April 3, 1970
Page 10291
ERA OF NEGOTIATIONS? – PART II
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished majority leader for his consideration.
Mr. President, the day before yesterday the French Cabinet expressed its grave concern about the widening war in southeast Asia and urged an effort to negotiate a settlement in Indochina.
Yesterday, the Paris Vietnam peace talks went through the motions of their 61st session with no meaningful response to the French proposal. Later reports in Washington indicate that the Nixon administration is cool to the French proposals. In short, Mr. President, while the war in Vietnam continues and spills over in Laos and Cambodia, our Government offers no initiatives to bring about the "era of negotiation" and it is reluctant to respond to the initiatives of others.
One week ago, yesterday, Mr. President, I began a series of speeches in the Senate on the unanswered questions about U.S. policy in southeast Asia, particularly as those questions relate to the question of a negotiated settlement of the conflict in South Vietnam and the growing conflict in Laos and Cambodia. My questions were not answered, and I raise them again:
What is the administration trying to convey by the unfortunate symbolic protocol gap in Paris?
The administration has now allowed 133 days to go by – more than 30 percent of the time it has been in office – without replacing Ambassador Lodge with a representative of like rank. For more than 4 months, second-rank representation from the United States has led to second and third-rank representation from the Communists, and similar representation from Saigon. If this was to be the "era of negotiation," as President Nixon promised in his inaugural address, why is the administration downgrading the tools of diplomacy?
How does the administration propose to deal with the instability and conflict in Laos and Cambodia, which is directly related to the war in Vietnam?
The impossibility of ending the war by Vietnamization, which I have pointed out before, has been further underscored by events across South Vietnam's ill-defined Western borders: In Laos, 67,000 North Vietnamese troops continue to operate, despite occasional countermoves and continuing U.S. air attacks. In Cambodia, upward of 40,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops now appear to be involved, in the midst of growing evidence of the risk of civil war.
I do not think the American people will tolerate widened intervention by U.S. ground forces in these cross border areas. While the South Vietnamese are incapable of settling the situation, they may well succeed in dragging us in to protect them. Laos and Cambodia cannot be expected to deal militarily with the present instability by themselves.
It should be obvious to anyone familiar with Southeast Asian affairs that we ought to be trying to halt the new, dangerous, and wider conflict in Indochina by a negotiated agreement. There is considerable merit in the suggestion that the Geneva conference be reconvened to consider all aspects of the Southeast Asia situation. There are substantial reasons for exploring the French proposal. But until the United States shows, by the level of its representation and the extent of its initiative in Paris, that it is seriously interested in a negotiated settlement, even the possibility of a Geneva conference will go begging.
Mr. President, I ask again the questions I raised last week:
Is the administration so certain, in the face of some contrary evidence, that Hanoi's position in Paris is one of total intransigence? Even if the administration is so convinced, does this mean it has no obligation to probe and to try?
Does it believe the tough bargaining necessary to achieve a negotiated end to the war is not worth the time of a top-level appointment as our chief negotiator in Paris?
Has the administration written off negotiations? If not, what are the preconditions for resuming meaningful negotiations? Is it, in effect, asking North Vietnam to surrender?
Is the administration playing a game where the next move can be made only by the other side?
Have we given up the initiative toward peace to the other side?
So far, Mr. President, the President's avowed policy of negotiations while we Vietnamize the war has not led to meaningful negotiations and it has not ended the war. It has been carried out against the uncomfortable and threatening backdrop of a widening war. It has reached the point where there are serious reports of an effort to slow down, or temporarily halt, the removal of U.S. troops for the next 6 months, in order to let our forces complete the pacification process in certain key areas in South Vietnam. How often have we heard similar requests in the past? How much longer will we talk of pacification in South Vietnam while the rest of Indochina goes up in smoke?
The fact is, Mr. President, that while we let the empty gestures at Paris go on – and yesterday was the 61st meeting – the war goes on, and spreads. The administration seems to be debating not how much faster we can withdraw, but how much slower. And we have allowed the Thieu-Ky regime to continue on the assumption that we will support them indefinitely. And, to add insult to injury, we have stood by silently while the Thieu regime jailed a South Vietnamese political leader who had been helpful to us. Mr. Chau's offense was alleged "neutralist" sentiments in contacting his brother, a North Vietnamese intelligence operative.
