War of Numbers (15 page)

I slammed in to Dean Moor’s office to berate him about “back burners.” He told me to calm down, official Washington was becoming aware of the problem (no thanks to the DDI, I thought), and the way I could help most was to finish my big study on the home guard.

Angrier than ever, I returned to work. By now I had gathered some two thousand reports—VC documents, POW and defector interviews, and so forth. My main problem was sorting them out. The Vietcong
organization had begun to emerge as a vast bureaucracy with elaborate chains of command, categories, and subcategories that had to be kept apart. I split the organization into two pieces, assigning each one its own safe drawer. One drawer was for the home guard, the second was for everything that wasn’t. The second drawer contained dozens of manila folders with such labels as “Ordnance,” “Quartermasters,” “Assault Youths,” “Armed Public Security Forces,” “Couriers,” and “Sappers.” The home guard drawer had folders for each kind of guerrilla and militiamen. Most folder labels came from my notes from the Long An Chieu Hoi center. They were in both English and Vietnamese: “Village Guerrillas—Du Kich Xa”; “Hamlet Guerrillas—Du Kich Ap”; “Secret Guerrillas—Du Kich Mat”; “Self-Defense—Tu Ve”; and “Secret Self-Defense—Tu Ve Mat.” The lines between different types of Vietcong were often blurred, and I found myself continually shifting reports from one folder to another.

In mid-November, Lorrie brought me our latest official estimate for the VC. It wasn’t the MACV Order of Battle (which the CIA still didn’t get) but a page-long précis issued by the DDI Watch. I glanced it over to see if MACV had added any guerrillas and militiamen. I noted with disgust that it hadn’t. Then I glanced at the other numbers, this time jotting them down. They were:

Somehow they looked familiar: not just the guerrilla-militia, but one or two of the others. Well, it was easy enough to check. I pulled out my copy of MACV’s Order of Battle—still dated 31 March 1966, and still (as far as I knew) the agency’s sole copy. I turned to the OB’s summary, and compared the old numbers there with the new ones from the DDI Watch. This is what I found. The “regulars” had increased by about
30,000. (
Fine
, I thought.) The “service troops” had gone up by some 600. (
Not much of a change
, I thought.) And the “political cadres” were
exactly
the same for November as they had been in March. I ticked off the months that had passed on my fingers: seven. A cartoonist would have drawn a light bulb igniting over my head. I asked myself: Could it be that the political cadres are in the same boat as the guerrilla-militia? I answered:
Yes.

I beat a path to Molly. She laughed: “This is getting repetitive.” I went to the sixth floor to find out from George Allen who the political cadres were.

He said: “They’re party members, armed police, and people like that. It’s what we call the ‘infrastructure.’ They’re the center of the VC organization; they run the thing, including the army. As for that number, ‘39,175,’ it comes from a study the South Vietnamese army did in mid-1965. It was a lousy estimate back then: it’s probably even worse now.”

“What about the ‘service troops,’ ” I asked.

“Medics, quartermasters, engineers, the same as in our own military,” he said. “Where the OB got its number for them I couldn’t tell you, but it’s been around for a long, long time. I think it’s safe to assume that no one’s looked at it for at least two years.”

I said: “It looks to me like the entire order of battle is worthless.”

“Except maybe the regulars,” he corrected. And he confided in me some of the details of his earlier career. He told me that he had started on Vietnam as a civilian in the Pentagon in 1951, that he watched the Vietminh grow steadily until the collapse of the French in 1954, and that he had followed Indo-China more or less steadily ever since. “We’ve fallen gradually into the same pattern of mistakes as the French,” he told me. “They didn’t begin by faking intelligence; they merely assumed success in the absence of clear proof of failure. We’ve been doing that for some time. Take that example I gave you about General Harkins deducting guerrillas from the OB, because, as he put it, ‘we’ve been killing the bastards right and left.’ He wasn’t really lying. But since there was no document around which showed that guerrillas should be
added to the estimate, he felt it was OK to subtract them. The danger in that kind of thinking is that it’s only a short step to outright fabrication. It’s a frame of mind that drove me to quit the Pentagon for the CIA. That was July 1963. I took a pay cut to come here, but I have no regrets at all. The agency’s pretty square. And here in Carver’s office, we work for the director, and the chances are good that if we have something to say with reasonable evidence to back it up, it’ll leave the building.”
¹⁷

