VIET NAM: The Soviets Settle In

Hanoi turns to Moscow for help and is coming up with lots of it

Following Hanoi's conquest of South Viet Nam in 1975, the country's Communist leaders repeatedly emphasized their determination to stay clear of great-power entanglements and to preserve their hard-sought independence. They have not succeeded. With surprising swiftness, Viet Nam has in the past three months turned increasingly to the Soviets for help in keeping its far-flung military machine running. In return, Moscow has extended its strategic and military reach into Southeast Asia with a vigor that has alarmed Japan and the Association of South East Asian Nations and certainly angered China.

Viet Nam's tilt toward Moscow became conspicuous in 1978. Hanoi first joined COMECON, the Soviet-bloc economic organization, then signed a 25-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with Moscow in November. The dramatic new Soviet military role in Indochina surfaced in February, when China invaded Viet Nam. Once proud of its self-reliant mobility, Hanoi has become virtually dependent on the Soviets for logistics and aerial reconnaissance.

Soviet "volunteer" technicians assist not only in the operation of Viet Nam's major airfields, but also in keeping open its ports. To move Hanoi's troops between its forward bases in Cambodia and the China border and the rest of Viet Nam, Soviet pilots fly them in mammoth Antonov-22 transports. Tan Son Nhut airport near Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is kept busy handling incoming flights of Ilyushin-76s, carrying pallets of artillery ammunition for use, presumably, in Cambodia. Danang airport, almost a ghost field after 1975, now serves as a refueling base for long-range TU-95D reconnaissance planes of the Soviet naval air fleet.

To support all this aerial activity, Moscow is completing two electronic eavesdropping complexes in Laos, and has started construction of a radar tracking center near Sisophon, in northwestern Cambodia. Soviet merchantmen ply between Vietnamese coast ports and the Cambodian port of Kompong Som on resupply missions. Submarines of the Soviet Pacific fleet glide in and out of the huge American-built complex at Cam Ranh Bay, even though it is not a full-fledged Soviet naval base.

Even the old Air America routes in Laos have been partly taken over by Soviet pilots in Antonov-12s. There have been reports that some of the pilots supplement their income by smuggling Laotian gold into Viet Nam. Observed a cynical military attaché: "Without the Russians it would be almost impossible to move around the greater Vietnamese Empire, er, excuse me, the Greater Indochina Co-Prosperity Sphere."