War of Numbers (29 page)

Obviously, the time had come to take stock in my career at the CIA. It was pretty much in shambles. Not only had the deputy director suggested that I resign, but now I was working under special restrictions. The word had long since arrived that I was no longer permitted to go to Vietnam. After the order-of-battle conference in Saigon in September 1967, Westmoreland’s headquarters had informed the Saigon Station that I was
persona non grata
, and that they didn’t want me on any military installations throughout the country. Somewhat later, Ron Smith had told me, as tactfully as he could, that I shouldn’t expect to attend meetings at which outsiders were present. But the weightiest blow fell on 8 April. On that day, OER’s Vietnam boss Paul Walsh called me in to say that I had spent far too much time on “extracurricular activities,” and to correct this fault, I should cut back on my lectures at Blue U. This was particularly discouraging since I’d at last gotten instruction on the VC up to twenty-four hours. The dons at Blue U. were as unhappy as I was over the development. Adding to my general discouragement was what had gone on with other people. Fed up with Vietnam, George Allen had asked for reassignment, and in late 1968 had taken off for London to attend the Imperial War College. That meant that one of my closest allies was no longer available. But the sorriest case of all was back at headquarters. It was Joe Hovey, the Collation Branch analyst who in November 1967 had composed the Saigon cable that had predicted the Tet Offensive. After leaving Vietnam in June 1968, he had reported to Langley several weeks later, naturally expecting some kind of recognition for his feat. This failed to occur. If anything, his cable had proved an embarrassment to the DDI for whom the offensive was an almost total surprise. For a while he couldn’t even find a job. Eventually, the Office of Current Intelligence picked him up and put him to work on the Sitrep. His boss was Thaxter Goodell, the author of OCI’s dismissive claim that Hovey’s message was crying wolf.

As usual, there were compensations. In February, for example, I had put together a bilingual chart detailing the communists’ provincial organization. It was going like hotcakes, with one customer—the Army’s Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg—having ordered five thousand
copies. Then a new batch of captured documents came in from the B-3 Front. The B-3 Front was a communist military command in South Vietnam’s central highlands made up of the VC provinces of Gia Lai, Kontum, and Daklak. The documents listed the Vietcong soldiers stationed in each province. Using these rosters, Bob Appell and I were able to check the communist troop estimates in his experimental order-of-battle memo, now several months old, about Gia Lai and Kontum. It was incredible. In one province (I forget which), it came within 10 percent of the actual number. In the other, it was within 5 percent. That’s about as good as you can get without seeing the daily morning reports. Despite its narrow focus, Appell’s memo was clearly one of the best OB papers written in the war so far. As already mentioned, its methods came into play—with a vengeance—in June 1971.

My biggest satisfaction, however, came from the Blue U. lectures, even in their truncated form. In contrast to many higher-ups at headquarters, most Vietnam-bound DDP-ers couldn’t give less of a damn about office politics. The majority were headed for the provinces, so that their main interest was what they were up against. As always, their questions concerned not, How many? but Why? And on many subjects I found myself gradually adopting their point of view.

One such subject was the numbers. Granted, the numbers were important as far as they went, but they failed to explain why the communists continued to hang in despite their enormous casualties.
^*
Almost every time we found an enemy unit, we trounced it severely.
The trouble was that we didn’t find them often enough. This led to the questions: Why was it the Vietcong always seemed to know what we were up to, while we could never find out about them except through captured documents? The DDP-ers kept asking about communist spies. I knew a fair amount about their espionage organization, but not that much about its accomplishments. A related problem was—for the lack of a better word—subversion, particularly of the South Vietnamese army. As we already knew, the group responsible for this was the VC Military Proselyting Section.

Unfortunately, research on the subject had come to a dead halt. The reason was the absence of Bob Klein. After his return from his honeymoon in November, he had made some additional stabs at trying to find out how successful the proselyters had been in encouraging desertion from the Saigon army. His attempts were to no avail. The problem was too complex. In late February, the U.S. Army called Klein to three months active duty in South Carolina. I had plenty to do myself. Proselyting could wait.

