ON MONDAY, MAY 12, 1975, at 5:12 A.M., fewer than two weeks after the American evacuation from Vietnam, officers in the White House Situation Room learned that the US merchant ship Mayaguez had been boarded and seized by armed Khmer Rouge forces in international waters off Cambodia. Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft received the call at home at 5:17 A.M., just as he was getting ready to leave for work. Because the military officers and State Department officials staffing the White House situation room had few details, Scowcroft chose not to telephone either President Ford or Secretary Kissinger. Scowcroft found out more at his 7:00 A.M. intelligence briefing, and at 7:40 A.M., during the regular morning intelligence briefing, he told the president what he knew.322
Khmer Rouge forces in five US-made Swift Boats, teenagers mostly, had fired upon and captured the Mayaguez and its crew of forty Americans just after three o’clock in the afternoon (2:00 A.M. Washington time). A ten-thousand-ton, five-hundred-foot-long, thirty-one-year-old ship owned by Sea-Land Services, Inc., the Mayaguez was making its way from Hong Kong to the Thai port of Sattahip when it was stopped and boarded by the communists near a small island about sixty miles from the Cambodian mainland.
The Mayaguez had been reconfigured to handle shipping containers after three previous lives (and three previous names) as a cargo ship. It was the first-ever American container ship—that is, the first US-flagged merchant vessel dedicated to transporting individual, prefilled container boxes capable of being stacked, inventoried, and loaded onto trucks and trains.323 One Cambodian said that when they seized the vessel with its 274 containers, they thought they might find evidence the ship was on a spying mission or carried weapons and munitions.
The Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia from the Lon Nol government barely four weeks earlier, on April 17. The Khmer Rouge quickly began to hunt down and execute members of the former regime as well as to assert its claims over territorial waters, especially over the waters around islands also claimed by Vietnam, where Shell and Mobil had discovered rich oil deposits.324 These claims had led to incidents involving Cambodian forces and boats belonging to Thailand, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Panama.325 Now an American ship had been seized. The Mayaguez had been in what the United States deemed international waters within eight miles of Poulo Wai, one of the islands also claimed by Vietnam, when it was boarded and captured. The Khmer Rouge kept the Mayaguez at Poulo Wai for only a few hours before moving it to a spot off Koh Tang (Tang Island), a three-mile-long, narrow island lying thirty miles southeast of the port of Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) on the Cambodian coast.
Coming so soon after the demoralizing fall of South Vietnam and loss of Cambodia, the seizure of the Mayaguez posed a serious international relations challenge to the president and his advisers. How the United States responded would send an all-important signal to America’s adversaries and the rest of the world. As Ford later recalled, editors of major newspapers worldwide were starting to question the United States’ resolve to support its allies and its commitment to defend their mutual interests in the aftermath of its “humiliating” retreat from South Vietnam and Cambodia.326 Kissinger was adamant: the administration could not let the incident go unpunished without seeming to concede that United States was in decline. The president agreed.
During the four NSC meetings convened over the four days and three nights of the crisis, the president, Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Nelson Rockefeller, chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, Brent Scowcroft, and others repeatedly emphasized the importance of international perceptions.327 As Kissinger put it at the Tuesday night NSC meeting, “We should do something that will impress the Koreans and Chinese.”328 Scowcroft defined the challenge in even broader terms, making clear that the global reputation of the Ford presidency and the United States was front and center. “Our objectives,” Scowcroft said, “must be the recovery of the crew and ship in such a fashion as to make clear that the United States will not tolerate violence to its interests and remains able to act decisively as a free world leader.”329
A second, more immediate challenge was to save the ship’s crew. With the Khmer Rouge condemning the “bourgeois” business and professional classes, beginning to purge members of the former Lon Nol government, and starting to impose its brutal vision of a communist utopia, Ford and his advisers imagined the worst. No one, Scowcroft in particular, wanted a repeat of the 1968 incident in which North Korean forces had captured the USS Pueblo, a US intelligence-gathering ship, and held the crew captive for nearly a year before their release. (Afterward, the North Korean government proclaimed “another great victory of the Korean people who have crushed the myth of the mightiness of the United States imperialism to smithereens.”)330
The president and his advisers dreaded the possibility that the Mayaguez crew might become political hostages. If the crew were removed to the mainland, the State Department’s Lawrence Eagleburger wrote, “their recovery would have been virtually impossible—unless the Cambodians decided to release them—after who knows how many months and how much agony and humiliation.”331 This concern appears to have been first and foremost in the mind of President Ford, himself a former Navy officer.
