War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  He paused briefly to let this sink in, and continued: “I would like you to know that if you take your complaints independently to the White House—and even if you obtain the results you desire by doing so—your usefulness to the agency will thereafter be nil. Let me repeat that: Nil.”

  “The director feels that this is an internal affair, and to handle it he has appointed the review board, all that anyone can ask. But if you feel that it isn’t, and take this matter outside the agency, you will be doing so at your own peril, for practical rather than legal reasons. It seems to me, Mr. Adams, that the most serious question at stake is whether you destroy your usefulness to the intelligence business.” The colonel went on in this vein for half an hour before asking if I had any questions. I did.

  “May I take this, sir, as a direct order not to forward my complaints to the White House?”

  “It has the effect of a direct order,” the colonel replied.

  “And you’re aware, sir, that Mr. Bross had gone canoeing, and won’t be back until 23 October?”

  “How John Bross spends his vacation is no concern of yours,” said the colonel.

  “Of course it isn’t, Sir,” I replied. “But his going bears on whether the incoming administration receives timely warning of the CIA’s failures over the last two years. I think they are far too big to be dealt with by the people who made them. Therefore, please tell the director that I intend to take action no later than the end of the month.”40

  Colonel White dismissed me, and I hotfooted it down to the VC Branch, well aware that he’d handed me a potent weapon—an outright threat, made for “practical” rather than “legal” reasons, obviously designed to prevent a president-elect from discovering CIA malfeasance. All that remained was to put the threat in writing. I did so, transcribing everything White had said in a memorandum of conversation. Beverly typed it up on Monday morning, and straightaway I sent it with a cover sheet to Colonel White. The cover sheet asked the colonel to comment in writing whether the memorandum of conversation was accurate or not. To make sure he couldn’t wiggle out of it, I stuck in a final paragraph that said: “Please do not feel you need to inform me in writing if the … memorandum accurately reflects the statements you made. If I have not heard from you by the end of the month, I will respectfully assume your silence means assent.”41 Therefore even if he chose to ignore the memo, he was still on the hook.

  Colonel White must have realized he was in trouble. Maybe he even envisaged the possibility (which I hoped he would) that I might take my bill of complaints to the White House with a copy of his threats stapled to it, thus making the package look even worse than it did already. For whatever reasons, when he called me back to his office that afternoon, he was profuse in his denials that he’d tried on Friday to “threaten, coverup, or delay. In fact,” he said, “I’ve just talked it over with the director and deputy director, and they agreed you can go forward.” I thanked Colonel White, saying that now that the principal of external review was established, I’d be happy to wait until after elections. I tried to hand him an extra copy of the memo of conversation, but he backed away from it, unfortunately tripping on the carpet as he did so. “I’m too busy to read that sort of thing,” he said.42

  “You nailed ’em that time,” Ron Smith said delightedly, when I told him what had happened. By now it was clear he had mixed emotions over my battle with the hierarchy. Sometimes he acted as if he were harboring a viper, other times as if he wanted me to succeed. I appreciated his dilemma, and had grown to like Ron a good deal.

  Another reason for my thinking him a satisfactory boss was that he allowed me to pick my own research topics. The VC Branch now had the order of battle well in hand, so I decided to help Bob Klein on the military proselyters. I recalled the question the DDP student had asked at Blue U., “Are they having any success?” This led rapidly to a second question—success at what? At this time, the South Vietnamese army was losing about one soldier in four per year to desertion. This seemed as good a place as any to start research. Klein and I tried to figure out how many deserters quit at VC urging. The problem was knotty. As might be expected, the enemy proselyters claimed credit in their reports for the entire desertion rate. This was unlikely. Many government soldiers doubtless went over the hill for other motives, such as fear, detestation of sergeants, and bad food—the same reasons which caused many Vietcong soldiers to desert. The problem went on a shelf on 26 October. On that date Klein got married and went on a honeymoon. Ten days later Nixon beat Humphrey in a squeaker.

