baughn remembers. “We had airlift capabilities and quotas for moving people out. Despite Embassy approval we started moving loyal Vietnamese, but many of them refused to go without their families. I think that General Smith did more than anyone else in the entire Mission to remove this bottle neck. Most of the American agencies in the Mission soon became aware of the DAO evacuation planning and wanted to follow our lead. On the 9th of April the Ambassador, after receiving recommendations from a number of people, put General Smith in charge of the Mission-wide evacuation planning. Smith again designated me as his agent to accomplish this responsibility.”
The next day Baughn held the first Mission-wide evacuation meeting. A number of high ranking civilians agreed that it was about time that somebody be put in charge of planning. Al Fancis, the Consul General in Da Nang when it collapsed, called to offer his assistance and cooperation, although the Embassy hadn’t included him as an attendee. “He had performed well under the most difficult of circumstances in Da Nang ,” Baughn says, “and saw the critical need to fill the obvious gap in Saigon in order to avoid a repetition of the Da Nang experience—or worse. He recently had been assigned to do some planning on evacuating Vietnamese and had been pressuring the Ambassador on the importance of doing the necessary Mission-wide evacuation planning, which put him out of favor with Martin. But Al continued to work hard and made a very important contribution to the evacuation process.”
At the meeting each of the agencies within the Mission reported what they had done in the way of preparing for an eventual evacuation and what problems they had identified. It appeared without exception, Baughn says, that the other agencies were pleased to hear how much the DAO had accomplished and made them feel somewhat relieved.
Yet, Baughn says, “One thing that startled all of us during the meeting was a request by the Embassy representative (Martin’s DAO monitor), who was observing the meeting. He informed us that the Ambassador would like to have a summary sheet outlining the provisions of the evacuation plan. The DAO monitor had requested a copy of the evacuation plan from us the day before.”
“The inference that Martin was not familiar with a plan that could be implemented within days and that he had no one on his staff familiar enough with the plan to brief him, caught the attention of all of us,” Baughn says. “We also were informed by the monitor that we would withhold further planning actions until Martin had been briefed and put his ‘blessing’ on the plan. We had no time to waste and the request to delay planning action was ignored and the on-going activity by the DAO continued unabated.”
The next day Baughn had a meeting with two Marine officers from the designated evacuation force in Okinawa, who were sent to review the situation, familiarize themselves with the proposed Saigon extraction points, and review the DAO planning actions and to provide further suggested actions that should be taken in preparation for the evacuation. After reviewing the situation, Baughn says, “The Marines were very concerned about the number of Americans still in Vietnam and an unknown number of loyal Vietnamese that would have to be evacuated. They believed that if they had to evacuate such large numbers it would be a high-risk situation for everyone concerned.”
With the lives of so many lives at stake and the military situation deteriorating rapidly, the Marines felt a special security force should be clandestinely moved into Vietnam as soon as possible. They also agreed that Marine helicopter pilots be brought in to augment the small group of Air America helicopter pilots who were already flying nonstop. The Air America people had asked for this, since Air America had one pilot per chopper, half of the normal crew requirement. For safety reasons, more pilots were urgently needed.
The arrangement for the Air America support had been accomplished by the DAO special planning group. “This was just another of the many actions the group had taken,” Baughn says, “despite Martin's business-as-usual policy. I don’t know the exact figure, but over 1,000 people were carried by the Air America helicopters. This would not have been the case if the special planning group had not initiated their planning actions.”
Baughn and the Marine colonel jointly prepared a message with our recommendations. “I asked the colonel to show the message to Martin’s DAO monitor, so the monitor could designate who in the Embassy should see the message before its release. Keep in mind, now,” Baughn says, “the monitor was the person who was supposed to insure that Martin was kept informed of all DAO actions. But for some reason, he did not see fit to show this message to Martin, although it had to be the hottest topic on the embassy’s list.”
Baughn can’t recall exactly who in the Embassy saw and signed message, but he recalls being happy they did not show it to Martin, since this information was something that needed to be released right away. “I would certainly not have sent it over Martin's objections.”
About two o'clock the next morning, Baughn was called by the message center and told that he had an urgent personal communication. The message was from Lieutenant General John Roberts, the Deputy for Personnel at Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, and it stated that Baughn was to depart from South Vietnam on the first available aircraft!
Later Baughn heard from General Roberts that Martin had telephoned the Secretary of Defense and asked him to get rid of Baughn immediately. Martin had read the Baughn message in his file that night and called for his removal.
Baughn concludes, “If I had it all to do over again I would do exactly as I did before. I was determined to avoid any further risk to the thousands of Americans and loyal Vietnamese and I was determined to avoid at all costs grandstand plays for lost causes, bureaucratic face-saving schemes, dim-witted intrigue or senseless demonstrations of bravado. The longer we continued Martin's head-in-the-sand policy, the further we put thousands of Americans and loyal Vietnamese at risk. ”In complete disgust,” Baughn said, “I decided to retire early.”
“Some thought that Martin had a vested interest in hanging on in Vietnam,” Baughn says, “because it would be his last hurrah. Others thought he would try to avoid being chased out of Vietnam at almost any cost due to his arrogance and irrational determination to establish his place in history. Representative Paul McCloskey, who visited Saigon while I was there, said that he thought Graham Martin was demented. General Louis L. Wilson, who was with the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Air Forces, once visited Martin. “As General Wilson and I drove away from the Embassy, Wilson shook his head and said, ‘I have now met my first egomaniac.’" One official, Baughn remembers, who knew Martin well, said that ‘Martin was one of the few men who could stand in the shadow of a corkscrew.’”
Reports show that during the evacuation the Embassy kept interfering with the process. About two weeks before Saigon fell; Martin suddenly expressed a desire to work on a plan to evacuate a million Vietnamese. His eleventh hour grandstanding caused hundreds of Vietnamese to rush to the DAO compound and nearly over whelmed the evacuation process. One attempt by the Embassy on the 21st of April to suddenly restrict Vietnamese evacuees to those of the immediate family nearly caused a riot. Several times they needlessly diverted evacuation buses and Air America helicopters on low priority missions.
When General Smith declared that the fixed wing(C-130) operation could not be continued, Martin refused to accept the recommendation and went to Tan Son Hhut to see for himself, which wasted precious time. “Getting in and out of the Embassy compound was a demanding operation during daylight with fresh crews,” Baughn says. “The Marine and Air America air crews and evacuees they were transporting should never have been put in that hazardous situation. When General Smith declared the airfield unsafe for fixed wing aircraft to continue their operation, the Marine commander should have been put in complete charge of the evacuation and Ambassador Martin should have been on one of the first helicopters out. It was only by the grace of God, the professionalism of the U.S. Marine Corps, DAO personnel and the civilians serving in Saigon that a major disaster was averted during the final withdrawal from Vietnam. In the end, thousands of Vietnamese were evacuated. Unfortunately, many deserving were left behind and many undeserving made it out.”
Looking back now, the American effort in Vietnam appears to Baughn to have been “a lost cause just waiting to happen.” Baughn points out that American military defeated the NVN in battle after battle, but never broke their will to fight. “During most of the war, the map that General O'Donnell was briefed from in 1962 changed very little in relation to the huge American effort in Vietnam. The red and the white would flow back and forth. During the day the white or the SVN controlled areas would increase. But as a rule, at night much of the white turned to red. And in April of 1975 it all became red.”
“I reject the notion that Vietnam was a military defeat. It was anything but that. It was political defeat, lead by the anti-war media and timid politicians—pure and simple. The NVN could have been defeated militarily had we chosen to apply our military power decisively. And of course, this could have been done without the use of nuclear weapons. But even if we had defeated them militarily, I am convinced that the NVN’s will to fight would never have been broken. Up to the very end, the NVN had less of everything than the SVN, except their will to win.”
By
Larry Engelmann
General Richard Baughn believes that the U.S. set the South Vietnamese up for eventual defeat by teaching them our expensive ways. Then, when Congress dug in its heels on the budget, some Americans kept promising the Vietnamese that more aid would come, while they told Congress the South’s ability to continue would be in jeopardy without more money. Baughn says, “The Vietnamese monitored these discussions very closely and maybe the only people we convinced that continued fighting was not possible with the lower budget were the South Vietnamese themselves. Had we had some South Vietnamese belt tightening before or starting with General Murray's request to the Ambassador, they would have been better conditioned and better postured for the change. (And it’s important to repeat that there was a great deal of evidence that the south always had more of everything than the north during most of the war. They needed more than money).
“I still cannot forget General Rosie O'Donnell's very perceptive comments in 1962. The North Vietnamese were always much more determined than the South Vietnamese and that’s why we had to keep increasing US troop levels to 500,000.”
It was really unfortunate, Baughn believes, that all of the equipment and supplies went for naught during the last days of the war. As it turned out, the DAO Army Division reported that at least 95,000 short tons of ammunition were left behind in MR 1 and MR 2 and was captured by the advancing North Vietnamese Army. And he recalls, another 20 to 30 thousand short tons were held off the coast and never delivered. During some of the extremely heavy fighting in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese used about 60 to 70 thousand short tons per month. So without more supplies they still had about two months of ammunition even under heaviest of combat conditions. But President Thieu's misguided actions forfeited the use of large quantities of ammunition and other military fighting hardware. Baughn strongly suspects that South Vietnam's supplies could have been even larger than those cited above.
There were highly-visible waste at the DAO and other agencies that could have been eliminated to set an example of belt tightening that might have influenced the Vietnamese and led them to see clearly that “the end of the golden chain was near.” One of the most visible of these was the number of staff cars and drivers assigned to individuals. “I had a staff car, an overweight, bullet-proof Chevrolet with a driver who was on 24 hour dispatch. In addition to that, I had six servants. The high number of servants for senior officers had started years earlier. Originally in my quarters there had been five assigned, but my predecessor hired a temporary maid when one of the regular maids had a baby. When the regular maid returned my predecessor didn't have the heart to let the temporary maid go.”
“The pay of these servants had gotten way out of hand by Vietnamese standards. The head maid who worked for General John Murray and later for General Homer Smith had a higher salary than General Cao Van Vien, the Chief of Staff for entire the South Vietnamese military forces. This may sound minor, but these facts were well known by the Vietnamese and I’m certain left them with the idea there was no end to the generous support of the United States. The Americans should have set the example by cutting waste and it should have started at the top in to be effective.”
When Baughn arrived the entire DAO was working seven days a week and most of the work days exceeded the normal eight hours. With only about 50 military people the bulk of the American work force were civilians. They had to be paid time and a half for overtime. In addition, many received a monthly bonus as an inducement to work in South Vietnam. “When you tallied their monthly pay and overtime,” Baughn says, “Although General Murray, General Smith and myself were in charge of DAO we far from the top wage earners in the DAO.” Baughn points out that a reduction in the DAO 40 to 50 million dollar budget would have been small in relation to the total aid budget, but a few million could have been easily saved.
Colonel Richard McMahon's July 1974 end-of-tour report for the DAO also covered in detail what he believed to be overstaffing through the American Mission. McMahon said the DAO was only paying lip service to the objective of turning things over to the Vietnamese. He cited cases where one agency might reduce their work force; the people would then quickly be rehired by another agency. He said it was a case of "Let's find a job for good old Charlie." He pointed out that in some cases American numbers had been increased. McMahon said, “My observations in the DAO did not indicate this was an agency that was trying to eliminate itself. It appeared to be flourishing.”
McMahon also said that many of the contractors hired to train and assist the Vietnamese were not interested in working themselves out of high-paying jobs. He said most of the employees had "vested interests." They were married to Vietnamese and they wanted to live in Vietnam. With their high incomes and the low cost of living in South Vietnam, they could maintain a very high standard of living.”
Overstaffing in the provinces was yet another example of waste of the taxpayer's money, according to McMahon. Citing a case where six different agencies of the American government had one or two representatives in each of the four regions and most of them were collecting the same or similar information. He believed that two good people, with proper supervision, could have done the same job as well if not better. He said that a few of the more candid DAO representatives had admitted to working no more than two or three hours a day. Of course, they wouldn't admit this to their bosses. Naturally, the bosses voiced strong disagreement with McMahon, but, Baughn says, “I sincerely believe he was absolutely correct.”
McMahon presented an excellent case for eliminating the entire Attache Office in the Embassy to which he and four or five other senior officers were assigned. He pointed out the Chief of the DAO was the military man the ambassador talked to and McMahon said that his office had been allowed to go its own way with little if any guidance from the Embassy. “If my memory serves me correctly,” Baughn says, “the replacement group of officers in the Embassy's Attache Office agreed with McMahon.”
McMahon maintained that the large DAO intelligence staff and field representatives could be cut back by relying more on the CIA. He said, “The CIA appeared to be very objective and the overall quality of their information was outstanding.” McMahon wrote that with the exception of NSA assets and aerial photography, all intelligence came from the same source--the Vietnamese themselves. He said that a few of the more dedicated and experienced Americans in the field were able to make valuable assessments of their information, but they were rare exceptions.
“Colonel McMahon sent his report to me and to General Murray. General Murray was very upset by it because McMahon had not brought these comments to him earlier,” Baughn said. Baughn was not sure what action Murray took as a result of the end-of-tour report, but some time after Murray departed, Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, who was placed in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency called Baughn about it. He asked Baughn if he had seen the report and wanted to know his reaction to it. Baughn told him he had read it very carefully and then passed it to General Murray. Baughn told Graham of Murray's reaction. He said that based on his own observations to date, the report was very objective, had foundation and that Baughn had not found anything in it with which he could disagree. Baughn also said that some of the agencies that McMahon was pointing the finger at would probably disagree strongly with it. That was the last time McMahon's report was ever mentioned to Baughn.
Changing the subject, Baughn recalls an interesting incident that occurred within a week of his arrival in Vietnam. General Murray asked him to sit in for him at the Mission Council Meeting, which was the Ambassador's staff meeting with the heads of the agencies. When the Ambassador arrived and saw Baughn, he immediately introduced Baughn as his very good friend. He said that they had served in Thailand together. Baughn said he was taken aback since he’d had never met Martin before. “I had heard his name mentioned when I was flying combat over North Vietnam from Thailand,” Baughn says, “but I had never seen the man.”
Baughn later mentioned this to Murray. Murray just smiled and said that the Ambassador was a master at dividing and conquering. "You have just had some distance put between you and the other agency heads and everyone else. They'll figure you're too close to the Ambassador and they will be very careful in what they say to you."
Baughn received a warning at the Pentagon as to how the State Department jealously guarded its prerogatives where the U.S. military was concerned. Since South Vietnam was run mostly by former military men, there was a natural tendency for them to be more at ease and open with the American military. “But after the US fighting forces had departed in 1973, the State Department wanted no mistake to be made about who was in charge,” Baughn recalls. “Martin, of course, was a natural for following this policy. But Martin did not limit it to just the military—he maintained an iron fist control over all of the other agencies in the U.S. Mission.”
One of the functions assigned directly to Baughn when he arrived in Vietnam was Operations and Plans. During his review of the plans he came across a document entitled "Evacuation Plan." Colonel Paul Siegmund, USMC, was in charge of the plans office and was with Baughn during this review. In paging through the Evacuation Plan Baughn noticed that one of the assumptions was that the Vietnamese military would provide the security, in most instances, if the Americans were ever to evacuate. The first thought that came to Baughn’s mind was, "Why would we want to evacuate if the South Vietnamese are in control of the situation?"
He asked Colonel Siegmund about this and, as Baughn recalls, he said that there were a number of inconsistencies in that document. Colonel Siegmund indicated that attempts to make changes and improvements were never received with much enthusiasm at the Embassy. The reason given for not changing was that” it might alarm the Vietnamese!” Baughn thought that if Martin was so concerned about alarming or panicking the Vietnamese, “then it appeared that withholding corrections to glaring flaws in the evacuation document was very incongruous. The prudent and logical thing would have been to modify the evacuation document as we identified problems requiring changes during a period of relative calm. As it turned out, several of the major flaws were not acted upon until a week or so before the final evacuation of Saigon.”
Baughn also noticed Embassy estimates of how many people -- Americans along with third-country nationals -- would be evacuated. The estimates were low, especially regarding loyal Vietnamese. The estimates also centered on Saigon and its environs and did not include people who were located throughout the rest of country. Of course, later it was found that the embassy estimates were far too small. “Unless we had some kind of idea of the total number of people to be evacuated from the provinces, as well as firm estimates of the numbers and locations of people around Saigon—then we did not in fact have a plan—but only a concept,” Baughn says. Colonel Siegmund, agreed and he tried to rectify this deficiency, but to no avail. Colonel Siegmund never received the necessary cooperation from the Embassy before completing his tour in March of 1975. Since the Consul Generals located in the various Military Regions were the only ones with the authority and the capability to determine the numbers of Americans in their areas, Baughn says, “we needed the Embassy's full cooperation. Again, the reason given for the lack of cooperation was that it would probably alarm the Vietnamese.”
“Until sometime in April of 1975, we had for the most an evacuation concept but no evacuation plan—and the omissions made it a highly flawed concept,” Baughn said. “We knew how the evacuation should be handled, but without a valid head count and knowledge of where these people were located, we could not turn the concept into a final plan. In addition, we were never allowed to plan a worst-case situation where security would become a problem, although this would more than likely be the situation if an evacuation became necessary.”
As Baughn recalls, there was very little consideration made for evacuating the loyal Vietnamese employees—the ones who had performed so ably in very sensitive jobs for the U.S. Government. Had any serious attempt been made to address this problem, he says, old Vietnam hands would certainly have highlighted the problem of trying to evacuate Vietnamese without their families.
In November of 1974, Colonel Bud Day, USAF, and Commander John McCain, USN, both former Vietnam POWs, came to Vietnam on official visit. They were briefed by the Embassy on the Vietnam situation and, as usual, were given the story that everything was going well. Colonel Day and Baughn had been acquainted for a long time and so they dined together during Day’s visit. During the course of the dinner the two men discussed how the war was going for South Vietnam. Day said to Baughn that he was happy to hear that they were doing so well. Baughn then gave his version of how they were doing -- a version that followed more along the lines of what the DAO had been reporting, which pointed out that the morale of the South Vietnamese was dangerously low, corruption was taking a huge toll and degrading their fighting capability and the balance was shifting dramatically in favor of the North Vietnamese. “Needless to say, Day was shocked,” Baughn remembers.
“I also told him that the people who were working on the MIA problem in Vietnam were not getting full support from the Embassy and that this had been upsetting me for some time. The US MIA people were denied one of their most effective tools—access to the press. The Embassy would not grant them the freedom they needed with the press when significant information that should have gone out. This was just another indication of Martin's press paranoia,” he observed.
On March 26, 1975, Baughn invited the Deputy Commander of the Vietnamese Air Force to accompany him on a visit to the Phan Rang Air Base, where General Pham Ngoc Sang, the 6th Air Division Commander from Pleiku had just escaped to after the SVN Army had cut and run from MR II without warning. “When we arrived, general Sang met us and immediately asked if he could get some supplies of bombs, fuel to fight the communists. He was mad as hell at the Vietnamese Army because they had evacuated Pleiku and never told him or his people anything about it. He said, “The Vietnamese Army had cut and run and left the highlands without a fight. They just ran away with no enemy in sight and never told any of us in the Air Force they were leaving.” Sang wanted to fight and ask us to help him get some army troops to protect his base while he bombed and attacked the communist forces. There was no doubt about his and his forces willingness to fight and it came as a breath of fresh air after so many stories of the South Vietnamese Army. We visited his airman and their families and they voiced their utter and complete contempt for the Vietnamese Army.
On the same visit Baughn also went to Nha Trang where the MR II headquarters was located, “to see if any of the command elements were still there.” He had been there a few months earlier and it had been a bustling place. “But now I didn’t see a single person. It was like a ghost town and reminded me of the movie Gunga Din when Cary Grant, Victor McLaughlan and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., entered a recently deserted outpost and village.” Nha Trang was occupied by the NVN a few days later.
When Baughn got back to Saigon he immediately called General Tran Dinh Tho, the Chief of Operations for the JGS, and told him about General Sang and the situation at Phan Rang. “I urged Tho to get some ground forces up there to secure the base, because the army had already evacuated. I also asked him to help arrange to get food and supplies in so the Vietnamese Air Force could fight. I told him that I was going to request some airlift supplies from the U.S. Air Force as well. I felt this might be the spot where the South Vietnamese could hold—but only if they moved fast. My airlift request to the U.S. Air Force was turned down right away. But the Vietnamese did get some army troops and supplies up there. Phan Rang held out until April 16th. General Sang was captured on that day.”
Baughn also briefed General Homer Smith – the Defense Attaché -- regarding his trip to Phan Rang and told him about the South Vietnamese Army “bugging out for no reason at all when the Air Division was ready to fight.” General Smith informed the JGS about the situation. But their eventual support proved to be too little too late.
Somewhere around the time the situation in MR-1 was showing signs of falling apart, an army general from General John J. Burns's Seventh Air Force headquarters visited General Tran Dinh Tho, the Chief of Operations for the Joint General Staff and reported that based on his discussions with Tho, the JGS had a good plan for defending MR-1 and Da Nang. The US Army general was very confident that they could regroup and hold. “It was really a laughable story in view of our minute-by-minute reports coming from Da Nang,” Baughn says. This same general had been trying to computerize the war for some time and one of his findings stated that the South Vietnamese were losing the battles but winning the war. About this time, Admiral Gayler came to Saigon – “Ambassador Martin was still back in the United States and the same Army general came to give Admiral Gayler the computer analysis of the present fighting. DAO intelligence personnel voiced their concerns about the briefing, but the general persisted. It did not take Admiral Gayler long to detect the flaws.”
The SVN military collapse in MR-1 and the resulting evacuation effort in Da Nang appeared to be spawning fears throughout South Vietnam. “Word of the Da Nang situation was spreading fast and many Vietnamese felt betrayed, with signs of anti-Americanism starting to appear. I worried that bringing all of the refugees south might result in more panic and I doubted the ability of the South Vietnamese government to handle the refugees in the face of other security problems.”
Baughn recommended in a letter to the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM,) since the Ambassador was still back in the States, that the uncontrolled mass evacuation be stopped. It was suggested that if the US were to assist in evacuating anyone from the northern Military Regions it should be military units that could be regrouped and used to defend the rest of the country. At the time Baughn said, “It appeared we were just reacting to situations rather than organizing an effort to salvage some of the fighting forces to defend against the NVN.” Baughn showed General Smith his letter. Smith had many things on his mind and his reaction was polite, Baughn recalls, but he was cool to the suggestion. “I don't know what he did with my letter. I retained a copy in my personal files. Later on Smith wrote in one of his end-of-tour reports words to the effect that he thought the refugee evacuation might not have been in the best interests of South Vietnam.
Baughn met the French Army Attache shortly after the attache was assigned to Saigon during the summer of 1974. He was a paratrooper who had fought in Vietnam and had been at Dien Bien Phu. Baughn asked him to give his appraisal of the situation after he had been in country for six months. “I believe it was around January or February of 1975,” Baughn recalls. “The French officer briefed me that South Vietnam had more than enough ammunition, hardware and supplies to fight the war, but lacked the most essential element of a good military organization—the will to win. He also emphasized their weak senior commanders and rampant corruption,” Baughn remembers.
There was a retired U.S. Air Force colonel Baughn had known in the past who had married a wealthy Vietnamese woman. “She was half French with a lot of money and good political connections,” Baughn said. They were living in Saigon and shortly after Baughn’s arrival in April, 1974, Baughn asked the colonel and his wife how long they thought South Vietnam could hold out against North Vietnam. The colonel's wife answered without hesitation, that they would hold out no more than one year. Her husband nodded his head in agreement.
Many of the military people assigned to the DAO could see the end of South Vietnam coming in January, 1975, when Phuoc Long Province fell to the North Vietnamese, Baughn says, “Others had seen it coming for a longer time. After the central highlands debacle in March 1975 a few more doubters became believers and by the time of the Da Nang panic all doubters admitted that the light at the end of the tunnel was all but out.”
Despite Ambassador Martin's refusal to do update the evacuation plan because he thought it would alarm the Vietnamese, he sent a sizable amount of his "personal valuables" back with General Fred Weyand, who was returning to the United States in early April. General Weyand had reviewed the situation and was going to brief the President on how many American troops would be required to stabilize the situation. Baughn’s Vietnamese maid asked the next morning, after General Weyand had left, when the Americans were leaving. When asked why she wanted to know, she said that the word was spreading that Ambassador had sent a lot of his valuable things back to the States with General Weyand. Many Americans were also discussing it.
“During this period many of the Embassies of other countries started sending their people home. There were other events taking place that were highly visible to the Vietnamese, all of which pointed toward the eventual evacuation.”
On April 1, 1975, CINCPAC sent a message to the DAO stating that the fall of South Vietnam appeared to be imminent and could happen in as soon as five days. They called for a massive reduction in American personnel as soon as possible and outlined other appropriate actions. General Smith requested that Baughn take the action on this message and Baughn assembled the senior military division heads in the DAO that afternoon. He also requested Colonel Wahle and Colonel McCurdy from the Attache Office in the Embassy, since they had been involved with the recent Embassy evacuation actions. He asked Colonel Wahle to chair a brainstorming meeting to come up with a list of actions that the DAO should take in support of CINCPAC's plans and guidance.
Colonel Wahle’s group worked most of the night developing plans for sea, fixed-wing air and helicopter evacuation techniques for covertly moving people. They recommended actions that the DAO could take immediately on its own and others for the Embassy. On the next day -- April 2nd -- the recommendations were given to General Smith and to Admirals Benton and Oberg. Baughn remembers that” without exception, everyone present agreed with the plans and recommendations.” The same afternoon, Wolfgang Lehman, the Deputy Chief of Mission, was briefed and he agreed that the alert status of the fleet and of the Air Force troop carrier forces should be upgraded and he approved of the holding of two to four MSC ships at Newport for possible sea evacuation. He deferred to Martin concerning a recommendation to order dependents and nonessentials out of the country. Martin turned that suggestion down. Although Baughn and others had discussed withdrawal of some high-value equipment and aircraft, they never brought up the subject because “we simply had to concentrate on people first.”