Meanwhile, the Sitrep continued to gush facts. Some of them were pretty interesting. On 28 April, for example, an accident occurred at Danang. Some grass had caught fire, leading to explosions that destroyed no less than forty thousand tons of American ammunition. On 14 May, President Nixon announced his “Vietnamization Program.” It envisaged our gradual turning over of the war to the South Vietnamese army. On 22 May, Ron Smith stopped by my desk to say: “The military’s sprung loose Klein today. He’ll be back to work on Monday.” Monday was the 26th. I reread the VC policy document that said: “We fight the war on three fronts—military, political, and military proselyting.”

Until now, American intelligence had concentrated on the first front, glancing from time to time at the second. Except for Klein’s first efforts, it had entirely neglected the third. At this moment I decided to join Klein full-time in investigating the third front.

^*
A captured VC document showed that fifty self-defense militia units helped occupy Hue, for example.
¹⁷

^*
On 23 February, the
Wall Street Journal
commented that “the American people should be getting ready to accept … the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.” Four days later, Walter Cronkite of CBS said he thought the war might end in a stalemate. According to President Johnson’s press secretary, Cronkite’s comment sent “shockwaves … throughout the government.”

^*
The supreme irony of the militia’s re-entry into our estimate at this point was that in many areas it had almost ceased to exist as a separate organization. The reasons were manifold. For example, right before the offensive, the VC turned large numbers into guerrillas, and sent others to higher-level units. Furthermore Tet was the first time the Vietcong employed militia formations away from home, partly—as Carver pointed out—as back-up troops in the cities, where they doubtless sustained high casualties. During Tet the toll of southerners recruited locally by the VC was so great that the communists had to rely increasingly thereafter on North Vietnamese replacements. According to a CIA estimate, the number of northerners to march south in 1968 was just short of a quarter million, another indication of the vast scale of the offensive.

^*
At the time of the Tet Offensive, the CIA’s sole agent among the Vietcong was run by a now-retired case officer named Foster Phipps. The spy’s warnings allowed the Marines to repel the VC from Danang, one of the few cities the communists failed to penetrate. Phipps—who reminded many people of W. C. Fields—received a letter of commendation from the Marines, but none from the CIA. He retired from the agency in 1973.

^*
As already noted, the VC divided their army into three parts: main forces, local forces, and guerrilla-militia, with service troops integral to each part. MACV lumped the first two parts under the heading “regulars,” created the separate category “service troops,” and counted only the top half of the guerrilla-militia. What this meant in practical terms was that American OB analysts had to shoehorn the numbers appearing in VC documents into MACV’s categories. Appell’s paper was an attempt to forego this step.

^*
My notes indicate that this conversation lasted until 11:05 A.M. Some hours later, perhaps as long as a day, President-elect Nixon summoned Helms to the Hotel Pierre in New York City to inform Helms confidentially that he intended to reappoint him as director of the CIA. The source of this information is Thomas Powers, author of Helms’ biography,
The Man Who Kept Secrets.
⁴⁴
Powers’ source was John Bross, the canoeist. Nixon announced the reappointment publicly on 16 December.

^*
When Nixon got up at 6:45 A.M. on the 21st—the first full day of his administration—his initial action (according to his memoirs) was to read the Sitrep. In March, he confidently told his cabinet that he expected the war to be over within a year.

