John Gunther Dean, the United States Ambassador in Cambodia, was rebuffed last spring when he proposed to Secretary of State Kissinger that an attempt be made to establish contact with a key insurgent leader to find out whether peace negotiations were possible, authoritative embassy sources said today. The sources said that Mr. Dean, who was new in Phnom Penh at the time but had already begun pushing for peace initiatives, recommended contact with Khieu Samphan, perhaps the leading figure in the insurgent movement. He is a deputy premier and defense minister in the insurgents’ government and commander in chief of the rebel armed forces. Secretary of State Kissinger rejected the proposal, the sources said, on the ground that the battlefield situation was going poorly at the time for the Phnom Penh government and that the United States would have been in a position of negotiating from weakness rather than strength. Long time observers note, however, that the situation has never been favorable for the Phnom Penh government since the war began in 1970.
The State Department did not mention the Dean proposal when it announced three days ago that Washington had made numerous attempts at negotiations with the insurgents, but had been rebuffed. The announcement was made at a news conference by Philip C. Habib, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who listed seven efforts since 1973. Mr. Habib was questioned by newsmen as to the seriousness of these efforts. He insisted they had been sincere and he rejected suggestions, made in recent news dispatches, that Mr. Kissinger was not enthusiastic about negotiations.
Mr. Kissinger’s critics have said that he lacks interest in peace talks because Cambodia is a small, inconsequential country, it is a losing situation for the United States and he does not want to be identified with defeats. It is also said that he does not want to expend the limited leverage he has on Peking in obtaining a Cambodian settlement that will be unsatisfactory for Washington in any case. The Dean episode sheds light on the apparent gap between the embassy here and public statements in Washington. President Ford and Mr. Kissinger, in an effort to persuade Congress to grant more military aid, have been saying that without the aid, the Phnom Penh government will fall within weeks, but that with the aid there is a chance of convincing the insurgents of the wisdom of a compromise settlement.
The embassy, according to sources inside it, believes that there is no possibility of a compromise and that the best that can be hoped for is little more than a negotiated surrender. This embassy assessment, based on conditions that have deteriorated since the insurgents began their offensive two months ago, is shared by virtually the entire diplomatic community. At the moment, this city of two million people is being kept alive solely by an American airlift because other supply routes have been cut by the insurgents. Even the airlift has been disrupted by enemy shelling of the airport.
Ambassador Dean, who is 49 years old, played a large part in arranging the coalition peace settlement in Laos, and when he arrived here he made the same efforts to lay the groundwork for a possible compromise in Cambodia. But, according to those familiar with his thinking, he has concluded that the same elements simply do not exist and the best that can be arranged is an orderly turnover of power to the Cambodian insurgents.
The Cambodian command has dismissed the commanding generals of two key units and replaced them with younger men in an apparently American‐inspired effort to inject new life into the faltering defenses of this capital. At the same time, General Chhim Chhuon, an adviser to President Lon Nol, was removed as head of the rear forces in Phnom Penh. But he retained his command of the main forces responsible for the city’s outer defenses. None of the changes was expected to have an effect on the war effort, which remained stalled on all fronts. In the northwest sector where government forces were seeking to knock out rocket positions, there was no significant contact with the rebels.
The rocket launchers, north of Tuol Leap, fired at least 40 rockets today at Pochentong Airport. Supply flights and international flights continued. An Air Cambodge jet arrived from Bangkok with foreign newsmen and departed with mainly Cambodian passengers. The capital was swept by false rumors that had President Lon Nol fleeing the country, the insurgents overrunning the airport and several embassles closing up entirely. The generals who were re placed in the command shuffle were Deng Layom, commander of the Seventh Division at Prek Phnou, 10 miles northwest of the capital, and Ros Proeng commander of the isolated garrison at Lovek, farther north. The new Seventh Division commander is Khy Hak, a young colonel promoted to general only two days ago. General Chhuon’s replacement as head of the rear guard defending the capital, is Gen. Yang Yok Hang, former head of the Selective Service.
