War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  “We’d like to open this morning with our latest reading on Vietcong morale,” declared General Godding, the first speaker; “this afternoon we’ll get to the numbers.” For the next hour and a half two MACV officers gave a detailed catalogue of the Vietcong’s most recent misfortunes. They were even sicker, hungrier and more frightened than usual and in some areas, running low on ammunition. I kept my mouth shut even though I knew the documents showed the VC desertion rate had lately taken a sharp drop.* We broke for lunch at noon.

  The lunch break was unusual. I was asking the whereabouts of the closest cafeteria when Danny Graham—the colonel, really a lieutenant colonel, whom Carver said ran MACV Estimates—came over and said: “The food around here’s almost inedible. I know where we can get something decent. It’s a South Vietnamese officer’s club.” It sounded like a good idea. Carver and I accompanied Graham to his jeep, which shortly crunched up to a slope-roofed building with verandahs. A sign over the door showed that it was, in fact, a South Vietnamese officer’s club. We went inside. There were no South Vietnamese, only Americans. Graham ushered us to a room whose sole light was a Wurlitzer juke box. We groped our way to a booth, and shortly a woman in a low-cut evening gown appeared from the murk. She sat down beside me, and put her arm around my shoulder. “My name Kim,” she said.

  “Hello, Kim,” I replied. “Where are you from?” (I never know what to say; meanwhile Graham and Carver were in deep conversation.)

  “Hanoi. What your name?”

  “Pete.”

  “Where you work, Pete? Betcha CIA.”

  “No, no, Army Personnel.”

  “Cut it out, you work CIA.”

  “Army Personnel!”

  “What you do for CIA?”

  And so on, this continued for fifteen minutes. She never wormed it out of me. I had a cheeseburger for lunch, and when we got back to MACV headquarters, the first briefer was our mealtime host, Colonel Graham.

  Graham’s thesis was that the communists were running out of men. Sometime earlier in the year they had reached what he called the crossover point. The crossover point had occurred when the enemy’s losses—from killed, died of wounds, defectors, and so on—exceeded his “inputs,” either from infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or from recruitment in the south. That was the communists’ big problem: the inputs. Both had fallen off dramatically. Not only were fewer northerners wending their way down the Trail, but the Vietcong were hard put to keep their boot camps going. MACV had recently done a study that showed the VC recruitment rate had halved—from 7000 men per month a year ago, to 3500 per month now.

  “The real significance of all this,” Graham went on, “is its effect on the order of battle. The OB is now in a state of substantial decline.” Although I agreed the VC army was losing men, I groaned inwardly. Decline, OK, but from what base? Graham launched an attack on the self-defense militia. He gave the standard reasons for their incompetence, ending up with the new one that “furthermore, the majority of the militia are women.” Leaving aside the fact that exploding a woman’s booby trap can be as harmful as exploding a man’s, this statement was untrue, and I damn well knew it. I threw open my briefcase, and grabbed the top document. It was Bulletin 689, the one that had started it all off, about Binh Dinh Province’s guerrilla-militia. I looked at the document’s statistical section and sure enough: of the Binh Dinh militia’s 34,441 members, 6147 were “females.” I worked out the percentage, wrote down “18%” on Bulletin 689, and slid it over to Carver, Carver nodded. Graham continued.

  “A good example of the crossover’s deleterious effect on the order of battle is that we now feel that the number of political cadres is in the neighborhood of fifty thousand.”18 Fifty thousand! Only a month ago Colonel Hawkins’ slide show had put them at 87,500. That was a one-month drop of 37,500 men. Incredible! I slid another note to Carter. Once again he nodded. I looked at General Davidson’s face. It was blank. I looked at Colonel Hawkins. The bleakness had turned to acute pain.