George went on like this for almost fifteen minutes before I asked him for a job. He said that he’d be happy to take me on, but that first he’d have to check with Carver. They’d let me know in a week or two. I went downstairs feeling a good deal better than when I’d come up.

There was still plenty to do in Room 5G44. And since the political cadres looked too complex to tackle right away, I decided to zero in on service troops. Question A was where the OB number had come from. But despite repeated phone calls to U.S. Army headquarters, to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to DIA, I couldn’t find anyone who knew. Shortly I gave up the search, and commenced going through my own files, especially the ones in my Non-Home Guard drawer. Within two weeks I had concluded that a more realistic estimate of service troops was in the neighborhood of 100,000, or about six times higher than the OB’s. It was no more than a semi-educated guess, but I felt it was conservative, since it stemmed from the theory that the Vietcong needed only one service soldier for each regular combatant. Our own army—admittedly far more sophisticated than the VC’s—had
six
service troops for every one who carried a gun.

As I was putting my findings on paper on Thursday, 1 December, Lorrie interrupted me with the morning mail. One of its reports brought me up short. It was about my old stamping ground, Long An Province, and was apparently responding to Colonel Hawkins’ request for a local estimate of guerrilla-militia. I recalled that the province chief, Colonel Anh, had told me there were “two thousand,” and sure enough, the report came up with virtually the same number.
¹⁸
Then I looked at the fine print. The two thousand were all
village
guerrillas; the
report omitted entirely hamlet guerrillas and self-defense militiamen. Well, in every province I’d looked at so far (for example, Binh Dinh) the two latter categories had way outnumbered the former. Therefore two thousand was only a fraction of Long An’s real number, and Colonel Anh—whether he had realized it or not—had been talking through his hat. I stuck a codicil on my service memo noting the OB number for Long An’s home guard, 160, was probably out of whack by several thousand percent.
^*
Lorrie typed it all up, and I gave it to Dean Moor. Leaving intact the service soldier part, he crossed out the codicil.

He said: “The front office already knows the guerrilla-militia estimate is suspect. No need to rub their noses in it. Besides you oughtn’t to bother them with all these details.”

“Details!” I exploded. “Maybe if we’d paid more attention to details, we wouldn’t be in such a god-awful mess.”

Just then Lorrie poked her head in the door to hand me a message. It was from the front office. Richard Lehman wanted to discuss my application for a job with George Carver. I was to go right away. I excused myself from Dean Moor, and stormed up to the seventh floor, muttering to myself about nonattention to details.

Mr. Lehman was rocking back and forth in his leather swivel chair, his hands in a praying position, just like the time I’d seen him about changing jobs from the Congo to Vietnam. He said: “What’s this I hear about you wanting to leave the Indo-China Division?”

“I want to work for George Carver, sir,” I replied pointedly. “He listens to details. Furthermore, he seems to be having more success than the DDI is in getting the message out about the size of the VC army.”

He said: “George Carver is an upstart.”

It was an odd beginning to our half-hour long conversation. The only time I’d heard “upstart” was in an old English movie, and Lehman had aroused my curiosity. I asked him: “Why is Mr. Carver an upstart?”

Lehman was discursive. From what I could gather, Carver had stolen the editorship of McNamara’s “Will to Persist” from under the DDI’s nose, and that since then he had sent numerous memos about Vietnam to the White House without so much as a by-your-leave. “The CIA ought not to speak with two voices,” said Mr. Lehman. I also got the impression that the DDI was annoyed at Carver for having commandeered George Allen, the agency’s foremost expert on the Vietcong. Finally Lehman asked me: “Now really, Sam, why do you want to go?”

