CHAPTER 2:
***
Indochina

1. Assertion:

"Empowered by Nelson Rockefeller with a virtual free hand to develop contacts of his own, he had gone so far as to involve himself with an initiative that extended to direct personal contact with Hanoi. He became friendly with two Frenchmen who had a direct line to the Communist leadership in North Vietnam's capital. Raymond Aubrac, a French civil servant who was a friend of Ho Chi Minh, made common cause with Herbert Marcovich, a French biochemist, and began a series of trips to North Vietnam. On their return, they briefed Kissinger in Paris. He in turn parlayed their information into high-level conversations in Washington, relaying the actual or potential negotiating positions of Pham Van Dong and other Communist statesmen to Robert McNamara. (In the result, the relentless bombing of the North made any 'bridge-building' impossible. In particular, the now-forgotten American destruction of the Paul Doumer bridge outraged the Vietnamese side.)²²

Facts:

In June 1967, Kissinger attended an academic conference in Paris. There he made the acquaintance of Herbert Marcovich, a French biochemist working for the World Health Organization. Marcovich mentioned to Kissinger

that a friend of his named Raymond Aubrac had become close to Ho Chi Minh when the Vietnamese revolutionary was living in exile near Paris in 1946. Perhaps, suggested Marcovich, the U.S. could use Aubrac as secret negotiating channel.²³

Kissinger conveyed Marcovich's suggestion to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Rusk approved a plan, code-named "Pennsylvania," to make a peace overture to Hanoi through Aubrac and Marcovich. Kissinger was retained as Washington's contact with the two French intermediaries.

In July, Aubrac and Marcovich traveled to Hanoi to meet with Ho Chi Minh and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. When Aubrac and Marcovich asked whether Hanoi would be receptive to an American offer for negotiations, Ho and Pham "repeated their long-standing position: if the U.S. stopped the bombing 'unconditionally,' negotiations could follow."²⁴ Aubrac and Marcovich were told to conduct any future exchanges with the North Vietnamese representative in Paris, Mai Van Bo.

Upon their return, Aubrac and Marcovich related this information to Kissinger; Kissinger in turn notified the Johnson administration. (Thus does Hitchens accuse Kissinger of "revealing the actual or potential negotiating positions of Pham Van Dong and other Communist statesmen" — a bizarre charge, given that Pham Van Dong had articulated this information specifically for Washington's consumption.)

President Johnson now authorized a response to be sent through Aubrac and Marcovich, in which Washington offered to stop bombing North Vietnam "if this will lead promptly to productive discussions" and if Hanoi "would not take [military] advantage" of the halt.

On September 10, 1967,

The North Vietnamese representative in Paris called Marcovich with the news that his government had rejected the offer; the American bombing had to be "ceased definitely

²² Hitchens, p 19.

²³ Isaacson, 121.

²⁴ Ibid.

6

and without conditions” before there could even be discussions of negotiations.
Kissinger responded with a flurry of messages to the North Vietnamese representative in Paris insisting that the U.S. was not demanding specific conditions before it would halt the bombing, only an indication that “productive” talks would then be forthcoming.
But he was unable to budge Hanoi.²⁵

This marked the end of the “Pennsylvania” initiative.

Both during the administration's overture (in August 1967) and after (in October), the United States Air Force conducted aerial strikes on Hanoi's Long Bien/Paul Doumer Bridge.

This bridge served as a crucial supply link between Hanoi, mainland China, and the port of Haiphong. It was used throughout the war to transport military personnel and equipment, and was defended by extensive anti-aircraft installations.²⁶

According to *New York Times* reporter Harrison Salisbury (who was himself not unsympathetic to Hanoi's cause²⁷), the bridge was

in all probability the single most important military objective in North Vietnam.
Without this bridge the movement of traffic from north to south [Vietnam] would be radically impeded. Loss of the bridge would not knock North Vietnam out of the war.
But it would make Hanoi's war effort infinitely more difficult.²⁸

While American attacks did not, as Hitchens claims, cause “the destruction of the Paul Doumer bridge,” they did inflict considerable damage on 3 of the bridge’s 19 spans – enough to cause a temporary disruption of Hanoi’s logistical network.²⁹

## 2. Assertion:

"This weightless mid-position, which ultimately helped enable his double act in 1968, allowed Kissinger to ventriloquize [sic] Governor [Nelson] Rockefeller and to propose, by indirect means, a future détente with America's chief rivals. In his first major address as a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller spoke ringingly of how 'in a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union, we can ultimately improve our relations with each - as we test the will for peace of both.' This foreshadowing of a later Kissinger strategy might appear at first reading to illustrate prescience. But Governor Rockefeller had no more reason than Vice-President Humphrey to suppose that his ambitious staffer would defect to the Nixon camp, risking and postponing this same détente in order later to take credit for a debased simulacrum of it."³⁰

### Facts:

This account has no factual basis.

During the summer of 1968, Kissinger served as a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign. His duties included writing policy briefs and drafting speeches (“ventriloquizing Governor Rockefeller,” per Hitchens’ phrase).³¹

²⁵ Isaacson, pp 121-22.

²⁶ Guenter Lewy, *America in Vietnam*, p 398.

²⁷ Lewy, pp 399-403. After the war, it was revealed that Salisbury had used North Vietnamese propaganda pamphlets as the main source for many of his reports.

