"Yahya has shown some surprising political naiveté before,” one of Pakistan's best- informed foreign newsmen remarked after listening to Friday's radio broadcast in an Army truck that was preparing to take all foreign correspondents in Dacca to the airport for expulsion.
"But that condition is not naive, it's disingenuous. It will make the whole purpose of the talks look like a delaying action while they flew in more troops from West Pakistan."
Plan To Deceive Recalled
The comment was not the first serious suggestion that the talks were a delaying action. One well connected traveler arriving in Dacca from Karachi shocked newsmen a week before the conflagration by reporting that two generals he regarded as highly reliable had told him that the Army's plan was to lull the Bengali leadership into believing the talks could succeed, then to crack down without warning.
No one wrote anything about it at the time, because there was no other equally reliable source to back the suggestion, and no one really wanted to entertain the idea that President Yahya would accept such a course after staking his reputation for two years on a plan to turn the government over to elected civilians.
There still is no way of having ironclad certainty as to the military regime's motives, but no one who witnessed the sequence of last Thursday's events can say with confidence today that it was not all planned in advance.
By the time Sheikh Mujib's statement calling for a general strike on Saturday to protest clashes between troops and civilians in outlying areas was read to the press Thursday night. President Yahya had already left his heavily fortified house. There hardly had been time for him to pack his bags between the end of the last meetings of his and Mr. Bhutto's advisers and the time a Bengali newsman said he saw the president leave.
By 7 P. M., soldiers were going up and down the elevator at the Intercontinental Hotel-to the 11th floor, which Mr. Bhutto had turned into a fortress complete with half a dozen automatic rifles in the lobby-at the rate of two a minute.
This activity continued for almost an hour until a large group of soldiers came down carrying a battered black cardboard suitcase, which was entrusted to a platoon of 20 or so troops who marched from the hotel to the president's house where a few guards were still on duty. What was in the black suitcase remains unknown?
An Inauspicious Time
Asked the whereabouts of the president's press aid, who had always been at the gate to greet correspondents, the guard said: “He is gone somewhere I don't know when he is coming back.' Please go ahead now. You come back 10 o'clock tomorrow."
Back at the hotel, only two blocks from the president's house, the guard appealed to be double its number on any previous night. None of the face that had become familiar since the guard was thrown up Sunday to protect Mr. Bhutto were on duty that night.
