War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  Part two of the package was the memo I’d written in November 1967 criticizing Fourteen Three. Outlining my problem with the OB, it said the “estimate’s history was one of attacks by soldiers and politicians, and retreats by intelligence officials,” but I hoped this rhetoric might slip by to the next administration.30 In any case, the memo showed that mine wasn’t just a case of twenty-twenty hindsight—that I’d begun complaining before Tet. When I read this package over before sending it to the seventh floor, it looked to me like a formidable piece of work. “It might even get results,” I told Doug Parry.

  “Well, you’ve laid the damn thing on the table,” the IG said at 12:30 P.M. the next day; “I suppose we’ve got to do something about it.” Stern-looking, with a patrician accent and a Brooks Brothers suit, the IG was Gordon Stewart, who already knew what I was up to from his assistant, Mr. Andrews. Rumor was that Stewart was a close friend of Helms, and interestingly, his main questions weren’t about the complaints’ substance, but over some requests I’d made at their end. The first was for an IG investigation (“Quite possible,” he said); the second that the package be sent to the White House (“That remains to be seen”); and the third for “a modest amount of storage space for the safekeeping of relevant memoranda which have been collected over the past two years.”

  “What’s all that about?” Mr. Stewart asked.

  “In case I get run over by a Mack truck, sir; I want to be sure my old memos are in a safe place. Xerox copies, of course.”

  “Xerox copies?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. The clear implication was that the originals would be stored someplace else, presumably beyond his reach. My main worry at the time was that the agency might kick me out, and feed all the early evidence about the low OB into a shredding machine. Incidentally, I said this in a highly respectful manner. The last thing I wanted was to be thought of as a wiseacre.31

  The next week was quiet, as I worked on routine papers. Finally, suspense got the best of me and I visited a friend in the DDI front office to find out if there’d been any reaction. “Reaction?” he said. “It’s like the day the soap sank at Proctor and Gamble.” This is the only word I got that my complaint had caused a stir.

  The next day, 5 June, Mr. Stewart called me back to his office. He told me that Helms had seen my bill of particulars, but had decided to “defer” sending it to the White House. Then, looking me straight in the eye, and with a hint of menace, he said: “We regard this as an internal matter. It would be a mistake to take it outside the CIA. The only person who can decide that is the director.” However, Stewart went on, Helms had said that an investigation by the Inspector General’s office seemed perfectly reasonable, and would be pushed. Thereupon he introduced me to two IG investigators who’d been standing by his desk: “These are Mr. Breckenridge and Mr. Grier. They will try to pin down the various episodes in the case.”32

  I spoke to Breckenridge and Grier many times over the next few days.33 Their first question was “Are you against the Vietnam war? Is that why you came to the IG?”

  It was easy enough to answer. I replied: “No, I’m not. My complaints are about American intelligence, not the war. Intelligence officers aren’t supposed to take sides, at least in theory, and partly for that reason, I’m neither a hawk nor a dove. Also it happens to be true. I can see why some people think it was a mistake to have gotten into Vietnam in the first place, but now that we’re there, I have no illusions about our enemy, the Vietcong.”

  And I meant it, even more so at that moment. Only a short while before, I’d seen several VC documents which the Marines had captured while retaking Hue. These showed that during the three weeks the communists had held the city, they had executed almost three thousand Vietnamese34—mostly government officials, but also relatives, including women and children. The South Vietnamese had already dug up over a thousand corpses. According to one report, many victims “had been beaten to death, shot, beheaded, or buried alive,” while many bodies were found “bound together in groups of ten or fifteen, eyes open, with dirt or cloth stuffed in their mouths.”35

  It was cold-blooded murder, and I was curious to find out who did it. There was no surprise. The Vietcong organization that planned the slaughter was the VC Security Service, about which I’d written the study a year before. The local communist police headquarters had chosen victims from blacklists prepared by the A2 branch of their B3—espionage, or diep bao—subsection. Shorthanded, the secret police had enlisted the help of other VC who had infiltrated the city. Among them were soldiers from the fifty self-defense militia units used by the communists as backup troops—the same ones MACV had expelled from its OB in late 1967.

