War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  Fowler said: “Harrumph! DIA cannot agree to this estimate as currently written. What we object to is the numbers. We feel we should continue with the official order of battle.” And he read off the OB’s four components. As usual, the first one, the regulars, was somewhat higher than a month earlier but the other three—the service troops, the guerrilla-militia, and the political cadres—were the same as ever. When Fowler announced their total, now 296,000, Collins turned to Layton: “Ok, Bobby, it’s your turn. Do it succinctly and without vituperation.”

  Layton said: “The notion that we should use numbers just because they’re ‘official’ simply won’t wash. I would like to remind everybody, in case they need reminding, that what we’re here for is to decide which numbers are official—the ones in MACV’s order of battle, which in three of four cases are several years old, or those in the draft, which are based on evidence, some good, some not so good. The nub of the question is evidence.” And Layton ticked off the draft’s four components, the same ones as Fowler’s, but three of them much larger. Layton’s total came to well over 500,000. Collins scribbled on a pad of paper, and said:

  “If my math’s correct, you gentlemen are close to a quarter of million apart. That’s a heap of folks. George, the ball’s in your court. What’s wrong with Bobby’s numbers?”

  The only thing right with Layton’s numbers, Fowler declared, was the regulars. There the estimate agreed with the OB. However, the draft’s service-troop figure is a “wild guess”; its guerrilla-militia number came from a speech by Nguyen Chi Thanh which was “pure propaganda”; and the political cadres were based on “extrapolations from documents.” Layton answered Fowler point by point, always admitting where the evidence was weak, but also asking where DIA’s component had come from. The response was unvaried: “The OB, harrumph, it’s official.” An hour and a half later, the onlookers were glassy-eyed, and General Collins interrupted:

  “That’s enough, George, you’ve made your point, but Bobby’s right. We can’t insert numbers in the estimate just because they’re official.” Collins paused. “Now gentlemen, it seems to me that we have two alternatives. Bearing in mind that counting enemy soldiers is normally a military prerogative, our first alternative is to put the OB numbers in the estimate, but with caveats that they’re way too low, and MACV’s trying to come up with something better. The second is to use our own numbers, or rather Bobby’s—a ‘best estimate,’ so to speak. I want a round-robin on the choices. OK, what’ll it be? The best estimate or the order of battle? George, I’ll begin with you. I know what you’re going to say, but say it anyway.”

  Fowler obliged: “The OB.”

  “Navy?” Collins asked.

  “Pass. At last report the VC were still ashore. When they put to sea, the Navy’ll count ’em.”

  “Air Force?”

  “Also pass. Same line of reasoning as my colleague in blue.”

  “Army?”

  “Frankly, general, I’d as soon not get involved, but I guess I have to go with the OB.”

  “NSA? Where do the code-breakers stand?”

  “As you know, sir, the National Security Agency doesn’t take positions on how to interpret evidence.* We have observed, however, that the communications net serving the communist army has increased severalfold in the last three years. Perhaps this bears on the problem.”

  “You’re damn right it bears on the problem,” said Collins. “State Department, what about the diplomats?”

  “Best estimate.”

  Collins then polled a half-dozen CIA-ers, myself included, who all said: “Best estimate.”1

  The meeting broke for lunch, and I went down to the sixth floor to tell Carver about George Fowler’s astonishing performance.

  Carver laughed. “Don’t pay mind to that old curmudgeon. He’ll repeat any whopper the Pentagon gives him and do it with a straight face. He’s DIA’s permanent fixture at the board meetings, but fortunately, he’s predictable.2 It’s the unpredictable ones who make all the trouble. Now look, on VC strength, it’s time to bite the bullet. You go back up there and do the best you can.”

