During the early 1960s, I revisited Cambodia several times, and as I wandered through the pleasant byways of Phnom Penh, I would at times recall the funny, tragic “l’affaire du elephant” with nostalgia. It marked for me one of the few periods of cordial relations between Prince Sihanouk and the United States. The relationship thereafter deteriorated into violent confrontation. Unexpectedly, I became directly involved in Prince Sihanouk’s angry exchanges with Washington.
On August 6, 1965, the New York Times published a United Press dispatch quoting military intelligence sources in Saigon as saying that the North Vietnamese had moved the headquarters of their 325th NVA division from South Vietnam to the extreme northeastern corner of Cambodia to escape bombing by American and South Vietnamese aircraft. The Cambodians denied the report, determined not to allow the United States or the South Vietnamese any pretext for crossing the border in pursuit. At this juncture, an invitation came to me from Prince Sihanouk through the Cambodian ambassador at the United Nations challenging me to check out the report of the presence of the 325th North Vietnamese division by touring the specified border area. It was in a region to which no Western observer had been for years.
My invitation arrived three months after Sihanouk, breaking diplomatic relations with the United States, had expelled the American military and economic aid missions. The prince acted five days after South Vietnamese planes bombed the Cambodian village of Khum Dar, a hamlet situated in open terrain two miles inside the border. Earlier, Sihanouk had protested repeatedly to Washington about bombing attacks on Cambodian border areas by American and South Vietnamese planes as well as ground incursions by South Vietnamese troops searching for Vietcong and North Vietnamese bases.
It was well known that Vietcong forces were slipping occasionally into Cambodian frontier areas to evade pursuit or to outflank some South Vietnamese position near the border. It was also evident that it was impossible even for a force twenty times the size of Sihanouk’s army of thirty thousand to close the border entirely to such incursions. But if the report that the 325th Division had moved its headquarters into Cambodia was accurate, it would mean that the North Vietnamese for the first time had established a major operations base there. This would give the South Vietnamese and American forces cause enough for a large-scale cross-border strike.
I eagerly accepted Sihanouk’s invitation—American correspondents at the time were barred from Cambodia—fully aware that it would be a tricky undertaking laden with propaganda pitfalls. Sihanouk was playing a game on both sides of the political divide. I had learned that Sihanouk, desperate to forestall any spillover of the Vietnam War into his kingdom, was secretly negotiating with the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Vietcong, to obtain a guarantee of the inviolability of his country’s borders. As an inducement he was dangling political recognition of the NLF.
General Westmoreland, learning of Sihanouk’s invitation, strongly advised me against making the trip, warning that I would be used as a propaganda tool by the Cambodians, who he maintained were concealing Communist use of the border region for strikes into South Vietnam. Unspoken was the general’s uneasiness about the possibility that I might report on the secret CIA and Special Forces reconnaissance missions being undertaken in Cambodia. I rebutted Westmoreland’s advice, arguing that at a minimum it would be useful to survey the terrain features of the border region so as to assess the nature of the strategic problem. Westmoreland then provided me with one of his staff officers to brief me on the locations of suspected Communist operations. In fact, what I was embarking on turned out to be a prelude to the covert American B-52 bombings of suspected Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, which would become a major issue in American politics.
In Saigon, my American briefing officer paced before a wall map pointing to forests near the Cambodian border where he believed major North Vietnamese and Vietcong bases were located. He traced the possible supply routes from these bases to where the Vietcong guerrillas were operating in South Vietnam. Above the twisting, poorly defined Cambodian border, largely hidden under thick jungle foliage canopy, U.S. reconnaissance planes crammed with electronic gear had been searching ceaselessly for evidence of North Vietnamese and Vietcong activity. The briefing officer quoted his South Vietnamese sources extensively but conceded that American intelligence independently had no hard evidence that there were major North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. I then flew to Phnom Penh and spent my first days there interviewing the British and French military attachés. They told me that they had failed in many investigations to establish that there were major Vietcong or North Vietnamese sanctuaries in the Cambodian border region or that the country was a route for the delivery of equipment and supplies to the Vietcong. They did pinpoint areas for me where there might be such activity but noted that the forested regions were so impenetrable that they could not be sure of what might be going on there.
