The President's Guerrilla Expert

THOUGH Viet Nam has been his specialty since 1961, Sir Robert Thompson was never influential with either John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. It was Richard Nixon who embraced his views wholeheartedly--most likely because they coincide with his own.

Suave, controlled and bearing a striking resemblance to the late actor Herbert Marshall, the Cambridge-educated Thompson, 53, was knighted for devising the strategy that ultimately defeated local Chinese Communist terrorists in Malaya in the 1950s. He was then Britain's secretary for defense of the Federation of Malaya; later (1961-65), he served as head of the British advisory mission in Viet Nam. Now retired from government, he is an occasional consultant for the Rand Corp., the noted U.S. think tank. His experience in Malaya convinced Thompson that counterinsurgency does not require massive forces, large-scale bombing or continual pursuit of the enemy. He contends that such tactics play into the hands of guerrillas by increasing casualties and enlarging the scope of the combat. Thompson emphasizes localized "police" actions to protect the population against guerrilla attacks and to ferret out subversives. That proved easier in Malaya, where the terrorists were often ethnically different from the local population, than in Viet Nam, where friend and foe may be indistinguishable. The Malaya guerrillas also had no handy sanctuaries across nearby borders.

Thompson's perspective has brought him alternately in and out of phase with the prevailing U.S. strategies in Viet Nam. He still subscribes to the domino theory that a Communist success in Viet Nam would jeopardize other shaky governments in Southeast Asia and even as far away as Latin America. He approved Kennedy's commitment of U.S. advisers and his accent on unconventional Special Forces. He advised the late South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to undertake a program of protected "strategic hamlets," but the program flopped when Diem moved too quickly, ignoring Thompson's warning to make certain that his troops could hold each area. In No Exit from Viet Nam, written after the enemy's 1968 Tet offensive, Thompson indicts President Johnson's excessive buildup and General William Westmoreland's use of unwieldy units to carry out unproductive "search and destroy" missions. Thompson warmly endorses the more limited "spoiler" tactics devised by General Creighton Abrams.

At President Nixon's request, Thompson recently spent five weeks touring Viet Nam. He found some of the improvements since 1968 to be "astounding." Though the Tet offensive was a Communist psychological victory, he contends, it was militarily "suicidal." "The thing that surprised me more than anything else was the extent to which the government has regained control in the countryside," he said last week. "The V.C.'s population base has been eroded. The population is gradually losing confidence in the ability of the Viet Cong to win. It is coming in toward the government. The war isn't won, but we're in the kind of position from which we could win."

Thompson is not as worried as some U.S. military advisers about current Communist infiltration. He contends that the enemy has lost at least 500,000 troops in the past two years--roughly comparable to the U.S. Army's losing 5,000,000 men. The replacements, he reports, are mainly ill-trained teenagers. "The Viet Cong are no longer 10 feet tall. They are more like frightened 16-year-olds." Thompson does not, however, see a quick end to the war. "It could take three to five years before Hanoi is compelled to give up her purpose and to negotiate a real settlement," he says. Until that happens, he advises, the allies should adopt "a long-haul, low-cost strategy" that relies more on the South Vietnamese army--a prescription that fits Richard Nixon's "Vietnamization" program perfectly.

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