That afternoon General Smith put Baughn in charge of the evacuation for the DAO and Baughn selected Colonel Wahle as his assistant. Smith also assigned Baughn some young officers to act as a special planning group and to assist in making preparations for security relative to the evacuation of the DAO. “I think it is fair to say that no single group of individuals did more than these young officers in eventually making the evacuation work,” Baughn says. “They were involved in all phases of planning and occasionally they would ask about taking some action that might be too overt for the Embassy. One case I recall was preparing new helicopter landing pads on the roofs of some buildings in Saigon. My response to Colonel Wahle was to do it. I told him to do whatever was required to make the evacuation successful.” It was about this time that Colonel Elmer Graham, a superior army communications officer, suggested that we obtain some satellite communications since we had only communication cables that could be easily cut. I gave him the go ahead and within a week we had satellite communications capability. Colonel Graham was a doer and this was typical of his work.
Baughn was able to determine for the first time how many Americans and third-country nationals were located in Saigon. As I recall, he says, “this was around the 7th or 8th of April and the figure was about seven thousand, which was much higher than the Embassy had been estimating. At last we had one of the critical pieces of information for developing the evacuation plan, but had no idea of how many loyal Vietnamese to evacuate.
The next week was a hectic one, filled with meetings and with frustration, Baughn remembers. “We had airlift capabilities and quotas for moving people out. Despite Embassy approval we started moving loyal Vietnamese, but many of them refused to go without their families. I think that General Smith did more than anyone else in the entire Mission to remove this bottle neck. Most of the American agencies in the Mission soon became aware of the DAO evacuation planning and wanted to follow our lead. On the 9th of April the Ambassador, after receiving recommendations from a number of people, put General Smith in charge of the Mission-wide evacuation planning. Smith again designated me as his agent to accomplish this responsibility.”
The next day Baughn held the first Mission-wide evacuation meeting. A number of high ranking civilians agreed that it was about time that somebody be put in charge of planning. Al Fancis, the Consul General in Da Nang when it collapsed, called to offer his assistance and cooperation, although the Embassy hadn’t included him as an attendee. “He had performed well under the most difficult of circumstances in Da Nang ,” Baughn says, “and saw the critical need to fill the obvious gap in Saigon in order to avoid a repetition of the Da Nang experience—or worse. He recently had been assigned to do some planning on evacuating Vietnamese and had been pressuring the Ambassador on the importance of doing the necessary Mission-wide evacuation planning, which put him out of favor with Martin. But Al continued to work hard and made a very important contribution to the evacuation process.”
At the meeting each of the agencies within the Mission reported what they had done in the way of preparing for an eventual evacuation and what problems they had identified. It appeared without exception, Baughn says, that the other agencies were pleased to hear how much the DAO had accomplished and made them feel somewhat relieved.
Yet, Baughn says, “One thing that startled all of us during the meeting was a request by the Embassy representative (Martin’s DAO monitor), who was observing the meeting. He informed us that the Ambassador would like to have a summary sheet outlining the provisions of the evacuation plan. The DAO monitor had requested a copy of the evacuation plan from us the day before.”
“The inference that Martin was not familiar with a plan that could be implemented within days and that he had no one on his staff familiar enough with the plan to brief him, caught the attention of all of us,” Baughn says. “We also were informed by the monitor that we would withhold further planning actions until Martin had been briefed and put his ‘blessing’ on the plan. We had no time to waste and the request to delay planning action was ignored and the on-going activity by the DAO continued unabated.”
The next day Baughn had a meeting with two Marine officers from the designated evacuation force in Okinawa, who were sent to review the situation, familiarize themselves with the proposed Saigon extraction points, and review the DAO planning actions and to provide further suggested actions that should be taken in preparation for the evacuation. After reviewing the situation, Baughn says, “The Marines were very concerned about the number of Americans still in Vietnam and an unknown number of loyal Vietnamese that would have to be evacuated. They believed that if they had to evacuate such large numbers it would be a high-risk situation for everyone concerned.”
With the lives of so many lives at stake and the military situation deteriorating rapidly, the Marines felt a special security force should be clandestinely moved into Vietnam as soon as possible. They also agreed that Marine helicopter pilots be brought in to augment the small group of Air America helicopter pilots who were already flying nonstop. The Air America people had asked for this, since Air America had one pilot per chopper, half of the normal crew requirement. For safety reasons, more pilots were urgently needed.
The arrangement for the Air America support had been accomplished by the DAO special planning group. “This was just another of the many actions the group had taken,” Baughn says, “despite Martin's business-as-usual policy. I don’t know the exact figure, but over 1,000 people were carried by the Air America helicopters. This would not have been the case if the special planning group had not initiated their planning actions.”
Baughn and the Marine colonel jointly prepared a message with our recommendations. “I asked the colonel to show the message to Martin’s DAO monitor, so the monitor could designate who in the Embassy should see the message before its release. Keep in mind, now,” Baughn says, “the monitor was the person who was supposed to insure that Martin was kept informed of all DAO actions. But for some reason, he did not see fit to show this message to Martin, although it had to be the hottest topic on the embassy’s list.”
Baughn can’t recall exactly who in the Embassy saw and signed message, but he recalls being happy they did not show it to Martin, since this information was something that needed to be released right away. “I would certainly not have sent it over Martin's objections.”
About two o'clock the next morning, Baughn was called by the message center and told that he had an urgent personal communication. The message was from Lieutenant General John Roberts, the Deputy for Personnel at Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, and it stated that Baughn was to depart from South Vietnam on the first available aircraft!
Later Baughn heard from General Roberts that Martin had telephoned the Secretary of Defense and asked him to get rid of Baughn immediately. Martin had read the Baughn message in his file that night and called for his removal.
Baughn concludes, “If I had it all to do over again I would do exactly as I did before. I was determined to avoid any further risk to the thousands of Americans and loyal Vietnamese and I was determined to avoid at all costs grandstand plays for lost causes, bureaucratic face-saving schemes, dim-witted intrigue or senseless demonstrations of bravado. The longer we continued Martin's head-in-the-sand policy, the further we put thousands of Americans and loyal Vietnamese at risk. ”In complete disgust,” Baughn said, “I decided to retire early.”
“Some thought that Martin had a vested interest in hanging on in Vietnam,” Baughn says, “because it would be his last hurrah. Others thought he would try to avoid being chased out of Vietnam at almost any cost due to his arrogance and irrational determination to establish his place in history. Representative Paul McCloskey, who visited Saigon while I was there, said that he thought Graham Martin was demented. General Louis L. Wilson, who was with the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Air Forces, once visited Martin. “As General Wilson and I drove away from the Embassy, Wilson shook his head and said, ‘I have now met my first egomaniac.’" One official, Baughn remembers, who knew Martin well, said that ‘Martin was one of the few men who could stand in the shadow of a corkscrew.’”
Reports show that during the evacuation the Embassy kept interfering with the process. About two weeks before Saigon fell; Martin suddenly expressed a desire to work on a plan to evacuate a million Vietnamese. His eleventh hour grandstanding caused hundreds of Vietnamese to rush to the DAO compound and nearly over whelmed the evacuation process. One attempt by the Embassy on the 21st of April to suddenly restrict Vietnamese evacuees to those of the immediate family nearly caused a riot. Several times they needlessly diverted evacuation buses and Air America helicopters on low priority missions.
When General Smith declared that the fixed wing(C-130) operation could not be continued, Martin refused to accept the recommendation and went to Tan Son Hhut to see for himself, which wasted precious time. “Getting in and out of the Embassy compound was a demanding operation during daylight with fresh crews,” Baughn says. “The Marine and Air America air crews and evacuees they were transporting should never have been put in that hazardous situation. When General Smith declared the airfield unsafe for fixed wing aircraft to continue their operation, the Marine commander should have been put in complete charge of the evacuation and Ambassador Martin should have been on one of the first helicopters out. It was only by the grace of God, the professionalism of the U.S. Marine Corps, DAO personnel and the civilians serving in Saigon that a major disaster was averted during the final withdrawal from Vietnam. In the end, thousands of Vietnamese were evacuated. Unfortunately, many deserving were left behind and many undeserving made it out.”
Looking back now, the American effort in Vietnam appears to Baughn to have been “a lost cause just waiting to happen.” Baughn points out that American military defeated the NVN in battle after battle, but never broke their will to fight. “During most of the war, the map that General O'Donnell was briefed from in 1962 changed very little in relation to the huge American effort in Vietnam. The red and the white would flow back and forth. During the day the white or the SVN controlled areas would increase. But as a rule, at night much of the white turned to red. And in April of 1975 it all became red.”
“I reject the notion that Vietnam was a military defeat. It was anything but that. It was political defeat, lead by the anti-war media and timid politicians—pure and simple. The NVN could have been defeated militarily had we chosen to apply our military power decisively. And of course, this could have been done without the use of nuclear weapons. But even if we had defeated them militarily, I am convinced that the NVN’s will to fight would never have been broken. Up to the very end, the NVN had less of everything than the SVN, except their will to win.”
General Richard Baughn, 1
Pulling the Plug
By
Larry Engelmann
Richard Baughn flew his last Vietnam combat mission in October, 1966, just as the radar jamming pods for the F-105s were being delivered. After completing his tour, he was assigned to the "Fighter Weapons Center" at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada as chief of the Requirements and Concepts section in Center Headquarters. One of the responsibilities of the section was to send Fighter Weapons Center pilots and electronics warfare officers to Vietnam to fly with the combat units and document their tactics, introduce new weapons and weapons modifications and identify weapons and aircraft problems that needed fixing. Upon completing their short tours, the crews gave briefings at the Tactical Air Command and Headquarters USAF covering their activities and concentrating on all of problems especially ones associated with weapons and aircraft in Southeast Asia. It was a way of getting a first-hand report to the highest level in a short period of time so that corrective action could be taken quickly. They also reported new or revised combat tactics to be used in training programs for new aircrews and the information was made a permanent record in USAF tactics manual.
Pilots and EWO’s from the Center were also sent to the early planning sessions for the F-15 and F-16 to provide expertise regarding aircraft and cockpit configurations. This was an invaluable effort and helped the USAF develop these outstanding aircraft.
During the two-year period Baughn held this position progress was made in improving weapons and training programs in support of the war. But the major problem of the Whitehouse’s and DOD’s dimwitted micro management of the war continued. “The administration's no-win concept still prevailed,” Baughn said. “I saw so many body count and bomb tonnage reports that were designed for computer analysis of the war that after leaving the job it felt good not to have read the daily reports from Vietnam.” The one exception was information regarding our POWs and MIAs in NVN. This subject he followed very closely, because many of the fighter pilots he had known over the years that were being held prisoner.
Baughn was commanding an air division with six air wings when he received orders for Saigon in 1974. During his round of briefings at the State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency and Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, it was apparent that few people were interested in the Vietnam War any more. When he was shown the budget that had been submitted to support the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) for the next year, he was convinced that nothing had changed in SEA since he’d left in October, 1966. “I could not believe it had been prepared by anyone from the U.S. Air Force, at least not the hard-working and dedicated types I had served with during my 30 years of service.” he remembers, “As a wing and division commander, I worked with very tight budgets that we monitored daily and that were closely supervised down through the junior NCO level. This Vietnamese Air Force budget was so obviously full of fluff that it should have been an insult to any reviewing agency.”
One of the more glaring examples, and there were many he says, was a request for a large number of T-29 transport aircraft. “There could be no legitimate justification for this aircraft. When I got to Saigon, I learned why the T-29’s had been requested. One of the Air Force colonels who worked on the budget told Baughn that they had previously prepared a budget that was turned down by the ambassador. They were then given a higher figure and told to justify it and the T-29’s had been added for this reason! According to the colonel, the order came directly from the ambassador.
Another item that caught Baughn’s eye was the size and variety of aircraft types assigned to the Vietnamese Air Force. “I could not believe they had over two thousand aircraft with so many different types of aircraft. It was really a mixed bag of worms. They would need a first-rate supply and maintenance system and many good people to keep all of those aircraft flying,” he said. “It would be one hell of a job for any good U.S. Air Force organization and I wondered how in the world the Vietnamese Air Force was coping. Eventually, I learned that expensive American contract maintenance teams did much of the maintenance for them.”
“We had a lot of very expensive contract programs to support the South Vietnamese military,” Baughn says. “The U.S.had given South Vietnam large quantities of military hardware in Operations Enhance and Enhance Plus in 1972. It was very much like stuffing their mouths full of dry crackers and then telling them to swallow. Smaller numbers of aircraft and other services equipment would have released a lot of money needed for shooting, moving and communicating. The north was doing a lot more with a lot less than the South Vietnamese.
“Keeping a flow of parts for so many different aircraft was a real nightmare. But again, an American contract effort, along with almost continuous help from the U.S. Air Force Logistics Command, was the only reason the system functioned at all. “In my opinion,” Baughn says, “the Vietnamese Air Force had too many aircraft and far too many types of aircraft given to them. It had been a mistake to do this. If the other services had followed a similar course of action, then it was not only a huge waste of money, but it would also certainly detract from their primary requirement of defending their country. This course of action would guarantee the continued presence of expensive American contractor support well into the future.”
Baughn says that his first thought upon looking at the makeup of the Vietnamese Air Force--and he became more convinced of this with the passage of time--was to give back a large portion of the aircraft or at least stop flying some types and to store them. The savings from this would have paid for a lot of ammunition, fuel, food, medicine and other supplies. Secondly, he thought, if this were done the Vietnamese Air Force could concentrate their efforts and do a better job. Many of the aircraft were World War II and Korean War vintage that the Untied States Air Force had taken out of the bone-yards and modified for a counter-insurgency mission, he said. Like any old aircraft, they were hard to maintain and to do so was an expensive proposition. But to discuss giving back or storing equipment “was not part of the party line,” he found. “It was not until we were well into the budget cycle that we were permitted to selectively store aircraft.” Of course, by then a great deal of money had been wasted.
Baughn was visited by retired U.S. Army General Hamilton Howze on 4 July 1974, who was then working for Bell Helicopter. Howze was inquiring about problems concerning the Vietnamese Air Force helicopter force. They had 900 helicopters, which was probably one of the largest helicopter forces in the world. Baughn told Howze the main problem concerning helicopters was the large number the VNAF possessed and the sloppy control of them. He said that about half of them should be returned to the U.S. Army. This would allow South Vietnam to concentrate on the smaller number and improve the quality of maintenance and the command and control of them. In addition it would free up a lot of money for ammunition and other critical supplies without actually degrading the ARVN fighting ability. Baughn told Howze that due to the lack of positive command control and judicious scheduling the helicopter force, they were probably losing more helicopters to careless accidents than combat. But, as Baughn reported after Howze’s visit, “This was not the thing that General Howze wanted to hear and he wasn’t the least bit impressed with my comments. Such a proposal was not good for business.”
South Vietnam had the 6th or 7th largest air force in the world and most of the assets were divided between and controlled by the Army Military Regional commanders. These commanders were like independent warlords and all had different ideas of how THEIR air force should be employed. Baughn said, “The regional army commanders were politically connected and as a result, the Vietnamese Air Force Commander, General Tran Van Minh, had relatively little say or input into how his Air Force operated or was employed (He probably had none in the case of helicopters).”
One of the largest air forces in the world was represented by a colonel on the Vietnamese Joint General Staff, which was headed by a four-star army general. The VNAF colonel was rarely consulted on air force matters. Due to this lack of central air control the Americans learned of cases where the Vietnamese Air Force in one military region might be overcommitted or in need of additional air strikes or other air support and the adjacent military region commander would refuse to release his air force units to help. This sort of thing continued to happen as South Vietnam was nearing its defeat in the spring of 1975.
The division of the Vietnamese Air Force degraded its effectiveness in other areas. Baughn found flying safety and aircraft accountability completely unsatisfactory. One of the first things he inquired about was aircraft losses due to accidents and combat. The U.S. Air Force Division in the Defense Attaché Office was manned primarily by maintenance and supply people who were working full time on these problems. As a result, Baughn requested a team of operations and flying safety people be sent from the 7th Air Force to review the Vietnamese aircraft losses since 1973.
Their findings were, in Baughn’s words, “truly startling.” They accounted for over two hundred and twenty losses or major accidents that had occurred in the past 12 months. There were numerous cases of gross lack of supervision. One case involved a young helicopter pilot who had been drinking and without authorization tried to fly an unserviceable helicopter. He got it a few feet into the air and then crashed into three or four other helicopters parked on the ramp. There were many cases where aircraft had been reported as destroyed but were still actively flying and some reported as serviceable that had been destroyed. “I briefed General John Murray, the Defense Attache, on the team findings and he was shocked,” Baughn says. “He could not understand why losses of this magnitude had not been brought to his attention before. When Murray rotated back to the states he requested the survey information from me. I gave it to him and he published it, as I recall, in the Air Force Magazine.” I often wondered why Murray, after learning what the USAF survey had revealed about the VNAF, hadn’t requested something similar for the Vietnamese Army. They were many times larger and had much more equipment then the VNAF.”
Another area that Baughn found to be grossly mismanaged was target selection--or rather the lack of target selection. When briefed on the North Vietnamese fuel/oil line that was being laid and the all-weather road that was being built, Baughn asked why the Air Force was not bombing them. “I was told that some of the Military Region commanders did not want to provoke the North Vietnamese and that besides the roads and pipeline were well protected by missiles and heavy AA,” he said. “Neither of these reasons made sense. In the case of the missiles and the AA, I knew there was no way the road or the fuel/oil line could be protected over their entire lengths.” But since Baughn was a new to the job and had been instructed by the Pentagon to stay out of “the tactics business,” he did just that for the time being.
The Vietnamese Air Force, he found, had many other problems, too. For example, the contractors had difficulty in getting the VNAF students to attend training classes. There were numerous cases where the local Air Force commanders did not provide adequate support for the maintenance program. Graft and corruption remained huge problems.
One noteworthy case of the latter occurred just a few months before the fall of Saigon. A retired Air Force colonel Baughn had known in the past was working for one of the contractors. Baughn and the colonel got together periodically so Baughn might be briefed on the effectiveness of contract support of the VNAF. “One day the colonel came in unannounced and was fuming,” Baughn recalls. “Some urgently needed and very expensive helicopter parts that had been flown in high-priority from the States on C-141s and had immediately turned up missing. The former colonel said that the parts had all disappeared shortly after they were removed from the C-141 and the former colonel was mad as hell about it. He wanted something done, so I called the CIC office and one of their agents came up. It was decided that the CIC agent and the colonel would meet the next day and an investigation would be started. I checked with the CIC agent in a day or two and he said that they were conducting the investigation but that they had not had much luck because most of the people they needed to talk to would not cooperate. We never found the parts.”
During Baughn’s Pentagon briefings he had several candid discussions with Major General George Keegan, the U.S. Air Force's Chief of Intelligence. “Keegan had a very good feel for what was going on in Vietnam and he knew all of the players and the pitfalls,” Baughn found. “He stressed the point of not trying to advise the Vietnamese Air Force on tactics, which would be in violation of the cease-fire agreement [The Paris Agreement of 1973].” Keegan said, “The politicians will throw you to the wolves if you’re caught giving tactical guidance.” “Keegan’s parting comment to me was that the politics of the job and the state of affairs in Vietnam made my job a no-win situation and it would be difficult to come out of this tour unscathed. This same warning was repeated by the Navy admiral in the Pentagon who discussed the Vietnamese Navy with me. My briefers also told me in so many words that I was to try and work myself out of a job. In other words, they wanted to see the day--and soon--when the vast majority of the American civilians and contractors in Vietnam could come home and let the Vietnamese take care of themselves.”
While Baughn was in Washington almost everyone with whom he spoke “wanted the US’s participation in Vietnam War to end.” “Everyone wanted to get on with the other problems and programs at hand,” Baughn found. “Most tried to be helpful, but there was no mistaking the fact that Vietnam had a very low priority.”
Yet Baughn made up his mind to do everything possible to help the Vietnamese. “I wanted, at the same time, to do it at a minimum cost to the American taxpayers,” he says. “It was obvious that the state of our own economy was the number one concern of the American public and Congress.” Baughn’s visit to the Pentagon demonstrated that the military shared this concern. “No one wanted, nor would they support, a freewheeling spending binge in Vietnam,” he added. “I firmly agreed with that sentiment and I was determined to do everything within my power to follow it.” In his own small way, Baughn hoped to make sure that American dollars were being properly spent and that what might be saved was in fact being saved.
During a stopover in Hawaii to visit with the three service commands and the Headquarters of the Pacific, Baughn found more Vietnam interest shown on the part of each of the staffs in all of the headquarters than what he experienced in the Pentagon. But there was concern about the forthcoming budget and some of the irrefutable waste in Vietnam.
Baughn noticed Ambassador Graham Martin [U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam] was discussed by many people because of the difficulty of getting along with Martin. Baughn also learned that Martin had evidently become very annoyed with Admiral Noel Gayler, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific, “over some rather insignificant thing.” Later in Saigon, a number of times Baughn heard Martin refer to Admiral Gayler “in less than flattering terms. Martin said several times that he did not want that polo-playing Admiral in this country. It was a most unfortunate situation to have the ambassador in a critical country in Southeast Asia being so openly critical of the senior military commander for all of the Pacific.” Baughn believed Admiral Gayler, was one of the most capable senior officers he had ever met and was a man who remained above such pettiness. Baughn added, “To the best of my recollection, until April of 1975, Admiral Gayler only visited South Vietnam when the Ambassador was out of the country.”
Shortly after Baughn’s arrival in Saigon, it became clear to him that the mood of the Americans in Saigon was different from that of the Americans outside Vietnam. It was so different, in fact that many of them, he concluded, seemed to be completely out of touch with the reality of the situation back in the US. A few days after his arrival, General Murray had a dinner party and Ambassador Martin and others attended. The subject of funds for Vietnam came up. Baughn said that in his opinion it would be extremely difficult to get the requested budget out of Congress and it appeared that the people back in the states were more concerned with the economy, because so many Americans were hurting. Then one of the Embassy people snapped back that this was not the case. He said that the budget would be approved--he was absolutely certain of it. Congress would eventually come around, he said, just as they had done so many times in the past. Later Baughn learned that this was the “party line” of the Embassy.
General Murray, Baughn’s superior in Vietnam, understood that funds for Vietnam would in fact be a real problem and he also knew that the Vietnamese were using ammunition and other resources at an extravagant rate. Murray wanted to advise the Vietnamese to conserve ammunition in order to avoid a crisis at a later day. But Ambassador Martin was afraid that they could not stand the shock of cutting back and was adamant in his position that the required aid would eventually arrive. Martin's rejection of Murray's request and his insistence that more money would come, Baughn concluded, was one of the reasons that contributed to President Thieu's precipitous decision to withdraw from Military Region II in the spring of 1975-- a decision that hastened the collapse of the already fragile fighting spirit of the Vietnamese. “At the very least,” Baughn thought, “the so-called crisis that Martin was trying to avoid was minor compared to the actual crisis that eventually occurred.”
When Baughn started reviewing some of the DAO reports that had been submitted to higher headquarters, one of the most significant things he read was General Murray's first Quarterly Assessment of the situation in Vietnam, since American fighting forces had been withdrawn. Murray pointed out that most of the information about the South Vietnamese forces was coming from the Vietnamese themselves, so it might not be as objective or as reliable as it had been when the Americans were looking over their shoulders. He stated that the Vietnamese were not devoting sufficient time or effort towards running their military and the Vietnamese were surprised to see Americans taking so much interest in what they were doing. Murray wrote that the South Vietnamese appeared unconcerned, lacked a sense of urgency, were preparing inaccurate reports, and did very little to correct their obvious problems.
As a result of reading Murray's report, Baughn immediately became wary of the South Vietnamese reports and all of the American analysis that was based on South Vietnamese sources of information. In Baughn’s opinion the Americans had more solid information on the communists than they did on the South Vietnamese fighting forces. The contents of General Murray’s report was either forgotten or ignored, because no one ever mentioned it.
There were other reports from Americans that revealed major problems affecting the morale of the Army of South Vietnam--problems like the lack of adequate medical support, not due to shortages, but due to the inattention or lack of concern on the part of the unit commanders in the army. Many SVN fighting men were not properly fed, even when adequate rations were available. Again, Baughn believed, this was because of the absence of Vietnamese command interest or because unit commanders or others were bleeding off the food supplies for personal gain. Towards the end of the war it was reported that the North Vietnamese in many cases were better fed in the field than was the American-supported Army of South Vietnam. Pay was also a problem. Sometimes soldiers would go for extended periods of time without pay and had to steal or sell their military equipment for money to feed their families.
Colonel Richard A. McMahon, the U.S. Army Attache, in his end- of- the- tour report in July of 1974 mentioned the first Mission Council meeting he attended, which normally included the Ambassador and all the heads of the various agencies in Vietnam. During this meeting, George Jacobson, a key advisor to the Ambassador, said that corruption in Vietnam exceeded all known previous bounds, even by Asian standards. Colonel McMahon said that the comment hardly caused a stir at the table. McMahon went on to say that he could understand the reluctance of Congress to approve more funds with all of the reports of corruption in Vietnam. But he said that nobody seemed to care and the American attitude in Vietnam might be summed up by the comment of one senior official who, when told that a Saigon newspaper claimed that over a billion American dollars had been stashed away in Swiss bank accounts by corrupt South Vietnamese officials. (This figure accounted for only a few people and not the bulk of the corruption). A high ranking American official said after a moment of thought, "Well, after all, that's less than two percent of what we have given them." Baughn said, “We evidently had come to accept these shortcomings of the Vietnamese and eventually lost sight of their potential effect on the moral fiber of the military and the people at large.”
Another report that Baughn read was a 30-day survey of a Military Region, MR II that was made by Rob Schwab in May of 1974. Schwab, was a former green beret, fluent in Vietnamese, and had more than ten years of experience in the country either as a civilian or in the military. He was also married to a Vietnamese woman. General Murray asked him to conduct a country-wide survey on the economic conditions affecting the South Vietnamese military. His report highlighted the following problems, all of which he concluded had sharply eroded the morale of the military.
1. Housing for military families was, for the most part, nonexistent.
2. Most soldiers were not receiving their full entitlements of rice.
3. Pay was inadequate because of inflation and many troops were not paid on time.
4. The commissary was of little use to the lower ranks because prices were too high and each family had only one card. When the husband went out into the field to fight he had to take the card so the unit could use it to purchase rations in bulk for the soldiers, which left the family with nothing.
