by Sam Adams
Until now, American intelligence had concentrated on the first front, glancing from time to time at the second. Except for Klein’s first efforts, it had entirely neglected the third. At this moment I decided to join Klein full-time in investigating the third front.
*A captured VC document showed that fifty self-defense militia units helped occupy Hue, for example.17
*On 23 February, the Wall Street Journal commented that “the American people should be getting ready to accept … the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.” Four days later, Walter Cronkite of CBS said he thought the war might end in a stalemate. According to President Johnson’s press secretary, Cronkite’s comment sent “shockwaves … throughout the government.”
*The supreme irony of the militia’s re-entry into our estimate at this point was that in many areas it had almost ceased to exist as a separate organization. The reasons were manifold. For example, right before the offensive, the VC turned large numbers into guerrillas, and sent others to higher-level units. Furthermore Tet was the first time the Vietcong employed militia formations away from home, partly—as Carver pointed out—as back-up troops in the cities, where they doubtless sustained high casualties. During Tet the toll of southerners recruited locally by the VC was so great that the communists had to rely increasingly thereafter on North Vietnamese replacements. According to a CIA estimate, the number of northerners to march south in 1968 was just short of a quarter million, another indication of the vast scale of the offensive.
*At the time of the Tet Offensive, the CIA’s sole agent among the Vietcong was run by a now-retired case officer named Foster Phipps. The spy’s warnings allowed the Marines to repel the VC from Danang, one of the few cities the communists failed to penetrate. Phipps—who reminded many people of W. C. Fields—received a letter of commendation from the Marines, but none from the CIA. He retired from the agency in 1973.
*As already noted, the VC divided their army into three parts: main forces, local forces, and guerrilla-militia, with service troops integral to each part. MACV lumped the first two parts under the heading “regulars,” created the separate category “service troops,” and counted only the top half of the guerrilla-militia. What this meant in practical terms was that American OB analysts had to shoehorn the numbers appearing in VC documents into MACV’s categories. Appell’s paper was an attempt to forego this step.
*My notes indicate that this conversation lasted until 11:05 A.M. Some hours later, perhaps as long as a day, President-elect Nixon summoned Helms to the Hotel Pierre in New York City to inform Helms confidentially that he intended to reappoint him as director of the CIA. The source of this information is Thomas Powers, author of Helms’ biography, The Man Who Kept Secrets.44 Powers’ source was John Bross, the canoeist. Nixon announced the reappointment publicly on 16 December.
*When Nixon got up at 6:45 A.M. on the 21st—the first full day of his administration—his initial action (according to his memoirs) was to read the Sitrep. In March, he confidently told his cabinet that he expected the war to be over within a year.
*At about this time, the Washington Post published an interview with North Vietnam’s minister of defense Vo Nguyen Giap by the Italian newswoman Oriana Fallacci. In the course of the interview, she said: “General, the Americans say you’ve lost a million men.” He replied: “That’s quite exact,” with Fallacci adding the comment that Giap “let this drop as casually as if it were quite unimportant, as hurriedly as if, perhaps, the real number was even larger.” Giap’s answer tended to confirm my belief that the American press’s suspicions were ill-founded that MACV was inflating enemy casualties. The real numbers problem was that the entire war, casualties included, was a lot bigger than generally thought. Another quote from Giap, taken from the same interview: “The U.S. has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetrical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they would have already exterminated us.” This quote was blown up into large print, and displayed prominently over one of the VC Branch safes.50
7 THE THIRD FRONT
“SHE WAS MUTTERING to herself. That’s how they caught her. Walking on the runway—well, plenty of Vietnamese do that, you’d think they didn’t give a hoot about getting run over—but this old lady was different. Not only was she walking on the runway, incidentally walking straight for a parked United States Air Force F-105 jet fighter, she was muttering as she went. ‘Holy mackerel’ said an alert young private in the Air Force. ‘Bet she’s got a bomb. Bet she’s gonna blow up that airplane.’ So he arrested her on the spot. It turned out she didn’t have a bomb. Still, that muttering was suspicious. So they kept asking her why. Finally the old lady confessed. She’d been pacing the distance between the edge of the runway, and the parked jet. The mutters were her counting her steps. That night the Vietcong planned to set up a mortar outside the compound in order to shoot at the jet, and they wanted to know exactly how far the plane was from where they were going to lay down the mortar baseplate. That way they wouldn’t have to waste so many rounds finding the range. Now, that’s what I call intelligence.”