  After the returns were in, I fulfilled my promise to Colonel White. That is, I sent a request to the seventh floor asking if it was all right now to forward my bill of particulars to the White House. Admiral Taylor, the deputy director, replied at once: Yes, he believed it was, but first I should talk to the director. I called Helms’ office and got an appointment to see him at 10:30 on Friday morning, 8 November. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect. Although technically a member of the director’s staff while working for George Carver, I hadn’t actually laid eyes on Helms since May 1966. At that time he’d been head of the DDP.

  I arrived at the director’s suite a quarter hour early on Friday. This was necessary in order to check in with the security guards, sign the visitors’ sheet, and warn the secretaries. I was familiar with the procedure, having visited John McCone several times in 1964 while I was Congo analyst. At 10:25 I entered Helms’s outer office. His secretary said: “Don’t bother to knock, Mr. Adams, he’s expecting you.” I opened the inner door.

  And there he was, Richard Helms, CIA director, archvillain, sitting behind his big desk with a half-smile on his face. He didn’t look much like a villain. He said: “Hello, Sam. Good to see you. How have you been?” He didn’t talk like one either. “Sit down,” he went on. “What seems to be the problem?”

  As I sat in the chair beside his desk, I took out a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. Observing this, he said: “I’d rather you didn’t take notes.” Apparently, he knew of Colonel White’s unfortunate experience with the memorandum of conversation. I put them away.

  “Now tell me,” he reiterated, “what’s the matter? Are your supervisors treating you unfairly? Are they being too slow on promotions?”

  No, I said. My main problem was that he had caved in on the numbers before Tet. I enlarged on this theme for about ten minutes, repeated others that I’d made in the bill of complaints—such as lack of research on the VC—and added a couple of new ones, including the dearth of training on the enemy for DDP men going to Vietnam. “Thirty thousand Americans have died in the war so far, sir, and I don’t think we’re taking it seriously enough. The biggest evidence of this, the one thing that’s really inexcusable, is our collapse on the order of battle in September last year.”

  Hitherto Helms had listened without expression. Now he leaned toward me and said intently: “Sam, this may sound strange from where you’re sitting. But the CIA is only one voice among many in Washington. And it’s not a very big one, either, particularly compared to the Pentagon’s. What would you have me do? Take on the entire military?”

  I replied: “Under the circumstances, that was the only alternative. The military’s numbers were faked.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like in this town,” Helms said. “I could have told the White House there were a million more Vietcong out there, and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy.”

  “We aren’t the ones to decide about policy,” I said. “Our job is to send up the right numbers and let them worry.”

  He replied OK, who was it I wanted to see in the White House. I said I didn’t know. How about Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, he asked. I told him that was not only acceptable, it was generous, and he said he would arrange the appointments for me. He accompanied me to the door.43

  At the last moment I remembered a question. By extraordinary coincidence, Helms had spent the previous weekend in Alabama, visiting one of my wife’s uncles,
Earl McGowin. He’d even slept at Edgefield, a large house with white pillars where Eleanor had grown up. I asked: “By the way, how’s Uncle Earl?”

  “Uncle Earl?”

  “Earl McGowin, sir, he’s Eleanor’s uncle.”

  It took a moment to register. His face lit up in a smile. He chuckled. Then he started laughing so hard he had to lean against the wall for support. This lasted maybe fifteen seconds. When he recovered, he said: “Excuse me for laughing. It struck me as funny. Uncle Earl’s just fine. He’s a nice person, Uncle Earl, and so’s Aunt Claudia.”*

  Later I was talking to my friend in the DDI front office. He said: “Helms is in a difficult position. He’s one of the gloomiest men in town on the war, but gloom is seldom what’s wanted. He feels if he pushes bad news too hard, he’ll get thrown out of the White House, thus leaving the field to the military. He thinks he has the agency’s best interests at heart.”

