The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (18 page)

As the situation deteriorated, Kennedy put the U.S. Marines in Okinawa on alert for possible intervention and sent five hundred Marines with helicopters to Udorn, Thailand, close to the banks of the Mekong. A Soviet airlift of arms and ammunition to the Pathet Lao, meanwhile, became the highest-priority supply operation since the Russian Revolution.
[51]

The president appeared on television to explain his actions. Unable to bring himself to say that America was on the brink of a world war for a place called ‘Louse,’ Kennedy pronounced it ‘Lay-os’ throughout the broadcast. He reminded his audience that Laos had been given its independence and guaranteed its freedom and neutrality by international agreement in 1954. The Communist military advances in that country had the external support of a Soviet airlift and heavy weapons and combat specialists from North Vietnam. ‘It is this new dimension of externally supported warfare that creates the present grave problem,’ Kennedy said.

‘I want to make it clear to the American people and to all of the world that all we want in Laos is peace and not war, a truly neutral government and not a cold war pawn, a settlement concluded at the conference table and not on the battlefield.’

But peace could come only if armed attacks by the Communists stopped. ‘If these attacks do not stop, those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response.’

Nobody watching had any doubts what that response would be. It was a direct warning that unless the Communists backed off there would be war.
[52]

The dangerous game of brinkmanship continued. The joint chiefs warned that U.S. intervention might result in an all-out Communist response - a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos backed by limitless Russian arms, and the ultimate possibility of war with China. Faced with such a risk, America had to choose between all or nothing. It was either back down now, or prepare to make a massive commitment of manpower, air cover, and possibly even nuclear weapons.

The last two years of the Eisenhower era had been taken up with fighting rearguard actions when the United States found itself on the defensive everywhere in foreign affairs. The State Department’s policy concerning Southeast Asia was to contain the thrust of Chinese Communist hegemony into Indochina, and beyond to Indonesia. Confrontation had been considered inevitable.

And now this confrontation was about to take place in tiny, insignificant Laos. Younger diplomats like William H. Sullivan - destined to become ambassador to Laos - had other ideas, ‘I thought it was a pretty lousy place to make a confrontation.’
[53]

President Kennedy had already asked for ideas from people in the State Department about how to meet the problems ahead of him. Tom Corcoran, a retiring, donnish man, was on the Laos desk at the time, and he developed a retiring, donnish alternative to superpower confrontation. Dubbed the ‘Red, White, and Blue Solution,’ Corcoran’s idea was to divide Laos into spheres of influence. The Americans and the Soviets would pull out, leaving the North Vietnamese (Red) a shade of influence on their border, the Thais (Blue) a shade of influence on their border, and the Lao (White), under Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, the main part of the country. This colorful arrangement - which merged into a very muddy gray indeed - was to be codified in a declaration of international neutrality, under the king.

It was Sullivan who put the Red, White, and Blue Solution on paper - together with some ideas on relations with China - and caught the young president’s attention. Away from the TV screen, Kennedy dropped the rhetoric about liberty and expressed the opinion that Laos was not a country ‘worthy of engaging the attention of great powers’ and that the previous policy of attempting to turn it into an anticommunist bastion was ridiculous.
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He believed neutralization to be the correct policy, but American prestige was now on the line, not to mention his own.

There could be no backing down, but there was a way out, and the Red, White, and Blue Solution, which offered something for everybody, seemed to be it. Krushchev finally accepted a third-power proposal for negotiations over Laos. The Red, White, and Blue Solution became the basis for protracted negotiations in Geneva during 1961 and early 1962. Besides, Khrushchev could afford to wait. ‘Why take risks over Laos?’ he said to Llewellyn Thompson, U.S. ambassador to Moscow. ‘It will fall into our laps like a ripe apple.’
[55]
The superpowers had approached the very edge, looked into the abyss, and drawn back.

The new king of Laos, Savang Vatthana, did his best to stay above and beyond politics. (All factions revered him, while ministers, officials, and governors of his kingdom took a long and solemn oath of loyalty, swearing on pain of the most awful retribution ‘not to stir up plots with unbelievers or foreign enemies... not to seek to kill the representatives of the government by means of spells.’) He was a high-minded, serious man who had been educated at the Ecole de Science Politique in Paris and had both read and traveled widely. He saw himself in a tragic mold. At the funeral of his father he had remarked to Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, in an accurate prophecy, ‘Alas, I am doomed to be the last king of Laos.’
[56]

The Americans interpreted his pessimism as the superstitious fatalism of an oriental potentate, and characterized him as indecisive and a ‘hand-wringer.’ They were not encouraged by the royal choice of automobile (a 1959 Edsel) and were suspicious of his obsession with Marcel Proust (he quoted frequently from
À la recherche du temps perdu
). They were embarrassed on several occasions when he wept openly in front of visitors, heartbroken by what he saw as the inevitable ‘demise of an ancient kingdom.’
[57]

But mostly the king was disregarded by the power brokers who jetted in and out of his country. They saw him as no more than an anachronistic if charming and exotic personality, to be paid the usual formal and ceremonial courtesies. In fact, his view of the Big Picture was crystal-clear.

On the eve of the Geneva Conference in 1961, when fourteen nations gathered to decide the future of his tiny kingdom, he addressed a message to his people: ‘Our country is the most peaceful in the world... At no time has there ever arisen in the minds of the Lao people the idea of coveting another’s wealth, of quarreling with their neighbors, much less of fighting them. And yet, during the past twenty years, our country has known neither peace nor security... enemies of all sorts have tried to cross our frontiers, to destroy our people and to destroy our religion and our nation’s aura of peace and concord.