On October 4, I was driven with military escort to the coastal town of Sihanoukville, northwest of the Vietnamese border, where my guide turned out to be no less than the Cambodian defense minister, Lieutenant General Lon Nol, who two years later would stage a coup overthrowing Sihanouk as head of state. Lon Nol was waiting for me beside a helicopter in an open field outside the port town. The general spread out maps on which I pointed out areas I wished to visit. These were locations where Western briefing officers and the media had reported Communist activity. We then mapped out an itinerary through the border jungles and set out on a two-day trek by helicopter, jeep, and on foot.
By helicopter we surveyed the border between Krek and Minot, just to the north of the Parrot’s Beak, which juts into South Vietnam’s Tay Ninh Province. American intelligence officers speculated that the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the unit coordinating North Vietnamese and Vietcong operations in the South, was based in Tay Ninh Province. What was believed to be its key operational area was labeled Zone C, extending from northwest of Saigon to the Cambodian border. The zone was being heavily bombed by American and South Vietnamese planes. I asked Lon Nol to make an unscheduled visit to Krek so that I could travel along Provincial Route Number 22 to a border crossing where American intelligence had received reports of wheel marks indicating Vietcong traffic in and out of Zone C. Our helicopter landed at Krek, and by jeep we drove to the Cambodian army post of Trapeang, about two miles from the frontier. Beyond that point no Western observer was known to have been permitted to go in at least several years. The general, whom I found to be a rather nervous, emotional man, agreed to proceed after he called in an overhead cover of two Cambodian Sky Raider fighter planes, since we were entering an area which was repeatedly bombed and strafed by South Vietnamese planes. The road was passable for another mile and then ended at an old destroyed bridge. Escorted by armed peasant militia, we picked our way across the stream over a temporary footbridge made up of loose tree branches and then followed a foot path through the jungle until we came to the barbed wire fence of a small Cambodian army installation, Poste Smach, sixty yards from the frontier. The old Route 22 was not passable beyond, and it was obvious that the tale of fresh wheel marks had no basis. That morning at Poste Smach we heard the sounds of bombs exploding nearby in Zone C. Militiamen at the post told me that it was the fourth such raid by South Vietnamese or American planes in ten days. Later I learned that the bombing we heard that day had been part of the start of a sustained campaign ordered by the Johnson administration in which, from 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties were flown by tactical aircraft dropping 214 tons of bombs along that section of the border.
At Bo Kheo, in the remote northeastern corner of the border, we made another unscheduled landing at my request, about twenty-five miles from the frontier, beside Provincial Route Number 19. We inspected an airfield which had been described in news agency reports quoting American intelligence sources as a Communist air base. We found the airfield heavily overgrown with brush. It obviously had not been used for years and could not have accommodated the North Vietnamese transport planes which the report said had been spotted landing there. Route 19 was cut and impassable for vehicles where it was shown on maps to cross the jungle-covered border. One intelligence report had said that forty trucks had been spotted on the highway crossing the border. From the air we surveyed the area in which the 325th North Vietnamese division was said to be operating. It was a dense, uninhabited, and trackless forest in the extreme northeastern corner of the border region. We saw no evidence of human activity, and there was no observable trail into the forest. It seemed most unlikely that any sizable military unit could be operating there.