Remember, Mr. President, that this act was carried out by Mr. Thieu, who said last July 11:
There will be no reprisals or discrimination after the (promised free) elections.
Those words, which President Nixon hailed, have a hollow ring, today.
Mr, President, what possible justification is there for this administration to refuse to speak out publicly in opposition to this action by the Thieu regime? The arrest and subsequent conviction of Chau without public protest on our part completely erodes the pretensions of the Saigon government of magnanimity toward its own people, unless they are all-out supporters of the Thieu-Ky administration.
Ambassador Bunker apparently did as he pleased on the case, in spite of State Department instructions. President Nixon has refused comment on this case. The State Department has refused comment. But questions will continue to be asked until there is a satisfactory response.
We cannot and must not be subservient to the Saigon regime.
President Thieu's every word and action in recent months indicates that he places his trust in winning the war by force and not by negotiations. In his press conference at the beginning of the year Thieu predicted, as he has done many times before, that the Communist military effort in South Vietnam will collapse within 2 or 3 years. The war will fade away, he predicted, and he did not foresee progress at the Paris talks. It was in this same press conference that he warned that many years will be required to remove all U.S. troops from South Vietnam. Is President Thieu dictating our withdrawal timetable?
Is it this attitude, Mr. President, which accounts for the forays of South Vietnamese battalions into Cambodia in recent days as reported in the press? Does the administration condone such actions by our allies? If not, what is it doing to prevent the further spread of the conflict by these means?
Mr. President, I will continue to ask these questions until some meaningful answers are given, and our Government again makes a genuine and reasonable effort to obtain a negotiated settlement of this tragic conflict.
I ask unanimous consent that recent articles which have appeared in the press relating to the military request for delay in further U.S. troop withdrawals, to the South Vietnamese attacks against Cambodia, and to the Chau case be inserted in the RECORD at this point.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
EVENTS PROVING OUT THESIS OF A SECOND INDOCHINA WAR
(By Stanley Karnow)
HONG KONG. – The late Bernard Fall, one of the wisest Western observers of Asia, insisted for years that the Vietnam conflict was actually a sequel to the struggle between the Communists and the French for supremacy over the entire Indochina peninsula that raged for a decade after World War II.
Therefore, Fall argued, the United States and its allies were really involved in what logically should have been termed the "Second Indochina War."
If that idea seemed somewhat esoteric before, it is now being proved prescient. For not only is the conflict spreading beyond Vietnam and Laos into Cambodia, but it is currently threatening to extend into Thailand as well.
The obvious danger in this growing turmoil is that President Nixon may feel compelled to escalate the American commitment to the region despite his repeated pledges to reduce the U.S. posture in the area.
Alternatively, however, there is the more hopeful possibility that the major powers may somehow sober up sufficiently to seek a multinational settlement for Southeast Asia in order to prevent an explosion that might ignite a world-wide catastrophe.
Thus the present situation may well be a turning-point that could lead, depending on the options taken, to either a wider war or a chance for peace. In short, it is a time of both hazards and opportunity.
Though climactic moments have a way of flaring into sudden headlines, a crisis is the gradual accumulation of events. So it has been in Indochina.
The conflict in Laos, a sideshow to the Vietnam theater, had long remained a minor affair because the contending forces there tacitly respected the unwritten partition of the country worked out during the 1962 Geneva Conference.
But last summer, when Gen. Vang Pao's Meo guerrillas and their American advisers moved into the Plain of Jars, they violated the understanding that kept the balance in Laos.
The Communists predictably counter-attacked this winter and, in addition to reacting with increased air support for the government, the United States openly strengthened the Thai units that have covertly operated in Laos for years.
The entry of the Thai reinforcements has in turn provided the Chinese, who also have troops inside Laos and thousands more poised on the border, to warn that they "will not sit idly by" – a phrase reminiscent of the days before their "volunteers" poured into Korea.
Hence a spiral of irrational challenges and responses threatens to transform the primitive kingdom of Laos into a battlefield on which no side can possibly attain victory.
Meanwhile, the ouster of Prince Sihanouk has disrupted the fragile equilibrium that served to spare Cambodia from becoming actively engaged in the war.
