by Sam Adams
“Four hundred!” I exclaimed in late June. “Before Tet the CIA had only a single spy in the VC.”
“This is only a third of the bulletins,” he said. “If noi tuyens keep showing up at this rate, we’ll have more than a thousand.”
We agreed that even a thousand was a small fraction of the total, or as Klein put it, “the tip of the iceberg.” Furthermore, what they were was even more impressive than their number. We must have gone over his list of VC agents a dozen times. It included eight South Vietnamese radiomen, including three sergeants and a corporal; a warrant officer attached to Saigon’s naval headquarters; two civilians working in intelligence at an airfield; a sergeant serving in a quartermaster depot at Danang air base; a platoon leader of a government anti-guerrilla formation; a Vietnamese employee of the CIA; two soldiers of unidentified rank working for Saigon’s chief of ordnance; a second lieutenant who served as assistant chief of the spywar section of a Marine battalion (and who had recruited three other Marines in the battalion); and eleven South Vietnamese officers, aspirant through “captain,” stationed in a single district in Kien Hoa. This last group—which came out of a report from a district proselyting section to VC province headquarters—was hard to swallow. I tried it out on Bill Johnson.
“If they have as many agents as this report claims, they must be running the entire district,” he said. “Maybe that’s so and we don’t realize it, but there’s no way to tell without a full-scale investigation. If I were you, I’d be very careful with a report like this. Vietcong agent handlers are doubtless like ours—subject to wishful thinking, and apt to exaggerate their accomplishments. For example, this ‘captain’ here; maybe the proselyters asked him to sign up as a fifth columnist, and he agreed to do it just to keep them out of his hair. Or to take out insurance in case the VC win. Mind you, I’m not saying that this report is necessarily all wrong. Maybe it’s true, or, more likely, partly true. My advice is to proceed with caution.”
This was my own instinct, and I handed him a copy of Klein’s list. Then I wrote up a memo about it for Ron Smith. Reflecting Johnson’s advice, it said the agents “should not all be taken as active and committed penetrations. Some probably are fence sitters, some nonexistent (the VC are prone to pad what they don’t have to account for), and some may have had their sympathies misinterpreted by VC reporting officers. However, the documents indicated that some also were actively committed agents. Others, including a share of fence sitters, might become active under different conditions (e.g., U.S. troop withdrawal). In any case, Mr. Klein’s efforts seem to be highlighting a problem of considerable scope.”
“ ‘Considerable scope’ is putting it mildly,” Ron Smith said after reading the memo. “But unfortunately, I haven’t had much success in inserting your paragraphs about spies into Fourteen Three. There’s a big brouhaha going on upstairs over communist logistics. I haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise.” The meetings on Fourteen Three, ’Sixty-Nine were already in session. I wasn’t allowed to attend them, because—as Ron had told me—of “that business back in 1967.” He said he’d try to arrange a private briefing, however, so I could argue my case in front of James Graham. Mr. Graham was the estimate’s chairman, just as he’d been on the one before Tet.
All this had begun to get annoying, but it was hardly a surprise. Over the past week or two, I’d made the rounds to test the reactions of various offices toward Vietcong espionage and subversion. The Office of Current Intelligence was predictable. They had no one to spare to look into the matter, everyone being too busy on the Sitrep; besides, chasing spies was the DDP’s business. The reaction of the DDP’s Vietnam desk was similar. When I told the desk chief that the number of communist agents might run into the several thousands, he said: “For God’s sake, don’t open that Pandora’s Box. We have enough trouble as it is.” The only person who seemed to give a damn about them was Bill Johnson.*
Ron Smith finally arranged my briefing for James Graham in early July. About ten people crammed into a tiny room on the seventh floor to hear it. They included Ron, Paul Walsh, some DDP officials, and of course, Mr. Graham. With Klein and Parry as backup men, I shot off both barrels—that is, Bob’s list and Doug’s cards. The briefing fell flat. Always polite, Mr. Graham said: “Thank you, Sam, that was very interesting.” A DDP desk man gave a short talk on Pandora’s Box. But when Fourteen Three’s latest draft arrived at the VC Branch on Monday, 7 July, it had no mention whatsoever of Vietcong military proselyting. The main subject was still the enemy supplies.
That was absurd, so I wrote some comments on the draft. Vietnam was a political struggle, I said, not a race between stevedores. Communist intelligence—which allowed them to attack or hide when and where they saw fit—largely negated our vast superiority in materiel. The draft wasted too much ink on “the minutiae of logistics.” On receiving the comments, Ron said, “Well, anyway, we tried.” I knew it wasn’t his fault, and began drafting a cable to the Saigon Station. It laid out Klein’s findings from the documents, and asked whether the Allies were using them to catch agents. The draft concluded: “Request information on, and assessment of, efficiency of [South Vietnamese] programs against military proselyters.”
Shortly thereafter, an incident occurred that became a major milestone on the downhill road of my career. At the time I didn’t even realize it was important. What happened was that I became involved in the “minutiae of logistics.” It began innocently enough around noon on Friday, 11 July, when Ron Smith came back from the morning session of Fourteen Three.
