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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/henry-kissinger-cambodia-bombing-survivors/">theintercept.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Nick Turse - May 24, 2023<br></div>
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<img src="cid:ii_li25yp933" alt="image.png" width="392" height="196"><br><p><u>TA SOUS, Cambodia</u> — At the end of a dusty path snaking through rice paddies lives a woman who survived multiple U.S. airstrikes as a child.</p>
<p>Round-faced and just over 5 feet tall in plastic sandals, Meas Lorn
lost an older brother to a helicopter gunship attack and an uncle and
cousins to artillery fire. For decades, one question haunted her: “I
still wonder why those aircraft always attacked in this area. Why did
they drop bombs here?”</p>
<p>The U.S. <a href="https://apjjf.org/Ben-Kiernan/4313.html">carpet bombing</a> of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 has been <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sideshow-Kissinger-Nixon-Destruction-Cambodia/dp/081541224X">well documented</a>,
but its architect, former national security adviser and Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, who will turn 100 on Saturday, bears
responsibility for more violence than has been previously reported. An
investigation by The Intercept provides evidence of previously
unreported attacks that killed or wounded hundreds of Cambodian
civilians during Kissinger’s tenure in the White House. When questioned
about his culpability for these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm
and refused to provide answers.</p>
<p>An exclusive archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents —
assembled from the files of a secret Pentagon task force that
investigated war crimes during the 1970s, inspector generals’ inquiries
buried amid thousands of pages of unrelated documents, and other
materials discovered during hundreds of hours of research at the U.S.
National Archives — offers previously unpublished, unreported, and
underappreciated evidence of civilian deaths that were kept secret
during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American
people. The documents also provided a rudimentary road map for
on-the-ground reporting in Southeast Asia that yielded evidence of
scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been
reported to the outside world.</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ta-lous.jpg?resize=1200%2C867" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">The road to Tralok Bek, Cambodia, in 2010, left. Meas Lorn, right, poses for a portrait in Ta Sous, Cambodia.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photos: Tam Turse</p></div>
<p>Survivors from 13 Cambodian villages along the Vietnamese border told
The Intercept about attacks that killed hundreds of their relatives and
neighbors during Kissinger’s tenure in President Richard Nixon’s White
House. The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and
survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the
long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war. These attacks
were far more intimate and perhaps even more horrific than the violence
already attributed to Kissinger’s policies, because the villages were
not just bombed, but also strafed by helicopter gunships and burned and
looted by U.S. and allied troops.</p>
<p>The incidents detailed in the files and the testimony of survivors
include accounts of both deliberate attacks inside Cambodia and
accidental or careless strikes by U.S. forces operating on the border
with South Vietnam. These latter attacks were infrequently reported
through military channels, covered only sparingly by the press at the
time, and have mostly been lost to history. Together, they increase an
already sizable number of Cambodian deaths for which Kissinger bears
responsibility and raise questions among experts about whether
long-dormant efforts to hold him accountable for war crimes might be
renewed.</p>
<p>The Army files and interviews with Cambodian survivors, American
military personnel, Kissinger confidants, and experts demonstrate that
impunity extended from the White House to American soldiers in the
field. The records show that U.S. troops implicated in killing and
maiming civilians received no meaningful punishments.</p>
<div>
<p>Key Takeaways</p>
<ul><li>
<p>Henry Kissinger is responsible for more civilian deaths in
Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of
U.S. military documents and groundbreaking interviews with Cambodian
survivors and American witnesses.</p>
</li><li>
<p>The archive offers previously unpublished, unreported, and
underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were
kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the
American people.</p>
</li><li>
<p>Previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian
witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks reveal new details of
the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war.</p>
</li><li>
<p>Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for
attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times
more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes
since 9/11.</p>
</li><li>
<p>When questioned about these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.</p>
</li></ul>
</div>
<p>Together, the interviews and documents demonstrate a consistent
disregard for Cambodian lives: failing to detect or protect civilians;
to conduct post-strike assessments; to investigate civilian harm
allegations; to prevent such damage from recurring; and to punish or
otherwise hold U.S. personnel accountable for injuries and deaths. These
policies not only obscured the true toll of the conflict in Cambodia
but also set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on
terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond.</p>
<p>“You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Greg Grandin, author of “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250097170/kissingersshadow" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kissinger’s Shadow</a>.”
“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the
framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a
perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”</p>
<p>Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia
that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, according to Ben Kiernan,
former director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and
one of the foremost authorities on the U.S. air campaign in Cambodia.
That’s up to six times the number of noncombatants <a href="https://airwars.org/investigations/tens-of-thousands-of-civilians-likely-killed-by-us-in-forever-wars/">thought to have died</a>
in U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia,
Syria, and Yemen during the first 20 years of the war on terror. Grandin
estimated that, overall, Kissinger — who also helped to prolong the
Vietnam War and facilitate genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/bloody-bloody-richard-nixons-role-in-a-forgotten-genocide">Bangladesh</a>;
accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and
death squads throughout Latin America — has the blood of at least <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/henry-kissinger-hillary-clintons-tutor-in-war-and-peace/">3 million people</a> on his hands</p>
<p>All the while, as Kissinger <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=D0AEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=kissinger+starlets&source=bl&ots=DKVYyHMe-j&sig=ACfU3U20a33_1W_6x8mDU-4oQjgUwqqKBA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiMsN3v5OfvAhVOJt8KHS23AIMQ6AEwAXoECAIQAw#v=onepage&q=kissinger%20starlets&f=false">dated starlets</a>, <a href="https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/upi_kissinger/52/">won coveted awards</a>, and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2018/04/25/the-132-billion-dinner-meet-the-tycoons-who-ate-with-trump-last-night/?sh=5aa36b62251b">rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners</a>,
Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the
U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma, and
unanswered questions. They did so largely alone and invisible to the
wider world, including to Americans whose leaders had upended their
lives.</p>
<blockquote>Henry
Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for decades and
has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there.</blockquote>
<p>Henry Kissinger dodged questions about the bombing of Cambodia for
decades and has spent half his life lying about his role in the killings
there. In 1973, during his Senate confirmation hearings to become
secretary of state, Kissinger was asked if he approved of deliberately
keeping attacks on Cambodia secret, to which he responded with a wall of
words justifying the assaults. “I just wanted to make clear that it was
not a bombing of Cambodia, but it was a bombing of North Vietnamese in
Cambodia,” he insisted. The evidence from U.S. military records and
eyewitness testimony directly contradicts that claim. So did Kissinger
himself.</p>
<p>In his 2003 book, “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger offered an
estimate of 50,000 Cambodian civilian deaths from U.S. attacks during
his involvement in the conflict — a number given to him by a Pentagon
historian. But documents obtained by The Intercept show that number was
conjured almost out of thin air. In reality, the U.S. bombardment of
Cambodia ranks among the most intense air campaigns in history. More
than 231,000 U.S. bombing sorties were flown over Cambodia <a href="https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/cambodian-genocide-program/us-involvement-cambodian-war-and-genocide">from 1965 to 1973</a>. Between 1969 and 1973, while Kissinger was national security adviser, U.S. aircraft dropped <a href="https://apjjf.org/-Taylor-Owen/3380/article.html">500,000 or more tons of munitions</a>. (During all of World War II, including the atomic bombings, the United States dropped around <a href="https://apjjf.org/Ben-Kiernan/4313.html">160,000 tons of munitions</a> on Japan.)</p>
<p>At a 2010 State Department conference on U.S. involvement in
Southeast Asia from 1946 through the close of the Vietnam War, I asked
Kissinger how he would amend his testimony before the Senate, given his
own contention that tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians died from
his escalation of the war.</p>
<p>“Why should I amend my testimony?” he replied. “I don’t quite understand the question, except that I didn’t tell the truth.”</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-1354450332.jpg?resize=1200%2C775" alt="The Cambodian Campaign (also known as the Cambodian Incursion) was a series of military operations conducted in eastern Cambodia during mid-1970 by the United States (U.S.) and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) during the Vietnam War. A total of 13 major operations were conducted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) between 29 April and 22 July and by U.S. forces between 1 May and 30 June. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="253"></p><p class="gmail-caption">President Richard Nixon speaks about the Cambodian campaign in 1970 in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</p></div>
<h2>“Anything That Flies on Anything That Moves”</h2>
<p>One night in December 1970, Nixon called his national security
adviser in a rage about Cambodia. “I want the helicopter ships. I want
everything that can fly to go in and crack the hell out of them,” he
barked at Kissinger, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/kissinger-phone-call-transcripts/">according to a transcript</a>.
