VIETNAM COVER-UP: PLAYING WAR WITH NUMBERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 49
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 21, 2001
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: May 1, 1975
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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CONFIDENTIAL
INTERNAL USE ONLY
This publication contains clippings from the
domestic and foreign press for YOUR
BACKGROUND INFORMATION. Further use
of selected items would rarely be advisable.
No .
2 May 1975
G^~- ;r?"_ T AFFAIRS
1
EAST ASIA
24
Destroy after backgrounder has served its
purpose or within 60 days.
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 ILARPERtS
,May 1975
Sam Adams is a fourth
cousin, seven times re-
moved, of President
John Adams. His great-
great-great-great-gran d-
father, also named John,
lost an ear at the Bat-
tle of Bunker Hill. Mr.
Adams raises cattle in
Leesburg, Virginia, and
is writing a book about
his now-aborted CIA
career.
A CIA conspiracy against its own intelligence
building adding and subtracting the number of
defectors. He called me into his office. "Those
statistics aren't worth a -damn," he said. "No
numbers in Vietnam are, and, besides, you'll
never learn anything sitting around Saigon."
He told me I ought to go to the field and start
reading captured documents. I followed Jorgy's
advice.
The captured documents suggested a phenom-
enon that seemed ,incredible to me. Not only
were the VC taking extremely heavy casualties,
but large numbers of them were deserting. I got
together two sets of captured papers concerning
desertion. The first set consisted of enemy unit
rosters, which would say, for example, that in a
certain seventy-seven-man only sixty men
were "present for duty." Of the seventeen ab-
sent, two were down with malaria, two were at
training school,. and thirteen had deserted. The
other documents were directives from various
VC headquarters telling subordinates to do
something about the growing desertion rate.
"Christ Almighty,"they all seemed to say."These
AWOLs are getting out of hand. Far too many
of our boys are going over the hill.''-' -
I soon collected a respectable stack of rosters,
some of them from large units; -arid I began to
extrapolate. I set up an equation. which went
like this: if A, B, and C units (the ones- for
which I had documents) had so many deserters
in such and such a period of time, then the
number of deserters per year for the whole VC
Army was X. No matter how I arranged the
equation, X always turned out to be a very big
number.- I could never get it below 50,000. Once
I even got it up to 100,000. -
The significance of this finding in 1966 was
immense. At that time our official estimate of
the strength of the enemy was 270,000. We
were killing, capturing, and wounding VC at a
rate of almost 150,000 a year. If to these casu-
alties you added 50,000 to 100,000 deserters-
well, it was hard to see how a 270,000-man
army could last more than a year or two longer.
I returned in May to tell everyone the good
news. No one at CIA headquarters had paid
much attention to VC deserters because cap-
tured documents were almost entirely neglected..-
The finding created a big stir. Adm. William F.
Raborn, Jr., then director of the CIA, called
me in to brief him and his deputies about the
Vietcong's AWOL problem. Right after the
briefing, I was told that.the Agency's chief of
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1 N LATE 1965, WELL AFTER the United States
had committed ground troops to Vietnam, the
CIA assigned me to study the Vietcong. Despite
the almost 200,000 American troops and the
advanced state of warfare in South Vietnam, I
was the first intelligence analyst in Washington
to be given the full-time job of researching our
South Vietnamese enemies. Incredible as it now
seems, I remained the only analyst with this as-
signment until just before the Tet offensive of
1963.
At CIA headquarters in 1965 nobody was
studying the enemy systematically, the principal
effort being geared to a daily publication called
the "Sitrep" (Vietnam Situation Report), which
Concerned itself with news about the activities of
South Vietnamese politicians and the location
of Vietcong units. The Sitrep analysts used the
latest cables from Saigon, and tended to neglect
information that didn't fit their objectives. The
Johnson Administration was already wondering
bow long the Vietcong could stick it out, and
since this seemed too complicated a question for
the Sitrep to answer, the CIA's research depart-
ment assigned it to me. I was told to find out
the state of enemy morale.
Good news and bad news
LOOKED UPON THE NEW JOB as something of a
promotion. Although I had graduated from
Harvard in 1955, 1 didn't join the Agency until
1963, and I had been fortunate in my first as-
signment as an analyst of the Congo rebellion.
My daily and weekly reports earned the praise
of my superiors, and the Vietcong study was
given to me by way of reward, encouraging me
in my ambition to make a career within the
CIA.
Without guidance and not knowing what else
to do, I began to tinker with the. VC defector
statistics, trying to figure out such things as
where the defectors came from, what jobs they
had,*and why they had wanted to quit. In short
order I read through the collection of weekly
reports, and so I asked for a ticket to Vietnam
to see what other evidence was available over
there. In mid-January 1966, I arrived in Saigon
to take up a desk in the U.S. Embassy. After a
couple of weeks, the CIA station chief (every-
one called him "Jorgy") heard I was in the
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Sam Adams
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research, it Jack Smith, had called me "the out-
standing analyst" in the research directorate.
But there were also skeptics, particularly
among the CIA's old Vietnam hands, who had
long since learned that good news was often
illusory. To be on the safe side, the Agency
formed what was called a "Vietcong morale
team" and sent it to Saigon to see if the news
was really true. The team consisted of myself,
acting as a "consultant," and four Agency psy-
chiatrists, who presumably understood things
like morale.
IIE PSYCHIATRISTS had no better idea than
U I'd had, when I started out, how to plumb the
Vietcong mind. One of the psychiatrists said,
"We'll never get Ho Chi Minh to lie still on a
leather couch, so we better think up something
else quick." They decided to ask the CIA men
in the provinces what they thought about enemy
morale. After a month or so of doing this, the
psychiatrists went back to Washington con-
vinced that, by and large, Vietcong spirits
were in good shape. I went back with suitcases
full of captured documents that supported my
the is about the Vietcong desertion rate.
But I was getting uneasy. I trusted the opin-
ion of the CIA men in the field who had told
the psychiatrists of the Vietcong's resilience.
The South Vietnamese government was in one
of its periodic states of collapse, and somehow it
seemed unlikely that the Vietcong would be
falling apart at the same time. I began to sus-
pect that something was wrong with my predic-
tion that the VC were headed for imminent
trouble. On reexamining the logic that had led
me to the prediction, I saw that it was based on
three main premises. Premise number one was
that the Vietcong were suffering very heavy cas-
ualties. Although I'd heard all the stories about
exaggerated reporting, I tended not to believe
them, because the heavy losses were also reflect-
ed in the documents. Premise two was my find-
ing that the enemy army had a high desertion
rate. Again, I believed the documents. Premise
three was that both the casualties and the de-
serters came out of an enemy force of 270,000.
An old Vietnam hand, George Allen, had al-
ready told me that this number was suspect.
In July, I went to my supervisor and told
him I thought there might be something radi-
cally wrong with our estimate of enemy
strength, or, in military jargon, the order of
battle. "Maybe the 270,000 number is too low,"
I said. "Can I take a closer look at it?" He said
it was okay with him just so long as I handed
in an occasional item for the Sitrep. This
seemed fair enough, and so I began to put to-
gether a file of captured documents.
The documents in those days were arranged
in "bulletins," and by mid-August I had collect-
ed more than 600 of them. Each bulletin con
tained several sheets of paper with summaries
in English of the information in the papers
taken by American military units. On the after-
noon of August 19, 1966, a Friday, Bulletin'
689 reached my desk on the CIA's fifth floor. It
contained a report put out by the Vietcong
headquarters in Binh Dinh province, to the ef-
fect that the guerrilla-militia in the province
numbered just over 50,000. I looked for our
own intelligence figures for Binh Dinh in the
order of battle and found the number 4,500.
"My God," I thought, "that's not even a
tenth of what the VC say."
In a state of nervous excitement, I began
searching through my file of bulletins for other
discrepancies. Almost the next document I
looked at, the onp for Phu Yen province,
showed 11,000-,guerrilla-militia. In the official
order of battle we had listed 1,400, an eighth of
the Vietcong estimate. I almost shouted from
my desk, "There goes the whole damn order of
battle!"
Unable to contain tuy excitement. I began
walking around the office, telling anybody who
would listen about the enormity of the over-
sight and the implications of it for our conduct
of the war. That weekend I returned to the of-
fice, and on both Saturday and Sunday I
searched through the entire collection of 600-
odd bulletins and found further proof of a gross
underestimate of the- strength of the enemy we
had been fighting for almost two years. When I
arrived in the office on Monday a colleague of
mine brought me a document of a year earlier
which he thought might interest me. It was from
Vietcong headquarters in South Vietnam, and it
showed that in early 1965 the VC had about
200,000 guerrilla-militia in the south, and that
they were planning to build up to 300,000 by
the end of the year. Once again, I checked the
official order of battle. It listed a figure of ex-
actly 103,573 guerrilla-militia-in other words,.
half as many as the Vietcong said they had in
early 19665, and a third a., many as they planned
to have by 1966.
No official comment
HAT AFTERNOON, August 22, 1 wrote a mem-
orandum suggesting that the overall order of
battle estimate of 270,000 might be 200,000
men too low. Supporting it with references to
numerous bulletins, I sent it up to the seventh
floor, and then waited anxiously for the re-
sponse. I imagined all kin' cli'of sudden and dra-
matic telephone cally_%' M'Ir. Adams, come brief
the director." "The President's got to be told
about this, and you'd better be able to defend
those numbers." 1 wasn't sure what would hap-
pen, but I was sure it would be significant, be-
cause I knew this was the biggest intelligence
find of the war-by far. It was important be-
cause the planners running the war in those
days used statistics as .a basis-for everything
they did, and the most important figure of all
was the size of the enemy army--that order of
battle number, 270",000. All our other inteli-
gence estimates were tied to the order of battle:
how much rice the VC ate, how much ammuni-
tion they shot off, and so forth. If the Vietcong
Army suddenly doubled in size, our whole statis-
tical system would collapse. We'd be fighting a
war twice as big as the one Nye thought we
were fighting. We already had about 350,000
soldiers in Vietnam, and everyone was talking
about "force ratios." Some experts maintained
that in a guerrilla war our side had to outnum-
ber the enemy by a ratio of 10 to 1; others
*A document was later captured which showed
the Vietcong not only reached but exceeded their
quota. Dated April 1966, it put the number of guer-
rilla-militia at 330,000. -
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said 5 to 1; the most optimistic said 3 to 1.
But even if Nye used the 3 to 1 ratio, the addi-
tion of 200,000 men to the enemy order of bat.
tle meant that somebody had to find an extra
600,000 troops for our side. This would put
President Johnson in a very tight fix-either
quit the war or send more soldiers. Once be
was informed of the actual enemy strength, it
seemed inconceivable that he could continue
with the existing force levels. I envisioned the
President calling the director on the carpet,
asking him why this information hadn't been
found out before.
Nothing happened. No phone calls from any-
body. On Wednesday I still thought there must
have been some terrible mistake; on Thursday
I thought the news might have been so impor-
ying to decide what
tant that people were still tr
to do with it. Instead, on Friday, the memoran-
dum dropped back in my in-box. There was no
comment on it at all-no request for amplifica-
tion, no question about my numbers, nothing,
just a routine slip attached showing that the
entire CIA hierarchy had read it.
I was aghast. Here I had come up with
200,000 additional enemy troops, and the CIA
hadn't even bothered to ask me about it, let
alone tell anybody else. I got rather angry and
wrote a second memorandum, attaching even
more references to other documents. Among
these was a report from the Vietcong high com-
mand showing that the VC controlled not 3 mil-
lion people (as in our official estimate) but 6
million .(their estimate). I thought that this
h elped to explain the origins of the extra
200,000 guerrilla-militia, and also that it was
an extraordinary piece of news in its own
right. A memorandum from my office-the of-
fice of Current Intelligence-ordinarily would
be read, edited, and distributed within a few
(lays to the White House, the Pentagon, and the
State Department. It's a routine procedure, but
once again I found myself sitting around wait-
ing for a response, getting angrier and angrier.
After about a week I went up to the seventh
floor to find out what had happened to my
memo. I found it in a safe, in a manila folder
marked "Indefinite Hold."
I wrnt heck clown to the fifth floor, and wrote
still another IUrrno, refr -ncing even more docu-
-men's; This time I didn't send it up, as I had
the others, through regular channels. Instead, I
carried it upstairs with the intention of giving
it to somebody who would comment on it. Wherr
I reached the office of the Asia-Africa area
chief, Waldo Duberstein;- he looked at me and
said: `,'It's that Goddamn memo again. Adams,
stop being such a prima donna." In the next
office, an official said that the order of battle
was General Westmoreland's concern, and we
had no business intruding. This made me event
angrier. "We're all in the same government
I said. "If there's a discrepancy this big, it
doesn't matter who points it out. This is no joke..
We're in a war with these guys." My remarks';
were dismissed as rhetorical, bombastic, and
irrelevant.
On the ninth of September, eighteen days af~
ter I'd written the first memo, the CIA agreed
to let a version of it out of the building, but
with very strange restrictions. It was .to be
called a "draft working paper," meaning that
it lacked official status; it was issued in only 25
copies, instead of the usual run of over 200; it
could go to "working-level types" only-ana-
lysts and staff people---but not to anyone in a
policy-making position--to no one, for exarnple,
on the National Security Council- One copy
went to Saigon, care of Westmoreland's Order
of Battle Section, carried by an official who
worked in the Pentagon for the Defense Intelli-
gence Agency.
Y THIS TIME I was so angry and exhausted
L) that I decided to take two weeks off to sim-
mer down. This was useless. I spent the whole
vacation thinking about the order of battle.
When I returned to the Agency, I found * that it
came out monthly and was divided into four
parts, as follows:
Communist regulars
About 110,000
(it varied by month)
Guerrilla-militia
Exactly 103,573
Service troops
Exactly
18,553
Political cadres
. Exactly
39,175-
That is, 271,301,
or about 270,000
The only category that ever changed was
"Communist regulars" (uniformed soldiers in
the Vietcong Army). In the last two years, this
figure had more than doubled. The numbers for
the other three categories had remained pre-
cisely the same, even to the last digit. There
was only one ' conclusion: no one had even
looked at them! I decided to do so right away,
and to find out where the numbers came from
and whom they were describing
I began by collecting more d,)cutnrnts on
the guerrilla-militia. These,were "the soldiers in
black pajamas" the press kept talking about;
lightly armed in some areas, armed to the teeth.
in others, they planted most of the VC's mines
and booby traps. This was important, I discov-
ered, because in the Da Nang area, for example,
mines and booby traps caused about two-thirds
of all the casualties suffered by U.S. Marines.
