by Seymour M. Hersh
As in Laos, Green Beret teams led by Americans constantly moved into Cambodia on secret intelligence-gathering trips. The number of such missions, at one time code named "Salem House," rose from fewer than 400 in 1967 and 1968 to more than 1,000 in 1969 and 1970. Some extremely sensitive operations inside Cambodia were conducted with the aid of the Khmer Serei, an anti-Communist Cambodian movement of mercenaries based in Thailand that was dedicated to the overthrow of the Sihanouk government. But the official policy then in effect for the Green Beret units ruled out the use of ethnic Cambodians while on operations inside the country, and the vast majority of such cross-border operations were conducted with Vietnamese, Chinese, or Thai mercenaries. The Khmer Serei and another ethnic Cambodian sect, the Khmer Kampuchea Krom, were also involved in the Phoenix assassination program, aimed at killing suspected Vietcong officials inside South Vietnam. Such operations were carried out by Green Beret special operations teams throughout Vietnam.
Randolph Harrison, the Green Beret lieutenant whose colleagues were killed in the aftermath of the first secret B-52 strike inside Cambodia in March 1969, recalls that Special Forces units operating in the border area at that time were constantly urged by their senior officers to avoid encounters with Cambodian civilians. After an operation in which a Green Beret unit inadvertently blew up a Cambodian civilian bus, causing heavy casualties, Harrison and other Green Berets were ordered to stop carrying American-made weapons while on missions. "There was no secret about what we were doing," Harrison says, "but we just didn't want to give Sihanouk material that he could use against us. Philosophically, we considered Sihanouk to be in bed with the North Vietnamese. We just knew that the North Vietnamese were all over the place."
Forrest B. Lindley was a Green Beret captain commanding a Special Forces team, which included 450 ethnic Vietnamese, near the Cambodian border. His main mission early in 1970 was to coordinate and inject intelligence teams inside Cambodia, and he was constantly pressured to keep the Cambodian sanctuary areas under surveillance. There were repeated complaints from the Sihanouk government about the operations of Lindley's unit, which routinely lobbed artillery shells into Cambodia. "In February of 1970," Lindley recalls, "I was told that there would be a change of government in Cambodia. My radio operator, an enlisted man, actually told me. He got it from the Special Forces B team [a higher command]; they told him that Sihanouk was taking off for France. The radio operator also told me that the Khmer Serei would be going into Cambodia." Lindley was later ordered to transfer two of the four companies under his command to another Green Beret unit as replacements for Khmer Serei units that were going into Cambodia. "Using Cambodians in Cambodia like this had never been done before," Lindley says. "The policy was not to use Cambodians there because of the political ramifications of the United States supporting mercenary troops against their own government. This was a policy change." Lindley was forced to cancel many operations which until then, had been considered a very high priority. He knew at that point that something big was in the air.
Other Green Berets repeatedly told colleagues after the 1970 coup that a highly secret Special Forces unit, known as Project Gamma, was responsible for conducting anti-Sihanouk intelligence operations inside Cambodia before Sihanouk's ouster. Project Gamma, formally listed as Detachment B57, Fifth Special Forces Group in South Vietnam, used members of the Khmer Serei and the Khmer Kampuchean Krom in its activities inside Cambodia, former Green Beret officers said. One member of B57, Captain John J. McCarthy, Jr. was court-martialed in T968 and sentenced to hard labor for life for killing a Khmer Serei operative believed to be a double agent. McCarthy's conviction was reversed in 1971, after an appeals hearing in Washington in which the Army warned that public disclosure of evidence in the case would damage national security. An official Army history of the Green Berets, published after the Vietnam War, does not mention Project Gamma or Detachment B57. Although the Pentagon has declassified much material about Green Beret crossborder operations inside Laos and Cambodia, nothing on Project Gamma has been made available. One former senior officer of the unit, who left South Vietnam prior to 1970, says that Gamma utilized only ethnic Cambodians in its operations, which were designed to gather tactical intelligence from deep inside Cambodia-areas that the normal Green Beret cross-border operations were forbidden to penetrate. The Cambodians involved in such missions, which included many Khmer Serei and some Khmer Kampuchean Krom, were extremely anti-Sihanouk, the former officer recalls, but he knew of no plans to overthrow Sihanouk while he was involved in Gamma.
