Blowback - S5 Episode 5 - "Last Tango In Paris"

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

One Cambodian coup, two US invasions and an unlikely American friend: China.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On May 5th, 1972, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were discussing their next moves for the war in Indochina, specifically whether to introduce more concern regarding the bombing of civilians. There was an election coming up in November, and Kissinger was concerned that the shocking death tolls from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia might hurt the administration's chances at re-election. Nixon scoffed, Henry, you don't have any idea. The only place where you and I disagree at the present time is with regard to the bombing.

You're so goddamn concerned about the civilians, and I don't give a damn. I don't care. You don't have a street the first time to regard to the mom and you're just about that and check about the studies and I don't get it. I don't think of them. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 5, Episode 5, Last Tango in Paris. In our last episode, we witnessed the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, the Nixon administration's grand plan to end the Vietnam War by expanding it. In a prelude, the White House had executed a secret bombing campaign in the spring of 1969, Operation Menu. There, it burned the flight records and implemented a cover-up. The plan was to crush Viet Cong sanctuaries over the border

while building up local strongmen and pulling out the American troops. This, Exhibit A of the so-called Nixon doctrine, existed alongside another private doctrine, coined by the president himself. Madman theory. Policy, in other words, meant to scare the shit out of the communist world. The next year, after Operation Menu, things didn't have to be so secret.

An American friend launched a coup inside of Cambodia, the superstitious right-wing general, Lon Nahl. With brutal efficiency, Lon Nol abolished Cambodia's ancient monarchy, sending the anti-American Prince Sianuk into exile in China and committing Lon Nol's military to help the American. Americans clear the country of communists, both Vietnamese and Cambodian alike. Now, after Sianuk had done everything in his power to stop it, Cambodia was the final victim

of the U.S. war in Indochina. But Lon Nal's coup may have been the last efficient thing he could pull off. His government was good at killing, but not so good at holding territory or winning battles. The Civil War in Cambodia will dissolve Nixon's hope of peace with honor next door in Vietnam. But it will do wonders for Washington's budding relationship with a new, unlikely friend, communist China. In the jungles north of Phnom Penh, General Secretary of the Cambodian communists Paul Pot, formerly Salasar, was steadily growing an army. They were, in fact, still a much smaller

fighting force in Cambodia, nested inside the more powerful Viet Cong, who did the vast majority of the fighting against Lonnal's forces. Kamir Rouge units often served as auxiliaries, or backup, while the seasoned Vietnamese took the brunt of the action. But the Vietnamese were no longer their sole partners. In the wake of Lonnall's coup in 1970, there had been some geopolitical matchmaking, chiefly organized from Beijing. A new umbrella group meant to serve as the official Cambodian opposition to Launal contained the communists, both Vietnamese and Khmer,

as well as some much smaller nationalist forces. It was known as Funk, short for United National Front of Kempichia. The figurehead of these jungle-faring guerrillas was none other than Prince Sianuk, presiding from a mansion in Beijing, complete with a heated swimming pool and nine personal chefs, because the prince insisted, I am a gourmet. The irony was not lost on many. At the head of this new resistance block, made up mostly of communists, was the monarch whose police and soldiers had cracked down on them for the better part of 20 years.

The artifice of the whole arrangement was clear any time that Sianuk was forced to interact with his coalition partners, whom he considered pretentious brats, classless bandits, and useful idiots of North Vietnam. For example, whenever Khmer Rouge leader Yang Sari flew to Beijing for a meeting, Sianuk would dig up racy or pornographic films from the French embassy, organize a screening, and force Sari to sit through the smut. The prince got a kick out of watching the austere communist squirm in his seat. Whenever Sari left, reports journalist William Shawcross, Sianuk would double over laughing and say, quote, he's going to have a hell of a self-criticism tomorrow.

While Sianuk choked down this alliance, this association with the prince lent the Khmer Rouge a new prestige and legitimacy. It was certainly enough for the Chinese to shift their support until now going to Sianuk over to the Khmer Rouge, a fact that Shawcross identifies as another unforced error of America's Cambodia policy. The Khmer Rouge were also now coming enough into their own to publish an official party history,

an extraordinary event in any communist movement, as Elizabeth Becker puts it. Quote, shortly before the history was circulated in the party, pamphlets were printed and issued under the United Front's imprint in Beijing that showed photographs of the Khmer Rouge leadership inside Cambodia.

First and most prominent were the three ghosts. Kusampan, Hoyun, and Hunim, until now, presumed murdered by Sianuk's police years ago. They lived up to their legends, handsome, fit men who stand out from the peasant soldiers as self-confident intellectuals and leaders. They're depicted as Renaissance men in the jungle, crossing swamps, sharing simple meals, gathered in meetings, relaxing on hammocks, seemingly always in command. but these men were not running the show. Quote, the photos of the three ghosts are followed by a short portrait gallery of the real party leaders, although they are not identified as such. The first photograph is of Saloth Saar, alias Pol Pot, seated in a bamboo grove.

