War of Numbers (7 page)

The inactivity put me to thinking about my future. Should I stay on in the now-sleepy Africa Division, or look for a more exciting job somewhere else? My only certainty was that I wanted to stay on with the agency. I no longer simply liked intelligence; in the last eighteen months I had come to love it. Part of the attraction was the CIA itself, as perhaps the best research facility in the world.

But mostly it was the people. Dana Ball was hardly unique. There were excellent men and women in every agency office, and best of all, the excellence ran clear to the top: First, the director, John McCone, awesome in his lust for obscure facts; then the DDI chief, Ray Cline, resolute in backing his analysts (if he felt they were right); and finally the head of the clandestine services, Richard Helms, calm and clear-thinking in a job demanding just that.

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind. Despite my good run on the Congo, I couldn’t see waiting around for southern Africa to burn out its slow fuse. The long and the short of it was that I decided to sign up as a spy. At the first opportunity, I handed Dana an application to join the DDP.

“So you want to be a spook?” said Dana. He said he’d be sorry to see me go, but that he understood, since at one time or another most DDI
analysts caught the same bug. And he fired my chit up to the seventh floor.

The reaction was immediate. One of the trio in charge of the Bulletin, Richard Lehman, called me to his office. I’d seen Lehman often during the rebellion and liked him a great deal. Short and wiry—“like one of those fast quarterbacks they used to have during the thirties,” someone had described him—he spoke with an air of quiet deliberation, rocking back and forth in his leather swivel chair as he did so, his hands in a position of prayer.

“Sam,” he told me, “you’re going off half-cocked. The other side of the house is no better than ours. Besides, you have a bright future in the DDI. You grasp things quickly, write tolerably well, and most important, you’re a generalist.”

“A what?”

“A generalist,” he repeated. “Someone who can cover many subjects at once. What the DDI has most of is specialists. They’re a dime a dozen.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“Okay,” Lehman replied. “Take Molly. (Molly Kreimer was an analyst from the Southeast Asian Branch whom I’d seen off and on in the halls.) Molly’s a typical specialist. She’s been working on the Vietnamese so long she’s beginning to look like one. She’s a wonderful woman, but she has limited horizons. Whereas you …” And he explained how one day I might land in the front office.

I heard him out. Then, with a tinge of embarrassment, I said that my biggest shortcoming on the Congo was that although I knew plenty about the Simbas, I didn’t know much about the country itself. “I’ve never even been there,” I explained. “So you want to travel,” said Lehman. “I’ll see what I can do.”

A week or so later he summoned me back to his office. He had a deal. If I’d give up joining the DDP, I could transfer to the Southeast Asia Branch and become a roving analyst on Vietnam. It was a step up, he said, because Vietnam was far more important than the Congo, and instead of writing for the Vietnam Sitrep, I’d be assigned to special
projects, the first being Vietcong morale.
⁸
As soon as I exhausted the subject at CIA headquarters, they’d give me a ticket to Saigon. What did I think?

Not bad, I had to admit. I said yes, and the next day left on vacation—my first in a year and a half—to visit my father in the Adirondacks. He had retired not long before from his job as a broker on the New York Stock Exchange, and was spending the summer in a cabin on a lake in the woods.

^*
It was always hard to attract staffers to the city. A State Department post report of 14 January 1963 listed as one of Stanleyville’s few advantages the fact that “Tarantulas and poisonous snakes are infrequently encountered in the city itself.” The report omitted the suburbs, however, and headed its “suggested reading list” with Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.

^*
When Hoare’s mercenaries eventually invaded the Pocket from Lake Tanganyika, the Bahembi put up a stiff fight. Che had disappeared. He later told a colleague that his experience in Africa was “negative,” because the human element failed. “There is no will to fight, the leaders are corrupt; in a word, there is nothing to do.”
⁷

2   THE SITREP

I GOT BACK FROM VACATION the first week of August, 1965, said hello to everyone in Southern Africa, and walked around the partition to Southeast Asia. As I entered the Southeast Asian cubicle—just like the one I’d left except for the maps—Ed Hauck, the branch chief, sprang to his feet.

