Air University Review, September-October 1977

Negotiating with the Enemy

RUMORS of an imminent cease fire filtered up to the district town of An Khe in the highlands of Binh Dinh province, South Vietnam, in the late fall of 1972. As the last remaining American adviser, I already had PCS orders in hand in anticipation of a speedy withdrawal from Vietnam. Then the news arrived via the local grapevine: President Thieu would address the nation and announce the cease fire arrangements. I packed my few belongings in a footlocker and prepared my equipment for speedy turnover to the district chief.

The district staff officers and their last" covan" (advisers) eagerly gathered around the radio in the district chief's office, straining to hear the fading, wavering signal as President Thieu told the people that the cease fire would begin in four days. Early the next morning I signed my property over, paid severance pay to my Vietnamese employees, packed my advisory files for shipment, and sat by the radio awaiting instructions from the Province Advisory Team Headquarters in Qui Nhon.

One by one the nine districts were called, and a pickup time was given when the chopper would arrive to extract the few remaining advisers in the field. My call was the last to be made - two hours until pickup. I could already see the smile on my wife's face as I arrived home early from a short tour for a change.

As I bounced into the Province Senior Adviser's office with a cherry "hello," I was greeted with unexpected news: "Karl, you've been chosen to serve on the Four Party Joint Military Commission; be prepared to leave for a briefing in Pleiku within the hour." Why me? What had I done wrong this time? "It's your master's degree in international relations and your language capability that got you the job. Congratulations." Congratulations? Dreams of a quick trip home and a joyous family reunion vanished in a haze of blue smoke. However, seven months later, when I finally did get aboard the "Freedom Bird," I was glad that I had been chosen to negotiate with the enemy.

There had been two months of frustrations as a deputy team chief of the United States element in a field team of the Four Party Joint Military Commission (FPJMC) at Bao Lap. It was frustrating because the team never became operational, the enemy refusing to deploy members to the field to begin supervising the cease fire. Things changed quickly when I found myself transferred to the Central Delegation in Saigon and taking part in the field negotiations for the release of the last acknowledged U.S. prisoner of war (POW), Captain Robert T. White.

While the rest of the U.S. delegates to the FPJMC withdrew when the commission was dissolved after sixty days, fourteen of us remained in Saigon to negotiate the implementation of Article 8 (b) of the Paris Agreement ¹ pertaining to the exchange of information about missing persons. I became the Deputy Chief of the Negotiations Division of the newly formed U.S. Delegation to the Four Party Joint Military Team on Dead and Missing Persons (FPJMT). Agreement en this rather exact title for the organization required nearly two weeks to negotiate and gave us our first hint of the semantic pitfalls ahead.

Scores of formal and informal negotiating sessions in both Saigon and Hanoi added to my experience and formed a sad yet pleasant memory when the plane carried me home at last. Colonel William W. Tombaugh, second chief of the U.S. delegation, expressed the same feelings in the Foreword of the first Delegation Yearbook;

It has been a year punctuated by incredible frustration, hard work, and remarkably little achievement regarding the implementation of the Protocol to the Paris Agreement. Nevertheless, it has been a year which I will recall with great pride and sentimentality. ²

Truly, we had learned to respect the wisdom of Secretary Henry Kissinger when he noted: "The peace negotiations in Paris have been marked by the classic Vietnamese syndrome: optimism alternating with bewilderment; euphoria giving way to frustration."³ As an extension of the prolonged Paris negotiations, our work was no less simple. Early in our research to establish a framework for our negotiating strategy, we read with great interest the history of the French negotiating efforts, after the 1954 Geneva Accords, to account for their missing. As our opponents' negotiating strategy gradually unfolded, we noted the use of the same techniques by the delegates of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG) and the Democratic Government of Vietnam (DRV) that had proved so successful in frustrating the French attempts to arrive at a complete accounting for their missing persons. Although the 1954 agreement set 1 July 1956 as the deadline for a complete accounting and repatriation of remains, as late as 1967 the French government still had a graves registration team working in North Vietnam, attempting to locate and repatriate remains.