The speaker was a jovial Counterintelligence staffer from Bill Johnson’s shop who looked like Burl Ives. His name was Stu Vance. He gave lectures with me at Blue U. about the Vietcong, one of his specialties being communist military intelligence. After relating the story (which he swore was true) he opened it up for discussion. “A Pentagon watchword these days is “cost-effectiveness,” he told a class of DDP-ers. “I wonder if you’d care to guess how cost-effective that operation would have been if successful. Compared to, say, the cost-effectiveness of one of our B-52 bomber raids.” In bringing up B-52s in such an offhand manner, he was disingenuous. Another of Vance’s specialties was how well our B-52 raids did.
I forget what was said, but recall what it came to. Nobody knew the precise weight or cost of anything, so the numbers were all approximations. Say it had taken the VC ten rounds to hit the jet. If an 81-millimeter round cost $25, and weighed maybe 10 pounds, that meant for $250 and 100 pounds of ammunition, the VC had done a job on a $1.5 million airplane. This contrasted to the job done by the B-52’s. Often they flew in formations of nine planes, each carrying 25 tons of bombs, for a grand total of 450,000 pounds of high explosive. The average raid cost what, maybe $500,000? “And from what I’ve been able to find out,” Stu Vance said, “the bombers usually don’t know what’s down there, or if they did, it’s probably left, and they’re darn lucky to knock apart more than a few ten-dollar huts, and maybe a blick.” (Blick was the military word for boat. It came from the first letters of MACV’s official term for one, Water-Borne Logistics Craft.)
“Now let me put this into perspective,” he went on. “Sometimes the VC only put holes in the airplane, and frequently they miss it altogether. Whereas if a B-52 bomb lands on a hut, that hut is demolished, I mean eradicated, so you can’t find a shingle, only a bent nail or two a couple of hundred yards away. And an occasional bomb even lands on a communist.* But that’s not my point. My point is that the VC do things more efficiently than we do. And the reason is that they usually know what they’re aiming at, and we usually don’t. Another way of putting it is that they have good intelligence.” He added that Vietcong military intelligence had a lot more going for it than old women who talk to themselves. “They have a radio intercept service with more than 600 listening posts—200 of them manned by people who know English and an espionage organization with agents, secret ink, couriers and microdots. It’s not primitive, it’s sophisticated, and good as anything we had in World War II. I might underline once again that this is an entirely different outfit from the ones Mr. Adams told you about.”
He was referring to two lectures I’d just finished. One concerned the Vietcong Security Service, whose B-3 component also ran spies in the Saigon government. The other was about the VC Military Proselyting Section, which, as Bob Klein had pointed out, had
fifth columnists, or noi tuyens, in the South Vietnamese army.
Klein got back from South Carolina on Monday, 26 May 1969. “Maybe we’ve gone at the proselyters from the wrong direction,” I told him. “Perhaps by trying to see how many desertions they cause without first finding out how big their organization is, we’ve put the cart before the horse.” We discussed this thesis off and on for almost a week before deciding that Klein’s next job should be to guess the size of the VC’s fifth column. “Coming up with a number is pointless,” I said. “Probably there’s not that much evidence on noi tuyens, so the best we can hope for is to say that the ‘network is extensive,’ or ‘it’s little,’ something of that nature.” We decided the best way to go about it was the one we’d used on the order of battle; start with the latest captured document, and work backwards. MACV’s document center had just published bulletin number 22,000.
I’d have helped Klein, but was too busy on my own. With the announcement of the Vietnamization Program on 14 May, the administration was pumping out questions on how well the South Vietnamese army could be expected to do when it took over the war. “Have a look at this one,” Ron Smith had told me. It was the draft for the latest Fourteen Three, the annual estimate to judge the “capabilities of the Vietnamese communists for fighting in South Vietnam.” I knew that phrase well, having spent five months on it while arguing the order of battle in Fourteen Three, ’Sixty-Seven.
