War of Numbers
Page 27
Sam Adams’s text ends here. Whether he intended to add anything further is not known.—Publisher’s note.
*This turned out to be CINPAC’s Lieutenant Colonel George Hamscher.
*Dean Acheson, George Ball, General Omar Bradley, McGeorge Bundy, Clark Clifford, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dillon, Abe Fortas, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert Murphy, and General Maxwell Taylor.
SOURCES AND NOTES
CHAPTER 1: THE SIMBAS
Sources
This chapter springs mostly from memory, as refreshed by then-current periodicals, interviews (see below), and two books: Congo Mercenary, by Michael Hoare (London: Robert Hale, 1967), and One Hundred Days in Stanleyville, by David Reed (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). Among the people I interviewed were Dana Ball and his wife, Janet Ball (then Southern Africa’s Mozambique analyst), both now retired in New Hampshire; Colleen King, contacted under her married name in Minnesota; and three current employees of the CIA. As to the chapter’s dialogue, I can vouch for its substance, but not its exact wording.
Notes
1. Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961, apparently on orders from the Katangan politician, Moise Tshombe. There was “no evidence of CIA involvement” in his death—according to a report by a Senate Select Committee to investigate the CIA—but the agency had laid plans to kill him the year before. These plans were unsuccessful. Suspecting, when I joined the Southern Africa Branch in 1964, that the agency might have had a role in Lumumba’s death, I asked the CIA’s Congo analyst of the earlier period whether the Eisenhower administration had ever plotted to kill him. “I doubt it,” the analyst replied. “They wouldn’t have been that dumb.” The analyst was probably as ignorant as he seemed of the plot, which was very tightly held. For an account of the CIA’s tries at Lumumba, see: U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Alleged Assassination Attempts Involving Foreign Leaders. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976) p. 13–70.
2. A factor in the early collapse of the first rebel regime in Stanleyville was a CIA operation carried out in 1961 by the Khartoum Station in the Sudan. The station had learned that a courier carrying the payroll for the Congo rebel army was en route from Cairo to Stanleyville by way of the Khartoum airport. Apparently unaware of airport procedures, the courier debarked from his plane, and, clutching a brown leather briefcase, entered the main waiting room, where a CIA operative—more familiar with Khartoum’s procedures—awaited his arrival. The public address system made the usual announcement: “Will the passengers on flight such and such from Cairo please report to immigration.” Not wanting to show up at immigration with a bag full of hot money, the courier shoved the briefcase under a waiting-room seat, and dashed off in accordance with the announcement. After the courier had disappeared, the CIA man slid the briefcase from beneath the seat and walked off with it to a waiting car. As he climbed in the front seat next to the driver, the theft was discovered, and pandemonium broke out in the terminal as the courier, the Sudanese police, and intelligence agents from other countries (which, as it turned out, also knew of the payroll) scurried about to discover what had happened. Flustered by the noise, the driver was unable to start the car. Eventually he succeeded, and when at last the briefcase was opened, it was found to have a false bottom, under which was $387,000 in American currency. Told of the heist, President Kennedy—still angry at the CIA for the Bay of Pigs—was “extremely pleased.” The CIA man received a letter of commendation, and (as he later told me at lunch) a “small monetary award.”
3. My only distinction at the Farm was to write the class skit, entitled, “How to Succeed at Espionage Without Really Spying.”
4. The suspicions were probably correct (see note 1). Tshombe also died under suspicious circumstances. Abducted to an Algerian jail, he succumbed—according to prison authorities—to a “heart attack.”
5. The DDP’s initials have since changed to DDO, which stands for “Deputy Directorate of Operations.” For an outline of the CIA’s organization in 1964, see U.S. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report. Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence; Book IV. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976) p. 100.
6. I learned later that the CIA had attached to the southern column a small team of Miami Cubans, whose job was to rescue the consular officials. The Cubans arrived in Stanleyville too late, the Americans having been saved already by the Belgian paratroops. For an account of the Stanleyville operation, including its use of Cubans, see Michael Hoare’s Congo Mercenary, chapters 7 and 8.
