No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon Page A

delays, Kennedy sent 5,000 marines to Thailand and put American forces at Okinawa on standby. Ho appeared to back down, and within two months there was an agreement in Geneva. Fifteen countries signed a treaty in which they pledged to recognize a new neutralist coalition government in Laos, to withdraw any military forces they had in the country, and to stop any paramilitary assistance to the rival political factions. The agreement was hailed by foreign-policy pundits in the media as a significant contribution to peace in Southeast Asia.
    All countries complied except one: North Vietnam.
    The agreement had stated that all foreign troops would leaveLaos through internationally supervised checkpoints. Ho never took any serious steps to remove his 7,000-man contingent from Laos. The total number of North Vietnamese soldiers recorded as leaving was forty.
    Unlike the American administration, Ho viewed all of Indochina not as four separate countries but as one strategic theater. His motive in signing the Geneva agreement was simple and cynical: He hoped it would enable him to restrict our zone of operation while his armies continued to operate freely throughout Indochina.
    When the plan worked, the North Vietnamese wasted no time in exploiting their advantage. Through the work of their Group 559, they virtually annexed southern Laos and constructed an elaborate system of infiltration routes—dubbed the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”—into South Vietnam and Cambodia.
    Those who argued that the war in Vietnam was an internal South Vietnamese conflict minimized the importance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail or even questioned its existence. The official North Vietnamese history of the war does not. It reads: “During the sixteen years of operation, Group 559, which at first had only a few hundred people who primarily used cargo bicycles on narrow trails, became a force with many components: transportation troops, military engineers, infantry, antiaircraft artillery, [fuel supply] troops, communications units, etc., totalling tens of thousands of people and thousands of cargo trucks organized into many divisions, regiments, troop encampments, workshops, stations, etc. There was created a strategic route bearing the name of the great Uncle Ho which crossed the Troung Son mountains [in Laos], connected the battlefields, and amounted to a relatively complete land route, pipeline, and river route network.”
    The Ho Chi Minh Trail became a lifeline for the Communist aggressors in Indochina and, in the end, a noose for their victims. By 1970, North Vietnam had stationed almost 70,000 troops in Laos and had transported over 500,000 troops along their network of roads. The Geneva agreement on Laos in 1962paved the way for the Communist victory in South Vietnam in 1975.
    The United States’ response to North Vietnam’s massive violations was tepid. Our friends in Laos were begging for help as the renewed Communist offensive drained their stocks of ammunition, but for months Harriman refused to allow the CIA to send any military or paramilitary assistance. He later reluctantly permitted covert shipments of ammunition, provided that he had approved the cargo manifest of each supply flight and that the arms be used for defensive purposes only. With North Vietnam’s offensive in high gear, it was not difficult to satisfy the second condition.
    The Kennedy and Johnson administrations steadily stepped up our covert operations in Laos, which later became known as “the secret war.” But our actions were sharply circumscribed and never matched those of North Vietnam. Neither administration wished to abandon the Geneva agreement entirely. Both sought to observe the spirit, if not the letter, of the agreement by enforcing two critical limitations on our involvement: They refused to give enough aid to our Laotian allies to enable them to expel the North Vietnamese, and they rejected plans to intervene directly in Laos with