Saar's hands are locked comfortably around his knees. The sun, filtered through the trees, falls as a spotlight on his full cheeks and coarsely barbered haircut. He appears with an unrecognizably thin, Yang Suri, a grim-faced coitoon, and, brother number two, Nuan Chia. They wore ill-fitting drab shirts and trousers. They stand and sit in undistinguished scrub jungle. There are no dashing shots of these men, cavorting through the marshes, wearing berets, laughing with their comrade soldiers, as are the three ghosts. The real leaders are alone. Their faces are weary, glum. Of them all, Salasar has the least memorable face, the least assertive stance. Even in front of the camera,

he hides. For Pol Pot, the year of Law Nahl's coup would bring changes, and not just to his name. Until 1970, writes his biographer, Philip Short. To all appearances, he was still the same soft-spoken, smiling, amiable man, who as a student in Paris, was remembered for his sense of fun and good companionship, who later as a teacher in Phnom Penh, had been adored by his pupils, and who finally, as a communist, was valued for his ability to bring together different tendencies and groups, end quote. But now, as Pol Pot, he would rise to the occasion of a civil war, and his party followed. At the beginning of Cambodia's war, the Khmeric communists were much like their counterparts in Laos and Vietnam. They recruited disaffected soldiers from the

government's army and preached an egalitarian vision to the peasant masses, a vision free of foreign domination and exploitation. And, like their counterparts across the border, they treated the peasants with respect, and in turn, received food and shelter. CIA reports from the time, surfaced by Shawcross, bluntly recognized this fact, quote, the communists help the people with the harvesting, offer to pay, treat the women with respect, the only people in the area who do not actively support the Viet Cong and Khmer communists are wealthy merchants, local functionaries, and professors. A man named Heath Sarin, who lived in Khmer Rouge territory and later fled,

summed up life in the communist areas at this time. Quote, people were no longer treated like coolies. Khmer Rouge troops would exercise a light touch in daily life, and, during hard times, would show up at the homes of the sick with food and medicine. They abstained from vice or corrupt dealings, writes Becker, and eliminated liquor, gambling, adultery, and feudal terms of address, writes Shawcross. At this early stage, it was not the Khmer Rouge,

but the army of law knoll that was infamous for committing atrocities, to which we'll get in a moment. But, as the war ground on, it was possible to discern in the Cambodian communists more than a tinge of extremism. Philip Short writes, the Maoist approach that enemy prisoners could

and should be won over to fight for the communist cause did not come naturally to the Cambodians. End quote. And that was just regarding their fellow Khmeres. And the party did have one thing in common with La Nahl. They did not take kindly to foreigners. Quote, if to La Nol's government

all Vietnamese were communists, short rites. To the Khmer Rouge, all foreigners were enemies. By the end of April, 26 Western journalists had gone missing in Cambodia. Those fortunate enough to end up in the hands of the Viet Cong were usually freed, as was the practice in Vietnam. But with three exceptions, all those captured during the war by the Khmer Rouge, priests and aid personnel, as well as journalists, were killed. Most suspicious to the Khmer Rouge were the Vietnamese.

Ku Pannari, Paul Potts' wife, personally embodied anti-Vietnamese paranoia on a clinical level. Quote, a Chinese official who met her in 1970, remembered her being, quote, so anti-Vietnam it wasn't possible even to mention the word Vietnam in her presence. Only much later was her illness diagnosed as chronic paranoid schizophrenia. paraphrania. Pol Pottskook recalled an aide putting out a glass of water one day. She screamed at him not to drink it, he said, because the Vietnamese had put poison in it. This kind of paranoia, extreme in Ponnery's case, but present among all the Khmer Rouge leaders, it would define the group in the years to come. I would hope that all the members of this administration

would have in mind the fact, a role that I have always had. And it's a very simple one. When the action is hot, keep the rhetoric cool. The writing press gets a break. Do you believe that the use of the word is to categorize some of those

who are engaged in dissent, and I know that you meant it to apply to those who are destructive, but it's been used in a broader context. Do you believe that's in keeping with your suggestion that the rhetoric should be kept cool? I would certainly regret that my use of the word bums was interpreted to apply to those who dissent.

All the members of this press corps know that I have for years defended the right of dissent. I have always opposed the use of violence. Now, on university campuses, the rule of reason is supposed to prevail over the rule of force. And when students on university campuses burn buildings, when they engage in violence, when they break up furniture, when they terrorize their fellow students, and terrorize the faculty, then I think Bums is perhaps too kind of word to apply to that kind of person. Those are the kind I were referring to. In the aftermath of the Cambodia invasion, President Nixon was feeling the heat of the 1970 midterm elections.

Just a few months away, writes Seymour Hirsch. quote, the president was reeling from a series of political reverses that included the Senate's rejection of two Supreme Court nominations, the disastrous invasion of Cambodia, and the shootings at Kent State University, end quote. There was a possible ace in the whole. For months, Nixon and Kissinger had secretly been trying to make nice with communist China. Not only for a more pliant influence on Vietnam and Cambodia, but also to isolate the Soviet Union. It was time to make a bold advance. That June, as Nixon was wrapping up the Cambodia invasion, he and Kissinger, quote,

authorized an aid to approach a Chinese official in Paris with an offer to open direct channels between Washington and Beijing, end quote. The president wanted to be the first American leader to visit China. and achieve the stunning diplomatic victory. But the Chinese didn't respond to this message, nor a follow-up, leaving Nixon and Kissinger very anxious. By early October, as Nixon's popularity fell, Hirsch continues, his anxiety about China became acute.

