Colonel Ray Sitton, the single source in one of the thinnest of Seymour Hersh’s thinly sourced claims: that Henry Kissinger had not only presided over the secret and illegal carpet bombing of Cambodia but also organized a vast conspiracy—what participants described as an elaborate “double bookkeeping” protocol—designed to keep the bombing hidden from Congress and the public…

Kissinger, Haig, and Sitton came up with a simple but comprehensive protocol. Sitton would work up a number of targets in Cambodia to be struck. Then he would bring them to Kissinger and Haig in the White House for approval. Kissinger was very hands on, revising some of Sitton’s work. “I don’t know what he was using as his reason for varying them,” Sitton recalled in his Air Force interview. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, “or strike here in that area.” Once Kissinger was satisfied with the proposed target, Sitton would use a special backchannel set up to send the coordinates to Saigon, and from there a special courier would be used to pass them on to the appropriate radar stations, where an officer would at the last minute switch out the official targets in South Vietnam for the covert ones in Cambodia. When the bombing was complete, he’d burn whatever documents—maps, computer print outs, radar reports, messages, and so on—that might reveal the true target and write up false “post strike” paperwork, indicating that the South Vietnam sortie was flown as planned. There was “a whole special furnace” set up in Saigon, along with others in the forward radar locations, for that job. “We burned probably 12 hours a day,” General Creighton Abrams (who, as one of the top military officers in Vietnam, recommended targets to Sitton) would testify before the Senate. The Senate would be provided “phony target coordinates” and other forged data. That way, it was possible to account for expenditures—fuel, bombs, spare parts—to Congress without Congress ever knowing Cambodia was being bombed…

In Saigon, a whole “special furnace” was set up for the job. “Every piece of paper, including the scratch paper, the paper that one of our computers might have done some figuring on, every piece of scrap paper was gathered up,” Major Hal Knight, who in 1973 testified to Congress that he had carried out the falsification (out of all the hundreds, prehaps more, of military personnel who participated in this cover-up, Knight is the only one who turned whistleblower), said: “I would wait until daylight, and as soon as that time came, I would go out and burn that.” Knight went on:

I destroyed the papers that had the target coordinates on them. I destroyed the paper that came off the plotting boards that showed the track of the aircraft …. I destroyed the computer tape that took the target coordinates, UTM coordinates and translated them into information that the bombing computers could use. Then I also destroyed any scrap paper that went with that, and the brushgraph recording.

The secret illegal bombing of Cambodia entailed the creation of an elaborate, covert parallel chain of command stretching from the White House basement to radar stations in South Vietnam. “Maybe,” as Vox wrote in its bid to take down Hersh, “there really is a vast shadow world of complex and diabolical conspiracies, executed brilliantly by international networks of government masterminds. And maybe Hersh and his handful of anonymous former senior officials really are alone in glimpsing this world and its terrifying secrets.”…

Read more at Lessons From the Thinnest of Seymour Hersh’s Thinly Sourced Claims | The Nation