A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  An example of George’s straight-from-the-shoulder prose came in a 1967 cable he sent to me from a vitally important order-of-battle conference in Saigon. After describing his efforts to get the MACV, the U.S. military headquarters in South Vietnam, to agree to a higher estimate of Viet Cong strength in South Vietnam, Carver wrote: “So far, our mission frustratingly unproductive since MACV stone-walling obviously under orders … [my] inescapable conclusion [is] that [MACV] has been given instruction tantamount to direct order that VC total strength will not exceed 300,000 ceiling. Rationale seems to be that any higher figure would generate unacceptable level of criticism from the press. This order obviously makes it impossible for MACV to engage in serious or meaningful discussions of evidence.” Carver’s cable catches the intensity of the seminal debate over the strength—the order-of-battle (O/B) of the North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

  A significant element in the O/B problem in a guerrilla/paramilitary situation is the difficulty in deciding exactly who should be counted as members of the hostile force. The problem in South Vietnam was uniquely difficult. In conventional ground warfare O/B is clearly defined—squads, platoons, companies, battalions, and on upwards to army groups. In South Vietnam the enemy forces included relatively conventional regular army formations, guerrilla and paramilitary units of various shapes and sizes, headquarters echelons of assorted strengths, local militia units, self-defense outfits, supply and service troops, Communist Party cadres, individual terrorists, and agents in place. Aside from those fully occupied in the field, many of Ho Chi Minh’s activists had day jobs ranging from clerks at MACV headquarters and the U.S. embassy to peasants in the fields, shopkeepers, locally hired employees of the foreign press and TV staffs, bar girls, and even domestic help. Any number could play, and there was no absolute litmus against which to sort one from another. Internal security in South Vietnam was an insuperable problem, and despite our efforts, an effective counterintelligence program remained beyond our grasp.

  The discrepancy between the Agency’s O/B estimates of the enemy military and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam and the more optimistic figures prepared by the MACV intelligence staff was one of the most persistent of the various intelligence bones of contention between the Agency and the Department of Defense. It had existed from the early days of our military involvement in Vietnam, and by 1966 had developed into a mean and nasty conflict. The Agency estimate of the North Vietnamese regular army strength in South Vietnam was always consistent with MACV’s assessment. The rub came in estimating the number of Viet Cong and other irregular forces. MACV’s early estimate of 100,000 to 120,000 Viet Cong irregulars in South Vietnam stood in contrast to the Agency’s figure of 250,000 to 300,000 Viet Cong. The Pentagon and Agency estimates of the combined strength of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam’s regular troops in South Vietnam were equally out of synch. MACV’s estimate was a total of 250,000 ranging upwards to nearly 300,000; the Agency’s calculation was of about 500,000—with some of our analysts holding out for an even more substantial figure. At the work level in the Pentagon and at MACV, various analysts supported the Agency’s position. This notwithstanding, the MACV figures were accepted by the Pentagon, and the White House continued to use these estimates in public statements.

  One of the reasons MACV stuck to the low order of battle figures was the traditional emphasis the military placed on counting the enemy forces that were clearly identified as military units, and to disregard the part-time irregulars who only occasionally might be called upon to stand and fight. There was also a significant political problem. The MACV staff had long claimed that the enemy was suffering such significant losses in South Vietnam that by mid-1967 the casualties might be expected to exceed the replacement capability. In view of the continuing increase in U.S. personnel and armaments in South Vietnam, any admission that the Viet Cong were actually gaining strength would obviously have stirred a severe public reaction on the home front.

  The MACV estimates were heavily weighted by reports from South Vietnamese military sources. Because it was obviously in the interest of the South Vietnamese military to paint the best possible face on their efforts, the Agency put little trust in these reports. MACV also based its O/B estimates on information classified at a rather low level—observations made by U.S. troops in the field, aerial and ground reconnaissance, captured documents, and data from POW interrogations. Agency assessments balanced this material against data coming from more highly classified sources such as communications intercept. Although less than an art form, O/B estimates in a situation as complex as that in South Vietnam will always represent in part the opinions of specialists. And, in some instances, experts working from parallel data bases are likely to come up with different evaluations.

  In January 1967, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signaled his dissatisfaction with the conflicting estimates and convened a conference in which MACV, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and CIA were to rationalize their differences. Carver’s outspoken cable cited earlier gives an eloquent impression of the atmosphere that marked the early hours of the conference. In time, an agreement—expressed in words rather than digits—was reached. The important conclusion was that the overall opposition to the United States in South Vietnam was “on the order of a half-million.”* Although new criteria for estimating enemy strength were agreed upon, MACV found no reason to change its position, and continued to base its reports on its original optimistic estimates. In effect, the general commanding MACV had taken a “Command Decision” as to the facts bearing on the O/B problem, and his subordinates had no choice but to fall in line.

