The 50th anniversary of the Kent State massacre has come and gone. But May 4, 1970, is forever memorialized in infamy by those ghastly newsreel images of Ohio National Guardsman firing on student anti-war protesters, four of whom were killed, and nine wounded, on that bloodstained campus.
Like all Americans who cannot forget, I decry this monstrous piece of our history and mourn the victims.
Some old friends from the anti-war movement have asked me how the tragedy affected those of us who worked for U.S. government agencies in Vietnam at the time. They cannot fathom why we all just didn’t up and quit and join their ranks.
To understand why most of us didn’t, you have to understand that the war for us was refracted through two lenses. One focused on the home front, besieged as it was by civil unrest and antiwar protests. The other perspective, far more vivid to us in the embassy, was shaped by intelligence and conditions on the ground.
I was well into my first CIA tour in Vietnam when Kent State exploded into the headlines. My job: to decipher enemy intentions from all-source intelligence. Over the past year, two things had happened in-country that upstaged everything occurring at home, including the growing disenchantment of so many of my own contemporaries.
First, in 1969, U.S. forces in Vietnam had captured the most significant enemy document ever to fall into our hands, a complete copy of a multi-page tome called COSVN Resolution 9, COSVN being the acronym for the top communist field command.
Second, the CIA had taken operational control of an extraordinary spy planted deep inside COSVN.
The spy, the most important ever to work for the CIA’s Vietnam Station, was able to vouch for the authenticity of the captured document.
The secret he and the document revealed was that NVA/VC forces in the south had been decimated in the heavy fighting of the previous year — the Tet offensive and two follow up initiatives — and would need two years of reduced battlefield activity to recoup their strength.
Uncovering this secret had enormous implications for Vietnamization, Nixon’s decision in 1969 to begin drawing down U.S. ground forces in-country and shifting main combat duties to South Vietnamese units. Thanks to Resolution 9 and our agent, we now understood there was a two-year window, an extended respite from enemy main-force activity, in which to accomplish the twin goals of Vietnamization.
The new intelligence also strengthened arguments behind the U.S. bombing of Cambodia secretly launched in 1965 and expanded four years later, and the US/South Vietnamese cross border incursions in the first half of 1970, which helped ignite the Kent State demonstrations. If, as COSVN 9 indicated, Communist forces were seriously weakened, then it made imminent sense to obliterate the Cambodian base areas essential to their resurgence.
When news of the Kent State bloodbath reached the embassy, many of us were horrified. But the horror soon gave way to despair as anti-war activists embraced a new mantra, loudly proclaiming that the latest Cambodia operations represented a “mindless” expansion of the war, a second homicide by a bloodthirsty madman (Nixon) who had no more qualms about gunning down American students than about incinerating Cambodian (or Vietnamese) peasants.
Nixon may have been a certifiably mad, especially when he was in his cups. He certainly was a soulless pragmatist, and I came to despise him and Kissinger for selling out Saigon in the later Paris peace talks to protect the President’s re-election prospects.
But in 1970 he and other policy makers faced a Hobson’s choice: if American troops were to execute a safe and rapid withdrawal from Vietnam, essentially what the anti-war movement demanded, the Cambodian enclaves had to be shut down; the war had to be extended cross-border and on the ground to keep the enemy on his heels.
I hated the choice. But the only other options were an immediate sellout of our allies and an abrupt evacuation of all Americans in-country, military and civilian, that would have dwarfed in blood and carnage what happened in April 1975.
There are some who argue we could have gotten the same deal with Hanoi in 1970 as we got two years later in Paris. But that ignores the fact that the Communists’ precondition in 1970 was the prior removal of President Nguyen Van Thieu, a U.S. initiated coup.
Enemy documents captured during the U.S. troop incursion into Cambodia yielded further evidence of the “wisdom” of the operation if you can call it that. They revealed that for at least the past three years most supplies destined for Communist troops in the Saigon area and the delta had bypassed the heavily bombed Ho Chi Minh trail system in Laos. Instead they had been delivered by ship to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville and then smuggled overland to South Vietnam. Cambodia had become a lifeline and safe-haven for NVA/VC forces killing Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese. If you wanted to stop the killing – on both sides – Cambodia had to be denied to NVA/VC logisticians and troops in recovery.