“I want gunships in there. That means armed helicopters. … I want it
done! Get them off their ass. … I want them to hit everything.”</p>
<p>Five minutes later, Kissinger was on the phone with Gen. Alexander
Haig, his military aide, relaying the command for a relentless assault
on Cambodia. “It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on
anything that moves. You got that?”</p>
<p>Two years earlier, Nixon had won the White House promising to end
America’s war in Vietnam, but instead expanded the conflict into
neighboring Cambodia. Fearing public backlash and believing that
Congress would never approve an attack on a neutral country, Kissinger
and Haig began planning — <a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/11/10/henry_kissingers_genocidal_legacy_partner/">a month after Nixon took office</a>
— an operation that was kept secret from the American people, Congress,
and even top Pentagon officials via a conspiracy of cover stories,
coded messages, and a dual bookkeeping system that logged airstrikes in
Cambodia as occurring in South Vietnam. <a href="https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/392518">Ray Sitton</a>, a colonel serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would bring a list of targets to the White House for approval. “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Kissinger_s_Shadow/a0hsCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=sitton+%E2%80%9CStrike+here+in+this+area,%E2%80%9D+Kissinger+hersh&pg=PA54&printsec=frontcover&bshm=nce/1">Strike here in this area</a>,”
Kissinger would tell him, and Sitton would backchannel the coordinates
into the field, circumventing the military chain of command. Authentic
documents associated with the strikes were burned, and phony target
coordinates and other forged data were provided to the Pentagon and
Congress.</p>
<p>Kissinger, who went on to serve as secretary of state in the Nixon
and Gerald Ford administrations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1973 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian
award — in 1977. In the decades that followed, he has continued to
counsel U.S. presidents, <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/07/09/henry-kissinger-every-president-but-biden-invites-me-to-white-house/">most recently</a> <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/10/10/henry_kissinger_to_president_trump_this_is_a_moment_when_the_opportunity_to_build_a_constructive_peaceful_world_order_is_very_great.html">Donald Trump</a>;
served on numerous corporate and government advisory boards; and
authored a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.</p>
<p>Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he
came to the United States in 1938, amid a flood of Jews fleeing Nazi
oppression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army
in Europe during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from
Harvard College in 1950, he continued on to an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D.
in 1954. He subsequently joined the Harvard faculty, working in the
Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs
until 1969. While teaching at Harvard, he served as a consultant for the
administrations of <a href="https://sais.jhu.edu/kissinger/about/legacy">John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson</a> before his senior roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations. A believer in <em>Realpolitik</em>, Kissinger heavily influenced U.S. foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.</p>
<p>Through a combination of relentless ambition, media savvy, and the
ability to muddy the truth and slip free of scandal, Kissinger
transformed himself from a college professor and government functionary
into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a
bona fide celebrity. While <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage-9904E7DF1F3FF933A05753C1A9639C8B63.html">dozens of his White House colleagues</a>
were engulfed in the swirling Watergate scandal, which cost Nixon his
job in 1974, Kissinger emerged unscathed, all the while providing fodder
for the tabloids and spouting lines like “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Richard_M_Nixon/OLBC9xLD0zYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=aphrodisiac+kissinger&pg=PA65&printsec=frontcover">Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac</a>.”</p>
<p>Kissinger was the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast
Asia, achieving almost co-president status in such matters. Kissinger
and Nixon were also uniquely responsible for attacks that killed,
wounded, or displaced hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/09/12/debate-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-new-faces-pac-ad/">laid the groundwork</a> for the Khmer Rouge genocide.</p>
<p>Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership cannot be exonerated for
committing genocide on the Cambodian people, said Kiernan, the Yale
scholar, but neither can Nixon nor Kissinger escape responsibility for
their role in the slaughter that precipitated it. The duo so
destabilized the tiny country that Pol Pot’s nascent revolutionary
movement took over Cambodia in 1975 and unleashed horrors, from
massacres to mass starvation, that would kill around 2 million people.</p>
<p>Kaing Guek Eav (known as “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-rouge-jailer-says-u-s-contributed-to-pol-pot-rise-idUSTRE5351VF20090406">Duch</a>”) who ran the Khmer Rouge’s <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53994189">Tuol Sleng prison</a>,
where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and murdered in the late
1970s, made the same observation. “Mister Richard Nixon and Kissinger,” <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-rouge-jailer-says-u-s-contributed-to-pol-pot-rise-idUSTRE5351VF20090406">he told</a>
a United Nations-backed tribunal, “allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp
golden opportunities.” After he was overthrown in a military coup and
his country was plunged into genocide, Cambodia’s deposed monarch,
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leveled similar blame. “There are only two men
responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia,” he said in the 1970s. “Mr.
Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.”</p>
<p>In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,”
Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes,
for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or
customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder,
kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, and Chile to East
Timor, Laos, and Uruguay. But Hitchens reserved special opprobrium for
Kissinger’s role in Cambodia. “The bombing campaign,” he wrote, “began
as it was to go on — with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and
with flagrant deceit by Mr. Kissinger in this precise respect.”</p>
<p>Others went beyond theoretical indictments. As a teenager,
Australian-born human rights activist Peter Tatchell felt greatly
affected by the U.S. war — and war crimes — in Indochina. Decades later,
believing that there was a strong case to be made, he took action. “It
surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under
international law, so I decided to have a go,” he told The Intercept by
email.</p>
<blockquote>“It surprised me that no one had tried to prosecute Kissinger under international law, so I decided to have a go.”</blockquote>
<p>In 2002, with Slobodan Miloševic, the former president of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, on trial for war crimes, Tatchell applied for
an arrest warrant at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London under the
Geneva Conventions Act of 1957, an act of Parliament that incorporated
some components of the laws of war as defined by the 1949 Geneva
Conventions into British law. He alleged that while Kissinger “was
National Security Advisor to the U.S. President 1969-75 and U.S.
