MY WAR WITH THE CIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200030031-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 27, 2004
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: August 26, 1973
• Content Type: NSPR

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Yid ! &0Approved For Release 2005/01/1 6C liR -01350R000200030034.-1/ `
Prince of peace
My War With the CIA
The Memoirs of Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
As Related to Wilfred Burchett.
Illustrated. 272 pp. New York:
Pantheon Books. $7.95.
Norodom Sihanouk - "Samdech"
or Prince to his Cambodian com-
patriots, "Monseigneur" to visiting
foreigners, "Snooky" to his Wash-
ington detractors-is a man who has
induced apoplexy in a 20-year suc-
cession of American Secretaries of
State, generals and emissaries. Un-
til early 1970 he had received their
demands and blandishments and had
outlasted all of them. And in so do-
ing, he had achieved the impossible:
kept Cambodia out of the Indochina
War, an oasis of peace in a desert
of hostilities. But then came the
Lon Not coup, and the United States
invasion; and today Cambodia has
been laid waste.
Sihanouk had special reasons for
avoiding Washington's embrace.
Cambodia is historically the Poland
of Southeast Asia, caught between
two martial peoples: the Thais, its
Germany, to the west; and the Viet-
namese, its Russia, to the east.
Throughout history both powers
have hacked away at the territory
of the Cambodian, or Khmers, gentle
heirs to the great civilization that
built the palaces and temples of Ang-
kor. In Sihanouk's time Washington
was allied to both traditional ene-
mies.
If the hostilities were to spread
to Cambodia, it was fairly predict-
able that the consequence would be
not
only
devastation and civil war
but
also
dismemberment. So, from
the
early
1950's onward, first as
King
and
then as Chief oi; State,
Norodom Sihanouk steered his peo-
ple on a course then deemed "im-
moral" by American statesmen, the
course of neutralism. But his neutral-
ism had its own special character,
dictated by both the geopolitics of
the region and the temperament of
the man. It was frenetic rather than
phlegmatic.
James C. Thomson Jr., who was
an East Asia specialist at the State
Department and White House, 1961-
66, is curator of the Nieman Foun-
dation for Journalism and lecturer
on history at Harvard.
Approved For
That policy required nearly con-
stant motion: a balancing act in the
midst of a typhoon. Frequent gest-
tures toward China were central to
the act, for only Peking could, in the
long run, protect against Bangkok
and Saigon and simultaneously re-
strain the ambitions of Hanoi. But
periodic moves in other directions
were also essential. And by the early
1960's there was, as a result, no-
where. in the world quite such a
polyglot East-West mix of foreign-
aid projects as one found in Cam-
bodia (bringing complaints from
Washington about the iniquity of
"co-mingling").
To such a formidable task the
Prince brought an appropriately hy-
perthyroid temperament. Vain and
gregarious, volatile and shrewd, co-
quettish and choleric, earthy and
cultivated - he seemed alternately
fearsome and ridiculous to his ad-
versaries, wise and bewildering to
his friends.
But withal the act worked, from
independence in 1953 to his ouster
in March, 1970. Although Cambodia's
eastern border regions were inevit-
ably singed by the Vietnam war-
through their violation by both Viet-
namese factions and, from 1969,
their secret bombardment by United
States aircraft -Cambodia remained
at peace, its independence preserved
under the one non-Communist leader
in mainland Southeast Asia to
achieve a formidable base of popu-
lar support at home. (Even his critics
admitted it: "If only we had a Sih-
anouk for South Vietnam," lamented
American officials in Saigon.)
The popular support came partly
from style, partly good works. He
was, after all, a Norodom, in the
kingly line - a Buddhist father-
prince and patron of the arts who
ran a splendid little court with a
nice degree of flamboyance. But he
was arso the one Southeast Asian
ruler who-when not globe-trotting
-spent more days in the country-
side than in the capital city: dedicat-
ing irrigation systems, opening roads
and clinics, receivigg petitions from
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further, his small rmy,-in`like other
Asian armies-was more boon than
bane to the populace. Soldiers con-
structed the dams, laid out the roads,
and even helped with the harvests.
Not that Sihanouk's Cambodia
was in any sense flawless. There
was, of course, the usual corrup-
tion in Phnom Penh ruling. circles.
