War of Numbers Read online

  Copyright © 1994 by Anne Adams

  Introduction Copyright © 1994 by David Hackworth

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections

  from this book, write to: Steerforth Press L.C., P.O. Box 70,

  South Royalton, Vermont 05068.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58642-202-8

  1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Secret service—United States.

  2. Adams, Sam, 1933–1988. 3. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Officials and employees—Biography.

  I. Title.

  DS559.M44A33 1994

  959.704′38—dc20 93–50207

  v3.1

  To Colonel Gains B. Hawkins

  and to my sons, Clayton and Abraham

  “My dear Spencer, I should define tragedy as a theory killed by a fact.”

  —Huxley

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Publisher’s Note

  Preface

  1 THE SIMBAS

  2 THE SITREP

  3 THE PUZZLE OF VIETCONG MORALE

  4 BULLETIN 689

  5 FOURTEEN THREE

  6 N-DAY

  7 THE THIRD FRONT

  8 CAMBODIAN REPLAY

  9 THE CROSSOVER POINT

  Appendix

  Sources and Notes

  A Note on the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  WALTER CRONKITE SUMMED up the national mood in the third year of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War when he said during the 1968 Vietnamese Tet Offensive, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.”

  Thousands of books have been written about the Vietnam War. Yet this unfinished memoir by Sam Adams could well be the most important of them and the most damning indictment of the “best and brightest” who engineered the war, from the White House policy makers to those top military and intelligence brass who lied about the war from womb to tomb. War of Numbers gives the inside story, chapter and verse, outlining why America’s intelligence community is as sick as a junkyard dog that’s gotten into the rat poison.

  Had the truth about the enemy’s strength and intentions been revealed before the Vietnamese New Year in 1968, 2,200 American lives might have been saved and tens of thousands of other American casualties could well have been prevented. A flawed and manipulated intelligence system cut these brave men down almost with the precision of machine gun fire. How many names are on the Black Wall of the Vietnam memorial in Washington today because of a corrupted intelligence machine? When commanders expecting 100 men to attack were hit by a thousand instead, it was the grunt who paid the grim price for fraudulent bookkeeping.

  War of Numbers is about one man’s effort to get the truth to the grunts and their sergeants, captains, and colonels who fought the war down in the blood and mud and who needed to know the straight skinny about their Vietnamese enemy.

  The man who made this effort was Samuel Adams, a young Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst who could not be bought or shut up by threat of ruining his career, but hung on like a pit bull to his gut conviction that persons on high were cooking the books on enemy strength in Vietnam. Adams had the passion, moral courage, and integrity of Oliver Cromwell just after he got up from his knees from prayers, a most uncommon trait in any bureaucrat. In his friendly way Adams took on his bosses toe-to-toe, from CIA director Richard Helms on down the corrupted go-along-to-get-along chain-of-command within the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House. He gave fits to the men appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to top jobs, and he presented the same dogged demand for honest accounting to Generals William Westmoreland and Phillip Davidson (the Theater Intelligence Officer for American forces in Vietnam) and platoons of deceptive colonels who forgot their solemn oaths to defend their country.

  In The Art of War, written over 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu said, “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Had Sam Adams been successful in getting the truth out, tens of thousands of lives would not have been shattered in Vietnam. His report would have clearly told Walter Cronkite who was winning and who was losing.

  Across the U.S.A. in 1968, television images of the Vietcong’s massive and coordinated assault struck the American people with perhaps as great an impact as the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The terrible battles fought simultaneously across Vietnam in early 1968 shocked, confused, and depressed the public. They had been assured for months by President Johnson, the Ambassador to Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker, and the American commander in the field, General Westmoreland, that we were winning the war in spades and that the Vietcong were about to go down for the count.

  The Tet offensive was a stinging tactical defeat for the Vietnamese insurgents when measured by Western military standards. Yet the TV was telling a different story. The small screen clearly showed the Vietcong as a potent and skillful force, and the communists as far from being defeated. The American people realized they’d been led down the primrose path, conned by political double talk. The sight of Vietcong holed up in the U.S. Embassy in the middle of Saigon told the American people with one picture all they needed to know. That picture put a lie to Westmoreland’s pronouncement in the fall of 1967 that “whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.”

  After years of solemn assurance that the Vietcong faced imminent defeat, the American people were dismayed to discover the enemy all over the place like ants at a barbecue. How could America’s top officials not know that North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap was going to launch a complex and massive attack involving hundreds of thousands of Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers striking within a 24-hour period in virtually every major city in South Vietnam? How could our multi-billion dollar, highly sophisticated intelligence community have failed to see this attack coming?

  Ironically, as the reader will see in the gripping pages that follow, just ten weeks before the Tet attack, the CIA analyst Joe Hovey had predicted from Saigon: “All-out offensive … January to March 1968 … urban centers.” Hovey’s bull’s-eye analysis had made the rounds among the CIA’s top brass and was even dispatched to the White House, where President Johnson read it 15 days before the attack. However, a note from George Carver, a top CIA official, shot down Hovey’s warning. Carver said Hovey was “crying wolf.”

