War of Numbers (33 page)

On 23 June Snider informed me that the Manpower Branch had put the Cambodian project on the back burner, and not to expect anything before Labor Day. Hearing this, I clambered upstairs to see Helms’s assistant, George Carver. I told Mr. Carver that the Manpower Branch planned to proceed all ahead slow on the Khmer communist army
paper, and intoned something to the effect of “Damnit there’s a war on.” I also asked Carver if Helms knew what was going on. Carver replied he would look into the matter.

At 4:30
P.M.
the following day, Mr. Pontiac, flushed with what looked to me like embarrassed anger, called me into his office, along with Bud. He inquired what my “frustration factor” was. I replied that a certain Snider had already been handed a number to come up with—30,000, without benefit of evidence—told not to bother about speed, and that the whole thing reminded me of the manipulations before Tet. Mr. Pontiac heard me out, then said that the DDI front office had just told him of my visit the day before to George Carver, and had said that the visit showed that Mr. Pontiac didn’t know how to control his underlings. This was not the case, Mr. Pontiac declared, since he (Pontiac) had “sent people packing” before, and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again in my case. Thereupon he advised me to work after hours and on weekends until my still far-from-complete chronicle of Cambodian rebels was done. He added that the front office had decreed that I remove myself from the Cambodian numbers business. (I followed the former instructions but not the latter; that is, I spent my weekends that summer at CIA headquarters as a historian—muttering to myself about being punished for discovering an enemy host—but continued to do sums on Cambodian rebels.)

Recalling the suggestion of the Kissinger staffer to send a bootleg copy of the original paper to the Pentagon, I called an old friend, David Siegel, of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Estimates Staff. We dined at noon at a Pentagon cafeteria, and I slipped him a copy of Bud’s revised version. Siegel swore secrecy as to whom he got it from, and promised to make several copies for DIA analysts, including Sergeant Reisman, still keeper of DIA’s Khmer rebel files.

In August, Bud summoned me to his cubicle to tell of an irate phone call he had just gotten from the DDI deputy chief, Mr. Walsh. Apparently Snider had visited Sergeant Reisman in the Pentagon and spied on the sergeant’s desk a Xerox copy of Bud’s revised version. On his return to the CIA, Snider reported the observation to his boss, who
relayed the news to the DDI hierarchy. Mr. Walsh ordered Bud over the phone to track down who it was that was leaking papers to the Pentagon about enemy armies. Bud looked me in the eye and asked if I was responsible. I replied uneasily that I was not.

Hearing at last that Snider’s draft was almost complete, on 12 November I asked Bud whether I, as an interested party, could follow DDI practice and review the paper before it went to press. Bud said the decision was up to the Manpower Branch. Later, the word arrived that I was not to see the paper before its publication. (Snider snuck me a draft anyway, but since I couldn’t admit I had it, and since he had to stay below 30,000, my furtive lobbies for higher numbers got nowhere.)

Toward the end of the month I received, through regular channels, a copy of Snider’s just-published paper. Affixed with the agency’s seal, and with the classification “Secret Special No Foreign Dissemination,” it went to those in Washington with proper security clearances and a need to know. The paper stated that the number of Khmers in the communist army in Cambodia was in a range of from 15,000 to 30,000 men; or within the limits given Snider on 22 June, the day he got the assignment. Having puzzled over it for several months, he at last settled on the same method the military had used in lowering the Vietcong estimate before Tet. He marched two whole categories out of the order of battle and “scaled down” what was left. The range of 15,000–30,000 became the U.S. government’s official estimate, and shortly appeared in the press.

On 1 December Mr. Pontiac, who said he spoke for the DDI hierarchy, put me on six months notice to find another job. (Nothing came of it.) Putting aside my saga of Cambodian rebels, I began to write a critique of Snider’s paper to suggest what was missing.
^*

The Manpower Branch received my critique of Snider’s paper on 27 December 1971. It cavilled once more at the absence of guerrillas, then
dwelt on omissions in the main and local forces. The critique noted, for example, that Snider had included some main forces soldiers who belonged to regiments, but none in the myriad smaller units such as battalions and companies. The shortchanging of small units, the critique observed, was a device that the U.S. command in Saigon had used on the Vietcong estimate before Tet. In early January, at Tate’s behest, Snider wrote a short rebuttal to the critique, which never left the building. That ended the matter.