Hardly was Sihanouk deposed than the South Vietnamese, evidently acting with the approval of the new Phnom Penh regime, hit Communist bases across the Cambodian frontier.
Apparently anticipating a larger American role in Cambodia, the Communists have already started to stir up trouble. They have called on Cambodians to overthrow Sihanouk's successors, and they are virtually certain to direct their own forces in the country against the Phnom Penh regime.
At the same time, from his asylum in Peking, the prince has cloaked the Communists in legitimacy by creating a government-in-exile and a "National Liberation Army" to fight "with other anti-imperialist peoples forces of fraternal countries."
And seizing Sihanouk's appeal, which they probably inspired, the Chinese and North Vietnamese are increasingly referring to the "struggles" in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a single "struggle for Indochina" To a large extent, Communist strategy appears to be designed to create diversions to the Vietnam arena, where Hanoi's dreams of rapid success have been punctured.
Their references to a bigger conflict are also calculated to stimulate anti-war sentiment in the United States and, in the process, raise the pressure on the White House to accept their conditions for peace in the region.
But whatever their motives, the Communists are making it clear that they are prepared to expand the war over the artificial boundaries that separate the Indochinese states, and there is no reason to doubt their intentions.
In another forecast that has become significant, Bernard Fall confided to a friend not long before his tragic death in Vietnam that his knowledge of that country might eventualy seem irrelevant if the conflict continued to escalate.
"I feel," he remarked, "like it is 1913, and I am an expert on Serbia who is about to be depasser par les evenements – outstripped by events."
[From the New York Times, Mar. 28, 1970]
U.S. IS SAID To HAVE BLOCKED VISIT BY CHAU, THIEU FOE
(By Tad Szulc)
WASHINGTON: The United States blocked a visit here by a South Vietnamese Deputy, Tran Ngoc Chau, last summer after the embassy in Saigon had advised that his trip would displease President Nguyen Van Thieu, authoritative quarters said here today.
This decision by the State Department came according to highly placed informants, at the time when President Thieu began the pressure against Mr. Chau that led to his arrest and trial three weeks ago, when he was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor.
The charges against Mr. Chau in a Saigon military court were that he maintained illegal and criminal contacts with his brother, a North Vietnamese intelligence captain, Tran Ngoc Hien, despite secret information conveyed to the Saigon Government by a high-ranking American official in July, 1969, that Mr. Chau had acted with the knowledge and approval of the United States Embassy and the Central Intelligence Agency.
FIRST MOVE LAST SUMMER
As reconstructed from Administration, Congressional and other sources here, the first effort by Mr. Chau's American friends to save him from prosecution by the Thieu regime, which regards him as a political foe, came last summer when it was first recognized that he was in danger of arrest and trial.
John Paul Vann, chief of the Rural Pacification Program in the Mekong Delta, testified at a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that he had presented "in detail" the background of Mr. Chau's association with the United States Government at a meeting in July, 1969, with Tran Thien Khiem, who was then Deputy Premier and now is Premier.
Mr. Vann testified that he informed Mr. Khiem of Mr. Chau's status with the authorization of his immediate superior, the Deputy Ambassador, William P. Colby.
The United States Government has not, however, publicly conceded that Mr. Chau was acting in concert with American political and intelligence officials.
Mr. Vann's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was heavily censored by the State Department and was returned to the committee this week pending a decision on its release.
BUNKER’S ROLE REPEALED
Mr. Vann's testimony, according to senatorial sources, also touched at length on the alleged delays by Ellsworth Bunker, the United States Ambassador in Saigon, carrying out instructions from the State Department to intervene in favor of Mr. Chau.
At about the time Mr. Vann conferred with the Deputy Premier, a number of Mr. Chau's American friends in South Vietnam arranged for him to visit the United States. But when Mr. Chau applied for a visa, he was refused one. Informants here said this was done on Mr. Bunker's recommendation, based on the belief that President Thieu would resent Mr. Chau's departure.
Mr. Chau's concern was communicated to Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He is reportedly to have suggested to Under Secretary of State Elliot L. Richardson that the Administration intervene.
Mr. Richardson cabled instructions to Mr. Bunker on Dec. 23 – the date was erroneously reported in the Times today as Dec. 22 – to raise the Chau case with President Thieu and inform him of the Administration's desire to see the charges dropped.
