The Lavelle Case

Rules have been our way of life out there. If I or any other commander picks and chooses among the rules, it will unravel in a way that you will never be able to control. A lot of these rules looked silly to many of the men. In a military, in a purely military sense, they appear silly, but they must be--if you are going to hold it together--they must be followed.

So testified General Creighton Abrams last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was examining behind closed doors the campaign against Hanoi carried on for a time by Air Force General John D. Lavelle. Last spring Lavelle was recalled from his command of all Air Force activity in Southeast Asia and demoted for conducting 28 raids against North Vietnamese airfields and radar sites between November 1971 and March 1972. The raids were in clear violation of the White House rules then in force on bombing North Viet Nam, and came at a period when the Administration was engaged in delicate peace negotiations with Hanoi.

Agony. Abrams, who is now awaiting confirmation as Army Chief of Staff, was then commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam. His small dissertation on following orders revealed anew the agony and ambiguity faced by the professional soldier of the long Viet Nam War, in which, as General William Westmoreland once complained, so often the U.S. commander has had to fight with one hand tied behind his back.

On his own, Lavelle loosed that hand, and the details of how he did it began to emerge in the hearings and the partially censored text of them that was released. The sum of the testimony seemed to exonerate Abrams or any higher officers of complicity in Lavelle's misdeeds; it also illuminated the baffling technology of the war and provided a classic case study of a bureaucracy warped to serve a devious purpose. To understand Lavelle's case, it is necessary first to understand the regulations governing the air war that he inherited when he arrived in Saigon to take command of the Seventh Air Force in August of last year.

Those regulations had first been devised by the Johnson Administration at the time of the bombing halt, and were carried forward and amended by President Nixon. Reconnaissance overflights of North Viet Nam would continue, and armed escort fighter-bombers would accompany the unarmed photographic craft simply for protection. The rules of self-defense were that the planes could not open fire or drop their bombs unless they were 1) fired on by anti-aircraft emplacements, 2) engaged by MIG fighters in the air or 3) threatened by surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. Pilots could readily tell when they were in danger from SAMs because an indicator on their control panel would automatically light up when a SAM'S tracking radar locked onto their planes. Any of these three conditions entitled pilots to take "protective reaction" and loose their ordnance against the enemy.

Beginning in November 1971, Lavelle began to send his pilots North on "planned protective reaction" strikes against installations that Lavelle felt threatened the safety of his crews simply by their existence. The phrase is, of course, an Orwellian contradiction in terms, and the actions were clearly against regulations. To justify and conceal that fact, an entire double-accounting system grew up. Sergeant Lonnie Franks, who first blew the whistle on Lavelle, claimed that he and 200 other officers and enlisted men often made out and passed along two sets of reports on unauthorized missions. One was truthful, and was filed; the other invented one of the three justifying hostile actions for a legitimate protective reaction strike, and that was forwarded on to the Pentagon. Just who and how many were involved in the falsification of the reports remains to be explored this week as the hearings continue.

While not denying the essential charges against him, Lavelle offered basically two defenses. One was that since the original formulation of the rules of engagement in 1968, Hanoi had greatly increased the sophistication of its air defenses. For years Hanoi had utilized --in addition to the SAM-linked radar --a countrywide Ground Clearance Intercept system similar to U.S. commercial radar for ground control of aircraft. At the time of his command, U.S. planes could detect the local SAM radar, but few if any were equipped to detect tracking by the GCI radar system (most are now). In any case, if that radar was working properly, most U.S. planes would be picked up and monitored long before crossing the DMZ. Beginning in mid-December 1971, Hanoi "netted" this radar into the lock-on radar capability of each local SAM site, alerting the SAM crews when a U.S. craft was coming within range. Indeed, Lavelle told the Senators, he lost planes and crews on two occasions when, without the SAM using its own radar, which U.S. pilots could detect, the general system guided missiles to kills. That, argued Lavelle, constituted sufficient rationale for planned strikes in the name of protective reaction. "The system was constantly activated against us," he said. When asked by a Senator if it was on this "that you build your case," Lavelle replied "Yes, sir." Yet Lavelle began his private raids about 40 days before the North Vietnamese melded the two radars.

Improper. Lavelle's second defense was even more curious. He claimed that he had never deliberately ordered his officers to falsify their reports on a regular basis. He admitted that in one instance he had told his staff that they could not report "no enemy reaction" as the pilot had done. After that, according to Lavelle, "the word apparently got distorted," and somehow the Air Force bureaucracy beneath him took it to be standard procedure to falsify reports on all subsequent staged "protective reaction" raids. He said that he never knew of the continued falsifications until confronted with them by Air Force Inspector General Lewis Wilson in March, after a letter from Lonnie Franks touched off an investigation.

Abrams, while clearly sympathetic to Lavelle's instincts as a fighting man, would not condone his actions. "He acted improperly," said Abrams, and "should have reported it." To emphasize the point, Abrams told of a questionable raid that he himself had authorized. On Jan. 5, 1972, Abrams gave Lavelle permission to go after a GCI installation in Moc Chau, which was controlling MIGS flying over Laos and North Viet Nam. After the strike, Abrams sent along full reports to Washington; two days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him that the strike had exceeded the rules. That, so far as Abrams was concerned, ended that kind of activity.

Back in June, when Lavelle had testified before a House committee, he implied that Abrams had known about his activities and, worse, had perhaps sanctioned them. But last week, under pinpoint questioning by Senate committee members, Lavelle admitted that he not only had never requested Abrams' authorization, but had never even told his superior his theory that the new radar setup called for a more liberal interpretation of the rules. That admission seemed to clear the way for Abrams' confirmation as Army Chief of Staff, but by no means answered all the questions of who else was involved in Lavelle's secret raids.

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