War of Numbers (34 page)

Of the agency’s higher reaches I was scarcely in a position to judge from my post at the bottom of the well. But I knew that Messrs. Helms, Carver, Proctor, Walsh, and Lehman had all involved themselves, one way or another, in the CIA’s acceptance of Westmoreland’s suspect numbers before Tet. So for them to diddle once again with an estimate—this one on Cambodia—would not be out of character. I have no proof, however, and in any case am unpersuaded that they were villains in the grand manner. I doubt, for example, that any one of them
snarled, “OK, Tate, go falsify those books.” Rather, there must have been a series of nervous consultations in which numbers popped up and down like soybean futures, broad hints passed, and finally, guilt sloughed downwards.

So the question of accountability seems to me unresolved. Perhaps the trouble is that the answer is too diffuse, and that the best explanation I’ve heard of the problem came from one of the agency’s burnt-out elders on Indo-China.

His name was Edward Haskins, and he had a grey crew cut, perhaps left over from World War II when he was with the U.S. mission in the hills of China with Mao. In the first half of the sixties he had run one of the CIA’s research groups that had repeatedly warned of our deepening Vietnam commitment. In 1966, he had despaired of being listened to, stopped working on Indo-China, and gone on to another assignment.

I forget when it was that he made his remarks about the problem of responsibility. As I recall, it was during a conversation in which he was recounting examples he’d seen in the last decade or so of official humbug. He mentioned the faked progress reports on Diem’s strategic hamlets, the whoppers the Air Force told when it first started bombing the Trail, and the habit that senior editors had of changing modifiers and dropping paragraphs to water down predictions. But what struck him most, he said, was not that there were scoundrels topside (this he assumed) but that it took so many people to practice the deceits. Because like all else in the U.S. government, tampering with evidence is a cumbersome thing to do. The generals have to pass the word to the colonels, the colonels to the majors and lieutenants, the lieutenants to the corporals. Then the supervisors must sort it all out, and the analysts and statisticians somehow glue together the wildly misshapen parts. Finally, the secretaries type it up, and the clerks store it away in the archives. And there it stays until months or years later (always too late to do any good) when some misfit complains aloud.

At this I joined in and the conversation spun toward its logical end. It seemed to us—I paraphrase—that the whole country, not just the government, had laid aside its normal pursuits and danced off to disport
itself in a puddle of flummery, that we had become a nation of pettifoggers, of smalltime tricksters, a padded Lilliput whose citizens had simultaneously forgotten how to tell the truth. That the itch to equivocate had become as widespread and as irresistible as the temptation to fudge on taxes—and so on and so forth.

At last it must have seemed to Mr. Haskins that the talk had crossed the line from the pompous to the goody-goody, because he leaned back in his chair and burst out laughing. “Maybe,” he said, smiling broadly as if the problem was certain to evaporate, “maybe they’ve put something in the water.”

By mid-January 1973 I had reached the end of the road. I happened to read a newspaper account of Daniel Ellsberg’s trial in Los Angeles, and I noticed that the government was alleging that Ellsberg had injured the national security by releasing estimates of the enemy force in Vietnam. I looked, and damned if they weren’t from the same order of battle that the military had doctored back in 1967. In late February I went to Los Angeles to testify for the defense. Naturally, it was oveijoyed to see me. When its lawyers heard my story, however, they decided to send for Colonel Hawkins. I knew this was more than the colonel had bargained for when he had agreed to an investigation. I tried vainly to dissuade them.

When Hawkins arrived in California a short while later, he looked at me as if I had betrayed him. “Stennis,” he said, “not Ellsberg.” I shared the colonel’s distaste for Ellsberg. (The first I had heard of the defendant was from George Allen who had recalled Ellsberg’s emotional pleas in Saigon in 1965 to send more troops to Vietnam. “Every year a new hobbyhorse,” said George.) I felt my position was untenable. In volunteering for Ellsberg, I was now jeopardizing the pension of a person who had gone out on a limb for me.

The matter came to a head as I was preparing to mount the witness stand. The colonel came up to me and said: “Sam, this is the end of our friendship.”