As we moved along the border, we encountered groups of Vietnamese refugees who had crossed into Cambodia to escape bombing and strafing by American and South Vietnamese aircraft. Near the Cambodia frontier post at Oyadao, I spoke to a Vietnamese rice farmer, named Nguyen Dieu, whose family had fled with seventy-two other families from their village of Thangduc in Pleiku Province, about eight miles from the Cambodian border. A gaunt, fifty-one-year-old peasant, Dieu spoke with more fatalism than rancor about the death of his village and the flight of its thirteen hundred inhabitants after an attack by American jet planes on August 7. For Nguyen Dieu, the war against the Vietcong had been until that day a nebulous happening beyond the horizon of his rice fields, although he had felt the pinch when his two eldest sons were drafted into the South Vietnamese army. Beginning in May, however, Vietcong occasionally came into the village to buy food. The war closed in when the Vietcong emerged in force from the forests in July and besieged Duc Co, two and a half miles west of the village. South Vietnamese troops and a U.S. Special Forces unit were then stationed in the post. To reinforce the besieged post a South Vietnamese paratrooper battalion was dropped into Duc Co. People in Nguyen Dieu’s village could hear the sounds of battle only distantly. Suddenly, in August bombers appeared overhead. “They were bombing villages around Duc Co,” Nguyen said. “Then planes bombed and fired their guns at my village. There were no Vietcong in Thangduc. People were killed. I do not know how many. Everyone began to run into the forest.” Other villagers were killed and wounded in the forest by the planes which followed them bombing and strafing, but Nguyen did not know how many. He said he never saw any Vietcong after the bombing. In the forest, Nguyen gathered his wife and five of his children. Their fourteen-year-old daughter was still missing, but he decided to join the group of families which had elected to go westward to the Cambodian border. Between August 8 and 14, six groups of 73 men, 75 women, and 243 children crossed the frontier into Cambodia. They walked along Route 19, carrying a few household possessions, until it became a footpath into the forest on which they encountered Cambodian border guards. At the time there were reports from Saigon, apparently based on aerial observation, of Vietcong movement across the border. Fleeing refugees may have been mistaken for Vietcong. Near Oyadao, Nguyen Dieu built a lean-to from bamboo and straw to shelter his family and their dog, which followed them from Thangduc. “We do not want to go back until there is peace,” he told me.
Our circuit along the border bespoke the obvious. As of October 1965, there were no major North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, as I reported in a series of stories to the Times. Vietcong units certainly, as evidenced by what I was told at Oyadao, were ducking in and out of the border region. By observation it also seemed obvious that the bombing strategy being employed along the border would be of limited effectiveness in combating the Vietcong or halting North Vietnamese infiltration. Precise spotting of targets by aerial reconnaissance in the vast forests with their thick canopies of foliage was nigh on impossible. The electronic gear employed was of little help. This is what had impelled the American military to begin deployment of teams of Special Forces and the CIA, usually composed of a mix of American and Vietnamese, to reconnoiter into Cambodia. Over the years in the highly secretive operation more than one thousand such reconnaissance missions were undertaken by teams under the operational code names of “Daniel Boone” and “Silver House.” The team members crossed into Cambodia in civilian clothes and without identification. They were told that if they were captured there would be no negotiation to obtain their release. Families of those killed or captured were told that they were lost in operations on the Vietnamese side of the border. This secrecy was, in part, political so as not to give substance to Sihanouk’s complaints that his border was being violated.
When I returned to Phnom Penh from the frontier, I was received by Prince Norom Kantol, a courtly, soft-spoken aristocrat who was premier and foreign minister. He vigorously denied that Cambodian territory was being used by the Vietcong and said that the United States shared in responsibility for the hundreds of South Vietnamese incursions. “It is to be feared,” he told me, “that these aggressions must be a prelude to an attack against our country in the near future.” The prince, like other Cambodians I interviewed, was convinced, despite denials by American officials, that an invasion of their country by the South Vietnamese was impending. The worst fears of the Cambodians did come to pass in the next years. When I left Phnom Penh, I knew that Sihanouk and his countrymen would use every means open to them and make any alliance simply to shield their country from any destructive foreign intrusion.
During my interview with Prince Kantol, he told me that Sihanouk was absent, on a trip to their Communist allies. He had already visited Peking and was en route to Moscow. Kantol was not aware that the trip had resulted in a political disaster and that Sihanouk was on the way home in a state of rage. Upon arrival in Phnom Penh, Sihanouk took to the Cambodian Radio and made a two-hour speech, on October 17, in which he said that the Soviet Union had humiliated him in a manner that was “a virtual provocation for the rupture of relations between the two countries.” He said that his long friendship with Soviet leaders had ended because of their curt cancellation of his scheduled state visit to Moscow. He described how the Soviet ambassador in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, had handed him a note on October 8 that said the Soviet leaders were “very busy” and would be unable to meet him as planned. The Russians offered to allow him to cross Soviet territory on the way to other Communist countries in Eastern Europe and suggested that he arrange another visit to Moscow. The prince said the slight was “absolutely inexcusable and irreparable” and that he had called off his entire Eastern European tour, since he was no longer interested in visiting countries in the Soviet camp.
