Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET - Sensitive
First Bombing Pause. Pressure for some form of bombing halt had mounted steadily throughout April and early May and, although the President did not believe that such a gesture would evoke any response from Hanoi he did order a brief halt effective May 13, "to begin" as he expressed it "to clear a path either toward restoration of peace or toward increased military action, depending on the reaction of the Communists." The political purpose of the pause -- to test Hanoi's reaction -- was kept under very tight wraps, and the project was given the code name MAYFLOWER. A great effort was made to inform Hanoi of the fact of the pause and of its political intent. Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin was given an oral explanation by Secretary Rusk, confirmed by a tough written statement, reasserting Rusk's public position that the cessation of the DRV's attacks upon South Vietnam was the only road to peace and that the US would be watchful, during the pause, for any signs of a reduction in such attacks. A similar statement was sent to U.S. Ambassador Kohler in Moscow, for personal transmittal to the DRV Ambassador there. Kohler, however, met with refusal both from the DRV Ambassador to receive, and from the Soviet Foreign Office to transmit, the message. A written note, sent to the DRV embassy, was returned ostensibly unopened. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that Hanoi was more than adequately advised of the contents of the U.S. message through the various diplomatic channels that were involved.
Given the "rather strenuous nature" of the U.S. note to Hanoi and the briefness of the pause, it is hardly surprising that the initiative encountered no receptivity from the Soviet government and evoked no positive response from Hanoi. The latter denounced the bombing halt as "a worn out trick of deceit and threat..." and the former, in the person of Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko in a conversation with Rusk in Vienna, branded the U.S. note to Hanoi as "insulting".
Having thus been unmistakably rebuffed, the President ordered the resumption of the bombing raids effective May 18. The entire pause was handled with a minimum of public information, and no announcement was made of the suspension or of the resumption. But prime ministers or chiefs of state of a half dozen key friendly governments were briefed fully after the event. A still somewhat ambiguous diplomatic move was made by Hanoi in Paris on May 18, a few hours after the bombing had been resumed, in which Mai Van Bo, the DRV economic delegate there seemed to imply a significant softening of Hanoi's position on the Four Points as "prior conditions." But subsequent attempts at clarification left that issue as ambiguous as it had been before.
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