Word: communist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Suave, controlled and bearing a striking resemblance to the late actor Herbert Marshall, the Cambridge-educated Thompson, 53, was knighted for devising the strategy that ultimately defeated local Chinese Communist terrorists in Malaya in the 1950s. He was then Britain's secretary for defense of the Federation of Malaya; later (1961-65), he served as head of the British advisory mission in Viet Nam. Now retired from government, he is an occasional consultant for the Rand Corp., the noted U.S. think tank. His experience in Malaya convinced Thompson that counterinsurgency does not require massive forces, large-scale bombing...
Thompson's perspective has brought him alternately in and out of phase with the prevailing U.S. strategies in Viet Nam. He still subscribes to the domino theory that a Communist success in Viet Nam would jeopardize other shaky governments in Southeast Asia and even as far away as Latin America. He approved Kennedy's commitment of U.S. advisers and his accent on unconventional Special Forces. He advised the late South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem to undertake a program of protected "strategic hamlets," but the program flopped when Diem moved too quickly, ignoring Thompson's warning...
...President Nixon's request, Thompson recently spent five weeks touring Viet Nam. He found some of the improvements since 1968 to be "astounding." Though the Tet offensive was a Communist psychological victory, he contends, it was militarily "suicidal." "The thing that surprised me more than anything else was the extent to which the government has regained control in the countryside," he said last week. "The V.C.'s population base has been eroded. The population is gradually losing confidence in the ability of the Viet Cong to win. It is coming in toward the government...
Thompson is not as worried as some U.S. military advisers about current Communist infiltration. He contends that the enemy has lost at least 500,000 troops in the past two years-roughly comparable to the U.S. Army's losing 5,000,000 men. The replacements, he reports, are mainly ill-trained teenagers. "The Viet Cong are no longer 10 feet tall. They are more like frightened 16-year-olds." Thompson does not, however, see a quick end to the war. "It could take three to five years before Hanoi is compelled to give up her purpose and to negotiate...
...weeks Alexander Dubček has been the object of a secret struggle within the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. The ultraconservative faction, led by Deputy Party Chief Lubomir Strougal, has wanted to put him on trial for treason. But Boss Gustav Husák, the Moscow-supported "realist" who last April replaced Dubček as party leader, has sought to prevent a return to the terror practices that gripped Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and early '60s. Last week, after a meeting of the ruling eleven-man Presidium in Prague, party officials announced that some time after...