Secretary of State 1973-77 he commissioned, aided and abetted and
procured war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” Judge Nicholas Evans
denied the application, stating that he was not “presently” able to
draft a “suitably precise charge” based on the evidence Tatchell
submitted.</p>
<p>When the arrest warrant was denied, Tatchell tried to engage
international humanitarian organizations to help or take over the case,
he told The Intercept, but they “did not see it as a priority.” He tried
unsuccessfully to contact potential American witnesses and engage U.S.
human rights groups.</p>
<p>But Tatchell maintains that Kissinger should still have his day in
court. “I believe that age should never be a barrier to justice. Those
who commit or authorise war crimes should be held to account, regardless
of their age,” he wrote, “providing they have the mental capacity for a
fair trial, which I understand is the case with Kissinger.”</p>
<div> <img src="cid:ii_li25xh3w2" alt="image.png" width="392" height="261"><br><p></p><p class="gmail-caption">Illustration: Matthieu Bourel for The Intercept; Source Photograph: AP</p></div>
<h2 id="gmail-h-five-decades-of-impunity"><strong>Five Decades of Impunity</strong></h2>
<p>Kissinger and his acolytes frequently cast blame for the American war
in Cambodia on the North Vietnamese troops and South Vietnamese
guerrillas who used the country as a base and logistics hub, while
giving short shrift to U.S. involvement there. “What destabilized
Cambodia was North Vietnam’s occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory
from 1965 onwards,” wrote former Kissinger aide <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rodman">Peter Rodman</a>.
But three years earlier — long before most Americans knew their country
was at war in Southeast Asia — U.S. “bombs hit a Cambodian village by
accident … killing several civilians,” <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015003337527&view=2up&seq=138&size=175">according to an Air Force history</a>.
And the “accidents” never stopped. Between 1962 and 1969, the Cambodian
government tallied 1,864 border violations; 6,149 violations of its air
space by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces; and nearly 1,000 civilian
casualties.</p>
<p>To Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia was a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sideshow-Kissinger-Nixon-Destruction-Cambodia/dp/081541224X">sideshow</a>:
a tiny war waged in the shadow of the larger conflict in Vietnam and
entirely subsumed to U.S. objectives there. To Cambodians on the front
lines of the conflict — farming folk living hardscrabble lives — the war
was a shock and a horror. At first, people were awed by the aircraft
that began flying above their thatched-roof homes. They called Huey
Cobra attack helicopters “lobster legs” for their skids, which resembled
crustacean limbs, while small bubble-like Loaches became “coconut
shells” in local parlance. But Cambodians quickly learned to fear the
aircraft’s machine guns and rockets, the bombs of F-4 Phantoms, and the
ground-shaking strikes of B-52s. Decades later, survivors still had
little understanding of why they were attacked and why so many loved
ones were maimed or killed. They had no idea that their suffering was
due in large part to a man named Henry Kissinger and his failed schemes
to achieve his boss’s promised “<a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?409120-1/1968-presidential-campaign-ads">honorable end to the war in Vietnam</a>” by expanding, escalating, and prolonging that conflict.</p>
<p>In 2010, I traveled to Cambodia to investigate <a href="http://amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061">decades-old U.S. war crimes</a>.
I searched the borderlands, looking for villages mentioned in U.S.
military documents, carrying binders filled with photos of Cobras,
Loaches, and other aircraft, asking villagers to point out the military
hardware that killed their loved ones and neighbors. My interviewees
were uniformly shocked that an American knew about attacks on their
village and had traveled across the globe to speak with them.</p>
<blockquote>To Nixon
and Kissinger, Cambodia was a sideshow. To Cambodians on the front lines
of the conflict, the war was a shock and a horror.</blockquote>
<p>For decades, the U.S. government has shown little interest in
examining allegations of civilian harm caused by its military operations
around the world. A <a href="https://civiliansinconflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PDF-Report-for-Website.pdf">2020 study</a>
of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found that most have gone
completely uninvestigated, and in those cases that have come under
official scrutiny, U.S. investigators regularly interview American
military witnesses but almost totally ignore civilians — victims,
survivors, family members, and bystanders — “severely compromising the
effectiveness of investigations,” according to researchers from the
Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human
Rights Institute. The U.S. military rarely conducted investigations of
civilian harm allegations in Cambodia and almost never interviewed
Cambodian victims. In all 13 Cambodian villages I visited in 2010, I was
the first person to ever interview victims of wartime attacks initiated
9,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights
groups have documented systemic killing of civilians, underreporting of
noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright
impunity extending from the drone pilots who slay innocent people to the
architects of America’s 21st-century wars in <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/04/03/libya-airstrike-civilian-deaths-lawsuit/">Libya</a>, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/02/25/africom-airstrikes-somalia/">Somalia</a>, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/04/25/coalition-airstrikes-in-raqqa-killed-at-least-1600-civilians-more-than-10-times-u-s-tally-report-finds/">Syria</a>, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/11/30/yemen-civilian-deaths-pentagon-investigation/">Yemen</a> and elsewhere. A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=LARd-r6sa1D6HJtvGHNDJqCdpoa8nVxFstk7PzunDts3H79y1qFq_H06NPVcMOrYXIrAgh4xZs5KjVX5-csDmfbOjxjbXHdWIUE9ycKy7DPt9qNh1kQQ_Iv3gxDfpkBEPnDCqsg4Nlao55eUstrclffMRtNbs2KylL2zzzIVJj9Bad4knX1zxjgZuGUELRvEzWrmyvEMXnZbvmkhp1Uqd6XPk4cgfnB_1aE9GUV9-hPZ7PYCrfgVhOjpob41wzLGJmur7QOUB2kDOo_o8ea8rqa4zzR3VeEXyt84Ep02a0-5ua4T_WhSwv-arc6UmgRX7bCe-FAueOSUO8W7CgDOwNhZi1iKLVnSAnv3bq5EmJ6u3620jttq867OPlGYui7RKA">2021 investigation</a>
by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan — which revealed that the U.S.
air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and
inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent
people — finally forced the Defense Department to unveil a comprehensive
plan for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian casualties.
The 36-page <a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3140007/civilian-harm-mitigation-and-response-action-plan-fact-sheet/">Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan</a>
provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses
noncombatant deaths but lacks a concrete mechanism for addressing past
civilian harm.</p>
<p>The Defense Department has been clear that it isn’t interested in
looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate
cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif.,
when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit
past civilian harm allegations from the forever wars. The possibility
that the Defense Department will investigate civilian harm in Cambodia
50 years later is nil.</p>
<p>I share some responsibility for the delay in publishing these
accounts. For 13 years — while I was reporting on drone strike victims
in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and
civil wars from Libya to South Sudan — survivors’ accounts from
Cambodian villages like An Lung Kreas, Bos Phlung, Bos Mon (upper), Doun
Rath, Doun Rath 2, Mroan, Por, Sati, Ta Sous, Tropeang, Phlong, Ta
Hang, and Udom were lodged in my notebooks. Other projects and
imperatives, coupled with the vagaries of the news industry that doesn’t
always view past atrocities as “news,” kept them there.</p>
<p>When I conducted my interviews, in 2010, the life expectancy in Cambodia was about <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KHM/cambodia/life-expectancy">66 years</a>.
