War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  “Hostages!” said Dana. “This has gotten serious.”

  Others thought so too. For the rest of the month and into November, tense meetings convened, both at the director’s office and at State, to discuss what to do. Despite my low rank, I went to several of these, having acquired the reputation—eagerly spread by the front office—as Washington’s leading authority on the Congolese rebels.

  The last meeting I attended took place just outside the director’s inner office. John McCone, Richard Helms, Ray Cline and I hunched in a tight circle in cushioned swivel chairs, listening to Helms describe what the DDP Special Operations Division had in mind to save the five men of the consulate. There were plans for parachute drops, helicopter raids, even something involving speedboats (not as odd as it sounds, because Stanleyville is on the Congo River, which flows past Leopoldville, over a thousand miles downstream, before emptying into the Atlantic.) When Helms had finished his descriptions, McCone asked him what he thought the chances were of success.

  “Lousy,” Helms said, “because we really don’t know where those men are.” Several reports put them at the Sabena Airways guesthouse on the edge of the city airport’s main runway, “but the information is weeks old at best, and I wouldn’t put money on it in the first place. What if we piled into that guesthouse and no one was home. Stand around with egg on our face?”

  “What do you advise?” McCone asked.

  “Wait,” Helms said. “If we play gangbusters, we might get not only our own people killed, but everyone else in the bargain.” More to the point, Belgium and the Pentagon had worked up a joint plan to save all the hostages at once. It called for dropping a Belgian parachute battalion on the airfield while a Congo army column, led by Hoare’s mercenaries, pushed up from the south.

  “Agreed,” said McCone, ending the meeting. I went back down to the sixth floor.

  The Congo in-box was even fuller than usual. I read through the paper quickly, taking notes and cross-referencing. Towards the bottom was a message from an A-1 source saying that the KGB bagman, Antoine Mandungu, had just shown up at the Sudanese frontier. I called to Dana, “The Russians are coming!”

  The Sudan borders the Congo’s northeast, which the rebels held, and a spate of recent reports claimed that the Russians were about to run guns from that direction. Dana and I debated how seriously to take them. Mandungu was the clincher. I wrote a quick piece saying that Soviet arms were about to arrive via the Sudan.

  It was in the nick of time. A day or so later, an urgent cable came in from Egypt reporting that five Russian-made AN-12 transport planes—their Soviet markings painted over with those of Algeria—had just taken off from Cairo for Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan. A second message, sourced to an agent at the Khartoum airport, said that the planes’ wheels bulged out as if they were heavily loaded. A third one, from an intercept station in Ethiopia, placed the AN-12s in Juba, a Sudanese town only a hundred miles from the Congo frontier. A final cable, whose source was a contact in Juba, said the planes had dumped cargo of heavy boxes onto trucks, and that the trucks, covered with tarpaulins, had headed for Aba, a village on the Congo side of the border. I had no doubt that those boxes contained guns. But if they were meant to save Stanleyville, they were too late.

  The Belgian paratroopers jumped into the city at 6:30 in the morning (Stanleyville time) of 24 November. The mercenaries arrived from the south a few hours later.6 I spent the night at the Watch, the seventh-floor office where the cables come in. Speed was essential. The main question was the fate of the hostages.

  In fact it wasn’t until well after the Sitrep’s deadline that I found the answer. It seems that in the confusion of the landing the Simbas had herded most hostages into a city street some two miles away. When the paratroopers finally arrived, the rebels opened fire. In the ensuing melee, hostages dropped to the ground, ducked into doorways, and jumped over walls. Eighty were killed or wounded. But over a thousand were unhurt. Among the survivors were the five American staffers, including the four from the DDP.

  Shortly I discovered why they made it. It was dumb luck. The Simbas had thrown them in with the other hostages well before the parachute drop. On hearing this news, I asked myself what might have happened if Helms hadn’t quashed the plans to rescue the Americans separately. I could think of only one answer: as bad as it was, the massacre probably would have been far worse except for Helms’s caution and good sense.