A third challenge presented by the capture of the Mayaguez was one of presidential leadership. In office only nine months, Ford faced a skeptical, Democratic-controlled Congress and a critical American public, only 39 percent of whom approved of Ford’s performance in office. The Mayaguez crisis would be the “first real test” of his leadership, Robert Hartmann told him: “What you decide is not as important as what the public perceives.”332
Complicating matters was the fact that any military action taken by the US government would trigger for the first time the 1973 War Powers Act, with its requirements that Congress be notified of any military action before it was undertaken and as it proceeded. Furthermore, the 1970 Cooper-Church Amendment barred the US government from further air operations in Cambodian airspace—in any airspace outside Vietnam, in fact—without congressional approval.333 Ford didn’t want to compromise his executive authority by acknowledging the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, but at the same time he didn’t want to provoke a constitutional controversy by ignoring or directly challenging Congress. So he wanted to concede as little as possible, declaring at one NSC meeting that he’d decide how the United States responded “irrespective of Congress.”334
As the crisis unfolded, Brent Scowcroft was at the nexus where US foreign policy, intelligence, military operations, international diplomacy, and domestic politics came together. He ensured that all intelligence sources were brought to bear on the situation, placing an orbiting satellite in the right spot, monitoring radio transmissions in the Khmer dialect, and checking that regular aircraft reconnaissance was up and running.335 He served as the link between Ford and the rest of the government, communicating orders from the commander in chief to the military and relaying information from the military to the White House. He reminded those attending the NSC meetings of important relevant facts, kept the discussions focused on the decisions needing to be made, and translated the discussion and Ford’s statements into specific actions.
In the first NSC meeting on the Mayaguez, Vice President Rockefeller set the tone by strongly advocating a “show of force.” For the outspoken Rockefeller, it was obvious what the United States had to do: the seizure demanded a “violent response. The world should know that we will act and that we will act quickly. . . . If they get any hostages, this can go on forever.”336
Schlesinger agreed. The United States should “attack and sink the Cambodian Navy . . . after we have our ship and our people out, in order to maximize the punishment.” Kissinger, too, welcomed “the opportunity to prove that others will be worse off if they tackle us, and not that they can return to the status quo.” It was “not just enough to get the ship’s release,” Kissinger said; the United States “should seize the island, seize the ship, and hit the mainland. I am not thinking of Cambodia, but of Korea and of the Soviet Union and of others. It will not help you with the Congress if they get the wrong impression of the way we will act under such circumstances.”337
The administration’s subsequent military plan was dedicated to communicating the message that the United States was not to be trifled with. The plan was a hybrid of the options presented to the president by General David C. Jones, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs (the regular chairman, Gen. George S. Brown, was in Europe on business). It had three parts: a ground assault on Koh Tang, an air attack on the Cambodian mainland, and the physical recapture of the Mayaguez.
If concern about international perceptions dominated Ford’s decision making, then the safety of the Mayaguez crew logically came second. For this reason, Ford approved the military plan despite the great risk it entailed. From late Monday, May 12, through late Wednesday, May 14—that is, for almost the entire duration of the crisis—the White House and Pentagon were never actually certain where the Mayaguez crew was. But time was of the essence. The White House wanted to act quickly to lessen the chance that the crew would be taken hostage and that more Cambodian forces would be mobilized. The tight scheduling put Ford, Kissinger, Rockefeller, Rumsfeld, and Scowcroft at odds with Schlesinger and General Jones, who wanted to move more deliberately.
Thanks in part to the fast timetable, the ground assault was a near disaster. It was premised on an erroneous CIA report that the crew of the Mayaguez had been taken ashore on Koh Tang—even though DCI Colby and others had evidence that some or all of the ship’s crew had been moved to Kompong Som. “I don’t think the Americans are [on Koh Tang],” deputy secretary of defense William Clements said in Wednesday’s NSC meeting. “They could be,” Kissinger replied. “The problem is that we do not know that they are not there.” But he conceded the White House didn’t have good intelligence “about the crew’s whereabouts and movement,” and then added, “Taking the island if they are not there is easier to explain than failing to take it if they are.”338 Thus, despite the fact that neither the Pentagon nor the CIA could confirm that the Mayaguez crew was on Koh Tang, Ford decided to go ahead and “seize the island.”