5. There was a shortage of uniforms, ponchos and boots. This was caused in part, because they had been sold by the soldiers for food.
6. There were many cases of troops not having had leave in two to three years. Schwab said that according to some soldiers this was a major contributing factor to the declining morale.
7. Some medication was in short supply, but many shortages were due to the lack of command attention because adequate supplies were available, but not requisitioned for the troops.
8. Concern for the economic conditions of families was the leading cause of desertion. Schwab did not pursue the "ghost-soldiering" problem, due to time restraints, but he said that the enlisted men reported that the average unit strength in MR II was 65 percent of authorization. Richard Moose and Charles Meissner, staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reported in May of 1974 of finding evidence of at least 100,000 “flower, gold and ghost soldiers” – terms for soldiers who were either nonexistent or AWOL but whose names appeared on pay slips and rosters, with some one in the Vietnamese military keeping the pay.
Baughn concluded, “The number of flower soldiers (nonexistent soldiers—who were paid) was substantial.” Based on discussions with others, who Baughn believed had a good feel for the problem, he estimated that it could have as high as 30 percent. “The figure of 1.1 million men, who were supposed to be in the military of South Vietnam, was a grossly inflated figure,” Baughn said.
9. There were a number of incidents of the Vietnamese Air Force helicopter pilots demanding every tenth bag of rice in payment for delivering supplies to an isolated unit in Darlac province. Reports from all of the other Military Regions followed this same theme and included most of the problems mentioned by Schwab in his report.
Baughn believed that to correct these problems pressure had to start at the top and work on down. It appeared that most Americans accepted the graft and corruption as a way of life in Vietnam and did very little to try and stop it. If only the problem of pay and food for the military had been resolved the morale of the troops and airmen would have been much higher. A closer liaison with President Thieu might have prevented the debacle in MRII (the SVN Army ran away from MRII without a fight) after Thieu had the meeting with the MR II commander, General Pham Van Phu, concerning the withdrawal from the Central Highlands. At the time Ambassador Martin was back in the States and it was reported that he couldn’t be located by either the Embassy or the State Department.
4439 Words
By
Larry Engelmann
Richard Baughn flew his last Vietnam combat mission in October, 1966, just as the radar jamming pods for the F-105s were being delivered. After completing his tour, he was assigned to the "Fighter Weapons Center" at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada as chief of the Requirements and Concepts section in Center Headquarters. One of the responsibilities of the section was to send Fighter Weapons Center pilots and electronics warfare officers to Vietnam to fly with the combat units and document their tactics, introduce new weapons and weapons modifications and identify weapons and aircraft problems that needed fixing. Upon completing their short tours, the crews gave briefings at the Tactical Air Command and Headquarters USAF covering their activities and concentrating on all of problems especially ones associated with weapons and aircraft in Southeast Asia. It was a way of getting a first-hand report to the highest level in a short period of time so that corrective action could be taken quickly. They also reported new or revised combat tactics to be used in training programs for new aircrews and the information was made a permanent record in USAF tactics manual.
Pilots and EWO’s from the Center were also sent to the early planning sessions for the F-15 and F-16 to provide expertise regarding aircraft and cockpit configurations. This was an invaluable effort and helped the USAF develop these outstanding aircraft.
During the two-year period Baughn held this position progress was made in improving weapons and training programs in support of the war. But the major problem of the Whitehouse’s and DOD’s dimwitted micro management of the war continued. “The administration's no-win concept still prevailed,” Baughn said. “I saw so many body count and bomb tonnage reports that were designed for computer analysis of the war that after leaving the job it felt good not to have read the daily reports from Vietnam.” The one exception was information regarding our POWs and MIAs in NVN. This subject he followed very closely, because many of the fighter pilots he had known over the years that were being held prisoner.
Baughn was commanding an air division with six air wings when he received orders for Saigon in 1974. During his round of briefings at the State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency and Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, it was apparent that few people were interested in the Vietnam War any more. When he was shown the budget that had been submitted to support the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) for the next year, he was convinced that nothing had changed in SEA since he’d left in October, 1966. “I could not believe it had been prepared by anyone from the U.S. Air Force, at least not the hard-working and dedicated types I had served with during my 30 years of service.” he remembers, “As a wing and division commander, I worked with very tight budgets that we monitored daily and that were closely supervised down through the junior NCO level. This Vietnamese Air Force budget was so obviously full of fluff that it should have been an insult to any reviewing agency.”
One of the more glaring examples, and there were many he says, was a request for a large number of T-29 transport aircraft. “There could be no legitimate justification for this aircraft. When I got to Saigon, I learned why the T-29’s had been requested. One of the Air Force colonels who worked on the budget told Baughn that they had previously prepared a budget that was turned down by the ambassador. They were then given a higher figure and told to justify it and the T-29’s had been added for this reason! According to the colonel, the order came directly from the ambassador.
Another item that caught Baughn’s eye was the size and variety of aircraft types assigned to the Vietnamese Air Force. “I could not believe they had over two thousand aircraft with so many different types of aircraft. It was really a mixed bag of worms. They would need a first-rate supply and maintenance system and many good people to keep all of those aircraft flying,” he said. “It would be one hell of a job for any good U.S. Air Force organization and I wondered how in the world the Vietnamese Air Force was coping. Eventually, I learned that expensive American contract maintenance teams did much of the maintenance for them.”
“We had a lot of very expensive contract programs to support the South Vietnamese military,” Baughn says. “The U.S.had given South Vietnam large quantities of military hardware in Operations Enhance and Enhance Plus in 1972. It was very much like stuffing their mouths full of dry crackers and then telling them to swallow. Smaller numbers of aircraft and other services equipment would have released a lot of money needed for shooting, moving and communicating. The north was doing a lot more with a lot less than the South Vietnamese.
“Keeping a flow of parts for so many different aircraft was a real nightmare. But again, an American contract effort, along with almost continuous help from the U.S. Air Force Logistics Command, was the only reason the system functioned at all. “In my opinion,” Baughn says, “the Vietnamese Air Force had too many aircraft and far too many types of aircraft given to them. It had been a mistake to do this. If the other services had followed a similar course of action, then it was not only a huge waste of money, but it would also certainly detract from their primary requirement of defending their country. This course of action would guarantee the continued presence of expensive American contractor support well into the future.”
Baughn says that his first thought upon looking at the makeup of the Vietnamese Air Force--and he became more convinced of this with the passage of time--was to give back a large portion of the aircraft or at least stop flying some types and to store them. The savings from this would have paid for a lot of ammunition, fuel, food, medicine and other supplies. Secondly, he thought, if this were done the Vietnamese Air Force could concentrate their efforts and do a better job. Many of the aircraft were World War II and Korean War vintage that the Untied States Air Force had taken out of the bone-yards and modified for a counter-insurgency mission, he said. Like any old aircraft, they were hard to maintain and to do so was an expensive proposition. But to discuss giving back or storing equipment “was not part of the party line,” he found. “It was not until we were well into the budget cycle that we were permitted to selectively store aircraft.” Of course, by then a great deal of money had been wasted.
Baughn was visited by retired U.S. Army General Hamilton Howze on 4 July 1974, who was then working for Bell Helicopter. Howze was inquiring about problems concerning the Vietnamese Air Force helicopter force. They had 900 helicopters, which was probably one of the largest helicopter forces in the world. Baughn told Howze the main problem concerning helicopters was the large number the VNAF possessed and the sloppy control of them. He said that about half of them should be returned to the U.S. Army. This would allow South Vietnam to concentrate on the smaller number and improve the quality of maintenance and the command and control of them. In addition it would free up a lot of money for ammunition and other critical supplies without actually degrading the ARVN fighting ability. Baughn told Howze that due to the lack of positive command control and judicious scheduling the helicopter force, they were probably losing more helicopters to careless accidents than combat. But, as Baughn reported after Howze’s visit, “This was not the thing that General Howze wanted to hear and he wasn’t the least bit impressed with my comments. Such a proposal was not good for business.”
South Vietnam had the 6th or 7th largest air force in the world and most of the assets were divided between and controlled by the Army Military Regional commanders. These commanders were like independent warlords and all had different ideas of how THEIR air force should be employed. Baughn said, “The regional army commanders were politically connected and as a result, the Vietnamese Air Force Commander, General Tran Van Minh, had relatively little say or input into how his Air Force operated or was employed (He probably had none in the case of helicopters).”
One of the largest air forces in the world was represented by a colonel on the Vietnamese Joint General Staff, which was headed by a four-star army general. The VNAF colonel was rarely consulted on air force matters. Due to this lack of central air control the Americans learned of cases where the Vietnamese Air Force in one military region might be overcommitted or in need of additional air strikes or other air support and the adjacent military region commander would refuse to release his air force units to help. This sort of thing continued to happen as South Vietnam was nearing its defeat in the spring of 1975.
The division of the Vietnamese Air Force degraded its effectiveness in other areas. Baughn found flying safety and aircraft accountability completely unsatisfactory. One of the first things he inquired about was aircraft losses due to accidents and combat. The U.S. Air Force Division in the Defense Attaché Office was manned primarily by maintenance and supply people who were working full time on these problems. As a result, Baughn requested a team of operations and flying safety people be sent from the 7th Air Force to review the Vietnamese aircraft losses since 1973.
Their findings were, in Baughn’s words, “truly startling.” They accounted for over two hundred and twenty losses or major accidents that had occurred in the past 12 months. There were numerous cases of gross lack of supervision. One case involved a young helicopter pilot who had been drinking and without authorization tried to fly an unserviceable helicopter. He got it a few feet into the air and then crashed into three or four other helicopters parked on the ramp. There were many cases where aircraft had been reported as destroyed but were still actively flying and some reported as serviceable that had been destroyed. “I briefed General John Murray, the Defense Attache, on the team findings and he was shocked,” Baughn says. “He could not understand why losses of this magnitude had not been brought to his attention before. When Murray rotated back to the states he requested the survey information from me. I gave it to him and he published it, as I recall, in the Air Force Magazine.” I often wondered why Murray, after learning what the USAF survey had revealed about the VNAF, hadn’t requested something similar for the Vietnamese Army. They were many times larger and had much more equipment then the VNAF.”
Another area that Baughn found to be grossly mismanaged was target selection--or rather the lack of target selection. When briefed on the North Vietnamese fuel/oil line that was being laid and the all-weather road that was being built, Baughn asked why the Air Force was not bombing them. “I was told that some of the Military Region commanders did not want to provoke the North Vietnamese and that besides the roads and pipeline were well protected by missiles and heavy AA,” he said. “Neither of these reasons made sense. In the case of the missiles and the AA, I knew there was no way the road or the fuel/oil line could be protected over their entire lengths.” But since Baughn was a new to the job and had been instructed by the Pentagon to stay out of “the tactics business,” he did just that for the time being.
The Vietnamese Air Force, he found, had many other problems, too. For example, the contractors had difficulty in getting the VNAF students to attend training classes. There were numerous cases where the local Air Force commanders did not provide adequate support for the maintenance program. Graft and corruption remained huge problems.
One noteworthy case of the latter occurred just a few months before the fall of Saigon. A retired Air Force colonel Baughn had known in the past was working for one of the contractors. Baughn and the colonel got together periodically so Baughn might be briefed on the effectiveness of contract support of the VNAF. “One day the colonel came in unannounced and was fuming,” Baughn recalls. “Some urgently needed and very expensive helicopter parts that had been flown in high-priority from the States on C-141s and had immediately turned up missing. The former colonel said that the parts had all disappeared shortly after they were removed from the C-141 and the former colonel was mad as hell about it. He wanted something done, so I called the CIC office and one of their agents came up. It was decided that the CIC agent and the colonel would meet the next day and an investigation would be started. I checked with the CIC agent in a day or two and he said that they were conducting the investigation but that they had not had much luck because most of the people they needed to talk to would not cooperate. We never found the parts.”
During Baughn’s Pentagon briefings he had several candid discussions with Major General George Keegan, the U.S. Air Force's Chief of Intelligence. “Keegan had a very good feel for what was going on in Vietnam and he knew all of the players and the pitfalls,” Baughn found. “He stressed the point of not trying to advise the Vietnamese Air Force on tactics, which would be in violation of the cease-fire agreement [The Paris Agreement of 1973].” Keegan said, “The politicians will throw you to the wolves if you’re caught giving tactical guidance.” “Keegan’s parting comment to me was that the politics of the job and the state of affairs in Vietnam made my job a no-win situation and it would be difficult to come out of this tour unscathed. This same warning was repeated by the Navy admiral in the Pentagon who discussed the Vietnamese Navy with me. My briefers also told me in so many words that I was to try and work myself out of a job. In other words, they wanted to see the day--and soon--when the vast majority of the American civilians and contractors in Vietnam could come home and let the Vietnamese take care of themselves.”
While Baughn was in Washington almost everyone with whom he spoke “wanted the US’s participation in Vietnam War to end.” “Everyone wanted to get on with the other problems and programs at hand,” Baughn found. “Most tried to be helpful, but there was no mistaking the fact that Vietnam had a very low priority.”
Yet Baughn made up his mind to do everything possible to help the Vietnamese. “I wanted, at the same time, to do it at a minimum cost to the American taxpayers,” he says. “It was obvious that the state of our own economy was the number one concern of the American public and Congress.” Baughn’s visit to the Pentagon demonstrated that the military shared this concern. “No one wanted, nor would they support, a freewheeling spending binge in Vietnam,” he added. “I firmly agreed with that sentiment and I was determined to do everything within my power to follow it.” In his own small way, Baughn hoped to make sure that American dollars were being properly spent and that what might be saved was in fact being saved.
During a stopover in Hawaii to visit with the three service commands and the Headquarters of the Pacific, Baughn found more Vietnam interest shown on the part of each of the staffs in all of the headquarters than what he experienced in the Pentagon. But there was concern about the forthcoming budget and some of the irrefutable waste in Vietnam.
Baughn noticed Ambassador Graham Martin [U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam] was discussed by many people because of the difficulty of getting along with Martin. Baughn also learned that Martin had evidently become very annoyed with Admiral Noel Gayler, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific, “over some rather insignificant thing.” Later in Saigon, a number of times Baughn heard Martin refer to Admiral Gayler “in less than flattering terms. Martin said several times that he did not want that polo-playing Admiral in this country. It was a most unfortunate situation to have the ambassador in a critical country in Southeast Asia being so openly critical of the senior military commander for all of the Pacific.” Baughn believed Admiral Gayler, was one of the most capable senior officers he had ever met and was a man who remained above such pettiness. Baughn added, “To the best of my recollection, until April of 1975, Admiral Gayler only visited South Vietnam when the Ambassador was out of the country.”
Shortly after Baughn’s arrival in Saigon, it became clear to him that the mood of the Americans in Saigon was different from that of the Americans outside Vietnam. It was so different, in fact that many of them, he concluded, seemed to be completely out of touch with the reality of the situation back in the US. A few days after his arrival, General Murray had a dinner party and Ambassador Martin and others attended. The subject of funds for Vietnam came up. Baughn said that in his opinion it would be extremely difficult to get the requested budget out of Congress and it appeared that the people back in the states were more concerned with the economy, because so many Americans were hurting. Then one of the Embassy people snapped back that this was not the case. He said that the budget would be approved--he was absolutely certain of it. Congress would eventually come around, he said, just as they had done so many times in the past. Later Baughn learned that this was the “party line” of the Embassy.
General Murray, Baughn’s superior in Vietnam, understood that funds for Vietnam would in fact be a real problem and he also knew that the Vietnamese were using ammunition and other resources at an extravagant rate. Murray wanted to advise the Vietnamese to conserve ammunition in order to avoid a crisis at a later day. But Ambassador Martin was afraid that they could not stand the shock of cutting back and was adamant in his position that the required aid would eventually arrive. Martin's rejection of Murray's request and his insistence that more money would come, Baughn concluded, was one of the reasons that contributed to President Thieu's precipitous decision to withdraw from Military Region II in the spring of 1975-- a decision that hastened the collapse of the already fragile fighting spirit of the Vietnamese. “At the very least,” Baughn thought, “the so-called crisis that Martin was trying to avoid was minor compared to the actual crisis that eventually occurred.”
When Baughn started reviewing some of the DAO reports that had been submitted to higher headquarters, one of the most significant things he read was General Murray's first Quarterly Assessment of the situation in Vietnam, since American fighting forces had been withdrawn. Murray pointed out that most of the information about the South Vietnamese forces was coming from the Vietnamese themselves, so it might not be as objective or as reliable as it had been when the Americans were looking over their shoulders. He stated that the Vietnamese were not devoting sufficient time or effort towards running their military and the Vietnamese were surprised to see Americans taking so much interest in what they were doing. Murray wrote that the South Vietnamese appeared unconcerned, lacked a sense of urgency, were preparing inaccurate reports, and did very little to correct their obvious problems.
As a result of reading Murray's report, Baughn immediately became wary of the South Vietnamese reports and all of the American analysis that was based on South Vietnamese sources of information. In Baughn’s opinion the Americans had more solid information on the communists than they did on the South Vietnamese fighting forces. The contents of General Murray’s report was either forgotten or ignored, because no one ever mentioned it.
There were other reports from Americans that revealed major problems affecting the morale of the Army of South Vietnam--problems like the lack of adequate medical support, not due to shortages, but due to the inattention or lack of concern on the part of the unit commanders in the army. Many SVN fighting men were not properly fed, even when adequate rations were available. Again, Baughn believed, this was because of the absence of Vietnamese command interest or because unit commanders or others were bleeding off the food supplies for personal gain. Towards the end of the war it was reported that the North Vietnamese in many cases were better fed in the field than was the American-supported Army of South Vietnam. Pay was also a problem. Sometimes soldiers would go for extended periods of time without pay and had to steal or sell their military equipment for money to feed their families.
Colonel Richard A. McMahon, the U.S. Army Attache, in his end- of- the- tour report in July of 1974 mentioned the first Mission Council meeting he attended, which normally included the Ambassador and all the heads of the various agencies in Vietnam. During this meeting, George Jacobson, a key advisor to the Ambassador, said that corruption in Vietnam exceeded all known previous bounds, even by Asian standards. Colonel McMahon said that the comment hardly caused a stir at the table. McMahon went on to say that he could understand the reluctance of Congress to approve more funds with all of the reports of corruption in Vietnam. But he said that nobody seemed to care and the American attitude in Vietnam might be summed up by the comment of one senior official who, when told that a Saigon newspaper claimed that over a billion American dollars had been stashed away in Swiss bank accounts by corrupt South Vietnamese officials. (This figure accounted for only a few people and not the bulk of the corruption). A high ranking American official said after a moment of thought, "Well, after all, that's less than two percent of what we have given them." Baughn said, “We evidently had come to accept these shortcomings of the Vietnamese and eventually lost sight of their potential effect on the moral fiber of the military and the people at large.”
Another report that Baughn read was a 30-day survey of a Military Region, MR II that was made by Rob Schwab in May of 1974. Schwab, was a former green beret, fluent in Vietnamese, and had more than ten years of experience in the country either as a civilian or in the military. He was also married to a Vietnamese woman. General Murray asked him to conduct a country-wide survey on the economic conditions affecting the South Vietnamese military. His report highlighted the following problems, all of which he concluded had sharply eroded the morale of the military.
1. Housing for military families was, for the most part, nonexistent.
2. Most soldiers were not receiving their full entitlements of rice.
3. Pay was inadequate because of inflation and many troops were not paid on time.
4. The commissary was of little use to the lower ranks because prices were too high and each family had only one card. When the husband went out into the field to fight he had to take the card so the unit could use it to purchase rations in bulk for the soldiers, which left the family with nothing.
5. There was a shortage of uniforms, ponchos and boots. This was caused in part, because they had been sold by the soldiers for food.
6. There were many cases of troops not having had leave in two to three years. Schwab said that according to some soldiers this was a major contributing factor to the declining morale.
7. Some medication was in short supply, but many shortages were due to the lack of command attention because adequate supplies were available, but not requisitioned for the troops.
8. Concern for the economic conditions of families was the leading cause of desertion. Schwab did not pursue the "ghost-soldiering" problem, due to time restraints, but he said that the enlisted men reported that the average unit strength in MR II was 65 percent of authorization. Richard Moose and Charles Meissner, staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reported in May of 1974 of finding evidence of at least 100,000 “flower, gold and ghost soldiers” – terms for soldiers who were either nonexistent or AWOL but whose names appeared on pay slips and rosters, with some one in the Vietnamese military keeping the pay.
Baughn concluded, “The number of flower soldiers (nonexistent soldiers—who were paid) was substantial.” Based on discussions with others, who Baughn believed had a good feel for the problem, he estimated that it could have as high as 30 percent. “The figure of 1.1 million men, who were supposed to be in the military of South Vietnam, was a grossly inflated figure,” Baughn said.
9. There were a number of incidents of the Vietnamese Air Force helicopter pilots demanding every tenth bag of rice in payment for delivering supplies to an isolated unit in Darlac province. Reports from all of the other Military Regions followed this same theme and included most of the problems mentioned by Schwab in his report.
Baughn believed that to correct these problems pressure had to start at the top and work on down. It appeared that most Americans accepted the graft and corruption as a way of life in Vietnam and did very little to try and stop it. If only the problem of pay and food for the military had been resolved the morale of the troops and airmen would have been much higher. A closer liaison with President Thieu might have prevented the debacle in MRII (the SVN Army ran away from MRII without a fight) after Thieu had the meeting with the MR II commander, General Pham Van Phu, concerning the withdrawal from the Central Highlands. At the time Ambassador Martin was back in the States and it was reported that he couldn’t be located by either the Embassy or the State Department.
4439 Words
If Tomorrow Never Comes: Frank Snepp's Vietnam
Frank Snepp.
"If Tomorrow Never Comes"
The first time I was seized by the notion that we were not peddling all the truth and maybe there was some smoke in what we were channeling back to Washington was in 1969 and 1970 right after I got to Vietnam. I was, like all fledgling analysts in Vietnam in those days, assigned to collect information that was passed to the CORDS(Civil Operations and Rural Development Support) program. I did a study comparing the number of people we had supposedly killed in the Phoenix program with the number of communist cadre who were operating out there, and looking over the statistics I discovered that there was no slippage in the number of cadre operating, although we had supposedly killed or eliminated 20,000 of them. And I wrote up a little memo on this and sent it to the C0RDS people across town. William Colby was the head of the CORDS program at that time. And being completely naive, once having filed a memo, I expected to see some action on this. After all, this was a serious conclusion. We were killing somebody but they were not all Viet Cong!
And there was nothing but a deafening silence.
I wrote another memo and there was another deafening silence. I heard nothing more about it. I thought about it and I was troubled. But there was so much to be troubled by in Vietnam that one episode like that could pass and you could forget about it.
I remember being awakened in the mornings by the rumbling out along the border of Vietnam, north of Saigon. Everyone I knew at the agency knew this was the secret bombing going on and I didn't realize it was secret. Some of my journalist friends would say, "You know there is bombing going on up there." And I said, "I guess I can't talk about it. It sounds like bombing to me, too." And we would sit around in the evening, and I would go over to the Newsweek villa and they would bring out their various theories about what the US was doing, and they would bounce them off me. They were terribly upset by various government transgressions. And their indignation and concern began to be infectious. I began to ask questions around the Embassy. But I never pursued them very seriously. It was always easy to avoid going too far with anything, because you could always find something else to concern you. And more than that, it never profited you to ask too many questions. Stay quiet and stay content and you are promoted.
For someone in his late 20s who has not experienced very much excitement in the world it is very heady stuff to be brought into the confidence of the station chief, this was Ted Shakley who was the CIA station chief at the time. He began to use me and others in the analytical cockpit to do speeches for him. Shakley made his career in the agency in part because he was such a good presenter. He could juggle facts and make them all come out right. He used to send cables that we referred to as "Shakleygrams" back from Saigon, which were designed to show the progress of the war. He set the pace, he set the example for a lot of the people I was operating with in the Embassy in those days. It wasn't the truth that got you ahead, it was the mimicking of truth that got you ahead. Shakley always insisted on our meeting various quotas -- number of reports turned out, number of agents recruited, all were set. Some of our case officers down in the Delta tried to meet Shakley's quotas in recruitment by hiring any prospective agent who came within range, and if they saw a colonel on somebody's staff he would be hired for our staff. And what happened is that prospective agents caught on; they earned money from the agency by reading a South Vietnamese newspaper, translating it into English and giving us that information. Well, it turned out several years later, looking back on Shakley's reign, that roughly a hundred of the agents we had recruited at that time were in fact false agents. They had been people who actually had very little to give. And in fact had given us information we could have picked up if we had spoken Vietnamese, but there were few of us in the Embassy who did, so we were misled. We were duped.
That is the way some of us began to cut our teeth on the agency. We developed a quality in which our sense of truth and integrity was slightly off the mark. What you do is you begin to blink.
Let me explain the process.
There was a very dear friend of mine in the agency who had been in Vietnam a long time and his specialty was the South Vietnamese government. And he knew a lot of South Vietnamese politicians and he worked with them hand in glove and he knew a lot of them were corrupt and he knew that they were not as reliable or as faithful to Thieu as we thought, as we wanted to think. And I remember one day -- and I knew I was a done for when this happened, I was long gone -- I was writing a piece of analysis for the new station chief, who was Tom Polgar. And I went to this CIA man and I said, "I need some input, I need some information." And he said, "Frank, you have to write into this analysis that there is some corruption and that this man is corrupt and that he is corruptible and he is not sincere." And I said, "Wait a minute, You know it and I know it. I gotta tell you it's not sellable. I can't persuade Polgar to include that in the analysis. I can't get him to keep it there. So I can't write it in." I said, "I'll do my best somewhere to float it up the system. But I can't do it this time." So what happens is that you begin censoring yourself. You censor what is not sellable. Because you get weary if you are a young operative or a young analyst arguing against "Star-Wars" opposition that something ought to be included. The corruption issue and the security issue were crucial. I never thought that we adequately monitored the rock that was destroying the South Vietnamese will to fight. Occasionally I spoke up about it. Occasionally Pat Johnson did. At one point in 1974 she did an analysis on the morale problems in the South Vietnamese military. But it was virtually unrecognizable after Polgar stomped it. He pulverized it. I knew why he was doing it. He did it for the right reason in his eyes. He felt, I surmised, and I can't quote him directly on this, but I surmised that he felt that this would make it very difficult for us to get aid out of Congress if it ever got back to Washington. He refused to let us do maps on the security situation in the South Vietnamese countryside, maps showing where the communists were in control and where the government was in control. This issue was particularly relevant right after the ceasefire accords. We were looking toward a standstill ceasefire, the forces stopping in place. I thought that knowing where the other side was was important. But Polgar refused to allow us to do up this map. We did one and he said, "I never want to see it in a briefing," and he said, "I really don't want to see it updated." And he discouraged us from adding to the map. So it died. I stuck it up on a shelf and it never came out again.