Fourteen Three, ’Sixty-Nine was somewhat better. For example, the OB paragraphs were satisfactory, since the VC Branch had provided all the numbers. Nonetheless, the draft seemed out of balance. Of its forty-odd pages, twenty-three were about Vietcong supply problems. I’d never thought supplies were very important, and there was little mention of the VC’s political prowess, and none at all on such subjects as communist espionage. By now I thought politics and spying were closely related. Ron had already heard the story of the old woman and the F-105 when I said to him: “This is supposed to be a ‘political war,’ and persuading that old lady to walk on the runway was a political act. It seems to me that the draft spends too much time counting boxes.” For good measure, I repeated my old bias on logistics. When the CIA had doubled the order of battle, it had neglected to adjust upwards its estimate of VC supplies. Therefore, the draft’s calculations on enemy logistics were based on the needs of a smaller army than actually existed. I didn’t want to get into a fight over this, because I didn’t think it mattered.
“If you want to write up something on VC spies and politicians,” Ron Smith said, “be my guest, but stay away from logistics. That’s Paul Walsh’s territory, and he doesn’t like other people intruding.” As already mentioned, Walsh’s reputation had come from his studies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s ability to successfully withstand our bombing.
I started up on Fourteen Three about the same time that Klein launched into the captured documents. He couldn’t have been at it for more than a few minutes when he interrupted me with the first reference to a VC fifth columnist. “Wow!” he exclaimed, as he waved the document in front of me. The fifth columnist was a South Vietnamese army lieutenant who ran a DIOCC. “DIOCC” stood for District Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Center, the basic engine at district level for the CIA-designed Phoenix Program. Phoenix’s purpose was to root out the VC political infrastructure person by person. It looked as though in this district the program was rooting out the wrong people. Klein and I speculated what the lieutenant could do to sabotage Phoenix:
“He could put the government supporters in jail as ‘VC agents.’ ”
“And let loose the real ones.”
“He could shuffle the files.”
“Throw them away.”
“Switch names.”
“Do in the district chief.”
And so on. It was a fine start to his project.
Thus encouraged, Klein went off to find more examples. I called the counterintelligence staff’s Bill Johnson, who said he’d alert the station about the DIOCC lieutenant. He added: “Meanwhile, you ought to know we just rolled up a net of Cuc Ngien Cuu agents in Saigon. The report’ll be coming out shortly. I’ll see that you get a copy.” By rolled up, he meant arrested. Cuc Ngien Cuu is Vietnamese for “Central Research Directorate,” the communists’ name for their military intelligence headquarters in Hanoi. It was the same outfit that had recruited the old lady on the runway, and incidentally, was the Saigon Station’s main counterintelligence target since the start of the war.
Not long after this conversation, Doug Parry appeared unexpectedly from the University of Utah Law School in Salt Lake City. “The agency hired me on for my summer vacation,” he explained, making me glad that I’d talked him out of going to the Inspector General nine months before. (It was no surprise when I found out Parry was near the top of his law class.) Ron Smith didn’t know what to do with him over such a short period of time. I had a brainstorm: “How about putting him on the documentation problem? While Klein’s looking for fifth columnists, Parry can find out how hard or easy it is for them to get government ID cards.” I already suspected the answer—fairly easy—but thought it was a good idea to be able to prove it. Ron said OK, and Doug disappeared from sight to pursue the research. This was fine, because Parry liked working on his own, and on the basis of past performance I figured he’d do a good job.
Activity was intense over the next three weeks. I doubt an intelligence proposition has fallen into place as quickly as this one. Namely: the Vietcong espionage and subversive network was well-oiled, highly successful, and possessed of vast numbers of agents.
This proposition was scarcely a world-beater for anyone familiar with Vietnam, but it involved two major surprises. The first was the enormous amount of hard evidence available to support it. The second was that nobody paid much attention to the evidence except the Counterintelligence Staff. The CI Staff seemed to have known about it all along. In fact, Bill Johnson gave me my biggest single piece of information. It was the station report he’d promised in early June, the one about the Cuc Ngien Cuu roll-up in Saigon.