I pleaded: “Please, Colonel, not that.”

He hesitated for perhaps ten seconds and said: “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing. Go on up there and give ’em hell.” We shook hands. The rest of the trial was an anticlimax.

When I returned to Washington in March, the CIA once again threatened to fire me. I complained, and, as usual, the agency backed down. After a decent interval, I quit. The date was 17 May 1973. It was the first day of Senator Sam Ervin’s hearings on Watergate.

^*
Broadcasting by radio from Hanoi on 9 April 1973, Prince Sihanouk stated that the number of soldiers in the Khmer rebel army’s “offensive” units, presumably meaning those in the main and local forces, had “now reached 120,000 men.” On receiving word of the broadcast, the CIA announced in its daily bulletin on Indo-China that Sihanouk’s claim was clearly exaggerated since the U.S. official estimate then stood at 40,000.

This estimate of the rebel’s strength clearly sprung from the mold set on 22 June 1971. It excluded guerrillas and service troops, who numbered in the many additional tens of thousands, and failed to account for legions of the main and local forces it purported to include. A study from the field put the number of such combatants as high as 90,000, not all that far from Sihanouk’s claim. But the study (which also omitted guerrillas and logisticians) remained unofficial. The true size of Khmer forces could have exceeded 200,000 by a considerable margin.

APPENDIX

Publisher’s note: After several years of research into the military’s side of the OB controversy Adams wrote an outline of what he believed had happened. The text which follows—“A Number to Live With”—was apparently written about 1980 or 1981. It is unsupported by footnotes or other source references, but the factual claims made in it were the substance of the CBS-Westmoreland trial and are all discussed repeatedly and are abundantly supported in the trial transcript. All are discussed, as well, in one of the books about the trial,
Vietnam on Trial: Westmoreland vs. CBS
(Atheneum, 1987), a thorough and carefully written account by Bob Brewin and Sydney Shaw. With the exception of the four officials named in the first paragraph, Adams interviewed all those cited in the text of this appendix. Adams believed that the OB was falsified in Saigon for political reasons, since there was no way to change the OB without informing the press, and there was no way to double the Vietcong forces in the OB while continuing to claim the sort of success required to continue the war. But Adams felt it was unfair to lay the blame for this falsification solely on General Westmoreland, whom he grew to like in the course of the trial. In Adams’s view MACV as a whole, Westmoreland included, was coerced by officials in Washington to suppress anything that might be interpreted as bad news. Adams believed that these Washington officials understood what was at stake in the OB controversy and deliberately exerted the pressure which resulted in falsification of the numbers. What mattered to Adams was not identification of those responsible, but reaffirmation of the importance of the integrity of intelligence. The whole sordid web of deceit which followed MACV’s refusal to accept an increase in the OB was the result of trying to make the evidence support the conclusion. In Adams’s view, all might have been avoided—the controversy, the trial, conceivably even the military disaster of the Tet offensive—if only the CIA had insisted on telling, and officials had been willing to listen to, the truth.

A Number to Live With

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A DETAILED ACCOUNT of how General Westmoreland’s intelligence staff—with White House encouragement—falsified the Vietcong strength estimates before the communist Tet Offensive of January 1968. It is by far the most heavily researched portion of the book. My sources include forty military and twelve civilian intelligence officials, voluminous files of official reports, and other correspondence, such as letters home. I have yet to interview the four persons still living whom I believe chiefly responsible for the falsification: General Westmoreland himself, General Philip Davidson (Westmoreland’s J-2 after McChristian), Mr. Robert S. McNamara, and Mr. Walt W. Rostow. I plan to approach them before the book goes to press, in the hope that they will shed further light on what happened, including the extent of President Johnson’s involvement.

As already noted, MACV discovered its vast underestimate of Vietcong numbers in late 1966. Westmoreland’s then J-2, General Joseph A. McChristian, although embarrassed, admitted his error, and by early 1967 was pressing for a higher order of battle. At this point, the main resistance against one came from the Pentagon, including the office of the secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara. As McNamara explained to an aide in late January, he realized the official OB was all wrong, but that he was not yet prepared to tell Congress. He meant what he said. On 6 March 1967, he briefed a Congressional committee using the official numbers, the same ones he knew to be low.