Unfortunately, no one knew how many Khmer Rouge soldiers were on Koh Tang or what arms they had. The generally accepted intelligence estimate used by Ford was one hundred troops, but Schlesinger gave an estimate of sixty at an NSC meeting, while other intelligence reports put the number at no more than twenty.339 Yet there was no attempt to reconcile or test the assumptions behind the inconsistent intelligence estimates.340 Worse, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s larger estimate of 150 to 200 troops—which turned out to be the most accurate—was never communicated to Air Force Lt. Gen. John Burns, who was the local commander of the operation, or to any of the US Marine Corps officers involved with the situation.341
The rule of thumb in the Marines is to go in with at least a three-to-one ratio of attackers to defenders, but the first wave of Marines, 150 troops, was only 50 percent larger than the estimated enemy force of 100. And the actual number able to land and engage the Cambodians was only 110 Marines—essentially a one-to-one ratio.342 Worse, it turned out that the Cambodians were armed with mortars, small arms, and light and heavy machine guns.
The ground assault was further handicapped by the fact there were only sixteen helicopters available (eight CH-53s and eight HH-53s) to transport the Marines from the U-Tapao military base in Thailand, 190 nautical miles (200 statute miles) away—and to get to U-Tapao, the helicopters had to be relocated from the Seventh Air Force Headquarters at Nakhon Phanom, in northeastern Thailand on the Laos border. Unfortunately, during the relocation of the helicopters from Nakhon Phanom to U-Tapao late Tuesday night (local time), one of the CH-53s crashed, killing nineteen air force security policemen and all four crew members.343
Complicating matters was the fact that half of the helicopters being deployed for the ground assault were unsuited to the mission. The Air Force versions of the CH-53 were designed for passenger and cargo transport, and were less heavily armored and not as well equipped for battle as the US Marines’ HH-53, the Jolly Green Giant.344
When the first wave of Marines went in at sunrise on Thursday morning, May 15, three helicopters immediately drew heavy fire and went down. Not until six hours later did the second wave of Marines land on the beaches. Because a total of eight helicopters had been downed or incapacitated, further waves of Marines were canceled.
The Marines nonetheless managed to secure part of the island, but faced with a well-armed enemy, they chose not to try to capture the island. American military leaders then decided to evacuate, but this was a problem: there were “insufficient helicopter assets available to lift all personnel prior to darkness,” the Department of Defense summarized.345 With daylight fading and with the Marines still under fire, the “remaining extraction” of the marines became “a race against time.”346
The Marines lost that race. In the near-chaos and deepening darkness of the extraction operations, three Marines were mistakenly abandoned on the island—anathema to the Marine Corps. The next morning, the USS Wilson returned to Koh Tang to search for the three men, but in vain. Further rescue attempts were called off. Although the Marines were initially listed as missing in action and then as killed in action, they were in fact captured by the Khmer Rouge and then executed, one on the island and the other two on the mainland.347 (Ford doesn’t count these three deaths among the total of Mayaguez-related fatalities he lists in his memoir A Time to Heal.) All in all, the first part of the three-part military plan was largely a debacle.
The second part was an air attack on the Cambodian mainland. Kissinger, Rockefeller, and Rumsfeld initially wanted to use B-52s stationed on Guam, and the president accordingly had them put on standby. But General Jones and Schlesinger disagreed, and Jones, Schlesinger, Ford, and eventually Kissinger realized that using attack aircraft on board the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea, which had arrived late Wednesday (Washington time), would allow for more accurate targeting and less collateral damage, since the Navy aircraft operated at lower altitudes and were armed with precision-guided bombs. Minimizing collateral damage was desirable, since the White House recognized that the B-52s had become notorious among members of Congress, the press, and the American public.348
Ford clearly viewed the air strikes as an opportunity to display America’s toughness. “We wanted to show them that we meant business,” he writes in A Time to Heal. When told in the Tuesday late-night NSC meeting that there were two possible targets on the mainland, an airfield and a naval base about ten miles southeast of Kompong Som, he asked, “Why not hit both of them? There would be as many objections to hitting one as two of them.”349 And when Kissinger emphasized the next day that he wanted “a strong effort” from the military and to “take out the port,” Ford agreed.350
Scowcroft’s record on the air strikes is unclear. The minutes from the NSC meetings do not show Scowcroft calling for air attacks on the Cambodian mainland, possibly because they have been edited. Neither do they show him making any objections to the strikes.351
Between 7:00 and 11:30 A.M. local time on Thursday, May 15—the same morning as the ground assault on Koh Tang—F-4 Phantom II fighters, A-7 Corsair II attack aircraft, and A-6 Intruder aircraft, grouped in four waves of ten to twelve aircraft, attacked Kompong Som and the nearby Ream airfield and naval base. The first wave did not drop its ordnance, a failure that would become the source of contention after the crisis ended. (Scowcroft had initially relayed an order from Kissinger to the national military command center that the first wave was not to drop its ordnance until being notified by the president, but Ford then rescinded that order.)352 However, the second and third waves of aircraft used strafing fire, cluster bombs, and five-hundred-pound bombs to hit the Ream airfield, the Ream naval base, oil storage facilities, a railroad yard, and the civilian port. The fourth wave was called off at 11:55, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff canceled all further offensive actions.353
The stunning feature of the air assault on the Cambodian mainland was that President Ford directed that the attack begin before he knew the location of the Mayaguez crew. On Tuesday evening, Scowcroft and the president talked about how the pilot of an Air Force A-7 had spotted three boats in the port:
Scowcroft: Mr. President.
