Files reveal extent of Nixon's secrets and lies on war in Cambodia

EVEN after Richard Nixon's secret war in Cambodia became known, the president persisted in deception, according to newly-declassified US government documents.

"Publicly, we say one thing," he told aides. "Actually, we do another."

The documents from the Nixon years shed light on the Vietnam War, the struggle with the Soviet Union for global influence and a president who tried not to let public and congressional opinion get in his way.

The release of some 50,000 pages of documents by the National Archives means about half the national security files from the Nixon era are now public.

On May 31 1970, a month after Nixon went on TV to defend the previously-secret US bombings and troop movements in Cambodia, asserting that he would not let his nation become "a pitiful, helpless giant", the president met his top military and national security aides at his Western White House in California.

Revelation of the operation had sparked protests and congressional action against what many politicians from both parties considered an illegal war. Nixon noted that Americans believed the Cambodian operation was "all but over", even as 14,000 troops were engaged across the border in a hunt for North Vietnamese operating there.

In a memo from the meeting marked "Eyes Only, Top Secret Sensitive", Nixon told his military men to continue doing what was necessary in Cambodia, but to say for public consumption that the US was merely providing support to South Vietnamese forces when necessary to protect US troops.

"That is what we will say publicly," he asserted. "But now, let's talk about what we will actually do."

He instructed: "I want you to put the air in there and not spare the horses. Do not withdraw for domestic reasons but only for military reasons.

"We have taken all the heat on this one."

He went on: "Just do it. Don't come back and ask permission each time."

The military chiefs, more than their civilian bosses, expressed worry about how the war was going.

"If the enemy is allowed to recover this time, we are through," said Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations who two months later would become chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff.

Nixon told his aides to plan offensive operations in neutral Laos, continue US air operations in Cambodia and work on a summer offensive in South Vietnam, saying: "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp."

The papers are also thick with minute aspects of Vietnam war-making and diplomacy. They show growing worries about the ability of the South Vietnamese government years before it fell but also seek encouragement wherever it could be found.

They also show concern that superpower rivalry would take a dangerous turn if events in the Middle East got out of hand.

The documents also touch on US actions through other foreign policy issues, including Israel's secretive nuclear programme, which quietly alarmed Washington.

To this day, Israel officially neither confirms nor denies its nuclear status. It has long been considered the only nation in the Middle East with atomic weapons.

"For a long time, the US kept secret its assessment of the status of the Israeli nuclear programme," said William Burr, senior analyst at the National Security Archives at George Washington University.