McChristian’s response to the Pentagon’s foot-dragging was to adopt a second set of books. Kept informally by his OB chief, Colonel Gains B. Hawkins, the second set listed the lesser three of the OB’s four parts.
The total for its most important component—the VC’s main battle forces—remained public knowledge. To MACV strength analysts (mostly unaware that a controversy existed) the compromise was satisfactory. None of them felt much pressure to raise or lower their numbers for any reason other than evidence.

Incredibly, General Westmoreland during this period seems not to have grasped what the full public impact might be of the higher numbers. Furthermore he had neglected to add them all up. He received his first detailed briefing on the second set of books, with their big sums totaled, in May 1967. General McChristian and Colonel Hawkins conducted the briefing in Westmoreland’s private office. Using a flipchart, they reviewed the OB’s four components one by one, and when they reached the bottom line on the flipchart’s last page, Westmoreland—according to my source—“almost fell off his chair.” “What will I tell Congress?” he gasped. “What will I tell the press?” On recovering, some minutes later, he turned to McChristian and said: “General, I want you to take another look at those numbers.”

McChristian took this as a suggestion to tamper with the second set of books. This he refused to do. He was sent home on 1 June 1967, protesting vigorously. At least some of his chagrin arose from the fact that his replacement was his archrival in the Army, an old West Point classmate, General Philip Davidson.

Davidson was more amenable than McChristian to manipulating the unofficial books. Among his first acts on 1 June was to lobby with the agency’s DDI representative in Saigon to drop from the OB one of its main subcomponents, the so-called self-defense militia (or tu ve). Davidson’s suggestion flew back and forth between Saigon and Washington for over a month. It came up at a meeting between Westmoreland and McNamara in Vietnam on 9 July, and again when the general and the secretary saw President Johnson at the White House on the thirteenth. Exactly what transpired at these meetings I have yet to find out, but what happened thereafter is clear.

MACV strength analysts began to suspect that someone was doctoring the order of battle. Among the first to harbor this suspicion was
Lieutenant Joseph Gorman, chief analyst for the VC main battle forces in IV Corps, which comprised South Vietnam’s southernmost and most populous quarter. One of his jobs was to warn J-2 headquarters each time he discovered a new VC unit, so that J-2 could add it to the OB. During this period, however, he found the headquarters increasingly reluctant to enter new units on the lists. At first he thought that J-2 had tightened its “acceptance criteria,” but as the summer wore on its reasons for disallowing new units became more and more frivolous. One VC battalion was turned down by J-2 because Gorman’s request form had a typographical error; another because the form’s cover sheet was not centered; a third because the sheet lacked the proper red-pencil markings. A second analyst, Lieutenant Richard McArthur—assigned in June to keep track of VC guerrillas countrywide—wrote his parents on 26 July that he had found that the guerrilla number for II Corps was “completely false,” and that J-2 was “feeding people nonsense figures with no documentary evidence.” He added, “I can’t believe half the things I’m digging up.”

Meanwhile, pressure continued to build on the order of battle. At the Board of National Estimates conference on Fourteen Three—convened in Langley in June—the CIA was still insisting on higher numbers. By August, its sessions had reached an impasse, and the principals had agreed to meet at an OB conference at Westmoreland’s headquarters in early September—with CIA, DIA, and MACV attending. The purpose of the conference was to come to an agreement over VC strength.

MACV’s preparations for the conference were both above board and below it. In one of the war’s most unusual messages, dated 20 August, MACV deputy General Creighton Abrams cabled Washington, with Westmoreland’s approval, the old request to drop the self-defense militia from the OB. What made the cable so extraordinary was the frank reason he gave for wanting to do so. To leave the militia on the lists, he explained, would contradict the “image of success” MACV had been lately building, and would provoke the press into drawing “an erroneous and gloomy conclusion” over the progress of the war. The message was widely distributed in official Washington.