Many of the people I spoke with — their ages in this article pegged to
the date we spoke — are likely dead. Few in these rural villages had
cellphones 13 years ago, so I have no way to reach them. But their
accounts remain vibrant and the horrors they recounted have not
diminished. Nor has their pain necessarily passed on with them from this
world. We know from Holocaust survivors, for example, that trauma can
have intergenerational effects; it can be passed on, whether <a href="https://www.research.va.gov/currents/1016-3.cfm">genetically</a> or <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745744/summary">otherwise</a>. Even at this late date, the pain of America’s war in Cambodia lives on — along with the architect of that country’s agony.</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cambodia-civilian-harm-cambodia-kissinger-theintercept-final-1.png?w=1024&resize=1200%2C900" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="294"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Map: The Intercept</p></div>
<h2>Memories of Atrocity</h2>
<p>Crossing a bridge over the Mekong River, I sped into the Cambodian
countryside, along highways where SUVs passed tiny carts pulled by tiny
ponies, motorbikes loaded with sheaves of bamboo or brightly colored
textiles or baskets of squealing pigs, and ancient flatbed trucks piled
high with rough-hewn, ochre bricks. I rolled through market towns of
open-air butcher shops and wooden stalls selling cases of motor oil or
motorcycle helmets or child-sized bags of rice or cases of Angkor Beer. I
raced past thick, unruly forests and rubber plantations and rice fields
where you could spot lines of water buffalo loping, single file, along
the paddy dikes. Finally, I turned off the pavement onto a path of
rutted, red dirt, looking for villages unknown even to the local police.
At the end of one of these dusty, pitted trails, I found a hamlet
straddling the border with Vietnam.</p>
<p>The air in Doun Rath was dry and musty during the day and punctuated,
in the late afternoon, by the comforting smell of cooking fires that
wafted up to wooden homes built on stilts to maximize air circulation on
sweltering days like these.</p>
<p>I came looking for members of a ravaged generation who had survived
both the American war and the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed. One of
them, Phok Horm, spry and 84 years old at the time of our meeting, with
close-cropped salt and pepper hair, told me: “Bombing was very common
in this area. Sometimes, it happened every day. Sometimes there were
dive bombers. Sometimes, the aircraft with the legs of a lobster would
fly over and shoot at everything.”</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Phok-Horm-84.jpg?resize=1200%2C1500" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="314" height="392"></p><p class="gmail-caption">In a photo taken in 2010, Phok Horm, 84, reflects on the attacks she survived in the village of Doun Rath.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Tam Turse</p></div>
<p>Vietnamese guerrillas operated in the nearby forest, Phok and fellow
village elders recalled. They came to Doun Rath to buy supplies from
residents already living hard lives, growing rice and selling it across
the border in Vietnam, before the war flooded the hamlet with refugees
from other bomb-ravaged Cambodian villages. But the guerrillas generally
weren’t present during the attacks. “Many people here were shot,” said
Chneang Sous, who was in his 20s during the conflict. “Most of them were
Cambodian.”</p>
<p>When the shooting started, villagers would scatter, running for the
uncertain protection of paddy dikes and, as the war dragged on,
subterranean bunkers that families dug beside their homes. Min Keun, a
teenager in 1969, remembered the regular intrusion of “lobster legs” in
the skies over the village. “People would panic. They would run.
Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they would be killed,” she recalled.
“There was so much suffering.” Min and others remembered helicopters
firing on fleeing villagers. Water buffalo and cattle were repeatedly
machine-gunned. At night, the helicopters’ bright search beams lit up
the darkness as they hunted for enemy forces. Bombs might fall at any
time.</p>
<p>Around 1969, Phok’s husband was caught in the open during a
“bombardment” and hit in the neck with shrapnel. He hung on for seven
days before succumbing to his wounds. Chneang recalled an instance when
an American Huey gunship popped up from behind a tree line, forcing
villagers to bolt for safety. The helicopter raked the area with machine
gunfire, killing his aunt and uncle. Nouv Mom told me that his younger
sister was gravely wounded in a 1972 bombing. Vietnamese guerrillas
arrived after the attack and took her away for medical treatment, but
his family never saw her again. All told, survivors believed that more
than half of all the villagers living in Doun Rath during the late 1960s
and early 1970s were either killed or wounded by American attacks.</p>
<p>In nearby Doun Rath 2, former village chief Kang Vorn said residents
led a simple life before the war, growing rice, beans, and sesame seeds.
They began to see Vietnamese guerrillas around 1965, but the bombing
didn’t begin until about 1969. Vet Shea, a one-eyed woman, recalled that
the attacks intensified as time went on. “Sometimes we were bombed
every day. Once, it was three or four times in one day,” she said. She
herself survived a helicopter attack targeting farmers working in the
nearby fields. “I ran flat out when I saw it,” Vet told me. “One person
was wounded. A few others died.”</p>
<p>Thirteen elders of Doun Rath 2 did their best to recall the names of
the dead. “Nul, Pik, Num, Seung,” said Sok Yun, an 85-year-old who
relied on a weathered walking stick, as she ticked off the names of four
villagers killed when their bomb shelter collapsed under a direct hit
from an airstrike. Vet said her aunt was slain in another attack. Tep
Sarum was just a teenager when a bomb hit his aunt’s house, killing her.
Mom Huy, 80 years old at the time of our interview, said deaths and
injuries from the bombs were common, while Kang, the former chief,
estimated that at least 30 villagers were wounded by airstrikes but
survived.</p>
<p>Just how many people in and around Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2 were
killed by Nixon and Kissinger’s war was already lost to history when I
visited. The U.S. documentary record is quite sparse, but it does exist.
On the night of August 9 and the morning of August 10, 1969, according
to an Army inspector general’s report, a U.S. “Nighthawk” helicopter
team — consisting of one Huey, equipped with a spotlight and
high-powered M-60 machine guns, and a Cobra gunship outfitted with a
powerful Gatling gun, rockets, and a grenade launcher — was operating in
a so-called free fire zone near the South Vietnamese border with
Cambodia.</p>
<p>The previously unreported investigation reveals that while only some
members of the helicopter crews mentioned sporadic ground fire that
night, they all agreed that lights were seen in “living structures.”
Helicopter crew members claimed that radar operators told them they were
over South Vietnam, but the radar operators said otherwise. One of
them, Rogden Palmer, speaking to investigators about the Huey commander,
said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[H]e told his Tiger bird (the cobra accompanying him) that he thought
he saw a light. At this time I advised him that he was close to the
Cambodian border, and he rogered my transmission. Night Hawk and Tiger
started circling … about the same time I advised him that he appeared to
be over the border. I don’t remember if he rogered my transmission, but
I beleive [sic] he did. At one time I told him he was over the border.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Apparently undaunted, the Huey focused its searchlight on the houses
and the Cobra gunship commenced a firing run, blasting three of what the
Pentagon documents referred to as “hooches” — shorthand for civilian
dwellings — with machine gunfire and rockets filled with “flechettes,”
tiny nails designed to tear through human flesh.</p>
<p>The U.S. investigation determined that the helicopters “did engage a
target in the vicinity of the Cambodian border which could have been the
village of Doun Rath.” The survivors in Doun Rath and Doun Rath 2
didn’t recall this particular incident, emphasizing that attacks were so
common for so long that they blended together. The report concluded
that the “aircraft commander exercised poor judgement [sic] in engaging a
target under these circumstances.” The inspector general, however,
recommended that “no disciplinary action be taken,” and until I arrived
decades later no one, apparently, had tried to investigate what actually
happened in Doun Rath.</p>
<p>Fifty years on, most U.S. attacks in Cambodia are unknown to the
wider world and may never be known. Even those confirmed by the U.S.
military were ignored and forgotten: cast into history’s dustbin without
additional reviews or follow-up investigations.</p>
<p>On January 6, 1970, for example, five helicopters breached Cambodian
airspace and fired on the village of Prastah, killing two civilians and
severely wounding an 11-year-old girl, according to an Army inspector
general’s summary report. That perfunctory review found that helicopter
gunships from the 25th Infantry Division had fired on enemy forces, who
allegedly withdrew into Cambodia. The inquiry determined that the
“gunships continued to engage and rounds did impact in Cambodia.” As to
the question of civilian casualties and property damage resulting from
the attack, the report stated only that “it was possible that civilian
personnel … could have been struck by fire from the gunships and some
crops could have been destroyed.” There is no indication that anything
was done to compensate the survivors.</p>
<p>In the early evening of May 3, 1970, a helicopter circled the
Cambodian village of Sre Kandal several times, scaring villagers and
forcing them to flee, according to a formerly classified Army report.
The file states that witnesses said a “helicopter of unknown type
circled their village several times. They became frightened and started
to run, at which time the helicopter allegedly fired.” According to
Cambodians who the U.S. military encountered just after the attacks,
three people suffered burns when a home was set ablaze in the attack and
one person was wounded by shrapnel. One of the burn victims, his name
likely engraved in the hearts of his Cambodian relatives but otherwise
lost to history, later died.</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-1354465835.jpg?resize=1200%2C809" alt="The Cambodian Campaign (also known as the Cambodian Incursion) was a series of military operations conducted in eastern Cambodia during mid-1970 by the United States (U.S.) and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) during the Vietnam War. A total of 13 major operations were conducted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) between 29 April and 22 July and by U.S. forces between 1 May and 30 June. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="264"></p><p class="gmail-caption">U.S. helicopter gunships fly over Cambodia in 1970.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</p></div>
<h2>“Everything Was Completely Destroyed”</h2>
<p>Less than a month after Kissinger and Haig began planning the secret
bombing of Cambodia, the U.S. launched Operation MENU, a callously
titled collection of B-52 raids codenamed BREAKFAST, LUNCH, SNACK,
DINNER, DESSERT, and SUPPER that were carried out from March 18, 1969,
to May 26, 1970. The attacks were kept secret through multiple layers of
deception; Kissinger <a href="https://cdsun.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cornell?a=d&d=CDS19730911.2.2&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------">approved</a> <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-just-and-liberal-vision-of-war/">each one</a> of the <a href="https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/History/Vietnam/Vietnam_1969-1970.pdf">3,875 sorties</a>.</p>
<p>Survivors say that living through a B-52 bombing is unimaginably terrifying, bordering on the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-02-16-mn-1039-story.html">apocalyptic</a>. Even within the confines of a deep, well-built bomb shelter, the concussive force from a nearby strike might burst <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-02-16-mn-1039-story.html">eardrums</a>. For those more exposed, the earth-shaking strikes could be extraordinarily lethal.</p>
<p>One morning, at the end of a busted dirt and gravel road near the Vietnamese border, I found <a>Vuth Than</a>,
78 years old at the time, with a shorn head of bristly gray hair and a
mouth stained red with juice from betel nut, a natural stimulant popular
in Southeast Asia.</p>
<p>Both Vuth and her sister, 72-year-old Vuth Thang, broke down as soon
as I explained the purpose of my reporting. They were away from their
home in the village of Por when a B-52 strike wiped out 17 members of
their family. “I lost my mother, father, sisters, brothers, everyone,”
Vuth Than told me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It was so terrible.
Everything was completely destroyed.”</p>
<p>Exposed by North Vietnam’s Hanoi Radio and confirmed by the New York Times in May 1969, the secret bombing of Cambodia was <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/07/25/90457558.html?pageNumber=1">officially denied</a> and unknown to the public and the <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/07/25/90457558.html?pageNumber=1">relevant congressional committees</a>
at the time. Congress and the American people were kept so deep in the
dark that on April 30, 1970, as he announced the first publicly avowed
U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/kissinger-cambodia-media-journalists/">to strike at suspected enemy base areas</a>,
Nixon could baldly lie, telling the country: “For five years neither
the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy
sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a
neutral nation.”</p>
<p>It was only in 1973, during the Watergate scandal, that the secret
bombing allegations came to the fore, prompting the first effort to
impeach Nixon on the grounds that he had waged a secret war in a neutral
nation in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Eventually, that <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/07/31/issue.html">article of impeachment</a> was voted down in the name of political expediency. In the face of the other charges, however, Nixon resigned from office.</p>
<p>“That was in essentially unpopulated areas and I don’t believe it had
any significant casualties,” Kissinger told me at the 2010 State
Department conference, titled “<a href="https://history.state.gov/conferences/2010-southeast-asia/secretary-kissinger">The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975</a>,”
when I questioned him about the bombing. It was effectively the same
reply he offered British journalist David Frost during a 1979 NBC News
interview in which Frost charged that Kissinger’s Cambodia policy set in
motion a series of events that would “<a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,947532,00.html">destroy the country</a>.” Kissinger <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/11/kissinger-and-frost-snarl-over-cambodia-on-tv/27d38f84-a54f-4498-ba0f-ed0bf72b39f5/">stormed out of the studio</a> after the taping and Frost quit the project, alleging interference by NBC, which was then also employing Kissinger as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/frost-abandoning-kissinger-interview-quits-project-at-nbc-in-a.html">consultant</a> and <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,947532,00.html">commentator</a>. NBC later released a transcript of the interview but allowed Kissinger to amend his comments through an attached <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/11/kissinger-and-frost-snarl-over-cambodia-on-tv/27d38f84-a54f-4498-ba0f-ed0bf72b39f5/">letter</a> to NBC News President William Small.</p>
<p>“We did not start to destroy a country from anybody’s point of view
when we were bombing seven isolated North Vietnamese base areas within
some five miles of the Vietnamese border, from which attacks were being
launched into South Vietnam,” Kissinger told Frost. In typical fashion
of seizing on discrepancies and muddying debates, he accurately denied
Frost’s contention that Base Area 704 was bombed — a mistake stemming
from a typographic error in a Pentagon document — during the secret B-52
attacks, noting that “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/11/kissinger-and-frost-snarl-over-cambodia-on-tv/27d38f84-a54f-4498-ba0f-ed0bf72b39f5/">base area 740</a>” was actually attacked. He said recommendations of targets were accompanied by a statement “that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/11/kissinger-and-frost-snarl-over-cambodia-on-tv/27d38f84-a54f-4498-ba0f-ed0bf72b39f5/">civilian casualties</a> were expected to be minimal.”</p>
<p>There were in fact <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/11/kissinger-and-frost-snarl-over-cambodia-on-tv/27d38f84-a54f-4498-ba0f-ed0bf72b39f5/">1,136 civilians</a>
living in Base Area 740, according to the Pentagon; a formerly top
secret Air Force report, declassified decades after the Frost interview,
noted that only <a href="https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA486570.pdf">250 enemy forces</a>
were present there. An Army document I discovered in the National
Archives also notes that the military was aware that civilians “were
wounded/killed by B-52 strikes in Base area 740” between May 16 and 20,
1970, around the time of the SUPPER attacks. According to the
confidential case file, those slain and injured were “Montagnards,”
members of an ethnic minority whose “hamlets were not accurately
reflected on commonly used maps.”</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Blizzard-2010-74.jpg?resize=1200%2C803" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="262"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Meak Hen, left; Koul Saron, center; and Meak Nea, right, speak with reporter Nick Turse in Tralok Bek in 2010.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photos: Tam Turse</p></div>
<h2>“I Was the Only Survivor of My Whole Family”</h2>
<p>In 2010, the village was officially known as Ta Sous, but to its
inhabitants it was still known by its name during the American war:
Tralok Bek. “Every house had a bunker during the war. But during the
day, if you were out tending to the cows, your life might depend on a
termite hill and whether you could hide behind it,” Meas Lorn explained.
“Planes dropped bombs. Helicopters strafed. Many people died,” said
Meak Satom, a gray-haired man with a gold tooth. A B-52 strike in 1969
killed about 10 people, including a young friend, he recalled.</p>
<p>While I interviewed locals about the many attacks that occurred there
during the war, Sdeung Sokheung said little. But when I brought out a
binder filled with photographs of many different types of American
aircraft, she zeroed in on an <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/08/08/90462326.html?pageNumber=6">F-4 Phantom</a>.
Pointing at it, she said that as a girl, she had witnessed the bombing
of Ta Hang village, about eight kilometers away, by that type of plane.</p>
<p>After finishing our interviews in Tralok Bek, I traveled winding dirt
roads, past stunted bushes and the occasional thin, tan-colored cow,
until we reached an area of dry, rock-hard rice paddies and towering
palms. A few minutes later, in a rustic wooden home, I found 64-year-old
Chan Yath, a woman with a substantial head of dark hair and teeth
stained from chewing betel nut. I asked if there had been a bomb strike
in the area during the war. She said yes; a family had been nearly wiped
out. The lone survivor, she explained, was her cousin, An Seun. A
younger woman was dispatched to find An and, 20 minutes or so later, we
saw her — a tiny, aging mother of 10 — ambling along a narrow paddy dike
path leading to the rear of Chan’s home. “During the time of a full
moon,” said An, referring to a Buddhist holy day, she was off visiting
her grandfather’s house. “At around 10 a.m., an airplane dropped a bomb
on my home. My parents and four siblings were all killed,” she told me
with wet eyes and a catch in her throat. “I was the only survivor of my
whole family.”</p>
<p>During these same years, the U.S. was also conducting clandestine,
cross-border ground operations inside Cambodia. In the two years before
Nixon and Kissinger took over the war, U.S. commandos conducted 99 and
287 missions, respectively. In 1969, the number jumped to 454. Between
January 1970 and April 1972, when the program was finally shut down,
commandos carried out at least 1,045 covert missions inside Cambodia.
There may, however, have been others, ostensibly launched by Kissinger,
that were never disclosed.</p>
<p>From January to May 1973, between stints as deputy assistant to the
president for national security and White House chief of staff, Al Haig
served as the vice chief of staff of the Army. Retired Army Brig. Gen.
John Johns told me that during this time, he was in Haig’s office at the
Pentagon when an important call came in. “I was briefing him on
something, and the red phone rang, which I knew was the White House,”
Johns recalled. “I got up to leave. He motioned me to sit down. I sat
there and heard him tell them how to cover up our intrusions into
Cambodia.”</p>
<p>Johns — who had never before revealed the story to a reporter — was
relatively sure that Haig was referring to past covert actions, yet did
not know if the operations were made public or who was on the other end
of the phone line. But Kissinger was responsible for many of the
cross-border missions, according to Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide who
served on the senior staff of the National Security Council. “A lot of
the time, he was authorizing the ongoing covert excursions into
Cambodia,” he told me. “We were running a lot of covert ops there.”</p>
<div> <img src="cid:ii_li25vj9j1" alt="image.png" width="392" height="261"><br><p></p><p class="gmail-caption">Illustration: Matthieu Bourel for The Intercept; Source Photograph: AP</p></div>
<h2>“How Could the People Escape?”</h2>
<p>After two days of driving local roads asking for directions, I turned
off a highway onto a red dirt track that cut through lush farmland and
finally spilled into a border village of simple wooden homes amid a sea
of variegated greenery. During the war, these houses had looked much the
same, said village chief Sheang Heng, a wiry man with calloused hands
and bare feet wearing a loose dress shirt that had once been white. The
only real change was that corrugated metal had replaced most of the old
thatch and tile roofs.</p>
<p>In 1970, when Sheang was 17 years old, this village was on the front
line of America’s Cambodian incursion. Halfway around the world, at Kent
State University, members of the Ohio National Guard killed four
students during a May 4, 1970, protest against this new stage in the
war. While that massacre received worldwide attention, a larger one in
Sheang’s village three days earlier went unnoticed.</p>
<p>On May 1, 1970, helicopters circled the Cambodian village of “Moroan”
(an American’s phonetic spelling of the name) before opening fire,
killing 12 villagers and wounding five, according to a formerly
classified U.S. document that, until now, has never been publicly
disclosed. After the assault, another helicopter landed and carried off
the injured; the survivors fled their village to another named
“Kantuot,” located in a neighboring district.</p>
<p>There is no village in Cambodia named “Moroan,” but the hamlet near
the Vietnamese border where I located Sheang was, he said, called Mroan.