Feeling slightly unreal—and that I wasn’t answering his question—I made the following points: that the Vietnam War was probably more than twice as big as American intelligence said it was; that our estimates of enemy logistics, recruitment, and population control were almost certainly dead wrong; that the Sitrep, which was the DDI’s main publication on the war, inadequately covered the Vietcong; that the best source on the VC, captured documents, were almost entirely neglected; that as far as I could tell I was the only analyst in Washington who worked on our southern enemies full time; and that worst of all, the MACV Order of Battle—the bedrock estimate on which all other estimates depended—was still unchanged despite a growing pile of evidence that it ought to be much higher.
²⁰

“Sam,” said Lehman with a kind voice, “we’re now aware of the problems with the order of battle, and we’re grateful to you for pointing them out. But you’re asking too much in too short a period of time. The change you want is enormous. You’ve got to allow the government machinery enough time to absorb it.”

“It’s had three months, sir,” I said.

“Deserting the Indo-China Division won’t help your career,” he said, still with a kind voice.

“I want to go to Carver’s,” I replied.

Lehman told me that the head of the DDI, R. Jack Smith, had said I could go if I insisted, but only under certain conditions. The main one
was that anything I wrote for Carver would have to have a DDI imprimatur. He repeated: “The agency ought not to speak with two voices.”

“With all respect, sir,” I said, “it’s high time that it did.” And I went below to see my prospective boss, George Carver.

Carver was lounging behind his polished wooden desk on the sixth floor, hair disheveled like an English don’s. In fact he had attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and had written there a dissertation on Thomas Hobbes. A copy of the dissertation was in a nearby bookcase. I asked him about Mr. Smith’s demand that my papers appear under the DDI label.

He said: “Don’t worry about R. Jack. His nose has been out of joint ever since ‘Will to Persist.’ Here you work for the director.” I was to start after the first of the year, he told me. The director, of course, was Richard Helms, of whom I highly approved, recalling the sensible way he had acted during the Congo rebellion. Helms’s office was on the seventh floor.

Freedom imminent, I finished up several memos for the Indo-China Division. On the following day, 2 December, the service-troop paper went upstairs, minus the Long An codicil.
²¹
A few days later, I sent up my latest guess on the number of VC.
²²
It was 600,000,
^*
or more than double the order of battle. To make sure the military knew what was going on, I cabled the Saigon Station, telling it to “alert the appropriate MACV officials, particularly Colonel Hawkins.”
²³

My swan song with the Indo-China Division was the home-guard study. When I gave it to Dean Moor, it was some sixty pages long, with a hundred or so footnotes—the most detailed paper about the Vietcong written to that date. One of its features was a map that used VC province names and VC province boundaries, often markedly different from those of the Saigon government’s. (In part, because there were then only thirty-eight VC provinces, in contrast to Saigon’s forty-four.)
It was the first time an agency paper had ever used a VC map, and to me it symbolized everything that was wrong with the DDI’s approach to the war. As I had complained three weeks before to Mr. Lehman, our best source in those days was captured documents, which of course employed VC names. But since the DDI seldom used enemy documents, it felt no need for an enemy map. A cartographer who helped me on the map said: “It looks like we want them to fight the war our way, not theirs.”
²⁴

The last days of December went quietly. The front office sent back my “Service Troop” and “600,000” papers without comment or request for amplification. My home-guard study went below to be looked at by somebody downstairs. And a Collation Branch analyst named John T. Moore—back from Vietnam on midtour vacation—stopped by to tell me that he’d also written a guerrilla paper in Saigon, but that it had been “suppressed.”
²⁵
The year-end MACV Order of Battle arrived on schedule. Except for the “regulars,” its numbers were unchanged.
²⁶