War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  In any case, Vietnam was relatively peaceful. In honor of the Tet holidays, General Westmoreland had declared a cease-fire (except in I Corps, where Khe Sanh was), and the procession to Major Blascik’s situation room had considerably abated. The job of tidying files went quicker than expected, and I decided to leave an hour before my customary departure time of six o’clock. On the way to the exit, I stopped by the fifth floor, as I often did, to read an advance copy of the Sitrep. I found one in somebody’s out-box, and scanned its front page, the summary, called the “Highlights.” It had its usual notation in the upper right-hand corner, “Information as of 1600” meaning four that afternoon. The highlights began: “Military activity in South Vietnam has slackened since the beginning of the modified allied cease-fire. Hanoi had indicated willingness to discuss a new proposal for negotiations with U.N. Secretary General Thant.” I skipped to the heading, “Political Developments,” which read: “Reaction in Saigon to President Thieu’s ‘state of the nation’ address has been mixed.” Thence to “North Vietnamese Military Developments”: a couple of MIGs had flown toward the DMZ. And finally to “Other Communist Military Developments”: “There is nothing of significance to report.”57

  I tossed the Sitrep back into the out-box without reading the full text (which went on for seventeen pages), and caught the elevator to the ground floor. On the way to the door leading to the parking lot, I glanced at a clock. The time was exactly 5:00 P.M.

  At the same moment in Vietnam it was six o’clock in the morning of 30 January 1968. “N-Day”—the codename for what became the turning point of the war, the Tet offensive—was approximately four hours old.

  * Fourteen Three’s official title was “Special National Intelligence Estimate Number 14.3–67,” or, “Capabilities for the Vietnamese Communists For Fighting in South Vietnam”; “14.3” was Indo-China’s serial number, “67” the year.

  *In theory, NSA is a “collection agency,” meaning that it is supposed to “collect” foreign messages rather than analyze what they mean. In practice, it does some of the best analysis in the business, and is all-too-often disregarded.

  *Hanoi Radio had announced General Thanh’s death on 6 July 1967. Actually Thanh died in a B-52 raid in late 1966. Thanh’s successor at COSVN headquarters was a party official whose cover name was “Muoi Cuc.”

  *Within the agency, the cable’s recipients included Richard Helms, the director; Admiral Rufus Taylor, his deputy; R. Jack Smith, head of DDI; Thomas Karamessines, head of the DDP; William Colby, chief of the DDP’s Far Eastern Section; Sherman Kent, head of the Board of National Estimates (where Fourteen Three’s chairman, James Graham, would also have seen it); and of course George Carver, Helms’ chief assistant on Vietnam. I saw Carver’s copy.

  *In September 1967, there were approximately 480,000 American troops in Vietnam. Well less than 100,000, of these were combat, the rest service. The reason the U.S. Army needed proportionately more service troops than the VC was its greater sophistication. Helicopters and tanks—which at this point in the war the communists didn’t have—need lots of men to keep them running.

  *So had the Chieu Hoi rate. According to our own statistics, the number of defectors from the VC army had fallen drastically since early spring. Thus: March 1967: 3,155; April: 1,873; May: 1,466; June: 1,412; July: 1,536; August: 1,298; September: 1,047. I had watched these statistics closely. It was clear that something unusual was going on. I couldn’t figure what.

  *Another quote from Hobbes: “What poor geometrician is there, but takes pride to be thought a conjurer? What mountebank would not make a living out of a false opinion that he were a great physician? And when many of them are once engaged in the maintenance of an error, they will join together for the saving of their authority to decry the truth.”26

  *Unlike the Komer, Abrams, and Westmoreland cables—which received wide distribution within the agency—Bunker’s message was closely held from the start. Apparently to keep his own people from seeing it, the ambassador sent it via private CIA channels to Langley for forwarding to Walt Rostow at the White House. Helms did this but kept a copy for himself. He made another for the Board of National Estimates before sending his own (with the notation “BNE has copy”) to the agency’s deputy director, Admiral Rufus Taylor, Taylor read it, and sent it “by hand” (very unusual) to Carver. That’s when I saw it.