“Glad you finally showed up,” he said, pumping my hand and smiling broadly. In his early forties, Hauck was somewhat taller than average, with a graying crew cut squared at the top, a deep tan, an athletic build, and exceptionally white teeth.

We sat down at his desk. Molly Kreimer—whom Mr. Lehman had said was a woman “of limited horizons”—was at the next desk over, squinting at her typewriter.

“You don’t know how lucky you are, not having to plug the damn Sitrep,” Hauck said, gesturing at that morning’s edition of the Vietnam Situation Report, still in his in-box. “We’ve been saddled with that son of a bitch since the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s a ravenous monster, and we feed it to keep it at bay.”

The Sitrep’s insatiable appetite, Hauck went on, was the main reason Dick Lehman had sent me over from Africa. Hauck already had a half dozen of his own analysts throwing fodder at it, and a half dozen more were doing likewise down on the fifth floor in the China-Asian
Satellites Division. For some ancient bureaucratic reason, no doubt clear at the time, China-Asian Satellites covered North Vietnam, while Southeast Asia covered South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Despite its mob of authors, however, the Sitrep had a flaw. Everybody was so busy writing about the daily coup plots, air raids and ambushes that some of the war’s larger issues had disappeared down the Sitrep’s crack.

“This is where you come in,” Hauck said. “You’re supposed to man the crack. Keep the larger issues from sliding through. Most particularly, the Vietcong from sliding through. Now this may surprise you, since we’ve managed to get ourselves in a war with them, but we don’t have anyone working full-time on the VC. As far as I know, you’ll be the first person in Washington to give the Vietcong his undivided attention. And as Lehman mentioned, your initial problem is to guess their morale.”

“But before you start plumbing the Vietcong mind,” Hauck said, “you ought to read up on Vietnam. I don’t want to sound condescending, but the Vietnamese are an old people, and they’ve already beat up on the Chinese, the Chams, and the French. You especially ought to read what they did to the French. That was only ten, eleven years ago. Sometimes I think the cables I read now are from that last war, only somebody’s changed the dates.”

“Me, too,” Molly called from her desk. She was now pounding furiously at her typewriter.

“Anyway, don’t break your neck getting a morale paper out,” Hauck said, “everyone knows it’s a tough subject, and besides, the VC aren’t about to fold in the near future. Not even by Christmastime, when McNamara prefers they surrender.” Did I have any questions, he asked.

I had one. “Mr. Hauck, how long do you think the war’s going to last? I mean, how long before we clean it up?”

Hauck’s cheerful expression turned sour. He paused, then, speaking slowly, as if it were a painful and much-gone-over subject, gave this answer:

“The Vietnam war’s going to last a long time. In fact, the war’s going to last so long we’re going to get sick of it. We’re an impatient people, we Americans, and you wait and see what happens when our casualties
go up, and stay up, for years and years. We’ll have riots in the streets, like France had in the fifties. No, we’re not going to ‘clean it up.’ The Vietnamese communists will. Eventually, when we tire of the war, we’ll come home. Then they’ll take Saigon. I give them ten years to do it, maybe twenty.”

“You’re kidding,” I gasped.

“Wish I was,” he said, smiling once again.
¹

At that I walked, maybe staggered is a better word, to my new desk at the other side of the cubicle. Good God, I thought. I’m only ten minutes into my first war, and already the boss says we’re going to lose it. I was so surprised that I didn’t think to ask why. Instead I went back to Southern Africa to see Dana Ball.

“Hey Dana,” I asked in a low voice, “what do you know about Ed Hauck? Is he okay?”

“Who? Ed?” Dana replied. “Sure. One of the best men in the business.”

Still shaken, I returned to Southeast Asia. My first reading on Vietnam was from the 1965
World Almanac:
²

Vietnam

Total area (est. 1958): 127,000 sq. mi.

Population (est. 1963): 31,517,00.

Vietnam is split between two hostile governments, the Republic of Vietnam, which controls the southern half, and the Communist regime of North Vietnam.

The Almanac also pointed out that Vietnam’s chief products included sweet potatoes, sugarcane and shellac. Huh. It didn’t look like much of a country to me.

