World: GROWING DOUBTS ABOUT HANOI’S INTENTIONS

EVER since President Nixon announced last June that he planned to begin bringing U.S. troops home from Viet Nam, Washington has waited anxiously for some sign of a reciprocal move by Hanoi. In the U.S., Nixon’s Viet Nam position rests heavily on some form of favorable response from the North. So far, the North Vietnamese have not obliged. Last week, in the wake of a presidential decision to delay further withdrawals until Hanoi’s position becomes clearer, a sharp debate broke out at the highest levels of the Nixon Administration over the enemy’s intentions and the appropriate U.S. response.

The exchange was touched off by, of all people, Dean Rusk. Breaking a seven-month silence on the subject of Viet Nam, the former Secretary of State told a University of Wisconsin audience that there had recently been an “almost total lack” of North Vietnamese infiltration into the South. Since such a development could be an important signal of Hanoi’s willingness to reduce the level of combat, newsmen the next morning eagerly clustered around the State Department’s spokesman, Robert J. McCloskey.

Question of Significance. McCloskey was ready with a prepared statement. “There has been a considerable reduction in infiltration,” he said, adding that the North was no longer sending as many men South as it had lost in battle. Many newsmen came away from the briefing with the conviction that Secretary of State William Rogers, who is committed to ‘U.S. disengagement, had orchestrated McCloskey’s performance in an effort to create a climate conducive to new U.S. withdrawals.

Almost immediately, the Pentagon sharply questioned State’s interpretation of the infiltration data. “They are making hard assumptions based on soft estimates,” said one officer. During the first six months of 1969, said the Pentagon, some 100,000 North Vietnamese troops joined enemy units in the South, more than replacing the 94,000 Communists killed during the same period. The Pentagon refused to release the figures for July and August, which reportedly show a 50% decrease in Southbound troop movements. It did note, however, that even so dramatic a decline could be explained by record monsoons in Laos, which have turned the infiltration routes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail into nearly impassable quagmires.

Hanoi, convinced that Nixon’s delay of troop withdrawals was essentially an empty gesture, reacted with smug cockiness. After the 32nd session of the Paris peace talks last week, North Viet Nam’s Nguyen Thanh Le loftily declared that rising American opposition to the war at home, combined with what he described as a near mutiny among U.S. troops in Viet Nam (see following story), would compel Nixon to accept the N.L.F.’s ten-point peace program. A pivotal point calls for unilateral U.S. withdrawal.

It was precisely that sort of Communist overconfidence that worried Richard Nixon. For the U.S. to continue troop withdrawals, the President has stated, there must be progress in at least one of three areas: 1) meaningful negotiations in Paris; 2) South Viet

Nam’s success in assuming a larger combat role; and 3) a decrease in the level of combat. Understandably, Nixon feared that another troop pull-out in the face of the recent renewed violence would be interpreted by Hanoi as a sign of U.S. weakness.

Communist High Points. Only two weeks ago the President was planning to authorize a pullout of at least 35,000 troops to follow the 25,000 now on their way home. When he changed his mind at the last moment, he caught both Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird by surprise. His reasons for deferring the decision: the renewed enemy attacks, including the rocketing of the U.S. hospital at Cam Ranh Bay, and allied intelligence warnings that Communist forces were readying a new “high point” for Sept. 2, the 24th anniversary of Ho Chi Minh’s proclamation of Vietnamese independence. Explained a ranking Administration official: “We have to impress Hanoi with our staying power or they won’t negotiate seriously.”

The testimony from the battlefield was that the Communists still preferred shooting to talking. During the last weekly reporting period in late August, U.S. battle deaths totaled 190—somewhat fewer than the 244 killed during the week of the last “high point” earlier in the month. Enemy losses were put at 2,757. Last week U.S. Marines and infantrymen engaged in a number of sharp fire fights, most notably in the rolling hills near Danang and north of Saigon.

Despite the reports of declining infiltration, allied fighting men thus found no shortage of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fighters. In fact, U.S. headquarters in Saigon places enemy strength at the same level as it was nine months ago: 205,000 combat troops, plus 45,000 administrative and political cadre (see map following page). Powerful enemy forces remain deployed throughout the country, with the heaviest concentrations in the III Corps area, which contains Saigon. While the enemy maintains strong support forces in its Laotian and Cambodian sanctuaries and north of the Demilitarized Zone, few large units have recently crossed into the South. One of these was the 24th Regiment of the 304th NVA Division, which disappeared into the North after the siege of Khe Sanh was lifted last year. In recent weeks the enemy has ominously deployed troops southward from II Corps to within striking distance of Saigon. North Vietnamese units have also begun showing up in force in the Mekong Delta, where they have never before operated in strength.

Nixon is expected to announce another troop withdrawal later this month. Though the White House bristles at any suggestion that the timing was more than coincidence, the Administration is obviously not sorry that it occurs when Congress convenes and the nation’s colleges reopen. Nixon’s main domestic pressure is to reduce the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam to a minimum. As last week’s debate indicates, his freedom of action is somewhat circumscribed by the Communists, who have shown no willingness to accommodate him. If they continue to gun down his strategy of a phased, orderly U.S. disengagement, the President might be forced to choose between other alternatives—either a precipitous exit that would gravely unnerve Washington’s other Asian allies, or a no-holds-barred military policy that would exacerbate antiwar sentiment in the U.S. He must avoid the appearance of either a bug-out or intransigence. Without some cooperation from Hanoi, however, the U.S. may find itself hard put to avoid one or the other of those unappealing alternatives.