7. See “Che” Guevera On Revolution, edited by Jay Mallin (Coral Gables, Florida; University of Miami Press, 1969) p. 35. Among the lessons Havana derived from its fiasco at Fizi was that intervention in Africa needed more muscle. About two dozen Cubans were with Che at Fizi. There are now (1983) some 40,000 Cubans in Africa, supported by helicopters, tanks, jet fighters, and armored personnel carriers.
8. President Johnson shared Mr. Lehman’s belief about the relative importance of the Congo and Vietnam. The index of his memoir, The Vantage Point (Holt, Reinhart, & Winston, 1971) has no entries on the Congo. Entries for Vietnam and related subjects total sixty-one inches.
CHAPTER 2: THE SITREP
Sources
I refreshed my memory about events described in this chapter by rereading the New York Times and the Washington Post for the period between 1 August 1965 and 10 January 1966, and by interviewing people I then worked with. These included Edward Hauck, Mary (“Molly”) Kreimer, and four current employees of the CIA.
Notes
1. As in Chapter 1, the conversations in this chapter are accurate in substance but not necessarily wording. However, this, my first conversation with Ed Hauck, was so memorable that several phrases are verbatim. I distinctly recall him saying that the war might last “ten years, maybe twenty”; that Americans were an “impatient people”; and there were to be “riots in the street’s.” Saigon fell on 30 April 1975, just three months before Hauck said it might.
2. The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1965. (New York: New York World-Telegram and Sun, 1965) p. 419.
3. I also read my copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the renowned 1911 edition. It describes the South Vietnamese, whom it calls the Annamese, as follows:
“The Annamese is the worst-built and ugliest of all the Indo-Chinese who belong to the Mongolian race. He is scarcely of middle height and is shorter and less vigorous than his neighbors. His complexion is tawny, darker than that of the Chinese, but clearer than that of the Cambodian; his hair is black, coarse, and long; his skin is thick; his forehead low; his skull is slightly depressed at the top, but well developed at the sides. His face if flat, with highly protruding cheekbones, and is lozenge-shaped or eurygnathous to a dgree that is nowhere exceeded … his mouth is large and his lips thick; his teeth are blackened and his gums destroyed by the constant use of the betel-nut, the areca-nut and lime. His neck is short, his shoulders slope greatly, his body is thick-set and wanting in suppleness. Another peculiarity is a separation of the big toe from the rest …”
4. For an excellent account of the pre-Starlight “jungle crap,” see Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (New York: Holt Rinehart, and Winston, 1977). The fighting that Caputo described turned out to be far more typical of the Vietnam war than that which took place during Starlight.
5. There are four sources for Operation Starlight: the New York Times of 19–28 August 1965; the Washington Post, of the same dates; Starlight’s “After Action Report,” submitted by Commanding General, Third Marine Division (Reinforced) to COMUSMACV, on 5 October 1965 (Reporting Officer, Colonel O.F. Peatross, commanding officer, 7th Marines); and the article “Application of Doctrine: Victory at Van Tuong Village,” also by Colonel Peatross, in Naval Review, (Annapolis, Md.: U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 1967) p. 2–13.
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p; 6. The Washington Post, 13 September 1965.
7. “Vietcong Morale: A Possible Indicator of Downward Drift,” CIA Office of Current Intelligence, (OCI No. 2390/65), 20 October 1965, p. 1.
8. The Washington Post, 29 October 1965, p. A-16. For an account of a fierce battle that took place near, and shortly after, the Special Forces officer made his remark about the VC, see “Fight at Ia Drang,” in John A. Cash’s Seven Firefights in Vietnam. (Washington, D.C.: Officer of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, 1970) p. 3–40. On 20 October 1976, Lieutenant Colonel George McGharrigle (U.S.A. Ret’d) of the U.S. Center of Military History told me that in a related one-day battle, a U.S. Army battalion suffered 276 casualties out of an estimated 443 men present for duty. This represents a 62-percent casualty rate, arguably the highest for one day suffered by an American battalion during the entire war.
