information of all: the knowledge that we had penetrated the Soviet code. Agents were killed to prevent the other side from knowing what their own side knew.
When I realized what we had done, I was beset with uncertainty and self-doubt. There was no one-time breaking of a code. The other side would always respond by creating a new one. By revealing to the Soviets that their security had been breached, we had merely alerted them that they needed to replace their code. Even if I had understood this, I might still have agreed to print his story anyway. My responsibility as a “revolutionary” was to hurt the United States. The overriding justification was one that weighed heavily on al1 the political decisions I made as a member of my radical generation. It was important that America should lose the Vietnam war. I did not believe that an NLF victory would mean “rice-roots” democracy, as Hayden had written. But I was convinced that America’s loss would be Vietnam’s gain. An American defeat would weaken oppression everywhere. Or so I believed.
When we told Fitch that we were going to run Peck’s article, he panicked. We would all be tried for treason and go to jail, he whined. We brushed his fears aside, practically laughing in his face. Where was his revolutionary spine? Where was his commitment to the cause? When we refused to reconsider our decision, Fitch announced he was quitting the magazine. He was not about to go down in flames with us. We enjoyed seeing this rhetorical maximalist exposed as a coward, but his departure caused an internal lurch nonetheless. What if he was right? We had families. Were we ready to jeopardize their futures even for a grand gesture like this? We began to sense that we might be out of our depths.
Taking a step back, we decided to defer a final decision to publish the article until we could consult a lawyer. I thought of contacting the defense team for Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon official who was then on trial in Los Angeles for leaking a classified report on American policy in Vietnam. We had just completed a Ramparts cover-feature on his case. I put in a call to Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, a member of the Ellsberg team. After I had outlined the situation, Nesson explained the law. Technically, he said, we would be violating the Espionage Act. But the act had been written in a peculiar way to apply to classified papers removed from government offices or material copied from government files. The government was able to indict Ellsberg because he had xeroxed actual papers. Therefore, Nesson explained, it was important for us not to acknowledge that any papers existed. If we took his advice, Nesson said, we might get away with publishing the article because to make its case in a court of law, the government would have to establish that we had indeed damaged national security. To do so it would be necessary to reveal more than the government might want the other side to know. In fact, the legal process would certainly force more information to light than the government would want anybody to have. On balance, there was a good chance that we would not be prosecuted.
I had just been given advice by a famous constitutional law professor on how to commit treason and get away with it.
We published the article and it became a journalistic coup, getting front-page coverage by The New York Times. But the Times story was disappointing because it did not even mention my notion that the NSA’s technology made surprise attacks impossible. Instead, it focused on the more pertinent question of whether Peck’s claim—that American agents had broken the Soviet code—was accurate. The Times story quoted experts to the effect that it was not. The Times account also revealed that the name of the man we knew as Winslow Peck was actually Perry Fellwock, a fact that could only have been learned from intelligence sources. After the Times story appeared, we held a press conference in the Ramparts offices which was attended by an impressive media cohort. We decided that one particular reporter was the CIA “plant” because he kept asking us whether we had any written documents. We held to the strategy that Nesson had devised and said there were none.
Thinking about these events, I have asked myself in retrospect whether there was any practical difference between my actions and those of radicals like Tom Hayden, who self-consciously served the Communist rulers in Vietnam. When Hayden and Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam and urged American troops to defect, it made me as uncomfortable as had Ralph Schoenman’s broadcasts over Radio Hanoi during my days with Bertrand Russell. Remembering my parents’ experience as members of the American Communist Party, when they were forced to become apologists for murder, I had long ago resolved that I would never commit myself to any regime or party that did not reflect my own political values. Yet war does not leave room for fine discriminations or intermediate stands. Looking back at what I actually did, my “critical independence” seems to me now a distinction without much of a practical difference. The same can be said for all those antiwar demonstrators who might have been critical of Communism but were willing to march behind slogans that called for the withdrawal of American troops, a policy that could only result in a Communist victory. They did not see Communism as a superior way of life the way Hayden did. But in regarding it as the lesser of two evils, they helped the enemy to win all the same.
As soon as the Communists did win, in April 1975, there were reports of a bloodbath in Indochina. The Khmer Rouge had swept across Cambodia leaving killing-fields in their wake. In Vietnam there were reports of a hundred thousand summary executions, a million and a half refugees and more than a million people imprisoned in “reeducation camps” and gulags in the South. These events produced a shock of recognition in some quarters of the left. Joan Baez took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to make an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam.” She enlisted a number of former antiwar activists to sign the appeal. As soon as the statement appeared Baez was attacked by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda as a tool of the CIA.11 A counter-ad was organized by Cora Weiss, who had traveled with Fonda to Hanoi and collaborated with the regime in its torture of American POW’s. The Weiss ad praised the Communists for their moderation in administering the peace.
In politics, Baez never did anything else as worthy and remained a leftist. Years later, on one of the anniversaries of the fall of Saigon, I appeared with her on a television show discussing the events. She dismissed my views with hostility, saying, “I don’t trust people with second thoughts.” My response—which I did not get a chance to express on camera—was: “I don’t trust people without them.”
In 1973 Nixon and Kissinger had negotiated a peace treaty that was designed to keep the South Vietnamese regime in place and remove America’s military presence. I knew that the outcome was not going to be the “liberation” we had promised. But with American forces out of the picture, I saw no compelling reason to remain politically in the fray. Hayden and others like him did. After the anti-draft movement had disintegrated in 1970, Hayden and Fonda organized an “Indochina Peace Campaign” to cut off remaining American support for the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. For the next few years, the campaign worked tirelessly to ensure the victory of the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge. Accompanied by a camera team, Hayden and Fonda traveled to Hanoi and then to the NLF-controlled zones in South Vietnam to make a propaganda film. It was called Introduction to the Enemy and attempted to persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create a new “liberated” society in the South, where equality and social justice awaited its inhabitants if only America would cut off support for the Saigon regime.
Assisted by radical congressmen like Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, Hayden set up a caucus in the Capitol building where he lectured congressional staffers on the need to end American aid. He directed his attention to Cambodia as well, lobbying for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. When Nixon resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.
It was the bloodbath that our opponents, the anti-Communist defenders of America’s role in Southeast Asia, had predicted.