  Three more sessions of Fourteen Three occurred in late June. The numbers continued as the main issues, and I took over from Bobby Layton most of the job of defending the agency’s position. There was some minor slippage in a couple of categories, but otherwise the CIA held firm. Serenely puffing on Chesterfields, Fowler stuck with the official OB. After each meeting, I reported back to Carver to tell him what had happened. One day in early July, his desk was empty. As was her custom, his secretary, Mary Ellen, wouldn’t let on where he’d gone. I found out on 10 July, however, when a “secret” cable arrived from Vietnam signed “Funaro,” which was Carver’s cover name.3 Evidently, Helms had sent him to Saigon to break what the message termed “the current Washington impasse” on VC strength. Accordingly, Funaro had met the day before with Gains Hawkins—still MACV’s Order of Battle chief—and General Philip Davidson, who not long before had succeeded General McChristian as Westmoreland’s head of intelligence.4

  Carver first relayed Colonel Hawkins’ assurances that—George Fowler notwithstanding—the MACV Order of Battle Section basically agreed with the CIA: about 100,000 was OK for the guerrillas, the colonel had said, although our guess of 75,000 service troops was perhaps “a little” too high. General Davidson fingered the real difficulty. “The chief problem,” Carver quoted Davidson as saying, “is the political and presentational one of coming out with a brand new set of figures showing a much larger force at a time when the press knows that MACV is seeking more troops.”

  No doubt the press was a problem, a big one, and Carver’s message suggested a solution. It was to break the order of battle into two parts: “military,” to include regulars, service troops, and guerrillas, totaling about 300,000 (or approximately the number in the old OB); and “nonmilitary,” to include self-defense militia and political cadres, coming to around 200,000. The total would be half a million, and then MACV could hold a press conference to explain the transaction. “Some elements in the press would always carp,” Carver said, “but the air would be cleared … and a valid baseline established for future … analysis.” Davidson said that it sounded like a good idea to him and that he’d try it out on General Westmoreland. I tried it out on George Allen.

  “Balls,” said George. “This business of fooling around with the OB for a few dumb reporters makes me sick. God knows what it’ll lead to. Maybe stowing the political cadres up on a nonmilitary shelf is legitimate, but not the militia, goddamnit. The militia are part of the VC army, and always have been. That’s the reason Bill Benedict and I put them in the OB in 1962, and that’s where they damn well belong.”

  “But George,” I said, “Carver’s only slicing the pie in a different way. It still adds up to half a million. What difference does it make so long as they show what we’re trying to demonstrate: that the war’s a lot bigger than we thought it was.”

  “Balls,” he repeated. I left him fuming.

  Frankly, the cable was fine by me: I was not necessarily pleased by its “solution,” which as far as I could see didn’t “solve” Westmoreland’s problem of how to explain the higher numbers to the press, but rather by a brief statement in its last paragraph. That said that the next session of Fourteen Three would have to wait until August, at which time Gains Hawkins would come to Langley to take over from George Fowler as champion of the military’s numbers. This meant the hanky-panky would stop; I shared the general opinion that Colonel Hawkins was scrupulously honest. But there was an even more pressing consideration. On my return from Saigon in May I had promised Bill Johnson of the counterintelligence staff that the study on the Vietcong police would be ready by the end of July. The delay in Fourteen Three would allow me to meet this deadline. A dividend to the postponement was the fact that the VC police were the political cadres, the OB category about which I knew least. I could bone up on them now.

  In fact the study was well underw
ay. A chapter on the COSVN Security Section, which Commander Siller and I had started at the Collation Branch, was already in final draft. A second chapter, concerning communist police operation in and around Saigon, had been farmed out to still another helper, Manny Roth, an eager young lieutenant whom Bill Johnson had wangled from the Army. Roth loved the work. “Binh Tanh!” he whooped at my desk one morning: “I got Binh Tanh’s!” He had discovered the VC cover designation of Binh Tanh Subregion, one of the six surrounding Saigon. It was “A23,” he said, and its police headquarters was “A536.” By mid-July he had turned up the cover designation of all six subregions, and for four of their six police headquarters. More important, he had begun to figure out which ones operated where. For example, Binh Tanh’s police ran secret agents into Saigon’s Second and Fourth precincts.