North Vietnamese troops, which have stepped up coordinated attacks throughout the Central Highlands in the last few days, today overran a small district seat in Phú Bổn Province, the Saigon command announced. The sudden assault on the town, Thuận Man, fitted the pattern of the latest attacks, which seem aimed at cutting the Highlands’ main roads and isolating the region’s principal population centers and garrisons. The isolation of the Highlands — a Communist goal since the time of the Việt Minh war against the French — would put enormous strains on the resources of the hard‐pressed Saigon Government, obliging it to airlift supplies and munitions into it the region. Moving under a shelling attack, North Vietnamese troops appeared to have seized the Thuận Man district headquarters this morning in a little over an hour, scattering its Montagnard regional force and militia defenders.
By 9 in the morning, according to the command, a spotter plane reported the district headquarters in flames and government fighter bombers were called in to hit Communist positions just south and southwest of Thuận Man. The importance of the district is that it lies just off Route 14, the vital interior artery that links the towns of Buôn Ma Thuột, Pleiku and Kon Tum. In the last few months, when Route 14 has been temporarily cut, convoys have rolled from Buôn Ma Thuột and up a dirt road from Thuận Man to Phú Bổn capital and then back to the highway. This alternate route was closed by the capture of Thuận Man.
Yesterday the command reported that a large‐size North Vietnamese force overran a Montagnard militia post 17 miles north of the consequential district town of Buôn Hồ, roughly in the same area as Thuận Man. For several weeks, the North Vietnamese 320th Division has been reported taking ambush positions around Buôn Hồ, with the evident intention of halting movement on route 14.
Even before the attacks, Route 14 had not been a safe road, in part because Montagnard dissidents—mostly deserters from the government side —had been shooting up buses, jeeps and other vehicles. This festering, Montagnard rebellion is only one mark of the Saigon Government’s weakening hold on the Highlanders’ loyalties. In numerous engagements in the Highlands in the last year, the Montagnards, who were once indulgently treated by the Americans, have not fought well.
It was not clear tonight whether the attacks north of Buôn Hồ had succeeded in halting movement on Route 14. Farther north, to the west of the same highway, between Pleiku and Kon Tum, North Vietnamese units were reported to have assaulted the militia base of Plei Mrong for the second straight day. In a series of small sabotage and ground attacks, the North Vietnamese have already blown up a number of bridges on the two roads leading out of the Highlands to the coast. Western military sources said today that nine bridges and culverts had been destroyed on Route 19, which winds up from the flat ricelands of Bình Định Province to the rolling, forested highlands.
On the other end of Route 19, east of Lê Trung district capital, the Saigon command has reported Communist shelling and ground attacks. Also the big air base at Phú Cát in Bình Định Province was reported hit by rockets for the second time since the Communist Highlands campaign began to unfold five days ago. The other road leading out of the Highlands is Route 21, which drops from the plantation country around Buôn Ma Thuột to Ninh Hòa on the coast. From different accounts, two bridges seem still to be out on Route 21, where the North Vietnamese 25th Independent Regiment is operating.
U.N. Security Council members failed again to agree on the text of a resolution aimed at the resumption of Cyprus peace talks, and a scheduled meeting of the 15-nation body was canceled. A spokesman said members. would reconvene for further private talks on Monday. The council has been meeting sporadically since February 20 in an attempt to get the Greek and Turkish Cypriots back to the negotiating table.
A Roman Catholic college student was shot to death and his wife seriously wounded by two gunmen who knocked at the couple’s Belfast home just before they were to leave for a wedding. Police said Michael Adamson, 23, an art student at Queen’s University, was shot when he opened his front door. Bullets struck his wife, Geraldine, 22, in the head and leg. The Adamsons’ 3-year-old daughter was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom at the time, police said.