  *You will recall our previous countrywide reading on guerrillas came from two VC documents, both dated early 1966, one listing 170,000, the other 180,000. This meant that over a year’s period—early 1966 to early 1967 —the guerrillas had gone down by about twenty or thirty thousand. This kind of decline was easy to credit.

  *At that time the VC had perhaps 250,000 guerrillas and militiamen in their home guard. Of these, the OB listed only 80,000 guerrillas.

  *But not President Johnson. He had a big Khe Sanh chart of his own in the White House basement. An acquaintance who saw both Johnson’s and Blascik’s maps said Blascik’s was much better.

  6 N-DAY

  TO ENTER ROOM 6F19, you first had to poke the right buttons. There were ten of them protruding from a small metal box by the outer door, and when on Tuesday morning I chose the appropriate ones—1–9–5–4, the date of the Geneva Accords, which George Carver felt everyone could remember—I had no idea that unusual events were happening in Vietnam. The buzzer sounded, the door swung open, and immediately I recognized that something was the matter. It was only 8:35, coffee time on normal days, but all four secretaries were typing. I walked past them to the situation room at the end of the hall, and opened the door.

  The room teemed with officials, gesticulating, reading cables, and squinting at maps. That is, all but Major Blascik, who was talking calmly on the gray phone between puffs on his pipe. In front of one of the maps I saw my friend Tom Becker, whom I’d last seen in Vietnam at CT Four in September. I said:

  “Hello, Tom, when did you get back?”

  “A few minutes ago. I left Saigon in late November. Been on leave ever since.”

  “What’s going on, anyway?”

  “The little beggars seem to have run amok,” he said, “But I really don’t know. I just got here myself.”1

  I looked at the map before him. It was of I Corps and already measled with red pins. Clearly, Blascik had come in early to stick them there. Just then the major hung up the gray phone. I asked him for a quick rundown.

  He said: “They’ve been at it since early this morning—that’s Vietnam time—and they’re hitting targets throughout the northern half of the country; first Nha Trang on the coast, fighting’s still going on there; then Ban Me Thuct and Kontum in the highlands; next Hoi An in the lowlands; then they tried to get into Danang, but the Marines seem to have kept out the infantry so far—least that’s what they claim—but not the rockets; next Qui Nhon and Pleiku; Cam Manh and Tuy Hoa as well; also several district towns, some that we know about, and others, probably, that we don’t. Communications have broken down in some spots. The interesting thing about these attacks, what makes them so unusual, is that they’re going into the cities. They’ve never done that before, at least not on this scale. God knows what’s happening in the countryside.”

  “What about Khe Sanh?” I asked.

  “Nothing on Khe Sanh. Some shelling, yes, but no major attacks, not yet.”

  “Any word on which units are committed?”

  “A couple of mentions in the cables, but that’s it. Everyone’s too busy fighting them off to find out who they are. That’ll come later. The cables are on one of those clipboards on the wall over there. Help yourself.” With typical Blascik efficiency, he had all the traffic in one place. I took down a clipboard and flipped through it. Unable to find the units Blascik had seen, I replaced it and took down another, this one holding the most recent intelligence publications. The top publication was the morning Bulletin, which, like the Sitrep, was put out by the Office of Current Intelligence.

  This Bulletin was only two hours old,
and had picked up the information the Sitrep had missed the night before.

  The Bulletin read: “Communist forces have launched a series of well-coordinated attacks on …” and it listed the cities that Blascik had already mentioned. It also noted that Westmoreland had announced cancellation of the Tet cease-fire, and concluded that the assaults were a “blatant violation of the truce period.”2

  At this point, George Allen showed up at my elbow. “This is the one they’ve been planning,” he said excitedly, “and they haven’t even started in on the south. That should begin in a few hours.” I showed him the bulletin’s comment that it was a “blatant violation of the truce period.”

  “Blatant?” he said; “it’s outrageous!” And he gave an imitation of General Westmoreland lecturing Ho Chi Minh: “Damnitall, Ho, you should be ashamed. Don’t you know Tet’s a religious holiday? Have you no Christian respect? Another sneak attack. You think I forgot your last one? Pearl Harbor? It was on a Sunday, goddamnit, a Sunday!”

