The War of Leaks
James G. Hershberg
Leaks have been in the news a lot lately, but unauthorized disclosures of secret information have long been a staple of Washington politics and journalism — including during the Vietnam War.
Of course, there’s the granddaddy of all leaks: Daniel Ellsberg’s release of most of the immense Pentagon Papers study of American decision-making in Vietnam to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times, which after months of clandestine preparations began publishing excerpts in June 1971, followed by other newspapers after the Nixon Administration tried to suppress the revelation.
But there were other, less memorable but still important leak episodes. Largely forgotten today, the “Marigold Affair,” involving diplomats on both sides of the Iron Curtain, stands out as much for its cloak-and-dagger Cold War intrigue as it does for its significance — for in it lies an object lesson in why a negotiated peace was so hard to achieve in Vietnam. Long concealed, this subterranean struggle has more fully emerged thanks to the release of reporters’ notes and opening of non-American, especially long-shut Communist, archives.
In 1966, the United States and North Vietnam had established secret contacts aimed at opening direct contacts. The effort, code-named “Marigold,” involved covert contacts in Saigon between the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, and a Communist Polish diplomat, Janusz Lewandowski, who could shuttle to Hanoi and back (via neutral Cambodia and Laos) to relay messages. Their clandestine meetings, hosted by Italy’s ambassador, Giovanni D’Orlandi, climaxed in early December with a seeming breakthrough: Hanoi’s consent to an unprecedented encounter between American and North Vietnamese ambassadors in Warsaw to confirm a 10-point American platform that could serve as a basis for ongoing discussions.
Yet the meeting never happened. In December, the United States conducted an intense bombing campaign against Hanoi, leading the North Vietnamese to cut off contact. (The bombing was memorably recounted by Harrison E. Salisbury, who visited the city soon after to witness the destruction of civilian neighborhoods.) The Poles, having warned the Americans that the strikes would doom the chance for peace, were furious.
Concerned that Washington might peddle its own, self-serving version of events, the Poles launched a pre-emptive strike in what quickly became a “war of leaks.” Violating a mutual-secrecy pledge, the Polish foreign minister, Adam Rapacki, directed his diplomats in Rome and New York to reveal the peace effort and share Poland’s view on why it fizzled to Pope Paul VI and the secretary general of the United Nations, U Thant, who in turn radiated secondary leaks, including to the Canadian and French ambassadors to the United Nations.
After Secretary of State Dean Rusk learned from the Canadians, on New Year’s Day 1967, that a “disturbing” Polish-inspired account of Marigold was circulating, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a round of quiet counterleaks to the pope, Thant, the Canadians and the British. Word of the failed peace bid spread to chancelleries around the globe — and, inevitably, also seeped out to reporters.
Robert H. Estabrook, the Washington Post’s United Nations correspondent, broke the story in early February, making banner front-page headlines. The insinuation that Washington had squandered an authentic peace chance infuriated American officials; the United Nations ambassador Arthur Goldberg fingered the “tendentious” Poles for the leak. (Decades later, Estabrook revealed that his source was actually a Danish diplomat, supplemented, his notes show, by Thant and Canadian and Yugoslav sources.)
In response, the Johnson administration, led by Rusk and the national security adviser, Walt Rostow, plotted to leak a more sympathetic story, and found an ideal conduit: John M. Hightower, the veteran national security specialist at The Associated Press. Hightower even received guidance from administration officials, notably Rusk himself, in meetings and phone calls to “tidy up” his draft: “Sec. told H. to write the story that takes into account some of the things Sec. has said privately and then Sec. will go over certain points with H.”
Hightower’s article, reflecting the American view that the Communists, not Washington, had destroyed any peace prospects, was featured by The New York Times (which never published its own inquiry) atop its front page on May 9; it quoted unnamed “high officials” as being “skeptical that Warsaw ever had a firm commitment or Hanoi a serious intention to open secret talks.” A State Department spokesman quickly endorsed the story’s accuracy.
In other words, the first account of the Polish peace affair, with an anti-administration spin, appeared in The Washington Post, whose editorial page strongly supported the war (and basically told readers to ignore the scoop on the front page), while The New York Times, editorially a trenchant antiwar critic, trumpeted a report with a strong pro-Administration tilt, shaped backstage by Rusk.
The administration’s victory proved pyrrhic, however. The exculpatory A.P. article aroused the suspicions of the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief, David Kraslow, whose paper remained staunchly Republican but was keen to enhance its journalistic stature. Sensing an important tale behind the classified veil, Kraslow and the bureau’s White House reporter, Stuart H. Loory, took a leave from their usual duties to chase a blockbuster exposé.
