War of Numbers (2 page)

The significance of Sam Adams’s book is that it clearly shows from the intelligence grunt’s perspective how and why the CIA and top military brass—with White House encouragement—misled the Congress, the
press, and the American people before the communist 1968 Tet Offensive by juggling the figures for enemy strength in Vietnam. Westmoreland and Davidson have argued that Adams’s figures were inflated, and that even if true they wouldn’t have affected the way the war was fought. Davidson wrote in his revisionist history,
Vietnam at War,
“In a military sense, the whole controversy was piddling, reminding one of Alexander Pope’s ironic aside that ‘mighty contests arise from trivial things.’ ” Among the “trivial things” Davidson almost casually mentions was, in this case, the communist order of battle (OB), a tabulation of the enemy’s strength. The “piddling” thing was the disappearance of almost 300,000 communist soldiers from Davidson’s intelligence books.

The Saigon brass in their plush villas didn’t believe that a VC youth of twelve who mined jungle paths and scouted for main force troops, or a fifty-year-old woman who tended VC wounded, should be counted as combat or support troops. They didn’t understand they were as much a part of the VC Army as any of the half dozen aides who kept Westmoreland’s villa operating efficiently. The paradox was that though the generals insisted these non-regulars be arbitrarily dropped from the OB, when killed, they were included in the body count.

As described in detail by Adams, the American military in Vietnam removed whole units from the OB, including the “self-defense” militia guerrillas who are key players in irregular warfare. In Vietnam, the local militia made up the replacement pool for the regular units. When a main force unit got bloodied, the local militia filled it back up, so virtually overnight the unit was fit to fight. Throughout the Vietnam War, American commanders were amazed at the speed with which main force units could recover from a beating. The local militia also provided valuable intelligence services, guided and scouted for main force units when they operated on their home turf, and provided logistical support such as raising food, tending the wounded, or sheltering VC soldiers. They set the mines and booby traps that were responsible for an estimated sixty percent of all U.S. casualties. Westmoreland has often been accused of fighting WWII all over again in Vietnam, which may explain why he didn’t want to count one of the main players in a guerilla war.
Not counting them is like a jeweler not counting diamonds because they’re small. Westmoreland’s fatal flaw was fighting an unconventional war with a conventional mind-set.

Adams argues that Westmoreland dropped around 300,000 local militia from the order of battle prior to the Tet surprise in order to prove the U.S. was winning. Westmoreland feared that his other perceived enemy, the U.S. press, would find out the true figures and expose the pre-Tet truth: our forces were not whittling the enemy down and we were losing the war in Vietnam. To leave the local guerrillas on the books contradicted the image of success promoted by Westmoreland and President Johnson. Westmoreland had his deputy, General Creighton Abrams, cable the White House to say that an increase in the OB would contradict the “image of sucess” they had been promoting, and would provoke the press into drawing “an erroneous and gloomy conclusion” over the progress of the war. This was the same manipulative game of changing the facts to present a winning picture that Westmoreland’s predecessor, General Paul Harkins, had played, and what had sucked American combat forces into Vietnam in the first place. The Vietnam War, from beginning to end, was an enormous deception.

War of Numbers
is one hell of a good tale about life inside the CIA and the struggle over the worst intelligence failure of the Vietnam War, but the book also gives the reader a good look at what the man, Sam Adams, was made of. His life was all about integrity and moral courage. He refused to bow to pressure and lie about the order of battle figures as a way to move onwards and upwards, and when his superiors went ahead and faked them anyway, he refused to let the issue die. Instead, he rattled every cage in Washington, from Congressional committees to the CIA’s Inspector General, kicking on doors all the way to the White House. What Adams had in abundance—the guts to stand up and be counted—has always been in short supply. Perhaps his stalwart example of moral courage will bring a comeback in a value that seems to have almost disappeared from the American scene.

