Nixon and Kissinger Launch Secret Illegal Bombing Campaign Against Cambodia - Operation Menu Kills 150,000-500,000 Civilians

Nixon and Kissinger launch Operation Menu, a covert bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia conducted without congressional authorization or public knowledge. The secret carpet-bombing campaign—with missions codenamed Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Dessert, and Supper—is confirmed at an Oval Office meeting on March 17, 1969. Nixon decides to keep the bombing secret from the American people because admitting to bombing an officially neutral nation would damage his credibility and reveal he is escalating rather than ending the war.

The operation involves systematic falsification of military records. Pilots receive false information about their target locations, and missions are kept off official records to make them appear never to have happened. Between July 1970 and February 1971, approximately 44% of the 8,000 sorties flown in Cambodia strike targets outside authorized zones, leading Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Colonel Ray Sitton to develop a policy of falsifying mission reports. According to a Pentagon report released in 1973, “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970” as well as “the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers.”

By the campaign’s end, the U.S. drops 110,000 tons of bombs killing between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians. The bombing destabilizes Cambodia, displacing more than one million rural citizens who flee to Phnom Penh, leaving the country vulnerable to the Khmer Rouge’s subsequent genocide. Constitutional experts testify before Congress in 1973 that by launching the offensive without obtaining congressional approval or even informing Congress, Nixon committed an illegal act, violating constitutional requirements that Congress alone holds the power to declare war. The Watergate scandal later reveals that Kissinger ordered FBI wiretaps on National Security Council members to discover who leaked news of the Cambodia bombing to the press, demonstrating the administration’s determination to conceal its illegal war from democratic oversight.