  Breckenridge and Grier continued their investigation through the rest of June and into July. To my surprise, it was straightforward. They talked to my coworkers, to higher-echelon types such as R. Jack Smith and Paul Walsh, and to most of my immediate bosses, including Ron Smith, George Allen, and George Carver. They even consulted Doug Parry. On Thursday, 1 August, Mr. Grier called me on the telephone at nine o’clock to ask if I could come upstairs. I could. Mr. Breckenridge was there too. One of them—I forget which—said: “This is the damnedest investigation I’ve ever been on. Normally we pull the troublemakers, but everyone we saw said you weren’t one. Personally, I think you’ve fingered some interesting problems. In fact …”

  “Anyway,” the other cut in, “we’ve finished our investigation, and now it’s in the hands of Mr. Stewart. He’ll write the final report.” At that point, I asked the obvious questions:

  “Who writes Mr. Stewart’s fitness report?” (A fitness report was the yearly evaluation a superior prepares on his subordinates.)

  “The executive director does. That’s Colonel White,” said Mr. Grier.

  “And who writes Colonel White’s?”

  “Mr. Helms.”

  “And who appointed Gordon Stewart Inspector General?”

  “Mr. Helms.”

  “Very well,” I replied. “Please inform Mr. Stewart that I still want my bill of particulars to go to the White House.” Then I thanked them both, saying it seemed to me they’d conducted a fair investigation. As I left, they shook my hand and said “Good luck.”36 Figuring it would take some time for Mr. Stewart to finish the investigation report, I resumed my latest endeavor.

  The project had first suggested itself over a year earlier. On my return from Saigon in May 1967, the Office of Training (or OTR) had asked me to give a one-hour lecture about the Vietcong secret police to CIA case officers headed for Vietnam. I said OK, and had done so ever since, maybe once every six weeks. During these lectures—held in Rosslyn, Virginia, in a blue-colored office building run by OTR under the nickname Blue U.—I discovered that the only other person talking on the VC was George Allen. Also an hour long, George’s lecture was about the history of the Vietnamese communist movement, starting with Ho Chi Minh in 1919. Therefore agency men got only two lopsided hours on the VC before being sent to the provinces with orders to spy on the enemy. Since none spoke Vietnamese, it was scarcely surprising that the CIA had so far managed to recruit only a single agent. The fault wasn’t with the men in the field, who were generally high-caliber, it was other factors, not the least of which was inadequate training. I didn’t speak Vietnamese either; but I knew something about the Vietcong. My project was to draw up a lesson plan increasing instruction time on the VC from two hours to twenty-four. On my last trip to Blue U. I’d gotten up to about five.

  In fact they were among the most valuable hours I’d ever spent. As anyone knows who’s done some teaching, the teacher always learns a lot more than the student. Since my main job at the time was the VC order of battle, naturally I gave the clandestine-service operatives a short talk on the OB. After one of these talks, a grizzled old DDI-er asked me: “Why are the numbers important?”

  After three years of working with sums, I was taken aback by the question. I retorted approximately as follows: “The numbers are important be
cause we think they’re important. The U.S. government seems to live or die over how many VC there are—for example, the size of our troop deployments depends on enemy numbers—and that being the case, we might as well use the right ones.”

  He said: “OK, I’ll buy that. We think they’re important. But are they important?”

  I thought for a minute before making this answer: “Given the size of our underestimate, yes. But the key is the ones we shortchange: the low-level types, the hamlet cadres, the guerrillas, the militia. In overlooking these people, we willfully disregard what the communists do best. They say this is a political war, a war of allegiance, a ‘people’s war.’ That’s where they put many of their best cadres—at the bottom of the heap, in the hamlets, to mobilize the people. Not all the people volunteer, you can argue that most of them are coerced, but there are a lot of them, and so far the Vietcong have managed to keep them coming.”

