Seaborn Third Mission
The following text is drawn from the document "A Study of Canadian Policy with Respect to the Vietnam Problem, 1962-1966." The full text of the report can be accessed as a PDF in the introductory page of this exhibit. Each of the sections of this exhibit constitutes a section of the study -- this page is composed of pages 21-29.
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Seaborn’s third trip to Hanoi was originally scheduled for the second half of November, this time reflecting continuing preoccupations in Saigon as a result of the stepped-up pace of the Commission’s activities. It should also be pointed out that it was never our understanding that Seaborn would proceed to Hanoi only when he had Bacon messages to deliver. As Canadian Commissioner, he had legitimate and indeed independent reasons for proceeding to Hanoi at any time. Our main concern was in coordinating his reasons for trips to the North so that he would not appear to be going too frequently, in stark contrast to earlier Commission custom, thus arousing suspicions in the South or the impression in the North that the Americans or indeed ourselves were too eager. More than that, we wished to avoid a situation in which Seaborn might have returned from a routine visit to Hanoi only a few days before Washington might initiate an urgent request for a further Bacon message. Seaborn’s activities had to be closely coordinated, and we made a special point of informing the Americans in Saigon and Washington of Seaborn’s plans well in advance so that adjustments in timing could be made if necessary.
When Seaborn’s plans for a trip North during the last week of November were made known to the Americans, they were also reminded that we wished to have time to study the contents before authorizing delivery. In conversation with the Americans in Saigon, Seaborn expressed the hope (initially on a personal basis but subsequently endorsed by us) that the USA would not think of a third message simply along the lines of the first one, the main themes of which had been repeated in the second meeting with Pham Van Dong "I (Seaborn) therefore hoped that if there was to be a new message it would be much more specific, whether it be in the form of an offer or a warning.”
In response to American requests, Seaborn’s departure for Hanoi was postponed until December 10. (Circumstances indicated that there might be a new message to deliver following senior-level consultations in Washington. Saigon telegram 677 of November 19, Appendix 14.) On December 3, Bundy made available the text of USA suggestions for Seaborn’s visit. (See Washington telegram 4189 of December 3, attached as Appendix 15.) In essence, what Seaborn was being asked to do was to express personal views and convictions that there was a growing possibility of direct confrontation between South Vietnam and the North and that 'the time is ripe for any message Hanoi may wish to convey”.
In Ottawa, our reaction to this request was one of disappointment and indeed anger; what had begun as a serious assignment had become, apparently, almost totally devoid of any real substance.
Or had it?
Reporting on his conversation with Bundy when the latter made available the text of suggestions for Seaborn, the Ambassador in Washington noted that the State Department’s reactions had been emphatically negative when asked whether Seaborn should imply that the USA would be interested in 'eliciting proposals from the DRVN'. Clearly, the attitudes in post-election Washington seemed to be toughening; in the wake of President Johnson’s landslide victory over Senator Goldwater, the Administration was still interested in talking to Hanoi but they were not getting down on bended knee to ask for a dialogue. In the same conversation, Bundy made some extremely interesting revelations of the outlines of U.S. policy planning:
"In summary, these amount for the present to: no radical change of course; no large-scale escalation; some limited USA bombing activities in Laos along the infiltration routes, if Souvanna agrees, with operations to begin possibly some days after December 10; and a possible but carefully measured and limited aerial reprisal, perhaps via South Vietnamese aircraft, against targets in the southern part of North Vietnam if there is some dramatic Viet Cong action in the South such as an attack on a provincial capital, mortaring of Saigon or a repetition of a Bien Hoa style operation." (Washington telegram 4190 of December 3 is attached as Appendix 16.)
Subsequently, we learned from New Zealand sources that the Americans had confirmed these same intentions to them but in rather more specific terms. Indeed, the New Zealanders told us that they had been informed that the Americans were even considering sending forces to South Vietnam to be stationed in the northern provinces to prevent Viet Cong from cutting across the narrow “waist” of the country just below the Demilitarized Zone.
