War of Numbers (28 page)

It came on 20 September 1968, a Friday, heralded by a telephone call at 11:30
A.M.
from Colonel Lawrence White’s secretary, asking me to come back upstairs. Colonel White was the executive director, number three man in the agency after Richard Helms and Rufus Taylor. I entered his office at 11:35. Bald, with a fringe of reddish hair—his nickname on the seventh floor being Red—he motioned me to sit in a large brown leather sofa catty-cornered from his desk. I did so, and commenced taking notes. Standing before the sofa, he said: “Mr. Adams, the director has indicated that he doesn’t want your memo to leave the building. We believe that at this moment you’re an asset to the agency, and that you have a role to play in its future, but what the role is depends on how you conduct yourself in this matter.”

He paused briefly to let this sink in, and continued: “I would like you to know that if you take your complaints independently to the White House—and even if you obtain the results you desire by doing so—your usefulness to the agency will thereafter be nil. Let me repeat that: Nil.”

“The director feels that this is an internal affair, and to handle it he has appointed the review board, all that anyone can ask. But if you feel that it isn’t, and take this matter outside the agency, you will be doing so
at your own peril
, for
practical
rather than legal reasons. It seems to me, Mr. Adams, that the most serious question at stake is whether you destroy your usefulness to the intelligence business.” The colonel went on in this vein for half an hour before asking if I had any questions. I did.

“May I take this, sir, as a direct order not to forward my complaints to the White House?”

“It has the
effect
of a direct order,” the colonel replied.

“And you’re aware, sir, that Mr. Bross had gone canoeing, and won’t be back until 23 October?”

“How John Bross spends his vacation is no concern of yours,” said the colonel.

“Of course it isn’t, Sir,” I replied. “But his going bears on whether the incoming administration receives timely warning of the CIA’s failures over the last two years. I think they are far too big to be dealt with by the people who made them. Therefore, please tell the director that I intend to take action no later than the end of the month.”
⁴⁰

Colonel White dismissed me, and I hotfooted it down to the VC Branch, well aware that he’d handed me a potent weapon—an outright threat, made for “practical” rather than “legal” reasons, obviously designed to prevent a president-elect from discovering CIA malfeasance. All that remained was to put the threat in writing. I did so, transcribing everything White had said in a memorandum of conversation. Beverly typed it up on Monday morning, and straightaway I sent it with a cover sheet to Colonel White. The cover sheet asked the colonel to comment in writing whether the memorandum of conversation was accurate or not. To make sure he couldn’t wiggle out of it, I stuck in a final paragraph that said: “Please do not feel you need to inform me in writing if the … memorandum accurately reflects the statements you made. If I have not heard from you by the end of the month, I will respectfully assume your silence means assent.”
⁴¹
Therefore even if he chose to ignore the memo, he was still on the hook.

Colonel White must have realized he was in trouble. Maybe he even envisaged the possibility (which I hoped he would) that I might take my bill of complaints to the White House with a copy of his threats stapled to it, thus making the package look even worse than it did already. For whatever reasons, when he called me back to his office that afternoon, he was profuse in his denials that he’d tried on Friday to “threaten, coverup, or delay. In fact,” he said, “I’ve just talked it over with the
director and deputy director, and they agreed you can go forward.” I thanked Colonel White, saying that now that the principal of external review was established, I’d be happy to wait until after elections. I tried to hand him an extra copy of the memo of conversation, but he backed away from it, unfortunately tripping on the carpet as he did so. “I’m too busy to read that sort of thing,” he said.
⁴²

“You nailed ’em that time,” Ron Smith said delightedly, when I told him what had happened. By now it was clear he had mixed emotions over my battle with the hierarchy. Sometimes he acted as if he were harboring a viper, other times as if he wanted me to succeed. I appreciated his dilemma, and had grown to like Ron a good deal.