I also found where .the number 103,573 came
from. The South Vietnamese had thought it up
in 1964; American Intelligence had accepted
it without question, and hadn't checked it since.
"Can you believe it?" I said to a fellow analyst.
"Here we are in the middle of a guerrilla war,
and we haven't even bothered to count the num-
ber of guerrillas."
The service troops were harder to locate. The
order of battle made it clear that these VC sol-
diers were comparable to specialists in the
American Army-ordnance sergeants, quarter-
masters, medics, engineers, and so forth. But
despite repeated phone calls to the Pentagon,
to U.S. Army headquarters, and to the office of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1' couldn't find anyone
who knew where or when we'd hit upon the
number 18,553. Again I began collecting VC
documents, and within a week or so had come
to the astonishing conclusion that our official
estimate for service troops was at least two years
old and five times too low-it should not have
been 18,553, but more like 100,000. In the pro-
cess I discovered a whole new category of sol-
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diers known as "assault youths" who weren't in
the order of battle at all.
I also drew a blank at. the Pentagon regard.
ing political cadres, so I started asking CIA
analysts who these cadres might be. One ana-
lyst said they belonged to something called the
"infrastructure," but he wasn't quite sure what
it was. Finally, George Allen, who seemed to
know more about the VC than anyone else, said
the "infrastructure" included Communist party
members and armed police and people like that,
and that there was a study around which showed
how the 39,175 number had been arrived at. I
eventually found a copy on a shelf in the CIA
archives. Unopened, it had never been looked
at before. The study had been published in
Saigon in 1965, and one glance showed it was
full of holes. Among other things, it left out all
the VC cadres serving in the countryside-
where most of them were.
By December 1966 1 had concluded that the
number of Vietcong in South Vietnam, instead
of being 270,000, was more like 600,000, or
over twice the official estimate.' The higher
number made many things about the Vietnam
war fall into .place. It explained, for instance,
how the Vietcong Army could have so many de-
serters and casualties and still remain effective.
Nobody listens
J
IND YOU, DURING ALL THIS TIME I didn't
keep this information secret-just the op-
posite. I not only told everyone in the Agency
who'd listen, I. also wrote a continuous sequence
of memorandums, none of which provoked the
least response. I'd write a memo, document it
with footnotes, and send it up to the seventh
floor. A week would pass, and then the paper
would return to my in-box: no comment, only
the same old buck slip showing that everyone
upstairs had read it.
By this time I was so angry and so discour-
aged with the research directorate that I began
looking for another job within the CIA, prefer-
ably in a section that had some use for real
numbers. I still believed that all this indifference
to unwelcome information afflicted only part of
the bureaucracy, that it was not something
characteristic of the entire Agency. Through
George Allen I met George Carver, a man on
the staff of Richard Helms, the new CIA direc-
tor, who had the title "special assistant for Viet-
namese affairs." Carver told me that I was "on
the right track" with the numbers, and he
seemed an independent-minded man who could
circumvent the bureaucratic timidities of the
research directorate. At the time I had great
-hopes of Carver because, partly as a result of his
efforts, word of my memorandums had reached
the White House. Cables were passing back and
forth between Saigon and Washington, and it
had become fairly common knowledge that
something was very wrong with the enemy
strength estimates.
In mid-January 1967, Gen. Earle Wheeler,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for
an order-of-battle conference to be held in Hono-
'lliii was broken down as follow: Communist
regulars, about 100,000; guerrilla-militia, about no,.
000; service troops, about 100,000; political cadres,
about 100,0()0.
lulu. The idea was to assemble all the analysts
from the military, the CIA, and the Defense In-
telligence Agency in the hope that they might
reach a consensus on the numbers. I went to
Ionolulu as part of the CIA delegation. I didn't
trust the military and, frankly, I expected theta
to pull a fast one and lie about the numbers.
What happened instead was that the head of
Westmoreland's Order of Battle Section, Col.
Gains B. Hawkins, got up right at the beginning
of the conference and said, "You know. there's
a lot more of these little ba'tards out there than
we thought there were." He and his analysts
then rai.ed the estimate of enemy s trengtlt in
each category of the order of battle; instead of
the 103,573 guerrilla-militia, for example, they'd
come up with 193,000. Haivkins's remarks were
unofficial, but nevertheless, I figured, "the fight's
over. They're reading the saute documents that
I am, and everybody's beginning to use real
numbers."
.1 couldn't have been more wrong.
After a study trip to Vietnam, I returned to
Washington in May 1967, to find a-new CIA
report to Secretary of Defense Robert McNa-
mara called something like "Whither Vietnam?"
Its section on the Vietcong Army listed all the
discredited official figures, adding up to 270,000.
Dumbfounded, I rushed into George Carver's
office and got permission to correct the. num-
bers. Instead of my own total of 600,000, I
used 500,000, which was more in line with what
Colonel Hawkins had said in Honolulu. Even
so, one of the chief deputies of the research
directorate, Drexel Godfrey, called me up to say
that the ill rectorate couldn't i lSe ~-('0,-U 1
cause "it wasn't official." I said: "That's the
silliest thing I've ever heard. We're going to use
real numbers for a change." Much to my satis-
faction and relief, George Carver supported my
figures. For the first time in the history of the
Vietnam war a CIA paper. challenging the pre-
vious estimates went directly to McNamara.
Once again I said to myself: "The battle's won;
virtue triumphs." Once again, I was wrong.
SOON AFTER, I attended the annual meeting
of the Board of National Estimates on Viet-
nam. Held in a windowless room on the CIA's
seventh floor, a room furnished with leather
chairs, blackboards, maps, and a large confer-
ence table, the meeting comprised the whole of
the intelligence community, about forty people
representing the CIA, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and
the State Department. Ordinarily the meeting
lasted about a week, its purpose being to come
to a community-wide agreement about the prog-
ress of. the war. This particular consensus re-
quired the better part of six months.
The procedure of these estimates requires the
CIA to submit the first draft, and then every-
one else argues his group's position. If one of
the services violently disagrees, it is allowed to
take exception in a footnote to the report. The
CIA's first draft used the same 500,000 number
that had gone to McNamara in May. None of
us expected what followed.
George Fowler from DIA, the same man
who'd carried my guerrilla memo to Saigon in
September 1966, got up and explained lie was
speaking for the entire military. "Gentlemen,
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we cannot agree to this estimate as currently
written. What we object to are the numbers.
We feel we should continue with the official
order of battle." I almost fell off my chair. The
official 013 figure at that time, June 1967, was
still 270,000, with all the old components, in-
cluding 103,573 guerrilla-militia.
In disbelief I hurried downstairs to tell my
boss, George Carver, of the deception. He was
reassuring. "Now, Sam," he said, "don't you
worry. It's time to bite the bullet. You go on
back up there'and do the best you can." For the
next two-and-a-half months, armed with stacks
of documents, I argued with the military over
the numbers. By the end of August, they no
longer insisted on the official order of battle
figures, but would not raise them above 300,000.
The CIA numbers remained at about 500,000.
The meetings recessed for a few weeks at the
end of the month, and I left Washington with
my wife, Eleanor, to visit her parents in Ala-
bama. No sooner had we arrived at their house
when the phone rang. It was George Carver.
"Sam, come back up. We're going to Saigon to
thrash out the numbers."
I was a little cynical. "We won't sell out,
will we?" -
"No, no, we're going to bite the bullet," he
said. -
Army estimate
WE WENT TO SAIGON in early September to
yet another order-of-battle meeting, this
one convened in the austere conference room in
Westmoreland's headquarters. Among the offi-
cers supporting Westmoreland were Gen. Phil-
lip Davidson; head of intelligence (the military
calls it G-2) ; General Sidle, head of press rela-
tions ("What the dickens is he doing at an
OB conference?" I thought); Colonel Morris,
one of Davidson's aides; Col. Danny Graham,
head of the G-2 Estimates Staff; and, of course,
Col. Gains B. Hawkins, chief of the G-2 Order
of Battle Section. There were also numerous
lieutenant colonels, majors, and captains, all
equipped with maps, charts, files, and pointers.
The military dominated the first day of the
conference. A major gave a lecture on the VC's
low morale. I kept my mouth shut on the sub-
ject, even though I knew their documents
showed a dwindling VC desertion rate. Another
officer gave a talk: full of complicated statistics
which proved the Vietcong were running out of
men. It was based on something called the cross-
over memo which had been put together by
Colonel Graham's staff. On the second day we
got down to business-the numbers.
It was suspicious from the start. Every time
I'd argue one category up, the military would
drop another category down by the same
amount. Then there was the little piece of paper
put on everybody's desk saying that the mili-
tary would agree to count more of one type of
VC if we'd agree to eliminate another type of
VC. Finally, there was the argument over a
subcategory called the district-level service
troops.
I stood up to present the. CIA's case. I said
that I had estimated that there were-about
seventy-five service soldiers in each of the VC's
districts, explaining that I had averaged the
numbers in a sample of twenty-eight documents.
I briefly reviewed the evidence and asked
whether there were any questions.
"I have a question," said General Davidson.
"You mean to tell me that you only have twen-
ty-eight documents?"
`'Yes sir," I said. "That's all I could find."
"Well, I've been in the intelligence business
for many years, and if you're trying to sell me
a number on the basis of that small a sample,
you might as well pack up and go home." As I
resumed my seat, Davidson's aide, Colonel Mor-
ris. turned around and said, "Adams, you're
full of shit."
A lieutenant colonel then got up to present
the military's side of the case. He had counted
about twenty service soldiers per district, he
said, and then he went on to describe how a
district was organized. When he asked for ques-
tions, I said, "How many documents are in your
sample?"
He looked as if somebody'had kicked him in
the stomach. Instead of answering the question,
he repeated his description of how the VC or-
ganized a district.
Then George Carver interrupted him. "Come,
come, Colonel," he said. "You're not answering
the question. General Davidson has just taken
Mr. Adams to task for having only twenty-eight
documents. in his sample. It's a perfectly legiti-
mate question. How many have you in yours?"
In a very low voice, the lieutenant colonel
said, "One." I looked over at General David-
son and Colonel Morris to see whether they'd
denounce the lieutenant colonel for having such
a all sax-41e. Both of them were looking at
the ceiling.
"Colonel," I continued, "may I see your
document?" He didn't have it, he said, and,
besides, it wasn't a document, it was a POW
report.
Well, I asked, could he please try and remem-
ber who the twenty service soldiers were? He
ticked them off. I kept count. The total was
forty. -
"Colonel," -1 said,,. you have forty soldiers
here, not twenty. How'did you get from forty to
twenty?" -
"We scaled down the evidence," he replied.
"Scaled down the "evidence?"
"Yes," he said. "We cut out the hangers-on."
"And how do you determine what a hanger-on
is?"
"Civilians, for example."
Now,I knew that civilians sometimes worked
alongside VC service troops, but normally the
rosters listed them separately. So I waited until
the next coffee break to ask Colonel Hawkins
how he'd "scale down" the service troops in a
document I had. it concerned Long D,t Dis-
trict in the southern half of South Vietnam, and
its 111 service troops were broken down by
components. We went over each one.- Of the
twenty in the medical Component, Hawkins
would count three, of the twelve in the ordnance
section, he'd count two, and so forth, until Long
Dat's 111 service soldiers were down to just
over forty. There was no indication in the docu-
ment that any of those dropped were civilians.
As we were driving back from the conference
that day, an Army officer in the car with us
explained what- the real trouble was: "You
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know, our basic problem is that we've been told
to- keep our numbers under 300,000.'
TER, AFTER RETIRING from the Army, Cal-
L: onel Hawkins confirmed that this was basi-
cally the: case. At the start of the conference,
he'd been told to stay below a certain number-
He could no longer remember what it was, but
he recalled that the person who gave it to him
was Colonel Morris, the officer who had told me
I wag "full of shit."
The Saigon conference was in its third day,
when we received a cable from Helms that, for
all its euphemisms, gave us no choice but to.
accept the military's numbers. We did'so, and
the conference concluded that the size of the
Vietcong force in South Vietnam was 299,000.
We accomplished this by simply marching cer-
tain categories of Vietcong out of the order of
battle, and by using the military's "scaled-
down" numbers.
I left the conference extremely angry. Anoth-
er member of the CIA contingent, William Hy-
land (now head of intelligence at the Department
of State), tried to explain. "Sam, don't take it so
hard, You know what the political climate is.
If you think they'd accept the higher numbers,
you're, living in a dream world-" Shortly after
the conference ended, . another category was
frog-marched out of the estimate, which
dropped from 299,000 to 248,000.
I returned to Washington, and in October I
went once again in front of the Board of Na-
tional Estimates, by this time reducLd to only
its CIA members. ! told them exactly what had
happened at the conference__how the numbers
had been scaled down, which types of Vietcong
had left the order of battle, and even about the
affair of Long Dat District. They were sympa-
thetic.
"Sam, it makes my blood boil to see the mili-
tary cooking the books," one of the board
members said. Another asked, "Sam, have we
gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishon-
esty?" And I said, "Sir, we went past them last.
August." Nonetheless, the board sent the esti-
mate forward for the director's signature, with
the numbers unchanged. I was told there was
no other choice because Helms had committed
the CIA to the military's numbers.
"But that's crazy," I said. "The numbers
were faked." I made one last try. My memoran-
dum was.nine pages long. The first eight pages
told how the numbers had got that way. The
ninth page accused the-military of lying. If we
accepted their numbers, I argued, we would
not only be dishonest and cowardly, eve would
be stupid. I handed the memo to George Carver
to give to the director, and sent copies to every-
one I could think of in the research branch. Al-
though I was the only CIA analyst working on
the subject at the time, nobody replied. Two
days later Helms signed the estimate, along with
its doctored numbers.
