War of Numbers (22 page)

Eighty thousand?
So Helms was sticking to the Saigon agreement after all! I quickly reviewed what the “all” consisted of. First, George Allen and me, the only ones at agency headquarters who’d worked on the subject; second, Colonel Hawkins, whose warning I’d passed to George Carver; third, the agency’s Saigon Station, its advice for a “sharp increase” in guerrillas only hours old; and fourth—and most important—the latest VC document, which gave a number almost double eighty thousand. Having blithely disregarded the “all,” just who was Helms regarding?

I said to myself:
The damn liars at MACV headquarters, that’s who!

At that moment, I happened to be holding a yellow Eberhart Faber no. 2 pencil. I snapped it in half. That was the turning point of my career at the CIA, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

I quickly simmered down, and for several minutes looked at the two halves of the yellow pencil, wondering what to do. Gradually the thought formed: Helms
still
hadn’t signed the estimate, and by God, I’d make one last try to stop him, this time putting all my thoughts
in writing.
That was important,
in writing.
The maxim had come to mind (I believe it was my old Africa boss, Dana Ball’s), “Bureaucrats cringe from written complaints as Dracula does from the cross.” Ok, that was funny, but I’d have to be careful.

I reread the Introductory Note. Its one piece of useful information was that the chiefs of the big intelligence agencies were scheduled to gather at 10:30 Thursday morning, 9 November, to review the final draft of Fourteen Three. That gave me six days to write my complaint. I tossed the pencil halves into a wastepaper basket, took out a ballpoint pen, and wrote down the title: “Comments on the Current Drafts of the Introductory Note and Text of National Intelligence Estimate Fourteen Three.” Not very pithy, but precise. I chewed on the end of the ball point, and began:

“Having studied the Vietcong manpower problem since early 1966, and discussed various drafts of Fourteen Three for what seems almost as long, I wish to make the following comments as a matter of permanent record. They are my views and not necessarily those of my office.” (This last took George Carver off the hook.)

I kept at the comments off and on for five days, using the same documents and arguments I’d used since early summer. By midafternoon of Wednesday, 8 November, I was beating an old hobbyhorse of mine, how the low manpower numbers had skewed all the other estimates, such as logistics, when I lost power. I read the comments over. There was something missing. It hit me what was wrong. Until that point they simply rehashed evidence. There were no conclusions. I chewed some more on the ballpoint pen, and under the heading “General Comments on the Text,” wrote as follows:

I see no reason to dwell at length on why I think the current draft of Fourteen Three is an inadequate piece of analytical work. I will make four points, briefly.

First, the current draft is ill-formed and incoherent. Discussions of logistics, losses, and manpower are largely unrelated.

Second, the draft is less than candid. It conceals rather than edifies, using such devices as the phrase “at least” to obscure the possible existence of tens of thousands of Vietcong soldiers. Too often, it attempts to blame the evidence as inadequate, when the fault is not in information but in analysis.

Third, the draft is timid. Its history is one of attacks by soldiers and politicians, and retreats by intelligence officials. Rather than admit the extent of past underestimates of enemy strength, its authors hide behind disclaimers and refuse to add up numbers, while protesting that it is inadvisable to make sums of apples and oranges.

Finally, it is unwise. Although it intimates that there are “considerable” numbers beside the “at least 223,000 to 248,000” (listed in paragraph 37), it does not come to grips with the probability that the number of Vietcong, as currently defined, is something over half a million. Thus it makes canyons of gaps, and encourages self delusion.”
³⁷

The “gaps” referred to were credibility gaps. Now, I realize by current standards, these conclusions look pretty dry, but for me back in those days, they were high rhetoric. Therefore, I decided to try the comments out on some other people before handing them to George Carver. Theresa Wilson typed it all up—saying “I hope you know what you’re doing” when she was done—then I showed them to Don Blascik. “You’ve hoisted the Jolly Roger,” he said. Next was George Allen.