‘Foreign countries do not care either about our interests or peace; they are concerned only with their own interests.’
[58]

The negotiations over the future of Laos moved slowly. In Geneva the principal nations involved - the United States, the USSR, China, North Vietnam, and Laos - nitpicked their way through wads of fine print, week after week, for fifteen months. The negotiations were tedious in the extreme until even Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko - no stranger to boredom - grumbled, ‘One cannot sit indefinitely on the shores of Lake Geneva, counting swans.’
[59]

The man in charge of the American mission in Geneva was Averell Harriman, a very experienced, wise, and tough diplomat who had been ambassador to the USSR at the end of World War II. He could be heartlessly straightforward and did not suffer fools gladly, and men whose heads he had bitten off for putting forward bad ideas dubbed him ‘the Crocodile.’ His instructions on Laos were simply that a military solution was impossible, and that he was to find a political solution.

On his arrival in Geneva he found what he considered to be a top-heavy mission with more than a hundred people in it (the Chinese contingent was even larger, consisting of two hundred deadpan bureaucrats). It quickly became apparent that William Sullivan, a relatively junior officer only thirty-eight years old, was the brightest of the bunch, and Harriman immediately offered him the job of personal deputy. Sullivan was obliged to point out that there were numerous officers his senior. Harriman promptly reduced the mission by half and sent home all the officers senior to Sullivan, who there-upon became his deputy.

While the talks dragged on, the Chinese and North Vietnamese managed to pull off two small agreements, independent of the negotiations in Geneva, which were to give the Communists a strategic military advantage throughout the coming war. On a visit to Peking in April 1961, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma agreed that the Chinese might proceed with road construction plans linking Yunnan province with Phong-Saly and Nam Tha (the provinces’ first roads). This gave China a legal right to put construction teams onto Laotian sovereign territory, where they were to remain for more than a decade, mushrooming into a force of twenty thousand combat engineers protected by formidable batteries of anti-aircraft guns.

A similar agreement was also made by the Lao government with the North Vietnamese in 1962, allowing them to construct all-weather roads over the Annamite Mountains. By the end of the year the North Vietnamese had completed work on four roads: one over the northern passage from the Dien Bien Phu valley; one to Sam Neua, the Pathet Lao HQ; two others came out of the mountain passes on the Vietnamese border into the Laotian panhandle, one from the pass at Nape to Kam Keut, and another from the Mu Gia pass to Nhommarath. At the same time, Route 7, linking the Plain of Jars to the Vietnamese seaport of Vinh, was also reconstructed to take heavy-duty traffic.

Later, beginning in September 1968, the Chinese began an even more ambitious project, pushing their road construction south from the border, and then splitting in two directions - one to link up with a North Vietnamese road built from the Dien Bien Phu valley, and the other toward Pak Beng on the Mekong, only nineteen miles from the Thai border.
[60]

In his memoirs Henry Kissinger describes this road construction as one of ‘China’s strangest projects during the Vietnam war’ and as something that ‘mystified’ the Americans. There was nothing mysterious about it. Military men understood that the road was being used to funnel into the country North Vietnamese troops and supplies that had traveled from Vietnam across southern China. Eventually, when the road was completed, it would allow the Chinese to move troops rapidly across Laos to the Thai border, should the need ever arise. (Later, in 1974, Zhou Enlai further enlightened Henry Kissinger in regard to the long-term nature of Chinese strategic designs. With the Americans removed from Indochina, the Chinese worried once more about the expansionist ambitions of their former Vietnamese ally to dominate the whole of Indochina. The road from China into Laos, on the flank of their ally turned adversary, could now be used to contain this expansion.)
[61]

Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed that Laos should not become an issue between the superpowers and that both of them should use their influence to make the country truly neutral. Both had difficult and unruly allies, and sporadic fighting continued within Laos throughout the months of negotiation, adding to their complexity. Khrushchev suggested locking the two foreign ministers in a room until they found a solution.

An agreement was finally signed on July 23, 1962. The essence of the various accords, veiled behind complicated legalistic wording, was that Laos should be genuinely neutral. It was endorsed by Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, whose first act as head of a provisional government of national union was to announce that Laos would ‘not recognize the protection of any alliance or military coalition.’ An International Control Commission was to supervise the cease-fire and ensure that all foreign troops were withdrawn within seventy-five days. All the signatories to the agreement promised they would ‘not use the territory of the Kingdom of Laos for interference in the internal affairs of other countries,’ which denied the North Vietnamese the use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

American forces had already been reduced during the negotiations, but the remaining U.S. military personnel were meticulously counted out of the country by the International Control Commission. In all they totaled 666.

It was a number of extraordinary ill omen. The fatalistic and highly superstitious Laotians would have trembled had they known the evil significance medieval occultists gave the number. A number of uncertain meaning, the ancient mystics often matched it with the Antichrist. According to St. John: ‘Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man: and his number is six hundred threescore and six.’
[62]
St. John supposedly chose the number because it fell just short of the holy number seven in every particular, while straining at every point to reach it - an analogy the negotiators at Geneva would have appreciated.

Averell Harriman, when asked, in the face of evidence that large numbers of North Vietnamese troops remained in the country, how things were going, replied: ‘Just about as unsatisfactorily as we expected.’ He described the settlement as ‘a good bad deal.’
[63]

The International Control Commission, which was not permitted to visit Pathet Lao territory, was incapable of checking how many North Vietnamese troops had left the country. Only forty were counted passing through the single checkpoint the ICC was allowed to observe, while it was estimated that ten thousand remained.