  The order-of-battle conference lasted for three days, and Colonel Graham’s presentation proved standard fare. Numbers bobbed, weaved, slithered, and sometimes altogether vanished. The slipperiest of all was the VC service troops. At a late session of Fourteen Three, Colonel Hawkins had pointed out that MACV’s slide show estimate entirely omitted the service soldiers of the communists’ 240-odd districts. A conference briefer got up to say that MACV had now corrected this oversight, and that five thousand district troops had joined the service estimate. I thought this might be a small step in the right direction until I saw the service estimate’s total. Despite the added five thousand it was even lower than before! In disbelief I looked at the total’s other components. Each of them (provinces, regions, etc.) had gone down to compensate for the districts’ gain. Obviously, MACV had robbed Peter to pay Paul.19 Well, this seemed a good place to do battle, so I wrote another note to Carver, asking permission to do so. He gave it, scribbling: “Be as emphatic as you want, but be tactful.”20

  How can you tactfully accuse somebody of fraud? I asked myself, as I rose to give the agency’s side of the argument. Well, I tried. I called the disappearing troops “an anomaly,” and reverted to the evidence. Not only were the province and regional deductions unjustified, I said, but five thousand was nowhere near enough for the districts. I now had a sample of twenty-eight districts, I went on, they averaged out to about seventy-five men apiece, and if this average held countrywide, it would come to eighteen thousand. I briefly reviewed my documents and asked whether there were any questions.

  “I have a question,” said General Davidson. “You mean to tell me you have only twenty-eight districts?”

  “Yes sir,” I said, “That’s all I could find.”

  “Well, I’ve been in the intelligence business for many years, and if you’re trying to sell me a number on the basis of that small a sample, you might as well pack up and go home.” As I resumed my seat, Davidson’s aide, Colonel Morris, turned to me and said, “Adams, you’re full of shit.”

  At which a lieutenant colonel got up from Colonel Hawkins’ side of the U to defend MACV’s five thousand.21 He had counted twenty-one service troops per district, he said, and then went on to describe how a district was organized. When he asked for questions, I said, “How many districts are in your sample?”

  He looked as if somebody had kicked him in the stomach. Instead of answering the question, he repeated his description of how the VC organized a district.

  Then George Carver interrupted him. “Come, come, Colonel,” he said. “General Davidson has just taken Mr. Adams to task for having only twenty-eight districts in his sample. It’s a perfectly legitimate question. How many have you in yours?”

  In a very low voice, the lieutenant colonel said, “One.” I looked over at General Davidson and Colonel Morris to see whether they’d denounce the lieutenant colonel for having such a small sample. Both of them were looking at the ceiling.

  “Colonel,” I continued, “may I see the document on which your sample is based?” He didn’t have it, he said, and besides, it wasn’t a document, it was a POW report.

  Well, I asked, could he please try and remember who the twenty-one service soldiers were? He ticked them off. I kept count. The total was forty.

  “Colonel,” I said, “you have forty soldiers here, not twenty-one. How did you get from forty to twenty-one?”

  “We scaled down the evidence,” he replied.

  “Scaled down the evidence?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We cut out the hangers-on.”

  “And how do you determine what a hanger-on is?”

  “Civilians, for example.”

  Now I knew that civilians sometimes worked alongside VC service troops, but normally the rosters listed them separately. So I waited until the next coffee break to ask Colonel Hawkins how he’d “scale down” the service troops in a document I had. It concerned Long Dat District in the southern half of South Vietnam, and its 103 service tr
oops were broken down by components. We went over each one. Of the 15 in the medical detachment, he’d count 3, of the 15 in the ordnance unit, again 3, until Long Dat’s 103 service troops were down to about 40.22 There was no indication in the document that any of those dropped were civilians. I thanked Colonel Hawkins for his help. As usual, he was laying it on the line.

  Not long after that, he did it again. Another lieutenant colonel23 had been stubbornly defending MACV’s guerrilla number, still 65,000, while I was trying for what I felt the documents supported—not quite double that figure. Along came the coffee break. A finger tapped my shoulder. It was Hawkins. He said: “Sam, I want you to know that my personal opinion is at variance with MACV’s official position. In my personal opinion, the real number of guerrillas is between a hundred and a hundred and twenty thousand.” Or exactly what I thought. He also handed me a document, published a couple of days earlier, which showed a VC province guerrilla listing far higher than MACV’s field report for the same province. I told Carver what Hawkins had said and showed him the document. Carver nodded. The funny thing was the lieutenant colonel wasn’t even MACV’s regular guerrilla analyst, who was also in the room. During all the arguments this analyst had remained seated. He was a young Army lieutenant, skinny, Irish-looking, by the name of McArthur.

