General William Rosson, deputy to General Creighton Abrams, the Commander of US Forces in Vietnam at the time, has declared that American commanders were informed several days beforehand that a coup was being planned and that United States support was solicited.29

Roger Morris, who was serving under Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council staff when the coup took place, reported that It was clear in the White House that the CIA station in Phnom Penh knew the plotters well, probably knew their plans, and did nothing to alert Sihanouk. They informed Washington well in advance of the coup. 30

William Shawctoss asserts that had Sihanouk returned quickly and calmly to Phnom Penh [following the anti-communist demonstrations] he would most likely have been able to avert disaster. That he did not do so may not have been by chance. Frank Snepp has revealed that the CIA persuaded Sihanouks mother, the Queen, to send a message to her son abroad reassuring him that the situation was not serious enough to warrant his return.31

With Sihanouk and his irritating neutralism no longer an obstacle, American military wheels began to spin. Within hours of the coup, US and South Vietnam forces stationed in border districts were directed to establish communication with Cambodian commanders on the other side and take steps toward military co-operation. The next day, the Cambodian army called in an American spotter plane and South Vietnamese artillery during a sweep of a Vietcong sanctuary by a battalion of Cambodian troops inside Cambodia. The New York Times declared that The battle appeared to be the most determined Cambodian effort yet to drive the Vietcong out of border areas. 32 The Great Cambodian War had begun. It was to persist for five terrible years.

The enemy confronting the United States and its Saigon and Phnom Penh allies was now not simply the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. The Cambodian Communists-the Khmer Rouge-under the leadership of Pol Pot, had entered the conflict, as had sundry Cambodian supporters of Prince Sihanouk.

On 30 April 1970, the first full-scale American invasion of the new war was launched. It produced a vast outcry of protest in the United States, rocking university campuses from coast to coast. Perhaps the most extraordinary reaction was the angry resignations of four men from Henry Kissingers National Security Council staff, including Roger Morris. (Kissinger labeled the resignations as the cowardice of the Eastern establishment .)33

By the end of May, scores of villages had been reduced to rubble and ashes by US air power; the long train of Cambodian refugees had begun their march.

Three years and more than a hundred thousand tons of bombs later, 27 January 1973 to be precise, an agreement was signed in Paris putting an end to a decade of American warfare in Vietnam. The bombing of Cambodia, however, continued.

Prior to the Paris agreement, the official position of the Nixon administration, repeatedly asserted, was that the sole purpose of bombing Cambodia was to protect American lives in Vietnam. Yet now, the US not only did not cease the bombing, it increased it, in a last desperate attempt to keep the Khmer Rouge from coming to power. During March, April and May, the tonnage of bombs unloosed over Cambodia was more than double that of the entire previous year. The societys traditional economy had vanished. The old Cambodia was being destroyed forever.

Under increasing pressure from Congress, the Nixon administration finally ended the bombing in August. More than two million Cambodians had been made homeless.

It does appear rather ludicrous, in the light of this application of brute force, that the CIA was at the same time carrying out the most subtle of psychological tactics. To

spread dissatisfaction about the exiled Sihanouk amongst the Cambodian peasantry who revered him, a CIA sound engineer, using sophisticated electronics, fashioned an excellent counterfeit of the Princes distinctive voice and manner of speaking- breathless, high-pitched, and full of giggles. This voice was beamed from a clandestine radio station in Laos with messages artfully designed to offend any good Cambodian. In one of the broadcasts, Sihanouk exhorted young women to aid the cause by sleeping with the valiant Vietcong.34

In a farewell press conference in September 1973, the American Ambassador to Cambodia, Emory Swank, called what had taken place there Indochinas most useless war .35

Later, California Congressman Pete McClosky, following a visit to Cambodia, had harsher words. He was moved to declare that what the United States had done to the country is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for our own benefit to fight against the Vietnamese. 36

On 17 April 197S, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in victory. Two weeks later, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery upon this unhappy land. And to add to the irony-or to multiply it-the United States supported the Khmer Rouge after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese, both by defending their right to the United Nations Cambodian seat, and in their military struggle against the Cambodian government and its Vietnamese allies. In November 1980, Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, visited a Khmer Rouge enclave in Cambodia in his capacity as senior foreign policy adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan. A Khmer Rouge press release spoke of the visit in warm terms.37 This was in keeping with the Reagan administrations subsequent opposition to the Vietnamese-supported Phnom Penh government. A lingering bitter hatred of Vietnam by unreconstructed American cold warriors appears to be the only explanation for this policy.