Over the summer they made scant progress quizzing reticent officials, yet were tantalized by a conversation with one figure they would describe only as a “close associate of the President” but whom notes identify as Bill Moyers, code-named “Source M.”
Johnson’s former press secretary, who had left the White House just as the secret peace gambit withered, said the reporters would “never get the inside story” of “Marigold” — the first time they heard the still-secret code-name — because none of the 10 or so officials who knew the truth would talk to them.
Why not?
“Because it makes our government look so bad,” Mr. Moyers said.
The reporters sensed progress in October, when, on a tip from Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had soured on the war — Kraslow visited Cambridge, Mass., to interview Henry A. Kissinger. The Harvard historian, a State Department consultant, was rumored (correctly) to be involved in a secret scheme to communicate with Hanoi via “French channels,” but he deftly deflected the reporter’s grilling. Exasperated, Kraslow threw a Hail Mary.
“We were chatting and chatting, and he was being very coy and very tight-lipped,” Kraslow remembered. “I said, ‘Henry, what do you know about Marigold?’ He turned beet-red and said, ‘How do you know about Marigold?’ And that told me everything I needed to know.”
Convinced they had a story, even a book, the reporters intensified their interviewing. They found sources — some of whom sent memos to higher-ups insisting they had intoned only the official line — who, notes indicate, actually spoke more candidly, admitting that failures to coordinate military and diplomatic tracks may have derailed multiple peace overtures.
Some top officials reacted angrily. McNamara told the reporters that anyone who spoke to them about “the most delicate subject confronting the United States government today,” other than the president or secretary of state (both refused interview requests), “should have his head cut off.” Rostow yelled that The Los Angeles Times’ probe was “as bad as giving away war secrets.” After Kraslow and Loory had fanned out to Western and Communist Eastern Europe to interview sources, the national security adviser scoffed: “Everybody and his brother knows what you’re doing. You remind me of Laurel and Hardy trying to play sleuths.”
At a late November meeting at the White House, Johnson and his aides plotted to undermine the duo. The president suggested that Rusk’s top Vietnam aide, William P. Bundy, disclose titillating tidbits on a Sunday TV talk show, while McNamara, afraid “the Canadians, the Italians and the Poles have ‘spilled their guts’” to them, proposed to “torpedo” their impending reports by leaking a more favorable version, including the “Marigold” code name, to a friendly reporter, The Washington Post’s Chalmers M. Roberts.
But again, the administration leak boomeranged. Warsaw’s ambassador in Washington, who had already spread a Polish version of Marigold, correctly inferred that Roberts’s article was intended “to take away the wind from the sails of the California journalists” and urged retaliation. In this situation, he cabled Rapacki, “we especially need to leak out information to them.” From Lewandowski in Warsaw, and D’Orlandi in Rome, Loory confirmed that both Communist Poland and the NATO member Italy had urged Washington against the Hanoi attacks that had spoiled the initiative.
In early 1968, as Kraslow and Loory wrapped up their interviews and began writing, the administration made one last thrust to steal their thunder: Bundy fed inside dope to enliven a Life magazine cover story (“Behind the Peace Feelers”), trotting out a ringer — a Hungarian diplomat who had defected the previous May but remained reclusive ever since — to back the argument that East European Vietnam diplomacy was fraudulent.
By the time the reporters published their findings, in the spring — first in a Los Angeles Times series, then a book, “The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam” — Johnson had already dropped out of the presidential race. Historians still dispute whether Johnson missed any real opportunities for peace. But the drip-drip-drip of leaks that he had done so, both foreign and domestic, had already widened his “credibility gap,” generating charges that his peace efforts were insincere, incompetent, or both, and leaving him vulnerable to an insurgency from within his own party.
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ER Mitchell
It always amazes me that via the fickle lives of merely a few dozen men, all wrapped up in their own lies, excuses and egos, were the ones truly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
That we as citizens still cede such great power to such a small group of cowardly, selfish individuals and that we still get stuck with such horribly bad leadership is such a depressing truism of life on this beautiful planet.
Watch interviews of Robert McNamara in his later years and see the tears fill his eyes. It's as sobering as anything I've ever watched; a once powerful man who realizes his life's work was to produce a hopelessly tragic war that murdered so many people.