“Chicken thieves,” he said. “You’re calling the CIA leadership a pack of chicken thieves.”

“Is it too strongly worded?” I asked nervously.

“No,” he replied. “It’s about right. Much weaker, and they wouldn’t get the point. Much stronger, and they’d hang you for insubordination. We’ve got to stop those numbers from getting in concrete.” He handed the comments back, saying “When you give this to Carver, tell him it’s with my blessing.”

Carver read them the following morning with what I took to be horrified disbelief. When he was through, I said: “Sir, I have two requests. The first is that you show these to Mr. Helms before his ten-thirty meeting today. The second is for permission to give copies to the other people around the building, particularly the Board of National Estimates.”

Looking me square in the eye, he said: “Permission granted.” Under the circumstances, it was an admirable reaction, especially so since he’d had a hand in what I was complaining about. Carver disappeared—I presumed to the director’s office—and I went to a Xerox machine. I distributed twenty-five copies by nine-thirty. Among the recipients were Mr. Graham and several other board members: R. Jack Smith, the head of the DDI, and his deputy, Edward Proctor, plus a number of lesser entities, such as Bill Hyland, Paul Walsh, Dean Moor, and Molly. Then I hunkered down to await the arrival of goodness knows what, maybe a posse.

No posse arrived, however, either for the rest of Thursday, or on Friday either. In fact nothing happened at all. On late Friday afternoon, curiosity overcame me, and I went to see my old friend in the DDI front office, the ex-Laotian analyst, Jack Ives. He showed me a note Edward Proctor had sent to R. Jack Smith concerning my comments. The note said: “This is the work of an angry young man. We ought not to allow it in our files without writing an answer.” However, no answer was forthcoming.

Helms signed Fourteen-Three on Monday morning, 13 November 1967.
³⁸
Since the first meeting 144 days earlier, the estimate had gone through twenty-two separate drafts, the hardest-fought in agency history. When I saw Helm’s signature—“concurred in” by the entire “United States Intelligence Board” (it said just below it)—I went to Carver to say I wanted to quit the director’s office. Carver looked embarrassed when I told him why, but he said there was nothing he could do. I thanked him for his help on the order of battle earlier in the year, and asked to transfer to the new DDI office whose job was to follow the Vietcong. He said OK, he’d see what he could do. I returned to my desk.

Well, maybe Helms and the U.S. Intelligence Board thought the numbers problem was laid to rest, but there was one group who didn’t: the Vietcong. They were trying to build up their regular army. Several more missing units had turned up lately, and I increasingly suspected
that the order of battle might be as low for this type of soldier as it was for the others. There was a problem, however; checking regulars was a prodigious task. Whereas the OB carried guerrillas, for instance, in a lump sum by province, it listed regulars by individual unit. Thus I’d have to snake them out battalion by battalion, platoon by platoon. There seemed no way of accomplishing this except by plodding once more through the VC documents. This I commenced to do.

It was a frustrating experience. On one occasion, for example, I flushed a covey of little rocket units the Vietcong had concealed in the central highlands. Their total complement was less than three hundred men, however, a drop in the bucket. An added indignity was the presence in Washington of Bunker and Westmoreland, who—recalled temporarily from Saigon—were buttonholing reporters to announce the VC were in a bad way. They had their effect. “The Enemy Is Running Out of Men” proclaimed a
Washington Daily News
headline on 16 November (a Jim Lucas exclusive).
³⁹
“Westmoreland Is Sure of Victory,” said the
New York Times
on the twenty-third. The
Times
story reported that the general had said at a Pentagon briefing that the Communist Army had dropped from 285,000 men in 1966 to 242,000 at last count.
⁴⁰
I read the story carefully to see if he’d mentioned the self-defense militia’s exit from the OB. He hadn’t. George Allen was as disgusted as I was. The day after the
Times
account, he sent a note in to Carver saying Westmoreland’s numbers were “phoney” and “contrived,” and “controlled by a desire to stay under 300,000.”
⁴¹
I didn’t bother to complain, partly through the conviction that it would do no good, but mostly because I was too busy looking for communist regulars.