CHAPTER 3 THE PUZZLE OF VIETCONG MORALE
Sources
Details for this chapter came from my letters home; from three-by-five index cards on which I recorded the names of, and conversations with, the people I talked to in Vietnam; from five-by-eight index cards on which I kept my notes on VC morale; and interviews of twenty-one Americans in Vietnam. Of these, one worked for Rand, three for MACV, and the rest for CIA. The most prolific source was Joseph Hovey, and ex–Collation Branch member whom I interviewed for a total of sixty hours in Los Angeles in March 1976. Hovey also sent me several letters. I was unable to locate Travis King. Paul Anderson died in a motor accident. I do not know what has happened to either Co Yung or Lieutenant Lam. For background information—and to jar my memory—I used Jeffrey Race’s excellent study War Comes To Long An (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), and Gerald Hickey’s study, Village in Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). The footnotes contain only representative samples from the above sources.
Notes
1. The description is based on a letter I wrote on 16 January 1966.
2. This explosion temporarily blinded the CIA station chief, Peer de Silva. For a description of the blast, see his Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: New York Times Book Co., 1978) p. 266–272. On page 266, he said the bomb weighed 350 pounds. Most other sources say 250. Take your pick. Mr. de Silva has since died of other causes.
3. As copied from five-by-eight notes on the provinces. Some notes were verbatim, others paraphrases of the USAID reports. Anyone interested in finding the reports should seek them under their original title. “USOM,” which stand’s for “United States Operations Mission,” the early designation for USAID in Vietnam.
4. Quoted—with slight emendations—from Songs of Saigon, of which I have a copy.
5. Westmoreland, William C., A Soldier Reports (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976) p. 159–160. Hereinafter referred to as A Soldier Reports.
6. Interview, Major General Joseph McChristian (USA, Retired) to author.
7. A Soldier Reports, p. 160.
8. Memorandum of instructions to General Westmoreland, “1966 Program to Increase the Effectiveness of Military Operations and Anticipated Results Thereof,” Top Secret, 8 February 1966, drafted by William Bundy and John McNaughton. General Westmoreland supplied a copy of the orders to Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard (USA, Retired), who was kind enough to let me see them on 15 March 1978. A Soldier Reports also refers to the orders on p. 161.
9. From my notes, made at the time.
10. Two months after this action, the head of the VC’s Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) said the 506th Battalion was the “best one in the entire region,” (See Race, p. 137). The “region” referred to was Vietcong Region III, comprising the provinces of the upper Delta.
11. From my notes, made at the time.
12. See Gerald Hickey’s Village in Vietnam.
13. And Lieutenant Lam almost certainly killed a great many VC. A later name for his counter-terror team was the “Provincial Reconnaissance Unit,” (PRU) generally considered by far the best government formation in Long An. I believe Lam appears in the eleventh photograph following p. 134 in Race’s War Comes to Long An, but I’m none too certain. For a description of the PRU’s activities, see Race, p. 212n, 213, 231, and 238. On p. 265, Race notes that the government programs best adapted to Long An “all shared a common organizational parentage in the Central Intelligence Agency.”
14. From my notes, quoting an agency FVS report dated 9 February 1966.
15. From my notes, quoting MACV document CDEC Log #01–1504–66.
16. From my notes, quoting an agency FVS 12,625 dated 9 February 1966.
17. From my notes, quoting MACV document CDEC Log #02–1174–66.
18. My notes on Captain Plowman’s reports reveal that in his statistics for the four-month period ending in February 1966 showed that US Marines in Vietnam had picked up 2,344 Vietcong suspects. Through interrogation it was found that 16 belonged to the main and local forces, 48 were guerrillas, and 48 were self-defense militiamen—that is, close to the same ratios that I’d found among defectors at the Long An Chieu Hoi center.
CHAPTER 4: BULLETIN 689
Notes
1. MACV Combined Document Exploitation Center Bulletin 689, of 19 July 1966 (date of issue by CDEC). Note that the Bulletin took a full month to make its way from the Tax Building in Saigon to Room 5G44 in Langley.
