Through a Glass, Darkly

Journalists and diplomats trying to make sense of it were already calling China's invasion of Viet Nam the "Great Inscrutable War." All things considered, it was probably the most bedeviling and worst-reported major conflict in recent history. The result: misinformation (mostly on casualty figures), unbridled speculation and wild surmise. Items:

P:On the third day of the invasion, it was falsely reported that the Chinese forces were already preparing to pull back.

P:On the sixth day, Chinese troops were erroneously said to have captured the key provincial capital of Lang Son.

P:On the seventh day, reports from Bangkok said that China had launched a series of air strikes against military depots near Haiphong, where Soviet ships were unloading supplies. Officials in Peking and Washington discredited the report within hours, but not before it had hit front pages around the world and had thus been woven whole cloth into the war's tapestry of mystification and misinformation.

No Western newsmen were allowed to the war zone from the Chinese side, and only a very few approached it through Viet Nam. Only two U.S. news organizations, United Press International and CBS-TV, managed to get near the front for a short time. They accompanied U.S. Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman on an escorted excursion from Hanoi to Lang Son, and disproved the report that it had fallen to the Chinese.

Otherwise, diplomats and news agencies were largely dependent on the self-serving communiques issued by Hanoi radio and the official Vietnamese party newspaper Nhan Dan, on the one hand, and the official Chinese news agency, Hsinhua, on the other. Hsinhua was particularly par simonious, limiting itself mostly to unenlightening announcements that "fighting was continuing." Consequently, most information and judgments came from other Asian capitals far from the front and from Washington, which provided bird's-eye data gleaned by reconnaissance satellites.

Tokyo was a fertile source, thanks to fiercely competitive Japanese correspondents based in Peking and Hanoi, including those of Communist organs favored by the regimes. Isao Takano, 35, Hanoi correspondent for Japan's Communist daily Akahata, became the war's first press casualty last week when he was killed by a Chinese sniper's bullet at Lang Son. The Kyodo news agency first reported the original invasion. Tokyo's military sources also proved useful in tracing Soviet naval movements in the area.

Thailand's capital, Bangkok, offered another neutral porthole for viewing the war-from 700 miles away. In the tradition of Lisbon in World War II and Beirut through the course of Middle East conflicts, Bangkok is a marketplace of intelligence and Asia's foremost rumor mill. In hopes of assembling a credible montage, diplomats and newsmen sifted through a cacophony of refugee reports, propaganda releases and tidbits of hearsay from stateless businessmen and drifters. The results were sometimes useful, but often not. Besides the Haiphong bombing, Bangkok "sources" served up the war's next most misleading report: the withdrawal of China's troops on Feb. 19 after just three days of war--and 14 days before it actually happened.

After three weeks, the distant war seemed all the more remote for being seen only through a frosted glass of frustration, darkly. Said Richard C. Wald, senior vice president of ABC News: "We are sort of left waiting for a Richard Harding Davis to emerge a couple of months from now and tell us what happened."

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