Paris Accords 1973 Documents
Signing of the Paris Peace Accords: January 27, 1973
https://blog.fold3.com/signing-of-the-paris-peace-accords-january-27-1973/
December 31, 2017 by Trevor
On January 27, 1973, representatives of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (which included the Viet Cong), and the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords, leading to the end of the United States’ active military engagement in the Vietnam War.
Fold3 Image - Drawdown of US troops following Paris Peace Accords
Though both secret and official peace talks, predominately between the United States and North Vietnam, had been taking place on and off since at least 1968, the breakthrough finally came in 1972. Up until that point, North Vietnam had insisted on an agreement that would ensure a new coalition government, and the U.S. had demanded the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the south—both non-starters for the other side. But in 1972, the North Vietnamese signaled they would be willing to drop their demand for a coalition government, and the U.S agreed that the north could keep their troops in the south.
In October 1972, American diplomats led by Henry Kissinger and a North Vietnamese delegation led by Le Duc Tho created a near-final agreement that led Kissinger to announce that “peace is at hand.” However, the South Vietnamese government, under President Nguyen Van Thieu, found the agreement unacceptable, feeling that the deal did not look after South Vietnamese interests, and the peace talks fell apart in December.
Following the U.S.’s 11-day Christmas bombing campaign at the end of 1972, the North Vietnamese agreed to resume negotiations in January. The final deal, which was not much different than the one agreed to in October, was secured on January 23, 1973. Then the formal peace agreement—officially named the “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Vietnam,” but informally called the Paris Peace Accords—was signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. Key points of the agreement included a cease-fire, the U.S. withdrawal, and the return of American prisoners of war.
Although from the U.S. perspective the agreement was meant to end the war, it only really ended the U.S.’s active military involvement. In December 1974, the North Vietnamese broke the cease-fire and attacked the south at Phuoc Long. Despite a promise to the south that the U.S. would take retaliatory action if the north violated the peace agreement, the U.S. did not provide the south with military aid. In late April 1975, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the north, and the entire country was reunited under a northern, communist government.
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PoliticsPolitics News
February 27, 1975 12:00PM ET
Kissinger’s Indochina Obsession: Will He Bomb Again?
Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/kissingers-indochina-obsession-will-he-bomb-again-237244/
To appraise this “success,” one must measure the reality today against Kissinger’s original declarations of intent. He laid out his position on Vietnam many times in the first months of the Nixon administration – especially in a January 1969 essay in Foreign Affairs. Kissinger insisted on several aims which he was finally forced to abandon four years and four million tons of bombs later:
1. He demanded a North Vietnamese troop withdrawal. But in 1973 he had to acknowledge that 150,000 of those troops were left behind in the South as the Americans withdrew.
2. He opposed any cease-fire which would leave the instability of “enclaves of conflicting loyalties” (what the military calls “leopard spots”). Yet that was precisely the situation in 1973, as it is today. No separation of revolutionary troops from rural population was achieved, as it was at the 1954 Geneva Conference when Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh troops were regrouped north of the 17th parallel.
3. Kissinger rejected in 1969 any form of coalition government because it would “destroy the existing political structure of South Vietnam.” But the Paris Agreement which he signed specifies that a National Council of Reconciliation be formed of the Saigon regime, third-segment neutralists and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.
4. He promised to protect and maintain not only Thieu but South Vietnam as a distinct entity, perhaps like South Korea or West Germany. But the agreement he accepted prohibits the U.S. from imposing “any political tendency or personality on the South Vietnamese people” (Article 9-c). The reunification of Vietnam is assured with the formula and words long advocated by the other side: “step by step through peaceful means on the basis of discussions and agreements between North and South Vietnam, without coercion or annexation by either party and without foreign interference” (Article 15).
5. Kissinger hinted broadly in early 1969 that the U.S. would be out quickly. “Give us six months and if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence,” he told visitors. Yet he was privy to national security memos, some put together by Daniel Ellsberg, which concluded that South Vietnam might not be “pacified” in less than eight years and certainly not for at least five. The memos, reflecting the varied views of government agencies dealing with Vietnam, unanimously concluded that the Saigon army (which was being “Vietnamized”) could never withstand a North Vietnam/PRG military offensive without massive American air-and sea-based strikes. The only way Kissinger could ignore these warnings was by secretly planning an unprecedented escalation of the bombing (“Kissinger was always a believer in the persuasive power of bombs,” the Kalbs write), by placing exaggerated hope in diplomatic power plays with the Russians and Chinese, and by hiding the war from the American people. Not only did he wind up with a settlement in four years rather than six months, his policy of massive deceit contributed to the White House atmosphere exposed by Watergate.
Page 2, 3.
Szulc has pieced together much of what happened in Moscow. Kissinger rushed there on April 20th–after the offensive but before the mining on May 9th – to offer the concession which Szulc calls the “first major turning point in the history of the Vietnam negotiations.” Kissinger indicated to a surprised Brezhnev that the U.S. finally would accept a cease-fire leaving North Vietnamese troops in place in the South. The offer was passed to Hanoi.