Still no response? What gives? Quote, nonetheless, the White House kept its signals flashing. Early in the month, Nixon was quoted in Time magazine as declaring, quote, If there is anything I want to do before I die, it is to go to China. If I don't, I want my children to. The critical intervention came in October, when Nixon met for an hour with one of his personal favorite U.S. sponsored dictators, Yaya Khan, president of Pakistan. I understand you are going to Beijing, Nixon directly said to Khan,

according to a declassified recap of the meeting. It is essential that we open negotiations with China. Soon after, Chinese Premier Joe Inlai finally got word back to Washington. As long as Taiwan was on the table, he said, a visit by Nixon, quote, will be most welcome in Beijing. It quickly became clear the cost to the Americans would be withdrawing troops from Taiwan. But the potential upside, in addition to the good optics of peacemaking, included Chinese support for negotiations over Vietnam in Paris,

which until now, Beijing had been telling Hanoi to reject. The same month as Nixon's chat with Ya Ya Khan, some nine months after La Nal and Prince Matok overthrew Sianuk. Cambodia was declared a new Khmer Republic. At a grand ceremony to inaugurate the government, reports short, soldiers fired a 101 gun salute. On the 15th salvo, the cannon exploded, killing one of the gun crew, end quote. Such was the official start to the Law-Nall regime,

backed by the United States and opposed by a communist right-wing coalition, which was headed by a deposed prince living in Beijing. While Pol Pot was laying down the principles of future Khmer Rouge policy in the jungles, read short, Law Nall plowed relentlessly on with his plans for a republic of the Cambodian middle class, end quote. The general was, in fact, ruling a garrison state, which lost more territory to the guerrillas every year. It thrived on corruption and had lived.

control outside of the capital. In fact, Becker reports, many peasants in the countryside going about their lives, quote, still believed Sianuk was ruling as king from Phnom Penh. Under Launal, the military was spoiled, yet remained downright dysfunctional. The troops mirrored their leader's own superstitious nature, and the slipshot picture did not improve farther up the chain of command, quote, the commander-in-chief of Lawnal's army, pampered his vanity by having a set of miniature furniture and platforms constructed for his office, so as to make him appear taller and larger. Naturally, army officials vacuumed up millions of dollars in USAID,

hit it in Swiss bank accounts, and spent it on mansions, limos, and other luxuries. Law and Null's military functioned like the mafia, complete with the practice of putting up no-show jobs. I'll tell you this no-show shit is tough. Deciding what not to wear to work, what not to put in my lunchbox. You're breaking my heart. You should try sitting here at 10.30 to 3. Officers reported and received money and supplies for regiments of tens of thousands of soldiers

who did not exist. And the really existing troops saw their wages stolen, while officers sold military equipment on the black market, and even sold surplus product to the same. the Khmer Rouge. The fratricidal trade went the other way, too. The law null officials often bought rubber from communist territory. The White House and Pentagon did nothing to stop all of this. The entire economy was a grift, fueled by U.S. dollars. Shawcross reports that, quote, Cambodians would complain, there is too much bonjour everywhere, bonjour

being the popular epithet for corruption. No one will ever know just how much was stolen. and dissipated. But the sums were not inconsiderable, and they grew every year as the Joint Chiefs, Kissinger, and Al Haig insisted on the expansion of Lawnall's forces. Ordinary people tried their best to win any remaining morsels from the economy. Quote, rice became an obsession in the capital, Becker reports. The war effort was secondary. The provision of food was handled by rice merchants who only sold a portion of their subsidized product and then used the remainder to open a black market

where hungry people paid higher prices. Still, the Americans refused to cough up humanitarian aid for two years. And when it came, it was nowhere near what was needed for the squalid, overstuffed capital and the masses of refugees forming from the countryside. Saddled with corruption, scarcity, and skyrocketing inflation, so vanished pesky things like civil liberties,

which Lonnell more or less eradicated in 1973. Totally gone, Becker writes, were freedom of the press, freedom of movement, and more. Quote, yet that middle class and the privileged, acquiesced to Lonnall's rule. They complained bitterly but saw no recourse other than an end to war. They felt cowed by America's complete support for Lawnall, and the dictates of war gave them more.

little room to maneuver. The fish, of course, rotted from the head. Lawnall himself was, quote, behaving like a superstitious dictator. He followed his favorite monk's orders to sprinkle the city's perimeter with, quote-unquote, holy sand

to ward off the enemy. According to Khmer's who spoke to Becker, he acted like a dangerous racist who believed in the superiority of the Khmer race and the inferiority of the Vietnamese. As a commander, he saw himself as a divine figure, waging a holy war for Buddha against a horde of infidels. Unfortunately for Buddha, Lonnall was not a great general. Quote, the first months of battle were disastrous.

Penhampen's forces effectively lost or gave up control of more than half of the country to the North Vietnamese army. By August, the Vietnamese had forced the Khmer Republic army to abandon huge, swaths of western Cambodia, end quote. Someone would have to be punished. From an NBC news report in May 1970. Many Cambodians simply hate the Vietnamese who live in their country. How do these Cambodians feel about Vietnamese soldiers now coming into their country? Frank, you're quite right.

It's unpleasant to say that Cambodians dislike the Vietnamese. They don't like them, whether they come from the north or the south, or whether they're communist or anti-communists. The government is playing upon this in its political campaign against Prince Xi Hanuk. They are portraying him as an ambitious despot trying to return to power at the head of a foreign army, the Vietnamese army. The coup that ousted Sianuk had kicked off with a violent campaign against Vietnamese citizens inside of Cambodia.