2. Layton’s memo to Smith, dated 18 August 1966, was entitled “Vietcong Guerrilla and Militia Strength.” It noted that the then-current guerrilla-militia estimate had “come to be used more by convention than conviction,” and that Bulletin 689 suggested that the office estimate was “too low, perhaps grossly so.”
3. CIA’s “An Analysis of the Vietnamese Communists’ Strengths, Capabilities, and Will To Persist,” 26 August 1966. The last-minute caveats about the guerrilla estimate appear in the text (section II, paragraph 5, p. 2, 3), and in a footnote to Table IV-5 of Annex IV.
4. MACV translation report, CDEC Log Number 04–1354–66, issued on 29 July 1966, p. 2.
5. MACV translation report, CDEC Log Number 01–1593–66, issued on 7 February 1966, p. 8.
6. MACV, CDEC log number 04–1371–66 of 29 April 1966.
7. Draft paper, “The Strength of the Vietcong Irregulars,” 22 August 1966. “Irregulars” was one of the many variations of “guerrilla-militia.”
8. Draft paper, “The Strength of the Vietcong Irregulars,” 29 August 1966.
9. CIA Draft Working Paper, entitled “The Strength of the Vietcong Irregulars,” 8 September 1966.
10. New York Times, 7 October 1966, p. 16.
11. Based on notes of my conversation with Major Blascik of 10 October 1966. Ex-Marine Corps Captain Philip Caputo, who served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966, has also commented on the subject. “We were making history: the first American soldiers to fight an enemy whose principal weapons were the mine and booby trap. That kind of warfare has its own peculiar terrors. It turns an infantryman’s world upside down. The foot soldier has a special feeling for the ground. He walks on it, fights on it, sleeps and eats on it; the ground shelters him under fire; he digs his home in it. But mines and booby traps transform that friendly, familiar earth into a thing of menace, a thing to be feared as much as machine guns or mortar shells. The infantryman knows that any moment the ground he is walking on can erupt and kill him; kill him if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, he will be turned into a blind, deaf, emasculated, legless shell. It was not warfare. It was murder.” From Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War, (New York: Holt Ridnehart and Winston, 1977, p. 288.) Another source: “I think the most terrifying feeling is knowing you are going through a mine field, because it’s kind of like being in the dark, knowing there is a step there, and afraid to walk. You have to almost force every foot down because your knees just don’t want to react. Just that type of emotion—every step of the way.” The source was Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., (convicted of murder for his participation in the My Lai massacre of March 196
8) as told to Hearst reporter Patrick Sloyan, in 1971. Shortly before the massacre, Calley’s platoon had lost several casualties to mines and booby traps. Correspondent Seymour Hersh, whose reporting on My Lai won him the Pulitzer Prize, has pointed out that more than 80 percent of American casualties in the My Lai area were caused by such devices.
12. “Operations of U.S. Marine Forces, Vietnam” (Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, June 1966, p. 8.)
13. Based on notes of my conversation with George Allen, undated.
14. COMUSMACV report number 6–075–7739/66, 18 October 1966.
15. Internal CIA paper, “Vietcong Irregular Strength,” 7 November 1966.
16. CIA cable, Saigon Station to CIA Headquarters, 9 November 1966.
17. Based on notes of my conversation with George Allen, undated. In another conversation, Allen told me that the person who hired him from DIA was Richard Lehman.
18. Defense information report 6–075–8866–66, 4 November 1966.
19. MACV CDEC log number 09–1509–67 contained in Bulletin 7216, of 13 September 1967.
20. I made no record of this conversation. However, later on the same day, I related it to a fellow DDI analyst, who unbeknownst to me, jotted down what I said. The analyst later gave me the notes, which form the basis of this passage in the book. Still an agency employee, the note-taker, who became very prolific, is hereinafter referred to as the DDI analyst.
21. Internal CIA paper, “The Strength of Vietcong ‘Main Force Support Personnel,’ ” (another name for “service troops”) 2 December 1966. On file with the CIA Inspector General.