South China Sea

network on computer digitization. I’d be afraid you’d descramble it in a couple of weeks.”

“We’ve been trying for months, Mr. Wray.”

“Call me Henry.” He turned to the two officers from the JDF. “How about infiltration of the Chongryun?” It was a large expatriate pro-North Korean organization in Japan that raised millions of yen for Pyongyang. Nearly ten percent of all North Korea’s urgently needed foreign exchange was from Korean workers’ remittances abroad.

“It and others,” the Japanese said. “Problem is, we have no idea how many North Koreans they are broadcasting to.”

Whatever the number of agents listening, the CIA and Japanese Intelligence knew that by now there must be a large organization of illegals, as well as those who had immigrant or visitor worker status, in the pay of Pyongyang. Should hostilities ever break out, either domestically in Japan or between Japan and North Korea, the Chongryun’s association of North Koreans and deep cover agents would come out en masse like ants from a nest to sow confusion aimed particularly at Japanese transport and communication networks.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Chinese invasion of Vietnam began at 0300 hours, the first crossings made on a four-mile front through a marshy area ten miles north of the Vietnamese town of Lang Son and on the left flank at the border town of Dong Dang. All three divisions used in the attack, about 41,000 PLA ChiCom regulars, had already traveled from Nanning in the Chengdu military region by rail to Pingxiang, near the Chinese-Vietnamese border. In the Vietnam War it had been a favorite staging area for NVA regulars to take possession of Chinese-shipped arms and munitions. Now, in this latest chapter of the long border battle between the two countries, Pingxiang once again became the jump-off point for one country’s invasion of the other. The Chinese forces were intent on overrunning the jungle-covered hills before Lang Son and the plains beyond, which ran down to the Red River delta and the Gulf of Tonkin seaport of Haiphong.

The Chinese were asked by the Secretary General of the U.N. “to disengage and withdraw immediately” from the border areas. But China, citing the “pirate actions of the Vietnamese imperialists” against a Chinese-owned oil rig and drill site in the South China Sea, insisted that Vietnam’s actions amounted to nothing less than “an act of war.”

The U.N. Secretary General’s office pointed out to Beijing that in fact both Chinese-U.S. venture sites were not within the two-hundred-mile economic zone of China. China disputed this, replying angrily that several joint Chinese-U.S. ventures in the Paracels were within two hundred miles of the coastline of the big Chinese island of Hainan, and that MV Chical 7, while beyond the two-hundred-mile zone, was historically owned by China, as Chinese fishermen a century ago had been there first to fish and to use the islands and reefs in the South China Sea for repairs and the like. “Furthermore,” a statement from Beijing added, if the “imperialist Vietnamese” did not remove their equipment and men from all the islands in the South China Sea, these would be seized by the PLA, as they “historically belong to the peace-loving Chinese people.”

Hanoi retorted that this “is typical of the warmongering imperialists in Beijing — who arrogantly aggrandize the territories by intimidation and threat”—and that if China did not recall its three divisions back to Chengdu, the Republic of Vietnam would have no alternative but to “repulse the Chinese with all available forces.”

Suddenly the President of the United States and his advisers, with help from the State Department’s China and Vietnam desks, realized an uncomfortable truth — the island dispute was centuries old, “like a fight between neighbors — the Hatfields and McCoys,” the President realized. Who had actually attacked whom was, in the final analysis, irrelevant. What was relevant was that the Chinese claim to own all the islands in the South China Sea was preposterous by any measure, and with the Chinese and Vietnamese on the brink of all-out war, the only consideration was how to stop it before it became general war in the Asian region. Because of this clear and present danger, and the catastrophic effect it would have on the U.S. trade-driven economy, the U.S. might have to intervene, albeit under the auspices of the U.N.

* * *

The Chinese attack south on Dong Dang with two divisions was led by General Wei. The other prong — an attack of one division, thirteen thousand men, on Lang Son — was led by General Wang. The assault on Dong Dang was made up almost exclusively of infantry brigades with one armored division leading the thrust south down the Pingxiang-Dong Dang road and railway. The road ran more or less parallel with the rail tracks, allowing Wei to move twice as many troops as would have been the norm on the road alone. Once Dong Dang fell, it was hoped by Wei that Wang’s forces on his left flank coming down east of him from Zhilang in China to Lang Son in Vietnam, a distance of about thirty miles, would be able to quickly sever the rail line running south from Lang Son to Hanoi, eighty miles away, thus cutting off the rail line the Vietnamese Army would need to rush reinforcements to the north. But the Vietnamese Army, already having explosive charges set at Ban Re, seventy-three miles north of Hanoi, blew both the rail line and the road at Ban Re. This prevented the ChiComs from capitalizing on their sudden attack south of the border and halted General Wang’s troops before they could press the attack farther south toward Hanoi.

* * *

To the north of Ban Re, at Dong Dang, General Wei had better luck, being able to reach the Na Ann junction, thirteen miles west from Dong Dang. There, Wei’s infantry and armored battalion, equipped with T-59s — upgunned T-55s— managed to sever two roads, the one leading northwest from Na Ann junction to Quinh Son and Na Nien, the other running south to Phu Lang Thuong, thirty miles northeast of Hanoi, the Chinese-Vietnamese border itself barely a hundred miles from Hanoi.

The two prongs of this 41,000-strong Chinese pincer attack, however, were not so much strategic as tactical in design. The Chinese did not intend to stay, but merely to shell and destroy as much of Lang Son and Dong Dang as they could — as they had in 1979—and then withdraw. It was, in short, meant to be a military punishment for what the Chinese were calling “blatant unprecedented Vietnamese attacks” against the Chical drill ships in the Paracels and Spratlys. In any event, neither General Wei nor Wang wanted to penetrate much farther south. As it was, they lost over four hundred casualties to minefields the Vietnamese had laid down after China’s 1979 incursions.

Vietnamese forces, despite the fast Chinese attack, reacted swiftly. From the Vietnamese garrison at Na Sam, seven miles northwest of Dong Dang, and from Loc Binh, twelve miles southeast of Lang Son, a two-pronged counterattack was launched by four regular infantry divisions well seeded with “Viet Cong” veterans who as young men had fought in the south against the Americans during the Vietnam War. Wei’s and Wang’s forces, in danger of encirclement, began to withdraw, but by Day Four after the initial Chinese invasion, the Vietnamese troops had cut off the Chinese retreat from Na Ann and Lang Son. Only those ChiComs from Dong Dang were able to withdraw with only light casualties.

Beijing had only two options now: to give up those infantry battalions of Wei and Wang that had been surrounded and thus trapped by the Vietnamese regulars, or to send in more Chinese troops to release them, Beijing realizing that the defeat of their incursion would be a singular loss of face in a part of the world where “face,” and therefore the nation’s standing in Southeast Asia — indeed, throughout all Asia — was at stake. Accordingly, Beijing ordered an all-out invasion, not merely to rescue their embattled infantry divisions, but to widen the war and gain a buffer zone of territory, militarily shortening the distance between Hanoi and the old border from a hundred miles to something much closer. If this was achieved, then in the future any Vietnamese hostility aimed at China could be quickly punished by massive retaliation against what was hoped would be a much closer target, namely Hanoi, which might in turn be ringed by Chinese-planted minefields and surface-to-surface missile batteries.

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese raced to reinforce the border zone between and around Dong Dang and Lang Son.

CHAPTER EIGHT