War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  But for two other reasons, it wasn’t. I’ve already mentioned reason number one—the enormous indisputable fact of the Tet Offensive, over which the whole United States press was in a grand halloo that showed few signs of abating. The second reason was less obvious, but in my view almost as important. Finally I had some help. There were four analysts beside myself assigned to work on the Vietcong. Two were alumni of Saigon’s Collation Branch, which meant they knew something about the VC; a third was named Joe Stumpf, who’d already visited Vietnam briefly to look into enemy recruiting; and the fourth was Doug Parry, who had given me the enemy document before Tet about the 150,000 VC guerrillas. A tall, clean-cut Mormon from Salt Lake City, Parry was eager to get to work. That was another problem. Having no direction from up top on what to do, the branch was at almost a dead standstill.

  In other words, the machinery was in place; all that remained was to turn it on. I made my first pass at this switch on 5 February, with a memo that began: “The events of the last week may well have changed many of the assumptions on which U.S. intelligence has operated in the past.” It tossed out some suggestions for research projects, most with an eye to upping the numbers, but some on other important-looking topics, such as VC spies. Its final recommendation was speed, because “big decisions are in the offing, such as whether to stay in or get out of Vietnam.”14 When I gave it to Ron Smith, he said: “I’ll see if I can get a decision from upstairs.”

  Goodness knows how long that would take, so I started to crank out papers by myself. On 7 February, for example, I wrote five: one about VC policy, three on missing regulars, and one about an attack at Tet. The fifth stemmed from new evidence, Vietcong documents having arrived at last concerning the offensive. Among them were the plans for the VC assault on Pleiku, including the formations assigned to do it. They were the Vietcong H-15 Battalion, Unit 90 (part of the VC 407th), and the Pleiku City Unit. Only one of the three, the H-15, was in the MACV Order of Battle.15 I showed the memo around the building. Ron Smith said: “I’ll take it upstairs.” George Allen said: “It makes me sick.” George Carver said: “If any more of these show up, I want to see them.”

  Over the next few days, I must have visited Carver a dozen times. The situation room crew joined in and so did George Allen. The situation room came up with the T89 and T87 battalions as having been in on the attack on Danang. Allen was the first to spot that the VC had formed extra units to help in the attack. Apparently, provinces with a single infantry battalion had formed two, districts had doubled up on companies, and so on. The new units were manned by late recruits and upgraded guerrilla militia—which helped explain the pre-Tet ferment in the VC home guard. George Allen told me: “One of the biggest casualties so far is the pacification program. The South Vietnamese have pulled in to protect the cities, and the guerrillas are raising hell in the hamlets.”16 He added that Vietcong local forces had borne the brunt of the attack so far, the communists having held in reserve most of their big divisions and regiments. There were exceptions. At least two enemy regiments were holed up in Hue, and the communists were finally moving in on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh. Troops of the North Vietnamese 304th Division had just overrun another Special Forces camp to Khe Sanh’s west—Lang Vei—for the first time using tanks.

  There was only one type of communist soldier unheard from so far. George Carver brought it up on the afternoon of 11 February, a Sunday. He asked me: “Did you read President Thieu’s speech?”

  “No, Sir,” I replied.

  “Well I did just a little while ago, and he said that many of the enemy soldiers active in the cities belong to the VC militia.”

  “The self-defense militia?”

  “Yes,” Carver said. “Apparently the Vietcong are using them as support troops for the attack, and to keep order in occupied parts of the cities.* You’ll remember that MACV read them out of the order of battle last September.”

  “I remember.”