  I was also immersed in cover designations. Having determined through the VC interrogator in Soc Trang that the “83” subsection of their police apparatus was diep bao, (which the Vietnamese sergeant had translated as “espionage”) I went through my boxful of VC documents looking for reports marked “83.” The policy spy network fell rapidly into place. Subsection 83, it turned out, had three parts: A1, A2, and A3. The first consisted of agent-handlers—who made a special effort to recruit the Vietnamese interpreters working for the Americans. I wondered about that sergeant in Soc Trang. The second section made blacklists of victims targeted for various woes: assassinations (which the VC called “executions”); kidnappings (“arrests”); or other “disciplinary measures” which would surely take place, the documents claimed, when the communists “liberated the south.” The third part, A3, were the thugs who actually did the work. Hitmen from A3 wielded silencer pistols, hustled Saigon officials into waiting cars, and set off explosions in city streets. Once again I recalled the kaboom that had sent me under the bed on my first Saturday in Vietnam. If the bomber were a VC policeman, I thought, he would have belonged to the A3 component of the B3 subsection of a local subregion police headquarters. Which subregion, I didn’t know, because I was unsure which of Saigon’s precincts the bomb had gone off in. That was easy to find out. I could look at a map.

  When the completed draft landed on Bill Johnson’s desk on 28 July, he whistled, saying: “I’d love to see the VC damage assessment when they finally read this thing.” It was a high compliment. A damage assessment is what intelligence organizations write after they’ve been found out. Perhaps “found out” was a little strong. For although the study presented an intricate wiring diagram of the Communist police network from its headquarters at the Ministry of Public Security in Hanoi down to the smallest hamlet in the south, and described at length how the police went about their work, it lacked important details. I mentioned the most prominent of these to Bill Johnson: “Names. There were a thousand documents, but not a true name in the lot. We don’t know who these people are.”

  He replied: “But this gives us a start. If we catch one of the agents, we’ll know more about the organization than he does. Maybe he’ll think we know everything and tell us the rest. Leastways that’s the theory. It doesn’t always work out.”

  The printers ran off the study, its 125 pages bound in a sullen gray cover, on Monday, 31 July 1967, right on schedule.5 It was in the nick of time. On the same day, George Allen, who was filling in for Carver during one of the latter’s unexplained absences, told me that Colonel Hawkins was getting ready to leave Saigon to attend the next session of Fourteen Three, due to convene shortly. I had mixed emotions. On the one hand, Hawkins’ honesty was doubtless better than Fowler’s harrumphs. On the other, I was daunted by my now having to carry the entire load on the numbers. My main backer at the meetings, Bobby Layton, had a new assignment. Earlier in the month, he had gone to Saigon to join the Collation Branch. Naturally, the DDI would be no help whatsoever. Methodically pumping out Sitreps, it still had no one working full time on the VC —and no one, as usual, who knew anything much about the order of battle. Annoyed at these now-ancient gaps, I wrote a memo to Carver suggesting that the agency form a “Vietcong Study Group.” I gave it to Mary Ellen on 2 August.6 “Thanks,” she said, and tossed it in his in-box, where it landed on a paper I’d written in mid-May.7 The May paper had complained that the DDI still wasn’t reading captured documents.

  Fourteen Three reassembled a few days later. I climbed to the seventh floor fifteen minutes early in order to say hello to Gains Hawkins. He was already in the conference room. We shook hands. He looked tired, I thought, probably from jet lag. The meeting was called to order by a new chairman, James Graham, a board member who’d recently transferred from the DDI front office. Why he’d taken over from General Collins as Fourteen Three’s boss was unclear; perhaps the general was on vacation. In any case, it didn’t matter. Graham was one of the front office people who had backed me up in my fight with the State Department over the rise of Tshombe in the Congo. “Screw State,” he had said in effect. I supposed he’d take the same attitude towards MACV—assuming it was warranted.

  “Gentlemen,” said Graham, “we’re going to have a slide show. Colonel Hawkins has just completed several new studies for the MACV Order of Battle Section, and he wants to tell us about them. Somebody douse the lights.” The room went black. There was a blast of light on one wall. The first slide wobbled to the center. It read:

  Headquarters

  United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam

  Vietcong Strength Study

  As the slide wobbled off, I caught a glimpse of George Fowler. His head was on his chest and his eyes were closed. When the next slide appeared, Colonel Hawkins began to read from an accompanying text. He spoke rapidly and was hard to follow. The slides were a maze of numbers and charts. I couldn’t see my pad in the dark, and therefore couldn’t take notes. A dozen had come and gone, when something caught my eye. I called out: “Colonel, could you leave that slide on for a minute, please? I’d like to copy it down.”