Another reason for my thinking him a satisfactory boss was that he allowed me to pick my own research topics. The VC Branch now had the order of battle well in hand, so I decided to help Bob Klein on the military proselyters. I recalled the question the DDP student had asked at Blue U., “Are they having any success?” This led rapidly to a second question—success at what? At this time, the South Vietnamese army was losing about one soldier in four per year to desertion. This seemed as good a place as any to start research. Klein and I tried to figure out how many deserters quit at VC urging. The problem was knotty. As might be expected, the enemy proselyters claimed credit in their reports for the entire desertion rate. This was unlikely. Many government soldiers doubtless went over the hill for other motives, such as fear, detestation of sergeants, and bad food—the same reasons which caused many Vietcong soldiers to desert. The problem went on a shelf on 26 October. On that date Klein got married and went on a honeymoon. Ten days later Nixon beat Humphrey in a squeaker.

After the returns were in, I fulfilled my promise to Colonel White. That is, I sent a request to the seventh floor asking if it was all right now to forward my bill of particulars to the White House. Admiral Taylor, the deputy director, replied at once: Yes, he believed it was, but first I should talk to the director. I called Helms’ office and got an appointment to see him at 10:30 on Friday morning, 8 November. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect. Although technically a member of the
director’s staff while working for George Carver, I hadn’t actually laid eyes on Helms since May 1966. At that time he’d been head of the DDP.

I arrived at the director’s suite a quarter hour early on Friday. This was necessary in order to check in with the security guards, sign the visitors’ sheet, and warn the secretaries. I was familiar with the procedure, having visited John McCone several times in 1964 while I was Congo analyst. At 10:25 I entered Helms’s outer office. His secretary said: “Don’t bother to knock, Mr. Adams, he’s expecting you.” I opened the inner door.

And there he was, Richard Helms, CIA director, archvillain, sitting behind his big desk with a half-smile on his face. He didn’t look much like a villain. He said: “Hello, Sam. Good to see you. How have you been?” He didn’t talk like one either. “Sit down,” he went on. “What seems to be the problem?”

As I sat in the chair beside his desk, I took out a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. Observing this, he said: “I’d rather you didn’t take notes.” Apparently, he knew of Colonel White’s unfortunate experience with the memorandum of conversation. I put them away.

“Now tell me,” he reiterated, “what’s the matter? Are your supervisors treating you unfairly? Are they being too slow on promotions?”

No, I said. My main problem was that he had caved in on the numbers before Tet. I enlarged on this theme for about ten minutes, repeated others that I’d made in the bill of complaints—such as lack of research on the VC—and added a couple of new ones, including the dearth of training on the enemy for DDP men going to Vietnam. “Thirty thousand Americans have died in the war so far, sir, and I don’t think we’re taking it seriously enough. The biggest evidence of this, the one thing that’s really inexcusable, is our collapse on the order of battle in September last year.”

Hitherto Helms had listened without expression. Now he leaned toward me and said intently: “Sam, this may sound strange from where you’re sitting. But the CIA is only one voice among many in Washington. And it’s not a very big one, either, particularly compared to the Pentagon’s. What would you have me do? Take on the entire military?”

I replied: “Under the circumstances, that was the only alternative. The military’s numbers were faked.”

“You don’t know what it’s like in this town,” Helms said. “I could have told the White House there were a million more Vietcong out there, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy.”

“We aren’t the ones to decide about policy,” I said. “Our job is to send up the right numbers and let them worry.”

He replied OK, who was it I wanted to see in the White House. I said I didn’t know. How about Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, he asked. I told him that was not only acceptable, it was generous, and he said he would arrange the appointments for me. He accompanied me to the door.
⁴³

At the last moment I remembered a question. By extraordinary coincidence, Helms had spent the previous weekend in Alabama, visiting one of my wife’s uncles, Earl McGowin. He’d even slept at Edgefield, a large house with white pillars where Eleanor had grown up. I asked: “By the way, how’s Uncle Earl?”

“Uncle Earl?”

“Earl McGowin, sir, he’s Eleanor’s uncle.”