  Over the next few days I went around to see the deputy directors. The head of the DDI, R. Jack Smith, asked me what the matter was, and I told him the same things I had told Helms. Smith said that the Vietnam War was an extraordinarily complex affair, that the size of the enemy army was only a “small but sensitive byway of the problem,” and that I had picked up a “bad case of tunnel vision.” His deputy, Edward Proctor remarked, “Mr. Adams, the real problem is you. You ought to look into yourself.”45

  On 18 November I wrote letters to Mr. Rostow and General Taylor telling them who I was and asking that they include a member of Nixon’s staff in any talks we had about the CIA’s shortcomings. I forwarded the letters, through channels, to the director’s office, asking permission to send them on.46 Permission was denied, and that was the last I heard about meeting with Rostow and Taylor.47

  In early December I did manage to see the chief aide of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, J. Patrick Coyne, at the Executive Office Building, next to the White House. He told me that a few days earlier Helms had sent over my bill of complaints, and that some members of PFIAB had read it, and that they were asking me to enlarge on my views and to make any recommendations I thought were in order. Coyne encouraged me to write a full report, and in the following weeks I put together a thirty-five-page paper explaining why I had brought the charges and why, among other things, the Sitrep was a less than adequate publication. My paper was ready for typing on Nixon’s inauguration day, 20 January 1969.*48

  I watched the swearing-in ceremony on television, after which the new president made his way up Pennsylvania Avenue. As he passed Twelfth Street, the cameras pointed at some peace demonstrators, who were chanting: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.” Someone was waving a Vietcong flag. I remember thinking: Why that damn flag? Maybe the VC are going to win, even probably so, but it will be ghastly when they do. I had followed the progress of the South Vietnamese in Hue, who had continued to exhume bodies. The government’s tally now coincided almost exactly with the VC police report’s, three thousand. Captured documents suggested that the communists had executed additional thousands, only in smaller lots, during their rampage through other cities at Tet. What made Hue unusual was that the Vietcong had had access there to more victims. I stopped watching TV when Nixon got to the White House.

  Unfortunately, Beverly was busy typing other papers so she didn’t get around to mine until Friday, the 24th. I sent it up to Helms’s office on the 27th with a request for permission to send it both to Mr. Coyne of PFIAB, and to Walt Rostow’s successor as head of the National Security Council, Henry Kissinger. Permission was denied in a letter from the deputy director, Admiral Taylor, who informed me that the CIA was a team, and that if I didn’t want to accept the team’s decision, then I should resign.49

  There I was—with nobody from Nixon’s staff having heard of any of this. It was far from clear whether Nixon intended to retain the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. J. Patrick Coyne said he didn’t know. He also said he didn’t intend to press for the release of the thirty-five-page report. I thought I had been had.

  For the first time in my career, I decided to leave official channels. Not long before I had met a man named John Court, a member of Kissinger’s incoming NSC staff. I gave Court my memorandum and explained its import—including Westmoreland’s deceptions before Tet—and asked him to pass it around so that at least the new administration might know what had gone on at the CIA and could take any action it thought necessary. Some weeks later Court told me that the memo had gotten around all right, but the decision had been made not to do anything about it. So I gave up. If the White House wasn’t interested, I’d reached the end of the line. I felt I’d done as much as I possibly could, and that was that.