It soon became clear that was only the beginning. Lonnall, partly out of genuine conviction, partly out of political opportunism, turned the already nasty rhetoric against the Viet Cong into a massive pogrom of Vietnamese in general. There were several hundred thousand ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia at the time, and, reports Becker, quote, generally they were as anti-communist as the new Phnom Penh regime, but they were inconveniently of the same race as the Viet Cong, end quote.

Quote, not long after the coup, crude signs appeared on store windows questioning the loyalty of Vietnamese proprietors within. Word-of-mouth campaigns started boycotts of Vietnamese establishments. Within a month, the military set up camps for all Vietnamese citizens of Cambodia. In a matter of days, Lonnall's troops rounded up tens of thousands of people. Mass internment quickly escalated to mass killing, with troops rolling into majority Vietnamese villages and massacring hundreds of civilians at a time. The radio screamed abuse, and in Phnom Penh, the government staged a pageant at which the brilliant, beautiful Khmeres were seen liquidating their knavish neighbors, writes Chalkross.

Scattered massacres had given way to mass deportations. Over the next year, 250,000 Vietnamese residents of Cambodia were forced to abandon their homes and belongings and were placed in concentration camps pending their expulsion. Christian churches, frequented mainly by Vietnamese converts, were bombed by Launal's Air Force, on the grounds that they might provide refuge for communist guerrillas. Ultimately, writes historian Ben Kiernan, of the 400,000 Vietnamese then in Cambodia, half were expelled by the Launal regime in 1970, with several thousand. killed in Paul Groms.

Washington was not happy. Lonnall's racist obsessions weren't winning any battles with the actual Viet Cong, and all this killing by their strongman in Cambodia was beginning to sour relations with the American strongman in South Vietnam, President Nguyen Van Tew. Lonnall, Becker writes, was one of those Cambodians who could not bring himself to call South Vietnam any name other than Campocia Crom. or lower Cambodia.

The racist policies were not limited to the Vietnamese. Quote, La Nau also went after the ethnic Chinese, the other type of foreign devil in his configuration of hell, writes Becker. In fact, Law Nall's first draft of the new constitution sought to make Cambodia an official ethno state, a land for pure Khmeres. This was vetoed by the more worldly elites advising him, Not that they had voiced any opposition to the pogroms, of course.

But maybe some of them foresaw complications, given that most Khmeres hold some kind of mixed heritage, be it in part Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, or otherwise. Here, the middle classes and elite began to think wistfully of good old Prince Sianuk. The new regime, it turned out, was preserving the worst aspects of his rule, but without any of the benefits of his old world, no bless oblige. Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight I would like to talk to you about a major new initiative for peace.

On August 28, 1970, writes Carolyn Woods-Eisenberg, Henry Kissinger was delighted to learn that the North Vietnamese would be sending a representative to meet with him in Paris. In high excitement, he reported to advisor H.R. Haldeman, quote, their big guys would be there. This led him to speculate that perhaps the invasion of Cambodia had done the trick, convincing the other side that they could not prevail on the battlefield, end quote. With U.S. elections coming up, a flashy diplomatic coup would be perfectly timed. Upon arrival in France, however, Kissinger found himself incapable of delivering

the October's surprise for the midterms that his master wanted. Kissinger had offered the North Vietnamese a, quote-unquote, stand-still ceasefire that would preserve the South Vietnamese government. But Hanoi's position had by now evolved beyond such concessions. Just as Kissinger had once feared, Vietnamization and its pullout of U.S. troops left the Viet Cong and the North in a stronger position, and so the communist rejected. Nixon's proposal.

But just as he sought to conduct his own exclusive foreign policy, Nixon had increasingly taken over his own public relations. On October 7th, a month before Election Day, he gave another TV address, promoting his own five-point deal for a ceasefire, which he and Kissinger well knew was dead on arrival with Anoy. After considering your recommendations of all my principal advisors, I am tonight announcing new proposals for peace in Indochina.

This new peace initiative has been discussed with the governments of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. All support it. Nixon's speech drew rave reviews from the American press, writes historian Robert Brigham. But the North Vietnamese weren't impressed. Speaking to reporters in Paris, top diplomat Wyn Tibin said,

quote, What can I say of the five points put forward last night by President Nixon? Only a gift certificate for the votes of the American electorate and a cover-up for misleading world opinion. For the moment, that would be enough for the White House. But what would Nixon buy with that gift certificate? The Republicans didn't end up getting shellacked in the midterms, gaining in the Senate, losing in the House,

which gave Nixon some wiggle room. So once again, the president in Kissinger put together a gambit, to smash the Ho Chi-Men Trail and break the back of the communists in Indochina. This time, an attack on Laos. Laos, America's not-so-secret war in Asia, reported by Charles Collingwood. America had waged a secret air war on Laos for the better part of a decade. That had been made known a few months earlier with the publication of Daniel Ellsberg's Pentech. Papers. This time, it would be different. An invasion, or incursion, as the phraseology went,

solely by South Vietnamese units, with no American ground troops as had been in Cambodia. After all, the White House needed to prove what Nixon had been telling everyone, that Vietnamization had worked, and Saigon could handle major military operations on its own. But when preparation for Operation Lamson 719, as the invasion of Laos would be known, actually got underway, the failures of Vietnamization quickly became obvious. A battalion of Crack South Vietnamese Rangers was driven from a fire base after three days of heavy North Vietnamese attacks. The Rangers are said to have suffered 300 casualties killed and wounded out of their original strength of 450 men. The Rangers have taken refuge at another firebase itself under attack. And the 16,000 men, South Vietnam Nice Force, which is in Laos, is still pinned down and not moving for the fourth day in a row.