Officials confirmed yesterday that Mr. Richardson followed up the first cable with a second one on Feb. 7, when it developed that Mr. Bunker had conveyed softened expression of American concern to lower ranking South Vietnamese officials.
As a result, Mr. Bunker met Mr. Thieu on Feb. 10, when he was informed that the case was already in the hands of the military court.
Before his audience with Mr. Thieu, Mr. Bunker was relaying assurances to the State Department that even if tried, Mr. Chau would not be imprisoned.
Meanwhile, the Administration continued to maintain silence on the Chau case. The State Department's spokesman, Robert J. McCloskey said today that he would not comment on any aspect of the case and did not anticipate that comment would be forthcoming.
In Key Biscayne, Fla., where President Nixon is spending the Easter holiday, the White House press secretary, Ronald O. Ziegler said that there "is no displeasure on the part of the President whatsoever in reaction to Ambassador Bunker's handling of his post in Saigon."
BUNKER-STATE DEPARTMENT SPLIT ON CHAU REPORTED BY COLUMNIST
Serious differences existed between Ellsworth Bunker, the United States Ambassador to South Vietnam and the State Department over the handling of the case of Tran Ngoc Chau, the opposition deputy sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, according to the Newsday columnist Flora Lewis.
In her syndicated column yesterday, Miss Lewis wrote that Ambassador Bunker had proposed making a public statement that no American ambassador had ever been involved in Mr. Chau's eight meetings with his brother Tran Ngoc Hien, a North Vietnamese intelligence officer, although Ambassador Bunker knew this is to be untrue.
But, according to Miss Lewis, the State Department ordered Ambassador Bunker not to make such a statement because it conflicted with secret testimony given by John Vann, chief of United States pacification efforts in the Mekong Delta, at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month.
"That was a diplomatic way of saying the department knew Bunker's proposed comment was untrue and was aware that Bunker also knew it was untrue," Miss Lewis wrote.
Ambassador Bunker was himself present at a meeting in September, 1967, when Mr. Chau briefed high American officials on his knowledge of enemy plans for the forthcoming Tet offensive. Miss Lewis wrote that Mr. Chau had learned of these plans from the meeting with his brother.
Although Mr. Chau did not have precise information on the timing and place of the impending attacks, Miss Lewis reported, some top American officers believe that his advice was instrumental in preventing Gen. William C. Westmoreland, then United States commander in Vietnam, from transferring more troops to outlying regions and exposing Saigon to disaster. The offensive began at the end of January 1968.
Miss Lewis wrote that Ambassador Bunker, in suggesting that contacts with Mr. Chau be denied, was acting to protect President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam.
"Bunker, 75, is a traditional type of New England Yankee with a record of high personal integrity," she wrote. "However, it was he who picked Thieu as America's favorite candidate for the presidency and, in effect, created the Thieu government. He is deeply committed to its maintenance in power."
WILL THIEU BE THE NEXT "DOMINO" TO FALL?
Sixteen years ago, the U.S. government set out to "save" Indochina (embracing Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia) for "democracy." Today, Laos is being overrun by the Communists; Vietnam is under the thumb of militarists; and in Cambodia a right-wing coup has just toppled the neutralist leader, Prince Sihanouk.
So after hundreds of thousands of American casualties, and the expenditure of more than $100 billion, all that the United States has to show for its vast effort in Southeast Asia is the dominance of one form or another of authoritarianism. There is hardly a glimmer of real democracy in the whole area that was Indochina.
With Sihanouk out, and Souvanna Phouma (our man in Laos) hanging by a thread, what will happen to our other man in Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu? Will he be the next domino to fall? That possibility is what makes Washington so uneasy, for the whole policy of "Vietnamization" rests on the viability of the fragile Thieu government.
Sihanouk himself has no illusions about his next-door neighbors. He has always said Vietnamization would not work. "The day the Americans left," he says; "the Saigon army would dissolve, because it is composed only of mercenaries – very well equipped, to be sure, but paralyzed by the lack of an ideal."
Moreover, the prince predicts, once the United States leaves, the population of South Vietnam would vote "massively" for the Viet Cong. He says old Saigon friends of his, including "big business men and Catholics," have told him they, too, would vote for the Viet Cong if there were elections.