So my passage of compromises will trace back a number of years and was reinforced or buttressed by subsequent experiences with Polgar. What happens is that if you are a young CIA operative and you are ambitious, which I was, and I had a lot of prospects, and Shakley knew me and Polgar began to use me for various purposes, and you say to yourself, as I think I even said to my CIA friend who suggested I add this stuff to the paper on corruption, "Look, you gotta compromise today. It's not a bad thing to compromise on the facts, because in that way you will amass political credit so that tomorrow you can make a difference. Hold your piece today and you begin to earn credit toward some sort of leverage tomorrow." Of course, tomorrow never comes. And you keep postponing the moment of truth, if you will.
And that's what happened.
Its a long march the bureaucrats march toward moral decrepitude. That happened a lot. And I think, in my case, I came very close to losing the capacity even to recognize that I was making the compromises.
I think it should be noted that our mind set on the cease fire situation was established very early on. The cease fire was conceived in duplicity -- Kissinger not telling the South Vietnamese that he was going to accede to the North Vietnamese' retaining a substantial force presence in South Vietnam. Kissinger also failed to alert the South Vietnamese even as of the day of the cease fire as to precisely the political terms of the agreement he negotiated for them in Paris. So the South Vietnamese stumbled into this cease fire without really knowing what they were facing and presumably assuming that there would be some cutback in the North Vietnamese presence. It's very hard to tell at this point. South Vietnamese documentation on this subject is pretty scarce.
Kissinger was also duplicitious with respect to Congress. He had not indicated to Congress--at least not publicly--that the American government would be expected to supply massive amounts of aid to the South Vietnamese and also some kind of reconstruction aid to the North Vietnamese. That was part of the understanding Kissinger had reached surreptitiously with the North Vietnamese--certainly they expected it. All of these underpinnings to the cease fire agreement went unnoted, so when accounts were called in, nobody was ready for them in Congress. That is to say, Congress was not preparred to vote the kind of massive aid to South Vietnam, coupled with the reconstruction aid to North Vietnam that probably would have been necessary to make the cease fire period work. A little more honesty up front, in short, could have probably conditioned both sides to a more responsive attitude to the terms of the cease fire agreement.
The duplicity continued on more fundamental levels, very early on. Right before the cease fire went into effect, the United States government rammed into South Vietnam under the Enhanced Plus Program, massive amounts of material so the South Vietnamese could withstand any North Vietnamese cease fire violations. This was not a violation of the cease fire agreement, since the agreement had not yet come into effect, at least not the letter of the agreement. But it certainly was a breach of the spirit of what had been discussed betweeen the two sides. Consequently it was no accident that the communists responded through the cease fire period and into the initial months of the cease fire by mounting their own Enhance Plus, reinforcing their own side so that they could withstand the coming cease-fire war which they rightly foresaw as being pretty intense. With Enhance Plus, they drew the conclusion that the South Vietnamese were not going to be encouraged by the Americans to play straight with the cease fire.
And in fact that was true. The South Vietnamese very early on began pushing into areas where their control was non existent or was extremely weak. And the North Vietnamese had anticipated a stand-still cease fire in place. During the early stages of the cease fire, I'm talking about the months up through May and June of 1973, the CIA and the Defense Attache's Office very studiously ignored the cease fire violations, the land-grabbing efforts of the South Vietnamese government or otherwise cast them simply as defensive, a response to North Vietnamese cease fire violations. This was a gross misstatement of what was taking place.
But it was strictly in character with the way we would approach intelligence throughout the cease fire period. When I say "we" I'm talking really about all intelligence producers in Vietnam. We tended too much, I believe, to view intelligence as an instrument of policy rather than as a neutral commodity to be generated without political considerations or without taking political considerations into account. It became something to be used to reinforce political objectives. There was not enough of a divorce between policy and the intelligence in Vietnam. There never had been and this was quite true of the cease fire period.
We also studiously avoided addressing what might be done to bring into effect the various mechanisms envisioned under the cease-fire agreement. For instance, there was some discussion in the agreement of the possibility of setting up joint inspection teams, joint PRG-South Vietnamese government bodies, and since these various bodies would have in effect sanctified the various areas of control of the two sides. Our unwillingness to address the prospect of setting up these bodies, these cease fire political mechanisms, these joint groupings, had as its corrollary our unwillingness to look at the question of exactly what were the respective areas of control under communist forces and South Vietnamese forces.
In short, policy dictated precisely what our intellignece would focus on. We would not focus on areas of control, because in doing so we would have to accede to communist control something and therefore there was a basis for setting up or establishing some kind of political cease-fire groupings which had been envisioned in the Paris Accords. I recall quite vividly at one point a draft estimate that I put together on the prospects that the North and South Vietnamese might be able to get together to form the joint political mechanisms set up under the cease fire agreement or prescribed by the cease fire agreement. This estimate was considerably diluted by Polgar and did not address the issue. In short it said, as I recall the way the draft was finally worded, which was May, June, July 1973, somewhere early in the first summer of the cease fire period, the estimate said in effect that communists weren't interested in any kind of political accommodation. And basically the evidence didn't point that way. There were a number of questions one might have asked about this in view of the intelligence we had in hand. In short, we, immediately after the cease fire agreement, came to view this cease fire struggle in strictly military terms. And there was never much attention paid to the possibility of accommodating or even trying to accommodate the communists on the political level.
People will argue, and it was argued in Saigon, that the communists didn't mean to compromise, they meant to have the whole pie. Well, that's quite true, but it seemed to me that was a judgment that you had to weigh against the counterveiling intelligence. And we didn't often do that.
There was during the initial cease fire period a great euphoria in the Embassy, as I recall it. We were all very optimistic. We thought the cease fire might work. And as I think back over that period I'm not sure why. As I say, quite early, we in the Embassy made up our minds not to try to force Thieu or the South Vietnamese into accommodating the communists politically. And if that wasn't going to happen, and knowing what we did about how the South Vietnamese army had performed and not performed in the past, we should have been much more cautious in our optimism. But there was a terrible temptation -- and I say terrible because it was truly something infectious -- a temptation to be optimistic, to hope that this time the war was finally over. It was completely unrealistic and I was caught up in it too. I did think that somehow the war or our commitment in South Vietnam might be salvaged. This was in those early days of the cease fire.
We used to sit around the CIA quarters in Saigon, we in the Agency, and discuss how nice it would be to come back to Vietnam after we had all retired many years hence for vacations. And we all agreed that the beaches at Vung Tau or Nha Trang would be a major tourist spot. And from time to time, although I didn't have many breaks during this period, I was able to turn brief assignments in MR2 or MR3 into side trips to the coast. At one particular point Ken Moorefield and I went up to Nha Trang and we went snorkeling out around the reefs and the little islands off Nha Trang, taking note that the coral was dying. South Vietnamese soldiers had, for no reason, taken to fishing with hand grenades. They would drop hand grenades over the side of the boat and explode hand grenades and the fish killed by the explosions would then drift to the surface. The explosions were killing the coral as well as the fish. And I remembef Moorefield and I noting that this was sad, because one of South Vietnam's primary tourist attractions was being gratuitously obliterated. I bring this up simply by way of underscoring that there was true optimism and not connected necessarily with any reality in the Embassy in the early days of the cease fire period.
I guess my optimism was reinforced because for the first time after the cease fire, despite the land grabbing efforts of both sides, it became possible to travel around the country in your car. I would from time to time take a few hours on Sunday afternoon and drive down to Vung Tau. During my initial years in Vietnam from '69 to '71 that had never been possible. Only the French had dared risk that, and some crazy American soldiers. Nobody would take that Vung Tau highway. I did so and suddenly Vietnam took on a much more human dimension. I think a lot of Americans in the Embassy went through similar experiences. A country that had to this point had been basically a collection of fire support bases, or Volpar stops -- Volpars were the small planes the CIA used in Vietnam -- all disconnected, a broken mosaic. Suddenly for these American who had seen Vietnam as a broken mosaic, the pieces began to come together and we began to see the country as it was and began to see the beauty. It was very beguiling to do this, and I think probably in retrospect it was probably counterproductive in terms of the intelligence, because you allowed yourself, and you wanted to allow yourself to be lulled into the notion that all this would now last, that something could be done to make this newly glimpsed magic work. And it didn't help our intelligence estimates to feel this way.
My own optimism perhaps was most keenly felt within hours of the cease fire. The announcement of the cease fire accord in Paris, I went to see a North Vietnamese prisoner I was interrogating. He was a very high ranking official of the North Vietnamese intelligence service. I told him that this was a very happy day because our two sides were, it appeared, on the verge of peace. We had him in an air conditioned room and he sat there shivering and he said, "If you are telling me the truth, this is a happy day." He was speaking through and interpreter, or I may have been speaking to him in French--at this point I can't recall. He was suspicious of my underscoring my own conviction that this was a breakthrough, I told him about the American Civil War, what had happened in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The two sides had a very difficult time coming together, but that it happened eventually. He listened, I thought, in good humor and seemed to absorb what I was saying, seemed to accept that there was some possibility of accommodation between the two sides.
I also told him that he would be released in accordance with the terms of the cease fire agreement. He was not. He was kept in confinement until the last days of the war. And was killed by the South Vietnamese. Bill Johnson now says that he would have known about this if that had happened, or something to that effect. In reality, Bill Johnson had confirmed to me, when I was doing my book that the prisoner had been killed by the South Vietnamese, just a few hours before the communists moved into Saigon. And he also indicated -- I don't want to get into this in detail -- that the killing had been at least acquiesced in, not ordered, but acquiesced in, by the CIA
I admired Tom Polgar a lot, and what happened was that in late 1974, he and I began to tussle over several notions that for me went right to the heart of the conflict in Vietnam. And for once I began not to back off.
We got information in August 1974 from an incredibly good agent, that the Communists were going to start turning up the pressure, in fact, there was a major offensive in the offing. The agent also reported that the communists were looking toward a new standstill ceasefire. And the communists were bruiting the notion of maybe even some sort of coalition arrangement. I had been in Vietnam since 1969 and you develop a sense -- you know these reports, you know the sources at least generally -- and when something totally new slips in, you smell it. It's hard to explain. Well, this is what happened. Suddenly we had references to a standstill ceasefire - coalition arrangement mixed in with references to an increased level of military pressure, that had to send off alarms in anybody who had been looking at Vietnam for a long time. Now this report I felt was crucial. It told us something about Communist intentions that I thought we could exploit. If they were looking at standstill and a ceasefire, we ought to note this, bring it to the attention of policy makers and let policy makers take the next step.
Well, there was a problem. The problem was that we were in the midst of pushing and shoving with Congress over increased aid appropriations, or Congress had cut back and General John Murray was very concerned and so was Graham Martin about persuading Congress to restore some of the cuts that had occurred. It was not prudent, therefore, to make it appear that the communists might turn down the pressure, might be thinking in political terms. Anyone in his right mind would have known that was not consistent with a good game plan vis a vis Congress.
I didn't realize initially that I would encounter opposition from Polgar. But I did.
As we moved into September, Polgar began putting the emphasis on Communist military options to the point of almost ignoring the prospects on the political front. So the notion that the Communists might opt for some kind of standstill ceasefire got lost. And we were suddenly talking about another Armageddon. That's fine because there was plenty of intelligence to the effect that the communists were going to turn up the pressure. But what concerned me was the failure to note the other possibility, that all of this was keyed to some kind of political option that they had in mind for the first time. And I would write analyses and I would see the political discussion drop out. I would write again and see them drop out. By way of trying to get the option noticed I went to the USIA office. Polgar and Martin and others in the Embassy used the USIA office as a mechanism for releasing documents which would reinforce in the public and in the presses mind the notion that the communists were going to step up the pressure, because then you could take these sanitized declassified documents and hand them to Congress. And I was asked to write the preface documents in research notes for the series. So I wrote the preface in one series of these documents that had to do with coming military pressure. My preface included the notion that it might be geared to a political option. I sneaked out, in other words the notion, that the political option was there, that there was something in the offing. I would go to some of my friends in the press and told them, "Look, we are, I think, missing one thing in all this we tell you on the record in briefings. The one thing we're not telling you is that there is a rumor somewhere in all of this madness about a coming offensive, a rumor of a political option."
So in effect I was overstepping the rules. For me it was very modest, but it was an unusual effort to get what I felt was a very important kernel of truth out. Because it was quite obvious that South Vietnam was in terrible trouble.
In the first place, morale was collapsing. The South Vietnamese were in terrible shape in terms of morale. One can argue up, down and sideways whether it was cutbacks in US aid or the economic malaise. Both of these big factors were considered in our analyses. One thing that seemed not to be considered was the slippage of morale itself. We would talk about, well, if something doesn't improve, it will slip. That was the line we would take in analyses. But we wouldn't say that morale has collapsed already. There is a very fine distinction. You will find documents that will dispute this but the preponderance of the intelligence analyses that we did both in the Embassy and the CIA channels either ignored the morale problem or in some way caste it so as to make it appear that there was some hope for morale. This was the context in which Pat Johnson did her paper on morale. Polgar took it and he rewrote it and he gave it to Martin who published it as an on-the-record cable. In effect, it's a very strange document, saying that the South Vietnamese are breeding like rabbits and so they must be happy and so morale is not so bad. It was an extraordinary document and I've never seen anything else like it. CIA headquarters refused to disseminate it initially as a field appraisal, so it was sent back and Polgar redisseminated it with Martin's help through Embassy channels. So we failed to recognize adequately what terrible shape South Vietnamese morale was in. General Murray's people at DAO, I think, rang the alarms on this. But again the alarms seemed to have to do with whether or not an increase in US material would make a difference.
Soon after his arrival Martin circulated an informal memo through the Embassy and I heard this phrase repeated many times: He said, "We will not engage in any proctological examinations of the South Vietnamese body politic." Well, if you were a lower ranking agency official or State Department official in Saigon, you did not need any kind of coding device or decipher to know what that phrase meant. It meant that reportilng on South Vietnamese corruption, the security situation in the countryside, would not be welcome in the front office. Gradually that kind of reporting began to dry up or get pigeonholed. In the intelligence business, reports never entirely disappear. They may be retained in some dead file in Saigon. So there was information on corruption but it never got widely disseminated. And when we got around to doing analyses on South Vietnamese survivability, the corruption issue was repeatedly and consistently de-emphasized to the point that it made no difference to the analysis.
The same was true of the morale problems of the South Vietnamese Army. Only when it became convenient to suggest the South Vietnamese morale might be fragile and contingent on massive U.S. aid, did that kind of phrasing slip into our intelligence analyses. Very seldom did our analyses reflect what I felt to be the true situation which was that the South Vietnamese morale was subject to vicissitudes quite apart from massive U.S. infusions of aid. Sure, if we'd gone back in with lots of money and had virtually remade the South Vietnamese economy, morale would have improved, but nothing short of that-- That was never in the cards anyway--would have turned South Vietnamese morale around enough to make the South Vietnamese army an effective fighting force.
Martin and Tom Polgar were both very egotistical men, very self-confident men, very sure of their points of view. Polgar was, I think, a cold warrior in Martin's mold. He hated the communists, was suspicious of communism in general, and was very much a patriot, as Martin was. Very much a hawk, in Martin's sense. But Polgar could admire Martin's rhetorical capabilities and would even allow that the Ambassador is an expert at this. And he would look at certain cables, I recall, of Martin's, and he would comment to me something to the effect, "What a fine writer he is. What a marvelous expounder of our particular point of view." Gradually I came to feel that the straightest presentation of facts or points of view was the best way and that the subtleties that were the subtleties of our intelligence would not be welcome in the Ambassador's office.
Polgar was, none the less his own man. He was also an extremely remote individual. He was rough hewn. He was one not inclined to forego challenging Martin's presumptions. But Polgar tended generally to agree with Martin. He was a person who liked to manipulate words. He liked to play with information, not to bend it or twist it necessarily, but to play with it, to make it conform to his particular perspective. During the first year of the cease fire, as I began to operate as his principal briefer and as his drafter of cables and analyses, Polgar was easy to deal with except on the subject of corruption and security in the countryside. On the military side he and I saw eye to eye. I don't think that I often disagreed with him on the military side during the first year of the cease fire. I did tend to feel that he underplayed the South Vietnamese cease fire violations. And I was suspicious that this might be because he was trying to accommodate Martin's point of view. But I can't say that he ever told me that he was deliberately underplaying for that purpose. At Mission Council briefings where I would stand up and discuss what the intelligence said about communist intelligence, I functioned without any clearance, generally. I would get up and simply talk about the intelligence and it was a fairly straightforward briefing, initially. Only as we got into the cease fire period did Polgar then later begin to take me aside after the briefings and say "Let's not get into the issue of what the communists are saying about their political options." He'd say,"I'll brief the Ambassador on this." Personally, he said, "Don't get into it!"
The Big Debate at the time concerned the question of material. Are the South Vietnamese out of material? Are they on their last legs? If that were true then US input was absolutely essential. But what if they have stuff stashed away? And had corruption made it so impossible to bring to bear any rationalized logistical system?
Murray and the DAO in general took the position that the South Vietnamese were running out of material because the pipeline was dry and the storehouses were empty or there were no parts for airplanes or tanks. It was an interesting argument. And it was a very attractive one, politically. The problem was that there was fairly little evidence to support it.
I'll never forget being in DAO with Murray before his departure in August of 1974. I used to go out in the morning with Pat Johnson and other analysts, and we would stand through the DAO briefings, and the DAO briefing officers were just fine and very good at what they did, which was mostly manpower and logistics. They often didn't have access to our --the CIA-- political reports. Be that as it may, they were quite good. One of the briefing officers said to Murray, "I've just come back from a place in the Delta and they have no batteries for the radios that they're using." And Murray said, "That's impossible!" The officer said, "I can't explain why it's happened but they don't have batteries for their radios." And Murray, said, "But I made a requisition for them, I saw the batteries delivered, they were supposed to be there."
That summed it up, that exchange, banal as it sounds. It was one of the major problems. Murray in very good faith would get the material and put it in some South Vietnamese pipeline and it would disappear. There was no way to verify how much was disappearing, how much was being stashed away from forward combat areas. And I had argued this point many times with people from DAO and continued to insist that they had a flawed monitoring system because they relied on all the generals to report what materials were delivered. We were relying on the people to whom we were supplying materials and in some cases had a stake in not leveling with us. And if I had been a South Vietnamese general I would have not leveled with us, because I would have thought, "Why tell the Americans we have enough? Always tell them we need more!" There was an irrationality built into our trust of the South Vietnamese logistics experts that defies imagination.
Still another problem that we could never resolve was the question of whether or not the NVA were being resupplied at massive new levels by Russia and China and whether or not that was also a political issue. If they were getting increased aid, we should do the same for the South Vietnamese. A big debate in the intelligence community was the question of whether or not to use dollar values to assess supplies going to the NVA or the whether you assess it in tonnage terms. It had been the CIA's habit to attach dollar values to all the material going into North Vietnam and a lot of us over time had developed skepticism about this dollar value which could be manipulated in various ways. What is the value of a dollar equivalent to a North Vietnamese piaster? What it came down to was that there was not very good evidence, certainly in tonnage terms that the North Vietnamese were being massively supplied. There was also evidence from collateral sources that the North Vietnamese were having problems persuading the Soviets to buck them up.
So each of these crucial questions was charged politically, unbelievably charged. The answer to any of these questions might tip Congress the other way. So there was no rational debate on these essential questions that went to the heart of whether or not the South Vietnam could survive.
I began to lose some of my traditional deference to Polgar. I began to write more and more trying not to shift down the reigning hypotheses, but at the same time to cause people to think. I was not welcome at DAO. There had always been a rivalry between the CIA and the DAO. And since I was the most high-profile CIA briefer, and probably very brash with the military guys, I was universally disliked. At one time they tried to hang a press leak on me and shut me out of the DAO briefings.
What I objected to in the DAO analysis was the notion that the spotting of military material, armor, on the trail system, could be taken as an indication that the communists were going to attack. There were very few net assessments of communist strengths. It was one of the problems of this crucial period. DAO would infer upon spotting a tank that this tank would be used in an offensive or immediately. We had no net assessments stating that they needed to replace one tank or the cannon, if they needed a replacement. I objected to the DAO unwillingness to factor in political considerations, and particularly communist planning. Their intelligence on Communist intentions was lodged almost exclusively on hardware, hardware meaning offensive material. They did not for instance say, well, as certain material is coming down the system, maybe its replacement material. A certain number of men are coming down the system, maybe they're replacements to keep up their battalion strength. How many people have been killed that the communists need to keep up their battalion strength? Just to keep it up, not to mount and offensive? DAO didn't do that and I thought their analyses were dangerously simplistic.
The DAO and the Pentagon uniformly would do analyses this way, not net assessments, but gross assessments, using manpower figures to suggest communist planning. The CIA's intelligence was always much better in the political area, I mean strategic political. We had sources within the communist command, we had multiple ways of looking at the communist side, aside from the flow of material and manpower. And DAO had so often cried wolf that the urgency of the situation had become lost on policy makers in Washington. They would just say, "Oh, that's DAO doing it again." Every month the DAO assessment was issued, and they'd have a briefing and publish it as an assessment, they'd always put an edge on it that I thought was overly bellicose. I'm certainly no dove. I think of myself as a fairly good intelligence analyst and a pragmatist. Sure, you get a warning that the Communists may come over the hill. Having done that you have to weigh in other factors. What are the conditioning considerations, what are the limitations that they face? What problems do the North Vietnamese face? What are the factions in the politburo? That means you should weigh in analyses of their intentions. And DAO never did that.
And so going into this crucial late 1974 period, DAO had dulled the senses of CIA people who were their audience at times, and I think they had dulled their own senses.
The drum fire that had been so much a part of the noise level out at DAO made things even more difficult within the Embassy. Nobody disputed that the Communists were going to turn up the pressure. The question was how much and how far and what did they want. As the pressure began to intensify in late 1974 so did the drum fire in the Embassy, and I was writing analyses for Polgar which reflected the increasing warning signals. But it became so difficult to write these analyses, because I kept trying to weave into them the line that maybe there was something they were after, maybe they are looking to a political objective, maybe they aren't coming over the hill. And it turns out that I was right. It turns out that Van Tien Dung says in his memoirs that this was the period in which they were testing. They were seeing how far they could go and then they would ratchet up the pressure a little more. He admits that there was no plan for a general offensive. And this was precisely what my analysis was and that of the other analysts in the CIA cockpit. But not at DAO. The communist plan was not to seize Saigon in 1975. It was to test and to look toward increasing the pressure if they could.
Le Duan was, I think, in a very delicate position. We got intelligence in December from a very good source. General Smith may not have seen this report. The intelligence was mind boggling. What it held was that the Communists were already picking candidates or sites for a new PRG capital in the South. I had never seen that in reports before, and certainly not in the reports from the source we were tapping into. It was stunning. It was like the piece of intelligence I noted just before the Paris Peace Accords, when I saw in a public statement by the North Vietnamese that they were no longer demanding Thieu's withdrawal before they signed the agreement. That kind of thinking just stopped you if you were familiar with the hieroglyphics of North Vietnamese planning.
I brought the intelligence to the attention of the Mission Council, which was Martin's regular weekly meeting. And Polgar would shoot that kind of thing down. He would say, "We're not going to believe that sort of thing," or "it's not important." And it became very discouraging when you try to put forward this kind of intelligence, and it was always written off. Now that critical piece of information came right before the Communist probe at Song Be. And the analysis of what we predicted was that the Communists would attack there. And we got it right.
And of course after they hit Song Be they proved to themselves that we would not intervene. Thieu drew the same conclusion. And he began to think about tacking, but much too late. There had been discussion all along, from the period mid 1974 to 1975, of shucking off unneeded territory. But it was a dirty word. We were not to discuss this with anyone. We were not to try to elicit intelligence on the shucking off of unneeded territory. We were told not to talk to the French offices or the Australian -- Ted Serong -- who was broaching this to Thieu. We were not to elicit information on this one, because once you put it in channels it might get to Congress.
Here was something the South Vietnamese were considering, here is something the Communists were considering, we were getting reflections of it in this intelligence burst in 1974 saying they might stand for a ceasefire. The communists would move into it and stand still.
When you talk about setting up a capital in a certain territory and that is your territory this is our territory, that's a different environment entirely. When Song Be fell the escalation began, and then the Communist planning shifted. And so did our analyses. I no longer felt the Communists were going for a political settlement. And the opportunity was lost. Whatever the Communists were looking at was possible within the wedge of time between August of 1974 and early 1975 was lost, and it was terrible because we could have put the brakes on the Communist side by some clever maneuver exceeding to a standstill ceasefire. The other question was if we could get the South Vietnamese to buy it. Certainly if we had made that initiative and pursued that, and it had become public, it would have been very hard to get Congress to vote additional aid. For public relations reasons we downplayed it and I think that for local reasons we caused it to be flushed out of the intelligence picture. And these were important indicators that could have given us some new lease or second lease or third lease on the life of Saigon.
In late 1974 I began to leak news to the press in Saigon. And I said, "Look, we're not getting into the intelligence channels, some of this stuff is not being emphasized." I almost am certain that I talked to Robert Shaplen at this time because he wrote that there was a political option that was not being looked at. I was becoming really, from the agency's standpoint, insubordinate. But nobody knew it. And there was so much going on. And I was doing rather important stuff for the Agency. Because one of the things that Polgar had done, he had cranked me into a very very important operation that we running into North Vietnam. The details I can't even begin to discuss. Suffice to say that it was an informal operation. It was very productive. To me it was the peak of my career.