  Towards the end of the second day, again after a break, several copies of a mimeographed note appeared around the U-shaped table. I hadn’t seen who had put it there, it was unsigned, but the originator was obvious. The note read approximately as follows: “The United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam will agree to add 15,000 to its estimate of Vietcong guerrillas if the Central Intelligence Agency agrees to drop entirely the VC self-defense militia.”24 Carver and I read the note simultaneously. My jaw dropped, he gave out a low whistle and said: “In writing. MACV must be crazy. They put it in writing.” I said something to the effect that this kind of bargaining might be acceptable in a rug bazaar, but goddamnit, it wasn’t intelligence. We ought to go home, put what we really think in Fourteen Three, and tell MACV to go jump in the lake. Let’em take a footnote.” That was Sunday afternoon.

  The CIA’s collapse occurred on Monday morning. I wasn’t there, and don’t know the details. Nor do I know the exact reason why. A friend from the DDI front office later told me that Helms had cabled Carver to throw in the sponge. Another source said that no such cable existed but that Carver had gone to Saigon with the director’s bidding to do his best, but above all to come to an agreement. Either way’s the same. Helms would go just so far in pursuing a realistic VC strength estimate, but not further. My hero of Stanleyville had taken a dive.

  Carver sent Langley word of the collapse on the same day in a cable addressed “Funaro to Knight,” “Knight” being Helms’ cover name.25 The cable began: “We have squared the circle.” The phrase came from Thomas Hobbes.* I took it to mean: “We have done the seemingly impossible.”

  The “seemingly impossible” agreement worked out by MACV and CIA in Saigon on that morning of 12 September 1967, was put in writing. To wit:

  Regulars: 119,000

  Service Troops: 37,500

  Guerrillas: 80,000

  Military Total: 236,500

  Political Cadres: 80,000

  In other words, the agency had gone along with MACV’s mimeographed bargain—and then some. The militia had marched out of the estimate in exchange for only fifteen thousand guerrillas, not the great many more that Colonel Hawkins and I agreed there were. The service troops, although higher than MACV’s earlier number, were still “scaled down” on the order of 50 percent. Even the regulars had dropped a couple of thousand, with no mention whatsoever of the possibility of missing sappers. Finally, the political cadres had flown off to a separate perch.

  The agreement paid the political cadres special heed. Under no circumstances, it said, were they to be “included in an aggregate” (meaning, added) to their military colleagues, particularly in “Washington publications” which dealt with the Vietcong, such as Fourteen Three. Furthermore, the cadres’ definitions “needed considerable refinement.” (something I agreed with), but “when this necessary work is completed, the political figure in its present form will disappear.” Poof! Carver’s copy of the agreement concluded with the hope that General Westmoreland “would extend to General Davidson and all of his able, most impressive staff, the thanks of the entire Washington delegation for their effective comprehensive briefings and other invaluable contributions to our joint endeavor.”27

  “Thanks of the entire delegation!” I sputtered, and tore off to locate Carver, so he could exclude me from the thank-you note. I couldn’t find him. Later in the day I tried to enter the MACV Order of Battle Section to find out what the analysts thought as against the lieutenant colonels. I was stopped at the door. “New policy,” a guard said; “No civilians allowed on the premises.” Another member of the CIA group, the Estimates staffer Bill Hyland, tried to explain: “Sam, don’t take it so hard. You know what the political climate is. If you think they’d accept the higher numbers, you’re living in a dream world.”

  That evening Bobby Layton of the Collation Branch held a party for the CIA delegation (minus Carver), saying: “You people could probably use one—let off steam, that kind of thing.” I belched smoke like Old Forty-four. I pounded the table, cursed the military, and drank way too much Scotch. At one point, I announced: “Only officer in the entire U.S. Army’s worth a damn is Colonel Hawkins.” That was untrue, and I knew it. There were plenty of others, including Major Blascik.