  The Stanleyville drop marked the high tide of the revolt. Naturally there was a storm of protest, but it lost steam when the first ghastly reports arrived from the interior that the Simbas had killed far more blacks than whites. The black victims ran to the many tens of thousands, mostly killed by torture. Congolese popular opinion began swinging back to the government. Tshombe was cheered wildly wherever he went. By late December, the Simbas’ main asset was the Soviet gun-running operation through the Sudan.

  We had those AN-12s pegged. I had cards on each airplane, with separate times of arrival and departure, cargoes, even the names of the Russian pilots. In a way I needn’t have bothered. Most guns captured from the rebels were too rusty to shoot. The Simbas had neglected to oil them.

  By March 1965 the rebellion had almost sputtered to a halt, and the Congo Sitrep had changed from a daily to a weekly. With tribal support for the Simbas drying up, the mercenaries captured Aba, forcing the Russians to stop their AN-12s, and the only part of the Congo left in rebel hands—except Kwilu, where government troops skirmished with Pierre Mulele over the remaining chickens—was the so-called Fizi Pocket. Fizi lay in the mountains off Lake Tanganyika, its dominant tribe the Bahembi, reputed to be fierce and loathed by its neighbors. Therefore it seemed to me that the Pocket was just what it said, a pocket, and I began to lobby with Dana to get the Sitrep killed altogether.

  But no, the revolt had one last spasm. A group of Cubans, these from Havana, crossed Lake Tanganyika in Russian-made motorboats, landed in the Congo near Fizi, and began handing out rifles. The group’s leader was none other than Che Guevera. Dana and I groaned. Foreign advisors were the one thing the Simbas had so far lacked. We couldn’t discount the possibility that Che and his Havanans might re-kindle the fire of revolution under the Bahembi.

  It failed to ignite. Acting with unusual speed, Leopoldville sent the Congo air force to shoot up the new arrivals. Its Miami Cuban pilots were delighted at the chance to avenge the Bay of Pigs, and Che’s advisory effort rapidly became a grudge fight between the two sets of Cubans. The Havanans soon found the B-26’s frequencies, and shouted curses in Spanish at the pilots over their combat radios. Later (it was said), the Miamians got some American-made motorboats, and the angry Latins chased each other at high speeds around Lake Tanganyika.

  “Deplorable,” said the Congo desk chief, when asked about this turn of events. “This was once a perfectly respectable Cold War confrontation. Now it’s the goddamn West Side Story.” Lost in the commotion were the Bahembi, for whom Che had little but contempt.* In May the front office decided the crisis was over. It killed the Sitrep. For the first time in almost a year and a half, I had nothing to do.

  In fact all southern Africa was relatively quiet. Rebellions against the Portugese were popping along as usual in Angola and Mozambique, apartheid still ruled in South Africa, and the only country that showed any sign of life was Rhodesia. There, the white prime minister, Ian Smith, was wrestling with the problem of what to do about British demands that he give the Africans majority rule. Dana had taken a new analyst to follow Rhodesia, however, and the newcomer—a black who had written a thesis on Ghana at Boston University—seemed to have settled in for the long haul. That’s just what it looked like too: a long haul. The consensus in the branch was that although the white-run regimes in southern Africa were headed for deep trouble, the crunch was several years off.

  The inactivity put me to thinking about my future. Should I stay on in the now-sleepy Africa Division, or look for a more exciting job somewhere else? My only certainty w
as that I wanted to stay on with the agency. I no longer simply liked intelligence; in the last eighteen months I had come to love it. Part of the attraction was the CIA itself, as perhaps the best research facility in the world.

  But mostly it was the people. Dana Ball was hardly unique. There were excellent men and women in every agency office, and best of all, the excellence ran clear to the top: First, the director, John McCone, awesome in his lust for obscure facts; then the DDI chief, Ray Cline, resolute in backing his analysts (if he felt they were right); and finally the head of the clandestine services, Richard Helms, calm and clear-thinking in a job demanding just that.

  It didn’t take me long to make up my mind. Despite my good run on the Congo, I couldn’t see waiting around for southern Africa to burn out its slow fuse. The long and the short of it was that I decided to sign up as a spy. At the first opportunity, I handed Dana an application to join the DDP.