The individual DRV-PRG negotiators also seemed to pose a striking resemblance to the Communist Chinese-North Korean delegates encountered by U.S. negotiators at the Korean Armistice Conference. U.S. senior delegate to the conference, Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, might have been describing our foes across the table when he wrote:

The Communist system of negotiating does not depend critically on the individuals involved. Their method is a dogma followed slavishly by each of their representatives. . . . Persistence and unruffled demeanor in the face of logic seemed to be prime characteristics of their negotiating group at the Korean Armistice Conference. ⁴

The Communists pursued a policy of obstructionism cleverly laced with half-truths and distorted polemics designed for a wider audience than the four parties that gathered for four hours twice weekly around the oval table at Tan Son Nhut. In July, after almost four months of nonproductive negotiation, the U.S. delivered a diplomatic note in Paris to the North Vietnamese (DRV) Delegation charging the DRV with delaying progress in the proceedings in Saigon. The note made it clear that

. . . "what the DRV has done has been to obstruct and delay the practical steps of urgent, humanitarian nature…The DRV has justified its position on the grounds that such practical steps must await total agreement on all points by all parties to the FPJMT. . . . ⁵

The Communists consistently maintained that a complete set of agreed-on operating principles was necessary before any concrete actions could be undertaken to begin the process of accounting for the missing persons of the various parties. As their strategy was revealed through the process of step-by-step negotiations, it soon became evident that the other side intended to rewrite completely the already agreed-on provisions of the Paris Agreement pertaining to the work of the Four Party Joint Military Team under the guise of " . .. reaching agreement on the contents for implementing Article 8 (b). . ."⁶

The DRV quickly seized the initiative and on 14 April, during the second week of the FPJMT, tabled a draft set of general operating procedures. These took the form of a careful rewording and expanding of each phrase in the original document signed at Paris. The stated Communist rationale was one of ensuring that we all had a common understanding of the original intent of the agreement. But in practice this allowed them to substitute wording which subtly changed the intent and/ or raised new controversy that could be used to delay progress and obstruct the flow of the negotiations.

This technique was not new to the American experience. Admiral Joy had already observed in Korea, "Communists are not embarrassed in the least to deny an agreement already reached. It makes little difference that such agreements may be in written form. If so, the Communists simply state that your interpretation is an incorrect one."⁷ This attitude became evident early in Saigon when at the first FPJMT meeting on 4 April 1973 the Communists stated their intent to review, and renegotiate as necessary, the eleven points pertaining to delegates' privileges and immunities that had been agreed to by the Chiefs of the Four Party Joint Military Conference at their last meeting on 28 March 1973.

The entire sixty days of the FPJMC's existence had been largely devoted to negotiating those eleven points. Now our adversaries were telling us we needed to go back to the starting point and review the entire thorny issue, which the U.S. and Republic of Vietnam (RVN) side had considered resolved to everyone's satisfaction. A month of the FPJMT's time was spent in reviewing those points before a minute of agreement was signed on 3 May 1973, in which all parties agreed to abide by the 28 March agreement and " . . . should problems arise and require additional items to insure completion of tasks of the team, the FPJMT will discuss and decide the matter on the basis of unanimity."⁸ This addendum left the Communist side with a neat mechanism for reopening the issue any time they desired to impede progress.

This same pattern was prevalent throughout the talks. The other side always insisted on putting qualifying phrases in all the agreements that would allow the issue to be renegotiated whenever an attempt to apply agreed-on procedures in practice did not serve DRV /PRG purposes. This is a standard Communist negotiating strategy since

…. communists believe that once negotiations have been initiated, to delay progress toward consummation of agreements tend to weaken the position of their opponents. They hope to exploit to their advantage the characteristic impatience of Western peoples, impatience to complete a task once it has been begun. ⁹

They were adept at creating incidents to delay the negotiations and shatter our illusions progress. Side issues such as alleged transportation difficulties, communications problems, power failures, and other assorted logistics matters regularly took up precious plenary session negotiating time. The ultimate issue for delay, however, was the Saigon-Hanoi liaison flight procedures.