I didn’t find many that day—Friday, 24 November—but I found something else, perhaps as significant: a VC report about faking South Vietnamese ID cards. It was of a kind I might easily have passed over but for my conversation in Vietnam in September with the CT Four analyst, Tom Becker. Becker had seemed to think that ID cards were an important subject, and in deference to his opinion, I read the report carefully. It laid out the activities of a small Vietcong forging cell on the
outskirts of Saigon during a recent nine-month period. During that time the cell claimed to have distributed 145 false ID cards, as well as a number of lesser papers, such as fifty-five draft deferment certificates, and forty sets of discharge papers from a South Vietnamese airborne battalion. That looked to me an awfully big output for a single cell—cells ran normally from three to six people—but there was an even more astonishing claim at the report’s end. It said that during the same nine months, the cell had received from “higher authorities” two hundred South Vietnamese civilian ID card blanks, fifty Government National Police ID card blanks, and two seals of Saigon’s Seventh Police Precinct,
all genuine.
⁴²

It didn’t take long to think out some harrowing implications. First, the VC had one or more spies in the government’s central ID-card-issuing office (meaning there were plenty more cards where these came from), and probably a spy in the Seventh Precinct’s National Police headquarters as well; second, the papers they were “forging”—on genuine blanks, stamped with genuine seals—were probably indistinguishable from the real thing (bearing in mind Tom Becker’s observation that the fingerprints on real ID cards were a mere formality since there was no place to check them against); third, the number of people the Vietcong could send into Saigon with legal documentation must be very large indeed. If this one cell could provide papers for 250 people (incidentally, the size of a standard Vietcong sapper battalion), several cells could provide—it was staggering to think. I called up my friend in the counterintelligence staff, Bill Johnson. “Better send me a copy,” he groaned. I showed the document to George Carver. “Write it up,” he said cheerfully. I think he was pleased not to get harangued again about the order of battle. “But it can wait ’til Monday,” he added. “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off?” I did so with thanks.

On Monday morning I got back to find that my discovery of Friday had been eclipsed by a long cable that the Saigon Station had sent in over the weekend. Apparently Walt Rostow of the White House had some days earlier asked the station what it thought the VC were going
to do in their upcoming winter-spring campaign. Based on documents and POW reports, the station answer was a shocker. George Allen read me some of the significant passages “ ‘The communist strategy is in a state of flux,’ ” he quoted. The VC were describing their campaign as the “decisive phase of the war.” Its goals were to be achieved through “a coordinated and countrywide, political and military offensive utilizing all Vietcong assets.”
⁴³
George handed me the cable, saying: “Looks to me like a balls-out attack, even bigger than what’s going on now at Loc Ninh and Dak To.” (He was referring to unusually large battles then in progress in South Vietnam’s interior.) “Now this is the station’s first cut at answering Rostow’s request. The final one’s due in two or three weeks. When it goes to the White House, it’ll probably cause a flap. I want you to keep a file on this offensive, and show me any reports—let’s call them ‘extraordinary documents’—which shed light on it.”

I got from Theresa Wilson a new manila folder to which I affixed the label “VC Winter-Spring Campaign.” In fact, as I thought about it, the station cable seemed to make sense out of some things I’d seen earlier.
If
the Vietcong were about to launch an attack “utilizing all their assets,” it was scarcely a surprise that they would want to shift the assets around to prepare for it. This might explain the reorganization around Saigon (the one Tom Becker had told me about), and the unusual activity among the guerrilla-militia. Christ! the guerrilla-militia. If you added them together, there were three times as many as we allowed in the order of battle.
^*
I thought: This was the last time on earth we should be playing games with the OB. Hurriedly I returned to my document hunt for VC regulars—the type of soldier who would spearhead an attack. On Monday, 4 December, the November Chieu Hoi statistics came in: 553 military defectors, the lowest number I’d ever seen.