  “So you want to be a spook?” said Dana. He said he’d be sorry to see me go, but that he understood, since at one time or another most DDI analysts caught the same bug. And he fired my chit up to the seventh floor.

  The reaction was immediate. One of the trio in charge of the Bulletin, Richard Lehman, called me to his office. I’d seen Lehman often during the rebellion and liked him a great deal. Short and wiry—“like one of those fast quarterbacks they used to have during the thirties,” someone had described him—he spoke with an air of quiet deliberation, rocking back and forth in his leather swivel chair as he did so, his hands in a position of prayer.

  “Sam,” he told me, “you’re going off half-cocked. The other side of the house is no better than ours. Besides, you have a bright future in the DDI. You grasp things quickly, write tolerably well, and most important, you’re a generalist.”

  “A what?”

  “A generalist,” he repeated. “Someone who can cover many subjects at once. What the DDI has most of is specialists. They’re a dime a dozen.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

  “Okay,” Lehman replied. “Take Molly. (Molly Kreimer was an analyst from the Southeast Asian Branch whom I’d seen off and on in the halls.) Molly’s a typical specialist. She’s been working on the Vietnamese so long she’s beginning to look like one. She’s a wonderful woman, but she has limited horizons. Whereas you …” And he explained how one day I might land in the front office.

  I heard him out. Then, with a tinge of embarrassment, I said that my biggest shortcoming on the Congo was that although I knew plenty about the Simbas, I didn’t know much about the country itself. “I’ve never even been there,” I explained. “So you want to travel,” said Lehman. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  A week or so later he summoned me back to his office. He had a deal. If I’d give up joining the DDP, I could transfer to the Southeast Asia Branch and become a roving analyst on Vietnam. It was a step up, he said, because Vietnam was far more important than the Congo, and instead of writing for the Vietnam Sitrep, I’d be assigned to special projects, the first being Vietcong morale.8 As soon as I exhausted the subject at CIA headquarters, they’d give me a ticket to Saigon. What did I think?

  Not bad, I had to admit. I said yes, and the next day left on vacation—my first in a year and a half—to visit my father in the Adirondacks. He had retired not long before from his job as a broker on the New York Stock Exchange, and was spending the summer in a cabin on a lake in the woods.

  *It was always hard to attract staffers to the city. A State Department post report of 14 January 1963 listed as one of Stanleyville’s few advantages the fact that “Tarantulas and poisonous snakes are infrequently encountered in the city itself.” The report omitted the suburbs, however, and headed its “suggested reading list” with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

  *When Hoare’s mercenaries eventually invaded the Pocket from Lake Tanganyika, the Bahembi put up a stiff fight. Che had disappeared. He later told a colleague that his experience in Africa was “negative,” because the human element failed. “There is no will to fight, the leaders are corrupt; in a word, there is nothing to do.”7

  2 THE SITREP

  I GOT BACK FROM VACATION the first week of August, 1965, said hello to everyone in Southern Africa, and walked around the partition to Southeast Asia. As I entered the Southeast Asian cubicle—just like the one I’d left except for the maps—Ed Hauck, the branch chief, sprang to his feet.

  “Glad you finally showed up,” he said, pumping my hand and smiling broadly. In his early forties, Hauck was somewhat taller than average, with a graying crew cut squared at the top, a deep tan, an athletic build, and exceptionally white teeth.

  We sat down at his desk. Molly Kreimer—whom Mr. Lehman had said was a woman “of limited horizons”—was at the next desk over, squinting at her typewriter.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are, not having to plug the damn Sitrep,” Hauck said, gesturing at that morning’s edition of the Vietnam Situation Report, still in his in-box. “We’ve been saddled with that son of a bitch since the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s a ravenous monster, and we feed it to keep it at bay.”

  The Sitrep’s insatiable appetite, Hauck went on, was the main reason Dick Lehman had sent me over from Africa. Hauck already had a half dozen of his own analysts throwing fodder at it, and a half dozen more were doing likewise down on the fifth floor in the China-Asian Satellites Division. For some ancient bureaucratic reason, no doubt clear at the time, China-Asian Satellites covered North Vietnam, while Southeast Asia covered South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Despite its mob of authors, however, the Sitrep had a flaw. Everybody was so busy writing about the daily coup plots, air raids and ambushes that some of the war’s larger issues had disappeared down the Sitrep’s crack.