  He said: “I figured you’d call me on that one, Sam. Of course you can.”

  I went to the wall, and in its bright light transcribed the display. The slide show continued for another half hour. The lights went on, and there was a coffee break. I looked at my notes. This is what they showed:

  Previous Estimate

  Regulars: 120,400

  Service Troops: 24,800

  Guerrilla-Militia: 112,800

  Political Cadres: 39,200

  Total: 297,200

  Revised Estimate

  Regulars: 120,400

  Service Troops: 26,000

  Guerrilla-Militia: 65,000

  Political Cadres: 87,500

  Total: 298,900

  Clearly, the two “estimates” were MACV’s current order of battle and its proposed new one.8 I went over the categories one by one. First the regulars: no change. Well, Fourteen Three hadn’t argued about regulars, although I was beginning to have doubts. I’d lately come across several small combat units, such as sappers (a kind of commando), which weren’t listed in the OB. However, not wanting to pick nits, I decided to leave them alone. Service troops: up 1200. What? Less than a month ago, Funaro’s cable from Saigon had reported that Colonel Hawkins thought that Fourteen Three’s then-current figure of 75,000 service troops was only “a little” too high. Seventy-five thousand is “a little” higher than 26,000? Cut it out. Something funny was going on. Guerrilla-militia: My God! Everyone after the hyphen, the self-defense militia—whom Nguyen Chi Thanh* had put at 150,000—had marched out of the OB without so much as a bugle call. And not to Carver’s “nonmilitary” shelf, either, but to oblivion. Then there were the pre-hyphen troops, the guerrillas. Only 65,000? Hawkins had told Funaro 100,000 a month ago, and General Thanh had said 180,000 a year before that. Again, it was awfully damn peculiar. I skipped over the political cadres to look at the totals. That was it! They are what had caught my eye! The totals were virtually the same.

  Immediately I suspected foul play. It looked to me that someone at MACV headquarters
had picked the new sum to coincide with the old one, in order to fool outsiders—presumably the press—into thinking the VC strength estimate was the same as ever. And then someone else, most likely from the OB Section, had taken the new total, and jiggering with the components, worked backwards. Who was the “someone else?” Colonel Hawkins? At just this point Mr. Graham said: “All right everybody, back to work. Coffee break’s over.”

  I studied the colonel as he resumed his seat at the conference table. I saw my first impression about his being “tired” was wrong. His face was as bleak as I’d ever seen a face. I also saw, for the first time, that he wasn’t alone. Sitting to his right was an Air Force brigadier general. I asked a neighbor who it was. The neighbor said: “General Godding. George Godding. He’s deputy J-2” That meant he was chief assistant to General Philip Davidson, Westmoreland’s new head of intelligence. Aha, I thought: Hawkins is on a short leash.

  For the next ten days—or so it seemed to me—Fourteen Three was in almost continuous session. The discussion was now entirely about numbers, with Hawkins and me the main disputants. It was a strange affair from the start. For example:

  ADAMS: Colonel, I suppose you remember that General Thanh’s speech of April 1966 where he said there were a hundred eighty thousand guerrillas. We talked about it in Honolulu.

  HAWKINS: I do seem to recall that, Sam, and I guess you know about Bulletin 4530.

  ADAMS: Bulletin what?

  HAWKINS: Forty-five thirty. It’s not a speech, but an accounting document. Also dated 1966. It lists a hundred seventy thousand guerrillas, at least that’s what it says here. Now that seems to pretty much confirm General Thanh, doesn’t it?

  The colonel handed me the bulletin.9 I’d seen it before, but had mislaid my copy. It was an accounting document (it subdivided the guerrillas by area), and it certainly backed up General Thanh’s speech. But hell, I was the one arguing for Thanh’s speech, not Hawkins. The discussion continued: