MY WAR WITH THE CIA

By Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia

Along these lines and re my previous posts on different subject matters re the Intelligence Community and abuses thereof, the following excerpt from the book "MY WAR WITH THE CIA," by then Prince, now King, Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, may be of interest. It was written in 1983 but provides great insight to what is happening today.

Bests,
John

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From: Neang,Savun (kcra@sanetech.com)

Subject: From a Book " My War With The CIA - Chapter 4 " By Norodom Sihanouk and Wilfred Burchett

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Date: 1999/09/11

Chapter Four

Resistance Starts

The Proclamation which I drafted on the way from Moscow to Peking, and broadcast over Pekin5 radio on 23 March 197o, had an immediate impact on my countrymen. I formally demanded the dissolution of the Lon Nol regime as illegal 'and unconstitutional, and called for the creation of a broad front of national union, and a national liberation army:

A Government of National Union will be formed. Pending Cambodia's return to a normal situation, a Consultative Assembly will be established. Its members will be qualified representatives of the Buddhist clergy, the army, the police, the provincial guards, youth, intellectuals, peasants, workers and others who live by their labor, industrialists, business people, civil servants, women, etc. belonging to all patriotic, progressive and anti-imperialist tendencies.

A National Liberation Army will be created to free the country from the dictatorship and oppression of the clique of traitorous and pro-imperialist reactionaries headed by Lon Nol, Sirik Matak and Cheng Heng and for the struggle against the U S imperialists - their masters.

The Government of National Union, the Consultative Assembly and the National Liberation Army will unite with the rest of the people to form a united front to be known as the National United Front of Cambodia which will have the double task of liberating the country and reconstructing it after victory.

I knew from the experience of our Vietnamese friends that the road to victory would be long and hard, but shorter for us because of the experiences and successes of the Vietnamese. On 24 March, I issued an appeal to my supporters inside

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the country to go underground and await arms an training, and asked those abroad to try and make their way to Peking. There were ferociously repressed uprisings and seizures of power all over the country in the days that followed; the Western press unfortunately reported only those in the eastern provinces close to the capital, where journalists had easy access. In vast areas, Lon Nol's administration simply evaporated before he could get it organized, and it has not been reconstituted since. He tried to pass off the uprisings as the work of the Vietcong, but Western journalists said otherwise. The Financial Times accurately described them as 'an almost spontaneous outburst of rural dismay at the departure of a ruler who made every effort to win the sympathy of the countryside'.

Between 26 and 30 March, hundreds of my compatriots unarmed - were shot down in cold blood for demonstrating in my favour. At least thirty were killed on 27 March at the Neak Luong ferry, some forty miles from Phnom Penh on Highway i, leading from Saigon. Another fifty were killed in the town of Kompong Chain on the same day when Lon Nol's troops fired into a crowd point-blank with anti-aircraft, heavy machine-guns. About fifty more were shot down at Suong and Memot, both near the South Vietnamese border. journalists reported counting about eighty corpses at Takeo and twenty to thirty each in the towns of Prey Veng and Angtassom. The dead were indisputably Cambodians. I have photos of long lines of our peasants, hands tied behind their backs, awaiting their turn for the firing squad; of students executed by being beaten to death in front of their fellow students. We were able to identify some of the executioners, at least, as the C I A-suborned 'deserters' from the Khmer Serei, whom Lon Nol had infiltrated into the Phnom Penh garrison and the military police.

In a broadcast on 4 April, I reported that over three hundred patriots had been massacred, and again advised my supporters to go underground, 'to go into the jungle and join the resistance forces already there', and where by now arms were available.

One of the developments which pleased me most was

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‘had already instituted a witch-hunt against the left, and many young people had followed the example of the three deputies and fled Phnom Penh for the security of the jungle. The C IA was not slow to take advantage of the situation. They started a campaign of rumours and distributed false tracts in the name of the Khmers Rouges - tracts which I denounced at the time as lies. The armchair experts who accuse me of having turned to the right in 1967, should take into account the extremely tense and complex situation. For the first time, there seemed to be substantial evidence that our independence was being threatened from the left, a possibility I had always resisted admitting.

As for the long arm of the C IA, there was a fascinating revelation by a C I A 'Green Beret', Captain John J. McCarthy, Jr, one of the accused in the case of the murder of Inchin Hai Lam, an alleged 'double agent' of Cambodian origin in the pay of the C IA. McCarthy resigned his commission in May I971, disgusted at what he had had to do - not to mention the way in which he had been treated by the US army for having obeyed C IA orders. He revealed at the time that he had headed a C IA team in an 'Operation Cherry', which involved leading a Khmer Serei unit deep into Cambodia. This much was revealed in the Norfolk Virginia Pilot on 25 May 1971 - Further information about the McCarthy case was unearthed by Richard A. Fineberg, whose report was published by Dispatch News Service International:

John J. McCarthy, Jr, formerly a Captain with the U S Army's Fifth Special Forces and commanding officer of a top-secret Cambodian operation known as 'Operation Cherry', says Son Ngoc Thanh was a key figure in his i 968 court-martial. McCarthy was accused of killing a Cambodian interpreter, who was also a member of the Khmer Serei, a secret, right-wing rebel sect, headed by Thanh and reportedly financed by the C I A.

The ex-Special Forces Officer was convicted of murder and served two years of a 2o-year sentence before his conviction was overturned on appeal in 1970. McCarthy says that his attorneys requested Thanh's appearance

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‘ At the two-day trial at Long Binh,South Vietnam, in January, 1968, but the Army said it could not compel foreign nationals to testify. At that time Thanh was living in Vietnam, where he was a powerful figure among the Cambodian minority of that country.

Thanh did not testify, but the trial record reveals that U S military officers met with members of the Khmer Serei - and possibly with Thanh himself - at a pagoda in Saigon shortly after the agent's death. At that meeting, the US paid an indemnity, reportedly 25,ooo dollars, to the Khmer Serei for the death of their member.

The transcript also indicates that Project Cherry was set up to conduct incursions into Cambodia from across the South Vietnam border. For this covert mission, the US hired Cambodian guides and interpreters, at least some of whom were members of the Khmer Serei. During the trial, McCarthy identified the Khmer Serei as an 'organization which in effect plans the political overthrow of the Cambodian government'.

Although the heavily-censored unclassified version of the transcript makes no direct reference to Thanh, the record refers to a man named Tan Son Hai, who was identified by one member of the Cherry team as 'the leader or high priest of the Khmer Screi'. McCarthy told this reporter he believes that Thanh and Ton San Hai are 'one and the same person'.

Prior to the trial, the Khmer Serei presented McCarthy with a gold medallion for his 'revolutionary act' on the assumption that he had killed the agent, whom the Khmer Serei believed to be a Communist-trained double agent. The citation accompanying the award was signed by (Son Ngoc) Thanh as 'leader of the Khmer Serei'.

Excerpts from the unclassified part of the transcript which have come into my hands are most revealing. For instance, the testimony of Sgt Ben W. Hancock, a member of MeCarthy's team, testifies under oath regarding a meeting he arranged between 'Tan Son Hai' and a Special Forces officer following the killing of the agent. This verbatim account is from page 138 of the trial proceedings:

Hancock: Because Special Forces was involved in the ... (classified) he asked me if I would go to the pagoda to see if I could make an arrangement for him to meet with Tan Son Hai. Q: Who is Tan Son Hai? A He is the leader of the ... (classified) in South Vietnam.

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‘Q: Did anything occur with reference to this proposed meeting?

A: I made a meeting for 6.oo that evening. And Col. Grover, myself and Maj. Adams met with Tan Son Hai, and the interpreter. And Col. Grover told them exactly what happened; they thought he had been killed by an American captain.

Q: What, if anything, was their reaction?

A: Well, he didn't seem bitter or anything, so first he asked how much money the American government would pay for Inchin Hai Lam's death. So a price was agreed on; we made an arrangement, or he made an arrangment with me to deliver the body the following morning to the pagoda in Saigon.

On page 141 of the same verbatim record, Hancock further identifies 'Tan Son Hai' as 'the high priest or leader of the Khmer Serei' so there can be little doubt that it was the arch-traitor, Son Ngoc Thanh, which explains why the US army was so accommodating in protecting him from appearing at the court-martial. McCarthy subsequently informed journalist Fineberg that the compensation paid was 25,000 dollars. The Fineberg report continues:

Although Project Cherry ended prior to McCarthy's trial, Green Berets continued to conduct covert intelligence operations in Cambodia for the C IA.

The 1969 death of another suspected double -agent emploved on a secret Cambodian intelligence project caused a sensation in the press when the Army attempted to court-martial eight Green Berets, including Col. Robert Rheault, the commanding officer of the Fifth Special Forces in Vietnam. The Army dropped the charges when the C I A refused to testify.

Captain Robert F. Marasco, one of the Green Berets involved in the latter case, ran two intelligence nets in Cambodia during 1968 and 1969. His mission, he told this reporter, ranged from 'pinpointing targets' and gathering information in Cambodia, to 'keeping tabs' on the whereabouts of Sihanouk when the Cambodian ruler visited the countryside. Marasco said he hired and trained Khmer Serei agents, as well as other Cambodians for his missions.

On 2 June 1970, Marasco revealed in an interview with the National Broadcasting Company that the code name of his

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‘mission was ' Blackbeard ', that it was divided into two groups with a network of agents 'in all of the Parrot's Beak and sometimes as far as Phnom Penh'. Among the tasks of the twenty South Vietnamese and Cambodian agents employed by Marasco was that of keeping watch on Prince Norodom Sihanouk,l which meant, among other things, deciding on propitious moments for assassination attempts.

What 'Operation Cherry' and the 'B 57' groups were really up to may never be known. journalists have informed me that it is unprecedented that the full transcripts of the McCarthy trial were put on the 'top secret' list. Not the least of C IA activities in 1967, at the time of the Samlaut affair, was the distribution of inflammatory leaflets in the name of the Khmers Rouges aimed at giving Lon Nol the pretext he needed to step up his persecution of the left and to drive a wedge between the Khmers Rouges and myself. . Fortunately the jeep accident in which Lon Nol was inlured removed him from the scene at a critical moment, and I was able to look into the Samlaut affair myself as soon as I returned. I found the peasants did indeed have justifiable grievances, and I immediately dismissed the governor of Battambang. I publicly announced the responsibility of the authorities in the unhappy affair, rebuilt villages that had been destroyed by Lon Nol's troops and settled the peasants back on their lands. Lon Nol's accident made it easy for me to reshuffle the cabinet to bring back Penn Nouth as Prime Minister. In an article written intrudes Cambodgiennes it was made clear that the rebellion was a strictly internal affair without any foreign support or encouragement, and the Royal Government will settle the problem by its own means and as it thinks best. However, hostile propaganda and C IA agents carried out a frenzied campaign of false information aimed at splitting the nation in two irreconcilable and hostile parts in order to prepare a pretext for direct interventions

1. The Fineberg account was published by Dispatch News Service International, Washington, 5 April 1972. Marasco's NBC interview was published in Interhational Herald Tribune, Paris, 3 June 1970.

2. Etudes Cambodgiennes, official organ of the Royal Cambodian Government, No. 10 , April-June 1967

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‘I did not know anything about 'Operation Cherry' at that time, but I clearly recognized the long arm of the C I A in the forged leaflets and in the phrasing of certain slogans that were launched against me.

Sensational stories began to appear in the Western press, picturing the oppressed Battambang peasants as being in bloody rebellion against Sihanouk and demonstrating the hand of Peking and Hanoi in this uprising. Worth noting is the opinion of a French journalist, G6rard Briss6, who lived for many years in Cambodia, and who investigated the Samlaut affair:

Contrary to what was written at the time, it was not directed against Norodom Sihanouk ... but against certain local petty despots ... The popularity of Norodom Sihanouk among the peasant masses remained intact, as was proven by the extent of the resistance organized over virtually the entire Cambodian countryside.1 (Briss6 was referring to the resistance after the I970 coup.)

However, Lon Nol's witch-hunt against leftist intellectuals, and the military campaign against the Battambang peasants, combined to drive both groups into an attitude of open, armed defiance which died down after I intervened in the Samlaut affair, then blossomed forth after the 18 March I97O coup.

In connection with the cloud which passed over my relations with Peking (but never with Chou En Lai, with whom I remained on the best of terms) there occurred a regrettable incident in August 1967. The Chinese-Cambodian Friendship Association in Peking had addressed a message to the Chinese-Cambodian Friendship in Phnom Penh, implicitly advocating my overthrow. This obviously amounted to direct intervention in Cambodian affairs and I had no choice but to dissolve the Phnom Penh association, together with all such bodies, and to replace them with official organizations. My critics jumped on this as conclusive evidence that I had turned to the right. But when I went to China in I970, Premier Chou En Lai told me that 1, in fact, had acted correctly in thus assuring Cambodia's integrity, for all this had taken place at a time when extremist elements had

1. From L'Anyde Politique et Economique, Paris, July 1970.

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‘gained control of China's foreign policy, and were issuing all sorts of provocative instructions through their embassies abroad. Not only Cambodia suffered from this, but in our case it did, unfortunately, happen at a particularly crucial moment in our postwar history. Chou En Lai told me that the leaders of the association in Peking had been punished. In general, the 'ultras' who emerged at the height of the Cultural Revolution were later thoroughly discredited, but not before much harm had been done to China's relations abroad.

To throw my own dissenters - rightists such as Lon Nol off the track, I occasionally made speeches attacking the Vietminh, Vietcong and Khmers Rouges. The first two realized that the main thing was my unswerving political, diplomatic and material support of their resistance struggle. But I did not know at the time that the Khmers Rouges had also understood this. The proof was their immediate acceptance of the alliance for resistance in 1970.

What had depressed me in i967, when I saw so many hundreds of Cambodian young people deserting home, studies and professions to march off to jungle and mountain guerrilla bases, turned out to be a blessing when I sounded the call for armed defiance in March 1970. The bases were there; the arms came soon after. The NLF, which had been very reluctant to give arms to the Khmers Rouges in 1967, thus risking a Cambodian civil war which might bring about US intervention, had no such misgivings in March of 1970. Immediately after the coup they started distributing weapons stocked in the frontier regions. When the Americans attacked six weeks later they were dismayed to find the storage areas almost empty. A high proportion of these arms went directly into the hands of the first units of our Peoples Liberation Armed Forces.

The very rapid development of our armed resistance something which astonished even our Vietnamese friends was due to the fact that we had veteran cadres which had learned irregular warfare in protecting their own lives and their bases from Lon Nol's raiding expeditions. There were bases in Ratanakiri Province in the north-east, in the Elephant Mountains in the south, and in the Cardamome

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‘Mountains in the west. The Khmers Rouges were quickly joined by tens of thousands of what some journalists called 'Sihanoukists'. These were peasants and townspeople, soldiers, including entire army units which had remained loyal to me, and Vietnamese and Chinese residents who joined us for ideological reasons, or because they Saw no alternative if they wanted to remain alive - and free.