The United States, during the Four Party Joint Military Commission period, in the interest of expediency, had agreed to provide weekly USAF C-130 liaison flight to Hanoi to allow the DRV delegation an opportunity to rotate delegates and receive instructions from their government. It is often true that "The diplomat who faces his opponent across the green baize sometimes acts only as a messenger. His powers may be so restricted that he can merely deliver prepared statements, outline positions as prescribed by his government, and receive communications from the opponent." ¹⁰ This was certainly true with the DRV/PRG representatives. So the flight seemed a necessity, the only other link the DRV delegation had to their superiors being via unreliable and insecure radio communications constantly monitored by South Vietnamese intelligence personnel.

Immediately after the FPJMT was formed, the DRV raised the issue of who was authorized to use the flights. They insisted that Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam delegates be allowed to travel to Hanoi with their DRV comrades. The Republic of Vietnam delegation objected and refused PRG representatives exit rights from Saigon on the basis that the PRG seat of government was alleged to be at Loc Ninh in South Vietnam, and a series of scheduled flights under Two Party Joint Military Commission (TPJMC) supervision were provided using South Vietnamese helicopters to give PRG delegates access to their authorities at Loc Ninh. This dispute was temporarily resolved by a tacit agreement between the DRV-RVN, mediated by the U.S. delegation, which provided that PRG delegates were allowed to go to Hanoi only if accompanied by an equal number of RVN delegates and only if the PRG officers returned to Saigon on the same flight since the DRV had refused to allow U.S. or RVN delegates to remain in Hanoi overnight. But just as the issue appeared to be settled, an 8 June shipboard fire provided the Communists with a heaven-sent opportunity for obstructionism.

Little did I realize as the burning particles from the DRV satchel began flying across the plane toward me that a nine-month delay in progress was about to begin. This flight had been scheduled to complete details for the repatriation of the remains of those U.S. POWs who had died in prison in the north and had been identified in lists exchanged at Paris at the time of the signing of the basic agreement. I was feeling quite confident after a successful detailed negotiating session with Hanoi officials. It looked as though repatriation would be possible during the last week in June. In fact, it was March 1974 before the remains were finally released at Gia Lam airport in Hanoi. The accident over the Red River shortly after takeoff from Gia Lam gave the Communists all the excuse they needed to delay repatriation and play on our Western impatience.

The fire, which originated in the satchel of a DRV captain known to us to be an explosives expert, we suspected to be a true accident caused by the premature ignition of a faulty magnesium-type document destructor. However, the North Vietnamese immediately seized on this opportunity to obstruct progress. Within minutes after the flames were extinguished by a highly efficient USAF crew, as senior U.S. delegate aboard the flight, I extracted a written statement from the still visibly shaken chief of the DRV delegation. This handwritten admission clearly placed the origin of the fire in the DRV satchel. It was not too surprising that this delegation head was replaced soon thereafter. The note allowed us to prevent the Communists from claiming U.S. liability for the injuries to their personnel aboard the U.S. aircraft but was of little value in preventing the other side from resurrecting the troublesome issue of flight procedures.

Armed with the DRV statement, we insisted on initiating a standard Air Force accident investigation to determine the cause of the fire and ensure that future flights were not similarly endangered. After the landing Tan Son Nhut, 33 hours of almost continuous negotiations were required to arrive at a thirteen-point agreement outlining the procedure to be followed in conducting the examination of the DRV satchel in which the fire had started. The prime Communist motive in insisting on these detailed safeguards as to minimize publicity about the cause of the incident. The agreement stipulated, "The result of the examination shall not be released to any delegation and any news agencies or correspondents. None of the delegations shall give information or statements about the examination." ¹¹ However, the Communists were not adverse to using this incident and alleged irregularities in flight procedures to waste valuable plenary session time in pointless discussions.