  Throughout the war, the intelligence and military top brass sometimes seemed incapable of getting anything right. In 1965, a CIA branch chief, Ed Hauck, said, “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.” What a heart breaker that this wasn’t said to the members of the U.S. Congress on national TV! Communist tanks rolled into Saigon ten years to the month after Hauck made his prophetic statement.

  Intelligence failures are no anomaly in American history. Since the Civil War, the U.S. intelligence community has dropped the ball as often as a freshman high school football team in its first game. During World War II, our spook
s didn’t see the Japanese coming in 1941 and missed the massive Nazi attack in the Ardennes in 1944. These blunders, which cost thousands of lives, were followed by the failure to identify the June 1950 North Korean invasion of South Korea, or the fact that five months later, a million man Chinese army entered the war and surreptitiously slipped behind U.S. forces deployed near the Yulu River, cutting them off. Only brave men prevented America from suffering one of its worst military defeats. Korea was followed by more intelligence failures, from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961 to Tet in 1968 to the 1979 failure to foresee the revolution that dethroned the Shah of Iran. Intelligence blunders continued in Beirut and Grenada in 1983, followed by the “let’s get Noriega” fiasco in Panama in 1989. But the biggest screw-up made by America’s inept multi-billion dollar intelligence machine over the four-decade-long Cold War was probably its failure to realize that the Soviet Union was finished well before its Iron Curtain came tumbling down like Humpty Dumpty. Even after the Berlin Wall disappeared in a night, the CIA director, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wouldn’t concede that the Cold War was over. For months afterward they continued to chant, “the Russians are coming.”

  It’s obvious from these examples that from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence community has been too often out to a very long, multi-martini lunch. Yet there has been little improvement since the cold war ended. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the intelligence community—miracle of miracles—finally got it on the nose. They predicted the exact date, but failed to determine Iraq’s strength or its disposition of nuclear and chemical capabilities, and from Desert Shield to Desert Storm, U.S. intelligence seldom got the Iraqis’ military intentions, strength, or disposition right. Subsequent to the invasion, they reported that a half-million man Iraqi army—“the fourth largest in the world”—was deployed in and around occupied Kuwait, when in fact we now know that less than a third of that figure was on the battlefield. The intelligence community greatly inflated the Iraqi military strength, whereas in Vietnam, as this brilliant book describes, the enemy’s size was purposely deflated by almost fifty percent. In both cases, as throughout the cold war, intelligence estimates were juggled to suit political purposes.

  The Desert Storm commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, told Congress in 1991 that military intelligence in the Gulf War was both a triumph and a failure. In the Gulf, I believe, the failures overwhelmed the triumphs. The Republican Guards’ will to fight was overrated, as was the Iraqi Army’s combat effectiveness. Intelligence also failed to pinpoint the number of Iraqi Scud missile launchers or to estimate the effectiveness of the naval blockade and economic embargo. Satellite systems provided an unprecedented amount of information, but it was often late in reaching the user. Cloudy days made observation spotty, bomb-damage assessment was both delayed by foul weather and far from accurate. Iraqi military codes were cracked early in the game, but the shortage of skilled translators impeded the flow of radio intercepts, and lack of access to the Iraqi leadership doomed the allies to ignorance of Saddam Hussein’s true intentions. One general said he had stacks of satellite imagery, but would swap it all for “one good spy on the ground.”

  The significance of Sam Adams’s book is that it clearly shows from the intelligence grunt’s perspective how and why the CIA and top military brass—with White House encouragement—misled the Congress, the press, and the American people before the communist 1968 Tet Offensive by juggling the figures for enemy strength in Vietnam. Westmoreland and Davidson have argued that Adams’s figures were inflated, and that even if true they wouldn’t have affected the way the war was fought. Davidson wrote in his revisionist history, Vietnam at War, “In a military sense, the whole controversy was piddling, reminding one of Alexander Pope’s ironic aside that ‘mighty contests arise from trivial things.’ ” Among the “trivial things” Davidson almost casually mentions was, in this case, the communist order of battle (OB), a tabulation of the enemy’s strength. The “piddling” thing was the disappearance of almost 300,000 communist soldiers from Davidson’s intelligence books.

  The Saigon brass in their plush villas didn’t believe that a VC youth of twelve who mined jungle paths and scouted for main force troops, or a fifty-year-old woman who tended VC wounded, should be counted as combat or support troops. They didn’t understand they were as much a part of the VC Army as any of the half dozen aides who kept Westmoreland’s villa operating efficiently. The paradox was that though the generals insisted these non-regulars be arbitrarily dropped from the OB, when killed, they were included in the body count.

