Jeff Stein of the web site Spytalk recently compared Russian bombing of Ukraine to the London blitz of 1940 and the US bombing of Hanoi at Christmas 1972 and argued it would fail, as the two previous atrocities had, in subduing a resolute people.
“The idea [behind the Christmas bombing] was to break Hanoi’s will and force it to sign a peace treaty that would return our POWs and allow the U.S. to get out of the war,” Stein writes. “The terror bombings of London and Hanoi did not break their wills to win. It’s not breaking Kyiv.”
The author’s description is appropriate to the blitz and the Ukraine campaign, but it shortchanges the unique character and multiple purposes the Hanoi bombing. This is not an academic quibble. The lessons of Vietnam are incomplete without a nuanced understanding of how an imperfect peace was forced on both Vietnamese combatants.
Secret Paris Peace Talks, October-December 1972:
In mid-October, 1972, Henry Kissinger, the Nixon Administration’s chief negotiator, left Paris with what he thought was workable if bare bones formula for a Vietnam peace accord underwritten by his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho. He was on his way to selling it to the South Vietnamese who had had been left out of the negotiations. But in the meantime, the CIA’s best penetration agent, a master spy named Vo Van Ba, delivered an intelligence report to the CIA station, and to the South Vietnamese government, that torpedoed Kissinger’s best laid plans.
Throughout the peace process, Ba’s reporting, which was based on field briefings at COSVN, the communist command in the south, had been one of best information sources for the CIA on Kissinger’s back-and-forth with Le Duc Tho.
Why did the CIA need such a backstop?
Because Kissinger had severely limited distribution of all official readouts about the secret discussions and had thus left the CIA’s vast analytical directorate largely in the dark. Many of us directly responsible for assessing the enemy’s intentions for the White House and the likelihood of success in Paris had to rely on the enemy’s own readouts to understand fully what was going on.
The October report from Ba was just the latest gem from this extraordinary intelligence asset. But for Nguyen Van Thieu it read like a death sentence.
By Ba’s account, Hanoi was even then instructing its forces and cadre in the field to prepare for a ceasefire any time after October 15, 1972, by grabbing as much land as possible in the forty-eight-hour period before and after the terms were announced.
The report confirmed Thieu’s worst suspicions that the US was trying to lock him into an agreement that would leave all North Vietnamese forces in the south and under terms that doomed the South Vietnamese. His fears were ramified by the transcript he obtained of an interview that a Newsweek reporter had just conducted with North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong, who gloated over what was in the offing.
In response, Thieu dug in his heels and signaled to Washington that the proposed agreement was a no-go for his regime. The North Vietnamese, who had spies everywhere, confirmed Thieu’s intransigence.
At follow-up talks in November and December, Le Duc Tho refused to reconsider the troop withdrawal issue or to recognize “any aspect of sovereignty for South Vietnam,” as Kissinger noted to President Nixon.
Faced with a total collapse of negotiations, Nixon approved the Christmas bombing as a message with two addressees. Extending from December 18 to the 29th, the air offensive was designed to intimidate the North Vietnamese into re-embracing a peace agreement that was basically a giveaway to them anyway. It was also aimed at assuring Thieu (falsely) that he could count on game-changing U.S. support if the Communists violated the prospective agreement.
The murderous two-way leverage worked. In late January 1973, the agreement went into effect with North Vietnamese laughing all the way to the lopsided payoff and the South Vietnamese grudgingly acceding to it. Even then Thieu had no complete copy of the agreement negotiated on his behalf.
Sources:
Ba’s report is mentioned, though without reference to Ba himself, on page 82 in Allan E. Goodman’s magisterial 1978 study, The Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War.
I wrote of the double dealing by Kissinger and the double messaging of the bombing in my memoir Decent Interval. I knew in real time of Vo Van Ba’s role in exposing to Thieu the U.S. sellout in Paris – I had been in direct periodic contact with Ba since 1971 and a fervent advocate of his reporting — but I could not name him in Decent Interval because the Ba case remained highly classified at the time. Ba’s former Vietnamese case officer, who now lives in the United States, published a recent web post that specifically credited Ba by name as the source of the information which persuaded Thieu to haul back on the negotiating levers and helped set the stage for the secret bombing.
I greatly respect Jeff, who has graciously published some of my own articles on Spytalk. As a former intelligence officer in Vietnam, he will doubtless have more to say about the Christmas bombing next time he tackles the subject. Far from being simply a sledgehammer effort to “break Hanoi’s will,” the bombing was, ultimately, a tragically effective tactic to get the North Vietnamese to accept a peace accord that already served their every interest.