Special Section: WHITE HOUSE YEARS: PART 2 THE AGONY OF VIETNAM

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that he established, with Nixon's encouragement, to bypass the regular bureaucracies. One such channel was set up in Paris to deal secretly with North Vietnamese negotiators. Initially he dealt with Xuan Thuy, Hanoi's chief negotiator at the official plenary peace talks on Avenue Kleber. On one occasion, Xuan Thuy argued that hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were in South Viet Nam through the "free choice" of the local population. Kissinger found this so absurd that, he writes, "I jokingly invited him to Harvard to teach a seminar on Marxism and Leninism after the war. He declined, saying that Marxism-Leninism was not for export—which will come as remarkable news to all the inhabitants of Indochina today." In any event, Kissinger soon learned that Xuan Thuy was a functionary, not a policymaker. The man he had to talk to was Le Duc Tho, who was clearly Hanoi's top representative in Paris.

Le Duc Tho and I held three secret meetings between Feb. 21 and April 4, 1970. On a weekend or holiday, to provide better cover, I would leave Washington on one of the presidential fleet of Boeing 707s. It would land at Avord, a French air force base in central France. My plane would touch down just long enough to let me off; it would then proceed to Frankfurt's Rhein-Main Airport. I would have transferred meanwhile to a Mystère 20 executive jet belonging to President Pompidou for the flight to Villacoublay Airport, a field for private airplanes near Paris.

One meeting was nearly aborted by a technical malfunction. Because the pilots did not know whether Avord had the equipment for repairs, the plane had to go to Germany, but no one there knew of our impending arrival, much less of our mission or predicament. Fortunately, we established contact from the airplane with General Vernon Walters, our defense attache in Paris, in a radio hookup through Washington. Walters went to the Elysee Palace, where President Pompidou himself authorized his jet to meet my plane in Frankfurt.

I landed in a dark corner of the Rhein-Main airfield; Pompidou's jet was already waiting, and we were airborne again within ten minutes of landing. Walters claimed that West German cooperation was speeded up by their belief, encouraged by him, that the passenger was a secret girlfriend of Pompidou's. I have often wondered why he thought the waiting ground personnel could have been fooled about the sex of the passenger.

In Paris General Walters would lead me to an unmarked rented Citroën. Walters would drive us to his apartment building in the Neuilly section of Paris, where he smuggled us by elevator from the underground garage. As far as his housekeeper was concerned, I was a visiting American general named Harold A. Kirschman. We would proceed the next day to a house at 11 Rue Darthe in Choisy-le-Roi on the outskirts of Paris.

At the first meeting, Xuan Thuy greeted me and led me into the living room to meet the man whose conceit it was to use the title of Special Adviser to Xuan Thuy, although as a member of the governing Politburo he outranked him by several levels. Le Duc Tho's large luminous eyes only rarely revealed the fanaticism that had induced him as a boy of 16 to join the anti-French Communist guerrillas. It was our misfortune that his cause should be to break our will and to establish Hanoi's rule over