  “This is where you come in,” Hauck said. “You’re supposed to man the crack. Keep the larger issues from sliding through. Most particularly, the Vietcong from sliding through. Now this may surprise you, since we’ve managed to get ourselves in a war with them, but we don’t have anyone working full-time on the VC. As far as I know, you’ll be the first person in Washington to give the Vietcong his undivided attention. And as Lehman mentioned, your initial problem is to guess their morale.”

  “But before you start plumbing the Vietcong mind,” Hauck said, “you ought to read up on Vietnam. I don’t want to sound condescending, but the Vietnamese are an old people, and they’ve already beat up on the Chinese, the Chams, and the French. You especially ought to read what they did to the French. That was only ten, eleven years ago. Sometimes I think the cables I read now are from that last war, only somebody’s changed the dates.”

  “Me, too,” Molly called from her desk. She was now pounding furiously at her typewriter.

  “Anyway, don’t break your neck getting a morale paper out,” Hauck said, “everyone knows it’s a tough subject, and besides, the VC aren’t about to fold in the near future. Not even by Christmastime, when McNamara prefers they surrender.” Did I have any questions, he asked.

  I had one. “Mr. Hauck, how long do you think the war’s going to last? I mean, how long before we clean it up?”

  Hauck’s cheerful expression turned sour. He paused, then, speaking slowly, as if it were a painful and much-gone-over subject, gave this answer:

  “The Vietnam war’s going to last a long time. In fact, the war’s going to last so long we’re going to get sick of it. We’re an impatient people, we Americans, and you wait and see what happens when our casualties go up, and stay up, for years and years. We’ll have riots in the streets, like France had in the fifties. No, we’re not going to ‘clean it up.’ The Vietnamese communists will. Eventually, when we tire of the war, we’ll come home. Then they’ll take Saigon. I give them ten years to do it, maybe twenty.”

  “You’re kidding,” I gasped.

  “Wish I was,” he said, smiling once again.1

  At that I walked, maybe staggered is a better word, to my new desk at the other side of the cubicle. Good God, I tho
ught. I’m only ten minutes into my first war, and already the boss says we’re going to lose it. I was so surprised that I didn’t think to ask why. Instead I went back to Southern Africa to see Dana Ball.

  “Hey Dana,” I asked in a low voice, “what do you know about Ed Hauck? Is he okay?”

  “Who? Ed?” Dana replied. “Sure. One of the best men in the business.”

  Still shaken, I returned to Southeast Asia. My first reading on Vietnam was from the 1965 World Almanac:2

  Vietnam

  Total area (est. 1958): 127,000 sq. mi.

  Population (est. 1963): 31,517,00.

  Vietnam is split between two hostile governments, the Republic of Vietnam, which controls the southern half, and the Communist regime of North Vietnam.

  The Almanac also pointed out that Vietnam’s chief products included sweet potatoes, sugarcane and shellac. Huh. It didn’t look like much of a country to me.

  I read on. First I looked at the CIA’s country briefing book and the Pentagon’s Southeast Asian Factbook. These were fairly short, about such subjects as North Vietnam’s gross national product and the size of the Vietcong army. Then I went through the much longer CIA-produced “National Intelligence Surveys” about Indo-China. These were large paperbound affairs, some two dozen in all, classified “secret,” with titles like “Vietnam’s Urban Areas,” “The Structure of the North Vietnamese Government,” and “Cambodia’s Inland Waterway.” Finally I read some old Sitreps.

  This first go-around made one thing clear about the Vietcong. They were in an entirely different ballpark from the Simbas. But what struck me most was the size of North Vietnam’s GNP, only $1.6 billion a year. I looked up America’s: $650 billion. That was 406 times bigger. Shaking my head at the difference (and wondering at Ed Hauck’s gloom in the face of it), I asked his okay to go to the CIA library for the next week or so to do some background reading.