A Facebook subscriber, who viewed the latest excerpt (Part 6) from Susan Hunter’s documentary featuring Vietnam eyewitnesses, recently sent me an email asking about a detail I had mentioned in my interview with her
The context was a briefing I had delivered to U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, a month before the Communist victory. In late March 1975, shortly after the collapse of government forces north of Saigon, Martin returned from meetings in Washington to confront the new crisis. As I was briefing him about the dire military situation, he interrupted to object, saying that he had “better” intelligence than my grim brief reflected. The Facebook subscriber wondered what that intelligence was.
Fair question.
Here’s my reply, based on material I have previously published:
When Martin returned in late March, disaster was already upon us. In just three weeks, largely through Thieu’s own chaotic and panic-driven miscalculations, the Communists had seized the top half of South Vietnam, routed half of its army, and turned the border areas of Cambodia into cost-free parking lots. Command and control within the Saigon military stood obliterated.
Even so, Martin comforted himself with the prospect that Henry Kissinger could induce the Soviets—and possibly the Chinese, for their own reasons—to pressure Hanoi into accepting a negotiated settlement that would leave South Vietnam intact. He soon signed off on a strategic assessment prepared by his defense attaché that reflected this fantasy.
He also labored under the illusion that Hanoi could not move fast enough to reach Saigon before the rainy season and that Thieu would therefore have time to rally the remnants of his army as Communist forces bogged down in the June–July monsoons outside the city. For that reason, he believed a new U.S. aid package might still make a difference, and he clung to the hope that the Saudis could be persuaded to invest quickly and heavily enough to reinforce South Vietnam’s survival prospects.
Since everything he imagined argued for maintaining the status quo, another mounting crisis loomed ominously. The setbacks of the past two weeks had sent 500,000 refugees rolling south toward Saigon in search of safety. There was also a sudden glut of jobless U.S. officials and government contractors whose outposts upcountry had been overrun by the enemy. Pentagon officials were particularly anxious to withdraw the nearly 1,200 civilian contractors now walking the halls of the defense attaché’s headquarters with nothing to do but soak up money from the federal budget.
By early April, drawdown orders had arrived from the Defense Department and several other sister agencies, but they had no real effect. Many of the 6,000-plus Americans still in-country who were suddenly vagrants or officially slated as “non-essential” refused to budge without Vietnamese friends and lovers. Thieu refused to ease restrictions on exit visas, for fear of accelerating the unraveling, and Martin refused to press him or to seek a loosening of U.S. immigration quotas for the very same reason.
It was as if we were all hovering at the exits, beckoning for someone else to pass through first as the enemy closed in.
To complicate matters, Kissinger refused in early April to assume control of evacuation planning and left all key decisions in this regard to Martin until Congress had had a chance to vote on the latest futile aid proposal for Saigon. The vote was slated for April 20. So, in effect, Martin had to bear the onus for the toughest decision of all—whether to begin pulling the plug on the U.S. commitment. He wouldn’t and couldn’t do it, because it seemed wholly unnecessary to him.
My own immediate boss, CIA station chief Tom Polgar—whose key intelligence assessments I often drafted—had decided by early April that Saigon had already been beaten. But he shared Martin’s illusion that the Communists would not be positioned to strike the capital until the rains arrived, at which point, he believed, weather would slow their advance. He also gave credence to French and Hungarian rumors that Hanoi would negotiate if Thieu stepped down, and he doubted that the Communists felt administratively capable of absorbing what remained of South Vietnam in one brutal gulp.
So, despite being far more pessimistic than Martin about Saigon’s overall survival prospects, he seconded the Ambassador’s reluctance to tempt fate by hastening personnel departures.
All of this—the Martin-Polgar-Kissinger psychodrama—played out against an evolving intelligence backdrop that was truly dire.
On April 1, our Hanoi source, an asset I had long been dealing with directly, told me that the Politburo was already on the scent of blood and would stop for nothing. Polgar, along with visiting CIA bigwigs Ted Shackley and George Carver, sat in on part of my debrief and were visibly shaken.
Seven days later, our prized COSVN source, Võ Văn Ba, filed a report ruling out any negotiated settlement. He also predicted imminent attacks “in and around” Saigon and warned that all talk of a diplomatic solution was a Communist ruse. The following day, CIA Director William Colby briefed President Ford on the report, though he misstated Ba’s categorical rejection of negotiations, leaving open the possibility that the Communists might pause their final attack to go through the motions of bargaining. It was a fatal misreading of the urgency of Hanoi’s operational plans.
Within the next week and a half, the military and strategic picture worsened. Cambodia fell, opening that entire country to Communist infiltration; Saigon’s last defenses forty miles to the north began crumbling; and coup rumors sailed through the capital.
In light of all this, Martin finally bought into Polgar’s theory that Thieu’s removal might bring the enemy to the negotiating table. Using a worst-case prognosis that the defense attaché’s staff and I had prepared, Martin persuaded Thieu to step down on his own.
Meanwhile, on April 17, just after Kissinger had appealed to the Soviets to intervene with Hanoi, I met directly with Ba and confirmed that Thieu’s impending resignation would make no difference, that negotiations wouldn’t either, and that the enemy planned to seize Saigon militarily by Ho Chi Minh’s birthday in mid-May. He added that they would begin striking directly at the city in late April, kicking off the final drive with airstrikes and artillery barrages.
Martin sent two cables to Kissinger urging him against accepting Ba’s scenario and commending the likelihood of an equitable political settlement. He pointed to assurances to this effect that Polgar had recently received from Hungarian diplomats and noted that Hanoi had yet to respond to the entreaties Kissinger had passed to them through the Soviets.
Though Martin remained guardedly hopeful, Admiral Noel Gayler, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, was so disturbed by Ba’s report that he accelerated contingency planning for an emergency airlift out of Saigon and showed up at the embassy himself to help prepare for it. Kissinger, to be on the safe side, ordered Martin to draw down the U.S. presence in Saigon to 1,100 within the next two days so that a few helicopter lifts could quickly clear the American presence in case of emergency.
Martin and Polgar continued to drag their feet on evacuation priorities, so convinced were they that negotiations would save Saigon and South Vietnam’s independence.
On April 25, the very day I drove Thieu to his own evacuation flight, Hanoi’s leaders sent a message to Kissinger through the Soviets. It was exquisitely hedged, saying that the Americans had a few more days to evacuate themselves—no reference to Vietnamese—and that Hanoi was looking for peace within the framework of the Paris accords, whatever that meant, since the accords had never been fully implemented.
Four days later, just as Ba had predicted, the Communists kicked off their final drive on Saigon with airstrikes (using captured aircraft), artillery, and rocket barrages. The final emergency helicopter lift quickly degenerated into every man, woman, and child for themselves.
NVA commander-in-chief, General Van Tien Dũng, was laughing all the way. Indeed, he later bragged in his memoirs about how Polgar and other U.S. officials had been led around like fools through Communist trickery.
Shortly after Dũng’s forces blasted into Saigon, Võ Văn Ba was betrayed to the enemy and captured. Rather than give away American secrets or Vietnamese comrades, he hanged himself with his belt.