Michael Spencer Naples, FL
Born in 1949, I was draft-eligible during the Vietnam war. I sought and received a 2s student deferment.
Fast forward many decades to today where I live in Naples FL. My lovely pedicure lady is my age -67- and lived near an active war zone. I was loafing in grad school while she was fighting for her life.
In a parallel universe my deferment was refused. We would have faced one another through the sights of a rifle.
There are so many ways to take this story, starting with the accidental facts of my birth: white, affluent, and free.
What stays with me, though, is the futility of fervor.
And my observation that the acuity of hindsight brings us no actionable life lessons. We merely shrug.
So we find ourselves, over and over, examining some nameless war. We will kill theirs, they ours.
At some inevitable future time the ones still standing become chance friends. One might even clean the feet of the other.
sdavidc9 cornwall
If our bombing accidentally or deliberately torpedoed our peace effort, the other side was basically correct and we were basically trying to shoot down the truth about what had happened. To describe a propaganda war without putting it in the context that one group of actors, including both Communist governments and allies, were trying to aid the peace process and we were trying to hide the fact that we had shot ourselves in the foot. This was not just a tale of intrigue, spy versus spy. We were trying to cover something up, probably a stupid, and lying and misleading to do it, but we prefer our history and our historians to leave such things between the lines.
John M Oakland CA
I expect the war hawks thought that the bombing campaign would win the war, and that the Polish warning was an attempt to trick the US into stopping a tactic that would result in a US victory. Air power advocates always think that the next bomb will bring victory, despite the lessons of the London Blitz. (The bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan reduced their industrial capacity, but did not reduce their will to fight. It's argued that the Japanese surrender had more to do with fear of the Soviet Union's entry into the war than Hiroshima and Nagasaki - one Tokyo firebombing raid killed more people than either atomic bomb, but did not end the war.
We see this today in the drone war, and in Donald Trump's war of words with North Korea. Macho posturing and hard-line stances prolong wars, they don't end them.
James Lee Arlington, Texas
Missing from Mr. Hershberg's interesting account of diplomacy in the Vietnam war is any explanation of why Johnson initiated a bombing campaign at the very time North Vietnam and the US seemed prepared to begin negotiations. The maneuvering to place blame for the failure of the gambit seems secondary to that crucial decision.
That said, the negotiations almost certainly would have failed. The Hanoi regime never changed its basic position, that peace could not come until the US removed its troops. It required four more years, and additional massive bloodletting, before the Americans accepted that position as the basis of ending our role in the war. Johnson would never have accepted those terms in 1966 or 1967.
Neocynic New York, NY
Peace initiatives have always been the Pentagon's most favoured bombing target. As seen innumerable times in Afghanistan and most recently in Syria.
Shonun Portland OR
Let us by no means forget that this is not an isolated example of such intrigues. Nor are they limited to the government (and the corporate business world) of the United States alone. The proclivity to lie, and then to cover lies, is a deeply entrenched human behavioral problem that causes untold amounts if suffering and death in the world. Much of it is related to the quest for power and wealth, yet such behavior even occurs at one-on-one interpersonal levels that are quite aside from money and politics.
In any case, given the strength and influence of such superpowers as the United States, Russia, and China, such lies and distortions of the truth have a terrible effect on the quality of life for millions of people. In the present day, with the rise of "fake news" and the countervailing efforts to correct it, truth has never been under greater assault. Revelations such as in this article are a small but important victory.
Vesuviano Altadena, CA
Hi, Mark Thomason -
Your last question is the important one - was the bombing campaign done to derail the peace talks? It would be revealing to know who authorized it.
The whole business is reminiscent of the time Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, shortly before Eisenhower was to meet with Khrushchev. Eisenhower had ordered all U-2 overflights of Soviet air space to stop until after their meeting, but someone in the government, probably Allan Dulles, ordered Powers to go up. Contrary to all procedures, Powers was carrying identification. Further, Powers claimed he was only shot down because he ran out of fuel and lost altitude in a glide.
Shady business.
Ed Watters California
"...for in it lies an object lesson in why a negotiated peace was so hard to achieve in Vietnam."
Even if one believed the US version of events regarding the back channel diplomatic opening, the fact Johnson deliberately scuttled the attempts with the bombing and that Kissinger and Nixon later announced their intent to disregard the Paris peace plan immediately after they signed it, clearly demonstrates that the US was never bargaining in good faith.
Harold Appel NYC
So agree. This article is saying these “leaks” about the bombing rather than the bombing itself ruined the chance for negotiations. What odd logic.
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