The fundamental differences between the Vietnamese parties soon made it evident that no meaningful discussions or exchanges of information about the missing would likely result from the plenary sessions. Five major controversial issues emerged which gave the Communist side ample grounds on which to practice their obstructionist tactics. The major stumbling blocks were the issues of release of civilian detainees, delineation of zones of control, disposition of PRG remains in RVN-controlled areas, grave visit procedures, and the building of memorials to those who had fallen in the conflict. The U.S. delegation found no magic formula to resolve these issues and learned only that" . .. lack of patience in the U.S. Delegation provides a near-assurance that the obstreperousness of the DRV will be pursued with increasing vigor."¹²

We decided that bilateral, informal discussions with the DRV and PRG delegates would serve to explore methods to by-pass the plenary session deadlock. So a carefully planned series of visits to the Communist compound at Davis Station on Tan Son Nhut was initiated. What little success the U.S. delegation achieved can be attributed to repatriation arrangements made and information gained during these informal sessions, for the most part between staff officers of the respective delegations. Plenary sessions after September 1973 were almost entirely nonproductive, being plagued by numerous boycotts and walkouts by both sides. The meetings that were held rarely reached the first stage of agreement on the agenda and were marked by highly vocal polemics. The DRV /PRG charged the U.S./ RVN with cease fire violations, illegal resupply, and land grabbing. The U.S. charged the Communists with obstructionism. The South Vietnamese became increasingly more distrustful of the Communists and stepped up their calculated efforts to harass the Communist delegates isolated in their cramped compound at Davis Station.

Truly, "The FPJMT had transformed itself from an organ dedicated to joint, humanitarian effort to a polemical forum." ¹³ All that remained for the United States delegation was for it to play a final role when it assumed control of the hectic helicopter evacuation from Tan Son Nhut in the last hours before Saigon fell. The enemy, who so lightly brushed aside our pleas for adherence to the humanitarian portions of the Paris Agreement, had no difficulty in making a travesty of the entire "peace" agreement.

WHAT LESSONS are to be learned from our unhappy experience in attempting to negotiate with the Vietnamese? How can we improve our continuing efforts to resolve the question of those missing in action (MIA) that currently is the central issue impeding the normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations?

Certainly the key to understanding the Vietnamese position lies in the theory of reciprocity. The Vietnamese realize that the information they possess is a valuable bargaining chip. They will not release that information until they can link the surrender of their most valuable negotiating issue to a reciprocal surrender by the U.S. of something equally valuable, be it money or U.S. support for some Vietnamese political objective. Hanoi intends to exact the maximum price obtainable for answers to the questions that have troubled the minds of the MIA families these many years.

To appeal to Vietnamese humanitarianism is an utter waste of effort. They react to only two stimuli, reward and punishment. Since we have ruled out the use of the latter, the only course of action left is that of "buying" information. The only issue to be decided is the "price."

How should our negotiators prepare themselves to meet this wily enemy at the round table? What tactics should be used to minimize the price we must pay to achieve our goal?

The first step must be to form a special team of carefully selected negotiators. They should be people familiar with the language, philosophy, history, and culture of the enemy they are about to confront. Our negotiating team should thoroughly research the history of the French experience in the 1954-55 negotiations with the North Vietnamese about this same issue. Hanoi's delegates can be expected to follow the same scenario used in those talks. The records of our 1973-74 FPJMT delegation and those of the Korean Armistice Conference will also provide valuable insights into day-to-day Communist negotiating tactics. Together these sources will help prepare our team to detect and avoid many of the pitfalls the Communists are sure to construct. Our negotiators should also receive formal instruction in the psychology of patience and mental endurance. 