²⁸ Salisbury, *Behind the Lines: Hanoi*, New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p 207.

²⁹ John L Frisbee, "A Place Called the Doumer Bridge," *Air Force Magazine* (February 1988).

³⁰ Hitchens, p 20.

³¹ Isaacson, *Kissinger: A Biography*, pp 124-128.

7

Indochina to devastating bombardment. In his own account, Kissinger replies that 'a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem.' (When asked 'Where?', Kissinger hazily proposed the Middle East.) It is important to bear in mind that the future flatterer of Brezhnev and Mao, and the proponent of the manipulative 'triangle' between them, was in no real position to claim that he made war in Indochina to thwart either. He certainly did not dare try such a callow excuse on Charles de Gaulle."³⁷

**Facts:**

The key aspect of Hitchens' account – "the old warrior demand[ing] to know by what right the Nixon administration subjected Indochina to devastating bombardment" – does not appear in the passage the author claims to be paraphrasing. It is purely fictional.³⁸

The actual passage runs as follows:

> It would be pleasant to report that my own contact with de Gaulle was at a level equal to my sense of his historic importance. Unfortunately, this was not so. The General considered Presidential Assistants as functionaries whose views should be solicited only to enable the principals to establish some technical point; he did not treat them as autonomous entities. At the end of the dinner at the Elysee, while liqueur was being served, an aide told me that the General wished to see me. Without the slightest attempt at small talk, de Gaulle greeted me with the query: "Why don't you get out Vietnam?"

> "Because," I replied, "a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem."

> "Where?" the General wanted to know. I mentioned the Middle East.

> "How very odd," said the General from a foot above me. "It is precisely in the Middle East that I thought your enemies had the credibility problem."³⁹

**5. Assertion:**

"No, it all came down to 'credibility,' and to the saving of face. It is known that 20,492 American servicemen lost their lives in Indochina between the day that Nixon and Kissinger took office and the day in 1972 that they withdrew United States forces and accepted the logic of 1968. What if the families and survivors of these victims have to confront the fact that the 'face' at risk was Kissinger's own?"⁴⁰

**Facts:**

Kissinger's own response to this charge is noteworthy:

> When Nixon came into office, America had already suffered 36,000 soldiers killed in action. Of the 20,000 killed in the Nixon period, 12,000 occurred in the first year before any new policy could take effect, 9,000 in the first six months⁴¹ – clear legacies of the previous administration. When Nixon came in, American soldiers killed in action had run at an average rate of 1,500 per month for a year. At the end of his first term, they had been reduced to 50 per month. When Nixon entered office, American troops in

³⁷ Hitchens, p 22-23.

³⁸ A similar technique may be found in the Introduction to *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*. Here, Hitchens *imagines* a scene in which Kissinger “feels a tremor of anxiety. He leaves the well-furnished table and scurries to the bathroom” to fret about being indicted for war crimes. Hitchens then offers this fictional scene as “evidence” of Kissinger’s supposed guilt.

³⁹ Kissinger, *White House Years*, pp 109-110.

⁴⁰ Hitchens, p 23.

⁴¹ These 9000 losses were incurred during the nationwide offensive that Hanoi launched on February 22, 1969 – just four weeks after Nixon's inauguration.

9

Vietnam stood at 525,000 and were still increasing according to plans made in the Johnson administration. In 1972, they had been reduced to 25,000.⁴²

**6. Assertion:**

"Thus the colloquially titled 'Christmas bombing' of North Vietnam, begun during [sic] the same election campaign Haldeman and Kissinger had so tenderly foreseen two years previously, and continued after [sic]⁴³ that election had been won, must be counted as a war crime by any standard. The bombing was not conducted for anything that could be described as 'military reasons,' but for twofold political reasons. The first of these was domestic: to make a show of strength to extremists in Congress and to put the Democratic Party on the defensive. The second reason was to persuade the South Vietnamese leaders like President Thieu - still intransigent after all these years - that their objections to a United States withdrawal were too nervous."⁴⁴

**Facts:**

By November 1972, Washington and Hanoi had negotiated the bulk of what was to become the "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet-Nam." It was at this point that Saigon presented Washington with a list of 69 desired modifications in the agreement's provisional text. Some of these changes were semantic issues; others were major substantive points of dubious attainability.

When Kissinger presented Saigon's points at a November 18 session with Le Duc Tho, Hanoi perceived a new opportunity to drive a wedge between Washington and Saigon and further shake the confidence of Thieu's government, which Hanoi sought to overthrow.

Over the next three weeks, the North Vietnamese delegation presented a series of changes which, taken together, vitiated the substance of the entire agreement.⁴⁵ Some of these new terms were announced in stern speeches decrying American treachery; others were simply placed without warning in the provisional Vietnamese text of the agreement.

Throughout this process, Le Duc Tho consistently declined to open negotiations on the agreement's protocols (documents specifying the means by which the agreement's clauses would be implemented). The effect was to keep a resolution always one step out of reach. On December 13, 1972, Kissinger cabled Nixon from Paris:

> I have come to the following conclusion. Hanoi has decided to play for time, either because of the public split between us and Saigon; or because they have a pipeline into the South Vietnamese and know about our exchanges; or because their leadership is divided and they are still making up their minds on whether to conclude the agreement. Their consistent pattern is to give us just enough each day to keep us going but nothing decisive which could conclude an agreement. On the other hand, they wish to insure that we have no solid pretext for taking tough actions. They keep matters low-key to prevent a resumption of bombing. They could have settled in three hours any time these past few days if they wanted to, but they have deliberately avoided this.... They

⁴² Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, letter regarding Christopher Hitchens' October 8 review of *The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon*, in *The New York Times Book Review* (November 5, 2000). This letter is reprinted in Hitchens, *Trial*, pp. 137-139.

