War of Numbers (26 page)

The next seven weeks were among the busiest I ever spent, rehashing and bringing up to date my old papers. There were occasional side trips, however, including a visit to Port Holabird on 27 February to give a lecture on the VC for Colonel Hawkins.
²²
He gave a lunch in my honor, toasting me as the “best OB man in the business.” From Hawkins this was high praise, and my pleasure in getting it was in sharp contrast to what I felt a couple of days later when the DDI chief, R. Jack Smith, and his deputy, Edward Proctor, visited the VC Branch. They pumped
my hand, and told me what a fine analyst I was, with Mr. Smith saying: “You know even more about Vietnam than you did about the Congo.” When they left, I said to Doug Parry: “If they thought I was such a fine analyst, why did they cave in before Tet?” He replied: “The wind was blowing from a different direction.” Parry had a point.

The press was gloomier than ever,
^*
and not without reason. Although the Marines had finally pushed the last North Vietnamese out of Hue, it was with great loss of life. The communists killed some two thousand U.S. soldiers in February, the highest monthly toll in the war thus far.

On Tuesday, 19 March, I was still scribbling away on the third floor, when Don Blascik called from the situation room to ask me to check a paper he’d put together on VC strength.
²³
I went upstairs and did so. He’d used the higher estimate (now “500,000 to 600,000 men”), so it was fine by me. “This is for the director,” he explained, “he’s about to give a briefing.” I asked who for, Blascik said he didn’t know but would try to find out. I told him not to bother, and went below to continue what had become a running conversation with Doug Parry. He said: “Now that Helms is using those numbers, the rest of the agency’s got to use them too.”

Of course Parry was dead right. It also meant my biggest excuse for not seeking an investigation—fear that the agency might back off—was less valid than before. As March wore on, the excuse grew thinner. On 26 March, for example, George Carver cabled the Saigon Station: “We are making a thoroughgoing review of the whole OB problem and hope to get an agreed Washington position prior to broaching the subject frontally with MACV. We will keep you advised of the progress in this exercise, and would appreciate your alerting us to any MACV rumbles possibly related thereto.”
²⁴
Already hardening, the agency position set in concrete on 30 March. On that date the CIA issued a joint paper with the
Defense Intelligence Agency that announced that the communists had an “insurgency base” (a newly coined euphemism for OB) of “around 500,000 men.” The paper concluded that “manpower is not a factor limiting Hanoi’s ability to continue the war.”
²⁵
There was no way out of it. Now my only excuse for not trying to get an investigation was the problem of finding an investigator who wouldn’t end up being its butt.

The next day was Sunday, which I spent at home. Normally the war was an avoided subject on days off, but this one was an exception. President Johnson had scheduled a “major policy address” concerning the war. I had a good deal of sympathy with his predicament, having long since concluded that Kennedy had boxed us into Vietnam. The president came on at 9:30. “Good evening my fellow Americans,” he said. “Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam.” He continued in this vein for some twenty minutes, saying that he planned to stop bombing North Vietnam except near the DMZ, and there’d be no more big troop increases. None of this was new; he’d scheduled bombing pauses before. The bombshell came at the end: “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

I said to Doug Parry the next morning: “It looks like LBJ is serious. Whoever the next president is, he ought to be warned what’s gone on down here. This is a good time to do it.” And I took off for the seventh floor to see the CIA Inspector General. According to agency regs, the IG is supposed to handle employee grievances.

A secretary said the chief inspector wasn’t in, but one of his assistants was, a Mr. Douglas Andrews. As I entered his office, Mr. Andrews smiled in welcome: “What can I do for you this morning?” I said: “I’ve come to file a complaint. I feel the conduct of American intelligence on Vietnam has been far less than satisfactory, and that the director and the head of the DDI might well have to be replaced. I want an inquiry started to alert the incoming president …”

He gulped slightly, but otherwise kept a straight face. Also, he began to take notes. It took an hour to tell my story. I laid out the problems with the OB, and such DDI failures as its omission to assign anyone to
work on the Vietcong. I explained that although my ultimate goal was to reach the White House, I wanted to do so through channels. That’s why I’d come to the IG. When I was done, he said: “This isn’t what I’d call our usual employee grievance. Normally we get complaints about cafeteria food, or slow promotions. That’s not the real problem, is it? Slow promotions?”

