Word: laird
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Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird told a stormy session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday that the United States has not escalated air strikes over North Vietnam...
...search-and-rescue missions into North Viet Nam already existed, and a number of similar raids had been carried out in enemy-held areas of South Viet Nam over the years. (Significantly, none of them had ever found a single live prisoner either, but the omen was discounted.) Eventually, Laird told the President that his intelligence people had recommended a P.O.W. camp at Son Tay as a likely target for search and rescue. Nixon was enthusiastic. On Aug. 11 he gave a go-ahead for planning the operation without actually authorizing the mission. The Pentagon assigned Brigadier General LeRoy Manor...
...President Nixon proposed "the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of war held by both sides." (Laird said last week that Saigon holds 35,000 P.O.W.s to the enemy's 3,000.) When that got no response, the U.S. turned again to the Ivory Coast alternative. Weather and moonlight conditions looked good for an assault either at the end of October or at the end of November. The weather worsened, so the October date was scratched. After a National Security Council meeting on Nov. 5, Laird stayed behind and told Nixon that it was time for a decision...
...raiders set off from Nakhon Phanom, a search-and-rescue base in Thailand. They approached their objective overland across Laos and mountainous inland North Viet Nam, a route that avoided the enemy's heaviest radar and antiaircraft defenses. When they returned emptyhanded, Nixon telephoned both Laird and Moorer. He had no regrets, he said; it had been a good plan, the right thing to do. If nothing else, the raid had clearly embarrassed Hanoi by pointing up the holes in the North Vietnamese air defenses...
...raiders came through virtually unscathed, Laird was not so lucky when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee early last week. The hearing room resounded with laughter when he told Chairman William Fulbright: "The intelligence in this mission was excellent." It was?but only up to the crucial point of whether or not prisoners were still at Son Tay. "Obviously the raid wasn't successful because of faulty intelligence," said Vice President Spiro Agnew from Palm Springs where he was golfing. Laird's only explanation was feeble: "We have not been able to develop a camera that sees through...