Three U.S. presidents, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, tried in vain to force reforms on the Saigon generals, in the hope of establishing a sound, democratic government capable of sustaining itself politically and militarily.
Nixon has fared no better. Thieu jails his opposition, shuts down the press, ousts a civilian as premier and installs a general in his place, tolerates corruption and arrests peace advocates.
This is the situation that has inspired Senators Alan Cranston, D-Calif., Thomas Eagleton, D-Mo., and Harold Hughes, D-Iowa, to introduce a new sense-of-the-Senate resolution calling for the prompt withdrawal of U.S. troops if the "Saigon generals do not immediately reform their government."
Vietnamization, says Cranston, "as now practiced will not end the war. It will keep the fighting going. More killing, more bloodshed, more sorrow, and for what? For a corrupt government which makes war on its own people." The Cranston-Eagleton-Hughes resolution is picking up support, for doubts about the Thieu government are not confined to the Democrats.
"Vietnamization," say Senator Charles Goodell, R-N.Y., "has been a great public relations success, but it is not a true policy of disengagement. We have not Vietnamized the war. We have cosmetized it."
Senator George McGovern D-S.D., puts it this way: "Vietnamization is an effort to tranquilize the conscience of the American people while our government wages a cruel and needless war by proxy."
Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, who is emerging as the Democrat's leading contender for the White House, voices a concern that is widely shared in Congress. "Given the prospect of our indefinite stay in Vietnam," he says, "Saigon has no incentive to improve militarily or to bargain away its own power at the peace table."
The sharpest criticism of Thieu has come not from the U.S. Senate but the South Vietnamese one. When Thieu railroaded a legislator, Tran Ngoc Chau, to prison earlier this month, Senator Phan Nam Sach, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, "President Thieu has torn up the Constitution."
Thieu however, brushed this aside, as he has the feeble, pro forma protests that the United States makes from time to time to keep up public appearances. Thieu knows that Nixon cannot abandon him without admitting Vietnamization is a failure. The best thing about the Cranston- Eagleton- Hughes resolution is that it offers Nixon a way out of this dilemma.
ARBITRARINESS IN SAIGON
The Saigon Government has taken a tardy first step toward reversing a dangerously arbitrary action with its decision to order a new trial for a neutralist legislator summarily convicted by a military court last week on charges of pro-Communist activity and then roughly seized in his sanctuary in the National Assembly. But it remains highly doubtful whether opposition leader Tran Ngoc Chau should ever have been brought to trial in the first place.
The House petition which the Thieu regime engineered to justify its violation of Mr. Chau's legislative immunity is of questionable legitimacy. Mr. Chau avers that members were bribed and threatened to persuade them to sign the document. Others have held that the Constitution requires an actual vote in the House to lift the immunity of members from prosecution.
Furthermore, the charges against Mr. Chau are based on contacts with a brother – since convicted as a Communist agent – which were carried out with the knowledge and approval of senior American officials in South Vietnam. John Paul Vann, chief of the United States pacification effort in the Mekong Delta, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently that Mr. Chau had reported to him on these contacts. Mr. Vann also told the committee that Mr. Chau was definitely not a Communist but rather a very dedicated nationalist.
In the light of this testimony it is inconceivable that Mr. Chau could be convicted of subversion because of his relations with his brother. It is disgraceful that senior American officials in Saigon have failed to intervene in the lawmaker's behalf, reportedly on the basis of orders not to do so.
The Chau case is only the latest in a long series of persecutions and harassments directed atSouth Vietnamese who, like Mr. Chau, have espoused the kind of compromise solution to the war to which the Governments of South Vietnam and the United States ostensibly are committed.
The perpetuation of this repressive policy by Saigon, with the acquiescence of Washington undermines the credibility of both Governments. It subverts the Nixon Administration's professed objective of achieving peace under a regime that is representative of the South Vietnamese people.
In the case against Tran Ngoc Chau it is really Saigon and Washington that are on trial. The charges against Mr. Chau should be dropped forthwith.
[From the Washington Post, Mar. 26, 1970]
U.S. SILENT ON BUNKER'S ROLE IN VIETNAMESE SPY CASE
(By Murrey Marder)
The State Department refused yesterday to discuss reports that Ellsworth Bunker, ambassador to Saigon, frustrated American intercession in South Vietnam's Tran Ngoc Chau case.
