Covert Support to Military Government in South Vietnam - CIA FOIA

C01268717
The search for informal channels to the Communists was largely
supplanted by the opening of preliminary talks with the North Vietnamese
in Paris in May 1968. After another Communist offensive that month,
the so-called mini-Tet, South Vietnamese and Allied forces regained the
military .initiative. Bloody ground combat and intensive air bombardment.
decimated the Communists' rural organization, and by the end of
the year a renewed pacification drive had brought "relatively secure" status
to an unprecedented 73% of the South's population. 3D
Ambiguously phrased claims of pacification results did nothing to
assuage public opposition to the war in the United States, and Hubert
Humphrey's close association as Vice President with Lyndon Johnson's
war policy cost him the 1968 election. The new President, Richard M.
Nixon, did not produce the "secret plan" for ending the war that he had
promised during the campaign. He did, however, accelerate what he
called the "Vietnamization" of the war, beefing up South Vietnamese
forces; in mid-1969, he announced the first US troop withdrawals.D
For the next three years, Vietnamization and the formal peace negotiations,
which got under way in January 1969, produced only stalemate.
With Washington's support of Saigon and continuing Chinese-Soviet aid
to the North, the combatants struggled to extend their territorial reach in
the South, anticipating eventual agreement in Paris. The Communists
broke the military deadlock with their Easter offensive of 1972, threatening
Saigon's hold on its northern provinces, but were finally beaten off by
a combination of South Vietnamese ground forces and American air
power. In October, the Communists agreed to cease-fire terms, and on
the eve of the US presidential election Nixon aide Henry Kissinger
announced that '.'peace is at hand." The proclaimed breakthrough helped
seal the fate of Democrat George McGovern's candidacy, and Nixon
won reelection in a landslide, Hanoi then balked, provoking the "Christmas
bombing" of North Vietnam that was followed by signature of the
accords in January 1973.D
American attention then turned to cease-fire implementation and an
effort to make the Saigon government militarily self-sustaining despite
the continued presence of North Vietnamese divisions in the South.
Whatever its potential, this undertaking came under intensified political
auack as the Nixon administration fought for its life in the face of the
Watergate scandal. When Nixon resigned on9 August 1974, to be succeeded
by Gerald Ford, the US Mission in Saigon was hearing the first
taint indications of a major Communist offensive in 1975. The assault
'The US Mission's pacification figure is given in "Vietnam: A Draft Chronology, 1940-1973" (U),
CIA History Staff. September 1974. Hereafter cited as "Vietnam Cbronology."O