We were not pleased with what was being proposed for Seaborn. Not only did it appear to us to be a non-mission, but we were also beginning to suspect that the Americans might not be telling us everything. But because the situation appeared to be shaping up in an ominous way, we thought that the risks involved in carrying out an assignment that seemed almost inconsequential to us might conceivably be less than refusal to do as we had been asked.
The text of our telegram Y-883 of December 4 (attached as Appendix 17) comments on the tactics we envisaged Seaborn adopting although it does not outline the other considerations mentioned above; these latter were never committed to paper. We were not quite sure what this mission meant.
Because of Seaborn’s mission, and because he was visiting the North in the company of the two other ICC Commissioners, we raised with the Americans the desirability of postponing any air attacks in Laos, no matter how limited and initially unobtrusive they might be. This proved to be impossible and in the end, the action in Laos appeared to make no difference - at least it made no obvious impact.
Throughout this visit to Hanoi, the only North Vietnamese official with whom Seaborn had discussions was Colonel Ha Van Lau, Head of the Liaison Mission charged with relations with the Commission. (He saw Pham Van Dong at the theatre but only a few innocuous pleasantries were exchanged.) The encounter with Ha Van Lau produced virtually no reaction. (Saigon telegram 773 of December 18 appears as Appendix 18.) When the results of Seaborn’s visit were made available in Washington to Rusk’s special assistant on Vietnam, the latter commented that "even the fact that the North Vietnamese have had nothing to say to Seaborn was something which was useful for the USA authorities to know". (Washington telegram 4396 of December 23).
To us in Ottawa at the time, the whole exercise seemed so peculiar and so devoid of substance, in circumstances which were more threatening than they had been six months before, that we felt that there must be “something else” in the background. It was not until afterward that we learned that there had been in fact another exercise which we knew nothing about and about which the Americans had not kept us informed. If I recall correctly, we first heard of it from the Secretary-General of the United Nations himself some months later. A convenient summary is provided in the context of an article entitled 'The Final Troubled Hours of Adlai Stevenson' by Eric Sevareid, appearing in 'Look' magazine of November 30, 1965:
"In the early autumn of 1964, he (Stevenson) went on, U Thant, the UN Secretary-General, had privately obtained agreement from authorities in North Vietnam that they would send an emissary to talk with an American emissary, in Rangoon, Burma. Someone in Washington insisted that this attempt be postponed until after the Presidential election. When the election was over, U Thant again pursued the matter; Hanoi was still willing to send its man. But Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Adlai went on, flatly opposed the attempt. He said the South Vietnamese government would have to be informed and that this would have a demoralizing effect on them; that government was shaky enough, as it was.
Stevenson told me that U Thant was furious over this failure of his patient efforts, but said nothing publicly. Time was passing, the war expanding. The pressures of U Thant, supposedly the Number One peacemaker of the globe, were mounting from all sides within the UN. So he proposed an outright cease-fire with a truce line to be drawn across not only Vietnam but neighboring Laos. U Thant then made a remarkable suggestion: United States officials could write the terms of the cease-fire offer, exactly as they saw fit, and he, U Thant, would announce it in exactly those words. Again, so Stevenson said to me, McNamara turned this down, and from Secretary Rusk there was no response, to Stevenson’s knowledge.
At the time of this incident, it was official American policy that the fighting would go on until North Vietnam 'left its neighbors alone' to use the phrase the State Department was then using. In other words, the Communists would have to quit first. It was not until April, in his Baltimore speech, that President Johnson changed all this and announced that the United States was willing to negotiate for peace without preconditions."
It is possible to speculate that the essential passivity of the Seaborn mission in December was designed to see whether the North Vietnamese would themselves mention the possibility of meeting the Americans in Rangoon; there is, however, no documentary evidence.