“Christ,” he said, “the fur’s flying up there.”
“What about?” I asked.
“A Navy commander named Roy Beavers—he represents the military—is slugging it out with Paul Walsh. Beavers says the CIA estimate of Vietcong weapons expenditure is much too low.”
“He’s probably right,” I shrugged.
“Maybe so,” said Ron. “Someone claimed that if you believe the agency tonnages, the VC aren’t even using as much ammunition as the Biafrans.”
“Has anyone checked that out with the Africa Division?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” he said, “that’d be asking for trouble.”
“Well, why don’t I? I used to work in Africa. It would be a cinch to find out.”
“If I were you, I’d leave well enough alone,” said Ron. He laughed, and we went separately to lunch.
Although I thought logistics was an overworked subject, Ron had aroused my curiosity. The province of Biafra in Nigeria was then engaged in a rebellion against the federal republic, and the Nigerian analyst was an old acquaintance, stretching back from my days on the Congo. So after lunch, instead of going to the VC Branch on the third floor, I went up to my old African office on the sixth. After a few minutes’ gossip with my ex-boss, Dana Ball, I sat down in the chair next to the Nigerian desk. The analyst’s name was Bill.
Bill and I discussed Biafran logistics for about fifteen minutes. It seems that our intelligence on the subject was superb. There was only a single supply route to the rebels, an airfield, and one way or another, the DDP had found out the precise load of ammunition on each incoming plane. “Pretty much down to the last bullet,” said Bill.
“How many tons is it a week?” I asked.
“Depends on the week.”
“Average.”
“One hundred fifty tons. It’s been averaging about one hundred fifty tons a week for several months now,” Bill said. “I’d say that’s accurate within a few percentage points.”
I jotted “150 tons” on the back of an envelope, and took the elevator down to third floor to the Office of Economic Research Logistics Branch, a few doors down the hall from the VC Branch. It still being lunchtime, the Log Branch had only two analysts in it, one named John Cole. Fortunately, Cole was the man who’d supplied the agency’s estimate of VC weapons expenditures for Fourteen Three.
“John,” I asked, “How many tons of munitions do the communists use up each week in
South Vietnam? What’s that number you put in Fourteen Three?” He did some figuring on a pad of paper.
“Seventy-seven tons a week,” he said.
“My God!” I exclaimed, “The Biafrans use a hundred and fifty! That’s a hard estimate, too.”
Normally stolid, Cole burst out laughing. “It doesn’t look right, does it,” he said. “I mean the little old Biafrans shooting off twice as much as the big bad VC.”
“It sure doesn’t,” I replied.
“How did you come up with seventy-seven tons?”
“I’d hate to tell you,” Cole said, at which the other analyst spoke for the first time: “Let’s just say it’s a soft estimate. Soft.”
Logistics had become interesting. I ran back upstairs to Africa to tell Bill. He also started to laugh. “That’s crazy. No wonder we’re losing the war.” I had some more questions. It turned out that the Biafran army was one-tenth as big as the VC’s, but that it used similar tactics: much bushwhacking, few large battles, no artillery barrages of the type that eat up large weights of ammunition.
Armed with the two sets of numbers, I returned to the Vietcong Branch to write a paper about them. Only two pages long, it compared Biafran and VC weapons expenditures, and made this observation: “Thus if we accept the above statistics … it would appear that the Biafran army, which is in the order of one-tenth the size of the communist army in Vietnam, consumes about twice as much tonnage in arms and ammunition. This seeming anomaly raises the following possibilities …” They were: (a) That Biafran soldiers fired twenty times as many bullets per capita as the VC; (b) That the CIA way overstated Biafran munitions expenditures; and (c) That the CIA way understated VC munitions expenditures.
Since the first possibility was unlikely and the second was against the evidence, that left the third as the most probable. I concluded that “the problem bears looking into.”
The weekend was at hand, and the subject was unimportant—or so I thought. In any case, I told Beverly she’d get the draft first thing Monday morning to type, and took off for home, unaware my memo wasn’t about Biafra, or Vietnam either. It was about Cambodia.
Monday was the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day. Ron was late for work. He stopped by my desk at ten o’clock. In the most casual kind of way, I handed him the Biafran memo. Just as casually, he glanced at the title. When he saw it, he stiffened.
“Adams,” he said, “you’re sticking your pecker in a pencil sharpener.”
“What do you mean by that, Ron?” I asked.
“I told you to stay out of logistics. It’s Paul Walsh’s turf. If he sees this, he’ll flip his lid.”
“But why?”
“Look, this tonnage fight’s between him and the military. Specifically between him and Roy Beavers. Leave it alone.”
“The military’s right on this one. Probably has been all along. The VC are using more ammunition than we think. What’s the big deal? A few more truckloads a week, that’s all.”
“There’s more to it than that,” said Ron.
The argument grew hotter. It became a matter of pride. I began insisting that the Biafran memo go straight to Paul Walsh. “I’m no big admirer of military intelligence,” I said, “but this time they’re right.” Smith relented. OK, he’d forward it, he said, but watch out. For the rest of the day the VC Branch atmosphere was positively electric. A fellow analyst, Joe Stumpf, said: “What’s the matter with you, Sam, anyway, you got a death wish or something?”
