Revealing Lon Nol’s departure from reality at the time of the Cambodian Civil War … From William Harben’s memoirs:
I carried “Mad Dog” Bolin’s 9 mm automatic under the seat. In the event that any Khmer Rouge soldiers blocked the road and tried to flag me down, I planned to abandon the car, dive into the bushes and make them keep their distance with a few shots from the 13-shot magazine.
My own section’s reports continued to be censored, which weighed heavily on my conscience. If we had been instructed in writing to conceal the deterioration of the situation we might have felt that we had done our job as well as the limitations of government allowed us, but that was not the case. Furthermore the reports of our embassy in Laos, of which we received some copies, were very frank, particularly in regard to corruption, which we were required to gloss over. Lives were at stake. When the enemy overran certain villages, or military camps, containing women and children, all those found therein were massacred. If the enemy were to overrun Phnom Penh a bloodbath would result. But even I did not suspect the dimensions of the mass murders which later took place. The embassy regarded most journalists as hostile, which was natural, since the truth was unrelievedly unfavorable and very easy to discover. The embassy would not even report Khmer newspaper articles. Unable to report directly and finding it very dangerous to talk to the many journalists steered to me, I refrained from saying anything myself, but recommended that they visit certain people from whom I believed they could get the truth without involving me.
On one occasion I thought a breakthrough was possible. The Marshal issued a presidential decree ordering the arrest of anyone seen buying rabbits in the market. These were enemy agents, said the decree, and would tie timed explosives on the backs of the little beasts, which would hop into the army’s entrenchments and blow them up! Since it had been broadcast on the state radio I knew that it would be circulated all over Washington by the FBIS in unclassified form. To make sure, however, I drafted a SECRET cable reporting the text. My superiors refused to send it. This led to a confirmation of the bureaucratic lesson I had learned in Moscow: the officer who reports an event which could be used to back criticism of a presidential policy will be suspected of political partisanship. If he even brings such reports to the attention of his superiors he runs an unacceptable risk.
And so it was that an emergency high-level mission from Washington was sent to Phnom Penh after a day of spectacular disasters which could not be concealed by any censorship. By then it was too late. One member of the team was a young fellow on the National Security Council who covered Cambodia.
“Why is the situation so much worse than we thought it was?” he asked me at lunch in my villa.
I told him that the ambassador had been discouraged from reporting the truth, “but anyway, there was enough material in the public print for any sensible person back there to realize that this place is going down the tube with its present leadership – like the rabbit bomb decree.”
“The what?” He had never heard of it. Apparently no one in Washington had dared send the item upstairs. The government had concealed the truth from no one but itself.
Post a Comment