Ford: Yes, Brent.
Scowcroft: Three little boats have taken off toward the northeast. One boat has been sunk. The second has turned back and the third is continuing full speed. If they can’t stop it any other way, we have no choice but to destroy it.
Ford: I think we have no choice. . . . If we don’t do it, it is an indication of some considerable weakness.
Scowcroft: No question about it.
Ford: I think we should just give it to them.
Scowcroft: To show them we mean business.354
Soon thereafter, Scowcroft described the sighting of a boat with “a group of what looks like Caucasians huddled on the bow”:
Scowcroft: The pilot thinks he can stop it without sinking it.
Ford: . . . Well, I don’t think we have any choice.
Scowcroft: If they get the Americans to the mainland they have hostages and . . .
Ford: We have to predicate all these actions on the possibility of losing Americans.
Scowcroft: I will have them ask the pilot to do his best to stop it without sinking it.355
With no one in the Pentagon or White House knowing where the crew was and with Caucasians having been seen in the port, the attack on Kompong Son put the captured Americans at risk.356 Ford nonetheless wanted to go ahead and strike the Cambodian facilities anyway, “whether or not we find the Americans” on the island.357 He told Senate minority leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), “We are not sure where they are,” and when House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Okla.) asked if the crew was on the boats about to be attacked, Ford answered that there was “no way of knowing.”358 Ford later told Ron Nessen he had concerns that members of the ship’s crew might be killed. And he warned his advisers that they should be prepared for the deaths of the Mayaguez crew: “I think we have to assume that the Americans were taken from the island and that some were killed. This is tragic, but I think we have to assume that it happened. Does anybody disagree?” No one disagreed.359
Still, some wondered whether they could avoid such a risk. In the Wednesday NSC meeting, Colby noted that the American crew “taken ashore may have been transported further inland by the Cambodians, and at present there is no way of telling where they may be.”360 And Ford’s general counsel, Philip Buchen, cautioned, “You might hit Americans.” Yet Ford decided to go ahead, irrespective of the risks: “I do not think we should delay. I think we should go on schedule. Then, whether or not we find the Americans [on the island], you can strike.”
Once the decision had been made, Kissinger advised the president and the others at the meeting on how they could avoid being second-guessed:
I think it is essential in situations of this kind to make clear that it is we who define the hazards. We can argue that we are doing this to protect our operations. What we have to get across to other countries is that we will not confine ourselves to the areas in which they challenge us. So I think we should do the strikes at the same time of the operation. Then, if we have not found our people, we can mine or do other things. We can also issue an ultimatum. We can say that the 100 aircraft was a protective operation. Of course, we would have some difficulties with people on the Hill and with others.361
Late that evening, after a black-tie dinner with the Dutch prime minister, Ford was informed that the Mayaguez crew had been released and that they were all fine. They had been held at the Cambodian navy compound at Koh Rong Sam Lem, about ten miles from Kompong Sam. When Schlesinger called the president shortly thereafter to tell him that the Mayaguez crew had been spotted on a boat at sea, Ford roared with laughter. “Schlesinger didn’t have a clue to what was going on. . . . He didn’t even know the crew had already been recovered.” Kissinger, Scowcroft, Rumsfeld, and others in the Oval Office then also “broke into loud laughter,” reported Bud McFarlane, who also joined in. At that moment David Hume Kennerly took his famous photograph of President Ford and his top advisers all laughing and appearing to celebrate the news of the crew’s release. Because the true story couldn’t be told—that they were all laughing at Schlesinger’s expense—the official description of the photograph was that it showed the happy reactions of the president and his aides upon learning of the crew’s safe release, letting out “whoops of joy” after an extremely intense and trying four days.362
Scowcroft then quickly got back to business. “Is there any reason,” he asked, “for the Pentagon not to disengage?”
