Each year I update this post to remind myself to remember — all the more timely given the current campus strife and the 50th anniversary of the fall of Vietnam .
The 55th anniversary of the Kent State massacre may go largely unnoticed amid the roiling controversies fueled by Trump 2.0. But May 4, 1970, is forever memorialized in infamy by 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 for us the war was a split-screen affair, perceived through two distinct lenses. One was 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 Saigon 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. During the previous 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 U.S./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.
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 that 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, and so lawless, the intelligence explaining why the enclaves had to be hit – and immediately — 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 commanders less trigger happy, “might” being the operative word.
The final reckoning:
During the spring of 1972, the Communists’ two-year moratorium on countrywide blitzkriegs, the proscription that had been set forth in Resolution 9, came to a shattering end. Heavily armed and armored NVA forces plunged across and around the DMZ and routed government forces in the northern provinces, giving the final lie to anti-war claims that this was a simple people’s revolution waged by peasants. 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 early 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 Haiphong and hurling all available surplus U.S. 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 and explicitly 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 un-condemned and un-protested on American campuses, and the two Vietnamese combatants continued to bloody each other for the next two years and counting.
On April 17, 1975, ten days before the end, the same spy who had reported on Resolution 9 told me and his case officers that Communist forces intended to move against Saigon by May 1, that they would bring airstrikes and artillery to bear on the city and that they would not pause for negotiations.
In a logical universe there should have been an immediate acceleration of all efforts to get remaining Americans and our highest-risk Vietnamese allies and employees out of the country. There was still time to send thousands of Vietnamese to the coast east of Saigon to be lifted off the beaches by U.S. landing craft or helicopters. And blessedly some U.S. military planners did begin refining plans for an emergency helicopter lift if it came to that.
But U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin remained obdurate. He rejected the spy’s warnings and continued to slow-walk the drawdown of embassy personnel and Vietnamese associates. Under Kissinger’s coaxing and on the advice of misguided foreign diplomats, he had come to believe that a negotiated ending was still possible and that any rush to the exits would destabilize the political conditions needed for it.
On April 27, while Martin equivocated, the road to the coast was severed by the enemy.
Two days later, as Hanoi’s legions closed on the city under cover of airstrikes and artillery barrages, 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.
All of us who made it out that day by chopper owe our lives in part to the spy whose warnings helped trigger the necessary contingency planning.
But millions of our loyal allies were left behind.
More than 400,00 were thrown into concentration camps for as long seventeen years. Southern Viet Cong leaders were sidelined or killed by their masters in Hanoi. Books were burned. The presses closed. Free speech trampled.
The spy who had reported Resolution 9 and everything else was betrayed to the Communists by one-time colleagues. Facing execution, he 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 and derided as 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 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the 55th anniversary of Kent State and contemplate the moral corruption, ethical relativism, narcissistic excesses, and bastardized truth that characterize some of the current campus demonstrations — and which Trump and his followers have made business-as-usual in our country.
When will we ever learn…