Other Americans besides the Green Berets were involved in plots and operations inside Cambodia in the late 1960s. Samuel R. Thornton, a Navy yeoman assigned in May 1968 as an intelligence specialist to the United States Navy command in Saigon, vividly recalls that major planning to overthrow and assassinate Sihanouk was initiated late in 1968 by a Lon Nol representative who was then a high official in the Sihanouk government. Lon Nol was seeking a commitment of American military, political, and economic support after he engineered the overthrow of Sihanouk. The message was relayed by Lon Nol's representative to a Cambodian merchant of Chinese ancestry who regularly traveled between Saigon and Phnom Penh, and who-as Lon Nol and his aides understood-served as an intelligence operative for the United States. The Cambodian merchant was debriefed immediately upon his return by his contact, or "case officer," an American working under cover as an AID adviser to the Vietnamese Customs Service in Saigon. "I was the first person the case officer spoke to after his debriefing of the agent," Thornton recalls.
According to Thornton, the United States did more than pledge its continued support to Lon Nol. It sought to participate in the coup directly. A highly classified operations proposal, initially code named "Dirty Tricks," called for the use of Khmer Kampuchean Krom mercenaries to infiltrate the Cambodian Army before the coup and provide military support if needed. In addition, "the plan included a request for authorization to insert a U.S.-trained assassination team disguised as Vietcong insurgents into Phnom Penh to kill Prince Sihanouk as a pretext for revolution." * After the assassination, "Dirty Tricks" called for Lon Nol to declare a state of national emergency and issue a public request for American military intervention in Cambodia. Such intervention would include assaults against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries along the Cambodian border.
Not all the evidence indicating American complicity has emanated from those on the scene in Southeast Asia, however. Stephen W. Linger was an enlisted man who believed utterly in the rectitude of the Vietnam War and the fight against communism when he joined the Army as a volunteer. His high IQ and his patriotism projected him in early 1970 into one of the most secret jobs in the Pentagon-handling top secret and "Eyes Only" messages for the backchannel communications link of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The link, formally known as the Digital Information Relay Center, provided the military with a secure way of exchanging informal single-copy messages not meant to be filed or retained in any form. In a world of secret badges and secret rooms, the Relay Center stood- at the pinnacle. It processed some of the most highly classified communications intelligence in the United States government-including intercepted material from the Soviet Union-and it handled messages between the highest military commanders. It was a vital means of communication for Henry Kissinger, who could relay messages to field commanders in Saigon and elsewhere without the State Department's knowledge and even without the knowledge of Laird or any of his aides in the Department of Defense.
Linger was thrilled at his assignment and the inside look it gave him into the government's activities. Over the months, however, as he began to perceive the difference between what was happening in Southeast Asia and what the newspapers were reporting, he became distressed. By early 1971, Linger was in touch with Jack Anderson, the newspaper columnist, and had begun to relay some of the Relay Center's information to him. Anderson's columns that spring and summer were to stagger Washington-and Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.
But on the evening of March 18, 1970, Stephen Linger was still new to his job, and the thought of providing information to a newspaper columnist was far off. Nonetheless, he was curious about what was really happening in Cambodia. There was a high-priority message from an overseas American embassy late that night: Sihanouk, in Moscow, had pleaded with a senior American official to "help me out." Linger followed his usual custom with such messages: He forwarded a copy for immediate dispatch to Kissinger's office and telephoned aides of General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would have to wake him up and read him the message. Linger's duty hours were over before an answer came back, but the next day he dug out the file to see what the United States government had decided to tell Sihanouk. The message, when he did locate it, was one he would never forget: America had decided to adopt a "laissez faire" attitude. "The basic thrust of the message was 'lay off and let Sihanouk get overthrown.' " Linger remembers. And there was other immediate backchannel traffic from Washington to Saigon in which the White House and the Pentagon "kept talking about the military requirements for the new regime."
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