An unidentified 20‐year‐old youth died in Lisbon’s Sao José Hospital today after a political rally last night in nearby Setúbal produced one of the worst outbreaks of violence since the overthrow of the rightist regime last April 25. With one dead and 19 injured after hundreds of extreme leftists tried to stop a meeting of the centrist Popular Democratic party, nervousness increased about Portugal’s ability to go through with elections April 12, the first free voting in close to 50 years. The embittered Popular Democrats, one of the major moderate groups in the country, charged that “there has been a recent increase in the wave of terror and hatred aimed at establishing a domination that could never be achieved by elections.”
Scattered clashes between political extremists and hit-and-run raids by neo-Fascists are tending to become everyday occurrences in Rome, and the city of three million people is worried.
The World Bank, a major source of aid for agriculture in developing countries, announced that it plans to double its annual investment by 1979 to help the poorest people in rural areas to improve food productivity. Its investment would grow from about $500 million to $1 billion a year. The bank said that part of the funds would come from contributions of the International Development Association and part from the bank, which raises funds through traditional capital markets.
The first “United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace” was proclaimed on International Women’s Day during the International Women’s Year.
Secretary of State Kissinger arrived in the Egyptian resort town of Aswan early today to confer with President Anwar el‐Sadat on translating Egypt’s general desire for a new Sinai agreement into specific terms acceptable to Israel. The Air Force 707 jet landed at 1:30 AM carrying Mr. Kissinger and his top Middle East aides, formally beginning Mr. Kissinger’s latest efforts at “shuttle diplomacy.” Mr. Kissinger was greeted after a five‐hour flight from Brussels by Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy. Talks between Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Sadat are to take place later in the day, with the Secretary of State expecting to receive from Mr. Sadat a more detailed proposal on a new Egyptian‐Israeli accord than has up to now been put forward by Egypt in preliminary diplomatic reconnoitering by Mr. Kissinger.
Secretary of State Kissinger began his latest round of “shuttle diplomacy” today by holding an extensive and detailed discussion with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt that produced precise ideas on how to bring about a new Sinai agreement between Egypt and Israel. Nevertheless, the gap between the two countries seemed still to be wide. Mr. Sadat said at a news conference that he believed Mr. Kissinger’s effort would be “very hard,” tougher than the previous Israeli-Egyptian negotiations. Mr. Kissinger said at the same news conference that he remained convinced “progress is possible”.
The survivor of a Palestinian group that attacked a seafront hotel here said today that the guerrillas had been trained in Syria and had embarked on their mission from Lebanon. The Arab, identified as Moussa Gumah, 23, a Bedouin from near Beersheba, was the only member of the eight‐man squad that survived. In all, 18 persons, including the Arabs, were known killed in the attack. Mr. Gumah, who was wounded in the head, was interviewed by newsmen. Two crewmen of the captured mother ship that had dropped the marauders 30 miles offshore and another guerrilla who had remained aboard also were introduced. Mr. Gumah said he had been a member of the Al Fatah organization since 1970 and had undergone training in Latakia in Syria before moving to Lebanon.
President Hafez al-Assad offered today to unify Syria’s political and military commands with those of the Palestinian guerrilla movement “as a means to consolidate the Palestinian struggle.”
Saudi Arabian oil production in February averaged 6.5 million barrels daily, declining to the same level as was reached in late 1972, the Middle East Economic Survey reported here today.
The Foreign Minister of Bahrain has questioned the future of the American presence here, saying continue use of naval facilities would depend on the United States attitude toward the Arab cause in the Middle East.
West Germany has asked South Yemen for information about five West German anarchists flown to Aden in exchange for the life of West Berlin politician Peter Lorenz. A Bonn spokesman said his government wanted to verify a statement by the South Yemeni Embassy in East Berlin that said the anarchists had been granted only a temporary haven in Aden at the special request of Bonn. The statement said the anarchists had now been asked to leave. The Aden Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said the anarchists were free to leave any time they wished — it did not say they had been asked to leave. A Yemeni statement, reported by the East German press agency tonight, said that a “campaign of slander” against the leftist Government of Southern Yemen by “reactionary circles in West Germany” led to the decision to order the prisoners to leave.
