War of Numbers (21 page)

“I’ve noticed that myself,” he replied; “why do you suppose they’re not coming in? They must know something which makes them hesitate to defect.” He suggested that I see another one-time Collation member, Tom Becker, who had taken a job elsewhere in town with a joint Vietnamese-American outfit called CT Four. Begun in late 1966, CT Four was the first serious effort by the Allies to attack the works of the Vietcong’s mainspring, the communist party, whose “infrastructure,” as we called it, included the enemy’s secret police. Aware of my interest in the latter, Layton said: “Maybe Tom could tell you whether CT Four’s picked up anyone from the VC security section.”

“No VC cops’ve checked in lately,” Becker told me later that day, and CT Four’s attack on the infrastructure was having its share of troubles. As usual, the first one was names. They’d collected thousands, he said,
but only a handful were real. Worse yet, CT Four had scarcely dented the even more vexing problem of connecting names with faces. The Allies had captured lots of photographs (every other VC owned a Brownie, it seems), but who all the smiling people were was impossible to tell. CT Four had even sent to the States for an Identikit—a device used by American police to draw suspects’ faces from composite features (eyebrows, chins, etc.)—but unfortunately the initial portraits all looked like Occidentals. Another problem was fingerprints. Supposedly they appeared on the ID cards of all South Vietnamese citizens, but there was no central fingerprint file to check the ID cards against. “So if we found a bomb under President Thieu’s desk, we couldn’t trace it, at least not by the prints.” Finally there was America’s general ignorance of the VC. “We don’t know enough about their organization. CIA case officers are showing up all the time who don’t even know the difference between the Party and the Front. That’s as basic as you can get. You’d think somebody back at headquarters would teach them.”

As I was leaving, Becker showed me a study just put out by the South Vietnamese. “It says the Vietcong are reorganizing around Saigon. Apparently they want to ‘expedite operations’ into the city. They’re always saying something like that, but this time they seem more serious than usual. I wonder what they have in mind. Think I’ll buy me a helmet.”

I reported back to Langley on Monday, 18 September. The Indo-China sections were abuzz with the Saigon conference. George Allen said: “We’ll live to regret it.” Molly said: ‘Squaring the circle,’ my foot. I might have known that if Carver sold the plantation, he’d start off with a fancy quote.” I defended him: “If it wasn’t for Carver, none of this stuff would have come out. I don’t think it was his fault. It must have been somebody higher. I put my money on Helms.”

“Could be,” said Molly. “Maybe even higher than that.”

For the next two weeks, much of the paper crossing my desk concerned what we were going to tell the press about the new VC strength estimate. It was a touchy subject, but I didn’t pay all that much attention.
What the reporters got was someone else’s business. I was waiting for the cleanup session of Fourteen Three.

The meeting, when it convened, wasn’t the cleanup after all. It was the pre-cleanup, meaning that only CIA officials were there. The conference room was crowded. Fourteen Three having achieved notoriety, several board members showed up instead of the usual one or two. There were also representatives from all the offices that dealt with Indo-China. The purpose of the pre-cleanup was to settle the Agency’s internal quarrels so we could present a more or less untied front when the rest of the intelligence community appeared for the regular meeting. The chairman was the same as before Saigon, James Graham. He said: “It’s been a long hard struggle, but I think—to employ a well-known phrase—there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The Saigon agreement may not be perfect, but it seems to have laid to rest the numbers question. Before we start, are there any questions or comments?”

I raised my hand.

Mr. Graham smiled: “OK, Sam, fire away.”

I did so. It took almost two hours. First I told them about the difference between Colonel Hawkins’ real and official positions (not using his name, since it might leak back, and get him in trouble.) Next I described the bargain that had led to the exit of the Vietcong self-defense militia—MACV’s note having unfortunately disappeared, but with Bill Hyland there to vouch for its existence. Finally, at a blackboard, I laid out the affair of Long Dat District, showing how MACV had “scaled down” each of its service detachments. Singling out the ordnance unit, which had dropped from fifteen to three, I described the jobs of each of the twelve soldiers who’d been crossed off the list. They might have belonged to an American ordnance detachment. I concluded: “Gentlemen, if we count them in the United States Army, why can’t we count them in the Vietcong’s?”