⁴³ Operation Linebacker II (the so-called "Christmas bombing") was not "begun during the... election campaign" and "continued after that election had been won." The "Christmas bombing" began on December 19, and ended on December 30. During the time Hitchens is referring to, the United States was observing a self-imposed bombing halt north of the 20th parallel.

⁴⁴ Hitchens, p. 23.

⁴⁵ For instance, on December 7 and 12, Hanoi sought provisions that would have permitted Communist military transit across the Demilitarized Zone into South Vietnam; and on December 11, Hanoi deleted a clause requiring North Vietnamese forces to withdraw from Laos and Cambodia.

10

have reduced the issues to a point where a settlement can be reached with one exchange of telegrams. I do not think they will send this telegram, however, in the absence of strong pressures.⁴⁶

Nixon moved to break this deadlock by authorizing one final, overwhelming application of American airpower in North Vietnam. The operation, code-named Linebacker II, targeted every site of military significance in Hanoi and Haiphong, and was intended to shock the North Vietnamese leadership into concluding an agreement with Washington.

After 11 days of pitched battle, Hanoi accepted Washington's offer to reopen negotiations. On January 8, talks resumed in Paris. On January 27, representatives of the four concerned parties ratified the "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet-Nam."

The "Christmas bombing," it must be noted, sparked a firestorm of criticism both at home and abroad. Yet most of this criticism drew on false or exaggerated reports of "deliberate" civilian casualties. In an authoritative study of the war based on classified Pentagon documents, the scholar Guenter Lewy recounts how, during the bombing campaign, North Vietnamese propaganda was routinely taken at face value:

> The incidental civilian damage and the overall extremely destructive impact of LINEBACKER II gave rise to predictable outcries of terror-bombing. The December bombing, Hanoi charged, surpassed the atrocities committed by the Hitlerite fascists and represented an "escalation of genocide to an all-time high." In only 12 days "the Nixon administration wrought innumerable Oradours, Lycides, Guernicas, Coventrys...." Antiwar groups in America and many others who should have known better joined in the worldwide chorus of denunciation. One scholar speaks of "unabashed terror tactics" and a "flaunting of established norms of civilized conduct."

These charges are disproven by evidence available then and by later reports from the scene. The North Vietnamese themselves at the time claimed between 1,300 and 1,600 fatalities, and even though both Hanoi and Haiphong were partially evacuated, such a number of victims — regrettable as any civilian casualties always are — is surely not indicative of terror-bombing. Attacks explicitly aimed at the morale of the population took place against Germany and Japan during World War II and killed tens of thousands. According to an East German estimate, 35,000 died in the triple raid on Dresden in February 1945; the official casualty toll of the bombing of Tokyo with incendiaries on 9-10 March 1945, stands at 83,793 dead and 40,918 wounded. The Hanoi death toll, wrote the London *Economist*, "is smaller than the number of civilians killed by the North Vietnamese in their artillery bombardment of An Loc in April or the toll of refugees ambushed when trying to escape from Quang Tri at the beginning of May. That is what makes the denunciation of Mr. Nixon as another Hitler sound so unreal." Part of the death toll was undoubtedly caused by the North Vietnamese themselves, for they launched about 1000 SAMs [surface to air missiles], many of which impacted in the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, and took their toll on their own people....Malcolm W. Browne of the *New York Times* was greatly surprised by the condition in which he found Hanoi and wrote that "the damage caused by American bombing was grossly overstated by North Vietnamese propaganda...." "Hanoi has certainly been damaged," noted Peter Ward of the *Baltimore Sun* on 25 March 1973 after a visit, "but evidence on the ground disproves charges of indiscriminate bombing.

⁴⁶ Kissinger, confidential cable from Paris, 13 December 1972, reprinted in Kissinger, *Ending the Vietnam War*, pp 407-408.

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Several bomb loads obviously went astray into civilian residential areas, but damage there is minor, compared to the total destruction of selected targets."⁴⁷

In an examination of the Paris negotiating record using declassified North Vietnamese documents, the historian Pierre Asselin concludes:

> When Hanoi stalemated and indefinitely suspended the talks in December, it suggested an unwillingness to resume them in the near future. Only a change of circumstances serious enough to threaten its ability to sustain the Resistance⁴⁸ and the Revolution⁴⁹ could cause...an about-face. The VWP politburo agreed to the White House request on 26 December to resume the talks because the bombing had crippled the DRVN's vital organs and thereby jeopardized the Revolution.... That the January talks finalized the agreement makes those talks notable; it likewise makes the importance of the December bombing conclusive. Washington and Hanoi signed the Paris Agreement less than thirty days after the White House ended Linebacker II. The bombing broke the pattern of negotiation in which the DRVN backed away from settlement at the last moment by reopening one or more issues already settled, sometimes with no more justification than an unwillingness to settle.... In retrospect, it is fair to say that the December bombing was a "cruel necessity." The agreement it produced dramatically reduced the violence in Vietnam.⁵⁰