Henry Kissinger later called the Laos invasion, quote, a splendid project on paper. It was his deputy, General Alexander Haig, who had organized the operation and had claimed to Kissinger that, quote, we are within an eyelash of victory in Vietnam. When the Laos plan was presented to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers, they both opposed it. But, as Brigham puts it, once again, Kissinger purposely kept the Secretary of Defense

out of the planning stages of a military operation by implying that only he and Nixon understood the full importance of military operations in Laos. Kissinger, during these days of 1971, was himself waging a multi-front war to preserve his unique pole position within the Nixon hierarchy. In fact, as early as 1969, Kissinger had personally sicked the FBI on his own staffers, as well as journalists suspected of leaking White House secrets. Last episode, we saw him vow to find and destroy the culprits.

The next year, Kissinger's rivals for power were taking pages out of his book. That fall, the Joint Chiefs had begun spying on Kissinger through a Navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council. In 1971, the material from this snooping began appearing in the columns of Jack Anderson, D.C. Reporter of the Leaks, summed up by Anderson, was that all Kissinger does, quote, even the toilet paper he uses is being stamped secret. It was the first major disclosure of Kissinger's unusual control over Nixon policy.

The Joint Chiefs mostly got a pass from Nixon for this breach of his White House's decorum, but the president was by now beyond paranoid. He convened the plumbers, a group of ex-CIA and ex-FBI men detached to the White House, to protect the secrets of the president. But the breakthrough with China, hitherto top secret, was now becoming public, and in the process,

bailing out Nixon and Kissinger in the public eye. In April 1971, to the surprise of the world, Chinese premier Joe N. Lai, told a group of, of visiting American table tennis players that they had, quote, opened a new chapter in the relations of Chinese and American people, or as history would term the development, ping pong diplomacy. In July, Kissinger made his clandestine arrival in Beijing via Pakistan and met with Joe and Lai for a tense but friendly meeting. Of course, afterward, Joe briefed Mao Zedong,

writes historian Chen Jian. When Joe reported that Washington would withdraw some but not all American troops from Taiwan, he writes, Mao smiled and commented, quote, it would take some time for a monkey to evolve into a human. They are now at the stage of an ape. At a meeting with Kissinger the next day, Joe agreed to a visit by President Nixon

to take place in the spring of 1972. And less than a week after Kissinger's arrival in China, Washington and Beijing went public with the news. It prompted a two-year boost in Nixon's approval ratings that lasted until the Watergate crisis. As the Chinese foreign minister said in the words of Jian, U.S. global strategy continued to emphasize America and Europe while regarding the Soviet Union as its main enemy.

But Nixon and Kissinger's overall strategy, strategy was still detente. The USSR was not simply left in the cold. Arms reduction was still a very real goal. And the President and Secretary Leonid Brezhnev would visit each other's capitals in the months to come. The White House was simply building the sweetest of all sites, a balance of power. The American President had, through his trademark scheming and secrecy, successfully capitalized

on the Sino-Soviet split, but someone would have to pay the price for better relations among so-called great powers. Each side was asking the other to betray an ally, writes Hirsch. The United States would walk away

from its commitment to Taiwan. The Chinese had an easier task, to begin to turn their backs on their future rival for dominance in Southeast Asia, the North Vietnamese. Cambodia's war was as ugly as anything found in Vietnam. Neither side took prisoners, writes Shawcross.

One of the lasting photographic images of the war was a grinning Cambodian soldier of La Nol's army with a severed enemy head in either hand. Khmer Rouge, captured by the government, often had their stomach slit and were then hung on trees to die slowly. others were flung into ravines. One authority notes, quote,

enemy villages were raised and the villagers were beaten to death by peasants conscripted by the army specifically for the task. Nixon declared this all part and parcel of the fight in Vietnam, quote, the dollars we send to Cambodia save American lives.

The Cambodians are people seven million, only, neutralists previously, untrained, are tying down 40,000 trained North Vietnamese regulars so that they can defend themselves against a foreign aggressor. This is no civil war, has no aspect of a civil war. The dollars we send to Cambodia saves American lives and enables us to bring Americans home, and I only hope the Congress approves it. La Nol's two biggest land operations occurred in the first year of the war, Chenla 1 and Chenla 2, named after a Khmer Kingdom from the 9th century.

The goal of these operations was to conquer the provincial capital of Kampong Tom, held by communists and serving as Pol Pot's own base of operations. The fate of Chenla 1 can be guessed by its commander, Colonel Um-Savut. He was an astonishing personality, Shah Kras writes, a thin, twisted man who was nearly always drunk. Early in his military career he had,

in a moment of high spirits, ordered a subordinate to place a cat on his head, and then, from a considerable distance, shoot the animal off. The subordinate refused. Umsavut insisted that it was a direct order. The man pulled the trigger, and a part of Umsavut,

head was blown away. Ever since, his body had been paralyzed, and he had to drink quantities of beer and scotch to kill his constant pain. The Khmer Rouge were not exactly rock-solid either. While the Vietnamese handled the most important fighting, the bulk of Pulpott's forces were, according to Philip Short, quote, raw recruits from the villages no better than the cannon fodder of La Nall's army. But where La Nall, from the summer of 1970, had introduced conscription, the Khmer Rouge recruits in the early days were all volunteers, and some, like Paul Potts' future secretary, joined because they liked the idea of becoming soldiers. Quote, others became guerrillas because the girls teased us if we stayed behind.

