196. Letter From the Consul General in Hong Kong (Rice) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Bundy)1
Dear Bill:
As you know, Mr. Clark Clifford and Mr. Patrick Coyne were with us October 30. I expect that you have had a more complete run-down than I could give you of the matters which concerned them. If you have heard all you want to know on the subject, you can toss this letter aside. But I will cover the ground of what was said here—just in case you are interested.
[Page 557]Mr. Clifford, who did the talking, said the President spends much of his time on Vietnam, and feels forced to make a great many decisions on the basis of inadequate information. What we lack and what he wants, despite the difficulties, is hard intelligence, including intelligence on matters outlined below.
- 1.
- Definite information about the Viet Cong. What about their attitudes? Are they re-evaluating their position? Are their attitudes softening or hardening?
- 2.
- North Vietnam. What is the thinking in Hanoi? Are the leaders there determined, or are they seeking a way out? Should we extend and accelerate the bombings? What about the populace: is it softening or hardening? What is the attitude in North Vietnam towards peace overtures?
- 3.
- What is the situation today in Red China? What is the attitude of the Government there towards the war in South Vietnam? That they cannot permit the war to be lost? Or that there are more important considerations, such as the drive to make Communist China a nuclear power? What is the attitude towards actual participation in the war? What is the possibility they will, for instance, send troops? What degree of assistance will Communist China give the DRV: unlimited, or if not unlimited, what is the limitation? Are the leaders in Peking determined to see the thing through all the way? What is the degree of fear of becoming over-involved—e. g., in a war with the U.S.?
I thought it might be useful to Mr. Clifford to be given an indication of opinions we have formed on some of these questions, and of our bases for forming them. In giving them I observed that I was not trying to make him a channel for our reporting. That deserved the greater degree of precision possible with written material as opposed to oral communication, and the qualifications one omits from thumb-nail summaries. The following paragraphs represent, except as otherwise noted, an effort to reconstruct from memory what I said after making those caveats.
It is hard for us at this distance, and with access to only some of the available intelligence, to judge whether the VC are softening up or hardening. We watch the statistics, but many of them are of questionable value. For instance, for seven weeks the VC had lost more weapons than the ARVN, whereas the opposite used to be true. But did these losses mean that VC morale and discipline were slipping, or that they now had such a relatively plentiful supply of weapons that they were no longer exercising the same care to prevent weapons losses? (Incidentally, accounts I have seen of the Pleime battle suggest that the fighting discipline of the attackers, comprising VC and DRV regulars, was good indeed. I wonder whether the bombing of the DRV does not give the DRV regulars a doubled motive for fighting—there is added to the [Page 558] motive of “liberating” the south, preparatory to reunification, the motive of getting back at an enemy which is bombing their homeland.)
I expressed to Mr. Clifford the belief that the leaders in the North are a tough lot, unlikely to soften under bombings. If they lost the relatively small industrial sector they have built up, I expected them to count on rebuilding it with Soviet and Chi-Com help. The accounts of visitors to the DRV and the intercepted letters from people there which we had read led us to think the bombings were, if anything, hardening popular attitudes towards the U.S. and cementing the loyalty of the people to the regime. It did not look to us as though the leaders and people of the DRV were ready to respond to overtures.
I said the leaders of Red China regarded the war in South Vietnam as a highly important proving ground for Mao’s doctrines on wars of national liberation. They would certainly give all the necessary material assistance they could spare. We believed the DRV would not want them to send in masses of Chinese troops into North Vietnam itself unless that proved absolutely necessary, and that Communist China’s leaders would hesitate to send them unless the existence of the DRV appeared threatened. The Chinese Communists are very powerful defensively on their own terrain—Communist China is probably impregnable to military occupation and political domination; it is sensitive about its borders and formidable in areas near them; it lacks the strategic mobility to project military power very far beyond those areas. There was plenty of evidence that Communist China feared U.S. attack and that people in South China fear war (our reading of intercepted letters shows this to be so). Communist China would fight if attacked, but I was not convinced the Chinese Communists would surely throw in their own troops to prevent the defeat of the Viet Cong rebellion, should our forces appear to be bringing the situation in South Vietnam under control. They conceivably could respond to dwindling prospects with the decision it would be better for the VC to draw back, preserve all the assets they could and wait for a better day. However, I thought the leaders in Communist China were like the leaders of other governments in some respects: they probably make some important decisions only as the relevant situations develop, instead of having decided in advance what they would do in all of a variety of contingencies.
I added that I thought some of the answers to the questions Mr. Clifford asked should be available within the U.S. Government through a careful fitting together of all relevant bits and pieces of information. (I also might have observed that some answers will come to those with sufficient background and experience by a process sometimes considered intuitive, i.e. by “feel”—but that would have raised the question of whose “feel” is to be trusted, and whose not? Still, to me, at least, it seems [Page 559] unlikely that we shall get many answers to the hard questions in the form of pieces of intelligence we can point to as “hard.”)
Mr. Clifford asked very few questions about this analysis as I went along and none about it afterwards. We then set forth our various sources of information and there was a little discussion of how they could be improved—e.g., by more extended tapping of British businessmen engaged in trade with Communist China. The meeting then closed.
This “open” meeting included myself, my deputy, the chief of the China Mainland Section, the three military liaison officers, and the CAS station chief. The station chief also had a private session with Messrs. Clifford and Coyne, which he has reported through his channels.
I should have liked to write this hard upon Mr. Clifford’s visit, when I could reconstruct my part of dialogue with greater confidence. But we have been inundated by visitors—Governors, trade missions, and CODELs. We will have one arriving on the average every day, with most of them staying for some days, at least through November—but will do the best we can to continue turning out the necessary regular work meanwhile.
I’m sending a copy of this letter to Tom Hughes in INR.
Sincerely,