“No,” Kissinger answered, “but tell them to bomb the mainland. Let’s look ferocious.”363 The president agreed, even though the third wave of attack aircraft had not yet reached its targets (and so could be called off), and even though the Mayaguez crew members had told Navy officers on the USS Wilson that “they promised [to the Khmer Rouge] air strikes would cease” upon their release. (Ford did order the Marines to halt the ground assault on Koh Tang.) So when General Burns checked with General Jones and Secretary Schlesinger to see whether he should continue on with the air strikes from the Coral Sea, they told him to proceed with the third strike. But there was no fourth strike, even though the White House hadn’t countermanded its earlier orders. Indeed, the angriest the president became throughout the entire crisis was when he found out that neither the first nor fourth wave of aircraft had expended its ordnance over Cambodia. Ford recollected that he had said “to continue the strikes until I said to stop.”
“That is my recollection,” Scowcroft replied. “And you told Schlesinger.”
The president, as a result, asked for “a detailed summary of the orders which went out and any changes which were made . . . including the time sequence of takeoffs and what happened.”364
The third part of the White House’s military plan was the recapture of the Mayaguez, timed to coincide with the assault on Koh Tang and the air attack. This turned out to be anticlimactic. Early Thursday morning, the USS Holt, which had arrived from Subic Bay, maneuvered alongside the Mayaguez, and forty-eight US Marines boarded the ship—the first ship-to-ship boarding by US Marines since 1836—only to find it abandoned. With the help of six merchant marine volunteers, the US marines got the ship’s generator started and raised the American ensign over the stern. The ship’s crew then got back on board; Captain Charles T. Miller took the helm and headed the Mayaguez to Singapore.365
In regard to the safety of the Mayaguez’s crew, the Ford administration got lucky. It’s easy to imagine one or more of the crewmembers being accidentally killed, whether by their captors or by US ordnance. Fortunately, local commanders and pilots followed the president’s orders to the letter and did not shoot on or sink any of the boats ferrying the Mayaguez crew to the mainland. Furthermore, although the ship’s crew was taken to the mainland, just as the crew of the Pueblo had been, the Khmer Rouge did not exploit them for political purposes. In addition, the Mayaguez captain was “exceptional,” able to keep the trust and loyalty of an independent-minded and potentially rebellious crew—one that included several former military men—over three and a half extraordinarily stressful days. Captain Miller succeeded at improvising in his negotiations with the Khmer Rouge and was able to convince them that if they were released, the US attacks would stop (seven Cambodian gunboats had been sunk over two days and, according to the account of one Cambodian official, a hundred of his countrymen had already been injured).366
But it was more than just luck. The president’s quick decision making and the almost immediate mobilization of US armed forces created their own momentum, inducing the Cambodians, who were fearful of further military actions, to release the Mayaguez crew unharmed.367 “Within forty-eight hours,” Kissinger writes,
an aircraft carrier, two destroyers, and one thousand Marines had already been deployed; an auxiliary carrier was scheduled to arrive a day later in a region where we had previously had no thought of taking any military action. B-52s were on alert, and tactical aircraft were blanketing the area. No other country would have been capable of undertaking so rapid and relevant a deployment.368
But the quick decision making and fast deployment came at the expense of diplomacy. Ten hours elapsed between when the Ford administration learned of the Mayaguez seizure and when any official tried to contact the Cambodian government. On the evening of Wednesday, May 13, Ford and his top advisers essentially ignored a Cambodian radio broadcast indicating that the Mayaguez’s crew had been released. And the White House disregarded an undisclosed foreign government’s communication fourteen hours before the assault on Koh Tang that it was intervening and soon expected the ship and its crew to be released.369
Nonetheless, with the ship’s crew safely recovered and all in good health, most members of Congress, the press, and the American public regarded the Mayaguez incident as a great success. Even congressional Democrats agreed with the president’s hard-nosed response and applauded the results. Editors and columnists praised the White House and Pentagon for saving the thirty-nine members of the Mayaguez crew and for restoring the reputation of the United States as the leader of the free world.
The Ford White House had successfully passed its three-part test. First, it had communicated to Cambodia, Korea, China, the Soviet Union, and other potential adversaries that the US government wouldn’t hesitate to defend its citizens and its interests. Regardless of what had happened in Cambodia and Vietnam, the United States wasn’t going to relinquish its role as the leader of the free world. Second, the administration had secured the safe release of the Mayaguez crew, with no one killed or injured. Third, the president had demonstrated his leadership. And while he also complied with the War Powers Act, he did so perfunctorily. He hardly “consulted” with the Democratic leadership, barely following the letter of the law by speaking with members of Congress late Wednesday, five minutes before the US Marines were to leave U-Tapao en route to Koh Tang. Ford himself acknowledged he didn’t act according to the spirit of the law. When asked by Schlesinger at the Monday NSC meeting how he wanted to handle his authority as president and relation with Congress, Ford answered “There are two problems: First, the provisions of summer, 1973,” and “Second, the war powers.” He then told his associates, “I can assure you that, irrespective of Congress, we will move.”370 Just as he and his advisers had planned, they conceded as little as possible to Congress.