  I had a hangover the next morning, but nonetheless felt better. Maybe the party had done some good. After all, I told myself, nothing’s in concrete. The numbers won’t become official until Helms signs off on Fourteen Three, and that was a bridge we hadn’t come to. There would have to be at least one “cleanup session” (as the last one was usually called), probably two, and I could use the occasion to tell the estimates board what had gone on at the conference. I decided to stop by the Collation Branch to apologize to Bobby Layton for the night before.

  “Don’t give it a second thought,” he said. “You were the life of the party.” I asked after another Collation member, Joe Hovey. Layton said: “Joe’s away at the moment, and it’s too bad. He’s got a theory that the Vietcong are up to big things, but he can’t figure out what. You’d be an interesting person for him to talk to, what with your knowledge of the communist army.” I told Layton that the main thing I knew about the order of battle was that it ought to be doubled but that I’d observed another interesting phenomenon; over the last six or seven months the Chieu Hoi rate had fallen off by two-thirds.

  “I’ve noticed that myself,” he replied; “why do you suppose they’re not coming in? They must know something which makes them hesitate to defect.” He suggested that I see another one-time Collation member, Tom Becker, who had taken a job elsewhere in town with a joint Vietnamese-American outfit called CT Four. Begun in late 1966, CT Four was the first serious effort by the Allies to attack the works of the Vietcong’s mainspring, the communist party, whose “infrastructure,” as we called it, included the enemy’s secret police. Aware of my interest in the latter, Layton said: “Maybe Tom could tell you whether CT Four’s picked up anyone from the VC security section.”

  “No VC cops’ve checked in lately,” Becker told me later that day, and CT Four’s attack on the infrastructure was having its share of troubles. As usual, the first one was names. They’d collected thousands, he said, but only a handful were real. Worse yet, CT Four had scarcely dented the even more vexing problem of connecting names with faces. The Allies had captured lots of photographs (every other VC owned a Brownie, it seems), but who all the smiling people were was impossible to tell. CT Four had even sent to the States for an Identikit—a device used by American police to draw suspects’ faces from composite features (eyebrows, chins, etc.)—but unfortunately the initial portraits all looked like Occidentals. Another problem was fingerprints. Su
pposedly they appeared on the ID cards of all South Vietnamese citizens, but there was no central fingerprint file to check the ID cards against. “So if we found a bomb under President Thieu’s desk, we couldn’t trace it, at least not by the prints.” Finally there was America’s general ignorance of the VC. “We don’t know enough about their organization. CIA case officers are showing up all the time who don’t even know the difference between the Party and the Front. That’s as basic as you can get. You’d think somebody back at headquarters would teach them.”

  As I was leaving, Becker showed me a study just put out by the South Vietnamese. “It says the Vietcong are reorganizing around Saigon. Apparently they want to ‘expedite operations’ into the city. They’re always saying something like that, but this time they seem more serious than usual. I wonder what they have in mind. Think I’ll buy me a helmet.”

  I reported back to Langley on Monday, 18 September. The Indo-China sections were abuzz with the Saigon conference. George Allen said: “We’ll live to regret it.” Molly said: ‘Squaring the circle,’ my foot. I might have known that if Carver sold the plantation, he’d start off with a fancy quote.” I defended him: “If it wasn’t for Carver, none of this stuff would have come out. I don’t think it was his fault. It must have been somebody higher. I put my money on Helms.”

  “Could be,” said Molly. “Maybe even higher than that.”

  For the next two weeks, much of the paper crossing my desk concerned what we were going to tell the press about the new VC strength estimate. It was a touchy subject, but I didn’t pay all that much attention. What the reporters got was someone else’s business. I was waiting for the cleanup session of Fourteen Three.

  The meeting, when it convened, wasn’t the cleanup after all. It was the pre-cleanup, meaning that only CIA officials were there. The conference room was crowded. Fourteen Three having achieved notoriety, several board members showed up instead of the usual one or two. There were also representatives from all the offices that dealt with Indo-China. The purpose of the pre-cleanup was to settle the Agency’s internal quarrels so we could present a more or less untied front when the rest of the intelligence community appeared for the regular meeting. The chairman was the same as before Saigon, James Graham. He said: “It’s been a long hard struggle, but I think—to employ a well-known phrase—there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The Saigon agreement may not be perfect, but it seems to have laid to rest the numbers question. Before we start, are there any questions or comments?”