Finally, I walked down the hall to the Logistics Branch to ask why the fuss. Surely it amounted to more than a few truckfuls of ammunition. I was right.
“You just blundered into the Sihanoukville dispute,” a Log analyst told me.
“What’s that all about?” I asked. I knew that Sihanoukville was Cambodia’s main seaport, about two hundred miles due west of Saigon, but I didn’t realize it was the subject of a dispute.
He told me the story. The CIA and the military had been fighting for the last two and a half years over how many weapons were coming through Sihanoukville bound for the VC. The military said a lot. The CIA said no, the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos provided virtually all the weaponry the communists “needed.” Right now the arguments centered on what was meant by “needed.” The CIA said the Vietcong’s needs were seventy-seven tons a week countrywide, and that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was able to provide them. The military (including Commander Beavers upstairs) thought the Communists’ needs were far more than seventy-seven tons, and in fact exceeded the Trail’s capacity by a considerable margin. Thus the communists “needed” a supplement to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The supplement was Sihanoukville.
“This is where your damn memo about Biafra comes in,” said the analyst. “The agency has other arguments as well, but the Biafran memo makes our principal one—the one about ‘needs,’ which is another word for ‘munitions expenditures’—look absolutely ridiculous. By implying that the CIA ‘way understates VC munitions expenditures,’ it supports the military’s side of the Sihanoukville dispute.”
*“That’s tongue-in-cheek,” Vance said later. Some raids hit major targets! Furthermore he was talking about preplanned raids, normally based on day- or week-old reports. These differed from tactical raids, such as the Marines called in on the communists around Khe Sanh. Often based on visual sightings which were hours and sometimes only minutes old, these raids could be devastatingly effective. One is said to have destroyed an entire communist infantry battalion.
*General Creighton Abrams succeeded Westmoreland as head of MACV in June 1968.
*The DDP’s Vietnam Desk oversaw the Saigon Station’s espionage and covert action programs. The Counterintelligence staff, of which Johnson was a member, was organizationally separate from the Desk, and in another part of the building.
8 CAMBODIAN REPLAY
Publisher’s note: Adams intended to include a long section about intelligence on Cambodia in his book, but never completed it. What survives is a draft of a magazine article, never placed, on which this chapter is based; a chronology of events, and notes for a study of the controversy over military munitions imported through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, briefly described in the previous chapter. Adams did a huge amount of research on this subject, which included a highly circumstantial story of espionage and agent handling in the classic mode, but he failed to turn his notes into finished text, perhaps realizing that he had commenced what was properly a second book. In telling the Cambodian story, Adams changed the names of some CIA employees in order to conceal their identities.
MOTIVES SEEMED LACKING to keep close tabs on the number of Cambodian rebels until March 1970. Analysts within the CIA who worked on Cambodia agreed there weren’t very many, and that in any case the so-called Khmer Rouge posed little threat to Prince Sihanouk’s government in Phnom Penh, and none at all to either us or our South Vietnamese allies.
Then on 18 March a right-wing coup unseated the prince. Chaos ensued. Sihanouk, away when the coup took place, announced his support of the rebels; the new government in Phnom Penh joined the Washington-Saigon alliance; the Vietcong invaded the Cambodian interior; and U.S. troops sallied over the frontier into Cambodia, where they stayed the months of May and June. While there, they captured some munitions and unearthed several boxes of papers belonging to the Vietcong high command.
By the late summer of 1970, Indo-China began to simmer down. Although a malaise persisted that the Vietcong could kick over the traces in Cambodia if they saw fit, the smart money bet they wouldn’t. Some reports told of enemy doings in the villages, but the Cambodian war seemed at bottom a contest between communist invaders, all Vietnamese, and government defenders, all Khmer. Since Khmers and Vietnamese are ancient rivals, the theory took hold that the communists would fail to gain a native following beyond the small band of Khmer Rouge rebels extant before the coup.
In late 1970, I had worked on the Vietcong for five years, mostly trying to figure how many there were. Then they transferred me
to a small staff to write a history of Cambodia’s rebels. The history had a low priority. Other offices had the more important task of recording current events in Cambodia. One called the Manpower Branch had the job of keeping count of communist forces there.
My employment as chronicler of Khmer insurgents began in early 1971. Knowing little about them, I started from scratch, and spent the next several weeks gathering paper from the archives that crowd the CIA’s lower floors. In short order I had stuffed a number of safe drawers with old reports, including a musty study done by French army intelligence in 1953. The study described the communists’ rebel army in Cambodia in the early fifties, and the types of soldiers it had.
In mid-April, I thought to look at more recent stuff, including the documents taken from Vietcong headquarters in Cambodia in 1970. Unfortunately, the CIA’s filing system, as good as it is for some things, had foundered at the prospect of sorting out by subject the cartloads of captured documents that showed up weekly from Indo-China. There was only one thing to do, plow through the lot and pick out those having to do with Cambodian rebels. I found a more or less complete set of Indo-Chinese documents—stored in large, brown, cardboard boxes in the CIAs first-floor archives—and went through two years’ worth. It took three weeks.
