The US
Role in the Coup Against Sihanouk
By Charlie Clements
In Jan of 1970 I was a co-pilot/pilot in a C-130 cargo
plane flying out of Saigon. The mission we were assigned early one morning
in January required the entire crew of five to have TOP SECRET security
clearances. That was quite unusual as the C-130 is known as a lumbering
four-engine turbo- prop specifically designed for take-off and landing on short
unprepared runways. Except for moving nuclear weapons, which might be
threatened by a typhoon, which is the reason our crew had TS clearances, I had
never heard of any classified mission for a C-130 in the war, where I had been
flying there for eight months.
Early that morning, we picked up eight civilians in Saigon
and flew them to a rendezvous point in Cambodia, where we were met by two aging
MiG-17 fighters of Korean War vintage. Cambodia was a so-called neutral country
at the time and the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations. The MiGs escorted
us to the runway at Phnom Penh.
The eight men, who we assumed were diplomats, were picked up
in a black car, not a limousine. We waited on the tarmac eight hours,
occasionally cranking up our Auxiliary Power Unit to cool off the aircraft in
the blistering heat. When the passengers returned, we took them back to Saigon.
They never introduced themselves, said hello or goodbye, or ‘thank you for a
nice flight.’ If you have ever ridden in the back of a C-130, you might
understand why. It is extremely noisy, the seats are canvas webbing hung
from the walls, there is a relief tube for male passengers, but no
accommodation for female passengers. There is no air conditioning and no way
for anyone in the cockpit to communicate with passengers. It is also very
challenging for passengers to even communicate with each other.
Two days later in a bar in Saigon as young men will do I
boasted that I had recently participated in a diplomatic mission to a nearby
country. A man introduced as “Ski”, one of three with whom I was
drinking, appeared to be in his forties, immediately guffawed and said,
“You’re pretty damned naive, Clements, if you believe that diplomatic crap. I
had a team on your aircraft, which was arranging the overthrow of Prince
Sihanouk. When he goes to Paris for his annual medical consultation in 60 days,
a palace coup will leave a General named Lon Nol in power. Sixty days after
that we will be invited to invade Cambodia.” I was led to believe he was with
the CIA and just assumed his comments were the typical one-upsmanship, common
in war zones.
Almost 120 days later as I was shuttling plane loads of
combat ready American soldiers to a protrusion of Vietnam into Cambodia called
the Parrot’s Beak, sometimes described as the ‘end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail’, it
was clear the invasion predicted in that Saigon Bar in January was imminent. Flying over Cambodia to Phnom Penh I had noted
large parts of Cambodia looked like the moon and there was only one weapons
system that did that - B-52s. I had also heard rumors that B-52 pilots were
occasionally required to alter their flight logs after particularly sensitive
missions - I had no idea what those were, but began to imagine there were
missions over Cambodia.
I got angrier and angrier that day and by the end of our
crew day about 8 p.m., I decided, because I had a cold to declare myself DNIF
(Duties Not Including Flying), which pilots could do if they had a cold...and I
did. They found another co-pilot for that mission and I flew back to Taiwan
with my own crew the next day. When I got there, I asked to see my commander,
explained that I was getting angrier and angrier about everything I saw in SE
Asia/Vietnam and asked for a change of assignment any place else in the world.
I explained that there were several offices within the Pentagon where my skills
as an econometrician would be in demand.
Though I was a Distinguished Graduate of the Air Force
Academy (number two in my class) and a decorated pilot, on April 30, 1970
I refused to fly further missions in SE Asia.
The Air Force locked me up in a psychiatric ward for eight months and gave
me an honorable, but medical discharge (10% psychiatric).
Returning to Phnom Penh, 55-years later John McAuliff arranged
a dinner with five survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide. They were five of
only 64 men who survived that a college degree or higher, all had served as government
ministers as Cambodia slowly and painfully rebuilt their country. I asked if
any of them had known or heard of evidence of CIA involvement in the coup that
overthrew Prince Sihanouk. They said no, but to a person they also stated
categorically that General Lon Nol did NOT have the wherewithal to have been
able to do something like that on his own. Press accounts, some written from
Cambodia, indicate widespread suspicion that this was a CIA-engineered
coup. Since Sihanouk in attempting to
remain neutral, had not permitted U.S. bombing of the portion of the Ho Chi
Minh trail inside Cambodia, the major supply route for the North Vietnamese and
Viet Cong armies fighting in South Vietnam, it was strongly in the U.S.
interest to install the more U.S. friendly General Lon Nol, then Sihanouk’s
Prime Minister.
Most Americans were led to believe that the B-52 carpet
bombings in Cambodia began with the so-called ‘incursion’ (read invasion) in
May 1970. However, in 2000 after Bush was elected, but before his inauguration,
Bill Clinton traveled to Vietnam. In a gesture to aid in recovery of the
remains of both American and Vietnamese MIAs, he released the previously
classified IBM database of all the U.S. bombing missions of the war from 1964
to 1973 - described as the largest
database ever created. It revealed many, many bombing missions that the world
had no knowledge of, providing proof that the U.S. B-52’s had been carpet
bombing Cambodia since 1965.
As Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen wrote, “The total tonnage of
U.S. bombs dropped on Cambodia, at least in the range of 500,000 tons, possibly
far more, either equalled or far exceeded the tonnages that the U.S. dropped in
the entire Pacific Theater during World War Two (500,000 tons) and in the
Korean War (454,000).38 In per capita terms, the bombing of Cambodia exceeded
the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, and the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam
(but not that of South Vietnam or possibly, Laos)”
The articles below by Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen describe in some detail and with
maps what the database revealed:
Bombs
Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War (with maps) https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf
October 2006
Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and
the Cambodian Precedent
June 28, 2010
https://apjjf.org/taylor-owen/3380/article [see note 38
correcting bombing totals in Walrus]
Making More Enemies than We Kill? Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped
on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications
April 27, 2015
https://apjjf.org/ben-kiernan/4313
While our delegation was in Cambodia, I was very interested to
visit the Cambodia Mine Action Center, often referred to by its initials CMAC.
I served on the board of Physicians for Human Rights, one of six NGOs that
founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). The campaign was
catalyzed by a book written by PHR and Human Rights Watch, which suggested that
using extant methods de-mining it would take 10,000 years to clear Cambodia of
these heinous weapons. No human language has survived that long. Within eight
years we had an international treaty banning that weapon and because it was the
first arms control treaty led by civilians rather than by militaries, the
Campaign was awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. I was President of PHR at the
time and present with me at both the treaty signing in Ottawa and the Nobel
Peace Prize ceremony a week later in Oslo was Tun Channarath, a Cambodian who
lost his legs to an anti-personal mine. I was heartened to learn from the
Executive Director of CMAC that Tun was still alive and active in their work.
CMAC is not only pioneering new methods of mine detection such as mine sniffing
rats, but with Japan has developed new technologies such as using drones to map
minefields. They train people in demining techniques from all over the world
including Ukraine and Sudan.
The recent cut-off of USAID funding has slowed down, but
will not halt CMAC’s efforts at disarming the vast amounts of unexploded
munitions that continue to kill and maim decades after the conflict in which
they were deployed has ended.
More about my personal decision to refuse to fly further
missions in SE Asia and the consequences can also be found in the book I wrote Witness
to War, Bantam, 1984.
Charlie Clements
5/31/2025
Charlie’s zoom
presentation of the Cambodia coup story can be seen at 39:55 in the VPCC 50th
anniversary of peace webinar https://youtu.be/-oUamqY6D0Q
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