By mid April, most of Cambodia was liberated, and our forces were knocking at the gates of Phnom Penh, eager to join our supporters inside the city. This, despite the importation of the 'Mike Force' (K K K commandos) for the defence of the capital. The Lon Nol-Sirik Matak r6gime was sagging at the knees, knocked on to the ropes, and awaiting the final count, when the United States invaded Cambodia with its own and Saigon forces on 3o April 1970, in one of the most flagrant acts of unprovoked aggression in modern history. No word but '-aggression' can be applied to this act. Lon Nol, to cover up his own involvement, claimed that he had neither invited the Americans in, nor had received any warning of the invasion. It is hard to believe, but this is the official, on-the-record position of the Lon Nol-Sirik Matak government. On 2 May, in the first days of the invasion, Lon Nol was reported by Western journalists as 'pondering' whether or not to lodge an official 'protest'. In the end he decided to 'approve' the invasion!

The best he could do to justify himself was to address a gathering of Buddhists on i i May, by which time scores of towns and villages had been reduced to rubble and ashes by u S air power, and hundreds of innocent civilians had been bombed, burned and machine-gunned to death by American and Saigon troops. With this inept and hypocritical dis quisition, he tried to vindicate the slaughter of thousands of Vietnamese civilians in an officially decreed rampage of racism and terror without precedent in our country's history That he should seek to justify butchery and treason in the' name of Buddhism, the most humane and tolerant of religious philosophies, provides a measure of the man's degeneracy. In a broadcast over Radio Phnom Penh, he said

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‘I address this appeal to my fellow countrymen who are Buddhist -It is believed that our religion will last 5,ooo years. We at 2,500 years, right, in the middle, of the Buddhist era. It is also believed that the Buddhist religion will prosper during the next 500 years. According to an oracle, the current war in Cambodia is a religious war. Our religion is Buddhism. We have our bonzes, our prayers, our disciplines, and belief that good will be rewarded and evil will be punished. The communists do not believe in religion because they do not believe in the existence of Buddha.

I wish to inform my fellow countrymen who are Buddhists that an oracle has predicted everybody will enjoy equal rights. Everybody will be happy and good when this religious war ends. But while the war is still going on, you must respect your religion and pray. Those who follow this advice will be spared all misfortune and will be rewarded with security and prosperity. The oracle who predicted a religious war in the middle of this era said that gold ' silver palaces and will be erected in the middle of the four branches of the Mekong, and that there will be killing in the middle of the four branches of the Mekong. This means the enemy of Buddha will kill the religious people. Then the King will flee, and a comet will appear.

When the Khmer people refused to abandon their Buddhist morality and to aid the Vietcong aggressors, the war broke out in accordance with plans mapped out by the Chinese and North Vietnamese communists. China does not love Sihanouk; it is using him as a tool to help the Vietcong wage war in our country with a view to transforming it into a communist base in South-East Asia. To make it easy to understand, according to the Buddhist religion, there must be war - a war against the Vietnamese communists who consider religion their enemy. In this religious war against the Vietnamese communists, who are the enemies of Buddha, there are many Buddhists who will come and help us. Our country will win final victory on the battlefield as predicted by the oracle. Therefore, we Buddhist believers must rise up together to struggle against the enemy who is committing the war of aggression in our country.(1) One could possibly deduce from the last sentence that Lon Nol was appealing to his Buddhist compatriots to rise up against the Americans, but his intentions were anything but that. I have italicized the repeated use of the expression 'religious war' in Lon Nol's ravings. This, together with the

i.Cambodia: The Widening War In Indo-China, pp. 109-12, Washington Square Press, New York, February 1971.