Sadly, his analysis proved accurate. The Communist forces which attacked during Tet came from a force double the size estimated in the official order of battle. Good men down on the ground paid the ultimate price for not knowing the enemy’s real strength. It is a tragedy that Sam Adams didn’t finish this work before he died suddenly at the age of fifty-five in 1988. It might have ended the controversy over who told the truth in Vietnam, and exposed the rivalries which infected the U.S. intelligence community throughout the cold war.

Adams stopped writing his book in the early 1980s to work on the CBS documentary which resulted in the Westmoreland lawsuit. (The case never went to jury; after great effort and expense Westmoreland dropped his suit at the last minute and CBS said it never intended to cast doubt on his patriotism.) Perhaps Sam Adams didn’t resume writing because he believed the truth had already emerged. There’s no question he had driven William Westmoreland, Phillip Davidson, Daniel Graham, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and a host of lesser figures nuts. He forced them to sit in lawyers’ offices for hours at a time and testify under oath about secrets they had intended to carry to the grave. The incredible thing was that Sam Adams was not a senior bureaucrat but a minor intelligence analyst, a mere grunt in a huge secret bureau that was a law unto itself, seemingly accountable to no one. A friend of Adams’s said, “I sometimes think that Sam was sent to this earth by God specifically to hound these people for their sins, and especially for the sin of having put their name to something which they knew was not true.”

Looked at from that point of view, Adams’s life was a great triumph, a David and Goliath story in which Goliath, while not slain, was covered with public shame. The history of the world is filled with similar episodes in which men who could not change the facts changed the paper; but in no other case did the whole sordid story emerge in all its factual detail as it did with the OB controversy. High officials are accustomed to telling clerk analysts to screw off, and the clerk analysts generally skulk from the room and history forthwith—but Adams, far from slinking off, subjected those officials to moments when they were heartily sorry they had ever been born.

Unfortunately, Adams didn’t see it as a triumph. He was never bitter, but he felt the exhaustion of utter defeat. Adams believed historians would ignore or revise the truth, and this has certainly been the case until now. Westmoreland, Helms, Davidson, Carver, Graham, and many others are in good jobs or comfortable retirement; the liars and number-fakers have prospered and risen and enjoyed celebrity status, while Sam Adams and his friends—the people who stuck their necks out, who ignored the threats, who broke with friends and told the truth—all of them were forced out of jobs, ostracized, demoted, ignored, treated like creepy complainers and malcontents, and the lives of one or two of the men who risked the most were completely shattered by the ordeal. Shortly after telling a friend he felt he’d achieved nothing, Adams died, leaving his unfinished memoir behind.

I believe Sam Adams could have died of a broken heart. He was a true patriot who perhaps felt, in the end, he had failed. Yet this unfinished work gives an outsider an inside view of the shabbiness of much CIA intelligence work during the Vietnam War. It certainly proves that Adams won not only the battle of the cooked books, but the war against the deceivers. This book is about true grit, about men and women who stood tall during a dark period in U.S. history.

We have a right to hope that Sam Adams’s legacy will be twofold: first, that other writers will pick up the torch he once held high and illuminate more facts in one of the great failures of our country’s intelligence history. We can hope that these future writings will spark much more vigilant congressional oversight of America’s intelligence services. And secondly, we can hope that Adams’s legacy will lead to desperately needed reforms which will cut out the blubber, the duplicated efforts and the rivalries from all the different intelligence agencies and streamline them into one lean and mean superior intelligence community at last. For as history has shown, they’ve seldom gotten it right in the past.

Sun Tzu said that no war could be won without good intelligence. He wrote, “Spies are the most important element in war, because upon them depends an army’s ability to move.” To be kept in ignorance of the
enemy by crooked operators who cook the books or by an ineffective intelligence service is worse than sending young men into battle without ammunition. This book vindicates Samuel Adams. The President of the United States should name the U.S. Military Intelligence School after him.