21. Laos 1957-1973

LArmee Clandestine

For the past two years the US has carried out one of the most sustained bombing campaigns in history against essentially civilian targets in northeastern Laos.... Operating from Thai bases and from aircraft carriers, American jets have destroyed the great majority of villages and towns in the northeast. Severe casualties have been inflicted upon the inhabitants ... Refugees from the Plain of Jars report they were bombed almost daily by American jets last year. They say they spent most of the past two years living in caves or holes.

Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, 19701

[The Laos operation] is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there ... is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective.

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State, 19712

The United Stales undertook the bombing campaign because its ground war against the Pathet Lao had failed.

The ground war had been carried out because the Pathet Lao were led by people whom the State Department categorized as communist , no more, no less.

The Pathet Lao (re)turned to warfare because of their experiences in working within the system .

In 1957 the Pathet Lao ( Lao nation ) held two ministerial posts in the coalition government of national union . This was during John Foster Dulless era, and if there was anything the fanatic Secretary of State hated more than neutralism it was a coalition with communists. This government featured both. There could be little other reason for the development of the major American intervention into this impoverished and primitive land of peasants. The American ambassador to Laos at the time, J. Graham Parsons, was to admit later: I struggled for sixteen months to prevent a coalition. 3

In addition to its demand for inclusion in the coalition government, the Pathet Lao had called for diplomatic relations with the countries of the Soviet bloc and the acceptance of aid from them, as was already the case with Western nations. Agreement to these conditions, said Washington, would have given the Communists their most significant gains in Southeast Asia since the partition of Indochina. 4 Others would say that the Pathet Laos conditions were simply what neutralism is all about.

In May 1958, the Pathet Lao and other leftists, running a campaign based on government corruption and indifference, won 13 of 21 contested seats for the National Assembly and wound up controlling more than one-third of the new legislature.5 Two months later, however, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, a man universally categorized as a neutralist, resigned to form a new government which would exclude the Pathet Lao ministers.6 (He subsequently claimed that he was forced to resign due to continued American opposition to Laotian neutrality; as it happened, one Phoui Sananikone, backed by the US, became premier in the reorganized government.)7 Then, in January 1959, the non-left majority in the National Assembly voted, in effect, to dissolve the Assembly in order to counteract communist influence and subversion . The left was now altogether excluded from the government, and the elections scheduled for December were canceled.8

If this wasnt enough to disenchant the Pathet Lao or anyone else with the Laotian political process, there was, in the late 1950s and eariy 1960s, the spectacle of a continuous parade of coups and counter-coups, of men overthrown winding up in the new government, and regimes headed by men who had sided with the French in their war against Indochinese independence, while the Pathet Lao had fought against the colonialists.9 There were as well government-rigged elections, with the CIA stuffing ballot boxes;10 different regimes-cum-warlords governing simultaneously from different capitals , their armies fighting each other, switching allies and enemies when it suited them; hundreds of millions of US dollars pouring into a tiny kingdom which was 99 percent agricultural, with an economy based more on barter than money, the result being unimaginable bribery, graft, currency manipulation and waste .11

The CIA and the State Department alone could take credit for engineering coups, through force, bribery or other pressures, at least once in each of the years 1958, 1959 and 1960, if not in others.12 By merely withholding the monthly payment to the troops, wrote Roger Hilsman (whose career encompassed both agencies, perhaps covertly simultaneously), the United States could create the conditions for toppling any Lao government whose policies it opposed. As it turned out, in fact, the United States used this weapon twice-to bring down the government of one Lao leader and to break the will of another. 13