“No, sir,” I replied.

He looked at me appraisingly. “I guess not. Well, I’ll see what I can do. However, if I were you, I wouldn’t count on getting Mr. Helms fired in the immediate future.” I said I harbored no such expectation, and would supply a written bill of particulars as soon as my work load let up. This might be a while since the rumor was around that another order-of-battle conference was about to occur. Then I went downstairs to tell Ron Smith what had happened.
²⁶

Amazingly, he already knew. He said: “they warned me you might be trouble. This is a snootful.” I said that none of my complaints were about him, and that he’d be the first to know if there were further developments.

The rumor about the OB conference turned out to be true. It was scheduled for 10 April, with a delegation expected from MACV. I turned on the heat to finish up my OB papers. Around 5 April Ron Smith stopped by my desk to say: “The front office just asked me to take you off the numbers business. I told them, ‘Over my dead body; without Adams MACV’d knock us apart.’ ” This took guts, and I was grateful to Ron Smith. I said: “Thank you.”

For the first time in the war, the CIA came to an OB conference adequately prepared. We had detailed papers for every category of enemy strength: one on guerrillas by Doug Parry: another on the self-defense militia by George Allen: and others on the regulars, service troops, and political cadres by me. Adequate preparation had never been the real problem, however, it was will. We had that now too. Resembling the English literature professor he’d once been, DDI chief R. Jack Smith laid it out on the opening day: “Since Fourteen Three, we have had a steady succession of problems with the numbers. We had hoped for a surcease of
these problems, but it did not happen. The White House said to Mr. Helms: ‘Straighten this out.’ We will come up with a draft. Footnote it if you wish.”
²⁷
In other words he told MACV to go fly a kite.

The MACV delegation listened in stung silence. It had four people in it, headed by Colonel Danny Graham. A lieutenant colonel when he’d taken me to lunch at the South Vietnamese officer’s club in Saigon, Graham had gotten his promotion recently. With him were Hawkins’ replacement as OB chief, a Marine lieutenant colonel named Paul Weiler; one of Weiler’s deputies, Navy Commander James Meacham, and a MACV political analyst, Captain Kelly Robinson.

There’s no point in detailing the conference. With Paul Walsh now leading the pack, we ran roughshod over MACV. The most interesting occurrence wasn’t the argument, which I’d heard many times before, but something Captain Robinson told me during a coffee break. He said: “Remember that kid called McArthur, our guerrilla analyst at Saigon? They tried to change his numbers, and he blew his stack. Now he’s transferred to Gia Dinh.” I had a vague recollection of a skinny lieutenant who’d sat quietly on the sidelines during the Saigon go-around, so I jotted down what Robinson said, unfortunately forgetting to ask McArthur’s first name. At the end of the conference, the agency’s top count of VC was just below 600,000.
²⁸
Among other things, we’d marched the self-defense militia back into the estimate.
^*
As Doug Parry said a short while afterward: “A little late.”

I felt the same way as Doug, and thus saw no reason to abandon my quest for an inquiry. It took several weeks to tie up the conference’s loose ends, however, so I didn’t get around to sending my bill of
complaints to the Inspector General until late May. On the day this happened, the twenty-seventh, Doug volunteered to go in on the project with me. I declined the offer with thanks, saying: “There’s no point in both of us sticking our necks out. It gives them a bigger target.”

Putting the package together had been ticklish business. On the one hand—since it was meant for the White House—I had to go easy on accusations of political pressure from on high. On the other—since its eventual purpose was to inform Johnson’s successor of what had gone wrong—I had to be as specific as possible. With these objectives in mind I split the package into two parts. The first were the complaints themselves, which dwelt on the shortcomings of the DDI. Detailing the almost total absence of serious research on the Vietcong, it emphasized the results. The most obvious, of course, was our underestimation of “the strength of the enemy and therefore the scale of the Vietnamese war.” A second was closer to home. The CIA’s attempts to recruit spies among the VC had “met with scant success, in part because we knew so little about what we were operating against.” I tossed in a footnote here that of the five-hundred-odd CIA employees roving Vietnam, the number who spoke Vietnamese was “considerably less than” six.
^*
29

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.”