The report was a doozie. It said the South Vietnamese National Police had recently arrested seventy Cuc Ngien Cuu agents in the capital city. These included the police’s own chief dentist—who apparently extracted information as he pulled teeth—a deputy in South Vietnam’s lower house, and a South Vietnamese army lieutenant “who regularly provided sensitive documents of strategic value.” I crossed over to the DDP side of the building to ask Johnson who the lieutenant was.
“A liaison officer,” he said.
“Liaison between what and what?” I inquired.
“Between Abrams’s* headquarters and the South Vietnamese Joint Chiefs. He carried paper mostly, such as plans for Allied operations, requests for B-52 raids, including the coordinates thereof, and so forth, Always in three copies—one for Abrams, one for the Joint Chiefs, and one for the Cuc Ngien Cuu.”
“Is that as bad as it sounds?” I asked.
“Let me put it this way,” Johnson replied. “If we had his equivalent in Hanoi, we’d have probably won the damn war three years ago.” This may have been counterintelligence hyperbole over the danger of spies, but the news was doleful; but not as doleful, however, as the report’s conclusion. It said that the arrested agents were a drop in the Cue Ngien Cuu bucket.
Just then Doug Parry showed up with his initial report. He’d been down in the district to visit AID headquarters’ Public Safety Division, which handled the Washington end of South Vietnam’s identificationcard program. “You’d never think that a laminated piece of paper could be such a touchy subject,” Doug said, “but apparently it is. With my first question, the Public Safety chief looked like he wanted to dive under the table.” I asked Parry what he’d found out.
It was a lot. Until late 1968, Saigon had been running a program under which seven and a half million ID cards were issued. However, these cards were easy to fake (which I already suspected because of the VC forging cell document)
, and large numbers had been lost or stolen by the VC. During the Tet Offensive, for example, the communists had assigned teams of cadres, including self-defense militiamen, to go door-to-door in the cities to collect government ID cards. The old system was so fouled up that President Thieu had decided to start up a new one. Saigon began distributing the new cards in October 1968. By 1 May 1969, the number of new cards issued was 1.5 million.
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but it looks like most people still have the old cards.”
“Right,” said Parry.
“OK, then, how do you get a new one?”
“By presenting the old card to the local police,” he replied, “or by showing them a birth certificate or proof of residency. Of course these are easy to forge too, and in any case, the requirement is normally waived for people who have lost them. I mean, there’s a war on, and if somebody’s house is burning down, one of the last things he thinks about is rescuing his identification papers. The police realize that.”
“Another question, how do you join the South Vietnamese army?”
“By presenting an ID card to the recruiting officer.”
“Very well, what’s to prevent a Vietcong cadre from going to a government police station, telling them he lost his ID card, getting a new one, and then walking down the street to the post office to join the army?”
“Nothing.” said Doug.
“In other words, becoming a VC spy …”
“Is like rolling off a log,” he completed my sentence. I told Doug he was cooking with gas, and to please find out what the South Vietnamese government did to screen applicants for sensitive jobs, such as cryptographers, officer candidates, special branch policemen, and staffers in President Thieu’s office. Once again he disappeared.
Parry’s findings would have been important even in normal times, but at this moment they were downright explosive. The reason was Klein. While the above conversations were going on, he was flipping through MACV bulletins. He had discovered almost at once that his first fifth columnist, the DIOCC lieutenant, was anything but unusual. Mentions of VC agents appeared in all kinds of documents: after-action reports describing how fifth columnists had helped in Vietcong attacks; notices of awards for especially good agents; and records kept by military proselyting sections, which sometimes included rosters of spies—as usual, by cover name only. Among the latter were extensive records captured in the VC province of Ben Tre. Ben Tre was roughly the same as South Vietnam’s Kien Hoa Province, a notorious hotbed of communist activity in the Delta. In this short period of time, Klein’s count of military proselyting agents in South Vietnamese ranks had grown to four hundred.