That was that. I went into Carver's office and
quit Helms's staff. He looked embarrassed when
I told him why I was doing so, but he said there
was nothing he could do. I thanked him for all
he had done in the earlier part of the year and
for his attempt at trying to deal with real rather
than imaginary numbers. I thought of leaving
the CIA, but I still retained some faith in the
Agency, and I knew that I was the only person
in the government arguing for higher numbers,
with accurate evidence. I told Carver that the
research directorate had formed a VC branch,
in which, I said, I hoped to find somebody who
would listen to me.
Facing facts
5 N NOVEMBER General Westmoreland returned
to Washington and held a press conference.
"The enemy is running out of men," he said.
He based this on the fabricated numbers, and
on Colonel Graham's crossover memo. In early
December, the CIA sent McNamara another
"Whither Vietnam?" memo. It had the doc-
tored numbers, but this time I was forbidden to
change them. It was the same story with Helms's
New Year briefing to Congress. Wrong numbers,
no changes allowed. When I heard that
Colonel Hawkins, whom I still liked and ad-
mired; had been -reassigned to Fort Holabird in
Baltimore, I went to see him to find out what he
really thought about the order of battle. "Those
were the worst three months in my life," he
said, referring to July, August, and September,
and he offered to do anything he could to help.
When he had been asked to lower the estimates,
he-said, he had retained as many of the front-
line VC troops as possible. For several hours
we went over the order of battle. We had few
disagreements, but I began to see for the first
time that the Communist regulars, the only cate-
gory I'd never looked at, were also seriously
understated-perhaps by as many as 50,000
men. No one was interested, because adding
50,000 troops would have forced a reopening of
the issue of numbers, which everyone thought
was settled. On January 29, 1968, 1 began the
laborious job of transferring my files from
Carver's office to the newly formed Vietcong
branch.
The next day the VC launched the Tet offen-
sive. Carver's office was chaos. There were so
many separate attacks that someone was as-
signed full.time to stick red pins in the: map of
South Vietnam just to keep track of there.
Within a week's time it was clear.that the scale
of the Tet offensive was the biggest surprise to
American intelligence since Pearl Harbor. As
I read the cables coming in, I experienced both
anger and a sort of grim satisfaction. There was
just no way they could have pulled it off with
only 248,000 men, and the cables were begin-
ning to show which units had taken part. Many
had never been in the order of battle at all;
others had been taken out or scaled down. I
made a collection of these units, which I showed
Carver. Two weeks later, the CIA agreed to
re-open the order-of-battle controversy.
SUDDENLY I WAS ASKED to revise and extend
the memorandums that' I had been attempt-
ing to submit for the past eighteen months.
People began to congratulate me, to slap me
on the back and say what a fine intelligence
analyst I was. The Agency's chief of research,
R. Jack Smith, who had once called me "the
outstanding analyst" in the CIA but who had
ignored all my reporting on the Vietcong, came
down from the seventh floor to shake my hand.
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"We're glad to have you back," he said. "You.
know more about Vietnam than you did about
the Congo." All of this disgusted me, and I ac-
cepted the compliments without comment. What
was the purpose of intelligence, I thought, if not
to warn people, to tell them what to expect? As
many as 10,000 American soldiers had been
killed in the Tet offensive because the generals
had played politics with the numbers, and here
I was being congratulated by the people who
had agreed to the fiction.
In February the Agency accepted my analy-
sis, and in April another order-of-battle confer-
ence was convened at CIA headquarters. West-
moreland's delegation, headed by Colonel Gra-
ham (now a lieutenant general and head of
the Defense Intelligence Agency) continued
to argue for the lower numbers. But from that
point forward the White House stopped using
the military estimate and relied on the CIA
estimate of 600,000 Vietcong.
All along I had wondered whether the White
House had had anything to do with fixing the
estimates. The military wanted to keep them
low in order to display the "light at the end of
the tunnel," but it had long since occurred to
nie that maybe the generals were under pres-
sure from the politicians. Carver had told me a
number of times that he had mentioned my OB
figures to Walt Rostow of the White House. But
even now I don't know whether Rostow ordered
the falsification, or whether he was merely re-
luctant to face unpleasant facts. Accepting the
higher numbers forced the same old, decision:
pack up or send a lot more troops.
On the evening of :'larch 31, the question of
the White House role became, in a way, irrele.
vant. President Johnson made his-announce-
meat that he- wasn't going to run again. Who-
ever the next President was, I felt, needed to be
told about the sorry state of Americanintelli-
gence so that he could do something about it.
The next morning, April 1, I went to the CIA
inspector general's office and said: "Gentlemen,
I've come here to file a complaint, and it in-
volves both the research department and the
director. I want to make sure that the next ad-
ministration finds out what's gone on down
here." On May 28 1 filed formal charges and
asked that they be sent to "appropriate mem-
bers of the White House staff" and to the Pres-
ident's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I
also requested an investigation by the CIA in.
spector general. Helms responded by telling the
inspector general to start an investigation. This
took two months. The director then appointed a
high-level review board to go over the inspector
general's report. The review board was on its
way to taking another two months when I went
to the general counsel's office and talked to a
Mr. Ueberhorst. I said, "Mr. Ueberhorst, I
wrote a report for the White House about three
months ago complaining about the CIA manage-
ment, and I've been getting the runaround ever
since. What I want is some legal advice. Would
I be breaking any laws if I took my memo and
carried it over to the White House myself?" A
few days later, on September 20, 1968, the ex=
ecutive director of the CIA, the number-three
man in the hierarchy, called me to his office:
"Mr. Adams, we think well of you, but Mr.
Helms says he doesn't want your memo to leave
the building." I took notes of the conversation,
so my reproduction of it is almost verbatim.
"This is not a legal problem but a practical one
of your future within the CIA," I was told.
"Because if you take that memo to the White
House, it will be at your own peril, and even
if you get what you want by doing so, your use-
fulness to the Agency will thereafter be iiil."
The executive director carried on this conversa-
tion for thirty-five minutes. I copied it all out
until he said, "Do you have anything to say,
Mr. Adams?" "Yes sir," I said, "I think I'll
take this right on over to the White House, and
please tell the director of my intention." I
ti~rote a nie:norandeun of the conversation, and
sent it hack up to the executive director's office
%,ith a covering let!er saying. "1-hope I'm quot-
ing you correctly; please tell :ale if I'm not."A short while later .he called me back- to his
office and,said, "I'm afraid there's been a mis-
understanding, because the last thing in the
world the director wanted to do was threaten..
He has decided that this thing can go forward."
I waited until after the Presidential election-
Nixon won, and the next day I called the sev-
enth floor to ask if it was now okay to send on
my memo to the White House. On November 8,
1.968, Mr. Helms summoned me to his office.
The first thing he said to me was "Don't take
notes." To The best of my recollection, the con-
versation then proceeded along the following
lines. He asked what was bothering me; did I
think my supervisors were treating me unfairly,
or weren't they promoting me fast enough? No,
I said. My problem. was that he caved in on t c
numbers right before Tel. I enlarged on the
theme for. about ten minutes. He listened with-
out expression, and when I was done he asked
what 1. would have had him do-take on the
whole military? I said, that under the circum-
stances, that was the only thing he could have
done; the military's numbers were faked. He
then told me that I didn't know what things
were like, that we could have told the White
House that there were a million more Vietcong
out there, and'it wouldn'thave made. the slight-
est bit of difference in our policy. I said that
we weren't the ones to decide about policy; all
we should do was to send up the right numbers
and let them worry. He asked me who I wanted
to see, and I said that I had requested appropri_-
ate members of the White House staff and the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
in my. memo, but, frankly, I didn't. know. who
the appropriate members were. He asked wheth-
er Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rol;tow would
be all right. I told him that was not only accept-
able, it was generous, and he said he would
arrange the appointments for me.
With that I was sent around. to see the deputy
directors. The chief of research, R. Jack Smith,
asked me what the matter was, and I told him
the same things I had told Helms. The Vietnam
war, he said, was an extraordinarily complex af-
fair, and the size of the enemy army was only-
his exact words----"a small but significant byway
of the problem." His deputy, Edward Procter,
now the CIA's chief of research, remarked, "Mr-
Adams, the real problem is you. You ought to
look into yourself."
FTF,R MAKING THESE ROUND'S. I wrote letters
Ato Rostow and Taylor, telling them who I
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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
his permission to send them on. Permission was
denied, and that was the last I ever heard about
meeting with Mr. Rostow and General Taylor.
In early December I did manage to see the
executive secretary of the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board, J. Patrick Coyne.
He told me that a few days earlier Helms had
sent over my memo, 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
charges. A few days after Nixon's inauguration,
in January 1969, I sent the paper to Helms's
office with a request for permission to send it
to the White House. Permission was denied in
a letter from the deputy director, Adm. Rufus
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.
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 oftcial channels. his had never occurred
to me before, not even when Helms had author-
ized the doctored numbers in the month before
Tet. I had met' a man named John Court, a
member of the incoming staff of the National
Security Council, and through him I hoped for
a measure of redress. I gave him my memoran-
dum and explained its import-including West-
moreland'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. Three 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 in-
terested, there didn't seem to be any other place
I could go. I felt I'd done as much as I possibly
could do, and that was that.
NCE AGAIN I THOUGHT about quitting the
Agency. But again I decided not to, even
though my career was pretty much in ruins. Not
only had the deputy director just suggested that
I resign, but I was now working under all kinds
of new restrictions. I was no longer permitted to
go to Vietnam. After the order-of-battle confer-
ence in Saigon in September 1967, Westmore-
land's headquarters had informed the CIA sta-
tion chief that I was persona non grata,, and
that they didn't want inc on any military in-
stallations throughout the country. In CIA head-
quarters I was more or less confined to quar-
ters, since I was no longer asked to attend any
meetings at which outsiders were present. I
was even told to cut back on the lectures I was
giving about the VC to CIA case officers bound
for Vietnam."
I suppose what kept me from quitting this
time was that I loved the job. The numbers busi-
ness was going along fairly well, or so I thought,
and I was becoming increasingly fascinated with
what struck me as another disturbing question.
Why was it that the Vietcong always seemed to
know what"i"ve were up to, while we could never
find out about them except through captured
documents? At the time of the Tet offensive, for
example, the CIA had only a single agent in the
enemy's midst, and he was low-level.
At about this time, Robert Klein joined the
VC branch. He had just graduated from college,
and I thought him one of the brightest and most
delightful people I had ever met. We began bat-
ting back and forth the question of why the
VC always knew what was going to happen next.
Having written a study on the Vietcong secret
police in 1967, 1 already knew that the Com-
munist's had a fairly large and sophisticated es-
pionage system. But I had no idea how large,
and, besides, there were several other enemy
organizations in addition to the secret police
that . had infiltrated the Saigon government.
Klein and I began to sort them out. The biggest
one, we found, was called the Military Proselyt-
izing Directorate, which concentrated on re-
cruiting agents in the South Vietnamese Army
and National Police. By May 1969 we felt
things were beginning to fall into place, but we
still hadn't answered the fundamental question
of how many agent.; the VC had in the South
Vietnamese government. l decided to do the oh-
vious thing, which was to start looking in the
captured documents for references to spies.
Klein and I each got a big stack of documents,
and we began going through then), one by one.
Within two weeks we had references to more
than 1,000 VC agents. "Jesus Christ!" I said to
Klein. "A thousand agents! And before Tet the
CIA only had one." Furthermore, it was clear
from the documents that the thousand we'd
found were only the top of. a very big iceberg.
Right away I went-off to tell everybody the
bad news. I had begun to take a perverse plea-
sure in niv role as the man in opposition at the
Agency- The first person I spoke to was the
head of the Vietnam branch of the CIA Clandes-
tine Services. I said, "Hey, a guy called Klein
and I just turned up references to over 1,000
VC agents, and from the looks of the documents
tlt:e,,overall number might run into the tens of
thousands." He said, "For. God's sake, don't
open that Pandora's box. We have enough trou-
bles as it is."
The next place I tried to reach was the Board
of National Estimates, which was just conven-
ing its annual meeting on the Vietnam draft.
Because of the trouble I'd made the year before,
and because the meeting included outsiders, I
wasn't allowed to attend. By now, Klein and I
had come to the very tentative conclusion, based
mostly on extrapolations from documents, that
the Military Proselytizing Directorate alone had
* In mid-1968 I had discovered that Agency officers
sent to Vietnam received a total of only one hour's
instruction on the organization and methods of opera.
tion of the Vietcong. Disturbed that they should be
sent tip against so formidable a foe with so little
training, I had by the end of the year increased the
hours from one to twenty-four. I gave nto.t of the
8 lectures myself.
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20.000 agents in the South Vietnamese Army
and government. This made it by far the biggest
agent network in the history of espionage, and
I was curious to know whether this was known
in Saigon. I prompted a friend of mine to ask
the CIA's Saigon station chief-back in Wash-
ington to give another briefing I wasn't allowed
to attend-just how many Vietcong agents there
were in the South Vietnamese Army. The sta-
tion chief (a new one; Jorgy had long since
moved) was taken aback at the question. He'd
never considered it before. He said, "Well, the
South Vietnamese Military Security Service has
about 300 suspects under consideration. I think
that about covers it." If Klein and I were any-
where near right with our estimate of 20,000,
that made the station chief's figure too low by
at least 6,000 percent.
New discoveries
Y-ft ECIDING THAT WE DIDN'T yet know enough
to make an issue of the matter, Klein and I
went back to plugging the documents. The more
we read, the wilder the story became. With a
great deal of help from the CIA counterintelli-
gence staff, we eventually found that Vietcong
agents were running the government's National
Police in the northern part of the country, that
for many years the VC had controlled the coun-
terintelligence branch of the South Vietnamese
Military Security Service (which may explain
why the station chief's estimate was so low),
and that in several areas of Vietnam, the VC
were in charge of our own Phoenix Grogram.
Scarcely a clay passed without a new discovery.