I can't give you any details on this. But it was a very very productive operation. So much so that we began to look at ways to get the information into regular channels. It was so sensitive that it was not even put into regular reporting channels. So I began to generate within the Embassy through State Department channels sort of a sanitized version of some of the intelligence we were getting so that more people would get a look at it. And I worked with State Department officers on it. And Polgar even began censoring that. Censoring by saying, "I don't like going out with that report. Everything must point in one direction." So when we talk of this particular State Department outlook that was right about communist planning, maybe taking into consideration a political option, it would somehow not get passed on.
Anyway, I was becoming very restless. And I was traveling around the country doing lots of briefings with South Vietnamese generals. And the sense of unreality was amazing. You'd go around and you'd discover with the South Vietnamese generals that they had no strategic intelligence. I was walking in, and I was a relatively middle level Embassy person, very young looking, and I would walk in and tell the corps commander that we had intelligence on this and this and this, and he would be nonplused, he wouldn't know. I would be his first word. That was stunning to me. I was sent out several times in the 1974-75 period. Col. Hoang Ngoc Lung, who was head of intelligence for the Joint General Staff was in DAO's pocket and I don't know what he was doing. I'm not saying that ARVN headquarters wasn't informed. I mean the officers up in the corps areas, they were baffled. And in early 1975, I was briefing General Nguyen Van Toan in MR III, and it was news what I was telling him, about overall communist planning and about what he could expect in his corps. And I think it came down to the South Vietnamese military staff being unwilling to share intelligence, which was power. I encountered this with General Pham Van Phu up in MR II, also.
If they had the facts, they would have understood the seriousness of the situation. But they were playing another game.
In early March I was sent out of Vietnam to meet some informants from North Vietnam. That was during the period when right before the strike on Ban Me Thuot, and I came back with very bleak information from North Vietnam, meaning that they were going for broke. That was my first sensation: there was no pulling back. I'm not talking about political options any more. That's gone. The Communists are now escalating way beyond the notion of setting up a province capital. By the end of January, when Song Be fell in Phuoc Long, we washed out of our analyses and I no longer felt that they would go for any kind of political option.
As the military situation began deteriorating through March, I did a piece of analysis based on the information we had in hand. And I miscalled, to my everlasting regret, the target of the thrust of the next communist offensive. Like many other people I thought it would crash in the Pleiku-Kontum area. And we missed entirely the Ban Me Thuot front. Looking at what we knew of communist force movements I drew up an estimate in early March noting that probably the communists would try in the Highlands to isolate Ban Me Thuot, but not attack it. We did not know that over three NVA divisions were poised outside of Ban Me Thuot. Our failure to ascertain this led to a gross misestimate of commmunist intentions in the immediate area. There were some indicators, and you can always go back and say we should have looked closer at this or that. But it was not emphasized at DAO and neither did the agency. We were misled by one thing. We had become totally reliant on sensitive intelligence sources, meaning radio intercepts, technical intelligence sources. The communists realized this and were deceiving us.
General Dung says that they had a headquarters radio, and we saw it and picked up on it and we thought his headquarters was there. But it wasn't.
After the ceasefire in 1973, NSA and whatever military people run the surveillance system, National Reconnaissance Office, they all shifted their priorities, so Vietnam got fewer priorities, so we had less coverage in terms of radio intercepts and aerial photography. And occasionally DAO would send out planes with derring do and with Minox cameras and get photos of troops. But intelligence coverage diminished. And we lost track of American prisoners of war. We used to maintain such absolute vital coverage that if an American was picked up in Cambodia, we could track him. I recall very vividly after Dana Stone and Sean Flynn were picked up, we had fixes on them and knew almost at the point where they disappeared, that is died. We had indications that they were thrashing around, that they were in communist hands. So the cutback in technical intelligence coverage was crucial.
Contributing to our failure to detect communist movements in the Highlands of Vietnam and in particular movements around Ban Me Thuot, was CIA corruption two years before. The chief CIA officer in the MR2 area, and by the way, by the time the final offensive kicked off he was no longer there for the reason I will explain. But we discovered that the chief CIA officer in MR2 area had been digging into the cookie jar. Operational funds earmarked for the development of intelligence networks in the highlands and elsewhere in MR2 had been diverted to this officer's own personal use. He had not accounted for them. Nor had the intelligence networks they were meant to pay for been developed. So this man's corruption, in effect, had deprived us of important sources of information in the very area where the communists were to attack first. What happened to this intelligence officer? After his malfeasance had been uncovered he had been removed and sent home to CIA headquarters where he had been reprimanded and retired. But he had not been prosecuted. The CIA seldom, at least up to that time, had prosecuted people who were caught committing unethical acts, or doing inappropriate things, because of the possibility that that might embarrass the agency as a whole.
Well I don't think that it's exaggerating to say that this man's corruption helped blind us in a very vital area, that we might have known more about communist intentions if he had used the operational funds as they had been intended.
As the communists were preparing to strike at Ban Me Thuot, President Thieu was making important adjustments in his own strategic plans. In view of the United States' failure to respond to the Phuoc Long debacle, and also in view of some very noncommittal responses he had received from the U.S. Embassy as to future U.S. intentions, Thieu moved into a new phase of strategy called "light at the top, heavy at the bottom". He had not told the CIA or his military contacts at DAO, nor had his military officers told the contacts there of this plan. So none of us were ready for the withdrawal from Kontum and Pleiku, which was to set in motion the unraveling of South Vietnam.
I remember very well the Saturday morning when we got our first word that South Vietnamese forces were pulling out of Kontum and Pleiku. As Polgar has indicated publicly, we had an agent inside the military structure in those provinces. Let's leave it at that. And so through him we would get word of the withdrawal. At the time the withdrawal began, I was briefing Polgar in his office and Wolfgang Lehmann who was substituting for Martin who was away in Washington visiting a dentist. It was a leisurely Saturday as Saturdays go in those days. We were all on high alert but I had been hoping to get away that afternoon and to spend a couple of hours at the swimming pool. I desperately needed to relax. I had been extremely busy over the past few weeks.
I was briefing Polgar, basically, on the disposition of communist forces, what we had just received on communist plans. Basically the intelligence was not very explicit. It didn't carry us much beyond what we had known two or three days ago. We were trying to keep track of the situation in Ban Me Thuot and that was difficult. Intelligence was coming out only sporadically. We were briefing one of the State Department's new arrivals in Saigon. Suddenly the secretary came in with a report from Pleiku and Polgar literally bolted out of the room to try to find Lehmann. When he couldn't, and I recall him racing around the office all during the afternoon, he tried to get in touch with the principal consul general in MR2 in Nha Trang to get a clarification and put pressure on him to pull the plug on the American presence in Kontum and Pleiku.
Over the next few days, as we literally saw the South Vietnamese army in the Central Highland disintegrate on Route 7B to the coast, Polgar's mood changed dramatically and I recall his making a reference to the withdrawal as being like a circus gone crazy. Nobody seemed to be able to impose any order on the withdrawing South Vietnamese forces from the highlands. Our briefing maps in the CIA cockpit very close to Polgar's office were literally bleeding from a thousand cuts. To indicate the advancing North Vietnamese army we were streaking the maps with red and it was almost impossible to keep track of the situation on the maps because the situation was deteriorating so quickly. I had seen this happen in 1972 during the communist offensive. At that time developments occurred so quickly that you couldn't be sure you were on top of them. And there is a strange feeling that overtakes an intelligence outfit in such circumstances. Suddenly you have a feeling you'd like to throw all the intelligence away and go into another business. You feel utterly futile and literally wasted. And that's how I think we began to feel in the analytical shop at CIA station during those days as we watched the South Vietnamese army disintegrate.
During this mid-March period I used to stumble back to my apartment well after nightfall. I had a maid who was part French. She spoke French and she would, as she prepared my meal, based on what she'd picked up in the Saigon market-- and you could look at the table and tell that we were in trouble, because the supply of various foods was beginning to narrow. She knew something was terribly wrong. Parts of her family were in the military up country, and she would look at me imploringly, as if to importune me into telling her about the situation. I couldn't do it. I studiously avoided discussing with her what was going on because I didn't want to admit it to myself. But the estimates I was now turning out -- and by the second or third week in March I was generating estimates at an unprecedented one a day--the tone of these estimates were all in one direction now. For the first time in my experience in Vietnam I was beginning to look to the prospect of some kind of decisive defeat for the South Vietnamese.
The last weeks of the war were truly traumatic. I never slept more than four hours a night. And sometimes I went for days without sleeping.
By mid-March the CIA and the DAO were much at loggerheads which didn't help anybody. We had different interests and different focuses, I think. I don't think CIA people went back to DAO for their briefings any longer. They didn't have time to. We were so overextended. And I say, we, I mean the analytical bunch. At the CIA we were pretty confident of our intelligence at that point. Martin was pretty resistant to the pooling of intelligence in the Embassy, almost like a South Vietnamese, he didn't want too much information in anybody's hands or too much power for an individual, I suppose. He covered the waterfront himself, though.
We operated in little pools, very isolated. To complicate things, Martin was continuing to beat the drum for additional aid, even when it became manifestly apparent that the South Vietnamese army was almost incapable of using the aid that it had.
The question was, how much can you get from American Congress? That question was key to our handling of the Congressional delegation that showed up.
Senator Sam Nunn was there in January. But we would not publicly concede how dangerous the situation was to visitors at that point. I know that in my briefings to visitors, and I briefed them all, it was always upbeat. And I would sit there and go for the dog and pony show, and they would just stare. and I was expected to say, as I was standing up there by the maps, half truths; not lies, but half truths, easy to explain.
I'd say, "The communists have infiltrated 60,000 men. So you can draw the conclusion we are looking toward increased military activity here." But you couldn't say that they had lost or withdrawn 60,000 men. And I became very good at it and did it very smoothly. And it became a very very cynical exercise.
Seldom was I ever put in the situation of having to contradict Polgar publicly. One time that happened was when, during the visit of the Congressional delegates in early 1975, Polgar invited me to brief Congressman McCloskey. Polgar led off with some familiar rhetoric about the communists planning major initiatives in the weeks ahead. He seemed to me to lay it on extremely heavy, pointing out or hinting that there was some kind of general offensive definitely in the works, and we did not know this at the time. And he also, I felt, gave much too much credence that the South Vietnamese could somehow withstand the coming pressure. He provided an echo in other words of the recent cable he had sent to Washington concerning Thieu's survivability and the likelihood he would run for re-election. I sat there wondering how I could somehow get the conversation back on track. You have to imagine this kind of session. It took place in Polgar's villa and we had had beer brought in and we were sort of sitting around a semicircle. I had all of my maps and pointers there. It was all very very informal, and it would have been very difficult to say anything critical of Polgar's point of view without being forced to get into real detail. Well I managed to do it. I managed to point out to McCloskey that we had seen escalating attacks in the past year and that we might see strikes in places like Tay Ninh and other areas in the weeks ahead. This was after Phuoc Long so Tay Ninh was now the focus of our concern.
Somehow I managed to convince the people who sat in on that briefing that I had taken a more honest line than Polgar. I'm not sure what was more honest, but in any case, that was the impression. So very soon I got word, sometime that afternoon, that representative Don Fraser and Millicent Fenwick and several of their aides wanted to talk with me and some other people in the Embassy. I agreed to do so with a friend of mine who was also in the agency. We sat down with Fraser and Fenwick and laterally with Bella Abzug--she was not in on the principal meeting. We talked about the situation very very candidly. Polgar was not in on this session, and I feel that probably my friend and I got an extremely grim view across to the congressmen. Don Fraser was blown away. Bob Boettcher, his staff aid was sitting in on it. I told him the truth. I told him that there was terrible corruption. The corruption had reached the point where the army and the command couldn't pull itself together, it couldn't pull in one direction. Thieu was indeed incarcerating political opponents. These weren't communists. And I gave him the bleakest possible picture of the military situation. And I didn't think that frankly aid would pull it out this time. It was very very black. I was led to believe by some of the staffers who were present that that briefing of mine and the other CIA officer without Polgar helped to solidify the very grim estimate that the congressional delegation went away with of the military situation and the strategic picture.
Later, I recall, we met the delegation at Polgar's house, and they asked questions coming out of the session I had earlier. Their questions led Polgar, I think, to suspect that I had given them the darkest possible picture of what was going on. So much so, and I think that it got to Martin too, that the briefers were pulled out of the last session the visitors had with Martin, the CIA briefers. That was very unusual. And so our negative assessment was missing and Fraser and the others left with really only Martin's version of reality, and I'm sure they didn't buy it. In fact I know they didn't.
On Martin himself, I have written extensively on him, but I might give you a few thoughts. Martin was a kaleidoscopic man. He was an individual who was a cold warrior of the old stripe. He lost an adopted son in Vietnam. The kid had been killed in combat in the highlands, I believe. And he was the last man in the world to give Vietnam up for dead. He was almost, in a sense, a tragic figure. He had to see the American commitment in Vietnam carried through to a successful conclusion. He had to believe that the South Vietnamese were worth saving.
That being said, he was also a Southerner. He tended with the sort of mind set of the Southern patrician, or would-be patrician, to be a bit patronizing toward those we would help. I recall sitting with him one day at the Ambassador's villa in Saigon. I had become close to Martin largely because of Martin's daughter whom I had gotten to know. I was sitting with Martin and he was talking about the South Vietnamese and he said something to the effect that we must do what we can for the South Vietnamese as we had to do what we could for the "darkies" in the South. He didn't use "blacks" and he didn't use "Negro", he used "darkies". He said we must help them find their strengths. That thought stuck with me, because being a southerner of a different stripe, I found any hit of racism terribly noxious and here it seemed to me was an expression, if not of racism, of a kind of paternalism which had been its corrollary in the South I had known. What did I say to the Ambassador? Well, I tried, I believe in this particular meeting simply to convey my sense that the South Vietnamese were a complex people.
I also pointed out to him, not merely on this occasion but on several occasions, that we were not doing in the CIA station the kind of in depth analysis on South Vietnamese stengths or weaknesses I felt we ought to be doing. But Martin had very firm views on this. He was willing to get information from almost any sources so long as it did not seem to rub up against his point of view. He was a very opinionated ambassador. He was so opinionated and so seized with his sense of place that when DAO failed to sit him at one of their briefings in the principal chair at the head of the table, or the loop of the horseshoe, he took offense and never thereafter attended DAO military briefings.
I was very much a Southern Boy, I had been nurtured on discipline and respect for authority. I was not one of these people who could easily throw the gauntlet right directly in my superiors face. I genuinely like Polgar and Martin. So it is not in my nature to say,"Jesus, we shouldn't be lying to these people in this way."
I lived a monkish existence at this time. It's very strange, nobody to talk to but the people I was working immediately with. Pat Johnson was becoming extremely nervous. So much so that she was eventually sent home. Polgar sent her home because she was on the verge of nervous exhaustion. We were all working around the clock and its a wonder any of us got any rest. After Ban Me Thuot I slept almost never, and would go two nights in row without sleep. I was not conditioned to do what I should have done. I should have grabbed Polgar by the shirt and screamed at him, "For God's sake why don't we look at the intelligence." My strategy was always to try to reason both sides out. Do what the bureaucrat does, go with the flow. Don't rock the boat if you can help it. Always listen to everybody else's point of view. And I did. And things continued to get worse and worse. I was telling these journalists on the sly that we were in a terrible situation. And that aid would not save it. That is where I diverged and others diverged from the standard line being handed out in the Embassy.
The Americans were telling Thieu that we had the option of using the air force in Thailand. But they didn't understand the War Powers Act. This business of threatening them with B52s just wouldn't work. Where would you have bombed? By then they would not have severed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Everything the North needed was already in South Vietnam. By December they already had in South Vietnam a huge array of forces. By the end of January they were coming down the Trail and coming across the DMZ. The manpower statistics of flow on the trail were extremely depressing. We discussed the use of B52s and we did in fact review the War Powers Act and the notion that you would have to do something very extreme.
During those last weeks we had a specialist in from CIA headquarters in Washington to look over various grids that might have been used as guides for the bombing of North Vietnamese forces. There was some contingency planning within the CIA analytical section and the station with respect to the possibility of using air power against the communist forces in Vietnam.
I was not actively involved in that planning, but I must say that my fellow analytical colleagues were pretty much amused by the prospect -- amused in a grim way over the prospect of possible bombing of North Vietnamese forces because it seemed certainly as of mid-April, that there were no clear or clean targets. The North Vietnamese had already rammed down their infiltration system massive reinforcements. There were only one or two divisions still unaccounted for among those that made up the North Vietnamese order of battle. So bombing the infiltration routes would have been by that point pretty futile.
And reinvolvement of American forces in any shape or form would have been extreme, and we took that as a given in the agency's cockpit. We also felt that talk of using B52s was dangerous for Thieu. Because Thieu thought that military planning should be keyed to the Americans coming in and helping them.
And the bombing of North Vietnamese forces inside South Vietnam would have been quite difficult as well, because that would have meant targeting a lot of populated areas, say in the Highlands, or in MR 1 where there was an eruption of refugees flowing toward the coast or down the coast into Saigon-controlled areas. In other words it would have been quite impossible to bring to bear massive air strikes, or even select air strikes on North Vietnamese targets in South Vietnam without risking massive civilian casualties.
The old shibboleth that we could have jacked up South Vietnamese morale by using bombers wasn't viable. I think South Vietnamese morale ceased to exist as a plus in mid 1974. I don't' think it varied with the show of American force. After all, whose morale are you talking about. The generals' morale? If you bring in air power it would have made the generals feel just fine. Would it then jack up the morale of the poor guy down in the trenches who may benefit from it? Bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail? Do you put out special additions of the Saigon Post saying what you're doing? I find it very difficult to understand how in 2 months time, beginning with Ban Me Thuot, with the army literally unraveling, you could have stopped the unraveling by bombing something. When that army began streaming out of the highlands, I think the North Vietnamese figured it was the beginning of the end and it was all over. Van Tien Dung says that is when they began figure on winning in the dry season.
The North Vietnamese intelligence was very good. They had several possible sources among our people. They certainly were on top of key moves almost before the Americans. When Thieu decided to begin shuffling forces and opted for "light at the top and heavy at the bottom," they had that almost before we did. I think the North Vietnamese used their intelligence splendidly. But they also were surprised by the unraveling of ARVN, and I think a tension was set up between General Dung or some of the other field commanders who wanted to push push push and some of the members of the Politburo or Central Committee, who wanted a cautious strategy of moving ahead.
You can argue that if we had made a show of force even with the army unraveling from the highlands, maybe we could have caused the North Vietnamese to pull up short. They had almost their entire army in the South. They had only two divisions waiting to come in. If you bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, you have only two divisions to halt from coming into the fray. They had fielded most of their forces. Anyway, it is a chess player's move. I can tell you at the time, and Polgar was right on, there was no problem here, once that Ban Me Thuot fell and that army began coming out of the highlands in pieces, he was insistent that we emphasize what he thought was happening and that was that this was the end. I think he held in mind and paid lip service to a notion that aid might have saved the day and turned it around. I would go in and do the analysis for him, and I say these are my thoughts and here are my notes, what points do we emphasize? And he would, "Well, I want to add to the end of the analysis or put something up top about this, and I'll do it back channel here pumping up what you put in the front channel stuff," and that would be it. I could almost do an analysis without going to him and asking him what was going on, I was so in sync with him. He would probably dispute that now, but it was true and it was quite uncanny. I would almost know how he would go at a subject. And in this period beginning really in late February, we were thinking, we were very much looking the same way, he was pointing the direction and I was following along. And he was all gloom, but he kept holding in reserve something that I didn't agree with. He thought that if we gave the South Vietnamese x dollars of aid it might help. And I think this ultimately created a last hope, the last best hope. And it made it very difficult when it came time to step up an evacuation plan. How do you step up evacuation planning when you're still holding out that last best hope?
Polgar was putting the best face on the situation because he said he didn't want to precipitate panic and that would accelerate the unraveling. But there was the flip side, and that was nobody was prepared for what happened. It was like a Kafkaesque world. People seemed to be out of touch with reality. You knew there was a problem when the Vietnamese who was supposed to cook your meals no longer showed up. But otherwise the pressures somehow impinged only very slowly, the reality impinged only very slowly on people in the Embassy.
As of the first of April I had talked once again to one of our sources in North Vietnam. They had indicated that the North Vietnamese were going for broke, they were looking for blood, there was no chance for a negotiated settlement, no chance for a political fix and that we had better start thinking about contingency planning. During the next few days we began receiving tactical indicators that the North Vietnamese were maneuvering into position to launch themselves toward Saigon. So my gloom was deepening.
The C5A crash didn't affect me that much because I think I was already so gloomy that that was just one more horrible indicator that we were in big trouble. Within a day of the plane going down, a day later, we got from an agent I was talking to but not running, an agent who was inside the communist command in the South, the agent was run by Martin, inside COSVN, he gave us information indicating that the communists were in effect going for broke. And he said that all of the talk of negotiations was shadow play. This kept cropping up in intelligence. And Polgar, finally, when he refused to send out one report this way said, "Well, we've seen it so often."
Sure enough we began picking up indicators about the end of the first week in April, there was talk of negotiations, but it wasn't stated explicitly in the initial report, that the tone of negotiations was purely for show. But all the indicators coming from various directions indicated that political byplay was just that. And way beyond that the Communists might be moving into position to target Saigon. That they were going to push this offensive to the limit. And sure enough when you look at Dung's memoirs you see that the communists did opt for winning it by May, before Ho Chi Minh's birthday. So our intelligence was really quite incredible within that time frame.
If you ask me if I saw the C5A as traumatic, yes I did, and the flights out of Danang were horrifying, not because they showed that our systems wouldn't work, that was always questionable. It proved that Americans would panic, that they would break under the strain, that you could not be certain of their reaction. The shock that went through the Embassy when we heard about that C5A crash -- I was in the radio room, the operations room when they began reading the names of the casualties on the C5A crash, and it was deathly silent, just the sound of the radio was the only sound in the room. And I felt that someone was sort of reading a benediction on the American presence in Vietnam when that happened. Then there was this eruption of, "My God, what do we do next?" from people all around me. And I thought, "My God, what are we going to be doing?" And there was the same general reaction when a plane attacked the presidential palace. There was then panic in the Embassy. And I think Martin was right about this. He cabled home and he was complaining about panic reflected in various channels. Alan Carter seemed to be overly anxious. And I'm not sure he wasn't right in being that way. And the reason for this overreaction from time to time was because the general community had been given some pap about, don't worry about this or that. It seemed to me there was an edge of irrationality that began to set-in in people's reaction, and that frightened me. Because I figured there was only one way we were gong to get out and that was to put a lid on people's emotions.
I think we lied to people too often before that. The fear of the Vietnamese turning on the Americans was so overdrawn. We had one or two reports that that might happen. I think that DAO was getting it from Lung, and I think some of the Vietnamese were doing it for reasons quite personal -- they wanted to get the hell out of the country and they thought the government would collapse. We had a report that Ky might turn on us. But the question was, how would it occur. It's hard to know what he felt from time to time. And the notion was, what would the Vietnamese do if they panicked? It meant the closing down of all evacuation channels. And it means that nobody gets out. That's why there was no panic on the last day to speak of. The South Vietnamese stood by because they knew this was the last launching pad and they knew that if they didn't stand back nobody would get out.
I think there was concern that there might be an uprising in the army. There were troops stationed out near Tan Son Nhut, and the airforce would have brought havoc with an air strike on Tan Son Nhut or DAO. I found it very difficult to believe that the South Vietnamese could muster enough planes, but one or two might have turned on the Americans.
My feeling was, and I argued at that time, I spoke with Polgar, that if we didn't start a rationalized evacuation plan, we might have panic. I gotta tell you, those kinds of discussions were fleeting. The main discussions focused on when the communists were going to attack and whether or not a political settlement was a possibility.
Pat Johnson and I began writing through the first week in April. We wrote analyses every moment. I'd never turned out that many before. Just pummeling headquarters. On about the 13th, Polgar and his number 2 called me in to write an analysis saying that no evacuation was possible. The analysis took the line that a large scale evacuation was becoming increasingly impossible. That any effort to move out over highways to the coast, would fall under communist interdiction efforts, since there were indications that the Communists had moved three battalions into the area of Vung Tau.
I wrote an analysis that went to Washington, and I think Polgar maneuvered cleverly here, it was designed to strengthen the hand of those who thought that Martin ought to begin taking more seriously the prospect of negotiations happening. It was all in a very strange flux period.
I wrote a cable for Polgar on the importance of getting rid of Thieu. This was in early April. Polgar thought that if we got rid of Thieu it would open the way, I suppose, for some sort of political fix. I thought we were saying get rid of Thieu because there was no chance for anything. It was all done. This leads me to what I think was the most crucial error we made, that is this notion, and it was fed by Tran Van Don, it was fed by Polgar's contacts, it was fed by the communist delegation at Tan Son Nhut, the notion that there was the chance for a political fix and the effects it had on our planning. Because it was a chaotic time, it is hard to take one strand and pull it out.
What happened was, the French began encouraging us in that view for their own reasons, that there would be a political fix. This notion seemed just fine to Martin. Martin latched onto the idea that there was some sort of fig leaf political arrangement we could make with the communists because I think he felt there was still a chance for Saigon and that there was still a chance for the South Vietnamese army. Polgar locked onto the idea of a political fix, because it was obvious to me he knew that it was over, he knew that this business of aid wouldn't do it, and that making a political fix would be the only thing that would save us, after my doomsday projection that an evacuation wouldn't work. It had to be. So when Brochand approached him, in the Cercle Sportif and told him that maybe there was a chance for a political fix, a Greek Tragedy almost began to impose itself on Polgar's reality, I think, and reality began to become a Greek Tragedy. For all the most humane reasons, in order to save lives and to save the Vietnamese, he became distracted. I know he argues that he didn't become distracted, that evacuation planning continued within the Embassy, that CIA evacuation planning continued, and that he tried to get Colby to step up and send additional planes, but there was no central direction. Polgar was somewhere else. He was focused on this. And that was the problem.