Unsurprisingly, a number of members of Congress were displeased at having been bypassed by the White House and asked the General Accounting Office to audit the administration’s actions.371 The subsequent report, written without White House cooperation, was highly critical of the Ford administration for acting prematurely, before it exhausted diplomatic channels. The White House classified the report and only released a watered-down version in early 1976. Nonetheless, most members of Congress were “overwhelmingly positive” about the outcome of the crisis and didn’t criticize him.372 The Mayaguez incident boosted morale in the White House, within the military, and throughout the government, and the president’s job approval ratings rose 11 percent.
The press helped secure this positive reaction. For four days following the release of the Mayaguez crew, the Pentagon maintained that there had been only one confirmed American death, some missing Marines, and several dozen injured. The White House and the Pentagon kept the news of the deaths in the Thailand helicopter crash “secret from the press for over a week,” and the story of the final three Marines didn’t emerge until much later. By the time the twenty-three deaths from the Thailand crash and the eighteen deaths on Koh Tang became known, the Mayaguez was old news. By then, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other influential papers had already featured leading stories celebrating President Ford’s actions, newspapers nationwide had already run complimentary wire stories and syndicated columns—the nationally syndicated columnists Evans and Novak, for example, proclaimed the Mayaguez incident a “spectacular triumph”—and Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and other magazines had run cover stories heralding Ford’s success.
Of course, the public relations success shouldn’t obscure the very real question of whether the Ford administration “deliberately withheld, delayed and falsified casualty figures in order to sustain as long as possible the general glow that followed the recovery of the ship and crew,” as the New Republic’s John Osborne put it. Very simply: it did.373
BEHIND THE ADMINISTRATION’S apparent triumph lurked an unpleasant truth: the national security system didn’t function nearly as well as it should have. There were repeated instances of communications being either delayed or transmitted incompletely, of poor or insufficient planning, and of flawed coordination within the military and across the government.
For example, the attack on Koh Tang, which was supposed to start at first light, didn’t begin until sunrise—more than half an hour after nautical dawn—with the result that the attack was less of a surprise and provided less of a tactical advantage than it should have. Tactical aircraft weren’t in contact with ground forces during the assault, so when the Air Force dropped a fifteen-thousand-pound daisy cutter on the island, the US Marines on the beach knew nothing of the bombing until the bomb actually went off. A more experienced Marine battalion based on Okinawa had been available but for some reason wasn’t assigned to the rescue operation.374 There were other problems as well.
President Ford was upset, as previously noted, to find out that on more than one occasion his orders hadn’t been carried out. So at the Thursday NSC meeting he instructed Kissinger to let him know of any “observations or suggestions which you consider would contribute to the ability of the National Security Council machinery to deal effectively with crisis situations.” Kissinger was to prepare a “consolidated evaluation report” for the president once State, Defense, and the CIA had finished their respective reports.375
Scowcroft and his NSC staff raised further questions. Why hadn’t there been pre-attack strikes on Koh Tang directed against antiaircraft installations and other observed targets, which was standard procedure for ground assaults? Why had there been negligible support from air and naval gunfire once the Marines had landed on the island? Why had there been no plans for the Marines to be taken to the nearby USS Coral Sea or the Henry E. Holt once they had finished their mission, rather than being helicoptered all the way back to U-Tapao? (Some were in fact taken to the Coral Sea, the Holt, and the Wilson during the rushed evacuation, but not by predesign.)
Why were so few aircraft used in each of the attack waves directed at Kompong Som on the Cambodian mainland? The Coral Sea carried eighty-one airplanes, but only around half were deployed. Why were the intervals between those attack waves—ninety minutes—so lengthy?376 And why weren’t senior US government officials immediately informed of the capture of the Mayaguez when the national military command center first found out?
Scowcroft passed the president’s and his staff’s questions on to the relevant departments and agencies for answers. Three questions were of particular concern to him: Why did the Department of Defense not develop options for the president, as it had been directed to do in the Monday NSC meeting? Why did the United States’ initial information about the ship’s location prove to be so unreliable? And why did the first wave of Coral Sea aircraft not release its ordnance over Kompong Som?
