Introduction
From the Introduction to ER IM 70-188, December 1970.
"In September 1970, this Agency [CIA] published ER IM [Economic Research Intelligence Memorandum] 70-126, New Evidence On Military Deliveries to Cambodia: December 1966 – April 1969, which presented our preliminary analysis of documentary evidence on the flow of military supplies to VC/NVA forces via the port of Kompong Som (Sihanoukville). Since the publication of IM 70-126, CIA has received and made available to the community more than 12,000 pages of additional documentation providing detailed and highly reliable data on the scope and nature of the Communists’ logistic activities carried out through Cambodia to support VC/NVA forces in South Vietnam.
"A special task force set up to exploit these documents has completed its validation and analysis of the new evidence, and this memorandum is the first product resulting from that effort. This memorandum presents revisions of the estimates made in IM 70-126 of the volume of military supplies delivered via Sihanoukville from December 1966 to April 1969 as well as new data on some overland deliveries via Laos."
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With that extraordinary introduction to its revised estimates, CIA essentially signaled that it had finally lost its extended debate with the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) and other military commands about the quantities and delivery routes of ordnance shipped through Cambodia to North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) units in South Vietnam. It was a consequential dispute, the outcome of which had the potential to influence US decisions to widen the Vietnam War to Cambodia and alter or end bombing campaigns in Laos.
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