Then at the May 1972 summit Kissinger made a political concession of equal magnitude. The Nixon/Brezhnev talks had hardened. “Nixon turned to Kissinger to whisper, ‘God, this cannot go on like this,'” Szulc reports. So the following day Kissinger conceded an American willingness to “back a tripartite commission in South Vietnam, including elements from the Saigon regime, the Vietcong and the neutralists.” To Szulc, “Kissinger was edging closer and closer to the Hanoi views – except for the immediate removal of Thieu – and was laying the foundation for what would become the ultimate settlement.”
Having won these major promises, the Hanoi side wanted something more substantive – release of political prisoners in Saigon and the creation of the “tripartite” regime in roughly the same time frame as the Americans would withdraw troops and get the POWs back. They suspected another betrayal of the promise of an election such as happened at Geneva and cost them 18 more years of fighting. But eventually they had to settle for Kissinger’s promise of a shift from war to political competition. It was a major compromise, though not as great as Kissinger’s. They could fight again, from a stronger base, if the promise went unfulfilled, while the Americans would be hard put to resume direct military intervention. Without that, the Saigon army could not stand for long. In effect, Hanoi gave Kissinger his “decent interval” and let the Saigon “fig leaf” cover the decline of American potency.
In summary, the American escalation on military and diplomatic fronts saved the Thieu regime temporarily. This has now been acknowledged by the North Vietnamese editor of the paper Nhan Dan who said in April 1974, “We would have been able to continue with bigger victories if the situation had remained as before April 1972. But detente between the U.S. and China and the U.S.S.R. created a better situation for the U.S. to intervene strongly and carry out its blockade. It gave a freer hand to the U.S. The balance of forces was changed. That’s why in the South we could only develop partially and fell short of expectations.”
The 1972 break came October 8th with a Hanoi diplomatic initiative (Hanoi had indicated for months in internal documents that a diplomatic settlement would be the outcome of the offensive). A draft peace agreement, embracing the compromise formula, was handed to Kissinger: The U.S. would accept the military status quo in the South, legitimize the PRG in a political settlement and the Hanoi/PRG side would accept their enemy Thieu transitionally in office. Kissinger has tried to spread the notion, through Louis Harris and other pollsters, that Hanoi decided to settle as soon as they saw McGovern had no chance. In this way he has continued the administration habit of blaming American military setbacks there on critics here. Hanoi no doubt wanted the settlement before the American election so as to lock Nixon into peace before his second term, but the content of the agreement reflected the actual balance of military/political power in Vietnam itself.
Kissinger concurred with Hanoi’s urgency at first. He and Le Duc Tho settled on a whirlwind finalizing schedule. Kissinger was to initial the peace agreement in Hanoi on October 24th and the U.S. secretary of state and North Vietnamese foreign minister would sign in Paris October 31st, one week before the American election. Kissinger promised Tho a “major effort” to follow the timetable, and on October 21st Nixon himself sent Hanoi a cable saying “the text can be considered complete” and could be signed October 31st.
The magnitude of Kissinger’s negotiating retreat can be seen in the response to the draft agreement from Saigon. Kissinger traveled to Saigon October 19th, less than one week before he planned to initial the agreement in Hanoi, to tell Thieu for the first time of its contents. Thieu reacted with “undisguised fury,” opposing most of the clauses in the draft, particularly the allowance of the North Vietnamese troops in the South and the tacit recognition of the PRG, the National Council of Reconciliation.
Why did Kissinger wait so long to confer with Thieu, the ally for whom America was fighting to keep free and independent? Kissinger certainly knew that Thieu distrusted him. In fact, the Kalbs say it was Thieu who leaked comments to the Saigon press such as, “The Jew professor comes to Saigon to try to win a Nobel Peace Prize.” Kissinger in turn had started to “hate” Thieu, Szulc writes. Yet both Szulc and the Kalbs believe that only Kissinger’s “arrogance” led him to believe Thieu could be persuaded in so short a time.
But could any level of arrogance, however bloated and fantastic, have expected Thieu to agree to a document such as this three days before it was to be initialed? Szulc insists that Kissinger’s ego is large enough. But a more realistic, though circumstantial, interpretation is possible: that Thieu’s ranting objections were “allowed” by Nixon and Kissinger to gain a delay in signing until after the November election.
In 1968 the Republicans and Thieu had done exactly this to the Democrats. Nixon urged through intermediaries in the old China lobby, like Mrs. Clare Chennault, that Saigon not attend the Paris talks which Johnson had begun in the last week of the campaign. It was suggested that Thieu hold out until the Republicans were in office. Now in 1972 Kissinger had essentially the same opportunity. He had an approaching election victory as well as a “stubborn” Saigon ally to confront Hanoi with, while himself acting as the reasonable but helpless party. He even added hints that he was more reasonable than the president, who might go back to bombing after November 6th.