  I asked George if he’d heard which units were involved in the offensive. He said: “No, I haven’t, but I imagine they include the elite ones you’ve been telling Carver about. It’s logical. Urban attacks are what they’re for.”

  I left the confusion of the situation room for my desk, in order to draft a cable to the Saigon Station. It began: “Although we are obviously ignorant of what units carried out the city penetration operations … we suspect that many … were undertaken by units not listed in the MACV Order of Battle.” Then I mentioned some types of OB normally omitted (city, sapper, scout, special action, etc.), threw in a few examples, such as the Danang city unit, including the T89 and T87 battalions, and concluded: “We request you draw MACV’s attention to this matter, and suggest they address the question of how to add the missing units … to the OB. Frankly, we find it something of an anomoly to be taking so much punishment from communist soldiers whose existence is not officially acknowledged.”3

  Fortunately, Carver was alone at the moment and I was able to see him. Stroking his already mussed-up hair, he perused the draft. His main alteration to it was to change anomoly to anomaly. He said: “That’s a pertinent question, whether these units are in the OB. Send it on, as is. But come to think of it, you should check it out first with Drex Godfrey.” Drexel Godfrey was the head of OCI, the same man who’d complained in May about my using “unofficial” figures. Theresa addressed a buckslip to OCI, stapled it to the draft, and I went to the credit union to cash a twenty-dollar check.4 Dawdling over some errands, I had a later-than-usual lunch, and didn’t get back to the situation room until two o’clock.

  If anything, it was more hectic than in the morning. The maps of I and II Corps were now a forest of red pins, and George Allen was expostulating to a visiting dignitary about woes to come. At about 2:15 P.M., a person clutching some AP ticker crashed into the room, shouting: “Christ, they’re into the embassy!” The dignitary’s face went pale, even George Allen looked surprised, and Major Blascik stuck a red pin into the capital city.5 It was the first one on the III Corps map. He said to a subordinate: “Better go downstairs and get some additional pins.” The subordinate reappeared a few minutes later with several more boxes. Blascik had already mounted on the wall a large-scale map of Saigon.

  The rest of the afternoon was a big drain on the pin supply. Only now—as George Allen had predicted—they skewered III and IV Corps. The province capitals checked in one by one from the Delta: Vinh Long, Bac Lieu, Can Tho, My Tho, Vi Thanh, Ben Tre, Moc Hoa, Ca Mau, Soc Trang and so on. Few Americans were in the Delta, so reporting was sketchy about the district seats. I wondered about those I’d visited in Long An. Had Major Foote survived with his sandbagged TV set? The first reports came in of American aircraft losses. They were heavy, mostly on the ground and mostly from rockets and artillery shells. I supposed the guns that shot at them weren’t in the OB. I checked Blascik’s clipboard for mentions of VC units: a few now, primarily big ones, the easiest to spot. The communist Fifth, Seventh and Ninth divisions were said to be closing on Saigon. With no official duties, I left work at five o’clock. Tomorrow was the last day of January, the date set for my departure for the third floor.

  The next morning the situation room had settled into a busy but cheerful routine. Blascik had drafted Tom Becker into the room’s staff, and he, with three others, kept up the numerous tote boards and charts. There were frequent entries, sometimes accompanied by whistles of admiration. Becker said: “I thought the VC were supposed to be little people who crept around the jungle in rubber sandals.” The cables showed that although the embassy grounds were now clear of Vietcong, the fighting had spread to other parts of Saigon, including its racetrack, and many more infantry assaults and shellings had occurred elsewhere during the night. A preliminary report from Danang said the communists had destroyed or damaged forty-three planes and helicopters at local runways alone. The worst news came from Hue. Enemy soldiers had overrun the citadel, and were roaming the imperial city in captured jeeps. About the only place in the country left quiet was Khe Sanh. By now the attacks had taken on a collective name—the Tet Offensive.

  All this was interesting, but the time had come to pack. I began loading my files into a shopping cart. As I did so, the “VC Winter-Spring Campaign” folder caught my eye. I skimmed the station cable that had prompted the folder’s start. Its date was 24 November 1967, and out popped the key phrases: All-out offensive; January to March 1968; and urban centers.6 My Lord, the message was almost ten weeks old, but whoever’d written it was right on the button. I asked Tom Becker, who’d been in Vietnam in late November, if he knew the author.

