Bombing Coverup

"American policy since has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people."

Thus President Nixon, in his April 30, 1970, television speech to the nation justifying the U.S. and South Vietnamese incursion into the Parrot's Beak of Cambodia, denied any previous American military action in the officially neutral kingdom of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In fact, as a result of testimony by a former Air Force officer before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, it was revealed that the President had for the previous 14 months personally authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, a clandestine campaign by B-52s that poured over 100,000 tons of explosives in 3,630 missions onto suspected North Vietnamese sanctuaries just across the border. The U.S. command hoped that the heavy bombing would disrupt otherwise safe staging areas used by the Communists for damaging attacks on American outposts in South Viet Nam. A secret "double entry" reporting technique was used by the Administration to hide the raids from the American people and Congress.

Former Air Force Major Hal M. Knight had served as an operations officer at a radar-guidance station in Bien Hoa, South Viet Nam, in 1970. He told the committee that he and others had doctored reports to make it appear that the Cambodian missions had been flown against targets in South Viet Nam. True reports on the Strategic Air Command bombing runs out of Guam or Thailand --as many as 407 in one month--were routed directly to President Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and a small handful of top officials, bypassing the normally classified Pentagon record-keeping channels.

Although a few friendly congressional leaders, Senator Barry Goldwater for one, were apprised of the secret bomb runs, the Senate Armed Services Committee was repeatedly told that no bombs were dropped on Cambodia before the April 29 invasion into the Parrot's Beak. An official declassified Pentagon list of all American attacks in the area, provided Democratic Senator Harold E. Hughes this spring, showed "zero" bombing in Cambodia before the 1970 incursion. Last week Hughes called the false reporting system "official deception" and demanded the resignations of the responsible officials.

Finding them may not be easy. Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense, and General Earle G. Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both hastily denied having ordered the falsifications. Henry Kissinger also asserted no knowledge of the Air Force's peculiar reporting procedures. After considerable doubletalk, the Pentagon finally issued a public statement saying only that the falsification processes were "authorized and directed from Washington."

Sealed Orders. Whoever was responsible apparently did not feel that the Pentagon's normal channels of secrecy would sufficiently guard the Cambodia bombing. Major Knight said that bombing orders in sealed, unmarked envelopes were secretly flown from Saigon by propeller-driven courier aircraft each afternoon before a raid. They were kept under lock and key until dusk--the missions were flown at night to avoid detection--then transmitted by radio to the approaching B-52s.

Following each sortie, the radar-station crew worked up a set of precisely executed fictitious reports with false map coordinates for transmission to the normal reporting channels. The next morning, said Knight, he carefully burned all copies of the actual orders for the Cambodian targets in a special barrel outside his hutch. Then he telephoned a special contact number in Saigon to deliver an innocuous mission-accomplished code line: "The ball game is over."

Some Administration officials claim that the remarkable cloaking--euphemistically called "special security reporting procedures"--was necessary to placate the relatively powerless Prince Sihanouk, who allowed the North Vietnamese to operate freely in border areas he could not control but secretly acquiesced to the American bombing at the same time. But Knight's commanding officer once told him that the duplicity was designed to serve the political purpose of keeping Senator J. William Fulbright's dovish Foreign Relations Committee from finding out what was going on. The information would also have provided fresh fuel to the antiwar protest movement.

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