Economic planning left much to be
desired, at least by M.I.T. standards.
And the Prince's own highly per-
sonalist version of "guided democ-
racy" sent dissenters of both the left
and the right into prison, insurgency,
or exile-and sometimes . to their
death.
Still, his nation was independent,
unaligned, and at peace. And that
was something of a miracle.
What happened in 1970 consumes
a large part of Prince Sihanouk's'
awkward and uneven "memoirs," as
told to the leftist Australian journa-
list, Wilfred Burchett. To put the
thesis simply: the Central Intelli-
gence Agency, long working for Sih-
anouk's overthrow, found willing
accomplices in two of his associates
while the Prince was off to Moscow,
and masterminded the coup that
exiled him to Peking.
A word about the text: a polemic
undoubtedly loses much when told
in French by a Cambodian to an
Australian-who then translates it
into English. This polemic also wan-
ders back and forth in time and
place. It is variously shrill, boiste-
rous and self-serving. But it does
 mostly sound like, pd'fqy l For.Rgle.qs.e 2Q051 1/13 :CIA-RDP88-01350R000200030031-7
.
As for the thesis of C.I.A. lingness to do what his pred-
complicity: prior to the Water- ecessors had regularly reject-
gate revelations. I would have ed? The loss of virtually all
found it most unlikely, After the Cambodian countryside to
Watergate, almost anything pro - Communist Cambodian
seems possible in terms of Pres- forces; and the disintegration
idential abuse of the relative of the Lon Nol Government in
integrity of the C.I.A. in its military, political, and econo-
post-Bay of Pigs phase, it is mic spheres. This judgment is
indisputable that the Agency not only Sihanouk's-a highly
did in fact give covert support biased source. It is also that oft
to Sihanouk's long arch-rival, the best reporters on the scene,
Son Ngoc Thanh, and his including those gifted investi-
Khmer Serei rebels in the late gators for the Senate Foreign
1950's.It is also true, however, Relations Committee, James G.
that the Kennedy and Johnson_ Lowenstein and Richard M.
Administrations, seeking ac- Moose, whose several published
commodations with the Prince, studies of Southeast Asia have
such support.
But a directive given is not
always a directive obeyed. And
at the least one can be certain
that intermediate links on the
chain of American contact with
the Khmer Serci and other anti-
Sihanouk elements in ' Vietnam
and Thailand gave the wink of
approval-and conveyed there-
by the impression of United
States support-to those who
finally mounted the plot. One
way or another, the Khmer
Serei participated in the coup,
and Son Ngoc Thanh became
Prime Minister in the Lon Nol
-Government.
But far greater than any
crime of covert complicity in
Sihanouk's overthrow is what
happened next: the overt Amer-
ican invasion of Cambodia on
April 30, 1970. By that sense-
less act the Nixon Administra-
tion destroyed all that Siha-
nouk had achieved: the shield-
ing-of Cambodia from the Indo-
china War and the preservation
of Cambodia's independence.
By that act, and by its sequel,
the obliteration bombing of
Cambodia, the .Nixon Adminis-
tration has gone far toward the
destruction of Khmer civiliza-
tion. Of all "high crimes" this
President is accused of, that
may well rank among the high-
est.
w a , a ter 1, was ac- gent forces. But he is still;
complished by Mr
'Nixon's wil despite ego, a realist: he stands
ing Cambodian tragedy,
So all that has stood be-
tween the architects of the 1970
coup and disaster is American
obliteration bombing - now
terminated by the Congress at
very long last.
Does the mercurial Prince
have a future? He currently
presides, from his Peking exile,
over the Khmer National Unit-
ed Front, the coalition of insur-
ready to remain as Chief of
State in a post-Lon Nol settle-
ment as a "working symbol"
of Khmer unity and he has pro-
posed the establishment of dip-
lomatic relations between such
a government and the United
States, on condition that all aid
to the Lon Nol party is ended.
But power, he senses, will lie
elsewhere. And the new Cam-
bodia will undoubtedly move
much to the left under his new-
found insurgent allies.
Will Southeast Asia's Poland
survive its American interlude?
It's a close question; but the
answer may still lie in the per-
son of Norodom Sihanouk. 1111
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