## 7. Assertion:

> "These locust years ended as they had begun - with a display of bravado and deceit. On 12 May 1975, Cambodian gunboats detained an American merchant vessel named the *Mayaguez*. In spite of reports that the crew had been released, Kissinger pressed for an immediate face-saving and 'credibility'-enhancing strike. He persuaded Gerald Ford, the untried and undistinguished successor to his deposed former boss, to send in the Marines and the Air Force. Out of a Marine force of 110, 18 were killed and 50 wounded. Some 23 Air Force men died in a crash. The United States used a 15,000-pound bomb on the island, the most powerful non-nuclear device that it possessed. Nobody has the figures for Cambodian deaths. The casualties were pointless because the ship's company of the *Mayaguez* were nowhere on Koh Tang, having been released some hours earlier. A subsequent congressional inquiry found that Kissinger could have known of this by listening to Cambodian Broadcasting or by paying attention to a third-party government which had been negotiating a deal for the restitution of the crew and the ship. It was not as if any Cambodians doubted, by that month of 1975, the willingness of the US government to employ deadly force."⁵¹

### Facts:

Again, the crux of Hitchens' allegation - that Kissinger "pressed for" a military confrontation "in spite of reports that the crew [of the *Mayaguez*] had been released" - is verifiably false. The relevant chain of events occurred as follows:

On May 12th, 1975, 7:40am, President Ford received word that members of the Khmer Rouge had "fired upon and boarded" an unarmed American merchant ship in international waters, and that the ship and its crew were "being towed to [an] unknown Cambodian port."⁵²

⁴⁷ Lewy, *America in Vietnam*, p 414. For a further discussion of this phenomenon, see Herz et al., *The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing: Images and Reality in Vietnam*.

⁴⁸ I.e., Hanoi's efforts to topple the Saigon government.

⁴⁹ I.e., Hanoi's domestic efforts to build a socialist society.

⁵⁰ Pierre Asselin, *A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement*, pp. 164-165.

⁵¹ Hitchens, pp. 23-24.

⁵² Mayaguez distress signal, received 12May 1975 by US Embassy in Jakarta, as reported in the *New York Times*, 16 May 1975, "A Chronology of the Mayaguez Episode."

12

Ford spent the morning conferring with Brent Scowcroft, his deputy assistant for national security affairs, and Kissinger, his Secretary of State. Their initial consensus was that Washington could not allow the American crew to reach the Cambodian mainland. This decision was based in part on intelligence reports describing the Khmer Rouge's fanatical barbarity.⁵³

At noon, Ford convened the National Security Council. There, the administration resolved to declare the seizure of the *Mayaguez* "an act of piracy," and threaten a military response unless the ship and crew were released immediately. At 1:50pm, White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen issued a press release outlining the American position. This was followed by a diplomatic demarche sent to the Cambodian Embassy in Beijing. (The Cambodians returned this message, unopened.⁵⁴)

In the meantime, Washington attempted to enlist Beijing's assistance in forcing the Khmer Rouge's hand. The State Department sent two messages – one through the Chinese Liaison Office in Washington, and the other through the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing – demanding that Cambodia release the *Mayaguez* and its crew. Beijing refused to accept the first note, and sent the second back to Washington.

Absent any Cambodian response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered assembled elements of the US 7th fleet to block any further movement of the seized American vessel. A-7 aircrafts signaled the American stance by strafing the water in front of the *Mayaguez* and dropping flares over Tang Island.

That evening (morning in Cambodia), the *Mayaguez*'s Khmer Rouge captors transferred the crew to a fishing boat. This vessel was now pulled towards the Cambodian mainland, preceded by three Khmer Rouge patrol boats.

At 8:12pm, Ford authorized the sinking of the Khmer Rouge patrol boats in an effort to halt the convoy; this occurred at 8:20pm. An American rescue helicopter sent 15 minutes later failed to locate any Cambodian survivors. At 8:45pm, the fishing vessel was observed proceeding to Kompong Som harbor. Strikes with riot control gas failed to halt the boat's progress.

The next day at 4:45pm, Ford ordered a full-scale military operation to rescue the *Mayaguez* and its crew. This operation was to include aerial strikes against Koh Tang and an adjacent base on the Cambodian mainland.

Three and a half hours later, with military operations already underway, the White House received an ambiguous signal from Cambodia. In a speech broadcast on Khmer Radio, Minister of Information and Propaganda Hu Nim had declared that "[r]egarding the *Mayaguez* ship, we have no intention of detaining it permanently," and "adhering to the stand of peace and neutrality, we will release this ship."⁵⁵ Hu Nim made no mention of the ship's crew, who remained in a separate fishing vessel under Cambodian guard.

Washington responded with the following message, sent – for lack of a more direct diplomatic channel – through the Associated Press wire service:

> We have heard a radio broadcast that you are prepared to release the SS *Mayaguez*. We welcome this development, if true. As you know, we have seized the ship. As soon as

⁵³ Ralph Wetterhahn, *The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War*, p 34.

⁵⁴ General Accounting Office of the United States Congress, "The Seizure of the *Mayaguez*. A Case Study of Crisis Management," 11 May 1976. This appears to be the "subsequent congressional inquiry" referred to by Hitchens, although no specific citation is given.

