Secrecy and Scandals

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, along with President Nixon believed that it would be in the best interest of the United States to keep the Cambodian bombings a secret. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson had been public about his involvement in Vietnam, which did not completely bode well for him. Protests and riots errupte as a result of Johnson’s exposure of war efforts. For these reasons, Nixon decided to keep all his Cambodia plans within a small circle of his trusted advisors.

Henry Kissinger⁷

In early 1969, all of the information regarding the US B-52 airstrikes on Cambodia was distributed on a “need to know” basis. Only a select group of people knew about the bombings, including General Abrams, the B-52 crews, and some of the US Military Assistance Command headquarters (MACV) in South Vietnam. There were a few people, however, that were skeptical of Nixon’s plans of secrecy. Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, one of the inventors of “Vietnamization,” wanted Nixon to go public with the bombings from the start. Other advisors, like Secretary of State William P. Rogers was opposed to the plan to bomb Cambodia all together.

For a while, Nixon managed to keep the raids a secret, until one spring morning when The New York Times leaked a story. The date was May 9, 1969, and William Beecher wrote:

RAIDS IN CAMBODIA BY U.S. UNPROTESTED

“American B-52 bombers have raided several Viet Cong and North Vietnamese supply dumps in Cambodia…”

Nixon and Kissinger were outraged as soon as the article was published. Kissenger called up Nixon immediately, and said, referring to the NY Times, “We must do something! We must crush these people! We must destroy them!” Nixon ordered Kissinger to have FBI director J. Edgar Hoover find the source of the leak. The main suspect was National Security Center staffer Morton Halperin. Kissinger decided to have Halperin’s phone “tapped,” which would allow he and the President to listen in to all of Halperin's phone conversations. This decision to tap Halperin’s phone would be the first of a series of “wiretaps” by President Nixon.

A day after the FBI tapped Halperin’s phone, they would go on to tap three more men. Two were Kissinger’s assistants, Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Daniel Davidson. The other was Laird’s military assistant, Robert Pursley. These wiretaps were legally questionable, but it was absolutely illegal when a private citizen, Joseph Kraft, was wiretapped. Wiretaps were set up in Kraft’s US home, although he and his wife were on vacation in Paris. Nixon went as far as having the French authorities set up writeaps in Kraft’s Paris hotel room.

The following year, William Beecher wrote another story about the continued bombing of North Vietnam on May 2, 1970. General Haig believed that there has was a “serious security violation,” and ordered four new wiretaps. These included William Beecher, Laird’s assistant Robert Pursley (who had been tapped a year earlier), Secretary of State William Roger’s assistant, Richard Pederson, and Roger’s deputy, William Sullivan.

Although President Nixon attempted to keep the overseas plans a secret, his tappings were never very successful. Word had constantly spread across the United States about the continued bombing, and the eventual invasion, of Cambodia. Soon, riots and demonstrations broke out in the US, especially on college campuses. It soon became known that Nixon was involved in all of these wiretaps, leading up to Nixon's infamous Watergate scandal. It looked certain that Nixon would be impeached on account of all these findings, however, he resigned on August 9, 1974.

Richard Nixon leaving the White House after he resigned⁸