Maximum use of private sessions should be made during the actual negotiations. Staff members on both sides can work out many of the nagging details that disrupt formal sessions if a continuing environment of staff coordination is created. This method of resolving details will also tend to minimize the opportunity for polemics in the plenary sessions. The Communists will continue to use open sessions as a forum for their propaganda. We should also continue our publicity efforts to solicit world opinion support for our position. However, it should be realized that this technique has no effect on the Vietnamese position.

A maximum effort should be made to gain the initiative in the talks by using a carefully planned series of graduated offerings of reward to determine the minimum price we can expect to pay for the information we are seeking. Our objective should remain consistent, and all Communist attempts to move from the specific issues at hand to abstract issues should be blocked. Abstract discussion in the plenary sessions should be avoided, and our specific objectives and our, position on the specific issues should be clearly and continuously stated.

Since the Communists have historically chosen to clothe their negotiators in military uniform for negotiations with the free world, there is a need to develop within the U.S. military establishment a group of officers trained in the techniques of negotiating with the Communists. There already exists within the services a body of officers trained in the general area of international relations in support of various intelligence and foreign area specialty programs. Consideration should be given to creating a DOD training course, in coordination with the State Department, to prepare selected officers in the specifics of negotiating tactics and the particulars of negotiating with Communist representatives. The stakes are too high in these types of confrontations to continue to use hastily thrown together groups of officers in the hope that their general knowledge and individual high motivation will overcome their lack of thorough preparation and training in the art of negotiation. The Communist delegates are all carefully trained, experienced negotiators, who have spent long months and even years in painstaking preparation for their roles. We can afford to do no less.

Since the Second World War we have amassed a considerable body of knowledge and experience about how to negotiate with Communists. Therefore, the information needed exists to form a solid foundation for a concentrated training program to prepare selected individuals, both in the military and other governmental agencies, to meet and defeat this enemy at the bargaining table.

American Embassy School of Chinese Language
and Area Studies Taichung, Taiwan

Notes

1. Full title: The Agreement for Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Viet Nam; With Four Protocols, signed 28 January 1973 in Paris by representatives of the United States of America, the Republic of Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam.

2. U.S. Delegation to the Four Party Joint Military Team Yearbook, April 1974, Saigon-Republic of Vietnam, Foreword.

3. Henry A. Kissinger, "The Viet Nam Negotiations," Foreign Affairs, January 1969, p. 211.

4. C. Turner Joy, How Communists Negotiate (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955), p. 10.

5.U.S. note delivered to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Embassy in Paris on 21 July 1973, p. 1.

6. DRV translation—minutes of FPJMT meeting, 15 May 1973, p. 1.

7. Joy, p. 130.

8. Point Four of FPJMT Minute of Agreement signed 3 May 1973 at Tan Son Nhut, p. 1.

9. Joy, p. 39.

10. Fred Charles Ikle, How Nations Negotiate (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 123.

11. Point Four of Agreement Approved by the Delegations to the FPJMT on the Examination of the Burned Bag Involved in the Incident Occurring on the U.S. Aircraft During the 8 June 1973 Liaison Flight and the Return from the Said Aircraft to the Headquarters of the DRV Delegation and the PRG Military Delegation; prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Vo Tho Son, Chief of the PRG RSVN Military Delegation, Host of the Session, 11 June 1973, p. 1.

12. William W. Tombaugh, "Some Thoughts on Negotiating with the North Vietnamese," The National Security Affairs Forum, The National War College, Spring/Summer 1975, p. 57.

13. U.S. Delegation Four Party Joint Military Team History, 31 March-31 December 1973, Saigon-Republic of Vietnam, 28 June 1974, p. 29.

Lieutenant Colonel Karl P. Piotrowski, USA, (M.S. in International Relations, Indiana State University), is an Army Engineer and member of the Foreign Area (China) Officers Specialty Program and presently a Chinese language student at the State Department's School of Chinese Language and Area Studies, Taichung, Taiwan. He has served in various command and staff positions in Germany, Vietnam, and the United States. Lieutenant Colonel Piotrowski is a graduate of the Armed Forces Staff College.

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