⁵⁵ Hu Nim's speech was broadcast on Cambodian radio at 7:07-7:36pm (Washington time); the operative clause was contained in the final two minutes. Within 40 minutes, the CIA's flash Khmer-to-English translation had arrived at the White House. A full copy of this translation is available in the *New York Times*, 15 May 1975.

13

you issue a statement that you are prepared to release the crew members you hold
unconditionally and immediately, we will promptly cease military operations.⁵⁶

At 10:53pm, the Pentagon received word that Marines had sighted the *Mayaguez* crew on a separate Thai fishing vessel previously seized by the Khmer Rouge. The ship was intercepted, and the crew delivered to American custody. At 11:14, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger relayed this information to the President. At 11:16, Ford issued an order "to cease all offensive operations and to begin to withdraw from Tang Island."⁵⁷

⁵⁶ As quoted in Wetterhahn, p 191.

⁵⁷ "Chronology," *New York Times*, 16 May 1975.

14

# CHAPTER 3:
## "A Sample of Cases: Kissinger's War Crimes in Indochina"

### 1. Assertion:

"Some statements are too blunt for everyday, casual discourse. In national 'debate,' it is the smoother pebbles that are customarily gathered from the stream, and used as projectiles. They leave less of a scar, even when they hit. Occasionally, however, a single hard-edged remark will inflict a deep and jagged wound, a gash so ugly that it must be cauterized at once. In January 1971, General Telford Taylor, who had been chief prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials, made a considered statement. Reviewing the legal and moral basis of those [Nuremberg] hearings, and also the Tokyo trials of Japanese war criminals and the Manila trial of Emperor Hirohito's chief militarist, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Taylor said that if the standards of Nuremberg were applied evenly, and applied to the American statesmen and bureaucrats who designed the war in Vietnam, then 'there would be a very strong possibility that they would come to the same end he [Yamashita] did.' It is not every day that a senior American soldier and jurist delivers the opinion that a large portion of his country's political class should probably be hooded and blindfolded and dropped through a trapdoor at the end of a rope...

"Nor did General Taylor omit the crucial link between the military command and its political supervision; this was again a much closer and more immediate relation in the America-Vietnamese instance than in the Japanese-Filipino one, as the regular contact between, say, General Creighton Abrams and Henry Kissinger makes clear... Taylor anticipated the Kissinger case in many ways when he recalled the trial of the Japanese statesman Koki Hirota:

> who served briefly as Prime Minister and for several years as Foreign Minister between 1933 and May 1938, after which he held no office whatever. The so-called "Rape of Nanking" by Japanese forces occurred during the winter of 1937-38, when Hirota was Foreign Minister. Upon receiving early reports of the atrocities, he demanded and received assurances from the War Ministry that they would be stopped. But they continued, and the Tokyo tribunal found Hirota guilty because he was "derelict in his duty in not insisting before the Cabinet that immediate action be taken to put an end to the atrocities," and "was content to rely on assurances which he knew were not being implemented." On this basis, coupled with his conviction on the aggressive war charge, Hirota was sentenced to be hanged."⁵⁸

### Facts:

Hitchens has relied on selective quotations and misleading paraphrases to distort General Taylor's views. Taylor did not advocate trying American government officials as war criminals; nor did he make any reference to Henry Kissinger in his public remarks or his 1971 book *Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy*.

Taylor's primary concern was what he viewed as the moral and intellectual inconsistency of trying German and Japanese officials as war criminals for actions that members of the Johnson administration had also committed.

During a January 1971 appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show," General Taylor commented that if "the American people... face the principles that they laid down and applied to Germans and Japanese... [and if] they're willing to have the principles work the other way too," then Lyndon Johnson's top military commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, could be tried for war crimes and "could be found guilty... That's for some court to decide if you have the evidence there and look at it."⁵⁹

⁵⁸ Hitchens, pp 25-29.

⁵⁹ Neil Sheehan, "Taylor Says by Yamashita Ruling Westmoreland May Be Guilty," *New York Times*, January 9, 1971. This is the "considered statement" Hitchens cites in his account.

15

A *New York Times* reporter later asked Taylor whether he meant to implicate other American officials in his remarks. “The only civilian leader to whom the Yamashita precedent might conceivably be applied, [Taylor] said, would be Lyndon B. Johnson as Commander in Chief.”⁶⁰

The extent of Hitchens' obfuscation is made clear in this letter from Taylor's authorized biographer Jonathan Bush⁶¹:

To the Editor:

Christopher Hitchens's originality and his use of evidence and international law are open to debate. But his reliance on the late General Telford Taylor's writings to argue that criminous [sic] heads of state must be tried, and that aerial bombardment constitutes a triable offense, is in error. As his biographer, my impression is that Taylor, though a passionate Vietnam dove, had too nuanced and forthright a view of international law to provide the ammunition Hitchens needs.

True, Taylor did say that Generals Westmoreland and Abrams, and even Presidents Johnson and Nixon, might be guilty of war crimes based on the *Yamashita* decision (in which the Supreme Court let stand a military conviction of a Japanese commander for atrocities in the Philippines that he neither ordered nor condoned nor knew of). But, like most civil libertarians, Taylor also thought that Yamashita was a procedural disgrace. He argued that the law was more accurately stated in Nuremberg's “Hostage Case” (U.S. v. *List*), which held commanders responsible for war crimes only when they “knew or should have known” of the atrocities, a more restrictive standard.