  Obviously, the time had come to take stock in my career at the CIA. It was pretty much in shambles. Not only had the deputy director suggested that I resign, but now I was working under special restrictions. The word had long since arrived that I was no longer permitted to go to Vietnam. After the order-of-battle conference in Saigon in September 1967, Westmoreland’s headquarters had informed the Saigon Station that I was persona non grata, and that they didn’t want me on any military installations throughout the country. Somewhat later, Ron Smith had told me, as tactfully as he could, that I shouldn’t expect to attend meetings at which outsiders were present. But the weightiest blow fell on 8 April. On that day, OER’s Vietnam boss Paul Walsh called me in to say that I had spent far too much time on “extracurricular activities,” and to correct this fault, I should cut back on my lectures at Blue U. This was particularly discouraging since I’d at last gotten instruction on the VC up to twenty-four hours. The dons at Blue U. were as unhappy as I was over the development. Adding to my general discouragement was what had gone on with other people. Fed up with Vietnam, George Allen had asked for reassignment, and in late 1968 had taken off for London to attend the Imperial War College. That meant that one of my closest allies was no longer available. But the sorriest case of all was back at headquarters. It was Joe Hovey, the Collation Branch analyst who in November 1967 had composed the Saigon cable that had predicted the Tet Offensive. After leaving Vietnam in June 1968, he had reported to Langley several weeks later, naturally expecting some kind of recognition for his feat. This failed to occur. If anything, his cable had proved an embarrassment to the DDI for whom the offensive was an almost total surprise. For a while he couldn’t even find a job. Eventually, the Office of Current Intelligence picked him up and put him to work on the Sitrep. His boss was Thaxter Goodell, the author of OCI’s dismissive claim that Hovey’s message was crying wolf.

  As usual, there were compensations. In February, for example, I had put together a bilingual chart detailing the communists’ provincial organization. It was going like hotcakes, with one customer—the Army’s Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg—having ordered five thousand copies. Then a new batch of captured documents came in from the B-3 Front. The B-3 Front was a communist military command in South Vietnam’s central highlands made up of the VC provinces of Gia Lai, Kontum, and Daklak. The documents listed the Vietcong soldiers stationed in each province. Using these rosters, Bob Appell and I were able to check the communist troop estimates in his experimental order-of-battle memo, now several months old, about Gia Lai and Kontum. It was incredible. In one province (I forget which), it came within 10 percent of the actual number. In the other, it was within 5 percent. That’s about as good as you can get without seeing the daily morning reports. Despite its narrow focus, Appell’s memo was clearly one of the best OB papers written in the war so far. As already mentioned, its methods came into play—with a vengeance—in June 1971.

  My biggest satisfaction, however, came from the Blue U. lectures, even in their truncated form. In contrast to many higher-ups at headquarters, most Vietnam-bound DDP-ers couldn’t give less of a damn about office politics. The majority were headed for the provinces, so that their main interest was what they were up against. As always, their questions concerned not, How
many? but Why? And on many subjects I found myself gradually adopting their point of view.

  One such subject was the numbers. Granted, the numbers were important as far as they went, but they failed to explain why the communists continued to hang in despite their enormous casualties.* Almost every time we found an enemy unit, we trounced it severely. The trouble was that we didn’t find them often enough. This led to the questions: Why was it the Vietcong always seemed to know what we were up to, while we could never find out about them except through captured documents? The DDP-ers kept asking about communist spies. I knew a fair amount about their espionage organization, but not that much about its accomplishments. A related problem was—for the lack of a better word—subversion, particularly of the South Vietnamese army. As we already knew, the group responsible for this was the VC Military Proselyting Section.

  Unfortunately, research on the subject had come to a dead halt. The reason was the absence of Bob Klein. After his return from his honeymoon in November, he had made some additional stabs at trying to find out how successful the proselyters had been in encouraging desertion from the Saigon army. His attempts were to no avail. The problem was too complex. In late February, the U.S. Army called Klein to three months active duty in South Carolina. I had plenty to do myself. Proselyting could wait.

  Meanwhile, the Sitrep continued to gush facts. Some of them were pretty interesting. On 28 April, for example, an accident occurred at Danang. Some grass had caught fire, leading to explosions that destroyed no less than forty thousand tons of American ammunition. On 14 May, President Nixon announced his “Vietnamization Program.” It envisaged our gradual turning over of the war to the South Vietnamese army. On 22 May, Ron Smith stopped by my desk to say: “The military’s sprung loose Klein today. He’ll be back to work on Monday.” Monday was the 26th. I reread the VC policy document that said: “We fight the war on three fronts—military, political, and military proselyting.”