  The DDP-ers were more interested in statistics about the Vietcong forging cell. At one point I said: “And the number of phoney ID cards that cell turned out in nine months near Saigon was two hundred and fifty.”

  “What?” said someone in the first row: “Would you care to repeat that figure?”

  “Two hundred and fifty.”

  There were about eighteen simultaneous whistles. The man in the front row said: “My God, I once spent the better part of two months equipping an agent with fake papers. One agent. Two months. If a single cell cranks them out at that rate, Saigon must be like Swiss cheese.”

  I said that the same thought had occurred to me, but I didn’t know much about their espionage network, not having looked into the problem. A related question came as I was explaining VC doctrine: “They claim they’re fighting the war on three fronts: military, political, and military proselyting.”

  “What’s military proselyting?” somebody asked.

  It was the Vietcong effort to subvert the South Vietnamese army, I said, and the documents suggested that it included letter-writing campaigns, appeals to relatives, and suchlike. The proselyters also appeared to run agents.

  “Are they having any success?” he asked. I replied that it was hard to tell, but everyone always said how screwed up the Saigon army was. Maybe the proselyter agents had something to do with it. This wasn’t much of an answer, but it was an intriguing question, and when I got back to headquarters, I asked Ron Smith if he could put someone to work on the subject. Not long before, two analysts named Bob Klein and Bob Appell had joined the VC Branch. Ron said he could spare Klein.

  Bob Klein was fresh out of college, and didn’t know anything about the VC. But he was bright, easygoing, and had an open mind. By mid-August, he’d gone through enough evidence to figure out the rudiments of the VC military proselyting organization. Another bash was scheduled at Blue U. for 19 August, and I felt confident enough in Klein’s abilities to let him give an hour’s speech on what he’d found out. By now I’d upped the training time on the VC to two full days. Klein spoke on the second day. He told them what he knew.

  Among other things, he’d uncovered the fact that the military proselyters ran the enemy’s prisoner of war cages. This wasn’t as odd as it seemed, he told the DDP-ers, since the Vietcong felt they could convert the POWs, and send them back to our side as agents. Naturally the communists were doing better converting South Vietnamese prisoners than they were with ours. To illustrate this point, Klein read from a study the VC had made on U.S. captives. The study pointed out that one American prisoner had spent two whole years doing nothing but computing his back pay. Another had invented a self-cleaning comb, which threw off dandruff as fast as it collected. Yankee captives were hard to fathom, the study remarked; because “they’re immune to the class struggle.” Klein also told the students which group of proselyters ran these agents once they got back to the South Vietnamese army. “It’s the Fifth Columnist Subsection,” he said; “the Vietnamese for ‘fifth columnist’ is noi tuyen. Remember that—‘noi tuyen.’ ” I made a note to spend more time on VC agents in later courses on the enemy.

  Gordon Stewart brought up my other big concern at ten o’clock the next morning, 21 August. After calling me to his office, he read a statement, solemnly, as if from a marble tombstone: “In view of the seriousness of your charges, the director feels they deserve more consideration. Therefore, he has appointed a review board to go over the charges again and advise him what to do. The review board will consist of Admiral Rufus Taylor, the deputy director; Mr. John Bross, one of Mr. Helms’ aides; and Mr. Lawrence Houston, the CIA’s general counsel, that is, our chief lawyer.” Then Mr. Stewart told me to cooperate with the review board. I said that of course I would.37

  It was clear what was going on. Helms had thought up another excuse not to send the complaints to the White House. Doubtless he could create review boards forever, but at this moment there seemed no point in raising a fuss. After all, my object was to warn the incoming administration, and although the Republicans in Miami had already chosen Richard Nixon as their presidential candidate, the Democrats—now gathering in Chicago—had yet to choose theirs.

  The person whom the review board annoyed most was Doug Parry. By now he’d gotten so fed up with what he called malarky that he’d decided to quit the agency to attend the University of Utah Law School. At the last moment he wanted to charge up to the IG to let off steam, but once again I dissuaded him. Partly I didn’t think it would do much good, but mostly he had the idea that he might want to rejoin the CIA after law school. If he had an IG complaint in his jacket, they probably wouldn’t let him back in. He was too good to lose.