Fires and earthquakes killed 15 Iranians and injured more than 200 in different parts of the country, authorities reported. A hospital fire at Rasht on the Caspian Sea killed five patients, and earthquakes in BandarAbass on the Persian Gulf took seven lives and injured 200, officials said. A huge blaze in Tehran killed three persons, injured six and heavily damaged the ancient bazaar where thousands of Iranians were shopping, officials said.
President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed of India told the new United States Ambassador, William B. Saxbe, today that the United States decision to lift an arms embargo on Pakistan and India, aiding mainly Pakistan, had “cast a shadow” on efforts to ease tensions in the area.
Two years after Muslim insurgents made their first coordinated attacks on government outposts in the southern Philippines, the martial‐law government of President Ferdinand E. Marcos finds itself mired in a nasty guerrilla struggle in which the chances of either a negotiated settlement or a military solution seem slight. When the fighting broke out the government was in a position to put only seven combat battalions into the field, no more than 3,500 troops. Since then, it has committed five times that number. The insurgents, meanwhile, have killed at least 1,750 troops and have wounded more than 5,200 — which means that the number of military casualties the insurgents have inflicted is at least twice the size of the force they originally faced. Government forces are now thinly stretched over the troubled areas of western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, where the total rebel strength is officially estimated at 16,000 armed men. Unofficial estimates put the rebel force as high as 20,000.
The Royal Canadian Mint announces a branch opening in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Mexico is looking for foreign bidders to help build the longest aqueduct ever attempted in that nation, an 80-mile pipeline to carry Colorado River water to Tijuana. Governor Milton Castellanos said the need for an adequate water supply must be met before Tijuana can be developed properly.
The Cuban Family Code, which decreed equality between husbands and wives, went into effect.
Three Americans jailed in Cuba on narcotics charges were released before their prison terms expired and quietly returned to the United States earlier this week, the State Department said. The three were identified as Roger W. Sanderson, 29, of Euclid, Ohio; David G. Libke, 28, of Streator, Ill, and Robert Guy Davis, 36, of Palo Alto, Calif. Sanderson was arrested when his yacht went aground on the Cuban coast in 1972 and the other two when their yacht was wrecked in 1973. Ten U.S. prisoners have been released since October.There are 25 others in Cuban jails, eight of them on political charges.
The Brazilian Bar Association will formally protest to the Government against the torture while under detention of Roberto Camargo, a lawyer, it was announced here today. The president of the bar association, José Ribeiro de Castro Filho, said that he Would ask for a meeting with the Minister of Justice next week to present a report on torture that Mr. Camargo said he had undergone. Mr. Camargo was arrested February 28 and released Tuesday. In a meeting with the Federal Council of the association yesterday, he said that his tortures had included beatings and electric shocks. At the same meeting, Mr. Castro Filho denounced the illegal detention of another lawyer, Jayme Amorim de Miranda, who is still missing. It was announced that a third lawyer, Manuel Mota Fonseca, was arrested in his office on February 27.
Army General Herman Brady, 54, became the new defense minister in Chile’s military government, replacing General Oscar Bonilla, who died last week in a helicopter crash. Brady, who was chief of staff of the defense command, is the third defense minister in the military government that took power in a coup against the late President Salvador Allende.
Ethiopia’s miltary revolution has created a new class — the fallen aristocrats. The revolution has scattered some members of the world’s last feudal elite. Some have gone into exile, some have been imprisoned, some have been executed and some have retreated to the hills to fight. Some, perhaps the saddest, are reduced to poverty. In interviews, they talk of past luxury and power, and the difficulty of finding jobs. Members of families that sired princes and owned whole river valleys tell how it feels, to face straitened circumstances. They asked that their names be withheld. The fallen aristocrats put their number between 1,000 and 3.000, in a total population of 26.5 million. Some are related to former Emperor Haile Selassie, but precise relationships often are obscured in a thicket of marriages, remarriages, half-brothers and cousins.