The most dramatic of them concerned a Viet-
cong agent posing as a South Vietnamese ord-
nance sergeant in Da I, ang. The document said
that the agent had been responsible for setting
oft explosions at the American air base in April
1969, and destroying 40,000 tons of ammuni-
tion worth $100 million. The explosions were
so big that they attracted a Congressional in-
vestigation, but the military managed to pass
them off as having been started accidentally by
a grass fire. %*
The problem with all these reports was not
that they were hidden, but that they'd never
been gathered and analyzed before in a system-
atic.. manner. Although CIA men in the field
were aware of VC agents, Washington had failed
to study the extent of the Vietcong network.
This is exactly what Klein and I attempted
in the fall of 1969. By this time we had con-
cluded that the total number of VC agents in
the South, Vietnamese Army and government
.was in the neighborhood of 30,000. While we
admitted that the agents were a mixed bag
most of them were low-level personnel hedging
their bets-we nonetheless arrived at an ex-
tremely bleak overall conclusion. That was that
the agents were so numerous, so easy to recruit,
and so hard to catch that their existence "called
into question the basic loyalty of the South
Vietnamese government and armed forces."
This, in turn, brought up questions about the
ultimate chances for success of our new policy
of turning the war over to the Vietnamese. % In late November Klein and I had just about
finished the first draft of our study when we
were told that under no circumstances was it to
leave CIA headquarters, and that, specificali ,
it shouldn't go to John Court of the White
House staff. Meanwhile, however, I had called
Court a number of times, telling him that the
study existed, and that it suggested that Viet-
namization probably wouldn't work. For the next
two-and-a-half months, Court called the CIA
front office asking for a draft of our memo on
agents. Each time he was turned down.
Finally, in mid-February 1970, Court came
over to the VC branch, and asked if he could
have a copy of the agent memorandum. I told him
he couldn't, but that I supposed it was okay if he
looked at it at a nearby desk. By closing time
Court had disappeared, along with the -nemo. I
phoned him the next morning at the Executive
Office Building and asked him if lie had it. "Yes,
I took it. Is that okay?" he said. It wa.:n't okay,
and shortly after informing my superiors I re-
ceived a letter of reprimand for releasing the
memo "to an "outsider." (Court, who worked
for the White House, was the "outsider.") All
copies of the study within the CIA-several
were around being reviewed-were recalled to
the Vietcong branch and put in a safe. Klein
was removed from working on agents, and told
that if lie didn't "shape up," he'd be fired.
T II}: HESF.AIti:II DEI'AItT1iFNT and perhaps even
Iclins (I don't know) apparently were ap-
palled by the agent memo's reaching the White
House. It was embarrassing for the CIA, since
we'd never let anything like that out before.
To suddenly say, oh, by the way,-'our ally,
the South Vietnamese government, is crawling
with spies, might lead someone to think that
maybe the Agency should have noticed them
sooner. We'd been in the war, after all, for
almost six years. --
Court later wrote a precis of the memo and
gave it to Kissinger. Kissinger gave it to Nix-
on. Shortly thereafter, the White House sent a
directive to Helms which said, in effect: "Okay,
Helms, get that damn agent paper out of the
safe drawer." Some months later, the Agency
coughed it up, almost intact.'
Meanwhile, Klein quit. I tried to talk him out
of it, but he decided to go to graduate school.
He did so in September 1970, but not before
leaving a letter of resignation with the CIA in-
spector general. Klein's letter told the complete
story of the agent study, concluding with his
opinion that the White House would never have
learned about the Communist spies had it not
been for John Court's sticky firigers.
By now my fortunes had sunk to a low ebb.
For . the first time in seven years, I was given
an unfavorable fitness report. I 'was rated "max-
ginal" at conducting research; I had lost my
"balance and objectivity" on the war, and, worst
of all, I was the cause of the "discontent lead-
ing to the recent resignation" of Klein. For
these shortcomings I was being reassigned to a
position where I would be "less directly involved
in research on the war." This meant I had to
leave the Vietcong branch and join a small his-
torical staff, where I was to take up the relative-
ly innocuUUS job of writing a history of the
Cambodian rebels.
Once again, I considered resigning from the
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CIA, but the job still had me hooked, and ever
since the c'otp that del;o-eel Sihanouk in March
1970 1 had b.-en wondering what going
fill :n Cambodia. Within a few weeks of that
coup, the Communist army had begun to dis
appear from the sotahern half of South Viet-
Want for Service next B oor, and 1 was curious to
find out -.vital it was up to. When I reported
to the historical staff, I began, as usual, to Col-
lect donuntents. This was toy !Hain occupation
for almost the next five mouths. I knew so lit-
tle about Cambodia that I was fairly indiscrim-
inate, and therefore grabbed just about every-
thing I could find. By late April 1971, 1 had
gathered several thousand reports, and had di-
vided them into broad categories, such as "mil-
itary" and "political." In early May, I began
to go through the "military" reports.
One of the first of the-.e was an interroga-
tion report of a Vietcong staff officer who had
surrendered in Cambodia in late 1970. The staff
officer said he belonged to a Cauul odian Com-
munist regional command with a code name
I'd never heard of: C40. Apparently C :0 had
several units attached to it, including regiments,
and I'd never heard of any of these, either. And.,
it seemed, the units were mostly composed of
Khmers, of whom C-40 had a total of 18,000.
Now that appeared to me to be an awful lot of
Khmer-soldiers just for one area, so I decided
to check it against our Cambodian order of
battle. Within a month I made a startling dis-
covery: there was no order of battle. All I could
find was a little sheet of paper estimating the
of V to
size t)S the 1st tiler L.vriiaT.iilli?t a Army at 5,400.9'
10,000 men. This sheet of paper, with, exactly
the same numbers, had been kicking around
since early 1970.
It was'the same story as our Vietcong esti-
mate of 1966, only worse- In Vietnam we had
neglected to look at three of the four parts of
the Vietcong Army; in Cambodia we hadn't
looked at the Khmer Communist Army at all.
It later turned out that the 5,000-to-10,000 fig-
ure was based on numbers put together by a
sergeant in the Royal Cambodian Army in 1969.
From then on, it was easy. Right in the same
room with me was every single intelligence re-
port on the Khmer rebels that had ever come
in. Straightaway I found what the VC Army had
been doing in Cambodia since Sihanouk's fall:
it had put together the largest and best advi-
sory structure in the-Indochina war. Within two
weeks I had discovered thirteen regiments, sev-
eral dozen battalions, and a great many coin-
panies and platoons. Using exactly the same
methods that I'd used on the Vietcong estimate
before Tet (only now the methods were more
refined), I came to the conclusion that the size
of the Cambodian Communist Arnty was not
5,000 to 10,000 but more like 100,000 to
150,000. In other words, the U.S. government's
official estimate way Ile.tween ten and thirty
tit::e5 too low.
My metro was ready in early June, :uul thi?
time I gave a copy to John Court of the White
House the day before I turned it in at the Agen.
cy. This proved to have been a wise move, be-
cause when I turned it in I was told, "Under
no circum=tances does this go out of the room."
It was the best order-of-battle paper I'd ever
lP
done. It had about 120 footnotes, referencing
about twice that many intelligence reports, and
it was solid as a rock.
A week later, I was taken off the Khmer Com-
munist Army and forbidden to work on num-
bers anymore.A junior analyst began reworking
my memo with instructions to hold the figure
below 30.000. The analyst puzzled over this for
several months. and at last settled on the same
method the military had used in lowering the
Vietcong estimate before Tet. He marched two
whole categories out of the order of battle and
"scaled down" what was left. In November
1971, he wrote up a memo placing the size of the
Khmer Communist Army at 15,000 to 30,000
men. The CIA published the memo, and that
number became the U.S. government's official
estimate.
More distortions
THE PRESENT OFFICIAL ESTIMATE of the
Khmer rebels-65,000-derives from the ear-
lier one. It is just as absurd. Until very recently
the Royal Cambodian Army was estimated at
over 200,000 men. We are therefore asked to
believe that the insurgents, who control four-
fifths of Cambodia's land and most of its peo-
ple, are outnumbered by the ratio of 3 to 1. In
fact, if we count all the rebel soldiers, including
those dropped or omitted from the official esti-
mate, the Khmer Rebel Army is probably larger
than the government's-perhaps by a consider-
able margin. dThe trouble with this kind of underestimate
is not simply a miscalculation of numbers. It
also distorts the meaning of the war. In Cam-
bodia, as. in the rest of Southeast Asia, the
struggle is for allegiance, and the severest test
of loyalty has to do with who can persuade the
largest number of peasants to. pick up a gun.
When American intelligence downgrades the
strength of the enemy army, it ignores the Com-
munist success at organizing and recruiting peo-
ple. This is why. the Communists call the strug-
gle a "people's war" and- why the government
found it difficult to understand.
I spent the rest of 1971 and a large part of
1972 trying to get the CIA to raise the Cam-
bodian estimate. It was useless. The Agency
was busy with other matters, and I became in-
creasingly discouraged. The Cambodian affair
seemed to me to be a repeat df the Vietnam
one;. the same people made the same mistakes,
in precisely the same ways, and everybody was
allowed to conceal his duplicity. In the fall of
1972 I decided to make otie last attempt at
bringing the shoddiness of American intelli-
gence to the attention of someone, anyone who
could do anything about it.
Between October 1972 and January 1973 I
approached the U.S. Army inspector general,
the CIA inspector general,. and the Congress--
all to no avail. To the Army inspector general
I delivered a memorandum setting forth the de-
tails of what had happened to the VC estimate
before Tet. I mentioned the possibility of Gen-
eral Westmoreland's complicity, which might
have implicated him in, three violations of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice. The memo-
randum asked for an investigation, but the in-
spector general explained that I was in the
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wrong jurisdiction. Of the CIA inspector gen-
eral I requested an investigation of the Cambo-
dian estimates, but he adopted the device of
neglecting to answer his mail, and no inquiry
took place. In a last desperate measure-des-
perate because my friends at the CIA assured
me that Congressional watchdog committees
were a joke-I even appealed to Congress. To
committees in both the House and Senate that
watch over the CIA I sent a thirteen-page
memorandum with names, dates, numbers, and a
sequence of events. A stall assistant to the Senate
Armed Services Committee thought it an inter-
esting document, but he doubted that the In-
telligence Subcommittee would take it up be-
cause it hadn't met in over a year and a half.
Lucien Nedzi, the chief superintendent of the
CIA in the House, also thought the document
"pertinent," but he observed that the forth-
coming elections obliged him to concern him-
self primarily with the question of busing.
When I telephoned his office in late November,
after the elections had come and gone, his ad-
ministrative assistant told me, in effect, "Don't
call us; we'll call you."
By mid-January 1973 1 had reached the end
of the road.'I happened to read a newspaper
account of Daniel Ellsberg's trial in Los An-
geles, and I noticed that the government was
alleging that Ellsherg had injured the national
security by releasing estimates of the enemy
force in Vietnam: I looked, and damned if they
weren't from the same order of battle which the
military had doctored back in 1967. Imagine!
Hanging a man for leaking faked numbers! In
late February I went to Los Angeles to testify
at the trial and told the story of how the num-
bers got to be so wrong. When I returned to
Washington in March, the CIA once again
threatened to fire me. I complained, and, as
usual, the Agency backed down. After a de-
cent interval, I quit.
One last word. Some day, when everybody
has returned to his senses, I hope to go back
to the CIA as an-analyst. I like the work. 11
THE MORAL OF THE 'FACE
Readers interested in the question of integrity in Amer-
ican government might take note of three successful
bureaucrats mentioned in this chronicle. All of them ac-
knowledged or abetted the counterfeiting of military
intelligence, and all of them have risen to high places with-
in their respective apparats. Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham,.who
hel?ed to lower the U.S. Army's estimate of the Vietcong
WAS11-1114 rTCN POST
27 April 1975
~By JOYCE ILLIG
Company Man
PHILIP AGEE, the ex-CIA agent living in
England,-has finally found a publisher
and filmmaker to get his book.Inside the
Company: CIA Diary out to the American
public. Stonehill Publishing Company
will publish the book and Emile de Anto-
nio has purchased the film rights. .
Stonehill, a small, relatively unknown
New York trade house distributed by
George Braziller & Co., signed a contract
with Scott Meredith, Agee's literary
agent,.giving Agee essentially the same
deal'he'd turned down with Straight Ar-
row Books: a $12,000 advance and a 6040
split on the paperback sale.
Stonchill is a four-year-old company
run by Jeffrey Steinberg. Steinberg is
young (late 20s), enthusiastic and persist-
ent. He was a founder of Chelsea House
publishers. and was hired in 1970 by Jann
Wenner to start Straight Arrow Books
with Alan Rinzler. He said that he didn't.,
strength, is now the head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency; Edward Procter, who steadfastly ignored accu-
rate intelligence, is now chief of the CIA research director-
ate; and William Hyland, who conceded the impossibility
of contesting a political fiction, is now the head of State De-
partment Intelligence. Theircollective docility might also in-
terest readers concerned with questions of national security.
last long because of personality differ-
ences with Wenner. Steinberg started
Stonehill and is backed by "a consortium
of European bankers."
Stonehill's current schedule for Agee's
book is to ship a first printing of 30,000
copies in June for July publication. The
probable price: $12.95. Steinberg is also
planning to add an index for the Ameri-
can edition.
"We're going to hold off on the mass
market paperback sale until we've com-
pleted our legal review and can deliver a
;reasonably meaningful warranty," said
Steinberg.
The American Civil Liberties Union
has given Steinberg a letter "agreeing to
provide as much legal assistance, at no
cost, as we warrant." This is in case all.
the rumors become fact concerning gov
ernment suppression of the book here
and threats of libel suits.
"There will definitely be a libel and in-
vasion of privacy review by our law firm,"
said Steinberg, "and there will probably
be a minor number of changes in the man=
uscript, but I don't think we'll have trou-
ble with Agee on them."
Scott Meredith said that Agee Is pre-
pared to warrant very little because he
has no money. "In the book deal as well as
the movie deal, the only warranty that
Agee is providing is the warranty that he
has.the rig t to sell these rights and that
the government doesn't own them," said
Meredith. I . "
Stonehill's biggest seller is a recently
published book called The Cocaire Pa-
pers. It's a $12.95 volume documenting,
Freud's use of cocaine.