  As Parry took off for Utah, I edited a recently drafted paper by the other new branch analyst, Bob Appell. Assigned by Ron Smith at my suggestion, Appell’s paper was an experiment. Hitherto, all our order-of-battle memos, in computing VC numbers, had used MACV definitions of who the enemy was. But this one—which zeroed in on just two provinces, VC Gia Lai and Kontum—employed Vietcong definitions.* Furthermore, Appell made extensive use of circumstantial evidence. For example, he had assumed that ordnance reports of large numbers of ninety-millimeter rockets heading for a certain area in Gia Lai implied the presence there of a ninety-millimeter recoilless rifle unit. On the face of it, this wasn’t much of an analytical leap, except that it hadn’t been done before, at least not by American intelligence in Vietnam. Actually it was an ancient technique, used by the French in estimating Vietminh in 1954, and no doubt by George Washington in counting the British in 1776.

  I finished Appell’s paper over the Labor Day weekend, and when Ron Smith got it the day after, he tossed it in his in-box, where it stayed for some time. This isn’t to blame Ron, who had higher priorities. The memo wasn’t all that important, and the only reason I mention it at all was that it became the basis for another paper, which—using the same analytical methods, and also involving Bob Appell—was to shake the foundations of American policy in Indo-China some two years and nine months later. The second paper was dated 8 June 1971.

  Meanwhile, amid tear gas and billy clubs in Chicago, the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey as their candidate for president. This might have been a good time to start pushing my IG complaints toward the White House, but I decided not to. As far as I could make out, Helms’ three-man review board had yet to meet, and it would have seemed presumptuous for a low-level analyst like myself to demand action right away. So I went on vacation, spending ten days with Eleanor and Clayton at my family’s cabin in the Adirondacks. On my return to CIA headquarters on Monday, 16 September, the first thing I did was check my back mail to see if the review board had gotten into gear. It hadn’t. However, another piece of mail shed light on the matter. It was a routine notice from the seventh floor announcing the “temporary absence of John A. Bross from 13 September 1968 to 23 October 1968.”38 That was six weeks, and since Bross was one of the review board trio, I telephoned his office to find out where he’d gone.

  “Mr. Bross is a canoe enthusiast,” his secretary a
nswered. “Every year he takes his holiday exploring the lakes.” So that was it. One third of the review board had gone canoeing, with no plans to paddle back to headquarters until right before elections. Obviously, I was getting the runaround. Something had to be done.

  Therefore, at nine o’clock on the following morning I went up to the general counsel’s office, and talked to an agency lawyer, Mr. James B. Ueberhorst. I said: “Mr. Ueberhorst, I wrote a report for the White House about four months ago complaining about CIA management, and I’ve been getting the runaround ever since. What I want is some legal advice. Would I be breaking any laws if I took my memo and carried it over to the White House myself?” In a highly agitated voice, Mr. Ueberhorst told me about the “employer-employee relationship” including the prerogatives of each, about the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, but he didn’t answer my question. I repeated it, adding that the last thing I wanted was to break the law, and would he please relay our conversation to his boss, the general counsel, Mr. Lawrence Houston, who also happened to be a member of the review board. Mr. Uberhorst said he would, and I went below to await the reaction.39

  It came on 20 September 1968, a Friday, heralded by a telephone call at 11:30 A.M. from Colonel Lawrence White’s secretary, asking me to come back upstairs. Colonel White was the executive director, number three man in the agency after Richard Helms and Rufus Taylor. I entered his office at 11:35. Bald, with a fringe of reddish hair—his nickname on the seventh floor being Red—he motioned me to sit in a large brown leather sofa catty-cornered from his desk. I did so, and commenced taking notes. Standing before the sofa, he said: “Mr. Adams, the director has indicated that he doesn’t want your memo to leave the building. We believe that at this moment you’re an asset to the agency, and that you have a role to play in its future, but what the role is depends on how you conduct yourself in this matter.”