THE UNCOUNTED ENEMY: A VIETNAM DECEPTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100040003-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 32
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 17, 2007
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: January 23, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20015 656-4068
PROGRAM CBS Reports
S T A T I O N W D V M T V
CBS Network
DATE January 23, 1982 9:30 PM CITY Washington, DC
SUBJECT The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception
MIKE WALLACE: The only war America has ever lost, the
war in Vietnam, reached a dramatic turning point 14 years ago this
month. The morning of January 30th, 1968, across the length and
breadth of South Vietnam, the enemy we thought was losing the war
suddenly launched a massive surprise attack. It was called the
Tet offensive. And the size of the assault, the cacualties, the
devastation caught the American public totally by surprise. But
more than that, it caught the mighty American Army, half a million
strong, unprepared for the enemy's bold strikes in all of South
Vietnam's cities.
As the fighting continued, it became clear that the
ragged enemy forces we thought were being ground down had greater
numbers and greater military strength than we had been led to
believe. Before they were finally pushed back, those Viet Cong
forces had left behind a nagging question in the minds of millions
of Americans: How was it possible for them to surface so brazenly
and so successfully at a time when Americans at home were being
told the enemy was running out of men?
The fact is that we Americans were misinformed about
the nature and the size of the enemy we were facing. And tonight
we're going to present evidence of what we have come to believe
was a conscious effort, indeed a conspiracy, at the highest levels
of American military intelligence to suppress and alter critical
intelligence on the enemy in the year leading up to the Tet offen-
sive.
A former CIA analyst, Sam Adams, introduced us to this
evidence and he became our consultant. What you're about to see
are the results of our efforts over the last 12 months to confirm
his findings, and then what my CBS colleague George Crile and I
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discovered when we took the investigation the next step.
What went wrong in Vietnam is still one of the great
questions of our recent American experience. We still don't
know all the answers. But tonight we shall offer an explanation
for one of the great mysteries of the war: why for so long our
government apparently believed, and wanted all of us to believe,
that we were winning the war.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: We are strong. No nation
has ever been stronger. Our troops have courage. None ever
have been braver or better trained. Our spirit is sharp. Our
cause is just, and it is backed by strength. Our cause will
succeed.
WALLACE: But despite all the assurances, we lost the
war in Vietnam. The cost: $150 billion, 12 agonizing years,
57,000 American soldiers dead; and the question that still haunts
us: How could we have lost the war when for so long we were told
we were slowly but inevitably winning?
Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war. But from the begin-
ning of the American buildup, the President placed his faith in
victory on one man, General William Westmoreland. Westmoreland
was there commanding the 25,000 American advisers in 1964, urging
the President to commit combat troops in 1965. And by 1966, he
was Time magazine's Man of the Year, America's first real military
hero since Eisenhower.
Cam Ranh Bay, October 1966, a moment of trimuph for Gen-
eral Westmoreland and for his commander-in-chief. The previous
year, Westmoreland had told the President we would lose if Amer-
ican combat troops weren't committed to the battle. The President
responded by sending 300,000 more American soldiers. And now
Lyndon Johnson was so encouraged by Westmoreland's reports that
he concluded a Communist victory in Vietnam was, quote, impossi-
ble.
Vietnam was a war in which statistics ruled supreme.
And the main reason for the growing optimism in the fall of 1966
was the overwhelming logic of General Westmoreland's statistics.
There were always accusations that the body count was
exaggerated. But there was no denying the fact that once the
American Army intervened, we started to capture or kill enormous
numbers of the enemy. And since Westmoreland put the total number
of Viet Cong at 285,000, it seemed inevitable that we would simply
grind the enemy down.
That became the government's position in the summer and
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fall of 1966. And it was just at this point that a lone analyst
at the CIA found reason to question the very basis of General
Westmoreland's assertion that we could defeat the enemy. His
name was Sam Adams.
As you began to study U.S. military intelligence on
the ground in Saigon, on the ground in Vietnam, what did you
learn about its quality?
SAM ADAMS: I couldn't really tell, except something
was terribly wrong.
WALLACE: What was wrong?
ADAMS: Well, you had all the casualties, maybe 150,000.
You had all the deserters that I was finding, 100,000 Viet Cong
taking over -- going over the hill, taking off. And this was all
happening, this quarter of a million guys leaving or getting
killed yearly out of an outfit that was supposed to be 280,000
strong. I had to ask myself: Who the hell are we fighting out
there?
WALLACE: Adams found the answer to his questions when
a top secret packet was delivered to his office at CIA.