Meanwhile, there were several Vietnamese I knew that I wanted to get out fairly early. And I went to the man in the agency set up who had been assigned to help put together some sort of evacuation list. I said I want to put some people on and he said, "It's no use. We've got people on this list who shouldn't be there and there is no official list and we can't get any priority or direction from Polgar's office." And that was the problem. People were going off in several different directions. It was a terribly complicated problem we had. No exit papers for the Vietnamese we wanted to get out. Martin didn't want to evacuate the families of generals or generals themselves because that might create an unraveling of South Vietnamese morale. Largely the evacuation efforts took on a very parochial nature. You had the DAO taking out bar girls, friends, what have you. Look, the more the merrier, let's get them out. But nobody would sit down and say, Lets do something about it. Now Polgar, to his credit, recognized the problem, and cabled CIA Headquarters and said, "Martin doesn't seem to realize the need to set up an immediate step up of the evacuation process." True. The problem, was that Polgar suffered from the same problem. And particularly as we got into mid April, people were not moving out of the station and Polgar would not order them out. People were staying behind to try to arrange the evacuation of their Vietnamese friends, or they weren't sufficiently apprised of the danger, despite the problem of Tan Son Nhut and the downing of the C5A and the bombing attack on the palace, and somehow by mid April it had not sunk in that we were on the edge of disaster.
So people were not moving with any due haste to get out, even if they had been declared nonessential. You can understand why for all the logical reasons, nobody wanted to admit that we were finished.
The fact is it didn't happen and we didn't see steam put into the evacuation. And then I started to get into another hassle with the powers that be. First, at the end March, we stopped giving briefings to Martin. I gave one of the last military briefings to him. Polgar would go in and talk to him from time to time. But Martin was getting a fragmented picture. I remember seeing him when he had just come back from Washington in early April and telling him that the highlands were falling, the northern part of the country was literally disintegrating, and I went into him and said, "Ambassador Martin, you know we've lost these units here, the South Vietnamese Army doesn't exist here." And Martin said to me, "How do you know that?"
That stopped me. Because I'm an intelligence officer drawing on all sources and its a little strange at this late date after so many years of briefing to be asked how do I know what I am telling him on a map. I said, "Well sir, we have this and this and this source." And he said, "I don't believe it. I have my own information."
Well, I was so stunned. That I just blew it. I feel in retrospect it was a vital chance lost when I should have said, "Oh come on, Ambassador Martin, you're full of it." But I didn't. I left. And I went back to Polgar and I said,"He doesn't buy this," or something to that effect.
Buy the 17th Martin was being so nudged by Washington to do something that he was beginning to straighten out the evacuation and he made the worst possible choice. He put somebody in charge of the evacuation planning who knew nothing about it. There was no coordination among the CIA people, people in the ranks and were trying to get people out, and when people came to me I told them go out to DAO and get in the lines. There is a friend of mine out there, get in his line and see what you can do. And that is what happened. There were so many things that happened in that period, and it's very hard to convey the real sense of futility, on my part. I felt as though I was at a funeral and everybody was sort of bearing each other up and I was stumbling forward hoping that I could get enough of my Vietnamese on an aircraft. But I didn't. I became obsessed with the idea of somebody realizing that there was no hope for a political fix. Just to get somebody to look at it a second time. I was writing an analysis every second, and talking to various people around the station, but it seemed to be a futile exercise.
I wasn't worried about me. I was worried about the Vietnamese I had known since 1969 getting out of the country. And it became particularly apparent that that wasn't going to happen, especially if were people were banking on some sort of political fix. That was the thrust of the analysis that I did for Polgar on April 8th, that said the evacuation options were very difficult. The military came to the same conclusion. CINCPAC came to the notion that you would have to infiltrate huge numbers of military forces to secure landing areas and that wasn't feasible so what do you do then?
I had a sense of slowly sinking into mud and there would be no extraction from it. And the Vietnamese were with me.
But I did something that was so terrible, and I didn't write about in the book or didn't tell the whole story of it. A few days before the evacuation, a very good friend of mine called, a Vietnamese friend of mine, and asked if I would help her get out of the country, and basically I said I can't help you right now I'm too busy. I'm writing another report. And she called later and she couldn't get out and shortly after that she killed herself. I thought about this a lot. The fact is we had all become fixed in our ways on some bureaucratic consideration, some mechanistic consideration. Getting a report out, getting Washington to believe that there would be a political fix. We forgot one thing. We were dealing with human beings there. You can't postpone that if their lives are on the line. You've got to do something about that. For all of my concern about getting the evacuation rationalized and pulled together and so forth, when the moment of truth occurred, when my friend called up, I was too busy, I was too busy writing another report.
My moment of epiphany came when I was coming off the roof of the Embassy in a helicopter, and as the helicopter banked up over the side of the Embassy, I could see down the streets and in the Embassy court, there were a lot of Vietnamese who would not get out.
I suddenly had this feeling that I had, for bureaucratic reasons, or whatever, some good, some very bad, been party to an awful betrayal of a lot of things I believed in and I had to make amends. I had to make amends first of all by getting the truth out in some way, shape or form. Getting the people to look at what happened. My initial feeling was something I hated to articulate, because you don't do it in the intelligence business. You don't talk about morality or making atonement for something you've done. But that was one of my senses. I wanted to confess--not to the outside world -- but to understand what the devil had gone wrong and how could we leave behind all these thousands of human beings and not understand them. How could anybody do it?
My intelligence senses had been so honed that there had to be an explanation. There had to be an explanation for this. You don't leave a country by way of helicopter in the middle of the night off the embassy roof with the enemy poised at the gates of the city. And that's it. And you analyze what the hell has happened, particularly if you feel guilty about it.
I went from Subic Bay at Polgar's direction to Thailand and I interviewed people who were still coming out of Vietnam. I was gathering the first intelligence on what the communists had done after they came in just six days before. Within seven days I was in Thailand doing it.
It was a nightmare.
Six days before I had seen all of these faces and now I was reading what had happened to them. I ran into an agent we had been running in Vietnam. He had managed to escape on his own. He said to me, "Will you help me go back in and rescue people? Will you set it up to get the CIA to back us?" And I went around the embassy in Thailand waiting for somebody to respond positively. By then I had generated lots of very hand-wringing reports about what had happened in Vietnam. I talked to journalists and that sort of thing, who had come out of Vietnam late. And I think CIA headquarters was tired of the hand-wringing. Already the CIA was immersed in congressional investigations. The last thing they needed was another scandal. Every report generated on the fall of Vietnam was one more potential scandal.
And I thought to myself, Gee, if we can just generate enough information on what terrible things happened, the Agency will get behind sending people back in to pull some of these people out.
It was a very pragmatic -- in other words, getting the truth out, or getting the facts, became for me a very pragmatic thing. I thought, Well we can focus attention on this and maybe get people out and the agency won't let it happen again. But I got back to CIA headquarters and it was as if Vietnam had been buried. It was very strange. I arrived late because I'd been in Thailand by that point and was sort of making my way back slowly. I didn't make my way back for two months after the evacuation. And I'd experienced all this stuff in Thailand.
When I showed up, maybe Vietnam had been on the front burner when everybody else showed, but when I got there it was "What? Vietnam? We got other problems." So that's when I began agitating into a different posture. My determination to write the book came very late. I really felt we would get an after-action report done on the inside and I went through various moves to get something done, but nobody could take authority for authorizing an after-action. "Why, gee, Frank, go to somebody else." I went to talk to George Carver and he said he didn't have the authority to do it. I went to Polgar, "Well, go to somebody else, I don't have the authority to authorize it either." "Great if you want to do it Frank, but I don't have the authority." It was like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
So that's what happened. I never approached Daniel Ellsberg's passion and I never was disillusioned with the Agency. I was disillusioned with a lot of the people I worked with. But I understood them. I presume to say I understood Polgar. I understood why it was hard for him to come to grips with what had happened. And I understand why he made some of the mis-calls he did. I'd like to try to understand why I made some of the ones I did. It was a horrible experience for a young person, being there at the moment of surrender. Old men rationalize their way in and rationalize their way out, and if you were a young GI you ended up dying for some of those rationalizations. If you're an intelligence officer you were a hell of a lot luckier. You never risked getting killed -- not much anyway. The only thing you ended up doing was, as the old men rationalized, you ended up lying to yourself and becoming more and more like the old men, becoming a bureaucrat, a yes man, becoming a guy who would march in lockstep. And the guy who next time around in the next Embassy crisis, or the next evacuation, would again postpone leaving for too long.
I think anybody who is not haunted by what happened in the end in Vietnam has got something very wrong with him. The people I worry about are the ones who go around saying, "What? What evacuation?" Anybody with the least sensitivity or concern for other human beings will be haunted and worse for it. The trick is not to be paralyzed. And everybody who was there I'm sure has his own way of exorcising the ghosts. For me it was the most natural thing in the world to write, because that's what I had been doing the entire war. I'd been an analyst dealing with information. I had to make one more stab at understanding what had gone wrong. Some of the others who engaged in disinformation during the war, I think, conjured up fantasies about what went on. I think as time goes on, a lot of the military people must in some way justify the performance of the military and end up justifying the institution which they love and which they feel--I've never felt this way--was disgraced by the war. So they overcompensate. This to me is madness.
I thought the CIA would in some way redeem itself. I think the Agency's performance was hideous. I'm not talking about Polgar's. Polgar, believe it or not, I had a lot of compassion for him, and I tried to write the book that way, to sound not carping, although some people said I'm carping. The point is, the Agency should have known better. Colby should have done more. All these people built their careers on Vietnam and what happened in the end is that we either had silence or finger pointing and nobody ever took responsibility for their actions, it seemed to me.
And Kissinger's the top of the list. I am simply appalled at his capacity for shunting the blame on somebody else. Martin has been excoriated by people who pretended to be on his side, or who had at least muted their criticism of him and let him function to do the terrible things they now criticize him for. Like Habib. Habib hated Martin, I am led to understand by people who work with Habib. Kissinger thought Martin was batty during the last days of the war. Why the hell didn't they pull Martin out? Now they are quite willing to make snide remarks, critical remarks about Martin. Well, they might have saved some lives if they had made those critical remarks when it counted. It's very easy to snipe at the old man from the hedgerows of anonymity. That's what's happened. Or at such a distance he can't defend himself. For God's sake, I criticize him so he can defend himself. These people the Habibs and the Kissingers, I think, are cowardly.
Frankly I'm much happier that somebody like Martin and certainly Polgar was in Saigon than the Habibs and Kissingers. At least they had the courage to stand up for what they believed in. And they've taken a lot of heat for it.
In any event, the saddest thing, I think, about the Vietnam War is that the recriminations have overtaken the lessons. And unfortunately my writings about the end of the Vietnam War have been taken to be an act of recrimination. In fact it was not meant that way at all. It was meant as a very presumptuous way, perhaps, of trying to get the accounting done that nobody seemed to want to do. I think if we'd all done it, we'd all put our thoughts down at that time. And we would have been in better shape.
I visit the Vietnam Memorial now whenever I'm in Washington. I don't go there by way of flagellating myself. I go there by way of tribute, because I think the veterans were badly treated. It's our way of doing homage to them
"If Tomorrow Never Comes"
The first time I was seized by the notion that we were not peddling all the truth and maybe there was some smoke in what we were channeling back to Washington was in 1969 and 1970 right after I got to Vietnam. I was, like all fledgling analysts in Vietnam in those days, assigned to collect information that was passed to the CORDS(Civil Operations and Rural Development Support) program. I did a study comparing the number of people we had supposedly killed in the Phoenix program with the number of communist cadre who were operating out there, and looking over the statistics I discovered that there was no slippage in the number of cadre operating, although we had supposedly killed or eliminated 20,000 of them. And I wrote up a little memo on this and sent it to the C0RDS people across town. William Colby was the head of the CORDS program at that time. And being completely naive, once having filed a memo, I expected to see some action on this. After all, this was a serious conclusion. We were killing somebody but they were not all Viet Cong!
And there was nothing but a deafening silence.
I wrote another memo and there was another deafening silence. I heard nothing more about it. I thought about it and I was troubled. But there was so much to be troubled by in Vietnam that one episode like that could pass and you could forget about it.
I remember being awakened in the mornings by the rumbling out along the border of Vietnam, north of Saigon. Everyone I knew at the agency knew this was the secret bombing going on and I didn't realize it was secret. Some of my journalist friends would say, "You know there is bombing going on up there." And I said, "I guess I can't talk about it. It sounds like bombing to me, too." And we would sit around in the evening, and I would go over to the Newsweek villa and they would bring out their various theories about what the US was doing, and they would bounce them off me. They were terribly upset by various government transgressions. And their indignation and concern began to be infectious. I began to ask questions around the Embassy. But I never pursued them very seriously. It was always easy to avoid going too far with anything, because you could always find something else to concern you. And more than that, it never profited you to ask too many questions. Stay quiet and stay content and you are promoted.
For someone in his late 20s who has not experienced very much excitement in the world it is very heady stuff to be brought into the confidence of the station chief, this was Ted Shakley who was the CIA station chief at the time. He began to use me and others in the analytical cockpit to do speeches for him. Shakley made his career in the agency in part because he was such a good presenter. He could juggle facts and make them all come out right. He used to send cables that we referred to as "Shakleygrams" back from Saigon, which were designed to show the progress of the war. He set the pace, he set the example for a lot of the people I was operating with in the Embassy in those days. It wasn't the truth that got you ahead, it was the mimicking of truth that got you ahead. Shakley always insisted on our meeting various quotas -- number of reports turned out, number of agents recruited, all were set. Some of our case officers down in the Delta tried to meet Shakley's quotas in recruitment by hiring any prospective agent who came within range, and if they saw a colonel on somebody's staff he would be hired for our staff. And what happened is that prospective agents caught on; they earned money from the agency by reading a South Vietnamese newspaper, translating it into English and giving us that information. Well, it turned out several years later, looking back on Shakley's reign, that roughly a hundred of the agents we had recruited at that time were in fact false agents. They had been people who actually had very little to give. And in fact had given us information we could have picked up if we had spoken Vietnamese, but there were few of us in the Embassy who did, so we were misled. We were duped.
That is the way some of us began to cut our teeth on the agency. We developed a quality in which our sense of truth and integrity was slightly off the mark. What you do is you begin to blink.
Let me explain the process.
There was a very dear friend of mine in the agency who had been in Vietnam a long time and his specialty was the South Vietnamese government. And he knew a lot of South Vietnamese politicians and he worked with them hand in glove and he knew a lot of them were corrupt and he knew that they were not as reliable or as faithful to Thieu as we thought, as we wanted to think. And I remember one day -- and I knew I was a done for when this happened, I was long gone -- I was writing a piece of analysis for the new station chief, who was Tom Polgar. And I went to this CIA man and I said, "I need some input, I need some information." And he said, "Frank, you have to write into this analysis that there is some corruption and that this man is corrupt and that he is corruptible and he is not sincere." And I said, "Wait a minute, You know it and I know it. I gotta tell you it's not sellable. I can't persuade Polgar to include that in the analysis. I can't get him to keep it there. So I can't write it in." I said, "I'll do my best somewhere to float it up the system. But I can't do it this time." So what happens is that you begin censoring yourself. You censor what is not sellable. Because you get weary if you are a young operative or a young analyst arguing against "Star-Wars" opposition that something ought to be included. The corruption issue and the security issue were crucial. I never thought that we adequately monitored the rock that was destroying the South Vietnamese will to fight. Occasionally I spoke up about it. Occasionally Pat Johnson did. At one point in 1974 she did an analysis on the morale problems in the South Vietnamese military. But it was virtually unrecognizable after Polgar stomped it. He pulverized it. I knew why he was doing it. He did it for the right reason in his eyes. He felt, I surmised, and I can't quote him directly on this, but I surmised that he felt that this would make it very difficult for us to get aid out of Congress if it ever got back to Washington. He refused to let us do maps on the security situation in the South Vietnamese countryside, maps showing where the communists were in control and where the government was in control. This issue was particularly relevant right after the ceasefire accords. We were looking toward a standstill ceasefire, the forces stopping in place. I thought that knowing where the other side was was important. But Polgar refused to allow us to do up this map. We did one and he said, "I never want to see it in a briefing," and he said, "I really don't want to see it updated." And he discouraged us from adding to the map. So it died. I stuck it up on a shelf and it never came out again.
So my passage of compromises will trace back a number of years and was reinforced or buttressed by subsequent experiences with Polgar. What happens is that if you are a young CIA operative and you are ambitious, which I was, and I had a lot of prospects, and Shakley knew me and Polgar began to use me for various purposes, and you say to yourself, as I think I even said to my CIA friend who suggested I add this stuff to the paper on corruption, "Look, you gotta compromise today. It's not a bad thing to compromise on the facts, because in that way you will amass political credit so that tomorrow you can make a difference. Hold your piece today and you begin to earn credit toward some sort of leverage tomorrow." Of course, tomorrow never comes. And you keep postponing the moment of truth, if you will.
And that's what happened.
Its a long march the bureaucrats march toward moral decrepitude. That happened a lot. And I think, in my case, I came very close to losing the capacity even to recognize that I was making the compromises.
I think it should be noted that our mind set on the cease fire situation was established very early on. The cease fire was conceived in duplicity -- Kissinger not telling the South Vietnamese that he was going to accede to the North Vietnamese' retaining a substantial force presence in South Vietnam. Kissinger also failed to alert the South Vietnamese even as of the day of the cease fire as to precisely the political terms of the agreement he negotiated for them in Paris. So the South Vietnamese stumbled into this cease fire without really knowing what they were facing and presumably assuming that there would be some cutback in the North Vietnamese presence. It's very hard to tell at this point. South Vietnamese documentation on this subject is pretty scarce.
Kissinger was also duplicitious with respect to Congress. He had not indicated to Congress--at least not publicly--that the American government would be expected to supply massive amounts of aid to the South Vietnamese and also some kind of reconstruction aid to the North Vietnamese. That was part of the understanding Kissinger had reached surreptitiously with the North Vietnamese--certainly they expected it. All of these underpinnings to the cease fire agreement went unnoted, so when accounts were called in, nobody was ready for them in Congress. That is to say, Congress was not preparred to vote the kind of massive aid to South Vietnam, coupled with the reconstruction aid to North Vietnam that probably would have been necessary to make the cease fire period work. A little more honesty up front, in short, could have probably conditioned both sides to a more responsive attitude to the terms of the cease fire agreement.
The duplicity continued on more fundamental levels, very early on. Right before the cease fire went into effect, the United States government rammed into South Vietnam under the Enhanced Plus Program, massive amounts of material so the South Vietnamese could withstand any North Vietnamese cease fire violations. This was not a violation of the cease fire agreement, since the agreement had not yet come into effect, at least not the letter of the agreement. But it certainly was a breach of the spirit of what had been discussed betweeen the two sides. Consequently it was no accident that the communists responded through the cease fire period and into the initial months of the cease fire by mounting their own Enhance Plus, reinforcing their own side so that they could withstand the coming cease-fire war which they rightly foresaw as being pretty intense. With Enhance Plus, they drew the conclusion that the South Vietnamese were not going to be encouraged by the Americans to play straight with the cease fire.
And in fact that was true. The South Vietnamese very early on began pushing into areas where their control was non existent or was extremely weak. And the North Vietnamese had anticipated a stand-still cease fire in place. During the early stages of the cease fire, I'm talking about the months up through May and June of 1973, the CIA and the Defense Attache's Office very studiously ignored the cease fire violations, the land-grabbing efforts of the South Vietnamese government or otherwise cast them simply as defensive, a response to North Vietnamese cease fire violations. This was a gross misstatement of what was taking place.
But it was strictly in character with the way we would approach intelligence throughout the cease fire period. When I say "we" I'm talking really about all intelligence producers in Vietnam. We tended too much, I believe, to view intelligence as an instrument of policy rather than as a neutral commodity to be generated without political considerations or without taking political considerations into account. It became something to be used to reinforce political objectives. There was not enough of a divorce between policy and the intelligence in Vietnam. There never had been and this was quite true of the cease fire period.
We also studiously avoided addressing what might be done to bring into effect the various mechanisms envisioned under the cease-fire agreement. For instance, there was some discussion in the agreement of the possibility of setting up joint inspection teams, joint PRG-South Vietnamese government bodies, and since these various bodies would have in effect sanctified the various areas of control of the two sides. Our unwillingness to address the prospect of setting up these bodies, these cease fire political mechanisms, these joint groupings, had as its corrollary our unwillingness to look at the question of exactly what were the respective areas of control under communist forces and South Vietnamese forces.
In short, policy dictated precisely what our intellignece would focus on. We would not focus on areas of control, because in doing so we would have to accede to communist control something and therefore there was a basis for setting up or establishing some kind of political cease-fire groupings which had been envisioned in the Paris Accords. I recall quite vividly at one point a draft estimate that I put together on the prospects that the North and South Vietnamese might be able to get together to form the joint political mechanisms set up under the cease fire agreement or prescribed by the cease fire agreement. This estimate was considerably diluted by Polgar and did not address the issue. In short it said, as I recall the way the draft was finally worded, which was May, June, July 1973, somewhere early in the first summer of the cease fire period, the estimate said in effect that communists weren't interested in any kind of political accommodation. And basically the evidence didn't point that way. There were a number of questions one might have asked about this in view of the intelligence we had in hand. In short, we, immediately after the cease fire agreement, came to view this cease fire struggle in strictly military terms. And there was never much attention paid to the possibility of accommodating or even trying to accommodate the communists on the political level.
People will argue, and it was argued in Saigon, that the communists didn't mean to compromise, they meant to have the whole pie. Well, that's quite true, but it seemed to me that was a judgment that you had to weigh against the counterveiling intelligence. And we didn't often do that.
There was during the initial cease fire period a great euphoria in the Embassy, as I recall it. We were all very optimistic. We thought the cease fire might work. And as I think back over that period I'm not sure why. As I say, quite early, we in the Embassy made up our minds not to try to force Thieu or the South Vietnamese into accommodating the communists politically. And if that wasn't going to happen, and knowing what we did about how the South Vietnamese army had performed and not performed in the past, we should have been much more cautious in our optimism. But there was a terrible temptation -- and I say terrible because it was truly something infectious -- a temptation to be optimistic, to hope that this time the war was finally over. It was completely unrealistic and I was caught up in it too. I did think that somehow the war or our commitment in South Vietnam might be salvaged. This was in those early days of the cease fire.
We used to sit around the CIA quarters in Saigon, we in the Agency, and discuss how nice it would be to come back to Vietnam after we had all retired many years hence for vacations. And we all agreed that the beaches at Vung Tau or Nha Trang would be a major tourist spot. And from time to time, although I didn't have many breaks during this period, I was able to turn brief assignments in MR2 or MR3 into side trips to the coast. At one particular point Ken Moorefield and I went up to Nha Trang and we went snorkeling out around the reefs and the little islands off Nha Trang, taking note that the coral was dying. South Vietnamese soldiers had, for no reason, taken to fishing with hand grenades. They would drop hand grenades over the side of the boat and explode hand grenades and the fish killed by the explosions would then drift to the surface. The explosions were killing the coral as well as the fish. And I remembef Moorefield and I noting that this was sad, because one of South Vietnam's primary tourist attractions was being gratuitously obliterated. I bring this up simply by way of underscoring that there was true optimism and not connected necessarily with any reality in the Embassy in the early days of the cease fire period.
I guess my optimism was reinforced because for the first time after the cease fire, despite the land grabbing efforts of both sides, it became possible to travel around the country in your car. I would from time to time take a few hours on Sunday afternoon and drive down to Vung Tau. During my initial years in Vietnam from '69 to '71 that had never been possible. Only the French had dared risk that, and some crazy American soldiers. Nobody would take that Vung Tau highway. I did so and suddenly Vietnam took on a much more human dimension. I think a lot of Americans in the Embassy went through similar experiences. A country that had to this point had been basically a collection of fire support bases, or Volpar stops -- Volpars were the small planes the CIA used in Vietnam -- all disconnected, a broken mosaic. Suddenly for these American who had seen Vietnam as a broken mosaic, the pieces began to come together and we began to see the country as it was and began to see the beauty. It was very beguiling to do this, and I think probably in retrospect it was probably counterproductive in terms of the intelligence, because you allowed yourself, and you wanted to allow yourself to be lulled into the notion that all this would now last, that something could be done to make this newly glimpsed magic work. And it didn't help our intelligence estimates to feel this way.
My own optimism perhaps was most keenly felt within hours of the cease fire. The announcement of the cease fire accord in Paris, I went to see a North Vietnamese prisoner I was interrogating. He was a very high ranking official of the North Vietnamese intelligence service. I told him that this was a very happy day because our two sides were, it appeared, on the verge of peace. We had him in an air conditioned room and he sat there shivering and he said, "If you are telling me the truth, this is a happy day." He was speaking through and interpreter, or I may have been speaking to him in French--at this point I can't recall. He was suspicious of my underscoring my own conviction that this was a breakthrough, I told him about the American Civil War, what had happened in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The two sides had a very difficult time coming together, but that it happened eventually. He listened, I thought, in good humor and seemed to absorb what I was saying, seemed to accept that there was some possibility of accommodation between the two sides.
I also told him that he would be released in accordance with the terms of the cease fire agreement. He was not. He was kept in confinement until the last days of the war. And was killed by the South Vietnamese. Bill Johnson now says that he would have known about this if that had happened, or something to that effect. In reality, Bill Johnson had confirmed to me, when I was doing my book that the prisoner had been killed by the South Vietnamese, just a few hours before the communists moved into Saigon. And he also indicated -- I don't want to get into this in detail -- that the killing had been at least acquiesced in, not ordered, but acquiesced in, by the CIA
I admired Tom Polgar a lot, and what happened was that in late 1974, he and I began to tussle over several notions that for me went right to the heart of the conflict in Vietnam. And for once I began not to back off.
We got information in August 1974 from an incredibly good agent, that the Communists were going to start turning up the pressure, in fact, there was a major offensive in the offing. The agent also reported that the communists were looking toward a new standstill ceasefire. And the communists were bruiting the notion of maybe even some sort of coalition arrangement. I had been in Vietnam since 1969 and you develop a sense -- you know these reports, you know the sources at least generally -- and when something totally new slips in, you smell it. It's hard to explain. Well, this is what happened. Suddenly we had references to a standstill ceasefire - coalition arrangement mixed in with references to an increased level of military pressure, that had to send off alarms in anybody who had been looking at Vietnam for a long time. Now this report I felt was crucial. It told us something about Communist intentions that I thought we could exploit. If they were looking at standstill and a ceasefire, we ought to note this, bring it to the attention of policy makers and let policy makers take the next step.