Emile de Antonio, the underground
Marxist filmmaker, plans to make a fic-
tion film of Agee's.book, using different
names for everyone- except the author.
De Antonio, creator of the controversial
and highly praised documentaries "Point
of Order" (the Army-McCarthy hearings),
"In the Year of the Pig" (an overview of
the Vietnam war) and "Millhouse" (a sa-
tiric look at Nixon), has agreed to pay
$25,000 dollars against five per cent of the
profits-the producer's gross, not the net
-of the picture. Agee will receive $7500
when fie signs the contract and $17,500
in the first day of principal photography,
which has to be within a year.
Haskel_Wexler has agreed to be the di-
rector of cinematography and De Antonio
'said that Jane Fonda has volunteered to
be in it.
JOYCE ILLIG writes regularly on the
publishing scene for Book World.
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NEW YORK TIMES
30 April 1975
Bomb .fasts Home
.Of a C.I.A. Official
in a Denver Suburb:
DENVER, April 29 (UPI)-Al
pipe bomb explosion outside
the suburban home of a Central
Intelligence Agency official
may have been caused by radi-
cals inspired by the bombing
of a bank hours earlier, or
may have been the work of
a "crackpot", the police said
today.
The bomb exploded in front!
of the home of James Sommer-
ville a C.I.A. regional director,
30 minutes before midnight
Monday, shattering windows
ar)d shredding portions of the
roof on the one-story brick
house in South Denver. Win-
dows in a house next door
were also broken.
Bricks were blown from the
front wall and a sprinkler sys-
tem inside the house were da-
maged, but neither Mr. Som-
merville's wife, Allane, nor
their 14-year-old son, asleep
att. the time of the blast, were
hurt.
Mrs. Sommerville, who said
that her husband was in Texas,
added: "I know people are con-
n^cting this with his job but,
there's no real proof. I really)
can't say what happened; Il
was asleep at the time. The
explosion woke me up."
,A bomb squad detective, Fred
Stevenson, said that the blast
tlid not appear related to the
explosion of a satchel of dyna-
mite at the American National
Bank in Denver 12 hours ear-
lier. Six employes received min-
or: injuries in that explosion.
But he said that the pipe bomb,
pushed against the foundation
of ? the Sommerville home,
might have been planted by
radicals who got the idea from
the bank explosion.
"You get one bombing an
there immediately follows a
rash of other," he said. "What
with all the publicity in the
papers about the C.I.A., it could
have been a radical group. Who
can say?"
The police said that they
were checking with other cities
in 6 which terrorists have set
off explosions to see if there
was a pattern to the bombings.:.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
27 April 1975
Our anti-intelligence agency..
President Ford has advised Ameri-
cans not to go on "refighting" a war
that is now finished for us. That seems
good advice, but h qualification goes
with it: We had better think over that
war at least long enough to learn from
Perhaps the basic lesson to be learned
Is that self-deception does not work. We
have heard a great deal about efforts
by the Johnson and Nixon administra-
tions to mislead the public. Less well
known, but even more disastrous, were
the determined and largely successful
efforts of government agencies to de-
ceive themselves. than government estimates.
it in a safe a week later, marked "in-
definite hold."
Over the next six and a half yearsi
Mr. Adams amassed hundreds of docu-
ments c l e a r l y indicating- that Com-
munist'strength in Indochina was vastly
greater than American officials thought.
He concluded, for instance, that there
were actually 600,000 Viet Cong-not
270,000--in the south; that.V. C. agents
were in control of the South Vietnamese
Military Security Service, and in some
areas were running the CIA's own
"Phoenix" program of political assassi-
nation; that Communist strength in
Cambodia was 10 to 30 times greater
A horrifying example. appears in.Bar? Each attempt to get this information
per's Magazine this month.. Taken at thin official c h a a n e l s to the White
face value; the 'story of Sabi. Adams, House was met with silence,- inaction,
former chief analyst of Viet Nam affairs or specific warnings to keep quiet, Mr.
for the -Central Intelligence Agency., Adams managed to convey his findings
shows that unwelcome facts were con- to the inspectors-general of the CIA and
sistently' covered up instead of reported. the army and the CIA "watchdog""com-
Accurate data on enemy strength would mittees of House and Senate.- Nothing
.have faced the White House with a happened. In 1973, after his superiors
painful dilemma, says Mr. Adams;' it
would , either have had to pull out .of
Viet Nam or throw.far more men and
materiel into an unpopular war. So the
reports were suppressed. Our policy
makers continued to make decisions on
the basis of information which intelli-
gence had reason to know was vwronao
o- .
again threatened to fire him-this time
for testifying in the Ellsberg trial-Mr.
Adams resigned.
It appears, then, that since 1966 our
intelligence establishment had access to
information that could have radically
changed this government's policies in
Southeast Asia-policies that have now
proved ruinously wrong. The information
Mr... Adams reports that in August,.. _ was kept. quiet and the man who. tried
1966, he found strong evidence in cap- to warn government leaders of it was
tured Viet Cong documents that. the treated as a troublemaker.
official estimate of V. C. strength in The questions now are [11 how- our
South Viet Nam-270,000 men-might be . intelligence system came to function as
200,000 too low, Mr. Adams sent this a protector and promoter of disastrous
explosive information to the CIA direc- ignorance, and [21 whether it is still
tor's office.. Nothing happened; it was functioning that way. The least that
read and' returned without questions or should result from Mr. Adams' dis-
comment. A. second memorandum closures- is a congressional inquiry to
simply disappeared. Mr. Adams found find the answers.
NATIONAL REVIEW
28 MARCH 1975
THE WASHINGTONIAN
MAY, 1975
? Talk about a responsible press. The media gave con-
siderable play a few weeks back to Dick Gregory .and
Ralph Schoenman when they dug up an old and very
blurred photograph taken the day of John F. Kennedy's
assassination in Dallas. They claimed that two of the
men in the background were Watergaters Frank Sturgis
and E. Howard Hunt, and, on the basis of that, made
the sweeping assertion that JFK had been the victim of
a CIA assassination attempt. Both AP and CBS News
refused to carry a 300-word statement by Hunt which
included the sentences: "I was not in Dallas, Texas, No-
vember 22, 1963; in fact I never visited" Dallas until
eight years later. I did not meet Frank Sturgis until
1972, nine years after we were allegedly together in
Dallas." Finally no one in sight bothered to inform 'the'
reader or listener of ' the antecedents of Schoenman.
Ralph Schoenman was the guru who got hold of the
senescent Bertrand Russell back in the Sixties and staged
that war crimes tribunal in Stockholm that indicted Lyn-
don Johnson and the United States of America for every
atrocity in the book. Schoenman was identified 'only as
"an associate" of Dick Gregory in the assassination in-
vestigation.
EXCERPTED:
...Parade maga-
zine recently ran a Personality
Parade item asking if New York
Times reporter Sy Hersh was
ever a CIA agent, and the an-
ser was no. But then George
Lardner of the Post was told
that Hersh actually did once
have CIA ties. Lardnerchecked
it out and finally called Hersh
to ask him pointblank:?Bov. you
finally got me," Hersh told
Lardner. "I was posted to the
Belgrade station in the 1950s
but was dismissed for homo-
sexual tendencies." Lardner,
according to friends of Hersh,
was set to run with the story
until he was told it was all a
put-on. Don't invite Hersh and
Lardner to the same party.
12
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Peer de Silva
od Fleas the C1
All article appeared in this space a few
4 weeks ago entitled "Abolish the
CIA!" it began by describing in some
considerable detail the Viet Cong bomb-
ing of the American Embassy in Saigon
in 1965. 1 was the CIA chief of station at
that time. I have a different perspective
on what happened that morning and on
the way Americans should be thinking
about the CIA these days.
The American Embassy was indeed
bombed on March 30, 1965, by a Viet
Cong terrorist squad who packed an old
sedan with about 350 pounds of C-4
plastic explosive and then rolled the car
up under my window in the embassy.
They set off a time-pencil detonator,
began a fire fight with local police on the
sidewalk and were blown up with them
when the car detonated just a few sec-
onds later.
One of my secretaries was killed in-
stantly, two of my officers were perma-
nently and totally blinded, and many
others on my staff were injured to one
degree or another, myself included. I
was let, away from the embassy. bleed-
ing like a stuck pig because that's the
way all head wounds bleed. Besides the
American casualties, more than a score of
innocent South Vietnamese passers-by
were killed by the blast and many
wounded.
GRIM PROPOSAL
This incident apparently served to
provide the author of the other article
with the notion that I had lied to him. He
reported that the Viet Cong terrorists had
finally opened his eyes and thus led him
to the grim proposal that the real way to
celebrate America's Bicentennial is by
abolishing the CIA entirely.
I find this proposal singularly frivolous
and downright dangerous. Whether one
likes the notion or not, the fact remains
that there are many tigers roaming loose
in the world today; they are unfriendly to
the United States and eagerly await the
opportunity to leap upon us if the risk is
not too great.
In certain quarters it has bec
had a significant military preponde.r:.'
ante in the two southernmost: milita.
ry regions. Even at that point, Soui:,
Vietnam might have saved its hear-r,
land, although it had dissipated ?.l-
-- most half its military aseets - -`-~
- But almost all combat-wort},y
troops were gathered into a static
perimeter defense around Saigon it-
self.
.Thieu did not use the arriving units
to mount spoiling attacks against the
encroaching enemy, who often simp-
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ly.-walked into major provincial capi-
tals. He did not even use the new ar-
rivals to replace other units for such
attacks, which were the only possible
hope of halting the Communist jug-
gernaut that was rolling forward vir-
tually unopposed.
Instead, he deployed the entire
South Vietnamese army as if it were
an: immense bodyguard intended to
protect himself and his clique-and
to. ensure that they would escape
with as much of their wealth as pos-
sible.
unknown, although it Is almost cer-
tainly in Europe and probably in
Switzerland, where Thieu is likely to
settle down.
By last week, the South Vietnamese
forces were totally demoralized.
Even those honest, patriotic officers
who had neither fled nor looted saw
no possible future in resistance. One-
star generals complained openly that
they had no idea what was happen-
ing and that they were receiving no
U,dcrs from their superiors.
The Vietnamese navy was concen
trated in the approaches to Saigon.
There could be only one conceivable
purpose, and it was not tactical
Those ships were to serve as a back-
up evacuation force for Thieu, his
clique and their loot. Already a sub-
stantial, if unknown, portion of the
three tons of gold presumably re-
maining had been distributed among
the clique.
Ironically, the high-ranking officer-
defectors did not appreciate that.
When the time came, the naval
crews would probably save them-
selves and their families. Large
bribes may, possibly, buy the senior
officials passages. But, some infor-
mants predict, the' angrily resentful
crews could well dishonor any agree-
ments they make. ,
. Demoralization has been intensified
by the rapid, visible American eva-
cuation. Ambassador Graham Martin
resisted the move for that reason. He. ,
may have waited too long to save
tens of thousands of Vietnamese
whom Washington considers particu-
larly worthy or imperiled.
`'Mme. Thieu had already left the
country when Thieu announced his
resignation last Monday. Otherwise,
-70.4 tons of gold. bars, treated as if
they were private property, were the
clique's chief concern, as were a few
millions in foreign-currency reserves.
,.Some informed estimates, inciden.
tally, are vastly larger, ranging up to
10 times as much. However, those
magnitudes appear most improbable
-not necessarily because much
greater sums were not diverted, but
because it would have been im-
prudent to retain them in Vietnam.
However, the true figures are, at this
,point, impossible to establish.
After failing to induce air carriers
to move the gold, the clique reported-
ly shipped three tons on a freighter
bound for Europe. The ship's name
and its exact destination are not
known to the informants.
An additional ton of gold was, ac-
cording to some informed reports?
moved by Air Vietnam, the national
airline, late last week and early this
week. Again, the exact destination is
NEW YORK TIMES
1 May 1975
In that atmosphere, Thieu was fi-
nally forced to step down. He was
succeeded, in violation of the strict
provisions of the Vietnamese consti-
tution, by 71-year-old former Premier
Tran Van Huong. The presidency
should have gone to Speaker of the
Assembly Tran Van Lam, but he
wanted no part of it.
A small group of senior Vietnamese
officers and officials, anticipating
Thieu's forced resignation, began sev-
eral months ago to press Huong, an
honest, capable, patriot, despite his
,years, to assume the responsibility.
That group promised Huong its full
support and counsel.
Even optimists, who predict that
Saigon could still hold out for a few
more weeks as a result of the politi-
cal shifts, now fear civil disorder
more than they do the immediate im-
pact of the Communist takeover. Sai-
gon, they predict, could become a Da
Nang on a much greater scale-with
revenge-inspired, loot-seeking mobs
rampaging through the streets, kill-
ing their countrymen and foreigners
indiscriminately.
The millions of Vietnamese crowd-
ed. into the Saigon enclave have no
place to go, unlike the Chinese Na-
tionalists in Shanghai, who had Tai-,
wan.
As a re" ult, even die-hard anti-
Communists now hope chiefly for an
orderly transfer of power to avoid a
final orgy of slaughter and destruc-
tion.
e
N NP
t.EUr,0j--y...Cd,1X_ns Scu Fall e-%f S
e, uron
-
-Shift of Policy Bxpected{ North Vietnamese Army. You
Polk y do anything against a
unanimous people Communist
? of ster Role of ATo or not, the idea of patriotism
is an incentive to which nobody
has found the equal."