—Colonel David Hackworth 
Whitefish, Montana, 1993

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

FOR THE LAST FIVE YEARS of his life, Sam Adams—Samuel A. on his paychecks at the Central Intelligence Agency but invariably Sam to all who knew him—told family, friends, and his publisher that he had nearly finished his memoir of his years with the CIA. This was a white lie born of writer’s block; he had set his incomplete manuscript aside in the early 1980s to work on a television documentary. What Adams had written was found in manila envelopes after he died suddenly of a heart atttack in 1988, shortly after moving to Vermont. Adams’s original publisher felt that the surviving manuscript, vivid as it was, needed both a conclusion and a defender, and that Adams, dead, could provide neither. Other publishers said much the same. Steerforth decided the book was too good to lose, and found an eloquent champion to introduce the work and speak for it on publication—Colonel David Hackworth (U.S. Army, Retired).

The book which follows was written by Adams. No new material has been added. The text has been carefully edited for style and consistency, in the manner usual with book manuscripts. A few minor changes have been made for reasons of clarity, or to drop repetitive material. Adams’s failure to finish the book on his own had its source
in the staggering quantity of official documents declassified during the three-year legal struggle over libel charges brought by General William Westmoreland, described briefly by Adams in his introduction. Adams felt he ought somehow to accomodate this ocean of material in his book but could not bring himself to begin. Steerforth felt the value of Adams’s book was to be found in the personal note he strikes on the first page and sustains throughout; nothing else like it exists in the literature of intelligence.
War of Numbers,
therefore, remains Adams’s account of the great adventure of his life—not a scholarly attempt to incorporate and weigh the vast documentary record of intelligence during the Vietnam war, now part of the public record as a result of Adams’s efforts.

The
preface
and the first seven chapters of
War of Numbers
were written by Adams as a single work.
Chapter 8
, “Cambodian Replay,” was intended for magazine publication, but failed to find a home. Adams was doing extensive additional research on this subject when he died.
Chapter 9
consists of a chronology and a draft of Adams’s conclusions, apparently intended to close his book. The
Appendix
is based on a late chronology of Adams’s reconstruction of what took place on MACV’s side of the numbers controversy. It was intended by Adams as a working document but it complements his own story well, and ends on a note of closure which strikes the editor as a fitting conclusion to his book.

PREFACE

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY employees don’t normally walk off with top secret documents, stash them in a wooden box, and bury them in a neighbor’s woods. I did. This book tells why. The immediate reason the documents went underground was a letter from Admiral Rufus Taylor, the agency’s otherwise kindly deputy director, who intimated that the CIA would be better off without me.

“Your suggestion of a board of inquiry,” he wrote, “into what you describe as past failures” would “take the time of busy people in the White House,” and would “seem to be more wasteful of time and effort than may be the very conditions you deplore … I suggest to you,” he concluded, “that if you cannot abide the decision implicit in the above, you cannot continue to consider yourself a helpful member of the intelligence team here at CIA, and should, therefore, submit your resignation.”

Well, that was that: no board of inquiry. And after the damnedest set of misdeeds that U.S. intelligence had ever strung together. The letter was Admiral Taylor’s last official act. On the CIA headquarters’ seventh floor that afternoon, he shook hands with well-wishers congratulating him on his final day in the government. The date was 31 January 1969, a year and a day after the Vietcong Tet Offensive swept South Vietnam, causing a near political cataclysm in the United States. Admiral Taylor shortly made off for retirement in Florida.

Despite his letter I had no intention of quitting. Instead, I removed from my desk a manilla folder of classified documents, slipped the folder into that day’s
Wall Street Journal,
walked past the guard at the agency’s west-side exit, and drove home.

Two years earlier I would never have dreamed of removing such documents from the CIA. Agency regulations, backed by God-knows-what federal statutes, forbade such a thing. Furthermore, it was against my habit. At the close of each day since joining the agency in March 1963 I had performed the ritual of tugging at the file drawers to make sure they were locked, pushing paper bags of classified trash down burn chutes, and even checking the floor around my desk for stray scraps of paper. Admiral Taylor’s letter modified my outlook on security, and for good reason.