Well, there was a problem. The problem was that we were in the midst of pushing and shoving with Congress over increased aid appropriations, or Congress had cut back and General John Murray was very concerned and so was Graham Martin about persuading Congress to restore some of the cuts that had occurred. It was not prudent, therefore, to make it appear that the communists might turn down the pressure, might be thinking in political terms. Anyone in his right mind would have known that was not consistent with a good game plan vis a vis Congress.
I didn't realize initially that I would encounter opposition from Polgar. But I did.
As we moved into September, Polgar began putting the emphasis on Communist military options to the point of almost ignoring the prospects on the political front. So the notion that the Communists might opt for some kind of standstill ceasefire got lost. And we were suddenly talking about another Armageddon. That's fine because there was plenty of intelligence to the effect that the communists were going to turn up the pressure. But what concerned me was the failure to note the other possibility, that all of this was keyed to some kind of political option that they had in mind for the first time. And I would write analyses and I would see the political discussion drop out. I would write again and see them drop out. By way of trying to get the option noticed I went to the USIA office. Polgar and Martin and others in the Embassy used the USIA office as a mechanism for releasing documents which would reinforce in the public and in the presses mind the notion that the communists were going to step up the pressure, because then you could take these sanitized declassified documents and hand them to Congress. And I was asked to write the preface documents in research notes for the series. So I wrote the preface in one series of these documents that had to do with coming military pressure. My preface included the notion that it might be geared to a political option. I sneaked out, in other words the notion, that the political option was there, that there was something in the offing. I would go to some of my friends in the press and told them, "Look, we are, I think, missing one thing in all this we tell you on the record in briefings. The one thing we're not telling you is that there is a rumor somewhere in all of this madness about a coming offensive, a rumor of a political option."
So in effect I was overstepping the rules. For me it was very modest, but it was an unusual effort to get what I felt was a very important kernel of truth out. Because it was quite obvious that South Vietnam was in terrible trouble.
In the first place, morale was collapsing. The South Vietnamese were in terrible shape in terms of morale. One can argue up, down and sideways whether it was cutbacks in US aid or the economic malaise. Both of these big factors were considered in our analyses. One thing that seemed not to be considered was the slippage of morale itself. We would talk about, well, if something doesn't improve, it will slip. That was the line we would take in analyses. But we wouldn't say that morale has collapsed already. There is a very fine distinction. You will find documents that will dispute this but the preponderance of the intelligence analyses that we did both in the Embassy and the CIA channels either ignored the morale problem or in some way caste it so as to make it appear that there was some hope for morale. This was the context in which Pat Johnson did her paper on morale. Polgar took it and he rewrote it and he gave it to Martin who published it as an on-the-record cable. In effect, it's a very strange document, saying that the South Vietnamese are breeding like rabbits and so they must be happy and so morale is not so bad. It was an extraordinary document and I've never seen anything else like it. CIA headquarters refused to disseminate it initially as a field appraisal, so it was sent back and Polgar redisseminated it with Martin's help through Embassy channels. So we failed to recognize adequately what terrible shape South Vietnamese morale was in. General Murray's people at DAO, I think, rang the alarms on this. But again the alarms seemed to have to do with whether or not an increase in US material would make a difference.
Soon after his arrival Martin circulated an informal memo through the Embassy and I heard this phrase repeated many times: He said, "We will not engage in any proctological examinations of the South Vietnamese body politic." Well, if you were a lower ranking agency official or State Department official in Saigon, you did not need any kind of coding device or decipher to know what that phrase meant. It meant that reportilng on South Vietnamese corruption, the security situation in the countryside, would not be welcome in the front office. Gradually that kind of reporting began to dry up or get pigeonholed. In the intelligence business, reports never entirely disappear. They may be retained in some dead file in Saigon. So there was information on corruption but it never got widely disseminated. And when we got around to doing analyses on South Vietnamese survivability, the corruption issue was repeatedly and consistently de-emphasized to the point that it made no difference to the analysis.
The same was true of the morale problems of the South Vietnamese Army. Only when it became convenient to suggest the South Vietnamese morale might be fragile and contingent on massive U.S. aid, did that kind of phrasing slip into our intelligence analyses. Very seldom did our analyses reflect what I felt to be the true situation which was that the South Vietnamese morale was subject to vicissitudes quite apart from massive U.S. infusions of aid. Sure, if we'd gone back in with lots of money and had virtually remade the South Vietnamese economy, morale would have improved, but nothing short of that-- That was never in the cards anyway--would have turned South Vietnamese morale around enough to make the South Vietnamese army an effective fighting force.
Martin and Tom Polgar were both very egotistical men, very self-confident men, very sure of their points of view. Polgar was, I think, a cold warrior in Martin's mold. He hated the communists, was suspicious of communism in general, and was very much a patriot, as Martin was. Very much a hawk, in Martin's sense. But Polgar could admire Martin's rhetorical capabilities and would even allow that the Ambassador is an expert at this. And he would look at certain cables, I recall, of Martin's, and he would comment to me something to the effect, "What a fine writer he is. What a marvelous expounder of our particular point of view." Gradually I came to feel that the straightest presentation of facts or points of view was the best way and that the subtleties that were the subtleties of our intelligence would not be welcome in the Ambassador's office.
Polgar was, none the less his own man. He was also an extremely remote individual. He was rough hewn. He was one not inclined to forego challenging Martin's presumptions. But Polgar tended generally to agree with Martin. He was a person who liked to manipulate words. He liked to play with information, not to bend it or twist it necessarily, but to play with it, to make it conform to his particular perspective. During the first year of the cease fire, as I began to operate as his principal briefer and as his drafter of cables and analyses, Polgar was easy to deal with except on the subject of corruption and security in the countryside. On the military side he and I saw eye to eye. I don't think that I often disagreed with him on the military side during the first year of the cease fire. I did tend to feel that he underplayed the South Vietnamese cease fire violations. And I was suspicious that this might be because he was trying to accommodate Martin's point of view. But I can't say that he ever told me that he was deliberately underplaying for that purpose. At Mission Council briefings where I would stand up and discuss what the intelligence said about communist intelligence, I functioned without any clearance, generally. I would get up and simply talk about the intelligence and it was a fairly straightforward briefing, initially. Only as we got into the cease fire period did Polgar then later begin to take me aside after the briefings and say "Let's not get into the issue of what the communists are saying about their political options." He'd say,"I'll brief the Ambassador on this." Personally, he said, "Don't get into it!"
The Big Debate at the time concerned the question of material. Are the South Vietnamese out of material? Are they on their last legs? If that were true then US input was absolutely essential. But what if they have stuff stashed away? And had corruption made it so impossible to bring to bear any rationalized logistical system?
Murray and the DAO in general took the position that the South Vietnamese were running out of material because the pipeline was dry and the storehouses were empty or there were no parts for airplanes or tanks. It was an interesting argument. And it was a very attractive one, politically. The problem was that there was fairly little evidence to support it.
I'll never forget being in DAO with Murray before his departure in August of 1974. I used to go out in the morning with Pat Johnson and other analysts, and we would stand through the DAO briefings, and the DAO briefing officers were just fine and very good at what they did, which was mostly manpower and logistics. They often didn't have access to our --the CIA-- political reports. Be that as it may, they were quite good. One of the briefing officers said to Murray, "I've just come back from a place in the Delta and they have no batteries for the radios that they're using." And Murray said, "That's impossible!" The officer said, "I can't explain why it's happened but they don't have batteries for their radios." And Murray, said, "But I made a requisition for them, I saw the batteries delivered, they were supposed to be there."
That summed it up, that exchange, banal as it sounds. It was one of the major problems. Murray in very good faith would get the material and put it in some South Vietnamese pipeline and it would disappear. There was no way to verify how much was disappearing, how much was being stashed away from forward combat areas. And I had argued this point many times with people from DAO and continued to insist that they had a flawed monitoring system because they relied on all the generals to report what materials were delivered. We were relying on the people to whom we were supplying materials and in some cases had a stake in not leveling with us. And if I had been a South Vietnamese general I would have not leveled with us, because I would have thought, "Why tell the Americans we have enough? Always tell them we need more!" There was an irrationality built into our trust of the South Vietnamese logistics experts that defies imagination.
Still another problem that we could never resolve was the question of whether or not the NVA were being resupplied at massive new levels by Russia and China and whether or not that was also a political issue. If they were getting increased aid, we should do the same for the South Vietnamese. A big debate in the intelligence community was the question of whether or not to use dollar values to assess supplies going to the NVA or the whether you assess it in tonnage terms. It had been the CIA's habit to attach dollar values to all the material going into North Vietnam and a lot of us over time had developed skepticism about this dollar value which could be manipulated in various ways. What is the value of a dollar equivalent to a North Vietnamese piaster? What it came down to was that there was not very good evidence, certainly in tonnage terms that the North Vietnamese were being massively supplied. There was also evidence from collateral sources that the North Vietnamese were having problems persuading the Soviets to buck them up.
So each of these crucial questions was charged politically, unbelievably charged. The answer to any of these questions might tip Congress the other way. So there was no rational debate on these essential questions that went to the heart of whether or not the South Vietnam could survive.
I began to lose some of my traditional deference to Polgar. I began to write more and more trying not to shift down the reigning hypotheses, but at the same time to cause people to think. I was not welcome at DAO. There had always been a rivalry between the CIA and the DAO. And since I was the most high-profile CIA briefer, and probably very brash with the military guys, I was universally disliked. At one time they tried to hang a press leak on me and shut me out of the DAO briefings.
What I objected to in the DAO analysis was the notion that the spotting of military material, armor, on the trail system, could be taken as an indication that the communists were going to attack. There were very few net assessments of communist strengths. It was one of the problems of this crucial period. DAO would infer upon spotting a tank that this tank would be used in an offensive or immediately. We had no net assessments stating that they needed to replace one tank or the cannon, if they needed a replacement. I objected to the DAO unwillingness to factor in political considerations, and particularly communist planning. Their intelligence on Communist intentions was lodged almost exclusively on hardware, hardware meaning offensive material. They did not for instance say, well, as certain material is coming down the system, maybe its replacement material. A certain number of men are coming down the system, maybe they're replacements to keep up their battalion strength. How many people have been killed that the communists need to keep up their battalion strength? Just to keep it up, not to mount and offensive? DAO didn't do that and I thought their analyses were dangerously simplistic.
The DAO and the Pentagon uniformly would do analyses this way, not net assessments, but gross assessments, using manpower figures to suggest communist planning. The CIA's intelligence was always much better in the political area, I mean strategic political. We had sources within the communist command, we had multiple ways of looking at the communist side, aside from the flow of material and manpower. And DAO had so often cried wolf that the urgency of the situation had become lost on policy makers in Washington. They would just say, "Oh, that's DAO doing it again." Every month the DAO assessment was issued, and they'd have a briefing and publish it as an assessment, they'd always put an edge on it that I thought was overly bellicose. I'm certainly no dove. I think of myself as a fairly good intelligence analyst and a pragmatist. Sure, you get a warning that the Communists may come over the hill. Having done that you have to weigh in other factors. What are the conditioning considerations, what are the limitations that they face? What problems do the North Vietnamese face? What are the factions in the politburo? That means you should weigh in analyses of their intentions. And DAO never did that.
And so going into this crucial late 1974 period, DAO had dulled the senses of CIA people who were their audience at times, and I think they had dulled their own senses.
The drum fire that had been so much a part of the noise level out at DAO made things even more difficult within the Embassy. Nobody disputed that the Communists were going to turn up the pressure. The question was how much and how far and what did they want. As the pressure began to intensify in late 1974 so did the drum fire in the Embassy, and I was writing analyses for Polgar which reflected the increasing warning signals. But it became so difficult to write these analyses, because I kept trying to weave into them the line that maybe there was something they were after, maybe they are looking to a political objective, maybe they aren't coming over the hill. And it turns out that I was right. It turns out that Van Tien Dung says in his memoirs that this was the period in which they were testing. They were seeing how far they could go and then they would ratchet up the pressure a little more. He admits that there was no plan for a general offensive. And this was precisely what my analysis was and that of the other analysts in the CIA cockpit. But not at DAO. The communist plan was not to seize Saigon in 1975. It was to test and to look toward increasing the pressure if they could.
Le Duan was, I think, in a very delicate position. We got intelligence in December from a very good source. General Smith may not have seen this report. The intelligence was mind boggling. What it held was that the Communists were already picking candidates or sites for a new PRG capital in the South. I had never seen that in reports before, and certainly not in the reports from the source we were tapping into. It was stunning. It was like the piece of intelligence I noted just before the Paris Peace Accords, when I saw in a public statement by the North Vietnamese that they were no longer demanding Thieu's withdrawal before they signed the agreement. That kind of thinking just stopped you if you were familiar with the hieroglyphics of North Vietnamese planning.
I brought the intelligence to the attention of the Mission Council, which was Martin's regular weekly meeting. And Polgar would shoot that kind of thing down. He would say, "We're not going to believe that sort of thing," or "it's not important." And it became very discouraging when you try to put forward this kind of intelligence, and it was always written off. Now that critical piece of information came right before the Communist probe at Song Be. And the analysis of what we predicted was that the Communists would attack there. And we got it right.
And of course after they hit Song Be they proved to themselves that we would not intervene. Thieu drew the same conclusion. And he began to think about tacking, but much too late. There had been discussion all along, from the period mid 1974 to 1975, of shucking off unneeded territory. But it was a dirty word. We were not to discuss this with anyone. We were not to try to elicit intelligence on the shucking off of unneeded territory. We were told not to talk to the French offices or the Australian -- Ted Serong -- who was broaching this to Thieu. We were not to elicit information on this one, because once you put it in channels it might get to Congress.
Here was something the South Vietnamese were considering, here is something the Communists were considering, we were getting reflections of it in this intelligence burst in 1974 saying they might stand for a ceasefire. The communists would move into it and stand still.
When you talk about setting up a capital in a certain territory and that is your territory this is our territory, that's a different environment entirely. When Song Be fell the escalation began, and then the Communist planning shifted. And so did our analyses. I no longer felt the Communists were going for a political settlement. And the opportunity was lost. Whatever the Communists were looking at was possible within the wedge of time between August of 1974 and early 1975 was lost, and it was terrible because we could have put the brakes on the Communist side by some clever maneuver exceeding to a standstill ceasefire. The other question was if we could get the South Vietnamese to buy it. Certainly if we had made that initiative and pursued that, and it had become public, it would have been very hard to get Congress to vote additional aid. For public relations reasons we downplayed it and I think that for local reasons we caused it to be flushed out of the intelligence picture. And these were important indicators that could have given us some new lease or second lease or third lease on the life of Saigon.
In late 1974 I began to leak news to the press in Saigon. And I said, "Look, we're not getting into the intelligence channels, some of this stuff is not being emphasized." I almost am certain that I talked to Robert Shaplen at this time because he wrote that there was a political option that was not being looked at. I was becoming really, from the agency's standpoint, insubordinate. But nobody knew it. And there was so much going on. And I was doing rather important stuff for the Agency. Because one of the things that Polgar had done, he had cranked me into a very very important operation that we running into North Vietnam. The details I can't even begin to discuss. Suffice to say that it was an informal operation. It was very productive. To me it was the peak of my career.
I can't give you any details on this. But it was a very very productive operation. So much so that we began to look at ways to get the information into regular channels. It was so sensitive that it was not even put into regular reporting channels. So I began to generate within the Embassy through State Department channels sort of a sanitized version of some of the intelligence we were getting so that more people would get a look at it. And I worked with State Department officers on it. And Polgar even began censoring that. Censoring by saying, "I don't like going out with that report. Everything must point in one direction." So when we talk of this particular State Department outlook that was right about communist planning, maybe taking into consideration a political option, it would somehow not get passed on.
Anyway, I was becoming very restless. And I was traveling around the country doing lots of briefings with South Vietnamese generals. And the sense of unreality was amazing. You'd go around and you'd discover with the South Vietnamese generals that they had no strategic intelligence. I was walking in, and I was a relatively middle level Embassy person, very young looking, and I would walk in and tell the corps commander that we had intelligence on this and this and this, and he would be nonplused, he wouldn't know. I would be his first word. That was stunning to me. I was sent out several times in the 1974-75 period. Col. Hoang Ngoc Lung, who was head of intelligence for the Joint General Staff was in DAO's pocket and I don't know what he was doing. I'm not saying that ARVN headquarters wasn't informed. I mean the officers up in the corps areas, they were baffled. And in early 1975, I was briefing General Nguyen Van Toan in MR III, and it was news what I was telling him, about overall communist planning and about what he could expect in his corps. And I think it came down to the South Vietnamese military staff being unwilling to share intelligence, which was power. I encountered this with General Pham Van Phu up in MR II, also.
If they had the facts, they would have understood the seriousness of the situation. But they were playing another game.
In early March I was sent out of Vietnam to meet some informants from North Vietnam. That was during the period when right before the strike on Ban Me Thuot, and I came back with very bleak information from North Vietnam, meaning that they were going for broke. That was my first sensation: there was no pulling back. I'm not talking about political options any more. That's gone. The Communists are now escalating way beyond the notion of setting up a province capital. By the end of January, when Song Be fell in Phuoc Long, we washed out of our analyses and I no longer felt that they would go for any kind of political option.
As the military situation began deteriorating through March, I did a piece of analysis based on the information we had in hand. And I miscalled, to my everlasting regret, the target of the thrust of the next communist offensive. Like many other people I thought it would crash in the Pleiku-Kontum area. And we missed entirely the Ban Me Thuot front. Looking at what we knew of communist force movements I drew up an estimate in early March noting that probably the communists would try in the Highlands to isolate Ban Me Thuot, but not attack it. We did not know that over three NVA divisions were poised outside of Ban Me Thuot. Our failure to ascertain this led to a gross misestimate of commmunist intentions in the immediate area. There were some indicators, and you can always go back and say we should have looked closer at this or that. But it was not emphasized at DAO and neither did the agency. We were misled by one thing. We had become totally reliant on sensitive intelligence sources, meaning radio intercepts, technical intelligence sources. The communists realized this and were deceiving us.
General Dung says that they had a headquarters radio, and we saw it and picked up on it and we thought his headquarters was there. But it wasn't.
After the ceasefire in 1973, NSA and whatever military people run the surveillance system, National Reconnaissance Office, they all shifted their priorities, so Vietnam got fewer priorities, so we had less coverage in terms of radio intercepts and aerial photography. And occasionally DAO would send out planes with derring do and with Minox cameras and get photos of troops. But intelligence coverage diminished. And we lost track of American prisoners of war. We used to maintain such absolute vital coverage that if an American was picked up in Cambodia, we could track him. I recall very vividly after Dana Stone and Sean Flynn were picked up, we had fixes on them and knew almost at the point where they disappeared, that is died. We had indications that they were thrashing around, that they were in communist hands. So the cutback in technical intelligence coverage was crucial.
Contributing to our failure to detect communist movements in the Highlands of Vietnam and in particular movements around Ban Me Thuot, was CIA corruption two years before. The chief CIA officer in the MR2 area, and by the way, by the time the final offensive kicked off he was no longer there for the reason I will explain. But we discovered that the chief CIA officer in MR2 area had been digging into the cookie jar. Operational funds earmarked for the development of intelligence networks in the highlands and elsewhere in MR2 had been diverted to this officer's own personal use. He had not accounted for them. Nor had the intelligence networks they were meant to pay for been developed. So this man's corruption, in effect, had deprived us of important sources of information in the very area where the communists were to attack first. What happened to this intelligence officer? After his malfeasance had been uncovered he had been removed and sent home to CIA headquarters where he had been reprimanded and retired. But he had not been prosecuted. The CIA seldom, at least up to that time, had prosecuted people who were caught committing unethical acts, or doing inappropriate things, because of the possibility that that might embarrass the agency as a whole.
Well I don't think that it's exaggerating to say that this man's corruption helped blind us in a very vital area, that we might have known more about communist intentions if he had used the operational funds as they had been intended.
As the communists were preparing to strike at Ban Me Thuot, President Thieu was making important adjustments in his own strategic plans. In view of the United States' failure to respond to the Phuoc Long debacle, and also in view of some very noncommittal responses he had received from the U.S. Embassy as to future U.S. intentions, Thieu moved into a new phase of strategy called "light at the top, heavy at the bottom". He had not told the CIA or his military contacts at DAO, nor had his military officers told the contacts there of this plan. So none of us were ready for the withdrawal from Kontum and Pleiku, which was to set in motion the unraveling of South Vietnam.
I remember very well the Saturday morning when we got our first word that South Vietnamese forces were pulling out of Kontum and Pleiku. As Polgar has indicated publicly, we had an agent inside the military structure in those provinces. Let's leave it at that. And so through him we would get word of the withdrawal. At the time the withdrawal began, I was briefing Polgar in his office and Wolfgang Lehmann who was substituting for Martin who was away in Washington visiting a dentist. It was a leisurely Saturday as Saturdays go in those days. We were all on high alert but I had been hoping to get away that afternoon and to spend a couple of hours at the swimming pool. I desperately needed to relax. I had been extremely busy over the past few weeks.
I was briefing Polgar, basically, on the disposition of communist forces, what we had just received on communist plans. Basically the intelligence was not very explicit. It didn't carry us much beyond what we had known two or three days ago. We were trying to keep track of the situation in Ban Me Thuot and that was difficult. Intelligence was coming out only sporadically. We were briefing one of the State Department's new arrivals in Saigon. Suddenly the secretary came in with a report from Pleiku and Polgar literally bolted out of the room to try to find Lehmann. When he couldn't, and I recall him racing around the office all during the afternoon, he tried to get in touch with the principal consul general in MR2 in Nha Trang to get a clarification and put pressure on him to pull the plug on the American presence in Kontum and Pleiku.
Over the next few days, as we literally saw the South Vietnamese army in the Central Highland disintegrate on Route 7B to the coast, Polgar's mood changed dramatically and I recall his making a reference to the withdrawal as being like a circus gone crazy. Nobody seemed to be able to impose any order on the withdrawing South Vietnamese forces from the highlands. Our briefing maps in the CIA cockpit very close to Polgar's office were literally bleeding from a thousand cuts. To indicate the advancing North Vietnamese army we were streaking the maps with red and it was almost impossible to keep track of the situation on the maps because the situation was deteriorating so quickly. I had seen this happen in 1972 during the communist offensive. At that time developments occurred so quickly that you couldn't be sure you were on top of them. And there is a strange feeling that overtakes an intelligence outfit in such circumstances. Suddenly you have a feeling you'd like to throw all the intelligence away and go into another business. You feel utterly futile and literally wasted. And that's how I think we began to feel in the analytical shop at CIA station during those days as we watched the South Vietnamese army disintegrate.
During this mid-March period I used to stumble back to my apartment well after nightfall. I had a maid who was part French. She spoke French and she would, as she prepared my meal, based on what she'd picked up in the Saigon market-- and you could look at the table and tell that we were in trouble, because the supply of various foods was beginning to narrow. She knew something was terribly wrong. Parts of her family were in the military up country, and she would look at me imploringly, as if to importune me into telling her about the situation. I couldn't do it. I studiously avoided discussing with her what was going on because I didn't want to admit it to myself. But the estimates I was now turning out -- and by the second or third week in March I was generating estimates at an unprecedented one a day--the tone of these estimates were all in one direction now. For the first time in my experience in Vietnam I was beginning to look to the prospect of some kind of decisive defeat for the South Vietnamese.
The last weeks of the war were truly traumatic. I never slept more than four hours a night. And sometimes I went for days without sleeping.
By mid-March the CIA and the DAO were much at loggerheads which didn't help anybody. We had different interests and different focuses, I think. I don't think CIA people went back to DAO for their briefings any longer. They didn't have time to. We were so overextended. And I say, we, I mean the analytical bunch. At the CIA we were pretty confident of our intelligence at that point. Martin was pretty resistant to the pooling of intelligence in the Embassy, almost like a South Vietnamese, he didn't want too much information in anybody's hands or too much power for an individual, I suppose. He covered the waterfront himself, though.
We operated in little pools, very isolated. To complicate things, Martin was continuing to beat the drum for additional aid, even when it became manifestly apparent that the South Vietnamese army was almost incapable of using the aid that it had.
The question was, how much can you get from American Congress? That question was key to our handling of the Congressional delegation that showed up.
Senator Sam Nunn was there in January. But we would not publicly concede how dangerous the situation was to visitors at that point. I know that in my briefings to visitors, and I briefed them all, it was always upbeat. And I would sit there and go for the dog and pony show, and they would just stare. and I was expected to say, as I was standing up there by the maps, half truths; not lies, but half truths, easy to explain.
I'd say, "The communists have infiltrated 60,000 men. So you can draw the conclusion we are looking toward increased military activity here." But you couldn't say that they had lost or withdrawn 60,000 men. And I became very good at it and did it very smoothly. And it became a very very cynical exercise.
Seldom was I ever put in the situation of having to contradict Polgar publicly. One time that happened was when, during the visit of the Congressional delegates in early 1975, Polgar invited me to brief Congressman McCloskey. Polgar led off with some familiar rhetoric about the communists planning major initiatives in the weeks ahead. He seemed to me to lay it on extremely heavy, pointing out or hinting that there was some kind of general offensive definitely in the works, and we did not know this at the time. And he also, I felt, gave much too much credence that the South Vietnamese could somehow withstand the coming pressure. He provided an echo in other words of the recent cable he had sent to Washington concerning Thieu's survivability and the likelihood he would run for re-election. I sat there wondering how I could somehow get the conversation back on track. You have to imagine this kind of session. It took place in Polgar's villa and we had had beer brought in and we were sort of sitting around a semicircle. I had all of my maps and pointers there. It was all very very informal, and it would have been very difficult to say anything critical of Polgar's point of view without being forced to get into real detail. Well I managed to do it. I managed to point out to McCloskey that we had seen escalating attacks in the past year and that we might see strikes in places like Tay Ninh and other areas in the weeks ahead. This was after Phuoc Long so Tay Ninh was now the focus of our concern.