There was a moment of uneasy silence. Mr. Graham broke it: “I guess the numbers aren’t settled after all.” Bill Hyland—who was tending the draft at one end of the conference table—said: “Christalmighty,
this can go on forever.”
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The meeting dispersed. Two board members came up to where I was erasing the blackboard. One, an old southern gentleman named Ludlow Montagu, said: “It makes my blood boil to see the military cooking the books.” The other was Sherman Kent, the man who had established the Board of National Estimates at CIA in the agency’s early years. He asked: “Sam, have we gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty?” I replied: “Sir, we passed them in August.”

During the next week, the agency’s fo’c’stle seethed with rebellion over the terms of the Saigon agreement. George Allen berated Carver twice daily. Major Blascik chomped on his pipe. But the most overt signs of revolt arrived in Carver’s office in the form of comments by various CIA officials on MACV’s latest proposed briefing meant to explain the Saigon numbers to the press. The average comment was angry, but the most bilious of all came from an official in the Office of Economic Research, Paul Walsh. “As seen from this office,” he wrote on 11 October,
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“I must rank it as one of the greatest snow jobs since Potemkin constructed his village.” It was so blatantly misleading, Walsh concluded, that “it gives us all the justification we need to go straight again.” The hint was strong that it was Saigon where the agency had gone astray. I called Walsh’s office to congratulate him, but he was out.

By Friday the thirteenth, even Carver had begun to waver. Perhaps stung by the ferocity of the attacks on MACV’s briefing, he sent his own comments on it to the Pentagon for relay to Saigon. He wrote that one paragraph of the briefing was so bad that it would be “torn apart by the Saigon press corps.” Another was “a clumsy piece of dissimulation.”
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These were strong words and when I read them Monday afternoon, I allowed myself to think the Saigon agreement was heading for the brink.

On Tuesday morning a message came from Vietnam that I felt pushed it over the edge. The message relayed the testimony of two midlevel defectors from the Delta. Both had the same story; the communists were reorganizing their army, in part by lumping together the guerrillas and the self-defense militia. I reread the message to make sure I’d gotten it right. I had. Its significance was immense.
If
the two types
of soldiers were to consolidate, we could no longer tell them apart, either through captured documents or any way else. Willy nilly the Vietcong were parading the militia back into the MACV’s Order of Battle.

I showed the cable to Carver. I hadn’t seen much of him lately, not through distaste, but because I’d begun to repeat myself. I said: “Mr. Carver, see if it strikes you the same way it struck me.” He read it.
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“Lord,” he said softly. As I had, he read it again. He said: “Send a message to Saigon, and referencing this cable, have the station send a flier to the provinces asking whether the reorganization is countrywide. If it is, we may have to reopen the bidding on the OB. Meanwhile, I’ll tell the director.” He sounded almost cheerful.

Theresa Wilson gave me some cable blanks, which I commenced to fill out. As I did so, another thought struck me. This was the
second
big VC reorganization I’d heard of in the last six weeks. The first was the one Tom Becker had pointed out in Saigon; the communists were streamlining their local structure to “expedite operations” into the city. Meanwhile, the Chieu Hoi rate was still falling off. What was going on, anyway? It was interesting to speculate, but my job, as Carver had put it, was to “reopen the bidding” on the VC strength estimate.

I tried. Fourteen Three continued to meet, and at each session I brought in new evidence on the numbers. They wouldn’t budge, but Mr. Graham agreed to some changes in wording. The overall estimate became “at least.” A sentence was added that it “could be considerably higher.” Then there was the exchange between Graham and me over the phrase “we believe their military force is in the range of …”

ADAMS
: “Sir, how about taking out ‘we believe’ and putting in ‘we estimate?’ ”

GRAHAM
: “You mean on the grounds that we don’t really believe it?”

ADAMS
: “Yessir.”

He did so. But he wouldn’t change the numbers. Once again, the Estimates staffer, Bill Hyland, tried to explain: “You’re tilting at windmills. Helms has us locked into the military’s figures. We can’t change them without his permission.”