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‘reference to the 'four branches of the Mekong', seems to be an attempt to explain the massacre of over a thousand Vietnamese civilians, men, women and children, whose bodies, arms tied behind their backs, were found drifting down the Mekong in mid April. This terrible stain on Cambodian honour was well reported in the world press at the time, but a 15 April dispatch from Jeff Williams of the Associated Press is especially worth recalling. Writing from the Neak Luong ferry, Williams described hundreds of executed Vietnamese bodies in the Mekong River. A police observer at one ferry crossing counted over four hundred bodies in a single morning, with others still floating down the river as far as the eye could see. (1)

A religious killing! Many of the Vietnamese were also Buddhists. And those who were Catholics? Buddhism preaches religious tolerance. Who are 'the many Buddhists who will come and help us'? Since when have Americans been considered Buddhists? I would urge all members of the US Congress and the American public at large to read Lon Nol's speech and then to assess the sort of leaders to whom they have entrusted so many hundreds of millions of dollars, and the political and moral philosophy being endorsed with American treasure and military might - not to mention prestige. Americans might also meditate on the following passages from the conservative Far Eastern Economic Review (2)

Foreign officials in Phnom Penh who brood over Cambodia's problem and vie for Lon Nol's car may be a bit disconcerted to learn that the premier gets some of his most intimate advice from a clique of Buddhist monks who often see him for hours at a stretch.

High among these well-placed advisers is Mam Prom Moni, a crafty-looking 20-year-old bonze whose confident air and haughty demeanor befit his title: 'Grand Intellectual of Glorious Purity'. He belongs to the Mohanikay sect. He describes himself as an astrologer, mineralogist and historian! He sees Lon Nol each week but will not divulge the content of their discussions beyond saying

1. The Publisher was not able to obtain permission for Prince Sihanouk's use of this dispatch and has inserted - this editorial paraphrase.

2. Published in Hong Kong, 16 January 1971

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‘ that they range from personal problems to affairs of state. To provide some sense of the wisdom he shares with the Cambodian leader, Mam Prom Moni offers the following predictions:

'Peace will come to Cambodia this spring, but will not endure until several requirements are met: all Vietnamese, from north and south, must leave the country ... U S businessmen must help Cambodia recover through heavy investment - and they must act before their Japanese counterparts do!'

Perhaps rumours of CIA-manipulated soothsayers are not so far-fetched after all!

One can readily understand why so many of my compatriots, faced with a choice of listening either to the obscurantist ravings of this turncoat or to logical, intelligent appeals to patriotism, national unity, and militant solidarity with comrades-in-arms across our borders in Vietnam and Laos, did not hesitate to choose the latter. With the invasion Of 30 April, Nixon's military strategists hoped to crush our resistance forces before they could get organized, and to smash the N L F in a vice between Lon Nol's forces and their own. The western jaw of the vice did not close because Lon Nol's forces had no stomach for the fight. Our embryo resistance forces, on the other hand, gave a good account of themselves. The 'Vietcong Pentagon' proved non-existent; the overwhelming bulk of supplies in the frontier bases have been transported elsewhere - as the Americans were to find out in the spring Of I 972 - or are in our hands; the 'sanctuaries' now spread westwards to include most of Cambodia. Nixon's Cambodian adventure resulted in the destruction of many Cambodian towns and villages, the loss of thousands of Cambodian - almost exclusively civilian - lives. But from a military viewpoint it was a disaster for the United States and its puppets - a disaster the extent of which Nixon has never dared reveal to the American people.

The invasion of April-May 1970 was the first baptism of fire for our PNLAFC (People's National Liberation Armed Forces of Cambodia). Within a very short time, Khieu Samphan and his comrades set up three types of forces; local guerrillas and regional guerrillas and a regular army. If, in the

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‘beginning, these branches lacked equipment, they more than made up for it by their superb morale. How could it be other-wise when they had seen their homes looted and burned; their parents massacred; their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters raped? If there were Cambodians who still had no clear idea of the difference between a Lon Nol and a Sihanouk after the coup of 18 March 1970, there were none after the aggression committed - by invitation or not - on 30 April. The seeds of our defiance fell on soil fertilized by the blood of our people. Sihanouk propaganda? One need only follow the tragic course of events since 18 March 1970.

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End Of Chapter 4





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