With nothing else to do, I returned to my history of the Cambodian rebels. I traced them back to 1947 and discovered that in 1954, some three thousand had gone to Hanoi for training. I also found that a full-scale communist-run rebellion had started in Cambodia in 1968, and that the head of the Cambodian rebels was an obscure Khmer named Pol Pot. None of the facts had been known at the time, not even that the VC called the Cambodian rebels the Red K, and that the Cambodian rebels called the VC, Friend Seven. Increasingly glum, I turned in my history in February 1972. Its concluding paragraphs ended with this prediction:

Finally there is the question of the party’s position in the communist world. Here the evidence strongly suggests that the Cambodian party, although formed in North Vietnam, had a mind of its own. There are already clear indications that its leaders have flirted with China to offset Hanoi … Although the Khmers’ short-term interests are clearly with Hanoi, the party leaders probably regard their dependence as temporary.

In fact, what evidence there is points to friction in the future. A KC document of late last year was already referring to the “Vietnamese problem.” A more recent document talked of difficulties the Khmer hierarchy was having with Friend Seven … And a COSVN assessment of October 1971 suggested that in some areas relations between the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists had grown “steadily worse.”

Whatever the problems may become eventually, they seem unlikely to get out hand in the immediate future. The two parties have
more pressing near-term goals … to gain Saigon and Phnom Penh, respectively, but it would not be surprising if at some more distant time, the ancient hatred between the Khmers and the Vietnamese publicly reemerges in the trappings of communist dialiectic.

Those were the last words I wrote that were published by the agency. The events they foretold have since come to pass. After their publication, I was told to work on Communist China.

On 13 March, however, a fresh CIA memorandum arrived on my desk again fixing the Khmer numbers at 15,000 to 30,000. I called Snider to ask why the range was unchanged. He replied that the Manpower Branch had stopped research on Cambodian numbers after the publication of his paper in November. He also mentioned in passing that as far as he knew no one in CIA headquarters kept a card file on enemy units. Hoping that a new volume of evidence might reopen the issue of size, I fished from my desk a cardboard box and a stack of three-by-fives, and reported to Bud’s cubicle to ask if I could work upstairs for a while on “filing.” Busy as usual at his typewriter, he replied absently that it was OK with him. That afternoon, I sat down at an unoccupied desk in the Cambodian Section of the DDI’s Office of Current Intelligence, filling out index cards on communist units. (Since I still had to do my job downstairs with the staff, the project was slow going, and took upwards of a month.)

On 31 March, the CIA sent a memorandum to the White House stating that the Vietnamese communists were unlikely to launch a really large-scale offensive in South Vietnam in the next few months. The memo, which followed an earlier CIA brief to the White House that the main Vietcong attack had fizzled in February, once more put the Khmer numbers at 15,000 to 30,000. The top end of the range was now nine months old. The next day Hanoi launched its Easter offensive in South Vietnam, its biggest since Tet 1968. Apparently sure that the Khmer rebel army was large enough to hold its own, the Vietnamese communists began to march their combat units from Cambodia to South Vietnam. As the Vietcong bolted through the Vietnamese countryside, I
started to shuffle my three-by-fives in preparation for another study on enemy strength in Cambodia.

“What are you trying to do—get all three of us fired?” Bud asked, evidently referring to himself, Mr. Pontiac, and me. I had just handed him the study based on the card file. The study listed by title an aggregation of Khmer communist units unaccounted for in the official estimate (and also noted that some forty Vietcong battalions were absent from the lists.) Despite his perturbation, Bud sent the study at once to the DDI front office. It responded shortly by instructing him to stop me from working on Indo-China altogether; and then it killed the memo. That evening I found that it had also packed me off to bureaucratic Coventry. A researcher from the Office of Current Intelligence telephoned my home to tell me—morose already—that Mr. Lehman, the office head, had passed down the official word to OCI analysts—some of whom had helped on the card file—to stop abetting my endeavors.