America's allies in Western
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY Europe confined their official
Special to The New York Tlmes reactions to a hope that, now
BONN, April 30--Saigon'sl moderation, a sobriety to the that the fighting was over, the
surrender after 30 years ofl tone of the news from South- Vietnamese people would be al-
struggle in Vietnam was seen east Asia. lowed to heal their wounds in
in Europe today as a chasten-i , The news was commented peace,
in defeat for American policy,! upon and evaluated by bureaus ,France Defers Recognition
-bun there were hopes that it. of The New York Times in nine France, with. the only em-
might prove salutary. capitals of Europe and the bassy still functioning in
Privately, many in the Eu- Middle East, which gathered Saigon, was understood to have
ropean community believe that reactions through interviewsI decided to go slowly before
the United States now will be and statements by officials, shifting formal recognition to
able to turn from what they newspapers and individuals. the new government, a step
always considered a morbidl Almost exactly 21 years ago; that neutral Sweden took
preoccupation with Vietnam to! Gen. Marcel Bigeard was com- today.
more important issues of re-, manding paratroops ir. Dien - In West Germany, officials
lations between the United Bien Phu, the battlefield where said relations with South Viet
States and Europe. ; France lost her colonial hold: nam had not been broken even
From London to the eastern over Indochina. . : though its diplomats evacuated
Mediterranean, 'there was a. Today, from the defense, Saigon, last week.
sense of a historic event, pos- ministry in Paris, he said: . . Among officials in London
sibly a turning point. Even in "This defeat' was unavoid- and Bonn, there was a sense
Moscow, a day before the May able. On the one side, people of a strong need to overcome
Day celebration of the Com- who lived in a sort of cocoon the shock of the American loss,
munist ideals that Hanoi's softly woven by the Americans. of face in Saigon with a dem?
troops fought for, there was a On the other, a young, tough onstration in Europe of soli-i
darity with the United States.j
A meeting of all leaders ofl
members of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization except
President Va;ery Gdidasc rvzily
President Valery Giscard d'Es-
taing of France to be held in
Brussels May 29 and 30, will
fill this purpose.
The defeat of Saigon's Gov-
ernment, in a view often heard
here, was not so much a sign
of American weakness as it
was of American illusions. The
defeat did not come, West Ger-
many's Social Democratic party
declared a few days ago, be-
cause of insufficient American
military aid. It was a product
of an unpopular policy that
failed to take account of the
interests of "broad masses" ofj
the South Vietnamese.
Little Gloating in Moscow ; j
In Eastern Europe and in
Moscow, those who have long
supported Hanoi and the Na-
tional Liberation Front in South
'Vietnam welcomed the victory.
But today at least, there was
little official Soviet gloating.
"The events in South Viet-
nam," commented Tass, the of-,
42
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ficial Soviet press agency, more the old savage truth t.hatllpeace treaties were just paper,l
"again confirm the truth that tools of war, no matter how -and I think it's dumb to argue!
in th presnt time a regime that powerful, are no substitute for 1 that onlv the Americans or the
not inevitable. The Western
rests only on foreign bayonets spirit, without which an army ~ South Vietnamese were to world must be more concerned]
is utterly nonviable." is nothing but a huge mass of blame for breaking them."
to defend social justice. This)
Important and influential panic-stricken people." 11 Brandt Emphasizes Ties justice which is often synony4
voices in West Germany, Brit-, In Cairo, officials said pri-'I" Former Chancellor Willy mows with independence, in
ain and France seemed to agree vately that they thought the !Brandt put some thoughts Asia as in Europe."
with Moscow that the funda- American "defeat" was a major !about Vietnam into a domestic American diplomats in Bonn
mental error of the United blow for Secretary of StateKis- ipolitical campaign speech in believe that recent visits to'
States was in trying to defend ! I singer and for President Anwar Dortmund last week. Europe by 'members of Con-
a,country' that would not de-: ! el-Sadat, who has been trying ' "We will not allow ourselves gress have dispelled some of
fend itself. to use his "American connec- to be separated from the United the concern in West Ger-
. But Moscow does not emerge tion" to ease the threat of an- I States," he said. "Our sympa- many that the Congress might
in triumph from the humilia- (other war with Israel. !thy belongs to the victims of now be able to force the Ad-
tion that its allies inflicted on The outcome in Vietnam, de both sides and we should not ministration to reduce the num-
the United States. Officials and 1 scribed by the Cairo radio as ; deny our help to refugees and ber of American troops in
ordinary people in Western "a victory for all peace-loving I children. A European mercy Europe.
Europe believe, as the Conserv- ;people" will limit Mr. Kissin- mission is also called for he "There is a vague fear," said
ative former Foreign Secretary, jger's influence in Cairo, ac- cause this war resulted from one, "that there could be some
telex Douglas-Home, said in the cording to Egyptian diplomats the heritage of the European lasting effect after Vietnam in
British House of Lords today: land others. colonial period." the United States, a neoisola-
"The free world has reached I The importance of the Amer- In London, the new Ameri- tionisrn, but I think the over-
a point of insecurity where the ican commitment to the defense can Ambassador, Elliot L. Rich- riding feeling is relief that the
-democracies must require proof:1 of Western Europe against ag- ardson, said that British offi- fighting is over."
of Communist Russia's intbn-;Igression is especially stressed cials had gone out of their way:, Der Spiegel, the left-center
tions and deeds which are com- in West Germany, whose east- to tell him that the defeat in, West German news magazine,
patible with cooperation and !ern border with East Germany Vietnam should "not affect) said:
partnership." is the dividing line between op- American commitments in; "America bids farewell to
I Euro e." Vietnam with a
Israelis Are Concerned ,posing social and political sys- P guilty con-
tems. As in West Germany, some' science but glad the darkest
!
' There is no country more From the lowliest stonework- British newspapers have been j hours of U.S. history are end-
dependent on United States mil- !er in the Rhine Valley to Chan- less confident. The Daily Tele-i ing."
itary assistance for protection);cellor Helmut Schmidt, there! graph said today: "America has; In Rome, Pope Paul VI issued
against aggression than Israel. Iseems to be little inclination received a fearful jab in the! a cautious statement through
There was some nervousness 'towards equating Vietnam and face, from which it will takeI the Vatican spokesman, Feder-
among Israelis today that the an count years to recover." ^ ico Alessandrini, who said that
turn of events in Indochina Y ry in Europe. "It is world Communism's! the Pontiff shared the "anxiety
My friends and I used to !
could weaken the credibility ofj talk about it a lot," said a biggest victory, the free) and trepidation" Roman
American su
pport for Israel. : worker in Cologne, "but even world's-- biggest defeat,.. it, Catholics in South Vietnam and
The Israeli newspaper Maarivl there, you had 500,000 trot s added: hoped tba real peace could
,.ommented, however: "The fi- P Jacques Faris, editor of y: I now be brought about in Viet-
, we said, "The same thing Monde in Paris, wrote toda nam in strict respect of civil,
nal sad chapter of the Vietnam I -m happen to their. as hap-
r rugg!e demonstrated once)"' rr-~' "Contra aitu roll i6u5 ri ii`s."
?Y to the vronhecies. . 6
,' r! tti~
pen--- - to the Frenci ate .. ai,nrv ...
BALTIMORE SUN
1 May 1975
US?t o
Stop the dothines
Washington-The United goal can be achieved. Jtion that the United States, giv-
States, which for years has been Mr. Kissinger said in his en the feelings of Congress on
arguing the validity of the dom--? Tuesday press conference that Indochina, will neither guaran- recognize the new government I
ino theory in one form or anoth- it is too early to assess the con- tee the defense of other non- in Saigon.
er, now must persuade its re- sequences of the fall of South Communist nations in the area Mr. Kissinger said American
maining Asian allies that it isn't Vietnam on the rest of Asia., nor expect commitments from officials will confer soon with
necessarily so. ! But he added: them. Indonesia, Singapore, Australia
President Ford and Henry A. "There is no question that Further, since the "sustain- and New Zealand. The first two,
Kissinger, Secretary of State, the outcome in Indochina will able" commitments to Asia are while enjoying stable govern-
had argued with increasing vig- have consequences not only in 'obviously severely limited, giv- ments and a comfortable geo-
or in the weeks before the fall! Asia, but in many other parts of 1 'en the mood of both the nation graphical distance from Indo-
of South Vietnam and Cambod- the world. To deny these conse and the Congress, the United china, are nevertheless anxious
is to the Communists that the quences is to miss the PossiblitY States to work out a method of living
might be expected to failure of the American Con- of dealing with them." give its unofficial blessing to with a bigger Communist pres- ;
gress to appropriate emergency Then there was the parting whatever in the area can make accommodations ence in the area and in neutral-
aid to those countries could fill-up of optimism, obligatorY I izing the destablizing effects it l
have disastrous consequences as counterpoint to the secret- with Communist regimes. might have.
for American foreign policy ary's public pessimism "But I; Many non-Communist coun- Australia and New Zealand
around the world. am confident that we can deal tries, including some stanch enjoy the additional comfort of
Allies, they argued, would with them, and we are deter- American io long, strong ties with the United
believe they no longer could de- mined to manage..." ed allies
en,
to States, reinforced by common
encouragement
pend on American promises of One of the lessons to draw move in th;.t direction. Thai- Anglo-Saxon beginnings. But
support. Enemies would probe from the United States's Indo- land is scrambling toward a they, too, are trying to adjust to
for weak spots. I china experience, Mr. Kissinger! neutral stance, ordering South the new realities of the growing
Mr. Kissinger has made it said, is that "foreign policy Vietnamese refugees to move power of non-Anglo, non-demo-
clear that the chief objective must be sustained over decades, on quickly, guaranteeing the re- cratic regimes in Asia. Austral-
for American foreign policy in if it is to be effective, and if its turn to Cambodia and South ! ia, significantly, already has
Asia now will be to reassure the, cannot be, then it has to be tai-l Vietnam of war materiel taken I announced its intention of rec-
allies and warn the enemies. lie) lured to what is sustainable." , from those countries by the ref- ! ognizing the new government in
has not made it clear how that: I That seemed a clear indica-' ugees, and moving quickly to I South Vietnam.
43
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WASHINGTON STAR
30 April 1977
Arthur Goldb
erg was American ties, by the extent of the destruction
permanent representative to th
e
United Nations, 1965-68, and was as-
sociate justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States, 1962-65. He is
now in the private practice of law.
of life and property in Vietnam, and In reassessing our commitments,
by reports that requests have been we must d
i
eterm
ne by constitutional
made of the President for substantial processes and candid, public discus-
troop reinforcements in South Viet- sion what our real interests are,
Warn.... Public support is
e
i
p
rma-
nterests which would truly justify
By Arthur J. Goldberg nently and substantially eroded.... commitment of American forces.
The war in Vietnam is finished. And never has a serious move to- Public opinion polls which indicate
The cost is incalculable - in lives, wards a political settlement been that the American people support our
American and Vietnamese; in dol- more necessary." commitments to Europe, to. Japan, to
Jars; in divisiveness among our peo- The thesis of this and prior memo- Israel, areas of vital interest, are not
ple; in disruption of our economy; randa and statements by me to the public opinion n on the ot really oand in disaster for the people of National Security Council was a sim- Are opinion ed thhard t Am question.
South Vietnam. Are we prepared to commit Ameri-
The dead have died with vbut pie one: Our government, we are can forces, suffer substantial casual-
The have, tied with valor a have taught by the,Declaration of Inde- ties, spend huge sums of money, and
bsquandered, a new isolationism pendence, depends upon the consent dislocate our economy in order to
been e n q our vital naewnonest of the governed; consent of the gov- support
mother parts vital the bona. iHnterests erned increasingly became lacking in
whose ose other nations -even those
in of world. ours?
the Vietnam war, not because of interests are vitally linked
ness and disruption of the economy overexposure by the media, but for saver would with
would have Before been clear. been clear. the not
have corroded the quality of Ameri- good and solid reasons. It is,not
can life. And the plight of the South so now.
Vietnamese people is beyond com re- The people were not fooled; long ?
pension. p before their leaders, the people Reassessment dictates that we re-
There is no need for a commission in
recognized our Vietnam po policy was not righter DeGaulle did for France after its de
to assess responsibility; we know It is said that this is not the time feat in Algeria. This will not be easy,
where the fault lies. All administra- for recriminations; I agree. This is a not only because of disillusionment
tions, past and present, however well tir e, however, to ponder whether
-intentioned; which ha :'e either with Vietnam, but because of the
... in- we have indeed learned the lessons of state of our do estic affa
ti OivP; ..~ iii try tnr~ w2r or >..i.. .i ,.? 5::...,.... ..I. o. ..Jr
Prolonged this great tragedy in American histo-
economy is in a shambles, present
our involvement, are responsible for ry which has caused us such incalcu- unemployment intolerable, inflation
the consequences of Vietnam. - lable damage.
I WRITE NOT from hindsight. In rampant, crime still growing, our
Let state what I conceive these cities squalor, our racial problems
lessons s to be. unresolved, any cynicism about our
1965, when I first assumed a position There shall be no more Vietnams. political process widespread.
of responsibility in foreign affairs as This is a catchy phrase which only It is a first priority that we put our
our ambassador to the United Na- partially illuminates the teaching. It domestic house in order if America is
tions and ever since, I have stead- means that we must not fight wars or to return to a viable foreign adhered to the view that there make major military commitments NO AMERICAN president de poand
was no justification for our involve- without the underlying consent of the Congress can any longer assume that
tent in this war. people and their in cans will, as they often have
Inasmuch as President Lyndon B. Congress. Under rthee Constitution, doneiin the past, adhere to the notion
Johnson declassified my memoran- Congress, not the President, declares that: "Our country . may she
dum to him of March 15, 1968, which war. Congress must assume and dis- always be in the right; but our coun-
summarized my consistent viewpoint charge this responsibility. The peo- try, right or wrong."
throughout my tenure at the U.N., I ple's representatives in Congress This slogan is no longer on the _
am at liberty to quote from this slo
memorandum: must see to it that this constitutional masthead of the Chicago Tribune. It
"Developments in our counts command is not infringed by the,' is no longer on the masthead of the
country President. American people. They are patriotic
have demonstrated that there is
grave concern among the American America cannot be the world's po. Our ' but roco ng ry will people whether the course we have liceman. The end of the war in Viet- t ntry ol henceforth have is
set in our Vietnam policy is right .. and
gam calls for a realistic reassess- right in its foreign involvements
concern which has been deepened by ment of our commitments - both commBefog wrong, as
the reverses we and the South Viet- legal and moral. A great nation mand the teaches, ct of nh longer com_
namese suffered during the Tet often- should make only realistic commit- And o the consent question the governed.
se the apparent lack of energy, ments, but it should keep the ones it and nd on the waging vital
war, the of imat te eclesson
effectiveness pna a makes. We committed far more in that ultimate
of sive, ppeal of the South Vietnam than we should have, but of Vietnam is that the consent of the
Vietnamese government, by the
mounting rate of American casual- less than we had led the Vietnamese governed is imperative.