  As described in detail by Adams, the American military in Vietnam removed whole units from the OB, including the “self-defense” militia guerrillas who are key players in irregular warfare. In Vietnam, the local militia made up the replacement pool for the regular units. When a main force unit got bloodied, the local militia filled it back up, so virtually overnight the unit was fit to fight. Throughout the Vietnam War, American commanders were amazed at the speed with which main force units could recover from a beating. The local militia also provided valuable intelligence services, guided and scouted for main force units when they operated on their home turf, and provided logistical support such as raising food, tending the wounded, or sheltering VC soldiers. They set the mines and booby traps that were responsible for an estimated sixty percent of all U.S. casualties. Westmoreland has often been accused of fighting WWII all over again in Vietnam, which may explain why he didn’t want to count one of the main players in a guerilla war. Not counting them is like a jeweler not counting diamonds because they’re small. Westmoreland’s fatal flaw was fighting an unconventional war with a conventional mind-set.

  Adams argues that Westmoreland dropped around 300,000 local militia from the order of battle prior to the Tet surprise in order to prove the U.S. was winning. Westmoreland feared that his other perceived enemy, the U.S. press, would find out the true figures and expose the pre-Tet truth: our forces were not whittling the enemy down and we were losing the war in Vietnam. To leave the local guerrillas on the books contradicted the image of success promoted by Westmoreland and President Johnson. Westmoreland had his deputy, General Creighton Abrams, cable the White House to say that an increase in the OB would contradict the “image of sucess” they had been promoting, and would provoke the press into drawing “an erroneous and gloomy conclusion” over the progress of the war. This was the same manipulative game of changing the facts to present a winning picture that Westmoreland’s predecessor, General Paul Harkins, had played, and what had sucked American combat forces into Vietnam in the first place. The Vietnam War, from beginning to end, was an enormous deception.

  War of Numbers is one hell of a good tale about life inside the CIA and the struggle over the worst intelligence failure of the Vietnam War, but the book also gives the reader a good look at what the man, Sam Adams, was made of. His life was all about integrity and moral courage. He refused to bow to pressure and lie about the order of battle figures as a way to move onwards and upwards, and when his superiors went ahead and faked them anyway, he refused to let the issue die. Instead, he rattled every cage in Washington, from Congressional committees to the CIA’s Inspector General, kicking on doors all the way to the White House. What Adams had in abundance—the guts to stand up and be counted—has always been in short supply. Perhaps his stalwart example of moral courage will bring a comeback in a value that seems to have almost disappeared from the American scene.

  Sadly, his analysis proved accurate. The Communist forces which attacked during Tet came from a force double the size estimated in the official order of battle. Good men down on the ground paid the ultimate price for not knowing the enemy’s real strength. It is a tragedy that Sam Adams didn’t finish this work before he died suddenly at the age of fifty-five in 1988. It might have ended the controversy over who told the truth in Vietnam, and exposed the rivalries which infected the U.S. intelligence community
throughout the cold war.

  Adams stopped writing his book in the early 1980s to work on the CBS documentary which resulted in the Westmoreland lawsuit. (The case never went to jury; after great effort and expense Westmoreland dropped his suit at the last minute and CBS said it never intended to cast doubt on his patriotism.) Perhaps Sam Adams didn’t resume writing because he believed the truth had already emerged. There’s no question he had driven William Westmoreland, Phillip Davidson, Daniel Graham, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and a host of lesser figures nuts. He forced them to sit in lawyers’ offices for hours at a time and testify under oath about secrets they had intended to carry to the grave. The incredible thing was that Sam Adams was not a senior bureaucrat but a minor intelligence analyst, a mere grunt in a huge secret bureau that was a law unto itself, seemingly accountable to no one. A friend of Adams’s said, “I sometimes think that Sam was sent to this earth by God specifically to hound these people for their sins, and especially for the sin of having put their name to something which they knew was not true.”

  Looked at from that point of view, Adams’s life was a great triumph, a David and Goliath story in which Goliath, while not slain, was covered with public shame. The history of the world is filled with similar episodes in which men who could not change the facts changed the paper; but in no other case did the whole sordid story emerge in all its factual detail as it did with the OB controversy. High officials are accustomed to telling clerk analysts to screw off, and the clerk analysts generally skulk from the room and history forthwith—but Adams, far from slinking off, subjected those officials to moments when they were heartily sorry they had ever been born.

  Unfortunately, Adams didn’t see it as a triumph. He was never bitter, but he felt the exhaustion of utter defeat. Adams believed historians would ignore or revise the truth, and this has certainly been the case until now. Westmoreland, Helms, Davidson, Carver, Graham, and many others are in good jobs or comfortable retirement; the liars and number-fakers have prospered and risen and enjoyed celebrity status, while Sam Adams and his friends—the people who stuck their necks out, who ignored the threats, who broke with friends and told the truth—all of them were forced out of jobs, ostracized, demoted, ignored, treated like creepy complainers and malcontents, and the lives of one or two of the men who risked the most were completely shattered by the ordeal. Shortly after telling a friend he felt he’d achieved nothing, Adams died, leaving his unfinished memoir behind.