Based on findings from the NSC staff, Kissinger drafted an “unusually long” memo to the president addressing many of the above questions. Kissinger recommended specific changes in NSC procedures, and he requested Ford’s authorization to send memoranda to Defense and the CIA criticizing their performances in this crisis.377 As one NSC staffer wrote in an internal report sent to Scowcroft, “Defense was remiss in not insuring that military commanders fully carried out several of the President’s orders. We have also concluded that both Defense and CIA did not provide as accurate information as was possible during the initial phase of the crisis.”378
The US government’s response to the Mayaguez seizure made two things amply clear. One was the importance of coordinated action within the administration, particularly in times of crisis. While President Ford was ultimately in charge of managing the Mayaguez crisis, he could realistically devote only some of his time to it. (During the four days, Ford conferred with members of Congress on other matters, met with foreign delegations and heads of state, and fulfilled other obligations).379 The implementation of the president’s policies therefore necessarily—and appropriately—devolved to his senior foreign policy advisers, his military leaders, and their respective staffs.
Here, the transcripts of the NSC meetings show that the Ford administration worked well as a team. The discussions were serious, intense, and candid, and the records reveal no obvious rivalries or opposing coalitions. Although Schlesinger, Kissinger, and Rumsfeld were known to oppose each other on various policy issues—SALT II, for example—during the Mayaguez crisis they worked together effectively, trying to come up with sound decisions under conditions of immense pressure.380
The NSC debates were remarkably professional and free-flowing, with many of the principals and their deputies taking part, consistent with Ford’s preference for open debate—so much so that White House photographer Kennerly at one point took the liberty to ask, “Has anyone considered that this might be the act of a local Cambodian commander who has just taken it into his hands to halt any ship that comes by? Has anyone considered that he might not have gotten his orders from Phnom Penh?” (Kennerly’s participation—a clear breach of protocol—doesn’t appear in the NSC meeting transcripts, because the memoranda of conversations, according to Scowcroft, were “edited and transcribed” for administrative purposes.)381
Only after the crisis had ended did the rivalry between State and Defense reemerge. On Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Joseph Laitin publicized the successful release of the Mayaguez crew without first informing the White House and letting President Ford or the White House press office break the good news. When presidential spokesman Ron Nessen was handed the newswire bulletin announcing that the Mayaguez crew had been freed, he shouted, “That goddamn Laitin has already leaked the news!”382
So teamwork at the leadership level was not a major problem during the Mayaguez crisis. And this was largely because of Scowcroft. He was at the center of it all—orchestrating foreign policy, coordinating the military operations, handling press relations, and consistently doing the little things that held the US government together.383 In fact, Scowcroft later described the Mayaguez rescue as a “beautifully done operation” that “went extremely well.”384
Scowcroft arranged for the Monday morning NSC meeting. He briefed the NSC on where things stood during the critical Tuesday midnight NSC meeting. And he kept the meetings focused on what needed to be decided and made sure that crucial information surfaced. For example, Scowcroft (and Rumsfeld) made the important point that aircraft from the Coral Sea could arrive at the battle scene significantly in advance of the carrier itself, a fact Schlesinger and General Jones neglected to point out.385 And Scowcroft reminded everyone of the diplomatic consequences of damaging US-Thai relations by using Thailand’s bases in connection with US military operations and the Mayaguez.
Ron Nessen observed that Scowcroft did whatever was necessary to keep the government operating over the three and a half days of the crisis, even as he seemed ready at times to “collapse from stress and exhaustion.”386 Late on Wednesday, Kissinger wanted to let the Cambodians know that the United States was willing to stop attacking once it had reassurances that the Mayaguez crew would be released. But Nessen balked at the order; Kissinger wasn’t his boss. So “Scowcroft, dressed in his tuxedo” for the state dinner with the Dutch prime minister, “burst into Nessen’s office, grabbed Nessen by the arm, and literally pulled him to Kissinger’s office.” The White House then got the message out to the Cambodian government over the Associated Press wire: “As soon as you issue a statement that you are prepared to release the crew members you hold unconditionally and immediately, we will promptly cease military operations.”387
Thanks to Scowcroft, the problems with the US response to the seizure of the Mayaguez were not so much those of teamwork. Rather, they involved deeper issues of what the president called the “mechanics of national security.” This was the second revelation the Mayaguez crisis made apparent: the problems with the planning and execution of joint military operations.388
The crisis plan that turned out to be a political triumph was nearly a military disaster. As Bud McFarlane stated during the Senate’s hearings on the restructuring of the Defense Department, the Pentagon’s response to the Mayaguez seizure was “dysfunctional,” and the dysfunction was “purely the consequence of service parochialism.” The secretary of defense had been “too easily co-opted by the Air Force,” in McFarlane’s assessment. By patching together a rescue operation that combined a marine battalion with Air Force search-and-rescue helicopter crews, the Defense Department created a recipe for failure. Schlesinger showed “poor judgment” in his decisions on how to use the military and was “not really as knowledgeable as the crisis demanded.”389
Scowcroft would get a chance to remake the NSC process in only a few months’ time. The comprehensive reform of the military command system and of joint operations—integrally related to Ford’s “mechanics of national security” and to the success of the NSC process—would not come until much later.