As in the other Cambodian border villages I visited, focusing on a lone
attack cited in U.S. military documents left residents baffled, given
that they had endured many airstrikes over many years. Still, when asked
about the date, Sheang gestured toward what is now the far edge of the
village. “Many died in that area at that time,” he recalled. “Afterward,
the people left this village for another named Kantuot.”</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Blizzard-2010-70.jpg?resize=1200%2C803" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="262"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Mroan, Cambodia, in 2010.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Tam Turse</p></div>
<p>Sheang and <a>Lim South</a>, who was 14 years old in 1970, said that
many types of aircraft battered Mroan, from helicopter gunships to
massive B-52 bombers. As Sheang — who lost his mother, father, a
grandfather, a nephew, and a niece, among other relatives, to airstrikes
— told me about the relentless attacks, his eyes reddened and went
vacant. “The explosions tossed the earth into the air. The ‘fire rocket’
burned the houses. Who could survive? People ran, but they were cut
down. They were killed immediately. They just died,” he said, trailing
off as he moved to a far corner of the room and slumped to his knees.</p>
<p>Each survivor told a similar story. Lim’s sister and three brothers
were killed in bombing raids. Thlen Hun, who was in her 20s in the early
1970s, said her older brother was killed in an airstrike. South Chreung
— shirtless in dress pants with a vibrant orange krama, the traditional
Cambodian scarf, around his neck — told me that he had lost a younger
brother in a different attack.</p>
<p>Villagers said that when they first saw American aircraft overhead,
they were awestruck. Having never seen anything like the giant machines,
people came out to stare at them. Soon, however, residents of Mroan
learned to fear them. Cooking rice became dangerous as Americans flying
above would see the smoke and launch attacks. Helicopters, survivors
said, routinely strafed both the nearby fields and the village itself,
then comprised of about 100 homes. “This one was the most vicious,” said
Sheang, pointing at a photograph of a Cobra gunship among pictures of
other aircraft I provided. When the “coconut shell” helicopter, a U.S.
Army OH-6 or “Loach,” marked an area with smoke, villagers recalled, the
Cobra would attack, firing rockets that set homes ablaze. “During the
American War, almost all houses in the village were burned,” said
Sheang.</p>
<p>Sheang and Thlen said that about half the families in Mroan — some
250 people — were wiped out by U.S. attacks. They led me to the edge of
the village, a riot of foliage in every shade of green that sloped into a
depression, one of several remaining nearby bomb craters. “About 20
people were killed here,” said Sheang gesturing toward the crater. “It
used to be deeper, but the land has filled it in.” Thlen — slim, with
graying hair, her brown eyes narrowed in a perpetual squint — shook her
head and walked to the crater’s edge. “It was disastrous. Just look at
the size,” she said, adding that this hole was just one of many that
once dotted the landscape. “How could the people escape? Where could
they escape to?”</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Blizzard-2010-75.jpg?resize=1200%2C803" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="262"></p><p class="gmail-caption">A boy stands at the edge of a bomb crater in Mroan in 2010.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Tam Turse</p></div>
<h2>The Stolen Suzuki and the Girl Left to Die</h2>
<p>The results of Nixon’s December 1970 telephone tirade and Kissinger’s
order to set “anything that flies on anything that moves” were
immediately palpable. During that month, sorties by U.S. helicopters and
bombers tripled in number. Soon after, in May 1971, U.S. helicopter
gunships shot up a Cambodian village, wounding a young girl who couldn’t
be taken for treatment because a U.S. officer overloaded his helicopter
with a looted motorcycle that was later gifted to a superior, according
to an Army investigation and exclusive follow-up reporting by The
Intercept. The Cambodian girl almost certainly died from her wounds,
along with seven other civilians, according to previously unreported
documents produced by a Pentagon war crimes task force in 1972.</p>
<p>How many similar killings occurred will never be known. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/my-lai-month/">Cover-ups were common</a>, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-vietnam6aug06-story.html">investigations were rarely undertaken</a>, and crimes generally <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/war-crimes-hunter">evaporated with the fog of war</a>.
But there were ample opportunities for mayhem and massacre. In the two
years before Nixon took office, there were officially 426 helicopter
gunship sorties in Cambodia, according to a Defense Department report.
Between January 1970 and April 1972, there were at least 2,116. In
January 1971, Congress enacted the Cooper-Church amendment, which
prohibited U.S. troops, including advisers, from operating on the ground
in Cambodia, but America’s war continued unabated. Evidence soon
emerged that the U.S. was violating Cooper-Church, but the White House
lied about it to Congress and the public. “As long as we didn’t set our
foot on that ground, we basically weren’t there, even though we did
missions there every day,” Gary Grawey, an Army helicopter crew chief
who flew daily missions in Cambodia during the spring of 1971, including
the May mission that killed the young girl, told me.</p>
<p>“They attacked that village,” Grawey said, noting that both the South
Vietnamese and American troops shot up the hamlet. “They were shootin’
and they didn’t even know who they were shootin’ at,” he recalled,
adding that the victims were “women and children,” just “regular
villagers.”</p>
<p>It started at half past noon on May 18, 1971, according to an Army
investigation file and previously unreported summary documents produced
by a Pentagon task force in 1972, when three U.S. helicopters — a
“hunter-killer team” conducting a reconnaissance mission — skimmed the
treetops inside Cambodia. The team came upon a village where they
spotted motorcycles and bicycles that, according to crew members’
testimony, were suspected of being part of an enemy supply convoy.
Hovering above, the Americans tried to motion for people on the ground
to open packs on the vehicles. When the villagers instead began moving
away, the highest-flying helicopter fired two incendiary rockets, a
numbingly common tactic to draw out enemy personnel who might be hiding
nearby. While the crew of one of the helicopters reported taking
isolated ground fire, no Americans were killed or wounded, nor were any
enemy personnel or weapons ever found.</p>
<p>According to a confidential report discovered in the U.S. National
Archives and published here for the first time, the high-flying
helicopter then “rocketed and strafed the buildings and surrounding area
with approximately 15 to 18 rounds of high explosive rockets and
machine gun fire.”</p>
<p>Capt. Clifford Knight, pilot of the “low bird,” said that his gunner
shot an apparently unarmed man, clad in civilian clothes, who was
“trying to run away.” The gunner, John Nicholes, admitted it, noting
that the killing took place after the initial rocket barrage.</p>
<p>Capt. David Schweitzer, the “high bird” commander, testified to
rocketing and strafing the area and calling for the insertion of South
Vietnamese, or Army of the Republic of Vietnam, troops to search for
suspected enemy forces. According to a summary of the testimony of
Grawey, the helicopter crew chief who ferried an elite ARVN Ranger team
and an American captain, Arnold Brooks, to the village:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>CPT Brooks and the ARVN Rangers acted “hog wild” when they deplaned,
shooting up the area although they received no return fire. … [H]e did
observe 5 to 10 Cambodian personnel that appeared to be wounded, but
that he did not know if they were wounded from air or ground fire.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Decades later, Grawey reconfirmed details of the incident in an
interview, noting that, as the ARVN deployed from the helicopter, he
told Brooks that “he was not to get off my bird.” But Brooks, whom
Grawey described as “gung ho,” pulled rank and ignored him. Brooks — who
he said was carrying a non-regulation “machinegun” — started shooting
indiscriminately.</p>
<p>Davin McLaughlin, the commander of a replacement “low bird” that was
called in when the first helicopter ran short on fuel, similarly noted
that the South Vietnamese met no resistance and, according to the
documents, “grabbed what they could.” A summary of the testimony of his
gunner, Len Shattuck, in the investigation file adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ARVN Rangers appeared melodramatic when they were inserted and in
his opinion fired excessively in the area. … He stated that there were
approximately 15 wounded personnel in the area and that he observed 2
males 50-60 years of age, and one female 8-10 years of age, that
appeared to be dead.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a 2010 interview, Shattuck told me that he didn’t fire a shot that
day and stressed that he only saw one section of the village. What he
saw there, however, stayed with him. “We came into a smoking village,”
he said. “I witnessed dead bodies. I witnessed some wounded people that
appeared to be civilians. … We didn’t evac[uate] anybody.” Shattuck
remembered the little girl as even younger than indicated by his
testimony, just 3 to 5 years old, and that she was covered with blood.