^*
On the track of a particular communist unit, I once called the Defense Intelligence Agency for help. A Captain White answered the phone, saying he worked with Sergeant Reisman. He didn’t know about the unit, but when routinely asked how DIA arrived at its Cambodian estimate, the captain replied, “First they give you the number, then they tell you to prove it.” He did not elaborate.

9   THE CROSSOVER POINT

THE EASTER OFFENSIVE was the last straw for me. As usual, it was a complete surprise, and I decided that something, goodness knows what, had to be done about American intelligence. I knew that my old friend, Gains Hawkins, had retired to Mississippi, so I determined to track him down. Eventually, I discovered he had bought a house in the small farming town of West Point. I called him up, he said he’d be glad to see me, and I flew down from Virginia. On a hot June afternoon in his backyard, he told me how, right before the Saigon conference of September 1967, he’d been given a number for the OB—and told not to go above it. He felt that the number he was given was unreasonably low, and that General Westmoreland was probably the person behind it. Hawkins agreed that an investigation was in order, and that Congress ought to do it. He particularly recommended the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Stennis of Mississippi. Hawkins was taking a big risk. In agreeing to talk to the Senate, he was putting his pension on the line. Retirees are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I returned to Virginia, and later in the year gave Stennis’ committee a thirteen-page paper that listed names, dates, and sequences of events. A staff assistant told me it was an interesting document, but he doubted that the Intelligence Subcommittee would take it up because it hadn’t
met in over a year and a half. I gave up on the Senate and tried the House. The House was likewise unresponsive.

Despairing of Congress, I tried the U.S. Army and CIA Inspector General. Neither would investigate my charges.

With the arrival of additional reports that the Khmer communist army had continued to grow, I called upon the office of the CIA’s Inspector General to lodge a formal complaint about the agency’s research on enemy strength in Cambodia. The date was 4 December 1972. Scott Breckenridge, who had handled some earlier grumbles of mine to the inspector about the mischief over the Vietcong estimate before Tet, scribbled notes as I related my story about Cambodia. Mr. Breckenridge later informed me that William Colby, then the CIA’s executive director, had learned of my complaint, and said, “Let the chips fall where they may.” It was the last I heard of the matter.
^*

This curious story of numbers poses several questions, the first of which is whether it really mattered. The answer of course depends on one’s point of view, but for American intelligence it must be yes. Because some time back—in McNamara’s day, I suppose—the U.S. government decided to measure its wars statistically. It follows that when the numbers are cockeyed, the conclusions drawn from them tend to be skewed as well. Had the computers gotten the data of late 1970, for example, that the Khmer rebel army was growing rapidly, we might have concluded far sooner than we did that the conflict in Cambodia was fast becoming a civil war, not unlike the one in South Vietnam.

A second question is why anyone bothered at all to cook the Cambodian books. Although in the case of the Vietcong numbers before Tet everyone concerned knew that the main reason for the adjustments was to keep aglow the light at the end of the tunnel, the motives for doctoring the Khmer estimate are more obscure. Certainly the agency had reason to hide its fifteen-month delay in asking whether our Cambodian foes had recruited an army; but as a sole cause, it seems farfetched. Perhaps the real motive lies hidden in the rubble of the American policy for Cambodia, which held that the problem there was caused by Vietnamese, not native, communists. This was an argument Washington used to justify the bombing of Cambodia.

A third question is who was responsible. In the absence of a proper inquiry, it’s impossible to say. But clearly the agency officials with whom I normally dealt were anything but sinister. Snider, for example, was a cheerful and usually candid young analyst from southern Virginia, who sometimes slipped me documents supporting higher numbers, and who often complained about what he thought was Congress’s airy neglect of the CIA. Bud was a quiet, careful, Far Eastern scholar whom I considered more a protector than adversary, and who, when adrift from his typing machine, was a sometime poet. (Once, on being asked to display an example of his scholarship in the agency library, he submitted a literary review opened to one of his poems; on the page opposite was some verse by Robert Lowell.) Mr. Pontiac was a dignified, rather kindly man—when not assigning penance on weekends—who in the previous decade had helped write some of the CIA’s darker reports on Vietnam, which made their way into the Pentagon Papers.