Chau, once a favorite of U.S. officials in Vietnam, was sentenced to 10 years in prison earlier this month for pro-Communist activity.
His prosecution is regarded by many U.S. sources as a calculated warning to South Vietnamese against private contacts with Americans, and a warning to those who favor broadening the Saigon government in order to seek a compromise settlement of the war.
What is really at issue, these sources contend, is Saigon's determination to gain veto power over any war settlement.
Apparent support for these suspicions came in another set of spy charges in Saigon last week. South Vietnamese police displayed a photo showing an alleged spy, Bui Van Sac, talking to an American official identified as Harold Colebaugh, former political officer at the U.S. Embassy.
DEFENDANT'S STORY
In the first case, against Chau, the defendant claimed at his military trial that he kept U.S. officials informed of his contacts with his brother, a confessed North Vietnamese secret agent.
Several U.S. sources have confirmed these contacts, including John Paul Vann, now a senior pacification official in Vietnam. Vann testified in closed session before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month about his association with Chau.
The American Embassy, to the private chagrin of many of Chau's American friends, remained publicly silent about the Chau case, however. Chau bitterly protested that he was being sacrificed by the U.S. government to avoid offending South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, who was determined to convict him.
In the subsequent spy case involving Bui Van Sac, however, the U.S. Embassy evidently regarded the implications about American contacts to be so blatant that embassy officials felt compelled to speak out.
In defense of Colebaugh's contacts with Sac, the embassy said last Sunday that Colebaugh and other U.S. officials had met with Sac "in connection with carrying out their official responsibilities."
BUNKER ACCUSED
Ambassador Bunker, in a published report yesterday, was charged with "misinforming" Washington about the Chau case. Flora Lewis, columnist for Newsday, reported that Bunker, one of President Thieu's strongest supporters, had planned to issue a statement intended to disassociate the American Embassy from Chau.
Bunker, Miss Lewis reported, planned to say publicly that "no American ambassador directly or through any intermediary suggested or encouraged Mr. Chau to initiate or continue his contacts with Capt. Hien" (Capt. Tran Ngoc Hien, the Hanoi agent and Chau's brother).
The State Department, Miss Lewis reported, advised Bunker not to issue the statement because it would conflict with testimony given by Vann at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Other sources said yesterday that the Bunker statement was carefully phrased to be technically accurate, but it would have exposed the Nixon administration to questioning of its credibility.
These sources said no one had claimed, as the Bunker statement denied, that an "American ambassador" had "suggested or initiated" Chan's contacts with Hien. Chau instead was said to have kept officials informed of the contacts and was also credited with helping alert U.S. officials to a Communist threat to Saigon, which later turned out to be the Tet Offensive of early 1968.
State Department press officer Carl E. Bartch said yesterday, "I will have no comment on that matter," declining to discuss the Chau case, the Lewis report or any other aspect of the affair.
President Nixon was asked about the Chau case on Saturday during his impromptu news conference. He replied that "this was a matter which Ambassador Bunker has discussed with President Thieu" but it "would not be appropriate" to say anything further.
SAIGON'S RANGERS AGAIN ATTACK FOE INSIDE CAMBODIA – TROOPS REPORTED IN ATTEMPT TO TRAP VIETCONG FORCE AT FOREST SANCTUARY – FIGHTING CALLED HEAVY – AMERICAN COPTERS SUPPORT EFFORT ALONG BORDER BUT STAY IN SOUTH VIETNAM
(By Terence Smith)
CHAUDOC, SOUTH VIETNAM.--South Vietnamese Rangers crossed the border into Cambodia for the second consecutive day today in an effort to trap a Vietcong force estimated at two battalions.
Despite official denials by the South Vietnamese in Saigon, reliable sources here, including officers involved in the operation, confirmed that South Vietnamese troops and armored personnel carriers again penetrated Cambodian territory today and engaged enemy soldiers on the edge of the Paknam Forest, a well-known Vietcong sanctuary just across the border.
The sources also said the operation was being conducted with the active cooperation of the Cambodian Army. They said two battalions of Cambodian troops had been deployed as a blocking force to prevent the Vietcong from escaping to the north, but had so far not been involved in the fighting.