An African theologian, Father Desmond Tutu, has been elected Anglican dean of Johannesburg — the first black to hold the post. He will succeed the Right. Rev. Timothy Bavin, who was elected bishop of the diocese last September. The election of Father Tutu, 44, was regarded as showing the increasing role of black clergymen within the Anglican hierarchy in South Africa.
Helicopters today began transferring civilian scientists and part of the crew from the crippled United States icebreaker Glacier, wedged in frozen seas near Antarctica, a United States Embassy spokesman reported. At Christchurch, New Zealand, the Coast Guard reported that the operation was being hampered by a snowstorm and subfreezing temperatures. It said that three sea cadets from Long Beach, California, had been flown from the Glacier to another United States icebreaker, the Burton Island, cruising in open seas in the area. The 309‐foot, 8,449‐ton Glacier broke a propeller and became trapped in ice up to 25 feet thick while on a mission to rescue an Argentine icebreaker the General San Martin, which had engine trouble. Both vessels were engaged in scientific soundings in the Weddell Sea southeast of Argentina. The United States Embassy spokesman said that it had been decided to partly evacuate the Glacier because the vessel lacked sufficient food and fuel to maintain all 226 persons aboard.
Former Governor Ronald Reagan of California took a firm stand against President Ford, Vice President Rockefeller and others who called last week for a Republican party broad enough to include moderates and liberals as well as conservatives in a speech at the closing session of the Republican leadership conference in Washington. He repeatedly brought the crowd of more than 2,000 grass-roots party leaders to its feet with his old-time Republican religion — a sermon on the desirability of a balanced budget, strong national defense, individual freedom and domestic law and order. “A political party cannot be all things to all people,” the California conservative said in a speech to the closing session of the Republican leadership conference. “It cannot compromise its fundamental beliefs for political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. It is not a social club or fraternity engaged in intramural contests to accumulate trophies on the mantel over the fireplace.” The significance of Mr. Reagan’s speech lay not so much in what he said; his message differed but little from the one he has been delivering across the country in recent months. But it took on new significance as a rebuttal to Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller.
Nearly eight of every 10 American adults oppose the Ford Admonistration’s proposal to provide South Vietnam and Cambodia an additional $522 miilion in military aid, according to a recent Gallup poll.
A compromise energy-economic program will be completed by May 1, Treasury Secretary William E. Simon predicted. Simon said the Ford Administration was having many “conversations and consultations concerning the program proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee and he said he expected a compromise to be reached by May 1. Simon appeared on an ABC news special with Rep. Al Ullman (D-Oregon), chairman of the House panel, and Senator Dale Bumpers (D-Arkansas). Ullman did not comment on Simon’s prediction. Bumpers opposed the tax cut proposals of both the committee and the Administration.
WIN has lost. The “Whip Inflation Now” (WIN) program, that had been launched on October 8, 1974, by the Citizens Action Committee to Fight Inflation”, was brought to an end by the same Committee. WIN, a catch‐phrase heavily promoted by President Ford, at whose behest the committee was set up last fall, soon became the butt of many jokes despite Mr. Ford’s appearance on television with a red‐and-white WIN button. “As an acronym, it is dead and God bless it,” announced Sylvia Porter, the economics columnist who heads the committee, after its third full meeting today. Mrs. Porter announced that the committee was shifting its emphasis from inflation in general to energy conservation in particular. “Energy conservation, through the voluntary cooperation of individuals, business, labor organizations, will be the first priority” of the committee, she said.
Political candidates and their contributing committees had more than $20 million left over at the end of last year. One reason for the large surplus appeared to be the broad collapse of Republican election efforts in 1974, which let many Democratic candidates coast to victory and keep their money in the bank. The figures were compiled by the foundation-funded National Information Center on Political Finance from reports by federal office-seekers, the parties and the special interest committees that support them.