Similarly, Taylor wrote repeatedly against the aerial bombing campaigns over both North and South Vietnam. But he knew that, except where it was demonstrably unnecessary, indiscriminate, and disproportionate, strategic bombing had not been criminal during World War II and that international law in this area had not evolved in the intervening twenty years. Taylor's view of bombing is illustrated in his December 1972 trip to Hanoi with Joan Baez and others who opposed the war. The delegation not only saw devastation but was itself bombed --Nixon's Christmas surprise. Taylor, nonetheless, told the press and his North Vietnamese hosts that the bombing was cruel, destructive, but not a violation of the laws of war. (The clear violation, he added, was North Vietnam's failure to evacuate American POWs to shelter as soon as bombing began.)

Taylor opposed stretching the rhetoric of international law to challenge even dreadful policy, as Hitchens could have discovered. In misconstruing Taylor's arguments, what Hitchens has managed to do is convince this long-time opponent of Nixon and Kissinger's foreign-policy disasters that even Kissinger deserves better than to be tried before the kind of international tribunal recently endorsed by the contrite Robert McNamara.

Jonathan A. Bush

Center for Scholars and Writers
New York Public Library
New York City

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Featured in the “Letters” section of the May 2001 issue of *Harper’s* magazine (pp 4-5), in response to the initial publication of Hitchens’ two-part essay “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (*Harper’s*, February & March, 2001). Hitchens responded to Bush’s letter in the same issue, but nonetheless published the misleading section verbatim in the book version of *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*.

16

**2. Assertion:**

"Melvin Laird, as Secretary of Defense during the first Nixon administration, was queasy enough about the early bombings of Cambodia, and dubious enough about the legality or prudence of the intervention, to send a memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking, 'Are steps being taken, on a continuing basis, to minimize the risk of striking Cambodian peoples and structures? If so, what are the steps? Are we reasonably sure such steps are effective.' There is no evidence of Henry Kissinger, as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State, ever seeking even such modest assurances."⁶²

**Facts:**

Kissinger, like Secretary of Defense Laird, sought to minimize civilian casualties during strikes against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. Hitchens himself offers evidence of Kissinger's efforts:

Colonel Sitton does recall, it must be admitted, that Kissinger requested that bombing avoid civilian casualties. His explicit motive in making this request was to avoid or forestall complaints from the government of Prince Sihanouk.⁶³

**3. Assertion:**

"From a huge range of possible examples, I have chosen cases which involve Kissinger directly and in which I have myself been able to interview the surviving witnesses. The first, as foreshadowed above, is Operation Speedy Express....

"Since General Creighton Abrams publicly praised the Ninth Division for its work, and drew attention wherever and whenever he could to the tremendous success of Operation Speedy Express, we can be sure that the political leadership in Washington was not unaware. Indeed, the degree of micro-management revealed in Kissinger's memoirs forbids the idea that anything of importance took place without his knowledge or permission."⁶⁴

**Facts:**

Operation Speedy Express was designed and implemented during the Johnson administration, under the authority of President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, and regional commander General Creighton Abrams. Kissinger had no operational role in this administration, nor any position in its military chain of command.

When the Nixon administration took office on January 20, 1969, the pacification campaign in Kien Hoa was ongoing. There is no evidence to suggest that the White House was made specifically aware of Operation Speedy Express, nor of its termination on June 1, 1969.

**4. Assertion:**

"Obsessed with the idea that Vietnamese intransigence could be traced to allies or resources external to Vietnam itself, or could be overcome by tactics of mass destruction, Kissinger at one point contemplated using thermonuclear weapons to obliterate the pass through which ran the railway link from North Vietnam to China, and at another stage considered bombing the dikes that prevented north Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding the country. Neither of these measures (reported retrospectively in Tad Szulc's history of Nixon-era diplomacy and by Kissinger's former aide Roger Morris) was taken, which removes some potential war crimes from our bill of indictment but which also gives an indication of the regnant mentality..."

⁶² Hitchens, p 29.

⁶³ Hitchens, p 39.

⁶⁴ Hitchens, pp 30-33.

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Facts:

In October 1969, Kissinger commissioned a study exploring the United States'
military options in Vietnam in the event of a breakdown in the Paris negotiations. Kissinger
instructed the authors of the study to consider the implications of "Duck Hook" — a
hypothetical operation designed to overwhelm Hanoi's military infrastructure and end the
war in one decisive stroke.

One staff member recalled Kissinger's instructions:

"You are to start without any preconceptions at all. You are to sit down and map out what would be a savage, decisive blow [to Hanoi]. You are to examine the option from every angle, you are to examine every detail of how it should be executed militarily, what the political scenario would be."⁶⁵

"Duck Hook" was to be modeled in part on the operations with which the United
States ended the Korean War. In May 1953, President Eisenhower had ordered aerial strikes
against five major North Korean dams, thereby destroying the year's rice crop and diverting
thousands of man-hours into flood control; at the same time, John Foster Dulles had
threatened the American use of nuclear weapons against China. The Communist side
relented, and within weeks an armistice was signed at Panmunjom.⁶⁶

Now, Kissinger instructed the Duck Hook task force to prepare a report on whether
a similar operation would be possible in North Vietnam:

At a minimum, the attack plan would include the mining of the port of Haiphong and
inland waterways, a naval blockade, and intensive bombing strikes at military targets and
population centers. The group was also instructed to consider the options of bombing
the Red River dikes to flood the vital farm land of North Vietnam and closing the rail
supply lines at the Chinese border.⁶⁷

Soon after Kissinger assigned the study,

as one of the men remembered it, "someone raised the question of nuclear weapons."
Kissinger said, "It is the policy of this administration not to use nuclear weapons, and we
shall not [use them], so this option excludes that one thing." But "you are not to
exclude the possibility of a nuclear device being used for the purposes of a blockage in the
pass to China, if that seems to be the only way to close the pass."