The Soviet snub was obviously a payback for the declarations made by Sihanouk in Peking in which he strongly endorsed the foreign policy and ideological positions taken by Mao Zedong contrary to those adopted by the Soviet Union. Sihanouk said that while in Peking he had been promised additional aid, including arms. The fallout with Moscow was costly to Sihanouk. The Russians were the major contributor of aid, particularly for development projects. In professing neutrality, the prince had been using the Soviet Union, and to lesser extent, France, as a counterweight in his relations with China. Sihanouk was now more dependent than ever on China as his principal mentor and ally.
After my return to Hong Kong, I received a personal letter from Sihanouk, written in French, dated December 5, 1965, which was indicative of the prince’s continuing frenetic balancing act. He said in part:
Certainly, the United States should be showing greater understanding of a country like Cambodia, which has succeeded despite American intrigues [aimed at overthrowing its national government] in effectively keeping Communism under control internally. This is what the Administration of your country attempts to do. In fact, through its brutal policy, its lack of understanding of Asian realities, and its support of dictatorial and unpopular regimes, it brings about the contrary effect. It creates Communists where they do not exist and multiplies them where they are not numerous. The breaking of relations between our two countries is not, therefore, a “contradiction,” neither on my part (since I have no reason to reproach myself) nor on the part of the United States, which is less interested in containing Communism than in creating docile allies in its struggle against China.
The prince referred me to his signed editorial in the Cambodian magazine Kambuja, a copy of which he sent me, in which he accused the Central Intelligence Agency of attempts to topple him from power. Sihanouk was alluding to a failed army coup attempt against him in February 1959. He said of the Johnson administration: “They have failed to understand that if Communism is to be contained they should assist in forging a cordon of states, strong in their nationalist convictions, irreproachably independent and genuinely free; states which have at their hand stubborn intractable leaders, as de Gaulle in France and (I will add without false modesty) Sihanouk in Cambodia.”
I had already become aware of Sihanouk’s list of heroes simply by strolling through his capital, an attractive prosperous, city of a half million residents. He honored them ceremonially by anointing some of the principal thoroughfares, such as Charles de Gaulle Avenue, Josip Broz Tito Boulevard, and Jawaharlal Nehru Boulevard. Once, taking a walk along the tree-lined streets, I had paused at a small café on the Boulevard of the USSR for a cup of tea and listened to a small string orchestra play the prince’s latest musical composition, the Bolero Twist. I now assumed, after the debacle of his canceled trip to Moscow, that the name of that pleasant boulevard would be changed.
In early January 1966, I covered the three-day state visit of Charles de Gaulle to Cambodia. I was one of several reporters in the large entourage accompanying the president. The occasion provided Sihanouk with what he regarded as his greatest moment of glory. It was also an occasion when the United States was offered an opportunity, which it did not exploit, to open peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. In a speech delivered before more than 100,000 people in Phnom Penh’s National Sports Stadium, the French president appealed to the United States to withdraw its forces from Vietnam. He said that the Vietnam conflict was threatening world peace and was “increasingly coming closer to China” and becoming “increasingly provocative in the eyes of the Soviet Union.” He said the opening of peace negotiations depended upon acceptance by the United States of an advance commitment “to repatriate its forces within a suitable and determined period.” De Gaulle spoke after meeting with Nguyen Thuong, chief of North Vietnam’s diplomatic mission in Cambodia, in the Palais Khemarin within the Palais Royal compound where the president was staying. His diplomatic aides took other soundings with envoys of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. The French diplomats told me later that Hanoi might find withdrawal during a period of two years from the issuance of such declaration by the United States as an acceptable basis for the opening of peace negotiations.