I read on. First I looked at the CIA’s country briefing book and the Pentagon’s Southeast Asian Factbook. These were fairly short, about such subjects as North Vietnam’s gross national product and the size of the Vietcong army. Then I went through the much longer CIA-produced “National Intelligence Surveys” about Indo-China. These were large paperbound affairs, some two dozen in all, classified “secret,”
with titles like “Vietnam’s Urban Areas,” “The Structure of the North Vietnamese Government,” and “Cambodia’s Inland Waterway.” Finally I read some old Sitreps.

This first go-around made one thing clear about the Vietcong. They were in an entirely different ballpark from the Simbas. But what struck me most was the size of North Vietnam’s GNP, only $1.6 billion a year. I looked up America’s: $650 billion. That was 406 times bigger. Shaking my head at the difference (and wondering at Ed Hauck’s gloom in the face of it), I asked his okay to go to the CIA library for the next week or so to do some background reading.

“You’re our roving analyst,” he said. “Rove on down to the library.”

I did so, and, settling into an easy chair, plowed through the standard books on Vietnam. These included Vo Nguyen Giap’s
People’s War, People’s Army,
a Vietnamese communist’s account of how they had taken twenty years to defeat the French; Bernard Fall’s
Street Without Joy,
a Frenchman’s view of the same defeat; and Joseph Buttinger’s
Smaller Dragon,
a history of Vietnam, whose main theme was that the Vietnamese had been fighting the Chinese off and on for two millennia.
³
By several days later, I had gained the strong impression that although the Vietnamese hadn’t much of a GNP, they were abnormally dogged. Also they seemed to detest foreigners. All very well, I told myself, that doesn’t beat four-hundred-and-six-to-one odds.

Back upstairs in mid-August, I started work on VC morale. Not knowing how else to begin, I decided to use the same approach I’d employed on the Simbas. I fetched some three-by-fives and black boxes from supply, and commenced copying VC names from the latest cables. Two hours passed, and the Laotian analyst stopped by my desk. He was six foot four, slender, with slick black hair and a big nose. His name was Jack Ives.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m making out index cards on the VC,” I replied. “It seems to me that you can’t dope somebody’s morale unless you first find out who he is.”

“Cheezil,” said Ives. He walked off, chuckling to himself.

A short while later Ed Hauck came by with the same question. I gave him the same answer. “There’s something you should know,” he said. “Those names are aliases. The VC want to confuse us. Keep that up long enough and you’ll have a list as big as the Manhattan phone book with nothing but fake names.”

“Maybe I should use another approach,” I said.

“It’s up to you,” he said. But I couldn’t think of a fresh one at the moment. I read old Sitreps instead.

A couple of days later—Wednesday, 18 August—I was still at a loss on how to decipher enemy morale when a fuss erupted on the other side of the cubicle. Phones were ringing off their hooks, and the two military analysts were talking loudly, rattling paper, and peering at maps. It had the look of a major flap. I asked what was going on.

“The Marines have landed,” one of them said. “At a place called Van Tuong Peninsula, south of Danang. They’re after the First Vietcong Regiment.”

“One of the VC’s finest,” I said, displaying my knowledge of old Sitreps.

“That’s right,” he replied, “only this time the Marines actually seem to have found it. They’re pulling an Iwo Jima, John Wayne, the whole bit. No more of this jungle crap.”
⁴

Well, this seems as good a place as any to dig in, I told myself. For one thing, I knew a lot about amphibious operations. After college I’d spent almost three years in the Pacific as communications officer on a U.S. Navy attack transport, the U.S.S.
George Clymer.
While there, I’d been in on about twenty practice landings. A couple of times I’d led the assault boats into the beach.

The military analysts said their out-box was all mine. I read the first messages, and it was like my good old days in the Navy. The command ship for the operation was none other than the U.S.S.
Bayfield!
I’d visited the
Bayfield
many times, once to inspect its communications division, then run by a young lieutenant, Dale Thorn, now a godfather to my son Clayton. The other ships were familiar too: the
Cabildo,
the
Vernon County,
the
Point Defiance,
the
Talledega.
I could all but hear the shout
“Away all boats!” followed by the squeal of the ship’s davits as they lowered the landing craft into the water.