HEAVY FIGHTING REPORTED
In today's action, a column of South Vietnamese armored personnel carriers pushed to a point one-and-a-quarter miles north of the border and 2 miles east of the Bassac River before turning south in an attempt to trap the Vietcong. Heavy fighting was reported, but no casualty figures were immediately available.
The operation is scheduled to continue for several more days, although officers involved in the planning said it might be terminated before then if contact with the enemy was lost or if diplomatic complications became too great.
It is apparently fear of embarrassing the new Government in Pnompenh that prompted the official denials in Saigon today.
A South Vietnamese Army spokesman at the regular evening briefing told newsmen that the fighting with the Vietcong had occurred "a few hundred meters" inside South Vietnam. Earlier in the day the spokesman had said that the enemy had been encountered three miles short of the border with Cambodia.
Both statements are technically correct. The operation is being conducted on both sides of the border and contact has been made with enemy units in South Vietnam as well as Cambodia. But the spokesman denied that any action had occurred on the Cambodian side.
U.S. DECEPTION IN SAIGON
(By Flora Lewis)
(EDITOR.-Flora Lewis reports exclusively that U.S. Ambassador to Saigon Ellsworth Bunker misinformed Washington about developments surrounding the arrest of a South Vietnamese lawmaker. She explains its considerable significance to U.S. relations with the Thieu government.)
NEW YORK – A recent series of cables between the State Department and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon indicates that Bunker is, to say the least, misinforming Washington and that Washington knows it.
The situation has come to a head over the case of Tran Ngoc Chau, a Vietnamese assemblyman who was tried and sentenced to 10 years at hard labor on a charge of being in touch with a Hanoi agent. Chau testified at his trial that the contacts were made with the knowledge and backing of the U.S. Embassy. But the U.S. has never commented publicly, one way or the other.
The Chau case is of the greatest importance because its implications are central to U.S. relations to the government of President Thieu, and to the question of whether or not Thieu has the power to veto any efforts to negotiate a Vietnam settlement with Hanoi. It reflects Thieu's efforts to manipulate the U.S. and his own people into a box, without challenge from the U.S. ambassador.
The cables show that Bunker proposed to make a public statement after Chau, whose trial Washington asked him to prevent, had been convicted. Bunker told State that Chau's testimony was "false and misleading" and that he planned to say publicly that "No American Ambassador directly or through any intermediary suggested or encouraged Mr. Chau to initiate or continue his contacts with Capt. Hien." (Capt. Tran Ngoc Hien, the Hanoi agent, is Chau's brother. He was arrested last April and is now jailed in Saigon.)
The Department told Bunker not to say anything of the sort because it was "in conflict" with testimony given to a secret hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month by John Vann, top U.S. civilian official in the Mekong Delta region, and thus would provoke awkward questions.
That was a diplomatic way of saying the Department knew Bunker's proposed comment was untrue, and was aware that Bunker also knew it was untrue.
Bunker wanted to include in his statement that Chau "on several occasions in conversations with American officials associated with him in the pacification program made veiled references to an important political cadre from Hanoi with whom he was in contact."
But Vann testified to the Senate committee that he received detailed descriptions from Chau of his brother and their relationship and how the Americans might contact Capt. Hien directly, if they chose. That was at a meeting in July, 1966.
Vann sought to arrange a meeting between Hien and then U.S. Ambassadors Lodge or Porter. But Lodge finally decided against it and authorized Vann to talk to the agent. That talk never took place because Hien answered Vann's request, sent through Chau, that he would see the men at the top, or no American official at all.
Vann's testimony made clear that Chau acted with the encouragement and backing of the U.S.
The record also shows that Chau played an important role in what became U.S. strategy before the 1968 Tet offensive, which may have prevented the fall of Saigon and a communist victory at that time.
Chau gave a long briefing on his understanding of coming events to Ambassadors Bunker and Samuel Berger, Lt. Gen. Frederick C. Weyand, Vann and others in September, 1967. Bunker does not deny this session.
Chau had learned from his brother that the Vietcong planned big attacks on populated areas, although he did not have precise information about the timing and place of the Tet offensive. Nonetheless, on the basis of his knowledge of the situation, he urged the U.S. to strenghten defenses of those areas instead of shifting most of its forces out to border regions.