“She was pretty badly shot up,” he recalled.</p>
<p>As Cambodians lay wounded and dying, the ARVN Rangers looted the
village, grabbing ducks, chickens, wallets, clothing, cigarettes,
tobacco, civilian radios, and other nonmilitary items, according to
numerous American witnesses. “They were stealing everything they could
get their hands on,” Capt. Thomas Agness, the pilot of the helicopter
that carried Brooks and some of the ARVN, told me. Brooks, however, had
the biggest score of all. With the help of South Vietnamese troops, he
hauled a blue Suzuki motorcycle onto a helicopter, according to Army
documents. Brooks acknowledged his service in Cambodia during a
telephone conversation and asked for a formal interview request by
email. He did not respond to that request or subsequent ones.</p>
<p>Agness, according to an Army investigator’s summary, said that he
received “a radio request to evacuate a wounded girl [but] denied on
instructions of CPT Brooks since he was fully loaded with the ARVN
Ranger team, a motorcycle and he was low on fuel.” The stolen Suzuki was
presented as a gift to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/135454759/carl-madden-putnam">Carl Putnam</a>,
who was later seen tooling around base on it, according to the
investigation documents. The Army concluded that the wounded girl, left
behind for the sake of the Suzuki, died.</p>
<p>Furious, Gary Grawey resolved to report Arnold Brooks. “I was really
pissed at the time,” he told me. “I said I would report him, which I
did.” A previously unreported final status report on the “Brooks
Incident,” contained in the files of the Pentagon war crimes task force,
concluded that allegations of excessive bombardment, pillage, and a
violation of the rules of engagement had been “substantiated.” While no
enemy weapons or war materiel were found in the village, according to
the report, civilian casualties “were estimated at eight dead, including
two children, 15 wounded and three or four structures destroyed. There
is no evidence that the wounded were provided medical treatment by
either U.S. or ARVN forces.”</p>
<p>Putnam and a direct subordinate were issued letters of reprimand — a
low-grade punishment — for their “actions and/or inactions” in the case.
(Putnam <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/135454759/carl-madden-putnam">died</a>
in 1976.) While court martial charges were filed against Brooks, his
commanding general dismissed them in 1972, instead giving him a letter
of reprimand. Records indicate that no other troops were charged, let
alone punished, in connection with the massacre, the looting, or the
failure to render aid to wounded Cambodian civilians.</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-158676313.jpg?resize=1200%2C806" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="263"></p><p class="gmail-caption">A
U.S. jet bombs a suspected Khmer Rouge advance position while a
government soldier walks into the dry rice field with a gun on his
shoulder in Samrong, Cambodia, on July 10, 1973.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Roland Neveu/LightRocket via Getty Images</p></div>
<h2>Backing the Genocidaires</h2>
<p>When Henry Kissinger hatched his plans for the secret bombing of
Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge numbered around 5,000. But as a 1973 CIA
cable explained, the Khmer Rouge’s recruitment efforts relied heavily
on the U.S. bombing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of
their propaganda. … The [Khmer Rouge] cadre tell the people … the only
way to stop “the massive destruction of the country” is to remove
[U.S.-backed junta leader] Lon Nol and return Prince Sihanouk to power.
The proselyting cadres tell the people that the quickest way to
accomplish this is to strengthen [Khmer Rouge] forces so they will be
able to defeat Lon Nol and stop the bombing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The U.S. dropped more than 257,000 tons of munitions on Cambodia in
1973, almost the same amount as during the previous four years combined.
A report by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that
“the intense American bombing in 1973 increased the cumulative number of
refugees to nearly half of the country’s population.”</p>
<p>Those attacks galvanized Pol Pot’s forces, allowing the Khmer Rouge
to grow into the 200,000-person force that took over the country and
killed about 20 percent of the population. Once the regime was in power,
the political winds had shifted and Kissinger, behind closed doors, <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/HAK-11-26-75.pdf">told Thailand’s foreign minister</a>:
“You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them.
They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We
are prepared to improve relations with them.” He then clarified his
statement: The Thai official should not repeat the “murderous thugs”
line to the Khmer Rouge, only that the U.S. wanted a warmer
relationship.</p>
<p>In late 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer
Rouge from power, driving Pol Pot’s forces to the Thai border. The U.S.,
however, threw its support behind Pol Pot, encouraging other nations to
back his forces, funneling aid to his allies, helping him keep
Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations, and opposing efforts to
investigate or try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide.</p>
<p>That same year, Kissinger’s mammoth memoir, “White House Years” was
published. As journalist William Shawcross pointed out, Kissinger failed
to even mention the carnage in Cambodia because “for Kissinger,
Cambodia was a sideshow, its people expendable in the great game of
large nations.”</p>
<p>In 2001 and again in <a href="https://twitter.com/Bourdain/status/960322190993477632">2018</a>, the late chef and cultural critic Anthony Bourdain offered sentiments shared by many, but rarely put so eloquently:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry
Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able
to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating,
murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or
attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without
choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius
for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting
in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/04/18/spain.kissinger/">human rights abuses</a>
by former South American military dictatorships, but he ducked
investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and
quickly leaving Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or
prosecuted for deaths in Cambodia or anywhere else.</p>
<div> <p><img src="https://i0.wp.com/production.public.theintercept.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Kissinger-spot-3-shadow-es-final.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="0" height="0"></p><img src="cid:ii_li25tpat0" alt="image.png" width="392" height="261"><br><p class="gmail-caption">Illustration: Matthieu Bourel for The Intercept; Source Photograph: Getty Images</p></div>
<h2>“Play With It. Have a Good Time.”</h2>
<p>“To spare you is no profit; to destroy you, no loss” was the cold
credo of the Khmer Rouge. But it could just as easily have been
Kissinger’s. In 2010, I followed up with Kissinger, pressing him on the
contradiction in his claims about only bombing “North Vietnamese in
Cambodia” but somehow killing 50,000 Cambodians, by his count, in the
process. “We weren’t running around the country bombing Cambodians,” he
told me.</p>
<p>The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates otherwise, and I told him so.</p>
<p>“Oh, come on!” Kissinger exclaimed, protesting that I was merely
trying to catch him in a lie. When pressed about the substance of the
question — that Cambodians were bombed and killed — Kissinger became
visibly angry. “What are you trying to prove?” he growled and then, when
I refused to give up, he cut me off: “Play with it,” he told me. “Have a
good time.”</p>
<p>I asked him to answer Meas Lorn’s question: “Why did they drop bombs here?” He refused.</p>
<p>“I’m not smart enough for you,” Kissinger said sarcastically, as he
stomped his cane. “I lack your intelligence and moral quality.” He
stalked off.</p>
<p>Cambodians in villages like Tralok Bek, Doun Rath, and Mroan didn’t have the luxury of such an easy escape.</p>
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