NEW YORK TIMES to expect.
30 April 1975
S c Participants Look Back
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
Spedal to The New York Votes
WASHINGTON, April 29-
For many Americans it may
have been a day of simple
emotions - relief, perhaps,
that the long war in Vietnam
was near an end, or bitter-
ness that the United States
and its ally had in the end
lost.
44
But for many Americans
who played prominent parts
in the long Indochinese strug-
gle - senior officials in
Washington, leaders of the
antiwar movement, reporters
who covered the war, offi-
cials who served in the
American Embassy in Saigon
- reactions were more com-
plex:
volvement of -two decades st
Some talked of fear for
their friends' well-being;
some dwelt on mistakes they
felt they and their country
had made; some expressed.
hope that the future would
be better.
Here are what some of
them had to say on the day
the last American officials
left Vietnam, ending an in-
a cost of vast blood and
treasure:
ROBERT W. KOMER, for-
mer chief of the pacification
program in Vietnam and ad-
viser to President Lyndon B.
Johnson:
"I feel terrible frustration
and depression about all the
things that we should have
done and could have done
and didn't do. In hindsight,
it was a disaster, but that's
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easy.
"I haven't thought about
much -in. the last month ex-
cept the people who are still
there-waking up in the mid-
dle of the night, worrying
about people like Colonel Be
[a Vietnamese pacification
expert]. We'll recover. But
will they?"
WILLIAM J. PORTER, for-
mer Deputy Ambassador in
Saigon and chief negotiator
at the Paris peace talks, now
Ambassador to Canada:
"All of my worries of all
these years about how it was
going to end have material-
ized. We didn't understand
the place, we didn't know
how to fight there. It was a
:sad epoch.
"There are lessons to he
drawn from it, very clear les-
sons. We should never have
tried to get by with half-
measures, because you can't
do that and control the out-
come. The national moral is
that you apply power if you
have it."
.BARRY ZORTHIAN, for-
mer chief information officer
for the United States Em-
bassy in Saigon, now an ex-
ecutive of Time Inc.:
:'I feel a real sense of hor-
.? ror about the awful way, in
which we had to get out com-
bined'with a sense of relief
that it's finally over. But
then there are the beginnings
of analysts, second thoughts,
recriminations, distillations.
"Where did things gn
wrong? Coulid there have been
a different result? I'm not
sure, but I sometimes think
we would have been better
to have let them solve it their
way 10 years ago. To what
degree was it our desires, our
ambitions, our pressures that-
kept putting them through
this?" -
ANTHONY LLAKE. former
Foreign Service officer in
Vietnam and aide to Secre-
tary of State Kissinger who
resigned to protest the Amer-
ioan invasion of Cambodia:
"I'm glad the fighting is
coming to an end, but I feel
shame that It took so long
and that we played the role
we did in extending it for so
long. It has been inevitable
that they would win the war
for so many years. -
WASHINGTON POST
29 April 1975
Marquis Childs
"Now here's a chance to
figure out what kind of for-
eign policy we should have
instead of having Vietnam
rip us apart. That hasn't
been possible before, not
when anyone who objected
to military aid for Saigon au-
tomatically was being called
neo-isolationist."
MORTON HALPERIN, for-
mer Defense Department of-
ficial and aide to Secretary
Kissinger, whose telephone
was tapped:
"I'm relieved that It's over
and that we didn't go back
again. My fear was that Viet-
nam was a film that would
keep running backwards and
forwards and would never
end.
"Then dismay that people
talk of losing Vietnam or the
fall of Vietnam. That country
has not fallen and we didn't
have it to lose. Vietnam will
now be independent."
RICHARD HOLBROOKE,
former Foreign Service offi-
cer in Vietnam who now
edits Foreign Policy, a quar-
terly:
"I'm just sort of weary.
We never belonged there
even though so many people
.tried to do so many good
things.
"And I'm angry at the gul-
libility of Nixon and Ford
and Kissinger for believing
that the South Vietnamese
could survive this offensive
without the vertebra of
cr,
American fire -
_.._ power, they couldn't survive any of
the earlier ones without us.
By this colossal foreign pol-
icy failure we provided for
our own humiliation, we
made the worst of a bad situ-
ation.
"Why did we never go to
Thieu, after Paris and the
Congressional arms cutoff,
and tell him that this was a
new world and'he had better
negotiate unless he wanted
defeat?"
W. AVERELL HARRIMAN,
long-time participant in
American foreign policy, who
turned against the war in the
late nineteen-sixties:
"It is tragic that President
Roosevelt's determination
not to let the French back
into Indochina after World
War Il was not carried out.
It would have saved France,
the United States and the
Vietnamese people this des-
perate experience."
DEAN RUSK, Secretary of
State under President John-
son and President John F.
Kennedy:
"Obviously, I'm very sad-
dened by ,recent develop-
ments, but also concerned
where the story ends. We
haven't seen the final bill
yet. The American people
around 1968 decided that if
we couldn't tell them when
the war would end, we might
as well chuck it. Part of this
decision was to take the con-
sequences, and that's what
we are going to have to do
now.
"I can't avoid my responsi-
bility for what happened in
Southeast Asia, but I don't.
think others, including the
the destinies of other coun-.
tries; we only think our tac-
tics were bad in Vietnam.
We're in for a period not of
real soul-searching, which
we need, but of blame-assess---
ing."
PROF. RICHARD FALK of'
Princeton University, a key.
antiwar theoretician:
"It goes back to the Paris?
cease-fire accords. We were.:
caught in a trap.
"We couldn't get our pris-
oners back without Thieu's
agreement, and we could only-;
get Thieu's agreement if we -
promised to support his op-
position to bringing about
peace. The result was an
unnecessary added interlude
WARD S. JUST, a former
Washington Post correspond-
ent in Vietnam, now a novel-
ist: -
"I was asked the other day:
ther for what will happen this and it just wouldn't go, -
now.,, it just wouldn't write. I had
CORA WEISS, antiwar ac nothing helpful or enlighten-'
tivist who hplnpd astah1ish ing or ameliorative to say;,
contact with anoi concerning
American prisoners of war:
"It's a very exciting and
tragic moment at the same
time. Exciting because no
more lives will be wasted,
because the people of Viet-
nam will be able to determine.:
their lives without foreign in-
terference. Tragic because
one can't forget the need:ess.
death and destruction. I
"For 25 years the united
States has tried to control 25.
million people on a tiny strip,
of land and we couldn't do it-
and we- should never try to?
do it again anywhere else." '
SAM' BROWN, one of the,
organizers of the Vietnam
moratorium demonstrations;
now Treasurer of the State .of
Colorado: .11
"There were some people-
here today suggesting a cele-
bration. That's so far from
what I feel. We started that
era with great hopes and ex-
pectations, and Vietnam
crushed them and our sense
of the future. Now I feel no
sense of rebirth; something '
has ended but nothing has .
started.
"Unfortunately, we still
think we should play with,
with a kind of horrified fas
cination. I don't believe the`-
cultures mix. It was a kind
of failure of our national
temperament; we felt that if.
we kept plugging away even
if we were on the wrong
course, by. the -triumph of`
American innocence every-
thing would come out $11':
right. It didn't."
MORLEY SAFER, a CBS
news correspondent in Viet.
nam: .
"I feel a deep unhappiness,.
a sense that surely there,
must have been a better way,
sorrow for the Vietnamese,
who saw the momentary ad-
vantage of going along with,
us. ,.
"It's vital to refight this
war for a long time to come
so that we understand just;
what we did over there, not,
only to ourselves but to.
them, and why we did it. We
don't understand it yet, and
we have to make the effort."
Some of those who sup-
ported the American effort to,
the end, including both jour-'
nalists and military officers,
said they were either too bit
ter or too sensitively situ-
ated professionally to com-?
ment on the day's events.
9
Sk -
Writing and Carpet liombill
Y. rD
Sifting the true from the false the Vietnam disaster, for that would in military supplies not yet sent td
in examining the fall of South Viet be to pass a large share of the blame Saigon. Of this, $200 million was in
nam will be an endless pursuit. As to his immediate predecessor, Richard the pipeline and up'to $700 million
reflected in Congress and the Public Nixon. And it was Nixon-who made was obligated but not expended. The
opinion polls, most people would like him President, bureaucratic process being as cum-
to get it over with and forget it. So much of Ford's motivation in bersome as it is, the committed ma-
But while repeatedly declaring that pounding on Congress again and again to ch much oammunition, e fi fohas
he has no intention of for more military aid must seem a Y recently been pointing t.'ie futile political gesture. Knowing Con- warding stage. What Ford surely
r
finger of blame, President Ford contin- gress out of his long experience, he knew, too, was that even if Congress
ncs to worry the -issue with an un must have understood from the be. in, say, early March had appropriated
comfortable awareness that lie is the ginning that it was no more than sky the $722 million he was requesting,
commander-in-chief at the moment of writing. - it would have been. not weeks but
this gritn climax. He can hardly speak months before the bulk of it, pantie
,the truth, which is that he inherited As he began to make his appeals,
4s
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on the way. .
As one official put it, the real rea-
son was moralcN Congress could have
told Nguyen Van Thieu and the world
that the United 'States- intended to
stand behind the South Vietnamese
and with tlfis pledge Thleu's armies
would have fought on.
In my opinion that is a highly doubt-
ful proposition. The only thing that
-would have changed the situation is
/direct American intervention with
bombers and troops. That is the
morale-builder Thieu had apparently
continued to hope for, which was un-
derstandable in a man trapped in the
blind alley of his own past.
It is truly remarkable that President
Ford shared this view, as he revealed
in the CBS interview. The Congress,
he said, "unfortunately" 'took away
from the President in August 1973 (by
the Cooper-Church amendment) "the
power to move in a military way to
enforce the agreements that were
signed in Paris." That can only mean
that if he had not been hobbled by
NEW REPUBLIC
3 May 1975
Congress he would have reopened
American participation in the war
as the only way to save Thieu.
We shall hear a great deal as the
noose tightens and the end draws
near about blood baths. Already we
have seen nightly on television the
desperate plight of the refugees. The
horrors of the Communist' takeover
in Hue during the Tet offensive of
1968, burial alive for many victims,
were written large.
But in any accounting of blood
hatreds it is well to remember there
is much on both sides of the blood-
stained ledger.' When Secretary Kiss-
inger's peace negotiations with Hanoi
broke down in Paris in mid-December
1972 President Nixon gave the Com-
munists 72 hours to go back to the
table. When that deadline passed, he
unleashed terror bombing on a scale
never known before with fleets of
B-52s, Phantoms and Navy fighter-
bombers.
was razed. . In the suburb of Thai
Nguyen, nearly a thousand civilians
were dead or wounded. The two prin-
cipal hospitals and a dispensary were
destroyed. On the walls left standing
angry slogans were chalked: "We will
avenge our compatriots massacred by
the Americans." "Nixon, you will pay
this blood debt."
Opinion around the world was re-
volted. Le Monde, the Paris news-
paper, compared the bombing to the
Nazi levelling of Guernica in the
Spanish civil War. The revulsion pub-
licly expressed reflected the intense
feeling in almost every chancellery in
the West.
At the end of two weeks of carpet
bombing, which by its very nature
could have little relation to military
targets, the Communists agreed to
resume negotiation. At the end of the
24th round of talks in 42 months the
accords were signed - accords that
have proved no barrier at all against
a resumption of the war.
p 1475. United Feature Synd.
The Secret Way
by George McT. Kahin .
In assessing American policy in Cambodia it is not
sufficient to judge the legitimacy of Lon Nol's regime
simply on the basic of its having been overwhelmingly
dependent from, the outset upon the US Treasury.
More important is the fact that its origins were tied to a
covert and subversive American intervention aimed at
displacing Sihanouk's neutralist government by one
willing to align itself with US strategic objectives.
The key features in this Nixon-Kissinger policy can
best be understood against the background of earlier
American attempts to destabilize Sihanouk's govern-
ment. These go back at least to 1958 and were centered
on building up an oppositionist military force known as
the Khmer Serei (Free Cambodians), led by Son Ngoc
Thanh, a bitter opponent of Sihanouk. Recruited
primarily from South Vietnam's large Cambodian
minority (Khmer Krom), this force was armed,
financed and trained by the CIA and later supervised by
US army special forces. Operating from bases in
Thailand and South Vietnam, these troops were by the
mid-1960s successful enough in penetrating Cambo-
dia's frontiers to tie up a substantial part of the small
30,000-man Royal Cambodian Army. On a visit to
Cambodia in 1967, during which I visited one of the
'border areas, I found that these Khmer Serei opera-
tions were regarded by the diplomatic community in
Pnompenh as aimed at keeping a counterforce available
in case the United States might want to use it against
Sihanouk, while more immediately keeping pressure on
him to ensure against his departing too far from an
international posture acceptable to the United States.
In fact this policy had already backfired and become a
major reason for Sihanouk's decision in 1965 to break
diplomatic relations with the United States.
During the last year of the Johnson administration,
the counterproductivity of American support of
military opposition to Sihanouk had become evident,
and although the Khmer Serei were not disbanded,
146
Washington and Pnompenh moved toward a
rapprochement. Sihanouk, worried over Cambodia's
deteriorating relations with China during the Cultural
Revolution and desirous of keeping the mounting air
and ground war in Vietnam away from his border
areas, welcomed improved relations with the United
States, and ultimately on June 11, a resumption of
diplomatic ties was announced.