Chau's combination of information and reasoning convinced Van and Gen. Weyand, the commander of the III Corps area which includes Saigon. Weyand then urged the strategy on Gen. Westmoreland, then U.S. commander in South Vietnam.
That was in November, 1967. Westmoreland, who in that period announced that the war was nearly won, had issued orders to move the great bulk of U.S. forces in III corps to the border provinces in pursuit of what he believed was a disintegrating enemy. The shift was to take place by January 1, 1968.
Weyand argued intensely against that strategy and finally won from Westmoreland a compromise delaying the movement for 6 months. At that time, the enemy was provoking battles near the border, notably at Dak Tho and Loc Minh, which with hindsight can be seen as an effort to draw U.S. troops away from the capital in preparation for the Tet attacks. The big Tet offensive came at the end of January.
Some top Americans who were in Vietnam at that time are convinced that if Westmoreland's orders had not been challenged, the big airports at Saigon and nearby Bien Hoa could have been overrun, preventing reinforcements and thus possibly leading to the loss of the Vietnamese capital.
President Thieu's government, in the course of the prosecution of Chau, has issued statements that it was unaware of Chau's connection with the Americans. (Vann testified to the contrary.)
Another official statement was made on Feb. 22, the day before attempts began to arrest Chau. It charged that the U.S. was in collusion with the Vietcong at the time of the Tet offensive and deliberately removed the South Vietnamese army's ammunition to weaken its defenses at the time of the attack.
American Vietnam experts interpreted this as a warning from Thieu to the Embassy against supporting Chau, lest it give some credence to this outrageous lie. The statement was made by Thieu's special assistant Nguyen Van Thang, whose position with Thieu is often compared to Henry Kissinger's role in the Nixon administration. The charge was repeated by prosecutor and judge in the public trial.
Bunker asked Thieu about it, reporting to Washington, "I said I was frankly amazed. Everybody knows about Chau's efforts to involve the U.S. in this case. Now the court seems to to have fallen in the same trap." He accepted Thieu's bland denial of any involvement.
In the period before Chau's trial, Bunker kept relaying without comment South Vietnamese assurances that Chau would not be prosecuted, although the preparations for his arrest were public knowledge. Bunker repeatedly told Washington, which asked him to head off the trial, that everything was being done according to due process and in strict legality. At the same time, however, his Embassy was reporting that Thieu's agents were bribing many deputies to remove Chou's parliamentary immunity and secretly organizing and paying for demonstrations against Chau.
Bunker, whose cables are read by top officials, took no note of these embassy reports which often contained a contradictory version of the facts to the State Department.
The case has caused immense concern among American officials below the top level in both Saigon and Washington, partly because they know and respect Chau and feel the U.S. has betrayed his trust, partly because they think Thieu's intricate maneuvering in this case has put him in a position to block any real efforts to negotiate a peace.
The U.S. still has issued no formal comment on the case, nor permitted release of Vann's testimony, presumably because it would be too embarrassing to appear to confirm Thieu's back-handed charges that the U.S. had secret dealings with the communists, and that they affected defenses during Tet.
Vann also testified that, despite Thieu's disclaimers, the South Vietnamese government was informed about Chau and the whole affair in July, 1969. Vann himself told South Vietnamese Prime Minister Khiem about it at that time, on the authorization of his superiors in the U.S. establishment in Saigon.
Bunker's cables ignore all this and protest instead at Chau being represented in the U.S. press as a "patriotic nationalist." He told the State Department that Chau had called for a coalition government, which is a crime in South Vietnam although President Nixon has said he would not oppose such a government.
The record shows, however, that Chau has publicly opposed admitting communists in the government, though he favors negotiations, a cease-fire, and the communists' right to participate in elected bodies such as the National Assembly.
Bunker, 75, is a traditional type of New England Yankee with a record of high personal integrity.
However, it was he who picked Thieu as America's favorite candidate for presidency and, in effect, created the Thieu government. He is deeply committed to its maintenance in power.
The upshot of all this pettigoggery has been, as one Saigon Embassy cable reported, to "defame the U.S."
It also indicates that Thieu is working to prevent the U.S. as well as any South Vietnamese from being able to negotiate a settlement to the war, which Nixon has said is the first aim of his Vietnam policy. So far, Thieu is getting away with it and Bunker is justifying him to Washington.