In his speech in the Sports Stadium, de Gaulle, erect in a tan summer uniform, spoke with sweeping gestures to an audience of thousands, which cheered him wildly. Seated on a bench behind the rostrum, I followed his remarks in the official text and noted that he rarely departed from it, although he hardly glanced at his own copy. In a voice laden with emotion, after citing the friendship of France and the United States over two centuries, he urged Washington to follow the example he set in withdrawing from rebellious Algeria, France’s former colony, saying: “In view of the power, wealth and influence at present attained by the United States, the act of renouncing[,] in its turn, a distant expedition once it appears unprofitable and unjustifiable[,] and of substituting for it an international arrangement organizing the peace and development of an important region of the world, will not, in the final analysis, involve anything that could injure its pride, interfere with its ideals and jeopardize its interests.” The French president’s emotional appeal did not move the Johnson administration.
From Phnom Penh I traveled with de Gaulle to Angkor. To celebrate the visit of his hero, Sihanouk transformed the temple enclave into a fantasy of light and sound, his Royal Ballet performing before the great temple. Upon leaving Cambodia, de Gaulle rendered homage to Sihanouk for his struggle to safeguard the territorial integrity of his country and its neutrality. Sihanouk, however, found in the next year that those twin goals were incompatible.
In 1967, in one of his ideological swings, after years of bitter animosity, Sihanouk turned once again to the United States. The situation on the ground had changed radically, and there was no longer any doubt that the North Vietnamese were infiltrating into Cambodia and had in alliance with the Khmer Rouge occupied large areas of the country, particularly in the northeast. Increasingly concerned, looking everywhere for help, the prince made overtures to the United States. In October 1967 he invited Jacqueline Kennedy to visit the temples at Angkor. I presumed he withdrew or apologized to her for his public remark uttered during one of his rages against the United States professing that he did not intend to mourn the death of her assassinated husband. Shortly afterward, Lyndon Johnson, hoping that Sihanouk would join in ridding his country of the Vietnamese Communists, messaged Sihanouk to the effect that Chester Bowles, the American ambassador to India, was available for a visit to Phnom Penh. Bowles had made a point of retaining good relations with Sihanouk. He had remained outspoken in his admiration of Sihanouk’s independent spirit and his struggle to safeguard the neutrality and integrity of his kingdom. In 1962 he had visited the Cambodian capital and had been treated most cordially by Sihanouk. The prince responded to Johnson by extending a warm invitation to Bowles, and in January 1968 the ambassador flew from New Delhi to Phnom Penh. Sihanouk was not aware that his invitation was putting into motion a top-secret operation that would be code-named “Vesuvius.”
Just prior to Bowles’s departure for Phnom Penh, under the tightest security, a group of American officials and military left Saigon on two T-39 light aircraft for New Delhi to brief the ambassador on violations of the Cambodian border by the Vietnamese Communists. The group, led by Philip Habib, a veteran State Department negotiator, included Lieutenant General William de Pugh, the chief of army operations in Vietnam, and two military intelligence officers, Lieutenant Colonel William White and Major James W. Reid. White and Reid carried with them briefing papers containing information collected in Cambodia by the Daniel Boone and Silver House teams in their cross-border forays. The papers also included data from air reconnaissance and radio intercepts, transcripts of interrogations of Vietcong deserters, and intelligence information gathered from the French rubber planter community.
Meeting with Sihanouk in Phnom Penh, Bowles displayed the maps and briefing books submitted to him in New Delhi by the Habib intelligence team. He proposed that whenever a bombing strike was to be made against North Vietnamese or Vietcong targets in the Cambodian border regions, the prince would be provided in advance with a data packet on the target area so that the prince could clear his people out of harm’s way. Sihanouk agreed in strict confidence to receive what became known as the “Vesuvius Packets.” But he specified that bombing must be restricted to areas uninhabited by Cambodians such as those in the northeast and asked for a guarantee that there would be no more American or South Vietnamese ground incursions. Bowles replied he could only convey the request on cessation of the ground incursions to President Johnson. It was a request never honored, but nevertheless, Vesuvius went forward in utmost secrecy.