Under continual US prodding during the last months
of the Johnson and the first months of the Nixon
administrations Sihanouk began to take actions helpful
to the US military position in Vietnam. Although not
extensive, these included public criticism of Commu-
nist Vietnamese occupation of border base enclaves and
actions calculated to reduce the flow of overseas
supplies to them via Cambodian ports. Ironically,
however desirous he may have been to reduce the flow
of military supplies and food to NLF and Hanoi forces,
Sihanouk could in fact do little because of the deep
involvement in this traffic by Lon Nol, Sosthenes
Fernandez and other highly placed Cambodian army
officers who were unwilling to give up their lucrative
roles as middlemen. While Sihanouk apparently
acquiesced to. American demands that the US be
permitted to carry out hot pursuit of Vietnamese
Communist troops a short distance into Cambodia. it is
quite certain that he would never have tolerated
anything like the all-out American military invasion
against the border bases of the PRG and North
Vietnam subsequently -approved by his successor, Lon
Nol. In any case Sihanouk's concessions were evidently
not sufficient to satisfy the Nixon administration.
By at least the early fall of 1969 plans had been set in
motion that led to the ousting of Sihanouk. There is no
doubt that there was considerable dissatisfaction with
his rule among much of Cambodia's urban civilian elite,
as well as in the officer corps. But it is inconceivable that
those who mounted the coup of March 18, 1970 against
Sihanouk would have dared move against him had they
not believed that prompt US recognition and support
would be forthcoming. However irrational Lon Nol
may have seemed in recent years, it is impossible to
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i
believe that without advance assurance of American
military backing he would have acted immediately after
the coup to challenge Hanoi and the PRG by sacking
their embassies and ordering their military forces to
leave Cambodian soil within 48 hours. But this move
was necessary to set the stage for the American
invasion aimed at ousting North Vietnamese and PRG
forces from their border bases, for which the US
military command in Saigon had been pressing.
Whether or not American personnel were directly
involved in the coup against Sihanouk, US mercenaries
were. During the course of the year preceding it, under
the aegis of Gen. Lon Nol there occurred a series of
what were officially described as "rallyings" of some
2000 of the CIA-supported Khmer Serei to the Royal
Cambodian Army and police. Infiltrated under Lon
Nol's direction into a number of key army and police
units, they were later to emerge. as the main activists
among the anti-Sihanouk forces which sacked the
Hanoi and PRG embassies and applied the pressure
necessary to cow some of the Cambodian deputies into
voting for Sihanouk's removal.
These CIA mercenaries were in fact rallying not to
Sihanouk , but to Gen. Lon Nol, and on terms worked
out between Lon Nol and the head of the Khmer Serei,
Son Ngoc Thanh, in negotiations that probably began
as early as September 1969 (soon after the unsuspect-
ing Sihanouk had appointed Lon Nol as his prime
minister). It is appropriate that these Khmer Serei
"'rallier s" have been termed a "Trojan Horse"-but a
Trojan Horse, it should be noted, that w..s paid for by
the United States and presumably directed by its
agents. That there had been an understanding respect-
ing further US support if Lon Nol should encounter
difficulties is suggested by the promptness with which
the United States sent him military reinforcements of
additional US-trained and financed Khmer Krom from
South Vietnam after the coup. Within a few weeks
approximately 4800 of these men, seconded from either
Saigon's army or directly from the American-led
Khmer Krom Mike Forces, were flown into Pnompenh
aboard US planes. ("Mike Force," short for Mobile
Strike Force, was an elite military element trained and
advised by US special forces, and often drawn from
NEW YORK TIMES
29 April 1975
Australians Disturbed by Ha .i
n. Closing Embassy in Saigon!
South Vietnamese minority groups-Cambodian or
Montagnard.) Presumably the Khmer Krom involved
in the riots against the PRG in the Cambodian border
province of Svey Rieng 10 days before the coup were
also US Mike Force personnel, sent directly across the
border from US bases in South Vietnam. According to
Son Ngoc Thanh, the Khmer Serei's leader with whom
I spoke in mid-1971, the total American-trained and
financed Khmer Krom-including Khmer Serei, Mike
Force and others-who had by then been infused into
the Royal Cambodian Army were in excess of 10,000,
with the US still providing their pay. Ngo Cong Duc,
former Saigon government congressman from South
Vietnam's Vinh Binh province, recently told me that
from his province alone approximately 7000 Khmer
Krom soldiers from the ARVN, led by three lieutenant
colonels, were dispatched to Priompenh shortly after
the anti-Sihanouk coup. IF Mike Forces are included, he
estimates that ultimately a total of 30,000 Khmer Krom
soldiers from South Vietnam were sent to fight in
Cambodia.
United States intervention in Cambodian affairs
helped cut out the middle ground and push people of a
variety of political convictions toward the standard of
opposition provided by Prince Sihanouk and the
National United Front. This was reflected as early as
August 1971 in a talk I had with Gen. In Tam, then
Minister of Security and Internal Affairs in Lon Noi's
government. He estimated the existing strength of the
armed opposition at about 10,000, of whom he
classified 3000 to 4000 as Khmer. Rouge (pro-
Comrauni t). i or the other 6000 to 7 000 he used a term
that he translated for me, a little sheepishly, as
"Cambodians striving against being under American
occupation." The whole of this Cambodian opposition
is now bound together in a' broad coalition-the
National United Front of Cambodia-that must enjoy a
political base far broader than Lon Nol ever had. If the
present administration is now to approach Cambodia in
terms of political reality, it should acknowledge this and
act accordingly.
George McT. Knkin, professor of government, directed
the Southeast Asia program at Cornell.
SYDNEY, Australia, April 28 have qualified for entry were I! profoundly ashamed of it in' to Australia, but even they]
-The Australian Government left behind when Ambassadors Saigon on Friday." 1had not left with the Austra-
has been strongly y criticized Geoffrey Price and his Austral- Malcolm Fraser. leader of lians.
here for closing stro embassy ian staff flew out of Saigon: the opposition Liberal and.I Mr. Morrison also said the;
its Friday. Country parties, said Prime i ! Saigon authorities had been'
in Saigon before all the Vietna- The reports said those left Minister Gough Whitam stoodi "making it very difficult fort
mese eligible to enter Australia in Saigon included embassy em-; indicted for procrastinaiton and'' Vietnamese to leave the coun-
were evacuated. ployes who had asked to be; heartlessness. I try." He added that Australia;
Earlier this month the; taken to Australia. One of them William Morrison. acting Min- had sought without success
Government announced that i? f was reported to have told a i ister for Foreign Affairs, who to influence the Saigon Gcv~rn-,
would permit the entry of Viet-1 correspondent of the Sydney last week said the United Iment to liberalize its formali-!
namese who were spouses or, Morning Herald: States was "acting illegally" 'ties. I
children of Vietnamese study-1 "It is shameful and Autral- in taking planeloads cf Vietna-
ing in Australia or who had; is s' name will never be forgot- mese out of South Vietnam, I
long and close association with: ten because of it." asserted that there was ''no
Australia and considered, their: In an article in the Herald question" of the lives of embas-
lives in danger. today, the correspondent, Mi- sy employes being in danger.;
According to newspaper re- I chasl Richardson, said: "I have He said only two of the 64;
ports oublished here, at least I; never felt ashamed of my ;Vietnamese connected with the'
250 Vietnamese who would, ~ Government before. But I felt I embassy had asked to be taken,
47
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NEW YORK TIMES!
23 April 1975
ipcli c' Postscript
By Paul P. Brocchini reer considerations and conformist
RIO DE JANEIRO-In purest bureau- pressures.
It
cratese it was labeled "the pipeline." was strange there in the base
ment. While great moralizing and
One entered it in Washington and hard-sell campaigns emerged from
emerged in Saigon. I went in the pipe- myriad Administration sources, ped-
line in January, 1966, as a junior Of- dling dominoes, World War II fears
ficer in the United States Information and Red threats to the public, there
Agency. was no one trying to sell us, the pipe-
In those days a selected number of line people. On the contrary, in an age
State Department, Agency for Inter- of institutionalized deceit, it was a
national Development, Central Intelli-.' refreshingly honest place, that base-
gence Agency, U.S.I.A. and military ment. No pep talks; No rah-rah about
people were sent to the Foreign Serv- saving democracy and freedom in
ice Institute in Arlington, Va., for in- places where neither had ever existed.
tensive Vietnamese-language training. But lots of straight talk.
In the basement of Arlington Bernard Fall, the writer and'histor-
Towers, a dreary complex of.red-brick !an who had devoted his life to the
apartment buildings facing the Poto-
mac,. we wrestled with exotic pho-
nemes, studied Vietnamese history and
culture, and had access to an amazing
amount of intelligence that painted an
accurate picture of ? what was really -
happening throughout Indochina. .
In 1966, tunnel-gazers who never
failed to see that terminal light, were
still in vogue in the upper echelons of
the United States Government. But
down at our basement level, at the
level of truth, we knew that was no
light. Yet most of us accepted our
assignments, pulled forward by the
inexorable forces of bureaucracy, ca-
BALTIMORE SUN
28 April 1975
Clfir k& f Yazt
affairs of Indochina, would come in
every week or two to tell it like it
was.
Rand Corporation confidential re-
ports on Vietcong morale made it
devastatingly clear who was motivated
in Vietnam, who fought with convic-
tion and who did not.
Foreign Service officers coming
back from Southeast Asia rarely. cov-
ered up: It was bad out there . and
getting worse. But they had finished
their tours and were relieved to be
able to pass on the mess to us.
Everyone who passed through that
basement, and there were thousands of
People Didn't Accept
Vietnam `Obligations"
New York
In speaking before a joint
-`'session of Congress April 10.
President Ford gave an ac-
"tount of United States "obli-
'gations" toward Vietnam. ar-
"Ising from the Paris agree-
?.-ments of two years ago. which
may well have represented
.the private intentions of the
-Nixon administration to main-
;,.tain the Thieu regime at any
,.cost.
;... These Intentions, however,
slid not reflect in any sense ob-
ligations or commitments ac-
- cepted by the United States
,congress and people either in
? January, 1973. or today
The US decision to with.
draw from the untenable posi-
;tion which it had unwisely as-
sumed in Indochina was taken
"March 31. 1968. when Presi-
dent Johnson conceded in ef-
fect both the failure of his pol-
icy and his own political de-
anise
The die was cast at that
"time, and consequent disen-
gagement should have been
prompt and unequivocal. .
= Yet the Nixon administra-
?"tion continued for four more
years our military Involve-
-'ment, extending it into Cam-
bodia in 1970 and escalating it
in 1972 with the Christmas
bombing of Hanoi. The agree-
ments concluded a month lat-
er in Paris were recognized
by almost everyone (except
unfortunately the American
negotiators) as no more than
an elaborate screen behind
which United States with-
drawal could be completed
and United States prisoners
'liberated
Nor was the ultimate out-
come ever in any serious
doubt, though it came more
:quickly than most expected
What has been lost this
month -is not American-honor
or credibility, but the last
shreds of this illusion
It is therefore with con-
sternation that one bears the
President charging that, if
Congress had only supplied
more aid, "this present tragic
situation in South Vietnam
would not have occurred " Or
the secretary of state insist-
ing, "We cannot abandon
friends in one part of the
world without jeopardizing
the security of friends every-
where."
To put one's country's pos-
ture, in tragic but inexorable
circumstances, in the worst
possible light is an act of sin-
gular irresponsibility If our
leaders claim we are unwor-
sensitive, reasonably well-educated
people, knew the score. But few, if
any, did anything about it. We, pro-
ducts of immense advantages, pos-
sessors of hosts of, academic degrees,
persons trained for careers in inter-
national. relations, sat on our hands.
Our training failed us, our country
and mankind, insofar as we had the
opportunity to influence events-and
I am convinced that even at our base-
ment level we did-because it lacked
the most essential element of civilized
life, a system of values.
Our credo was pure American: "To
get along, go along." All our lives,
parents, teachers, supervisors had told
us to shine our shoes, brush our teeth,
comb our hair, if we wanted to fit in,
to reap the rewards c f American life.
"Don't rock the boat. Don't make
waves. Go along."
And so we did, in spite of the bright
light of truth that shone in our base-
ment. We, the pipeline people, shut
our eyes and ears, turned off our minds
as easily as the evening news on tele-
vision, and moved through our figura-
tive pipe as surely as water downhill.
Paul P. Brocchini, who had been a cul-
tural officer with the U.S.I.A. in Co-
lombia and Brazil, left the pipeline-
and the foreign service-after six
months at' the Foreign Service Insti-
tute. He is now a businessman in
Brazil.
thy of trust, how can they
themselves expect to be be-
lieved?
Of course the claim is pre-
posterous. The American Con-
gress and people have kept
and will keep commitments
they themselves have under-
taken Had our final exit from
Vietnam been more timely. it
would have been more grace-
ful, but it had to be made We
will be stronger. not weaker,
when it is at last completed
and this consuming obsession
is dissolved.
James R. Schlesinger, the
Secretary of Defense, said in a
recent article in the Philadel-
phia Bulletin that the out-
come in Southeast Asia is
"primarily psychological" and
the impact of losing that part
of the world to the Commun-
ists would be "a very slight
weight indeed."
What is needed now from
our leaders and ourselves is
the sober confidence our basic
circumstances warrant We
remain the world's strongest
military power We remain.
despite a depression already
heeinntng to lift, the world's
strongest economic power We
remain the world's most con-
spicuous and stable democra-
cy. our institutions confirmed
118
and strengthened by Water-
gate We remain unequivocal-
ly committed by formal treat-
ies to our North Atlantic al-
lies, Japan. the Philippines
and others, and by strong pub-
lic sentiment to Israel. These
commitments will be deemed
unreliable only if we persist in
saying they are.
We no doubt shall find it
expedient from time to time
during coming years to make
our exit from other parts of
the world Let us prepare to
do so gracefully and in timely
fashion, not as though each
disengagement were the end
of the world.
Let us judge coolly and
realistically what in the
1970's our truly vital interests
are, and adjust our priorities
and strategies accordingly.
Nothing could be more fatal,
and more likely over time to
undermine confidence at
home and abroad, than to
overreact out of fear of seem-
ing "weak," to hold on where
we are not wanted until we
are squeezed out,. to equate
solid commitments to com-
patible partners with some
imagined need, to maintain a
universal status quo.
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