The Mayaguez became part of a cumulative history of botched joint military operations, extending from the “terrible problems in Vietnam in joint operations” and the ill-fated 1979 Iranian hostage rescue (Operation Eagle Claw) to the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, and the flawed invasion of Grenada in 1983 (Operation Urgent Fury). In the Grenada operation, for instance, the military services couldn’t agree on which would control the island, so one-half of Grenada was controlled by the Army and the other by the Marines. As a result, Army helicopters weren’t able to evacuate injured soldiers, because their pilots hadn’t been trained to land on ships. And communication between the Army and Navy was so bad that an Army officer had to use an AT&T telephone card to call Fort Bragg, North Carolina, so he could connect with Navy officers. As one Pentagon official summarized, “Command and control, communications, [and] planning and operations” were all “just a disaster.”390
Ultimately, this series of disasters led to the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. Spearheading this effort to reform the US military’s joint operations was General Jones, who later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Carter.391 And it was the Mayaguez crisis that convinced Jones “of the problems of the joint system.” The Goldwater-Nichols Act concentrated military authority and promoted integration and collaboration among the services in order to make joint operations more effective. It strengthened the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the “principal military adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense” and giving him authority over the service chiefs for military planning and the defense budget.392 It also adjusted promotion requirements in each of the four services so as to foster the development of effective communication, command, and control of joint operations by military leaders. Officers were now required to have joint service experience before being promoted to general officer or flag officer. In addition, the Goldwater-Nichols Act sharpened the military chain of command so as to concentrate war-making responsibilities in the regional commanders (including CINCPAC, SOUTHCOM, and CENTCOM). These regional commanders were now directly answerable to the secretary of defense and given broad authority over military operations, joint service training, and the management of equipment and supplies.393
Although Scowcroft didn’t play an official role in the wholesale reform of DOD practices, he “talked to the group that was running the operation many times.” Not only did he strongly encourage the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act—unlike defense secretary Casper Weinberger, many high-ranking military officers, and many members of Congress, who opposed the bill—but Scowcroft’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee played an important role in shaping the ultimate legislation, according to James Locher’s comprehensive account.394
SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the Mayaguez crisis, the Department of Defense placed two letters in General Scowcroft’s personnel file. The first, dated May 18, 1975, was from Henry A. Kissinger. “Dear Brent,” Kissinger wrote, “Your extraordinary performance during the Mayaguez incident was no surprise to me, but it reminded me of the debt I and the President and the country owe you. You were the focal point of the effort. Your judgment and strength were a tremendous support. The successful outcome was your contribution as much as anyone’s.”395
The other letter, dated May 27, 1975, was signed “Jerry Ford.” “During the Mayaguez incident your support to me was even more than your usual superb contribution,” President Ford wrote. “Twenty-four hours a day, you were a pillar of strength. Your dedication and professional skill were in the highest tradition of service of the Armed Forces of the United States. I want you to know how much I appreciate it. Not only the crew of the Mayaguez and their families, but all Americans owe you a debt of gratitude.”396
The Mayaguez incident was the last official battle of the Vietnam War; the names of the three Marines left behind on Koh Tang are the very last names engraved on Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The United States “had entered Indochina to save a country,” Kissinger remarked, and it “ended by rescuing a ship.”397
The irony of it all was that the seizure of the Mayaguez was wholly random. Local Khmer Rouge forces had been ordered to take the next ship coming along, and the Mayaguez happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The young soldiers seizing the Mayaguez didn’t even know the ship was American until they climbed aboard; the ship’s crew hadn’t hoisted the US ensign because the sea winds would have ripped it to shreds. In 1979 Sea-Land sold the Mayaguez for scrap steel.398
The Ford administration’s response to the Mayaguez seizure was a bright spot in its history—but only a brief respite in the midst of more than two and a half very difficult years.