Years later I was given the secret details of the Vesuvius operation by James Reid, a member of Habib’s team, now a retired colonel of the U.S. Army Intelligence. Although the most junior member of the Habib mission, the young Major Reid became a key player in the unfolding Vesuvius operation. Reid was ideally suited for his clandestine assignment. He was fluent in French and while a Princeton exchange student at the Ecole de Sciences Politiques in Paris had gained a working knowledge of Vietnamese. When I met Reid, a tall, intense man, he was authoring elaborately illustrated art books and travel guides. He was a distinguished lecturer in cultural programs aboard cruise ships. The prize possession in his home in Hartsdale, New York, which was stunningly decorated with ancient and modern art objects, was an eighteenth-century bronze drum of Cambodia’s Kha Hill tribesmen ferried discreetly to him out of Phnom Penh by the Australian military attaché.
Reid described to me for the first time the delivery and preparation of the Vesuvius Packets, to which he contributed information from his excellent French planter sources. One of the first of the packets, which were assembled in Vietnam by the intelligence wing of the MACV, contained information that the Vietcong had established a hospital hidden in the Cambodia border area to care for their troops wounded in Vietnam. Since the United States had no diplomatic relations with Cambodia, delivery of the packets required intermediaries. Reid would deliver the packets to a contact at the American Embassy in Saigon. The ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, in turn would pass them to the Australian ambassador, Noel St. Clair Deschamps, who would fly to Phnom Penh and deliver them personally to Sihanouk. The Australians were then representing the United States in the Cambodian capital. Prior to the Bowles mission, Deschamps had already delivered information to Sihanouk on Communist violations of the border.
Reid’s most important intelligence coup was made possible by his contacts in the French community, notably rubber tree planters. When Reid first raised the question of cooperation with the French, General West more land replied caustically: “Do you really believe we can rely on the French after what’s happened here in the last 100 years?” But once persuaded by Reid, Westmoreland agreed in return for intelligence information provided by the planters to desist from the practice of cutting back plantation rubber trees beside trails which might serve as concealment for Vietcong ambushers. The arrangement enabled Reid to solve a puzzle bedeviling American intelligence.
It was known that food and medicine were being trucked at night from Sihanoukville, the Canadian port neighboring the Vietnamese border, with the connivance of Sihanouk and Cambodian army officers, to the Communist units operating in the border areas. Many of the supplies destined for the Communists were being unloaded from ships flying the flags of neutral countries such as Panama. But American agents could find no evidence that weapons or munitions were being unloaded and transported, particularly the devastating 122-mm rockets, bearing Chinese factory markings, used to bombard targets in South Vietnam. How were they being delivered?
This is Reid’s story, told to me at his Hartsdale home, of how the puzzle was solved:
I was invited to dinner in Saigon by the Marquis de la Garde, to whom I had been introduced by friends in Paris. I was in worn field fatigues— what a startling contrast to the elegant French. My dinner partner was Marie Georges Sauvezon, a charming, cultured French woman. She was the publisher in Saigon of the excellent French daily newspaper, le Journal d’Extreme Orient. At the dinner, Madame Sauvezon suggested that I come to her apartment the next day for drinks. “There would be,” she said, “someone there with very interesting information.”
At her apartment the next day, Marie introduced me to a rubber planter. His plantation was on the coast near Ha Tien, virtually on the Vietnamese border. He told me that one night he awoke at about 3 A.M. suffering from a headache. He went out on the terrace of his villa which was on a hill overlooking the coast. There was a full moon, and he made out movements near the beach. Intrigued, he dressed, went down, and walked several hundred yards along the hill where he was able to get a clearer view. What he saw astounded him. For there, stretching out to sea for hundreds of feet was a long line of coolies standing up to their waists in water, which was barely three feet deep in that area. Out beyond, in deeper water where the sea bed dropped sharply, was a large cargo ship, and from it a small boat was transporting weapons—apparently rock-ets—to the head of the human line. The first person on the line shouldered the rocket, handed it to his neighbor, and so on until it reached the shore. Apparently from that beach the weapons were transported across the border. Surveillance of the coast was tightened thereafter.
Reid left Vietnam in July 1968 for his next assignment, to attend Stanford University for advanced studies on South America before serving there as a military attaché. Prior to leaving he was presented with the Legion of Merit for “outstanding meritorious services” by General Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam. The Vesuvius operation continued after his departure, although it is highly dubious that in making his compact with Bowles Sihanouk would have agreed to the magnitude of the massive B-52 bombings which ensued.