War of Numbers (30 page)

He was referring to two lectures I’d just finished. One concerned the Vietcong Security Service, whose B-3 component also ran spies in the Saigon government. The other was about the VC Military Proselyting Section, which, as Bob Klein had pointed out, had fifth columnists, or noi tuyens, in the South Vietnamese army.

Klein got back from South Carolina on Monday, 26 May 1969. “Maybe we’ve gone at the proselyters from the wrong direction,” I told him. “Perhaps by trying to see how many desertions they cause without first finding out how big their organization is, we’ve put the cart before the horse.” We discussed this thesis off and on for almost a week before deciding that Klein’s next job should be to guess the size of the VC’s fifth column. “Coming up with a number is pointless,” I said. “Probably there’s not that much evidence on noi tuyens, so the best we can hope for is to say that the ‘network is extensive,’ or ‘it’s little,’ something of that nature.” We decided the best way to go about it was the one we’d used on the order of battle; start with the latest captured document, and work backwards. MACV’s document center had just published bulletin number 22,000.

I’d have helped Klein, but was too busy on my own. With the announcement of the Vietnamization Program on 14 May, the administration was pumping out questions on how well the South Vietnamese army could be expected to do when it took over the war. “Have a look at this one,” Ron Smith had told me. It was the draft for the latest Fourteen Three, the annual estimate to judge the “capabilities of the
Vietnamese communists for fighting in South Vietnam.” I knew that phrase well, having spent five months on it while arguing the order of battle in Fourteen Three, ’Sixty-Seven.

Fourteen Three, ’Sixty-Nine was somewhat better. For example, the OB paragraphs were satisfactory, since the VC Branch had provided all the numbers. Nonetheless, the draft seemed out of balance. Of its forty-odd pages, twenty-three were about Vietcong supply problems. I’d never thought supplies were very important, and there was little mention of the VC’s political prowess, and none at all on such subjects as communist espionage. By now I thought politics and spying were closely related. Ron had already heard the story of the old woman and the F-105 when I said to him: “This is supposed to be a ‘political war,’ and persuading that old lady to walk on the runway was a political act. It seems to me that the draft spends too much time counting boxes.” For good measure, I repeated my old bias on logistics. When the CIA had doubled the order of battle, it had neglected to adjust upwards its estimate of VC supplies. Therefore, the draft’s calculations on enemy logistics were based on the needs of a smaller army than actually existed. I didn’t want to get into a fight over this, because I didn’t think it mattered.

“If you want to write up something on VC spies and politicians,” Ron Smith said, “be my guest, but stay away from logistics. That’s Paul Walsh’s territory, and he doesn’t like other people intruding.” As already mentioned, Walsh’s reputation had come from his studies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s ability to successfully withstand our bombing.

I started up on Fourteen Three about the same time that Klein launched into the captured documents. He couldn’t have been at it for more than a few minutes when he interrupted me with the first reference to a VC fifth columnist. “Wow!” he exclaimed, as he waved the document in front of me. The fifth columnist was a South Vietnamese army lieutenant who ran a DIOCC. “DIOCC” stood for District Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Center, the basic engine at district level for the CIA-designed Phoenix Program. Phoenix’s purpose was to root out the VC political infrastructure person by person. It
looked as though in this district the program was rooting out the wrong people. Klein and I speculated what the lieutenant could do to sabotage Phoenix:

“He could put the government supporters in jail as ‘VC agents.’ ”

“And let loose the real ones.”

“He could shuffle the files.”

“Throw them away.”

“Switch names.”

“Do in the district chief.”

And so on. It was a fine start to his project.

Thus encouraged, Klein went off to find more examples. I called the counterintelligence staff’s Bill Johnson, who said he’d alert the station about the DIOCC lieutenant. He added: “Meanwhile, you ought to know we just rolled up a net of Cuc Ngien Cuu agents in Saigon. The report’ll be coming out shortly. I’ll see that you get a copy.” By rolled up, he meant arrested.
Cuc Ngien Cuu
is Vietnamese for “Central Research Directorate,” the communists’ name for their military intelligence headquarters in Hanoi. It was the same outfit that had recruited the old lady on the runway, and incidentally, was the Saigon Station’s main counterintelligence target since the start of the war.