Fourteen Three met for the last time in the board conference room on Friday, 20 October 1967. With the completion of the last draft, resistance to the Saigon agreement ran out of steam. Gloomily I read the comments of the once-incipient rebel, Paul Walsh, on Monday afternoon. On behalf of his office, he wrote: “We share with many others numerous reservations about the estimate. We feel that the OB figures generally understate the strength of the enemy forces but recognize the apparent obligation for the estimate to be consistent with the figures agreed to at Saigon.”
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It was disgusting. Less than two weeks before, Walsh had recommended that the agency “go straight again,” and had called MACV’s proposed press briefing a “Potemkin’s village.”

The village was almost up. At the agency’s insistence, the Pentagon had reluctantly inserted mention of the militia’s exit from the OB into MACV’s yet-to-be-given briefing, but this candor disturbed Saigon, including Ambassador Bunker. He cabled the White House (“Eyes Only Rostow”) on 28 October that telling the press about the militia’s departure “still bothers General Westmoreland, Bob Komer, and myself. Given the overriding need to demonstrate progress in grinding down the enemy, it is essential that we do not drag too many red herrings across the trail.” To admit dropping the militia from the OB was “simply to invite trouble … Far better in our view is to deal with the matter orally if it arises (in the hopes of) forestalling many confusing and undesirable questions.” He concluded: “Sorry to badger you on this, but the credibility gap is such that we don’t want to end up conveying the opposite of what we intend.”
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I tried to envisage the white-haired old gentleman whose last words to me in Saigon were to give his best to my father. I couldn’t, and stuck his cable in a file marked “self-defense” along with the messages Komer, Abrams, and Westmoreland had sent about the militia in August.
^*

My hopes flickered briefly on the morning of 3 November. Helms still hadn’t signed Fourteen Three and two big pieces of evidence arrived that I felt might stop him. The first was a cable from the Saigon Station, answering my query about the communists’ lumping together the guerrillas and self-defense militia. The station couldn’t yet tell whether such a consolidation had taken place, but it had news from the provinces that was equally important. The VC home guard was everywhere in a state of unprecedented flux, with guerrillas joining regular infantry units in some areas, training as sappers in others—a vast roiling about of the entire guerrilla-militia. Although the VC’s purpose was unclear, the station recommended a sharp increase in the guerrilla numbers in Fourteen Three. I took the cable to Carver.
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“A little late,” he said, “but I’ll send it on to the director.”

The other evidence was a captured document. It came from —of all places—the DDI. Its bearer was a young analyst named Douglas Parry from a newly formed office whose main purpose, at last, was to study the Vietcong. Although MACV had published the document in late September, I’d missed it. A staff officer at COSVN headquarters had written the thing in “early 1967,” I guessed about April.
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“Take a look at page ten,” said Parry. I did so. There it said that VC guerrillas in South Vietnam numbered 150,000. Assuming April was correct for the date, this figure was only six months old. Yet Fourteen Three’s “currently agreed” number was 80,000. Could the guerrillas have dwindled that much in just half a year? It was almost inconceivable.
^*
I thanked Parry, the first DDI-er to have given me a document since Molly had in August 1966. Then I showed it to Carver. “I’ll send it on.” he said.

It was useless. Late that afternoon Theresa handed me a memo from Helms. It wasn’t to me personally, but to everyone who held copies of the final draft of Fourteen Three. His memo was called an “Introductory Note,” explaining how American intelligence had managed to
underestimate the size of the communist army.
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First, Helms blamed the South Vietnamese, because their information was “unreliable.” Then he blamed “a social environment where basic data is incomplete and often untrustworthy.” Finally, he condemned “complex methodological approaches which cannot rise above uncertain data inputs.”
Baloney!
The reason we’d underestimated the communist army was that no one had looked at a damn thing until August 1966! With growing anger, I read the remaining paragraphs. The last one said that the VC had a “deliberate” policy of “sacrificing” the lower levels of their army in order to maintain the strength of the regulars (which was true), but that the lower level to sacrifice the most was the guerrillas, “now estimated to total some 80,000.”
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