Had Kissinger and Nixon not been so addicted to secrecy, the intelligence explaining why the enclaves had to be hit – and now — might have been made public for all to see. I doubt it would have kept the demonstrators off Kent State’s campus. It should not have done so; opposition to the war was morally justified and needed expression. But full transparency on Nixon’s part might have dampened the passions and paranoia on both sides of the deep political divide in this country. It might even have made the guardsman and their masters less trigger happy, might being the operative word.
Postscript:
During the spring of 1972, the Communists’ two-year moratorium on countrywide blitzkriegs, the proscription set forth in Resolution 9, came to shattering end. Heavily armed and armored NVA forces plunged across and around the DMZ and routed government forces in the northern provinces. Security in the highlands and west of Saigon collapsed. Only close-in U.S. air, artillery and advisory support served to halt the enemy’s advance. Clearly Vietnamization had not eliminated the corruption and leadership problems that were destroying the regime’s capacity for survival.
By fall 1972 the secret talks in Paris between Kissinger and Hanoi’s Le Duc Tho had reached a turning point. Hanoi had given up on demanding Thieu’s prior ouster, but Kissinger had made compromises too. Without telling our allies he had agreed to let Hanoi keep its 140,000 troops now in the south in exchange for a ceasefire, the release of American POWS and the safe departure of the last U.S. forces. The same spy who had reported on Resolution 9 learned of the secret agreement from his contacts inside COSVN and conveyed the news to the U.S. embassy in Saigon and to President Thieu.
Caught wholly unawares, Thieu protested the one-sided bargain to Nixon and Kissinger. Nixon responded by bombing the bejesus out of Hanoi and hurling all available surplus hardware at Saigon, much of it junk without spare parts, to sweeten Thieu’s mood.
Kissinger didn’t bother to tell the U.S. Congress that he had secretly promised massive postwar aid to both Hanoi and Saigon to coax them into toeing his line. Though Congress had to sign the checks, it had been left in the dark. No wonder legislators would remain wary of all administration aid requests for the South Vietnamese.
The ceasefire went into effect in January 1973, and, soon after, American prisoners and the last U.S. troops in Vietnam went home.
Understandably the antiwar movement felt vindicated. But the continued presence of 140,000 enemy troops on South Vietnamese soil went largely un-condemned and un-protested on American campuses.
In April 1975, the same spy who had reported on Resolution 9 and so much else warned (in a key instance, to me personally) that COSVN intended to seize Saigon by May 1 and would not allow for negotiations that might have assured an orderly evacuation of American civilians and their Vietnamese associates. The U.S. Ambassador refused to prepare adequately for that contingency for fear of upsetting the “controlled conditions” he felt necessary for a negotiated settlement, the very thing the spy, and Hanoi, had ruled out.
If the spy had been believed, evacuation planning might have proceeded apace. Thousands of imperiled Vietnamese might have been able to make their way to the coast east of Saigon to escape on their own or to be lifted off the beaches by U.S. landing craft or helicopters. But the spy was not believed despite my every effort to ensure otherwise, and on April 27 the road to the coast was severed.
Two days later, as Hanoi’s legions closed on the city, those of us in Saigon who had desperately wanted to end the war barely escaped from the embassy rooftop and other emergency helicopter pads at nearby Tan Son Nhut airbase.
Millions of our loyal allies were left behind to be thrown into concentration camps. Southern Viet Cong leaders were sidelined or killed by their masters in Hanoi. The spy who had reported Resolution 9 and everything else was betrayed to the Communists by one-time colleagues, including an American detainee who had worked for the CIA. While in custody, the spy hung himself by his belt.
Meanwhile American GI’s who had served valiantly in Vietnam were mocked on their own street corners as dupes or baby killers, the spiritual brethren of the murderous guardsman at Kent State. Many in the old anti-war movement kept silent.
Where was the morality in any of this?
An old CIA colleague of mine, with a taste for Shakespeare, dipped into a sonnet about misspent passion and came up with a perfect description of the war. He called it an “expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”
That phrase echoes down the years as I mark the 45th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the 50th anniversary of Kent State and contemplate the moral corruption, ethical relativism and bastardized truth that now govern Trump’s republic.
When will they ever learn…