^*
At about this time, the
Washington Post
published an interview with North Vietnam’s minister of defense Vo Nguyen Giap by the Italian newswoman Oriana Fallacci. In the course of the interview, she said: “General, the Americans say you’ve lost a million men.” He replied: “That’s quite exact,” with Fallacci adding the comment that Giap “let this drop as casually as if it were quite unimportant, as hurriedly as if, perhaps, the real number was even larger.” Giap’s answer tended to confirm my belief that the American press’s suspicions were ill-founded that MACV was inflating enemy casualties. The real numbers problem was that the entire war, casualties included, was a lot bigger than generally thought. Another quote from Giap, taken from the same interview: “The U.S. has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetrical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they would have already exterminated us.” This quote was blown up into large print, and displayed prominently over one of the VC Branch safes.
⁵⁰

7   THE THIRD FRONT

“SHE WAS MUTTERING to herself. That’s how they caught her. Walking on the runway—well, plenty of Vietnamese do that, you’d think they didn’t give a hoot about getting run over—but this old lady was different. Not only was she walking on the runway, incidentally walking straight for a parked United States Air Force F-105 jet fighter, she was muttering as she went. ‘Holy mackerel’ said an alert young private in the Air Force. ‘Bet she’s got a bomb. Bet she’s gonna blow up that airplane.’ So he arrested her on the spot. It turned out she didn’t have a bomb. Still, that muttering was suspicious. So they kept asking her why. Finally the old lady confessed. She’d been pacing the distance between the edge of the runway, and the parked jet. The mutters were her counting her steps. That night the Vietcong planned to set up a mortar outside the compound in order to shoot at the jet, and they wanted to know exactly how far the plane was from where they were going to lay down the mortar baseplate. That way they wouldn’t have to waste so many rounds finding the range. Now, that’s what I call intelligence.”

The speaker was a jovial Counterintelligence staffer from Bill Johnson’s shop who looked like Burl Ives. His name was Stu Vance. He gave lectures with me at Blue U. about the Vietcong, one of his specialties being communist military intelligence. After relating the story (which he
swore was true) he opened it up for discussion. “A Pentagon watchword these days is “cost-effectiveness,” he told a class of DDP-ers. “I wonder if you’d care to guess how cost-effective that operation would have been if successful. Compared to, say, the cost-effectiveness of one of our B-52 bomber raids.” In bringing up B-52s in such an offhand manner, he was disingenuous. Another of Vance’s specialties was how well our B-52 raids did.

I forget what was said, but recall what it came to. Nobody knew the precise weight or cost of anything, so the numbers were all approximations. Say it had taken the VC ten rounds to hit the jet. If an 81-millimeter round cost $25, and weighed maybe 10 pounds, that meant for $250 and 100 pounds of ammunition, the VC had done a job on a $1.5 million airplane. This contrasted to the job done by the B-52’s. Often they flew in formations of nine planes, each carrying 25 tons of bombs, for a grand total of 450,000 pounds of high explosive. The average raid cost what, maybe $500,000? “And from what I’ve been able to find out,” Stu Vance said, “the bombers usually don’t know what’s down there, or if they did, it’s probably left, and they’re darn lucky to knock apart more than a few ten-dollar huts, and maybe a blick.” (
Blick
was the military word for boat. It came from the first letters of MACV’s official term for one, Water-Borne Logistics Craft.)

“Now let me put this into perspective,” he went on. “Sometimes the VC only put holes in the airplane, and frequently they miss it altogether. Whereas if a B-52 bomb lands on a hut, that hut is demolished, I mean
eradicated
, so you can’t find a shingle, only a bent nail or two a couple of hundred yards away. And an occasional bomb even lands on a communist.
^*
But that’s not my point. My point is that the VC do things more efficiently than we do. And the reason is that they usually know what
they’re aiming at, and we usually don’t. Another way of putting it is that
they
have good intelligence.” He added that Vietcong military intelligence had a lot more going for it than old women who talk to themselves. “They have a radio intercept service with more than 600 listening posts—200 of them manned by people who know English and an espionage organization with agents, secret ink, couriers and microdots. It’s not primitive, it’s sophisticated, and good as anything we had in World War II. I might underline once again that this is an entirely different outfit from the ones Mr. Adams told you about.”