In a move aimed at banning flights of the current model of the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde in the United States, Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) said he would introduce a bill Monday which would force supersonic jetliners to meet U.S. noise standards in effect now for subsonic aircraft. Proxmire’s plans were prompted by a recommendation from the Federal Aviation Administration that British Airways and Air France each be allowed to begin flying three Concordes a day into New York and Washington, D.C., next year.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation mailed what some agents considered an “unsavory” tape recording made from an electronic bug to Coretta King to frighten her husband, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., into halting his criticism of the bureau, according to a former high official of the agency. The mailing of the tape to Mrs. King was part of nearly a decade of “harassment” of the late civil rights leader by the bureau, several former agents and officials say.
Thousands of black civil rights marchers, remembering a not-so-peaceful day 10 years ago, walked solemnly across the Alabama River bridge in Selma today in what the widow of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a continuing great struggle for liberation.”
The Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army reportedly helped the Washington, D.C., police department develop a surveillance system that produced a 20,000-name index file, which now is being destroyed. The police requested CIA help after the 1968 Washington riots and the Washington Post reported that $148,000 had been spent since 1968 to compile data on antiwar and other protest groups and leaders. CIA agents traveled in police patrol cars and the CIA provided the police with cars, radios, and a secret CIA radio frequency, it was reported.
Led by an all-female marching band, about 2,500 men and women paraded down Fifth Avenue in New York on International Women’s Day. They carried placards and banners. calling for equal pay for women and expressing solidarity with women around the world. Other demands included equal employment opportunities, universal child care, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, civil rights for lesbians, and an end to militarism. The line of march extended for several blocks, tying up traffic on intersecting streets and drawing horn blasts from irate motorists. One male dissenter carried a sign reading. “Ask not what my husband can do for me, but what I can do for my husband.”
New York telephone company executives, suspicious of arson in a rash of fires that knocked out thousands of phones in the city, said the company had stepped up security precautions statewide. Company representatives met with fire and police department officials and FBI agents to discuss the series of four fires, as well as the sabotaging of a fire sprinkler system in a company garage in nearby Westchester County.
Women may be excluded from membership in the United States Jaycees, a U.S. appeals court ruled. The three-judge court ruled unanimously that a lower court had “no power to grant an injunction prohibiting the discriminatory membership policies” even though the organization received federal funds and tax exemptions. The ruling reversed a decision barring the national Jaycees from revoking the charter of the New York City Jaycees, which decided to accept women despite the national organization’s male-only policy.
Three deaths and seven illnesses have been traced to a salt shaker that contained sodium nitrite instead of salt, Chicago Board of Health officials said. The salt shaker belonged to the first victim, Mrs. Charles Edwards, who died on February 7 of what was first thought to be a heart attack but turned out to be sodium nitrite poisoning After Mrs. Edwards’ death, her daughter took some of her mother’s belongings, including the salt shaker, across the street to a woman who ran a rooming house. The rooming house operator and one of her roomers subsequently died, and seven others who ate there became ill before the salt shaker was found to contain sodium nitrite. Authorities were still trying to find out how the sodium nitrite got into the salt shaker.
The trustees of Yale University yesterday formally adopted a policy calling for suspension or expulsion for “wilfull and persistent” disruption of free speech at the university.
22nd ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament: North Carolina beats North Carolina State, 70–66.
Born:
Brett Conway, NFL kicker (Washington Redskins, Oakland Raiders, New York Jets, New York Giants, Cleveland Browns), in Atlanta, Georgia.
Chris Gizzi, NFL linebacker (Green Bay Packers), in Brunswick, Ohio.
Billy Austin, NFL defensive back (Indianapolis Colts), in Washington, District of Columbia.
Kenny Wheaton, NFL defensive back (Dallas Cowboys), in Phoenix, Arizona.
Jesús Peña, Dominican MLB pitcher (Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox), in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Peggy Zina [Panagiota-Calliope Chrysicopoulou], Greek pop and modern laika singer, and piano player, in Athens, Greece.
Died:
George Stevens, 70, American film director (“A Place In The Sun”; “Giant”; “Swing Time”; “Gunga Din”), and winner of two Academy Awards for “A Place in the Sun” and “Giant”, of a heart attack.
History Diaries 