Somehow I managed to convince the people who sat in on that briefing that I had taken a more honest line than Polgar. I'm not sure what was more honest, but in any case, that was the impression. So very soon I got word, sometime that afternoon, that representative Don Fraser and Millicent Fenwick and several of their aides wanted to talk with me and some other people in the Embassy. I agreed to do so with a friend of mine who was also in the agency. We sat down with Fraser and Fenwick and laterally with Bella Abzug--she was not in on the principal meeting. We talked about the situation very very candidly. Polgar was not in on this session, and I feel that probably my friend and I got an extremely grim view across to the congressmen. Don Fraser was blown away. Bob Boettcher, his staff aid was sitting in on it. I told him the truth. I told him that there was terrible corruption. The corruption had reached the point where the army and the command couldn't pull itself together, it couldn't pull in one direction. Thieu was indeed incarcerating political opponents. These weren't communists. And I gave him the bleakest possible picture of the military situation. And I didn't think that frankly aid would pull it out this time. It was very very black. I was led to believe by some of the staffers who were present that that briefing of mine and the other CIA officer without Polgar helped to solidify the very grim estimate that the congressional delegation went away with of the military situation and the strategic picture.
Later, I recall, we met the delegation at Polgar's house, and they asked questions coming out of the session I had earlier. Their questions led Polgar, I think, to suspect that I had given them the darkest possible picture of what was going on. So much so, and I think that it got to Martin too, that the briefers were pulled out of the last session the visitors had with Martin, the CIA briefers. That was very unusual. And so our negative assessment was missing and Fraser and the others left with really only Martin's version of reality, and I'm sure they didn't buy it. In fact I know they didn't.
On Martin himself, I have written extensively on him, but I might give you a few thoughts. Martin was a kaleidoscopic man. He was an individual who was a cold warrior of the old stripe. He lost an adopted son in Vietnam. The kid had been killed in combat in the highlands, I believe. And he was the last man in the world to give Vietnam up for dead. He was almost, in a sense, a tragic figure. He had to see the American commitment in Vietnam carried through to a successful conclusion. He had to believe that the South Vietnamese were worth saving.
That being said, he was also a Southerner. He tended with the sort of mind set of the Southern patrician, or would-be patrician, to be a bit patronizing toward those we would help. I recall sitting with him one day at the Ambassador's villa in Saigon. I had become close to Martin largely because of Martin's daughter whom I had gotten to know. I was sitting with Martin and he was talking about the South Vietnamese and he said something to the effect that we must do what we can for the South Vietnamese as we had to do what we could for the "darkies" in the South. He didn't use "blacks" and he didn't use "Negro", he used "darkies". He said we must help them find their strengths. That thought stuck with me, because being a southerner of a different stripe, I found any hit of racism terribly noxious and here it seemed to me was an expression, if not of racism, of a kind of paternalism which had been its corrollary in the South I had known. What did I say to the Ambassador? Well, I tried, I believe in this particular meeting simply to convey my sense that the South Vietnamese were a complex people.
I also pointed out to him, not merely on this occasion but on several occasions, that we were not doing in the CIA station the kind of in depth analysis on South Vietnamese stengths or weaknesses I felt we ought to be doing. But Martin had very firm views on this. He was willing to get information from almost any sources so long as it did not seem to rub up against his point of view. He was a very opinionated ambassador. He was so opinionated and so seized with his sense of place that when DAO failed to sit him at one of their briefings in the principal chair at the head of the table, or the loop of the horseshoe, he took offense and never thereafter attended DAO military briefings.
I was very much a Southern Boy, I had been nurtured on discipline and respect for authority. I was not one of these people who could easily throw the gauntlet right directly in my superiors face. I genuinely like Polgar and Martin. So it is not in my nature to say,"Jesus, we shouldn't be lying to these people in this way."
I lived a monkish existence at this time. It's very strange, nobody to talk to but the people I was working immediately with. Pat Johnson was becoming extremely nervous. So much so that she was eventually sent home. Polgar sent her home because she was on the verge of nervous exhaustion. We were all working around the clock and its a wonder any of us got any rest. After Ban Me Thuot I slept almost never, and would go two nights in row without sleep. I was not conditioned to do what I should have done. I should have grabbed Polgar by the shirt and screamed at him, "For God's sake why don't we look at the intelligence." My strategy was always to try to reason both sides out. Do what the bureaucrat does, go with the flow. Don't rock the boat if you can help it. Always listen to everybody else's point of view. And I did. And things continued to get worse and worse. I was telling these journalists on the sly that we were in a terrible situation. And that aid would not save it. That is where I diverged and others diverged from the standard line being handed out in the Embassy.
The Americans were telling Thieu that we had the option of using the air force in Thailand. But they didn't understand the War Powers Act. This business of threatening them with B52s just wouldn't work. Where would you have bombed? By then they would not have severed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Everything the North needed was already in South Vietnam. By December they already had in South Vietnam a huge array of forces. By the end of January they were coming down the Trail and coming across the DMZ. The manpower statistics of flow on the trail were extremely depressing. We discussed the use of B52s and we did in fact review the War Powers Act and the notion that you would have to do something very extreme.
During those last weeks we had a specialist in from CIA headquarters in Washington to look over various grids that might have been used as guides for the bombing of North Vietnamese forces. There was some contingency planning within the CIA analytical section and the station with respect to the possibility of using air power against the communist forces in Vietnam.
I was not actively involved in that planning, but I must say that my fellow analytical colleagues were pretty much amused by the prospect -- amused in a grim way over the prospect of possible bombing of North Vietnamese forces because it seemed certainly as of mid-April, that there were no clear or clean targets. The North Vietnamese had already rammed down their infiltration system massive reinforcements. There were only one or two divisions still unaccounted for among those that made up the North Vietnamese order of battle. So bombing the infiltration routes would have been by that point pretty futile.
And reinvolvement of American forces in any shape or form would have been extreme, and we took that as a given in the agency's cockpit. We also felt that talk of using B52s was dangerous for Thieu. Because Thieu thought that military planning should be keyed to the Americans coming in and helping them.
And the bombing of North Vietnamese forces inside South Vietnam would have been quite difficult as well, because that would have meant targeting a lot of populated areas, say in the Highlands, or in MR 1 where there was an eruption of refugees flowing toward the coast or down the coast into Saigon-controlled areas. In other words it would have been quite impossible to bring to bear massive air strikes, or even select air strikes on North Vietnamese targets in South Vietnam without risking massive civilian casualties.
The old shibboleth that we could have jacked up South Vietnamese morale by using bombers wasn't viable. I think South Vietnamese morale ceased to exist as a plus in mid 1974. I don't' think it varied with the show of American force. After all, whose morale are you talking about. The generals' morale? If you bring in air power it would have made the generals feel just fine. Would it then jack up the morale of the poor guy down in the trenches who may benefit from it? Bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail? Do you put out special additions of the Saigon Post saying what you're doing? I find it very difficult to understand how in 2 months time, beginning with Ban Me Thuot, with the army literally unraveling, you could have stopped the unraveling by bombing something. When that army began streaming out of the highlands, I think the North Vietnamese figured it was the beginning of the end and it was all over. Van Tien Dung says that is when they began figure on winning in the dry season.
The North Vietnamese intelligence was very good. They had several possible sources among our people. They certainly were on top of key moves almost before the Americans. When Thieu decided to begin shuffling forces and opted for "light at the top and heavy at the bottom," they had that almost before we did. I think the North Vietnamese used their intelligence splendidly. But they also were surprised by the unraveling of ARVN, and I think a tension was set up between General Dung or some of the other field commanders who wanted to push push push and some of the members of the Politburo or Central Committee, who wanted a cautious strategy of moving ahead.
You can argue that if we had made a show of force even with the army unraveling from the highlands, maybe we could have caused the North Vietnamese to pull up short. They had almost their entire army in the South. They had only two divisions waiting to come in. If you bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, you have only two divisions to halt from coming into the fray. They had fielded most of their forces. Anyway, it is a chess player's move. I can tell you at the time, and Polgar was right on, there was no problem here, once that Ban Me Thuot fell and that army began coming out of the highlands in pieces, he was insistent that we emphasize what he thought was happening and that was that this was the end. I think he held in mind and paid lip service to a notion that aid might have saved the day and turned it around. I would go in and do the analysis for him, and I say these are my thoughts and here are my notes, what points do we emphasize? And he would, "Well, I want to add to the end of the analysis or put something up top about this, and I'll do it back channel here pumping up what you put in the front channel stuff," and that would be it. I could almost do an analysis without going to him and asking him what was going on, I was so in sync with him. He would probably dispute that now, but it was true and it was quite uncanny. I would almost know how he would go at a subject. And in this period beginning really in late February, we were thinking, we were very much looking the same way, he was pointing the direction and I was following along. And he was all gloom, but he kept holding in reserve something that I didn't agree with. He thought that if we gave the South Vietnamese x dollars of aid it might help. And I think this ultimately created a last hope, the last best hope. And it made it very difficult when it came time to step up an evacuation plan. How do you step up evacuation planning when you're still holding out that last best hope?
Polgar was putting the best face on the situation because he said he didn't want to precipitate panic and that would accelerate the unraveling. But there was the flip side, and that was nobody was prepared for what happened. It was like a Kafkaesque world. People seemed to be out of touch with reality. You knew there was a problem when the Vietnamese who was supposed to cook your meals no longer showed up. But otherwise the pressures somehow impinged only very slowly, the reality impinged only very slowly on people in the Embassy.
As of the first of April I had talked once again to one of our sources in North Vietnam. They had indicated that the North Vietnamese were going for broke, they were looking for blood, there was no chance for a negotiated settlement, no chance for a political fix and that we had better start thinking about contingency planning. During the next few days we began receiving tactical indicators that the North Vietnamese were maneuvering into position to launch themselves toward Saigon. So my gloom was deepening.
The C5A crash didn't affect me that much because I think I was already so gloomy that that was just one more horrible indicator that we were in big trouble. Within a day of the plane going down, a day later, we got from an agent I was talking to but not running, an agent who was inside the communist command in the South, the agent was run by Martin, inside COSVN, he gave us information indicating that the communists were in effect going for broke. And he said that all of the talk of negotiations was shadow play. This kept cropping up in intelligence. And Polgar, finally, when he refused to send out one report this way said, "Well, we've seen it so often."
Sure enough we began picking up indicators about the end of the first week in April, there was talk of negotiations, but it wasn't stated explicitly in the initial report, that the tone of negotiations was purely for show. But all the indicators coming from various directions indicated that political byplay was just that. And way beyond that the Communists might be moving into position to target Saigon. That they were going to push this offensive to the limit. And sure enough when you look at Dung's memoirs you see that the communists did opt for winning it by May, before Ho Chi Minh's birthday. So our intelligence was really quite incredible within that time frame.
If you ask me if I saw the C5A as traumatic, yes I did, and the flights out of Danang were horrifying, not because they showed that our systems wouldn't work, that was always questionable. It proved that Americans would panic, that they would break under the strain, that you could not be certain of their reaction. The shock that went through the Embassy when we heard about that C5A crash -- I was in the radio room, the operations room when they began reading the names of the casualties on the C5A crash, and it was deathly silent, just the sound of the radio was the only sound in the room. And I felt that someone was sort of reading a benediction on the American presence in Vietnam when that happened. Then there was this eruption of, "My God, what do we do next?" from people all around me. And I thought, "My God, what are we going to be doing?" And there was the same general reaction when a plane attacked the presidential palace. There was then panic in the Embassy. And I think Martin was right about this. He cabled home and he was complaining about panic reflected in various channels. Alan Carter seemed to be overly anxious. And I'm not sure he wasn't right in being that way. And the reason for this overreaction from time to time was because the general community had been given some pap about, don't worry about this or that. It seemed to me there was an edge of irrationality that began to set-in in people's reaction, and that frightened me. Because I figured there was only one way we were gong to get out and that was to put a lid on people's emotions.
I think we lied to people too often before that. The fear of the Vietnamese turning on the Americans was so overdrawn. We had one or two reports that that might happen. I think that DAO was getting it from Lung, and I think some of the Vietnamese were doing it for reasons quite personal -- they wanted to get the hell out of the country and they thought the government would collapse. We had a report that Ky might turn on us. But the question was, how would it occur. It's hard to know what he felt from time to time. And the notion was, what would the Vietnamese do if they panicked? It meant the closing down of all evacuation channels. And it means that nobody gets out. That's why there was no panic on the last day to speak of. The South Vietnamese stood by because they knew this was the last launching pad and they knew that if they didn't stand back nobody would get out.
I think there was concern that there might be an uprising in the army. There were troops stationed out near Tan Son Nhut, and the airforce would have brought havoc with an air strike on Tan Son Nhut or DAO. I found it very difficult to believe that the South Vietnamese could muster enough planes, but one or two might have turned on the Americans.
My feeling was, and I argued at that time, I spoke with Polgar, that if we didn't start a rationalized evacuation plan, we might have panic. I gotta tell you, those kinds of discussions were fleeting. The main discussions focused on when the communists were going to attack and whether or not a political settlement was a possibility.
Pat Johnson and I began writing through the first week in April. We wrote analyses every moment. I'd never turned out that many before. Just pummeling headquarters. On about the 13th, Polgar and his number 2 called me in to write an analysis saying that no evacuation was possible. The analysis took the line that a large scale evacuation was becoming increasingly impossible. That any effort to move out over highways to the coast, would fall under communist interdiction efforts, since there were indications that the Communists had moved three battalions into the area of Vung Tau.
I wrote an analysis that went to Washington, and I think Polgar maneuvered cleverly here, it was designed to strengthen the hand of those who thought that Martin ought to begin taking more seriously the prospect of negotiations happening. It was all in a very strange flux period.
I wrote a cable for Polgar on the importance of getting rid of Thieu. This was in early April. Polgar thought that if we got rid of Thieu it would open the way, I suppose, for some sort of political fix. I thought we were saying get rid of Thieu because there was no chance for anything. It was all done. This leads me to what I think was the most crucial error we made, that is this notion, and it was fed by Tran Van Don, it was fed by Polgar's contacts, it was fed by the communist delegation at Tan Son Nhut, the notion that there was the chance for a political fix and the effects it had on our planning. Because it was a chaotic time, it is hard to take one strand and pull it out.
What happened was, the French began encouraging us in that view for their own reasons, that there would be a political fix. This notion seemed just fine to Martin. Martin latched onto the idea that there was some sort of fig leaf political arrangement we could make with the communists because I think he felt there was still a chance for Saigon and that there was still a chance for the South Vietnamese army. Polgar locked onto the idea of a political fix, because it was obvious to me he knew that it was over, he knew that this business of aid wouldn't do it, and that making a political fix would be the only thing that would save us, after my doomsday projection that an evacuation wouldn't work. It had to be. So when Brochand approached him, in the Cercle Sportif and told him that maybe there was a chance for a political fix, a Greek Tragedy almost began to impose itself on Polgar's reality, I think, and reality began to become a Greek Tragedy. For all the most humane reasons, in order to save lives and to save the Vietnamese, he became distracted. I know he argues that he didn't become distracted, that evacuation planning continued within the Embassy, that CIA evacuation planning continued, and that he tried to get Colby to step up and send additional planes, but there was no central direction. Polgar was somewhere else. He was focused on this. And that was the problem.
Meanwhile, there were several Vietnamese I knew that I wanted to get out fairly early. And I went to the man in the agency set up who had been assigned to help put together some sort of evacuation list. I said I want to put some people on and he said, "It's no use. We've got people on this list who shouldn't be there and there is no official list and we can't get any priority or direction from Polgar's office." And that was the problem. People were going off in several different directions. It was a terribly complicated problem we had. No exit papers for the Vietnamese we wanted to get out. Martin didn't want to evacuate the families of generals or generals themselves because that might create an unraveling of South Vietnamese morale. Largely the evacuation efforts took on a very parochial nature. You had the DAO taking out bar girls, friends, what have you. Look, the more the merrier, let's get them out. But nobody would sit down and say, Lets do something about it. Now Polgar, to his credit, recognized the problem, and cabled CIA Headquarters and said, "Martin doesn't seem to realize the need to set up an immediate step up of the evacuation process." True. The problem, was that Polgar suffered from the same problem. And particularly as we got into mid April, people were not moving out of the station and Polgar would not order them out. People were staying behind to try to arrange the evacuation of their Vietnamese friends, or they weren't sufficiently apprised of the danger, despite the problem of Tan Son Nhut and the downing of the C5A and the bombing attack on the palace, and somehow by mid April it had not sunk in that we were on the edge of disaster.
So people were not moving with any due haste to get out, even if they had been declared nonessential. You can understand why for all the logical reasons, nobody wanted to admit that we were finished.
The fact is it didn't happen and we didn't see steam put into the evacuation. And then I started to get into another hassle with the powers that be. First, at the end March, we stopped giving briefings to Martin. I gave one of the last military briefings to him. Polgar would go in and talk to him from time to time. But Martin was getting a fragmented picture. I remember seeing him when he had just come back from Washington in early April and telling him that the highlands were falling, the northern part of the country was literally disintegrating, and I went into him and said, "Ambassador Martin, you know we've lost these units here, the South Vietnamese Army doesn't exist here." And Martin said to me, "How do you know that?"
That stopped me. Because I'm an intelligence officer drawing on all sources and its a little strange at this late date after so many years of briefing to be asked how do I know what I am telling him on a map. I said, "Well sir, we have this and this and this source." And he said, "I don't believe it. I have my own information."
Well, I was so stunned. That I just blew it. I feel in retrospect it was a vital chance lost when I should have said, "Oh come on, Ambassador Martin, you're full of it." But I didn't. I left. And I went back to Polgar and I said,"He doesn't buy this," or something to that effect.
Buy the 17th Martin was being so nudged by Washington to do something that he was beginning to straighten out the evacuation and he made the worst possible choice. He put somebody in charge of the evacuation planning who knew nothing about it. There was no coordination among the CIA people, people in the ranks and were trying to get people out, and when people came to me I told them go out to DAO and get in the lines. There is a friend of mine out there, get in his line and see what you can do. And that is what happened. There were so many things that happened in that period, and it's very hard to convey the real sense of futility, on my part. I felt as though I was at a funeral and everybody was sort of bearing each other up and I was stumbling forward hoping that I could get enough of my Vietnamese on an aircraft. But I didn't. I became obsessed with the idea of somebody realizing that there was no hope for a political fix. Just to get somebody to look at it a second time. I was writing an analysis every second, and talking to various people around the station, but it seemed to be a futile exercise.
I wasn't worried about me. I was worried about the Vietnamese I had known since 1969 getting out of the country. And it became particularly apparent that that wasn't going to happen, especially if were people were banking on some sort of political fix. That was the thrust of the analysis that I did for Polgar on April 8th, that said the evacuation options were very difficult. The military came to the same conclusion. CINCPAC came to the notion that you would have to infiltrate huge numbers of military forces to secure landing areas and that wasn't feasible so what do you do then?
I had a sense of slowly sinking into mud and there would be no extraction from it. And the Vietnamese were with me.
But I did something that was so terrible, and I didn't write about in the book or didn't tell the whole story of it. A few days before the evacuation, a very good friend of mine called, a Vietnamese friend of mine, and asked if I would help her get out of the country, and basically I said I can't help you right now I'm too busy. I'm writing another report. And she called later and she couldn't get out and shortly after that she killed herself. I thought about this a lot. The fact is we had all become fixed in our ways on some bureaucratic consideration, some mechanistic consideration. Getting a report out, getting Washington to believe that there would be a political fix. We forgot one thing. We were dealing with human beings there. You can't postpone that if their lives are on the line. You've got to do something about that. For all of my concern about getting the evacuation rationalized and pulled together and so forth, when the moment of truth occurred, when my friend called up, I was too busy, I was too busy writing another report.
My moment of epiphany came when I was coming off the roof of the Embassy in a helicopter, and as the helicopter banked up over the side of the Embassy, I could see down the streets and in the Embassy court, there were a lot of Vietnamese who would not get out.
I suddenly had this feeling that I had, for bureaucratic reasons, or whatever, some good, some very bad, been party to an awful betrayal of a lot of things I believed in and I had to make amends. I had to make amends first of all by getting the truth out in some way, shape or form. Getting the people to look at what happened. My initial feeling was something I hated to articulate, because you don't do it in the intelligence business. You don't talk about morality or making atonement for something you've done. But that was one of my senses. I wanted to confess--not to the outside world -- but to understand what the devil had gone wrong and how could we leave behind all these thousands of human beings and not understand them. How could anybody do it?
My intelligence senses had been so honed that there had to be an explanation. There had to be an explanation for this. You don't leave a country by way of helicopter in the middle of the night off the embassy roof with the enemy poised at the gates of the city. And that's it. And you analyze what the hell has happened, particularly if you feel guilty about it.
I went from Subic Bay at Polgar's direction to Thailand and I interviewed people who were still coming out of Vietnam. I was gathering the first intelligence on what the communists had done after they came in just six days before. Within seven days I was in Thailand doing it.
It was a nightmare.
Six days before I had seen all of these faces and now I was reading what had happened to them. I ran into an agent we had been running in Vietnam. He had managed to escape on his own. He said to me, "Will you help me go back in and rescue people? Will you set it up to get the CIA to back us?" And I went around the embassy in Thailand waiting for somebody to respond positively. By then I had generated lots of very hand-wringing reports about what had happened in Vietnam. I talked to journalists and that sort of thing, who had come out of Vietnam late. And I think CIA headquarters was tired of the hand-wringing. Already the CIA was immersed in congressional investigations. The last thing they needed was another scandal. Every report generated on the fall of Vietnam was one more potential scandal.
And I thought to myself, Gee, if we can just generate enough information on what terrible things happened, the Agency will get behind sending people back in to pull some of these people out.
It was a very pragmatic -- in other words, getting the truth out, or getting the facts, became for me a very pragmatic thing. I thought, Well we can focus attention on this and maybe get people out and the agency won't let it happen again. But I got back to CIA headquarters and it was as if Vietnam had been buried. It was very strange. I arrived late because I'd been in Thailand by that point and was sort of making my way back slowly. I didn't make my way back for two months after the evacuation. And I'd experienced all this stuff in Thailand.
When I showed up, maybe Vietnam had been on the front burner when everybody else showed, but when I got there it was "What? Vietnam? We got other problems." So that's when I began agitating into a different posture. My determination to write the book came very late. I really felt we would get an after-action report done on the inside and I went through various moves to get something done, but nobody could take authority for authorizing an after-action. "Why, gee, Frank, go to somebody else." I went to talk to George Carver and he said he didn't have the authority to do it. I went to Polgar, "Well, go to somebody else, I don't have the authority to authorize it either." "Great if you want to do it Frank, but I don't have the authority." It was like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
So that's what happened. I never approached Daniel Ellsberg's passion and I never was disillusioned with the Agency. I was disillusioned with a lot of the people I worked with. But I understood them. I presume to say I understood Polgar. I understood why it was hard for him to come to grips with what had happened. And I understand why he made some of the mis-calls he did. I'd like to try to understand why I made some of the ones I did. It was a horrible experience for a young person, being there at the moment of surrender. Old men rationalize their way in and rationalize their way out, and if you were a young GI you ended up dying for some of those rationalizations. If you're an intelligence officer you were a hell of a lot luckier. You never risked getting killed -- not much anyway. The only thing you ended up doing was, as the old men rationalized, you ended up lying to yourself and becoming more and more like the old men, becoming a bureaucrat, a yes man, becoming a guy who would march in lockstep. And the guy who next time around in the next Embassy crisis, or the next evacuation, would again postpone leaving for too long.
I think anybody who is not haunted by what happened in the end in Vietnam has got something very wrong with him. The people I worry about are the ones who go around saying, "What? What evacuation?" Anybody with the least sensitivity or concern for other human beings will be haunted and worse for it. The trick is not to be paralyzed. And everybody who was there I'm sure has his own way of exorcising the ghosts. For me it was the most natural thing in the world to write, because that's what I had been doing the entire war. I'd been an analyst dealing with information. I had to make one more stab at understanding what had gone wrong. Some of the others who engaged in disinformation during the war, I think, conjured up fantasies about what went on. I think as time goes on, a lot of the military people must in some way justify the performance of the military and end up justifying the institution which they love and which they feel--I've never felt this way--was disgraced by the war. So they overcompensate. This to me is madness.
I thought the CIA would in some way redeem itself. I think the Agency's performance was hideous. I'm not talking about Polgar's. Polgar, believe it or not, I had a lot of compassion for him, and I tried to write the book that way, to sound not carping, although some people said I'm carping. The point is, the Agency should have known better. Colby should have done more. All these people built their careers on Vietnam and what happened in the end is that we either had silence or finger pointing and nobody ever took responsibility for their actions, it seemed to me.
And Kissinger's the top of the list. I am simply appalled at his capacity for shunting the blame on somebody else. Martin has been excoriated by people who pretended to be on his side, or who had at least muted their criticism of him and let him function to do the terrible things they now criticize him for. Like Habib. Habib hated Martin, I am led to understand by people who work with Habib. Kissinger thought Martin was batty during the last days of the war. Why the hell didn't they pull Martin out? Now they are quite willing to make snide remarks, critical remarks about Martin. Well, they might have saved some lives if they had made those critical remarks when it counted. It's very easy to snipe at the old man from the hedgerows of anonymity. That's what's happened. Or at such a distance he can't defend himself. For God's sake, I criticize him so he can defend himself. These people the Habibs and the Kissingers, I think, are cowardly.
Frankly I'm much happier that somebody like Martin and certainly Polgar was in Saigon than the Habibs and Kissingers. At least they had the courage to stand up for what they believed in. And they've taken a lot of heat for it.
In any event, the saddest thing, I think, about the Vietnam War is that the recriminations have overtaken the lessons. And unfortunately my writings about the end of the Vietnam War have been taken to be an act of recrimination. In fact it was not meant that way at all. It was meant as a very presumptuous way, perhaps, of trying to get the accounting done that nobody seemed to want to do. I think if we'd all done it, we'd all put our thoughts down at that time. And we would have been in better shape.
I visit the Vietnam Memorial now whenever I'm in Washington. I don't go there by way of flagellating myself. I go there by way of tribute, because I think the veterans were badly treated. It's our way of doing homage to them
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