Word: conge
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...Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia suddenly became an intolerable threat to a reduced American presence in Viet Nam remains a mystery. How the destruction of antiaircraft installations in North Viet Nam will ensure the safety of departing U.S. troops is clearly open to critical debate. What is to be gained from a sixto eight-week "defensive" probe across the Cambodian border is at best fuzzy speculation, and miserably incapable of justifying the immediate cost in American lives and the potential costs of an Indochina...
...very start of the information-gathering process, there are inevitable limits. The subjectivity of intelligence agents can easily lead them to ask different questions and thus get differing answers from what is before them, whether the subject is a Viet Cong prisoner or a pile of captured documents. Hilsman argues that the intelligence pipeline is further bent because even good data gathered in the field pass through many channels before arriving at their destination. If the information was not digested, of course, it would be unmanageable. So at each step, it is scrutinized, reinterpreted, perhaps expanded, more often cut down...
...peasants are befuddled," a French businessman said in Phnom-Penh last week. "Prince Sihanouk had been increasingly and-Viet Cong. Now he joins with the Viet Cong to kill Cambodians. I strongly doubt that the peasants will support him, even if he were to return to a 'liberated zone' in the country." That appraisal is shared by many observers, Western and Cambodian. If it is accurate, it may mean a considerably longer life for the regime of Premier Lon Nol than seemed possible a short while...
Communist forces seem ubiquitous and unbeatable in the entire third of the country east of the Mekong River. Last week they launched a major thrust west of the Mekong as well, when a force of up to 600 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese seized the ferry crossing at Neak Luong, then drove up densely forested Route 1 to within 30 miles of Phnom-Penh...
Despite the apparent menace, however, there are no hard signs yet that the Communists really intend to attack the capital. Moreover, their successes are at least partly illusory. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces have been operating in small bands, occupying a town or blocking a road for a few days, then disappearing when challenged by sizable force. Still, Lon Nol is taking no chances...