ESCALATION OF MILITARY AID TO THAILAND ANNOUNCED
As a "reward" to the King of Thailand for the "gold car" reception given President Johnson there during his tour of the Far East, it was announced October 30 in Bangkok that the United States would increase its "military aid" to the monarchy by fifty percent.
The announcement gives added weight to the growing fear that Thailand may possibly become another south Vietnam. As Pete Hamill of the New York Post observed in an October 29 dispatch from Bangkok:
"The U.S. now has 32,000 fighting men in Thailand which is 9,000 more than we had in South Viet Nam in January, 1965. Some 80 per cent of all the bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Min trail in Laos comes from six Thai bases. We have Special Forces men here training the Thais in guerrilla warfare. We are building a giant
$500 ,000,000 sea-air base at Sattahip with a landing strip that will accommodate B-5S2s. We have already poured more than a billion dollars in economic and military aid into the country, and are donating more at the rate of $100,000,000 a year.”
Thailand may fit into further escalation of the war in Southeast Asia im still another way. Mohammed Hassenein Heikel, the influential editor of the Cairo Al Abram and a confidant of President Nasser, declared October 28 that he had received information that the U.S. is making "nuclear preparations in Thailand.” The aim of the preparations is ostensibly to "deter" the People's Republic of China from offering more vigorous backing to the Vietnamese freedom fighters.
Heikel also said that the Manila conference was a "clear indication” of an American “tendency to escalate the war in Vietnam™ and that it had been staged to bolster Johnson's popularity and to help the Democrats in the coming congressional elections.