Several participants assumed Kissinger meant using a tactical nuclear weapon to
close the mountain pass over which the railroad line runs from China to North Vietnam.
This railway was one of the most important routes for deliveries of Chinese war
materiel, fuel, and food to Hanoi, and railroad bridges and tracks in Vietnamese territory
were often hit by American aircraft throughout the war. But the special group never
considered in its study the possibility of using a nuclear device as part of the proposed
blockade of North Vietnam, and Kissinger is not known to have alluded to it again.⁶⁸

In November 1969 Kissinger presented the study to Nixon, who rejected the "Duck Hook" option. Such were the "potential war crimes" and "the regnant mentality" to which Hitchens refers.

**5. Assertion:**

"There remained Cambodia and Laos, which supposedly concealed or protected North Vietnamese supply lines.... [L]aw and precedent [were] to be

⁶⁵ As quoted in Tad Szulc, *The Illusion of Peace*, p 150.

⁶⁶ William Stueck, *The Korean War: An International History*, pp 328-330. See also “Dam Raids of 1953,” in Spencer C. Tucker et al., *Encyclopedia of the Korean War: A Political, Social, and Military History*, Vol. I, pp 179-180.

⁶⁷ Roger Morris, *Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy*, pp 163-4.

⁶⁸ Szulc, pp 151-152.

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thrown to the winds when Nixon and Kissinger aggrandized the notion of 'hot pursuit' across the borders of Laos and Cambodia."⁶⁹

Facts:

1) *Laos*:

Hanoi first charted infiltration routes through Laos in 1954 as a means of circumventing the DMZ and transporting troops and military supplies into South Vietnam. By the late 1960s, North Vietnam had annexed large swathes of "neutral" Laotian territory to build a strategic corridor complete with roads, bridges, oil pipelines, fuel dumps and anti-aircraft installations.

These installations, dubbed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail," were a legitimate military target under both international and American domestic law. This is why, according to Johnson administration Undersecretary of State William Bundy:

> From early 1965 on, American forces regularly bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, part of which ran through eastern Laos. When the bombing of North Vietnam itself was halted in October 1968, that of Laos increased...

By 1970 Hanoi had infiltrated over half a million troops over the Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Vietnam, and the number of North Vietnamese troops stationed in Laos had risen to 67,000. After a major Communist assault on the Plain of Jars, Laotian Premier Souvanna Phouma formally appealed to Washington for assistance.

Accordingly, the Nixon administration authorized stepped-up aerial strikes against North Vietnamese troops and supply routes in Laos. In keeping with the previous administration's practice, the Nixon administration briefed key members of Congress on the strikes. However, Washington

refrained from public statements about operations in Laos, partly to keep alive Laos's façade of neutrality, which might be made real if all went well, but decisively because of the insistence of the sophisticated, admirably tough Prime Minister of Laos, Prince Souvanna Phouma, who was thoroughly informed of all that was happening in the north-central areas as well as of the essentials of the Ho Chi Minh Trail bombing.⁷⁰

At the time, Hanoi repeatedly denied that it maintained any troop presence at all in Laos. In 1995, however, North Vietnamese Army colonel (and later Nan Danh editor) Bui Tin offered a candid explanation of Hanoi's Laotian operations:

> The reason why we had to undertake this difficult journey was the establishment under the Geneva Agreements in 1954 of the demilitarized zone along the Ben Hai river which marked the division between North and South....[T]he fence prevented us from moving directly down Highway One [to South Vietnam]. We had to circumvent it by crossing into the mountains of Laos...

> In early 1964... we felt a new opportunity was opening up in the South. We had already begun to send a few companies and even battalions, despite the advice of the Chinese to restrict ourselves to guerilla warfare. Now we had to consider whether it was possible for whole regiments to travel south. The field of battle there had to be studied carefully. Could such units, which had no anti-tank weapons, contend with the very mobile and well-equipped army in the South?....

> [I]f we were to pursue the war in the South, we had to look into the question of communications and how the Ho Chi Minh Trail could or should be expanded. In 1964 this was the subject of heated debate within the Army General Staff and its logistics department. There were those who argued in favor of maintaining the Trail as it was... The opposing argument was to expand the trails to 6 or 8 meters wide to accommodate

⁶⁹ Hitchens, p 34.

⁷⁰ Bundy, p 69.

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Chinese or Russian trucks. That would mean strengthening bridges and ferries, setting up a network of repair facilities and fuel dumps along the Trail, as well as anti-aircraft units.

This latter was what we finally developed, and by the early 1970s we had constructed a network of oil pipelines along the trails. It was a tremendous logistical achievement with engineering units supported by volunteer youth groups not only building but also having to repair the roads and bridges destroyed by the enemy. There were also signals and medical units as well as, of course, defense forces deployed all the way along the trails to ward off ambushes and surprise attacks. In fact the Truong Son operation, as we called it, needed the equivalent of two entire army corps to maintain the trails as the strategic artery between North and South.⁷¹

## 2) *Cambodia*:

Beginning in 1965, Hanoi annexed 16 areas along the Cambodia-South Vietnam border. Communist troops cleared these areas of their Cambodian inhabitants, then converted them into supply depots and staging posts for attacks against South Vietnam.