Yet others went to fight not for communism, but for Prince Sianuk, or because their friends did so, or simply to get out of their villages. End quote. launched the next year in August 1971, stretching into October, was a classic example of a guerrilla victory. The Viet Cong essentially allowed Lonnall's troops into a city, producing much pompant circumstance back in Phnom Penh. Then the Viet Cong encircled a complacent troops,

broke them apart, and sent them fleeing into the jungles. Soon after, Lawnal ordered elections, which were engineered to give him a resounding mandate, despite the disastrous Chenlaq campaigns, quote, slightly embarrassed by the obviousness of vote-rigging in the election, and under orders from Washington to keep the Panampan government afloat, reports Becker, the U.S. Embassy spent the rest of the year privately entreating the actual winning candidates to join Lon Nal's quote-unquote elected government. Such was the state of the Khmer Republic. It would need help and would receive it.

most critically, in the form of the American B-52 bomber. Air power was the first thing Cambodians had ever tasted of the United States military. First, there were the brief incursions over the border in the mid-60s, then the Secret Operation Menu in 1969, and then the invasion in 1970. And then? A defeat in southeastern Laos in March of 71, which convinced Nixon and Kissinger that the Joint Chiefs had been right in their suspicions about Vietnamization. Shifting the lion's share of fighting to client states had been a mug's game.

Between Lon Nall and Nguyen Vantu, results were lacking. It was time to bomb, bomb, bomb, and bomb some more. President Nixon had publicly declared, quote, I am not going to place any limitations on the use of air power in Indochina, except to exclude nuclear weapons. He kept both parts of that promise. U.S. pilots over Cambodia had even more freedom to strike whatever they wanted whenever their commanders felt like it.

There were fewer controls and restraints on targeting in Cambodia than in Vietnam, right, Shaw Cross. The falsification of Cambodian bombing reports was now accepted as normal, and the battle zones of Cambodia were even more inaccessible to the press than those of Vietnam. None of this changed the basic arithmetic. Quote, the Khmer Rouge army by then numbered 35,000 men, backed by an estimated 100,000 Vietnamese guerrillas, writes Philip Short. More than enough to hold their own against Lawnal's increasing,

demoralized troops, Chinese weaponry flowed down to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Throughout the liberated zones, a stable administration was in place. A third of the population, more than two million people, were already living under Khmer Rouge control. In the two years after the American invasion, bombings slowly decreased in Cambodia, while they spiked drastically next door in Vietnam. But the worst had yet to come. What happened in 1973 would destroy any last wisp of hope. But before the bombing in Cambodia

reached its apocalyptic peak, there was a peace conference to get out of the way. The most sacred of all of Kissinger's domains in the Nixon kingdom was his exclusive control over diplomacy with the North Vietnamese in Paris. But here, too,

Kissinger faced an uphill battle. In Hanoi, as Eisenberg puts it, news of the Chinese-American thaw, quote, had the paradoxical effect of strengthening North Vietnamese resolve as the possibility of Beijing's betrayal increased the attractiveness of a military solution. Kissinger was able to keep the Vietnamese back channel alive through the fall of 71.

One area of change, according to Robert K. Brigham, was Hanoi's willingness to call war reparations U.S. contributions to heal the war. This removed the guilt clause from the notion of reparations, end quote. But the North Vietnamese would not budge on the question of leaving President Wynne Van 2 in power in the south. Hanoi now wanted the Catholic strongman gone. Kissinger could not meet this demand. In turn, Nixon became increasingly dissatisfied with Kissinger, in Brigham's words, quote, losing patience with him. But Kissinger, perhaps, made for an easy scapegoat for Nixon's pickle. Despite the opening with Beijing, America was still waist-deep in Indochina.

The president's re-election was no sure thing. Events had come full circle from 1968, when Nixon and Kissinger, had collaborated to spoil Lyndon Johnson's peace talks. More than ever, the two men now realized it was much easier to destroy peace than create it. January 13th, Nixon kicks off a year of diplomacy, war, and electioneering with a televised address. February 21st, Nixon begins a week-long tour

of China. Good vibes run rampant. Quote, after being rescued from the brink of death, writes a story in Chen Jian. Mao Zedong was healthy enough to meet with Nixon to discuss questions of philosophy with the American president. March 30th, Hanoi launches its long-awaited spring offensive. Nixon and Kissinger retaliate by dialing up the bombing of North Vietnam, parts of South Vietnam, and the border air. with Cambodia. Kick the shit out of them, no matter what the cost, were Nixon's instructions. April 15th, new waves of protests pop off across America, particularly on college campuses.

May 9th, riding high in the opinion polls, Nixon commences Operation Pocket Money, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, a move that will cut off North Vietnamese naval traffic for 300 days. June 18th, police arrest five men attempting a burglary at a Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. Their recent employment history, the White House and the CIA, is quickly made obvious. August 23rd, Nixon is renominated for president at the Republican National Convention in Miami. October 8th, one month until the election. Le Duc-toe proposes in Paris to create a commission to oversee neutral elections in South Vietnam.

