Attack & Talk

Hardly had the U.S. sat down again at the peace talks in Geneva last week, on the hopeful assumption that a cease-fire was at last in effect in Laos, when the news arrived from Ban Hat Bo, a village near the Mekong River in central Laos. After a heavy mortar barrage that lasted two hours, 1,000 Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers had attacked to a frenzied blowing of bugles. The Ban Hat Bo garrison fled, along with their five U.S. military advisers. One of them noted bitterly that the Communist assault, with its tooting bugles and the human-wave technique, was "Korea all over again."

Optimists had predicted that the Royal Laotian Army, after it fell back from Padong a week earlier, would now be able to consolidate its hold on stronger positions and stop the Communist drive. The truth was that morale was so badly shattered that the army probably could not win a battle anywhere in Laos. The Pathet Lao claimed to hold "four-fifths of Laos" (a better estimate: about half), and it seemed determined to keep gobbling up more while talking peace at Geneva.

The one condition that the U.S. had attached to its participation in the 14-nation Geneva conference was an effective ceasefire. But with Ban Hat Bo, the U.S. seemed to have abandoned even that feeble condition, offering the somewhat lame excuse that otherwise "the pace of events might pass us by." U.S. Delegate Averell Harriman charged that two companies of Viet Minh troops had participated in the earlier attack on Padong, and again asked Russia's Andrei Gromyko to approve a Canadian plan to dispatch helicopters and light planes to the International Control Commission so that it could carry out its assignment of policing the ceasefire. In the absence of instruction and equipment, the I.C.C. had not budged from its headquarters in Vientiane. In reply, Gromyko was almost insolent. He saw no need for additional equipment for the I.C.C., and he and Red China's Foreign Minister Marshal Chen Yi took turns denouncing the U.S. for "provoking" new attacks. Instead, Gromyko proposed that the conference move on to other matters. "One cannot sit indefinitely on the shores of Lake Geneva counting the swans," he complained.

The slight hope that still remained for some agreement rested on a weekend meeting between the key Laotian princes in Zurich. Up from Nice, where he has been sunning himself, came the U.S.'s favorite Premier, Prince Boun Oum. From Geneva, looking as relaxed as a pair of tourists, came Russia's favorite Premier, "neutralist" Prince Souvanna Phouma, and his brother, "Red Prince" Souphanou-vong, who commands the Pathet Lao. Prince Souvanna greeted his rival warmly and talked in friendly style about getting together on a "broad-based coalition government." The way things were going back home, one diplomat cracked, "Boun Oum will be lucky to get the Education Ministry." After two days, about the only thing the princes could get together on was that they would keep amiable King Savang Vatthana as a figurehead monarch. "The King is sacred to us," said the Red Prince piously.

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