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for occupation. The Vietnamese had agreed to three new UNHCR staff for that office, one of whom would be an American, Meyer, who would work exclusively on US cases.
Meyer would come with his wife, but the question of whether she too would be allowed to work in the office was still under discussion. Following a visit by an American doctor, procedures for medical examination of those going to the United States had been agreed. Johnsson thought that it would be possible to handle the medical examination of up to five hundred US-bound Vietnamese a week. He hoped that a computer in Bangkok would handle the appalling problem of lists of applicants: he could certainly not hope to deal with this by means of an inadequate clerical staff.
4. Johnsson said that countries had now submitted lists totalling 30,000 names. 21,000 of these were names of people whom the United States were prepared to accept (he thought that the majority were probably not family reunion cases). In addition the Americans in Bangkok were processing some 50,000 names for whom application to leave Vietnam had been made in the United States (the majority of these he thought were probably family reunion cases). c added that the Americans were aiming at a departure rate of 2-3,000 per
month.
5. The Vietnamese, for their part, had said that by the end of
the year they would have approved some 300,000 names for exit visas. Johnsson thought that by the end of November it would be posible to compare the lists of the Vietnamese authorities and those submitted by other countries. Names common to bolh would then be processed for the first flights. He thought that such flights might perhaps start in December.
6. Whilst I do not think we should be carried away by Johnsson's optimism, there are certainly now some grounds for taking the view that the expanded 7-point programme may actually start within two or three months. When I asked Bill Clarance whether he thought that Johnsson had perhaps exaggerated a little his own achievements, he replied that he could not comment at this early stage: but he had no illusions about the many difficulties still to be overcome. The testing point will of course come when the Vietnamese lists and those submitted by foreign countries are compared. How many names will be common to both? when such cases have been flown out, what happens next? The fear of some of my colleagues, which 1 share, is that the Victnamese may refuse to allow many of the family reunion and compassionate cases (eg ex-Embassy employees) to po, and will hold on to them as bargaining counters for obtaining agreement of foreign countries to accept the old, infirm, and politically and/or racially undesirable elements which Vietnam wishes to ret
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