As the New Year began, the atmospherics surrounding the Bacon exercise were not characterized by intense enthusiasm or optimism. A memorandum prepared on January 14 by the Head of Far Eastern Division (See Appendix 19) is a case in point. On the same day, the Embassy in Washington reported that Unger, the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Far East in charge of Vietnam affairs, "indicated today, in response to a direct query, that the USA was most unlikely to have anything to communicate to the DRVN in the near future".
Throughout January, Canadian Commission policy efforts in Ottawa, Delhi, and Saigon continued to encounter Indian obstruction. Our frustration had reached the point where we had almost decided to publish the so-called draft Legal Report, in whole or in part, on our own. We felt that unless there were some international recognition of the importance of North Vietnamese subversion in the South, international prescriptions for the politico-military ailments of Vietnam were likely to be directed at the wrong disease. The events of early February - specifically the commencement of retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnamese targets on February 7 forced the pace of events within the Commission and our hand in relation to discussions within the Commission. Whether or not we might ever have struck a deal with the Indians and come up with a balanced report is an open question. Personally, I doubt it; I believe that for India the Special Report of 1962 was an aberration rather than a turning point and I am convinced that the Indians would never again have put North Vietnamese action in South Vietnam on one hand and American policy on the other on an equal footing. Be that as it may, the first air strikes gave the Poles and Indians a perfect excuse to demand that the Commission send a special report to the Co-Chairmen announcing what headlines in every newspaper around the world had already told international public opinion - that peace was deteriorating because the USA had, evidently for no reason in the Indian-Polish scheme of things, decided to initiate a dangerous policy of military action against North Vietnam. We were angered by Indian haste to proceed along these lines and we let the Indians know that while we did not disagree that bombing was a "bad thing", especially as it related to our responsibilities under the Cease-Fire Agreement, we did not favor a report dealing only with this phenomenon, highlighting it as if it were the only dangerous aspect of the situation in Vietnam and the only thing of importance that had happened since the Commission’s last report in 1962. This was the origin of the Commission’s Special Message of February 13 to which the Canadian Delegation appended a minority statement quoting extracts from the so-called Legal Report. The burden of the Canadian minority statement was not a disagreement with the substance of the majority report; clearly the bombing had taken place and it was a dangerous policy. Rather, it represented an attempt to restore an essential balance to the Commission’s report when read as a whole.
By an unfortunate coincidence, this Special Message appeared at about the same time as a USA White Paper on Vietnam entitled "Aggression from the North". We knew nothing about the preparation of this American document and its appearance was as much a surprise to us as the Commission’s Special Message probably was to the Americans; with respect to the latter, there was never any Ottawa-Washington consultation or coordination and no American request for the inclusion or exclusion of anything. The public accusation that the Canadian minority statement was somehow or other an attempt to buttress the "propaganda line" taken in the USA White Paper was therefore totally untrue. It was, however, probably the first piece of so-called "evidence" on which critics subsequently based their accusation of Canadian "complicity".
The minority statement of February 1965 is chiefly interesting, in retrospect, as a reflection of Canadian attitudes at the time. It was tough and angry. For almost a decade we had been forced to sit back in Vietnam and watch peace being eroded by Hanoi’s policies directed at controlling the whole of Vietnam and probably the whole of Indochina. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the situation were in historical perspective, it would be a distortion of history to regard the Canadian Government as having had much sympathy for North Vietnamese policies at that time. We were not particularly happy with the measures being adopted by the United States to strengthen its South Vietnamese ally and to counter North Vietnamese actions, and we thought that negotiations - if they could be started - would be a more fruitful avenue. But we were also firmly convinced that the likelihood of North Vietnam undertaking significant political contacts or indeed negotiations would not be increased by international opinion failing to come to grips - and in forthright public terms - with the underlying causes of instability in Vietnam. It was not just a question of questioning the wisdom of USA policy. North Vietnamese subversion and interference in the South had to be taken into account as well.
In a statement to the House of Commons on February 8, the British Foreign Secretary declared that it could not be held that 'recent USA actions had increased the danger in South Vietnam; these actions, however, drew attention to a danger that had been present there for some time.' This, in succinct terms, was the message of the Canadian minority statement.