  “It’s time to bite the bullet,” said Carver. “We plan to send a cable on the quiet to the Saigon Station voicing headquarters’ concern about the troops MACV dropped from its OB, such as the militia. This might be a good opportunity to reopen the whole numbers question, since the recent offensive obviously couldn’t have happened if MACV’s figures were accurate. I don’t see how we can start subtracting losses from the communist force structure until we have a handle on how large the structure is.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, smiling enigmatically, and went below to write a memo of conversation. This had become habit. To Carver’s remarks, I appended these comments: “It appears to me that the last hand has been taken from the brake (at least on the quasi-working level), and that we can now plunge forward toward making a realistic estimate of enemy strength. With the political atmosphere being what it now is—a new willingness to hang the rap on MACV—I think we can push forward many ideas that would have been rejected two weeks ago.”18 For Ron Smith’s benefit, I suggested the same research projects as the week before. The front office was still sitting on them.

  Not having come in over the weekend, Ron Smith didn’t read the memo until Monday morning. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said and disappeared once again, presumably to tug the chain of command. Smith had no sooner gone out the door than Doug Parry observed, “You realize that in most other trades, these people would be in deep trouble. They lied about the OB before Tet, which caught them by complete surprise as a result, and now they’re trying to think up ways to get out of it. There ought to be an investigation. Somebody should be told about this.”

  Parry had touched a sore point. As if trying to excuse myself, I explained that although an investigation was a good idea, it was unclear how to get one started. Who should I complain to? The CIA Inspector General? He reported to Helms. The White House? The White House had probably put Helms up to it. Congress? The committees supposed to oversee the agency were well-known patsies. A more important problem was timing. “The CIA’s about to go straight,” I said, “and if I complained now, they’d probably stay crooked.” Parry agreed it was a problem.

  The next morning Carver at last sent off a cable to Saigon that indicated that headquarters was thinking of reopening the order-of-battle dispute. Among those to sign on it were Drexel Godfrey of OCI, plus a close colleague of OER’s Vietnam honcho, Paul Walsh. Helms’ name didn’t appear on the message, but I guessed he must have given his OK.19 In any case, Ron Smith was optimistic. “The light is no longer red,” he said. “I think it’s amber.”

  Six days later, the Saigon Station sent in a message the effect of which was to turn the light green. It said that, far from repenting, MACV had climbed out even further on its limb. According to the DDI representative in Saigon, a “crash” J-2 study entitled “Cost and Impact on the Enemy of the Tet Offensive” had concluded—after some intricate math involving VC casualties and recruitment rates—that the communists had suffered a net loss during the offensive to date of 24,000 men. OK so far but in order to reflect this mayhem, MACV had slashed its order of battle from 225,000 (the truncated number before the offensive) to 201,000 men.20 “You see where they’re headed,” I said to Ron Smith, “at this rate there won’t be any VC left by the end of the year.” “Impossible,” he replied, and took off to see Paul Walsh.

  A short while later, Walsh called me up to his office. I had mixed feelings about him. Although he’d gone along with the fake OB before Tet, he’d done so reluctantly. Furthermore he’d fought the military over enemy logistics, having argued repeatedly that despite the bombing, the Ho Chi Minh Trail provided the VC with all the munitions they needed throughout the country. He was pale, with pouches under his eyes, which looked balefully over plastic-rimmed glasses.

  “This is a travesty,” he said, pointing at the message. “and I don’t think we should let MACV get away with it. I want you to draft a reply to the ‘Cost and Impact’ paper.” I did so, saying we didn’t doubt that the Vietcong had suffered a net loss of 24,000 men—if an
ything, the losses were even higher, what with the carnage—but it came from a force two or three times bigger than MACV would admit. This put the offensive into a different perspective; for example, belying Westmoreland’s claim that communist casualties were “disastrous,” when actually they were quite reasonable under the circumstance. Walsh signed my cable almost without change, and shortly thereafter the DDI front office gave Ron Smith the go-ahead for the sidelined research projects.21

  The next seven weeks were among the busiest I ever spent, rehashing and bringing up to date my old papers. There were occasional side trips, however, including a visit to Port Holabird on 27 February to give a lecture on the VC for Colonel Hawkins.22 He gave a lunch in my honor, toasting me as the “best OB man in the business.” From Hawkins this was high praise, and my pleasure in getting it was in sharp contrast to what I felt a couple of days later when the DDI chief, R. Jack Smith, and his deputy, Edward Proctor, visited the VC Branch. They pumped my hand, and told me what a fine analyst I was, with Mr. Smith saying: “You know even more about Vietnam than you did about the Congo.” When they left, I said to Doug Parry: “If they thought I was such a fine analyst, why did they cave in before Tet?” He replied: “The wind was blowing from a different direction.” Parry had a point.

