A NEW ROUND of secret talks between the United States and North Vietnam will begin very soon in Paris. The continued offensive by North Vietnamese and PRG forces in South Vietnam as well as President Nixon's determination to defeat that offensive by all the conventional military means available does not augur well for the renewed negotiations.

The last round of secret negotiations which ended without agreement in November 1971 may help provide some insight on the present military and diplomatic dilemma.

On April 26, President Nixon told the nation that after the U.S. presented its eight point plan to Hanoi on October 11 of last year:

...Hanoi's answer to this offer was a refusal even to discuss our proposals and, at the same time, a massive escalation of their military activities on the battlefield. Last October, the same month when we made this peace offer to Hanoi in secret, our intelligence reports began to indicate that the enemy was building up for a major attack. Yet we deliberately refrained from responding militarily. Instead we patiently continued with the Paris talks....

President Nixon's statement may lead the reader to believe that last October the North Vietnamese were perfidiously sabotaging the President's plans for a negotiated settlement in favor of their own military goals. It is thus instructive to consider what President Nixon said at a news conference last November 12 concerning the "most recent trend towards the infiltration by the enemy":

...The infiltration rate has come up some as it always does at this time of year. However, it is not as high now just as the casualties are not as high now and the level of enemy activity (Ed. is not as high as it was last year. We want to see, however, what the situation is in December and January....

As of November 12, it would therefore appear that the rate of infiltration was not as high as it had been in 1970. And yet, on November 17 the French paper Le Monde reported that five U.S. aircraft carriers were cruising along the Vietnamese coast and that there was a great deal of activity at U.S. air bases in Thailand. Le Figaro of the same day reported that the North Vietnamese were strengthening their air defenses in the event of attacks by B-52s.

In relation to the use of air power. President Nixon said on November 12:

As we reduce the number of our forces, it is particularly important for us to continue our air strikes on the infiltration routes. If we see any substantial step-up in infiltration in the passes, for example, which lead from North Vietnam into Laos and, of course, the Laotian trail which comes down through Cambodia into South Vietnam--if we see that, we will have to not only continue our air strikes; we will have to step them up.

Could it be that through excessive concentration of air power in the Indochina area during a period when by his own admission North Vietnamese infiltration had not even reached the comparable level for the previous year, President Nixon convinced the leaders in Hanoi that the U.S. did not really want to negotiate?

THE ANSWER to the above question is as yet unclear. Perhaps a chronological summary of what happened between October 11 and November 22 will shed some light on the reasons that the last round of secret negotiations did not succeed.

* October 11: The U.S. delivered to North Vietnam an eight point proposal which "goes to the limits of possible generosity" and "does not join the enemy to overthrow our ally." The exact content of the plan is unclear, but the U.S. did call for secret negotiations in Paris on November 1 to discuss it.

On the same day in a dispatch from Moscow in the London Evening News Soviet agent Victor Louis stated, "A negotiated end to the Vietnam war appears to be in sight. All the indications are that, with Russia and the United States finding a common interest over the conflict, a race for peace has begun."

* October 22: The South Vietnamese Embassy in Paris published a call for a step up in the Phoenix campaign. In order to gain a "lasting peace," all of the PRG soldiers and cadres infiltrated among the populace would have to be wiped out, the article said.

* October 25: North Vietnam sent a message to the U.S. in which it said that Le Duc Tho would be coming to Paris for secret talks on November 20 rather than November 1.