An earlier Kissinger/Thieu conversation, reported by Szulc, is revealing of intentions here. It was in July 1972, after the final round of diplomacy had begun but before any draft agreement was circulating. Kissinger told Thieu that the election in America made it necessary for Nixon to “come forth with seemingly attractive proposals knowing full well that Hanoi would reject them.” Presumably the concessions on North Vietnamese troops and the tripartite commission were the “attractive proposals” which Kissinger may well have expected Le Duc Tho to reject as long as Thieu was to be kept in power. Kissinger also told Thieu that the U.S. “would not hesitate to apply all its power to bring North Vietnam down to its knees.” Szulc has difficulty understanding this discussion in his framework, since Thieu rather than Kissinger was supposed to be the hard-line figure. He regards it possibly as a placating lie by Kissinger to his worried ally.
But Kissinger had speculated on massive bombings, invasions and other means of getting Hanoi to its “knees” before. By the time of the early 1971 Laos invasion, the Kalbs report, Kissinger had wholly adopted military assumptions he once had doubted. In a private report to Nixon, he seemed to “enjoy the whimsical thought that one day a ‘fighting ARVN’ would be unleashed against North Vietnam.” As early as 1969, according to Szulc, Kissinger came to the “unshakable belief” that a “breakthrough in negotiations could come only after a final paroxysm of battle.” Both Daniel Ellsberg and Morton Halperin, a former Kissinger aide, believe that Kissinger was projecting the 1972 mining of Haiphong to Soviet ambassador Dobrynin in 1969, and the Kalbs quote Kissinger himself as telling the Russian that if his government “didn’t produce a settlement” that the U.S. would “escalate the war.”
Given all this, not to mention Kissinger’s firm support of every escalation, why is it unreasonable to believe that Kissinger meant every word of his promise to Thieu in July 1972? The unexpected emergence of the draft agreement one month later may have prohibited the invasion of the North but not the attempt to bring Hanoi “down to its knees” during the Christmas bombing.
Whatever Kissinger’s plans, the North Vietnamese were apprehensive about any stalling of a settlement until after the 1972 election. They were right to worry.
Page 3, 4.
He wants out, but also wants more concessions to Saigon first: a cease-fire in all Indochina, DRV troops out of the South, a weakening of the National Council of Reconciliation.”
Immediately after the election, the U.S. did toughen its position. An airlift called Operation Enhance, followed by Operation Enhance II, rushed at least $1 billion in military equipment to Saigon. Kissinger returned to Paris two weeks after the election and by all accounts reopened issues of substance. Kissinger later told friends that on November 20th he “did put Washington’s demands on the table.” In other versions Kissinger says he presented both Thieu’s and Nixon’s demands to Le Duc Tho. The Saigon demands numbered 69 in all, according to Szulc; the North Vietnamese say 126 changes were proposed, most of them substantive. What most upset Hanoi were Kissinger’s demands for a withdrawal of DRV troops, a massive supervisory force which they thought could become a “new occupying army,” dilution of the National Council to a meaningless shell and the lack of any recognition of the PRG’s existence.
Kissinger’s account of the period seems evasive. The new demands, he has said, were placed only as an “exercise for the record book” – an interesting reversion to academic life just at the critical moment of a long war! The Kalbs dutifully reported that Henry said Le Duc Tho could not have taken his escalated demands seriously. Szulc accepts this not as a blatant cover story but “probably a mistake” in Kissinger’s judgment.
Hanoi’s negotiators in fact say Kissinger threatened the resumption of bombing on several occasions, including six times in one day. At the very least Kissinger was displaying a willingness to increase the pressure to see if new concessions would be forthcoming (a conservative Soviet affairs expert, Victor Zorza, wrote at the time that Nixon really wanted a four-year guarantee of Thieu’s survival in Saigon). In short, the underlying compromises that made the original draft agreement possible were now being undermined by Kissinger.
Amidst growing suspicion, Kissinger flew home to tell a December 16th press conference that the talks were “99% completed.”
Page 8,9.
The U.S. stopped the bombing, the talks resumed and the agreement was signed in January. The popular impression was that the B-52s had won “peace with honor.” Szulc feeds this notion: “Evidently Hanoi felt that it had taken all the punishment it could take and proposed the resumption of negotiations.” But the circumstantial evidence is that the U.S. agreed to what Hanoi had demanded all along: a resumption of talks, on the condition that the bombing be stopped.If the conventional wisdom is correct, that the bombing forced Hanoi to the table, it would be reflected in pro-U.S. changes in the final agreement which was reached in mid-January. Yet there is no evidence of any basic changes from the October draft.
Kissinger claimed the new agreement, as compared with the October draft, protected the “sovereignty” of South Vietnam, but could only point to three relatively minor changes in the text to prove his case. The first, in Article 14 on South Vietnam’s future neutral foreign policy, was little different from what the National Liberation Front had advocated from its inception. The second, Article 18-e on the supervisory commission respecting South Vietnam’s sovereignty, was precisely the PRG position. Szulc adds that a compromise was reached between Hanoi’s demand for a few hundred on the supervisory force and Kissinger’s demand for 5,000. In any event, the 2,500 finally agreed upon have proven themselves certainly to be less than an “occupying” force as Hanoi feared. The third, Article 20 on Indochinese countries respecting each other’s independence, was again no different from the PRG position.
Page 10, 11.
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