  The press was gloomier than ever,* and not without reason. Although the Marines had finally pushed the last North Vietnamese out of Hue, it was with great loss of life. The communists killed some two thousand U.S. soldiers in February, the highest monthly toll in the war thus far.

  On Tuesday, 19 March, I was still scribbling away on the third floor, when Don Blascik called from the situation room to ask me to check a paper he’d put together on VC strength.23 I went upstairs and did so. He’d used the higher estimate (now “500,000 to 600,000 men”), so it was fine by me. “This is for the director,” he explained, “he’s about to give a briefing.” I asked who for, Blascik said he didn’t know but would try to find out. I told him not to bother, and went below to continue what had become a running conversation with Doug Parry. He said: “Now that Helms is using those numbers, the rest of the agency’s got to use them too.”

  Of course Parry was dead right. It also meant my biggest excuse for not seeking an investigation—fear that the agency might back off—was less valid than before. As March wore on, the excuse grew thinner. On 26 March, for example, George Carver cabled the Saigon Station: “We are making a thoroughgoing review of the whole OB problem and hope to get an agreed Washington position prior to broaching the subject frontally with MACV. We will keep you advised of the progress in this exercise, and would appreciate your alerting us to any MACV rumbles possibly related thereto.”24 Already hardening, the agency position set in concrete on 30 March. On that date the CIA issued a joint paper with the Defense Intelligence Agency that announced that the communists had an “insurgency base” (a newly coined euphemism for OB) of “around 500,000 men.” The paper concluded that “manpower is not a factor limiting Hanoi’s ability to continue the war.”25 There was no way out of it. Now my only excuse for not trying to get an investigation was the problem of finding an investigator who wouldn’t end up being its butt.

  The next day was Sunday, which I spent at home. Normally the war was an avoided subject on days off, but this one was an exception. President Johnson had scheduled a “major policy address” concerning the war. I had a good deal of sympathy with his predicament, having long since concluded that Kennedy had boxed us into Vietnam. The president came on at 9:30. “Good evening my fellow Americans,” he said. “Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam.” He continued in this vein for some twenty minutes, saying that he planned to stop bombing North Vietnam except near the DMZ, and there’d be no more big troop increases. None of this was new; he’d scheduled bombing pauses before. The bombshell came at the end: “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  I said to Doug Parry the next morning: “It looks like LBJ is serious. Whoever the next president is, he ought to be warned what’s gone on down here. This is a good time to do it.” And I took off for the seventh floor to see the CIA Inspector General. According to agency regs, the IG is supposed to handle employee grievances.

  A secretary said the chief inspector wasn’t in, but one of his assistants was, a Mr. Douglas Andrews. As I entered his office, Mr. Andrews smiled in welcome: “What can I do for you this morning?” I said: “I’ve come to file a complaint. I feel the conduct of American intelligence on Vietnam has been far less than satisfactory, and that the director and the head of the DDI might well have to be replaced. I want an inquiry started to alert the incoming president …”

  He gulped slightly, but otherwise kept a straight face. Also, he began to take notes. It took an hour to tell my story. I laid out the problems with the OB, and such DDI failures as its omission to assign anyone to work on the Vietcong. I explained that although my ultimate goal was to reach the White House, I wanted to do so through channels. That’s why I’d come to the IG. When I was done, he said: “This isn’t what I’d call our usual employee grievance. Normally we get complaints about cafeteria food, or slow promotions. That’s not the real problem, is it? Slow promotions?”

  “No, sir,” I replied.