It took a moment to register. His face lit up in a smile. He chuckled. Then he started laughing so hard he had to lean against the wall for support. This lasted maybe fifteen seconds. When he recovered, he said: “Excuse me for laughing. It struck me as funny. Uncle Earl’s just fine. He’s a nice person, Uncle Earl, and so’s Aunt Claudia.”
^*

Later I was talking to my friend in the DDI front office. He said: “Helms is in a difficult position. He’s one of the gloomiest men in town on the war, but gloom is seldom what’s wanted. He feels if he pushes bad news too hard, he’ll get thrown out of the White House,
thus leaving the field to the military. He thinks he has the agency’s best interests at heart.”

Over the next few days I went around to see the deputy directors. The head of the DDI, R. Jack Smith, asked me what the matter was, and I told him the same things I had told Helms. Smith said that the Vietnam War was an extraordinarily complex affair, that the size of the enemy army was only a “small but sensitive byway of the problem,” and that I had picked up a “bad case of tunnel vision.” His deputy, Edward Proctor remarked, “Mr. Adams, the real problem is you. You ought to look into yourself.”
⁴⁵

On 18 November I wrote letters to Mr. Rostow and General Taylor telling them who I was and asking that they include a member of Nixon’s staff in any talks we had about the CIA’s shortcomings. I forwarded the letters, through channels, to the director’s office, asking permission to send them on.
⁴⁶
Permission was denied, and that was the last I heard about meeting with Rostow and Taylor.
⁴⁷

In early December I did manage to see the chief aide of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, J. Patrick Coyne, at the Executive Office Building, next to the White House. He told me that a few days earlier Helms had sent over my bill of complaints, and that some members of PFIAB had read it, and that they were asking me to enlarge on my views and to make any recommendations I thought were in order. Coyne encouraged me to write a full report, and in the following weeks I put together a thirty-five-page paper explaining why I had brought the charges and why, among other things, the Sitrep was a less than adequate publication. My paper was ready for typing on Nixon’s inauguration day, 20 January 1969.
^*
48

I watched the swearing-in ceremony on television, after which the new president made his way up Pennsylvania Avenue. As he passed Twelfth Street, the cameras pointed at some peace demonstrators, who were chanting: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.”
Someone was waving a Vietcong flag. I remember thinking:
Why that damn flag? Maybe the VC are going to win, even probably so, but it will be ghastly when they do.
I had followed the progress of the South Vietnamese in Hue, who had continued to exhume bodies. The government’s tally now coincided almost exactly with the VC police report’s, three thousand. Captured documents suggested that the communists had executed additional thousands, only in smaller lots, during their rampage through other cities at Tet. What made Hue unusual was that the Vietcong had had access there to more victims. I stopped watching TV when Nixon got to the White House.

Unfortunately, Beverly was busy typing other papers so she didn’t get around to mine until Friday, the 24th. I sent it up to Helms’s office on the 27th with a request for permission to send it both to Mr. Coyne of PFIAB, and to Walt Rostow’s successor as head of the National Security Council, Henry Kissinger. Permission was denied in a letter from the deputy director, Admiral Taylor, who informed me that the CIA was a team, and that if I didn’t want to accept the team’s decision, then I should resign.
⁴⁹

There I was—with nobody from Nixon’s staff having heard of any of this. It was far from clear whether Nixon intended to retain the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. J. Patrick Coyne said he didn’t know. He also said he didn’t intend to press for the release of the thirty-five-page report. I thought I had been had.

For the first time in my career, I decided to leave official channels. Not long before I had met a man named John Court, a member of Kissinger’s incoming NSC staff. I gave Court my memorandum and explained its import—including Westmoreland’s deceptions before Tet—and asked him to pass it around so that at least the new administration might know what had gone on at the CIA and could take any action it thought necessary. Some weeks later Court told me that the memo had gotten around all right, but the decision had been made not to do anything about it. So I gave up. If the White House wasn’t interested, I’d reached the end of the line. I felt I’d done as much as I possibly could, and that was that.