Not long after this conversation, Doug Parry appeared unexpectedly from the University of Utah Law School in Salt Lake City. “The agency hired me on for my summer vacation,” he explained, making me glad that I’d talked him out of going to the Inspector General nine months before. (It was no surprise when I found out Parry was near the top of his law class.) Ron Smith didn’t know what to do with him over such a short period of time. I had a brainstorm: “How about putting him on the documentation problem? While Klein’s looking for fifth columnists, Parry can find out how hard or easy it is for them to get government ID cards.” I already suspected the answer—fairly easy—but thought it was a good idea to be able to prove it. Ron said OK, and Doug disappeared from sight to pursue the research. This was fine, because Parry liked working on his own, and on the basis of past performance I figured he’d do a good job.

Activity was intense over the next three weeks. I doubt an intelligence proposition has fallen into place as quickly as this one. Namely: the Vietcong espionage and subversive network was well-oiled, highly successful, and possessed of vast numbers of agents.

This proposition was scarcely a world-beater for anyone familiar with Vietnam, but it involved two major surprises. The first was the enormous amount of hard evidence available to support it. The second was that nobody paid much attention to the evidence except the Counterintelligence Staff. The CI Staff seemed to have known about it all along. In fact, Bill Johnson gave me my biggest single piece of information. It was the station report he’d promised in early June, the one about the Cuc Ngien Cuu roll-up in Saigon.

The report was a doozie. It said the South Vietnamese National Police had recently arrested
seventy
Cuc Ngien Cuu agents in the capital city. These included the police’s own chief dentist—who apparently extracted information as he pulled teeth—a deputy in South Vietnam’s lower house, and a South Vietnamese army lieutenant “who regularly provided sensitive documents of strategic value.” I crossed over to the DDP side of the building to ask Johnson who the lieutenant was.

“A liaison officer,” he said.

“Liaison between what and what?” I inquired.

“Between Abrams’s
^*
headquarters and the South Vietnamese Joint Chiefs. He carried paper mostly, such as plans for Allied operations, requests for B-52 raids, including the coordinates thereof, and so forth, Always in three copies—one for Abrams, one for the Joint Chiefs, and one for the Cuc Ngien Cuu.”

“Is that as bad as it sounds?” I asked.

“Let me put it this way,” Johnson replied. “If we had his equivalent in Hanoi, we’d have probably won the damn war three years ago.” This may have been counterintelligence hyperbole over the danger of spies, but the news was doleful; but not as doleful, however, as the report’s
conclusion. It said that the arrested agents were a drop in the Cue Ngien Cuu bucket.

Just then Doug Parry showed up with his initial report. He’d been down in the district to visit AID headquarters’ Public Safety Division, which handled the Washington end of South Vietnam’s identificationcard program. “You’d never think that a laminated piece of paper could be such a touchy subject,” Doug said, “but apparently it is. With my first question, the Public Safety chief looked like he wanted to dive under the table.” I asked Parry what he’d found out.

It was a lot. Until late 1968, Saigon had been running a program under which seven and a half million ID cards were issued. However, these cards were easy to fake (which I already suspected because of the VC forging cell document), and large numbers had been lost or stolen by the VC. During the Tet Offensive, for example, the communists had assigned teams of cadres, including self-defense militiamen, to go door-to-door in the cities to collect government ID cards. The old system was so fouled up that President Thieu had decided to start up a new one. Saigon began distributing the new cards in October 1968. By 1 May 1969, the number of new cards issued was 1.5 million.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but it looks like most people still have the old cards.”

“Right,” said Parry.

“OK, then, how do you get a new one?”

“By presenting the old card to the local police,” he replied, “or by showing them a birth certificate or proof of residency. Of course these are easy to forge too, and in any case, the requirement is normally waived for people who have lost them. I mean, there’s a war on, and if somebody’s house is burning down, one of the last things he thinks about is rescuing his identification papers. The police realize that.”

“Another question, how do you join the South Vietnamese army?”

“By presenting an ID card to the recruiting officer.”

“Very well, what’s to prevent a Vietcong cadre from going to a government police station, telling them he lost his ID card, getting a new
one, and then walking down the street to the post office to join the army?”