  He looked at me appraisingly. “I guess not. Well, I’ll see what I can do. However, if I were you, I wouldn’t count on getting Mr. Helms fired in the immediate future.” I said I harbored no such expectation, and would supply a written bill of particulars as soon as my work load let up. This might be a while since the rumor was around that another order-of-battle conference was about to occur. Then I went downstairs to tell Ron Smith what had happened.26

  Amazingly, he already knew. He said: “they warned me you might be trouble. This is a snootful.” I said that none of my complaints were about him, and that he’d be the first to know if there were further developments.

  The rumor about the OB conference turned out to be true. It was scheduled for 10 April, with a delegation expected from MACV. I turned on the heat to finish up my OB papers. Around 5 April Ron Smith stopped by my desk to say: “The front office just asked me to take you off the numbers business. I told them, ‘Over my dead body; without Adams MACV’d knock us apart.’ ” This took guts, and I was grateful to Ron Smith. I said: “Thank you.”

  For the first time in the war, the CIA came to an OB conference adequately prepared. We had detailed papers for every category of enemy strength: one on guerrillas by Doug Parry: another on the self-defense militia by George Allen: and others on the regulars, service troops, and political cadres by me. Adequate preparation had never been the real problem, however, it was will. We had that now too. Resembling the English literature professor he’d once been, DDI chief R. Jack Smith laid it out on the opening day: “Since Fourteen Three, we have had a steady succession of problems with the numbers. We had hoped for a surcease of these problems, but it did not happen. The White House said to Mr. Helms: ‘Straighten this out.’ We will come up with a draft. Footnote it if you wish.”27 In other words he told MACV to go fly a kite.

  The MACV delegation listened in stung silence. It had four people in it, headed by Colonel Danny Graham. A lieutenant colonel when he’d taken me to lunch at the South Vietnamese officer’s club in Saigon, Graham had gotten his promotion recently. With him were Hawkins’ replacement as OB chief, a Marine lieutenant colonel named Paul Weiler; one of Weiler’s deputies, Navy Commander James Meacham, and a MACV political analyst, Captain Kelly Robinson.

  There’s no point in detailing the conference. With Paul Walsh now leading the pack, we ran roughshod over MACV. The most interesting occurrence wasn’t the argument, which I’d heard many times before, but something Captain Robinson told me during a coffee break. He said: “Remember that kid called McArthur, our guerrilla analyst at Saigon? They tried to change his numbers, and he blew his stack. Now he’s transferred to Gia Dinh.” I had a vague recollection of a skinny lie
utenant who’d sat quietly on the sidelines during the Saigon go-around, so I jotted down what Robinson said, unfortunately forgetting to ask McArthur’s first name. At the end of the conference, the agency’s top count of VC was just below 600,000.28 Among other things, we’d marched the self-defense militia back into the estimate.* As Doug Parry said a short while afterward: “A little late.”

  I felt the same way as Doug, and thus saw no reason to abandon my quest for an inquiry. It took several weeks to tie up the conference’s loose ends, however, so I didn’t get around to sending my bill of complaints to the Inspector General until late May. On the day this happened, the twenty-seventh, Doug volunteered to go in on the project with me. I declined the offer with thanks, saying: “There’s no point in both of us sticking our necks out. It gives them a bigger target.”

  Putting the package together had been ticklish business. On the one hand—since it was meant for the White House—I had to go easy on accusations of political pressure from on high. On the other—since its eventual purpose was to inform Johnson’s successor of what had gone wrong—I had to be as specific as possible. With these objectives in mind I split the package into two parts. The first were the complaints themselves, which dwelt on the shortcomings of the DDI. Detailing the almost total absence of serious research on the Vietcong, it emphasized the results. The most obvious, of course, was our underestimation of “the strength of the enemy and therefore the scale of the Vietnamese war.” A second was closer to home. The CIA’s attempts to recruit spies among the VC had “met with scant success, in part because we knew so little about what we were operating against.” I tossed in a footnote here that of the five-hundred-odd CIA employees roving Vietnam, the number who spoke Vietnamese was “considerably less than” six.*29