October 12th, 26 days until the election. More dissension in the American ranks. A riot breaks out on the USS Kitty Hawk, a ship supporting the bombing mission. A meeting concerning racism on the ship devolves to violence. October 26th, 12 days before the election. despite ample warning from South Vietnam that it is unhappy with the direction of talks in Paris. Henry Kissinger makes a bold declaration at a press conference.

Quote, peace is at hand. Now let me briefly touch upon several significant things about this election. first, and this for me is rather unusual. I've never known a national election when I would be able to go to bed earlier than denied. On November 7, Nixon won a landslide re-election. His opponent, anti-war Senator George McGovern, of South Dakota, had only won the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia after sinking in the polls for weeks.

Nixon's 60.7% share of the popular vote was a record for a Republican, unbroken as of this recording. But in Saigon, South Vietnamese president, Win van Tew, was far less impressed with Nixon. Talks in Paris were cohering around an agreement that would leave North Vietnamese troops in the South, giving to the correct idea

that the Americans were about to pull a runner on him. When Kissinger handed a prospective peace agreement to president two, six weeks after Nixon's re-election, South Vietnam's president refused to go along, calling it, quote, a cunning, crafty trick. The subsequent breakdown in talks drove Nixon mad. North Vietnam had temporarily walked away from Paris, seeing the disarray across the table. wasn't peace supposed to be at hand, in the words of Kissinger? The president returned to madman theory, telling a journalist that he, quote, did not care if the whole world thought he was crazy. If it did so much the better, the Russians and the Chinese might think they are dealing with a madman, end quote.

And Nixon would give them one last bombing to prove his point. Hanoi got word to Washington that once the bombing stopped, Paris talks could resume. After 1972, turned into 1973, Kissinger was back in Paris, meeting with Le Dukto. Upon his arrival in France, for the first day of the new talks, Duk upbraided Kissinger. Quote, under the pretext of interrupted negotiations,

you resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, just at the moment that I reached home. You, and no one else, stained the honor of the United States. After nearly a decade, America's war in Vietnam was officially over. The numbers of the dead from Vietnam range from 2 million to over 3 million, with millions more made refugees.

Historian Mark Lawrence points out that the peace deal signed on January 27, 1973, differed only cosmetically from the accord hammered out in October of 1968, the accord that Nixon and Kissinger had sabotaged. And this time he made it clear to Saigon, it had no choice but to accept. In just that four-year period that extended the war from 1968, three million civilians were either killed, injured, or displaced, according to a U.S. Senate subcommittee on refugees.

The Pentagon's numbers in that same period of four, four years, put American deaths at over 31,000, South Vietnamese deaths at over 86,000, and quote-unquote, enemy deaths at over 475,000. However many of those deaths were Viet Cong soldiers, or those simply labeled as such by the Phoenix program, and campaigns such as Speedy Express, is ultimately unknowable. What was certain was that America would now finally step back from Vietnam. Hanoi was content to see elections and wait out President 2. The communists would give, quote-unquote, satisfactory assurances to Washington that they could do their part to keep Laos from boiling over. But in the same four years in which the Vietnam War went on under Nixon, an entirely new war

was foisted on neutral Cambodia, and that war would continue. The Nixon administration had made noises about a ceasefire for Cambodia, but available evidence indicates there was no real attempt. to bring it about. For a year now, the White House knew that Lawnall was growing more demented by the day. Kissinger's NSC had released a psychiatrist's assessment. It found that the dictator, who had always been a bit of an odd duck, was demonstrating increased erratic behavior as the result of his earlier stroke. The assessment claimed that, quote, in the next six to 18 months, there may be clinical manifestations, either as a stroke, which could be incapacitating or fatal,

or a deterioration of his emotional stability, cognitive functioning, and physical stamina. Some in Washington considered more popular, more modern-minded, and simply healthier people for Cambodia's leadership. But all these alternatives were ultimately rejected. The Black Papa, as he was known, would remain America's man, in Cambodia. Lonnall's Khmer Republic was now in no better shape than its leader. The economy had withered into a weak U.S. colony, corrupt from the top down. The military could not hope to overcome what its soldiers increasingly saw as a demonic

force of unkillable communists. And refugees fleeing the countryside piled into the cities, escaping either Lonnall's troops, South Vietnam's soldiers, American B-52s, or some, the austere life among the growing Khmer Rouge. The capital, Phnom Pen, was overrun by hundreds of thousands of refugees. All of this was too much for the already weak state infrastructure. The health ministry collapsed. Out of the nearly $250 million of American aid to Cambodia,

little more than a million dollars went to assist the refugees, created by the bombing and the war. When an official from the Ministry of Health asked the American mission for more aid, a staffer told him, that was not the Americans' area. Quote, I strongly recommended that he seek assistance through other embassies,

including those of the socialist countries, as it was clear that he was seeking humanitarian assistance for civilian casualties, end quote. But it wasn't quite true that the U.S. government wasn't involved in relief efforts. It was just not how everybody thought. By the end of 1972,

humanitarian aid, or what passed for it, came largely from Catholic missionaries and an evangelical NGO known as World Vision, which had nominally started up in the 1950s as a charity for orphans of the Korean. war. Now, World Vision had grown into an international organization and deployed its volunteers to Cambodia. If you recall, in the 50s and early 60s, there was the case of Dr. Tom Dooley, a celebrity physician who made his name volunteering in Vietnam. He fabricated stories of communist

atrocities, laundering U.S. government propaganda through his charity work. And there was John Hannah, who had turned Relief Agency USAID into another wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. With World Vision in Cambodia, U.S. intelligence entangled itself in Christian charity once again. From the April 1975 issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, a report titled, Cash for Services Rendered. Quote, under the guise of humanitarian relief work, at least two, Christian voluntary agencies in Southeast Asia are receiving million-dollar annual subsidies from the U.S. government in exchange for highly valued political and military intelligence.

