The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

34 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Operating Below the Radar Working in offices where we had access to some cables and intelligence reports but, with one exception, no Vietnam responsibilities, a small group of us who had all served there began meeting every day at lunch to talk about the deteriorating situation. These below-the-radar meetings took place in Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll’s conference room. The core group included Frank Wisner (Director for Manage- ment in Public Affairs), Paul Hare (Deputy Director of Press Rela- tions), Craig Johnstone (Director of the Secretariat Staff), Lionel Rosenblatt (on the Deputy Secretary’s staff), Jim Bullington (who worked on the Vietnam desk and could keep us informed about desk-level actions) and myself (who had been working on Secretary Kissinger’s staff). We were joined on occasion by one or two others. The group worked at two levels. EAP Assistant Secretary Philip Habib accepted our offer to work on issues the bureau was too busy to cover. Deputy Secretary Ingersoll supported us by issuing occasional tasking requests, which permitted us to draft action papers. Reviewing the embassy’s evacuation plan, we found it woe- fully inadequate for the thousands of American citizens living throughout the country. In addition, we believed that the United States had an obligation to large numbers of Vietnamese who had worked with Americans over the years and would be endangered under a communist regime. We estimated that an evacuation plan for Vietnam needed to cover about 6,000 Americans, 4,000 other foreigners (ceasefire observers from the 1973 accords, foreign diplomats and third- country nationals working for the United States), and anywhere from 100,000 to one million Vietnamese. We developed informa- tion about commercial aircraft and ships in the area, consulted with Pentagon officials about military evacuation assets and sent forward various evacuation scenarios. As North Vietnamese troops got closer to the capital in April 1975, the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to close the airport to commercial traffic. We pushed it to keep the airport open and called commercial airlines to increase the number of flights into Saigon. The end seemed near, but nobody had any idea about Hanoi’s intentions, how long the South Vietnamese would resist or how violent the last days might be. Amb. Martin continued to oppose planning an orderly departure for American personnel or con- sidering any evacuation for the many Vietnamese who had been associated with the U.S. effort. His concern was certainly understandable: the Vietnamese numbers were staggering and the implications dramatic. Our figures showed 164,000 current embassy employees and fam- ily members, 850,000 former employees and family members, 93,000 close relatives of U.S. citizens, and 600,000 military and civilian officials who likely had close ties to Americans. Organizing a Task Force Our second major concern was howWashington organized itself for the end game. These were the days before State routinely set up task forces the moment a crisis emerged. We wanted to keep the department at the center of operations, but argued for an interagency task force that included representatives from the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and vari- ous domestic agencies. State agreed to establish an in-house task force, but we kept pressing for it to be an interagency operation to deal with the huge influx of Vietnamese refugees we anticipated would follow the collapse. On April 18, 1975, the special Inter-agency Task Force was established under the leadership of Ambassador L. Dean Brown, a former deputy under secretary for management. We approached Amb. Brown immediately and volunteered to take leave from our jobs to become his core staff. Key members from other agencies who joined the task force staff at the beginning These were the days before State routinely set up task forces the moment a crisis emerged. Parker W. Borg, a Foreign Service officer for 35 years, served as a district adviser in Vietnam’s Binh Dinh province from 1968 to 1969, and as a staff member of the Military Assistance Command Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support headquar- ters in Saigon in 1970. After the 1973 ceasefire, he returned to Vietnam as a political observer and worked on the Vietnam evacuation effort. He later served as ambassador to Mali and Iceland, and held senior State Department positions in the areas of counterter- rorism, narcotics suppression, the international dimensions of informa- tion technology and African affairs. After retiring from the Foreign Service, Ambassador Borg worked on national security issues related to the war in Iraq at the Center for International Policy from 2002 to 2003. He then taught international re- lations at the American University of Rome from 2005 to 2008 and at the American Graduate School of International Relations in Paris in 2009.