  “Joe Hovey,” said Becker. “He wrote it on Thanksgiving Day. I saw it at Collation right before I left Saigon. The Agency should put his name in lights on top of the headquarters building: Joseph Hovey, The Man Who Predicted The Tet Offensive.”

  “Fat chance,” I replied, recalling that Hovey’s cable had gone to the White House in mid-December under a note by Carver which strongly implied—at OCI’s behest—that Hovey was crying wolf. I was still annoyed at this thought when Theresa handed me the draft that I’d sent Drexel Godfrey the day before about VC units omitted from the order of battle. Godfrey had scribbled on the buckslip: “To Sam Adams. Suggest you hold this until things quiet down. Also, its validity seems a little dubious—at least as of now.”7

  That buckslip was too damn much. Godfrey had tried to kill realistic numbers nine months before, and he was still at it. Overcome with disgust, I wrote Carver a letter of resignation, something I hadn’t intended to do. The letter said that the CIA’s failing was to acquiesce to MACV’s half-truths, distortions and sometimes outright falsehoods.” Furthermore, Westmoreland’s order of battle was a “monument of deceit” to which the agency had cravenly bowed in Saigon in September. These were the last sentences I composed for the Office of the Director, and when I slid it in Carver’s in-box on my way out the door, it occurred to me that he was the wrong recipient.8 It wasn’t really Carver’s fault, not even Drexel Godfrey’s. It was Helms’s.

  I found myself wheeling the shopping cart back and forth all day. The VC Branch secretary, Beverly, was appalled. “Where am I going to put all this crap?” she asked. It turned out not to be a problem. There was room. The VC Branch was so new that it had few files of its own. Unfortunately, it was also on the bottom of the mail room’s distribution list, so I spent most of the rest of the week back with Major Blascik, looking for VC unit designations. I searched everything in sight, even the newspapers. In fact, there were a couple of interesting stories. On Thursday, for example, Ward Just of the Washington Post wrote that “even the toughest pessimists here had not thought that the communists could mount so many offensives with so many men.”9 When I showed it to George Allen, he looked insulted. And in a later Post, Peter Arnett reported from Saigon that Allied soldiers rifling the pockets of dead VC sappers after their attack on the U.S. Embassy had found forged curfew passes. The story said that per
haps five communist battalions were now in Saigon, and that many VC troops had entered the city three days before the attack.10 Five VC battalions equals two thousand men, likely a fraction of the people involved. I recalled the pre-Tet document which had put the claimed production of a VC forging cell for nine months at 250 fake ID cards, scarcely enough for that big a force. My suspicion heightened that this forging cell was only one of many such cells.

  Saturday’s Bulletin observed that VC troops were still in Hue, Hoi An, Phan Thiet, and Dalat, with new assaults on Xuan Loc and Phuoc Le, and that “the effectiveness of the Saigon government was being sorely taxed in the current military crisis.”11 Eventually, the situation room maps showed that the VC attacked forty of South Vietnam’s forty-four province capitals, almost a hundred of its district seats, and four of the five autonomous cities. In most of these places, they’d broken into town. Other situation-room records showed the VC destroyed or damaged twelve hundred U.S. aircraft.12 The offensive was not only a slam-bang performance, it was a fine piece of evidence. How could the communists have mounted such a big attack with an army of only 225,346 men, the number carried in MACV’s latest Order of Battle?13

  I put that question on Monday morning to the VC Branch chief, Ron Smith. A friendly man of ruddy complexion and Maine accent, he said: “It’s obvious they couldn’t. They’ve got double that figure, and probably a lot more. The main question is whether the higher numbers are acceptable to the chain of command.” I was well aware of the problem with the chain of command. The VC Branch was part of the Office of Economic Research, whose boss on Vietnam was Paul Walsh, a pre-Tet supporter of the Saigon agreement. Moreover, as part of the DDI, Walsh reported to its head, R. Jack Smith, who in turn reported to the director, Richard Helms. Looked at from this angle the numbers predicament was the same as ever.