The directors of two agencies in Phnom Penh, Catholic Relief Services and the Protestant-related World Vision Inc., recently admitted these facts to the Reverend John M. Nakajima, General Secretary of the National Christian Council of Japan." quote. Another report in the August 1975 issue of the National Catholic Reporter was more direct. Quote, CIA funded manipulated missionaries. Yet another piece in the progressive Christian century notes that, quote, American military trucks and helicopters were always available for World Vision programs, and the CIA used information obtained by the group's field workers as part of its normal intelligence function.

In a meeting with the Reverend Nakajima and requesting no reporters present, the director of World Vision told him, quote, we give much more service to the U.S. government than we get from it, end quote. The reverend asked him what he meant. Quote, for instance, the giving of information. We often go to places where government officials cannot go. We provide them with information. The same director added, reports the Economic Review, that he worked directly for USAID in Saigon before joining World Vision.

The Reverend Nakajima, hardly a communist, solemnly stated that the Christian churches deploying in Indochina, or for that matter, India, or Bolivia, or Guyana, or the Philippines, are, quote, serving as willing pawns of U.S. foreign policy interests, greatly undermining local, and truly Christian efforts, end quote. Even the outsourced humanitarian aid coming to Cambodia was turned into another way to spy, to sabotage, to control. Civil War had gone through several phases. The 1973 Paris Agreement for Vietnam marked the latest. In every stage, one can see not only the slow defeat of La Nol's Republic, but also the growing rift between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese. 1973 was the year that the Khmer Rouge finally came into their own. The Vietnamese,

closing in on a peace deal and turning their focus. to taking Saigon, drifted away from the Cambodian communists. By now, the Khmer Rouge army numbered around 50,000 guerrilla soldiers, who could act independently of Hanoi. Sienuk instead shuffled around his Beijing estate while the cultural revolution swept his host country. Behind the walls of his princely mansion, the Cambodian leader lived like the king he still was, writes Philip Short. He entertained guests from French writers to his good friend Kim Il-sung, and, quote, he made broadcast to the Cambodian people over the funk radio in Hanoi, end quote.

But in the political arena, Sienuk was sidelined, with Khmer Rouge higher-up Yang Sari, acting as the real Cambodian leader whenever he was in Beijing. Sionuk had had his fun, pulling pranks on the prudish communist leaders, But now, the joke was on him. As they gained a longer leash from both Beijing and Hanoi, the Khmer Rouge had experimented in social policy. In 1972, Pol Pot announced collectivization in the liberated zones, where possible. Quote, the poorest and lower middle peasants, whom the party regarded as the strongest supporters of the regime, did well out of the Khmer Rouge reforms, right short.

The first years of Khmer Rouge rule were better than what had gone before and for most of the other half not markedly worse even for richer families the reform was relatively mild everyone continued to farm individually or at most in mutual aid groups

of four or five families but these were not the only policies coming from the party in an early effort to homogenize the population the Khmer Rouge banned the traditional clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles of the Muslim cham minority. Their vibrant customary dress was traded for uniform, plain, black pajamas. Quote, the chams were the earliest victims of a general policy aimed at the cultural, social, and economic leveling of all Cambodians, regardless of race or creed, right short. There were other signs of something sour in the air.

Throughout the war, the party had mimicked Maoist commandments on the battlefield, such as act properly toward women and be modest and simple. But Pol Pot, Yang Sari, and their commanders were coming up with new ones as well. Quote, Mao's injunctions to his troops not to ill-treat captives, right short, was absent from the Cambodian list. Instead, the Khmer Rouge were urged to, quote, have burning rage towards the enemy, and not to depend on foreigners, end quote.

Until this moment, Lon Nahl's army had been the one infamous for its wanton cruelty. But now, even the Khmer Rouge soldiers in the field felt the change. No longer were deserters treated with indulgence, short writes. Now they were killed.

Not long after the Paris Agreement, Hanoi trimmed down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that ran through Cambodia. But one important delivery did make it down. The Old Guard, the Cambodian communists who were taken up to Hanoi after the Geneva Agreement, nearly 20 years earlier, returned home. Their welcome was somewhat underwhelming.

quote, Paul Pot gave orders that the Hanoi returnees, apart from a small minority who had proved their loyalty, should be rounded up and taken to a detention center on the west bank of the Mekong as suspected Vietnamese agents. Most of the returnees

would eventually be executed. The Cambodian communists who had founded the party, who had fought the French, fought Sionuk himself, were but for a few, few wiped out. There was no room for them in the new party. Its leaders had survived police crackdowns, palace intrigue, Vietnamese domination, and American bombs. They trusted no one.

And now, Pol Pot and Yangtari turned their gaze to the dirty, corrupt city of Phnom Penh, with a burning vision of a glorious future. I'm going to be.