  In 1967, Sam Adams, a keen young CIA analyst with a genealogical lineage going back to the founding fathers, was one of the first to leap into this imbroglio. He began by establishing his own criteria for determining precisely those who should be counted as members of the opposing force. Adams then made an intensive analysis of a mass of reports—many of them from the notoriously unreliable POW interrogations—on the irregular forces in a single South Vietnamese district. From this, he developed a reasonably documented paper which to his satisfaction proved that the number of irregular combatants in that district was far larger than the figure that MACV had accepted. When this figure was pro-rated with other South Vietnamese districts it more than doubled the estimated enemy force. He then began a one-man campaign to have his work accepted as the official U.S. position on the enemy strength in South Vietnam. General Westmoreland and the military command in Saigon and the Pentagon were adamantly opposed to his position.

  In the course of his campaign, Adams argued his position—without achieving consensus—through every pertinent echelon of the Agency. In the process, the issue became so involved that I asked the Agency’s inspector general to conduct an investigation. His report was as thorough as it was complex. After studying it, I took the unusual step of appointing a special review board—wise men, all, each with different substantive experience—to review it. Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor, the deputy director of Central Intelligence; Lawrence Houston, the Agency general counsel; and John Bross, one of my closest advisors and a senior veteran of OSS and CIA, were as high level a committee as could be found within the Agency. Adams was also authorized to make his case with members of the White House staff.

  When Adams, who was never less than totally convinced of his own judgment, failed to persuade Admiral Taylor and the others, he demanded that I arrange for him to confront President Johnson. I had no qualms in vetoing Adams’s demand, and explained that since President Johnson was not an O/B expert, it would not be fair to subject him to any such briefing, no matter how artfully it had been developed.

  Adams continued his crusade until it seemed to become more of an ego trip and obsession than a carefully reasoned opinion. In 1984, when General Westmoreland and CBS were locked in a libel suit over a TV documentary film concerning the alleged suppression of O/B data, the impression was given that the O/B conflict ha
d somehow been hidden from Washington officialdom. At the time the O/B donnybrook was at fever pitch, I was convinced that every card-carrying member of the foreign affairs elements of the U.S. government in Washington and the concerned members of Congress were fully aware of the conflict. Aside from that, I had several times discussed the different estimates of the enemy strength in South Vietnam with President Johnson.

  The responsibility for estimating the strength of the forces it faces in the field is traditionally, and properly, the responsibility of the military. Even in static positions with opposing forces in uniform, O/B estimates are a far cry from laboratory science. In paramilitary/guerrilla situations, O/B estimates are of necessity often based on extrapolations from shaky evidence, a process not to be confused with a test-tube DNA analysis. It was never my intention to insist that the Agency estimates—prepared by civilian staffs in Washington—override those of the military who were face-to-face with the enemy in the field. From the beginning, however, the President was fully aware of the marked difference in the Agency and Pentagon estimates of the enemy strength. Had LBJ wished, he might have recited these differences from memory, but he obviously did not wish to emphasize them even in his intimate circle.

  I would, of course, have preferred to be able to give the President an exact agreed-upon figure on the strength of the enemy force. One slight consolation was my conviction that in the prevailing circumstances neither Ho Chi Minh nor General Giap, the North Vietnamese military commander, could have come up with a precise count.

  Considering the immense pressure under which he labored, it is much to President Johnson’s credit that never at any time did he request or suggest that I change or moderate any estimates or intelligence reports which did not support his administration’s public evaluation of the situation in Vietnam. This could not have been said about the members of his staff who frequently challenged our work with infuriating suggestions that we “get on the team”—that is, trim our reporting to fit policy.

  As director of Central Intelligence, it was my responsibility—as it had been my predecessors’—to report directly to the President. On a very few occasions, I handed reports of the greatest sensitivity directly to President Johnson, leaving him the option of informing the secretaries of state and defense, Congress, and any others as he saw fit. As a rule, I would direct reports of somewhat less sensitivity directly to the President and the secretaries of state and defense.

  Throughout 1967 various military and civilian members of the Johnson administration appeared confident that American operations were reducing North Vietnamese forces to the point they would be able to wage only a limited war of attrition. Hal Ford, a senior member of the Agency’s intelligence staff who drafted many of the Vietnam estimates, has noted some of these statements.*

  In March 1967, Robert W. Komer, a special assistant to President Johnson on Vietnam, stated that aside from possible slipups, “major military operations might gradually fade as the enemy … put his emphasis on a protracted guerrilla level war.” In November 1967, General William Westmoreland told the National Press Club: “Infiltration will slow; the Communist infrastructure will be cut up and near collapse; the Vietnamese Government will prove its stability, and the Vietnamese army will show that it can handle the Vietcong: United States units can begin to phase down.” Walt Rostow, the national security advisor, urged Bill Colby in January 1968 to develop new analyses based on “totally different key facts, e.g.… that the gentlemen in Hanoi see the equation … as tending to indicate that one year from now, they will be in a considerably worse bargaining position than they are today: so that settlement now might be to their advantage.”