“Nothing.” said Doug.

“In other words, becoming a VC spy …”

“Is like rolling off a log,” he completed my sentence. I told Doug he was cooking with gas, and to please find out what the South Vietnamese government did to screen applicants for sensitive jobs, such as cryptographers, officer candidates, special branch policemen, and staffers in President Thieu’s office. Once again he disappeared.

Parry’s findings would have been important even in normal times, but at this moment they were downright explosive. The reason was Klein. While the above conversations were going on, he was flipping through MACV bulletins. He had discovered almost at once that his first fifth columnist, the DIOCC lieutenant, was anything but unusual. Mentions of VC agents appeared in all kinds of documents: after-action reports describing how fifth columnists had helped in Vietcong attacks; notices of awards for especially good agents; and records kept by military proselyting sections, which sometimes included rosters of spies—as usual, by cover name only. Among the latter were extensive records captured in the VC province of Ben Tre. Ben Tre was roughly the same as South Vietnam’s Kien Hoa Province, a notorious hotbed of communist activity in the Delta. In this short period of time, Klein’s count of military proselyting agents in South Vietnamese ranks had grown to four hundred.

“Four hundred!” I exclaimed in late June. “Before Tet the CIA had only a single spy in the VC.”

“This is only a third of the bulletins,” he said. “If noi tuyens keep showing up at this rate, we’ll have more than a thousand.”

We agreed that even a thousand was a small fraction of the total, or as Klein put it, “the tip of the iceberg.” Furthermore, what they were was even more impressive than their number. We must have gone over his list of VC agents a dozen times. It included eight South Vietnamese radiomen, including three sergeants and a corporal; a warrant officer
attached to Saigon’s naval headquarters; two civilians working in intelligence at an airfield; a sergeant serving in a quartermaster depot at Danang air base; a platoon leader of a government anti-guerrilla formation; a Vietnamese employee of the CIA; two soldiers of unidentified rank working for Saigon’s chief of ordnance; a second lieutenant who served as assistant chief of the spywar section of a Marine battalion (and who had recruited three other Marines in the battalion); and eleven South Vietnamese officers, aspirant through “captain,” stationed in a single district in Kien Hoa. This last group—which came out of a report from a district proselyting section to VC province headquarters—was hard to swallow. I tried it out on Bill Johnson.

“If they have as many agents as this report claims, they must be running the entire district,” he said. “Maybe that’s so and we don’t realize it, but there’s no way to tell without a full-scale investigation. If I were you, I’d be very careful with a report like this. Vietcong agent handlers are doubtless like ours—subject to wishful thinking, and apt to exaggerate their accomplishments. For example, this ‘captain’ here; maybe the proselyters asked him to sign up as a fifth columnist, and he agreed to do it just to keep them out of his hair. Or to take out insurance in case the VC win. Mind you, I’m not saying that this report is necessarily all wrong. Maybe it’s true, or, more likely, partly true. My advice is to proceed with caution.”

This was my own instinct, and I handed him a copy of Klein’s list. Then I wrote up a memo about it for Ron Smith. Reflecting Johnson’s advice, it said the agents “should not all be taken as active and committed penetrations. Some probably are fence sitters, some nonexistent (the VC are prone to pad what they don’t have to account for), and some may have had their sympathies misinterpreted by VC reporting officers. However, the documents indicated that some also were actively committed agents. Others, including a share of fence sitters, might become active under different conditions (e.g., U.S. troop withdrawal). In any case, Mr. Klein’s efforts seem to be highlighting a problem of considerable scope.”

“ ‘Considerable scope’ is putting it mildly,” Ron Smith said after reading the memo. “But unfortunately, I haven’t had much success in inserting your paragraphs about spies into Fourteen Three. There’s a big brouhaha going on upstairs over communist logistics. I haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise.” The meetings on Fourteen Three, ’Sixty-Nine were already in session. I wasn’t allowed to attend them, because—as Ron had told me—of “that business back in 1967.” He said he’d try to arrange a private briefing, however, so I could argue my case in front of James Graham. Mr. Graham was the estimate’s chairman, just as he’d been on the one before Tet.