Fearing retaliation from Hanoi, the Phnom Penh government shied away from formally protesting the North Vietnamese invasion. Yet as early as January 10, 1968 – during the Johnson administration – Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk told presidential emissary Chester Bowles:

> We don't want any Vietnamese in Cambodia.... We will be very glad if you solve our problem. We are not opposed to hot pursuit in uninhabited areas. You would be liberating us from the Viet Cong. For me only Cambodia counts. I want you to force the Viet Cong to leave Cambodia. In unpopulated areas, where there are not Cambodians,– such precise cases I would shut my eyes.⁷²

Like the Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, Sihanouk's main concern was that the strikes not be publicized. To this end, Sihanouk told General Creighton Abrams that, in the absence of a formal American announcement,

> I can't imagine the Hanoi representative coming to my Minister of Foreign Affairs and saying, "I have the honor to inform you that the Americans have bombed my forces who are in your country without authority."⁷³

It was in this context that On February 22, 1969, four weeks after Nixon took office, Hanoi launched a nationwide offensive against South Vietnam – in total violation of the "understandings" that had led to Johnson's October 31 bombing halt. Reluctant to reverse the bombing halt, the new administration moved to consider other means of disrupting Hanoi's war effort.

General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland's successor and now the commander of the American force in Indochina, cabled Washington to request permission to bomb North Vietnamese sanctuaries along the Cambodian border, arguing that "The enemy's logistic system depends on use of Cambodia, and this use increases daily." Nixon authorized Abrams' request.

Two months into the "secret bombing of Cambodia," Sihanouk held a press conference in Phnom Penh, telling reporters:

71 Bui Diem, *Following Ho Chi Minh*, pp 48-50.

72 As quoted in Kissinger, *Ending the Vietnam War*, p 67.

73 As quoted in Lewis Sorley, *A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam*, p 119.

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Here it is – the first report about several B-52 bombings. Yet I have not been informed
about that at all, because I have not lost any houses, any countrymen, nothing, nothing.
Nobody was caught in those barrages – nobody, no Cambodians.

I have not protested the bombings of Viet Cong camps because I have not
heard of the bombings. I was not in the know, because in certain areas of Cambodia
there are no Cambodians.

That is what I want to tell you, gentlemen. If there is a buffalo or any
Cambodians killed, I will be informed immediately. But this is an affair between the
Americans and the Viet Cong - Viet Minh without any Khmer witnesses. There have
been no Khmer witnesses, so how can I protest? But this does not mean – and I
emphasize this – that I will permit the violation by either side. Please note that.⁷⁴

Two months later, Sihanouk reestablished formal diplomatic relations with the United States and invited Nixon to Phnom Penh.

When, in May 1970, US and South Vietnamese forces moved to clear out the
Cambodian sanctuaries, they discovered that the military significance of the area to Hanoi
had been, if anything, underestimated. One historian recounts the massive caches of military
and cryptographic materials that they found and commandeered:

Among the significant cache sites uncovered was one so extensive that it came to be
known as "The City." It yielded nearly 1,300 individual and more than 200 crew-served
weapons, along with a million and a half rounds of AK-47 ammunition and much else.
Another site, dubbed 'Rock Island East' in reference to a famous Army arsenal,
contained 329 tons of munitions. To make these numbers more understandable, the
commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division told his men they had seized enough
weapons to equip two NVA [North Vietnamese Army] divisions, more ammunition
than the enemy had fired in their corps area during the preceding twelve months, and
enough rice to feed all the enemy's maneuver battalions in their area of operations for a
year.

Major General Nguyen Duy Hinh, author of a postwar monograph, summed up
results of the incursion overall, tabulating 9,300 tons of weapons, ammunition, and
supplies seized, plus 7,000 tons of rice, altogether constituting enemy requirements for
at least six months of operations in the COSVN area....

Said Lieutenant General Mike Davidson, commanding II Field Force, the troops
going into Cambodia asked just two questions: "Why didn't we do this years ago? Why
don't the American people understand why we're doing this?"...

The cross-border operations in Cambodia yielded huge treasure troves of
intelligence, more than a million pages of documents and thirty-two cases of
cryptographic material in just the first three weeks....

[Guerilla war expert] Sir Robert Thompson visited South Vietnam in the autumn of
1970...Thompson saw the effects of the Cambodian incursion at work. Destruction of
the enemy base areas, seizure of his supplies, the manpower losses inflicted on him, and
the loss of Sihanoukville as a port of entry for military goods had all had their effect,
weakening the enemy and forcing him to concentrate on expansion of his lines of
communication from the North. The proximate result, especially in Military Regions 3
and 4, was to greatly reduce the enemy threat for a period Thompson calculated to be at
least a year, time during which pacification, consolidation, and force improvement by
the South Vietnamese could continue to progress, even as U.S. forces continued
withdrawing.⁷⁵

⁷⁴ As quoted in Kissinger, *Ending the Vietnam War*, p 68.

⁷⁵ Sorley, *A Better War*, pp 204-213.

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