  A dispatch from the Saigon station in December 1967 noted that captured enemy documents called for “all out, coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam utilizing both military and political means to achieve ‘ultimate victory’ in the near future” and suggested that this attack might fall during the upcoming Tet holiday. This accurate report did not stand out from other data—based on captured documents, prisoner interrogation, and troop movements—that had accumulated during the preceding weeks that indicated preparations for a major attack. Although the beleaguered Marine base at Khe Sanh, near the border with Laos, was considered to be a primary target, MACV issued a “maximum alert” for all its forces in South Vietnam some hours before the attack was unleashed.

  On January 30, 1968, a bold North Vietnamese offensive broke out with simultaneous attacks on installations in Saigon, Hue, and most of the provincial capitals and major towns throughout South Vietnam. The strength of the attack—by some 80,000 troops and irregulars—surprised MACV, and to a considerable degree validated the Agency’s view of the size and strength of the North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

  *In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 293.

  *Thomas Ahern, personal letter to me.

  *Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962–1968 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998).

  *McCone, Memorandum for Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara, Saigon Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and McGeorge Bundy.

  *Russell Jack Smith, The Unknown CIA (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989), p. 194. Smith was the CIA deputy director for intelligence throughout this period.

  *Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, pp. 106, 107, 108.

  Chapter 32

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  TURBULENT TIMES

  The early January 1968 election of Alexander Dubcek as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was good news, and strong evidence of the probable liberalization of Czechoslovakia. The first bad news of that tumultuous year came on January 23, when the North Koreans attacked the U.S.S. Pueblo, a naval communications intercept ship operating in international waters but close to the North Korean coast. After a brief firefight and four casualties—the ship was lightly armed and not equipped to defend itself—the Pueblo was boarded and taken into a North Korean port. The National Security Agency had cautioned the Joint Chiefs that the North Koreans had recently taken other belligerent actions in international waters, but the warning was ignored. Despite President Johnson’s strenuous maneuvering to free them, it was some eleven months before the surviving crew and officers were released.

  The next bad news came seven days later, at two-forty-five on the morning of January 30, the first day of the Tet lunar year holiday season, when Viet Cong commandos blasted their way onto the American embassy grounds in Saigon. This raid kicked off the North Vietnamese (NVN) campaign that became known as the Tet offensive. It was a bold series of well-orchestrated attacks by more than 80,000 fighters in five major cities, a hundred district and provincial capitals, and some fifty villages across South Vietnam. In the vicious battling that ensued, an estimated 58,000 NVN fighters died, and literally countless civilians perished. Hundreds were murdered as suspected sympathizers with either the northern forces or the government of South Vietnam as cities and hamlets were occupied and retaken by the contesting forces. The bulk of the NVN casualties were irregular forces, Viet Cong and others, with a lesser number of regular NVN troops. Eleven hundred Americans fell before the Tet offensive was beaten down.

  Ho Chi Minh’s best forces in South Vietnam suffered losses in numbers that would take more than two years to replenish. The quality and spirit of the replacements were never to match those of the cadres who died in the failed attacks. But what Hanoi lost on the battlefield it more than gained in a political victory. No matter how hard President Johnson had tried to convince the public that we were winning in Vietnam, it was now clear that he could no longer count on maintaining public confidence in an eventual victory.

  The request of General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces there, for more than 200,000 new troops to be added to the half million already serving in Vietnam provoked another CIA assessment of the enemy’s “will to persist.” No evidence could be found to sugg
est that North Vietnam would fail to match our forces in any likely escalation.

  The news of General Westmoreland’s request for the additional troops leaked to the press in early March, with the predictable public reaction. At a Tuesday luncheon, Clark Clifford, a Washington lawyer, former Truman aide, and longtime Democratic advisor, who had replaced Bob McNamara as secretary of defense, recommended that LBJ convene the “Wise Men” for an intensive post-Tet briefing. These men were an informal group of a dozen or so—among them, Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, General Maxwell Taylor—to whom LBJ occasionally turned for counsel. I arranged for George Carver to brief the group for the Agency. Major General William DePuy presented the Pentagon briefing, and Philip Habib spoke for the State Department.

  Carver argued that although the Tet offensive had weakened the NVN forces in South Vietnam, the fighting clearly showed that the enemy was much stronger than had been estimated, and gave no indication of seeking peace. The following day, Dean Acheson, a hawk if ever there was one in that group, advised the President that, with two exceptions, the Wise Men’s consensus was that Vietnam was a bottomless problem, and that it was time to begin to disengage. As he stepped out of the Cabinet Room, LBJ allegedly—and very plausibly—is said to have remarked, “Those establishment bastards have bailed out.”*