ADAMS: And what it was was a captured enemy document
a translation of one, which arrived on my desk. And it said
the number of enemy guerrillas and militiamen in Binh Dinh pro-
vince was 50,000. And I looked at the official order of battle
and I looked up Binh Dinh to compare it to the documents, and I
saw the number carried in the official order of battle -- that
is, our official estimate of enemy strength -- was 4500, one-
twelfth or one-eleventh, whatever it is, of the number in the
document. And there I saw it clearly. We had been underesti-
mating the number of enemy, probably not only in Binh Dinh, one
of 44 provinces, but perhaps through the whole country.
WALLACE: In time, Adams' discovery would precipitate
the longest, bitterest battle in the history of American intelli-
gence. But it would be several months before he could persuade
the CIA to confront the military with his evidence of a far
larger enemy.
In the meantime, the President's optimism was growing.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: What we do know is General West-
moreland's strategy is producing results, that our military situ-
ation has substantially improved.
WALLACE: But despite Lyndon Johnson's assurances,
millions of Americans had become disenchanted with the war. And
by the spring of 1967, with half a million American troops already
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committed, it was clear that Congress and the American public
would not tolerate any further escalation.
The angry street demonstrations were worrisome. But
far more menacing to the White House were the growing numbers
of hawks, as well as doves, who were beginning to question the
President's claim that we could win.
It was at this moment, in April 1967, that Lyndon John-
son took an unprecedented step. He called his field commander
home from the battle front to reassure the American public that
the President's policy was sound, that we were in fact winning
the war.
GENERAL WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: I was ordered to come
to Washington.
WALLACE: I remember there was a great to-do about your
coming back from Vietnam.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I wasn't happy about it, but I
was ordered back. And I s a i d, " I f this is the President -- if
this is what the President wants me to do, well, I'll do my best."
WALLACE: Was President Johnson a difficult man to feed
bad news about the war?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, Mike, you know as well as
I do that people in senior positions love good news. Politicians
or leaders in countries are inclined to shoot the messenger that
brings the bad news. Certainly, he wanted bad news like a hole
in the head.
WALLACE: But on this day, Westmoreland had mostly
good news to offer his commander-in-chief. The Viet Cong's army,
he said, had leveled off at 285,000 men. And best of all, he
told the President, the long-awaited crossover point had been
reached. We were now killing or capturing Viet Cong at a rate
faster than they could be put back in the field. We were winning
the war of attrition.
MAN: Mr. Speaker, Mr. William C. Westmoreland.
[Applause]
WALLACE: Never before had a field commander addressed
the Congress in a time of war. It should have been a moment of
uncomplicated triumph. But put yourself in General Westmoreland's
shoes in the troubled spring of 1967. He had just used very spe-
cific figures to assure the President that the enemy was losing
strength, that we were winning the war of attrition. And now
the President was forcing Westmoreland to put that message on the
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on the record for the American public, to assure them that Gen-
eral Westmoreland believed we were on the road to victory.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Backed at home by resolve, con-
fidence, patience, determination and continued support, we will
prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor.
WALLACE: What Westmoreland apparently didn't know when
he came here to Washington was that his intelligence chief back
in Vietnam had just discovered evidence that confirmed the CIA's
estimates of a far larger enemy.
What had happened was that Westmoreland's army had just
completed the largest offensives of the war, Operation Junction
City and Cedar Falls. A major Viet Cong stronghold had been over-
run. And afterward, one of the enemy's central headquarters had
been found deep underground. American GIs had crawled down hun-
dreds of feet into an elaborate network of tunnels and underground
rooms and had come up with hundreds of thousands of pages of cap-
tured enemy documents detailing the Viet Cong's organizational
structure and manpower records.
With these documents in hand, General Westmoreland's
intelligence chief had gone to work to check out the CIA's asser-
tion of a far larger enemy.
When we began our interview with General Westmoreland,
he attempted to dismiss the CIA's reporting on the enemy as un-
reliable.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: There was a few individuals, as
I recall, a young man named Adams, who was an analyst, who had...
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Is that -- I don't know his name.
But anyway, his school of thought was that we were underestimating
the strength of the enemy.
Now, in the meanwhile, we were on the ground. We dealt
with every village, every hamlet, every province as a separate
item. We didn't use extrapolation in order to come up with the
figures.
WALLACE: And your intelligence chief there on the
ground in Vietnam, General Joseph McChristian, was the fellow who
had developed a lot of this?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: General Joseph McChristian was
a superb intelligence officer.
WALLACE: Westmoreland's intelligence chief, General
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Joseph McChristian, began his career estimating enemy capabilities
as General George Patton's intelligence chief during World War II.
A West Point graduate, he was the military's Chief of Intelligence
for two years, 1966 and 1967, in Vietnam.
So when it came to reporting on the enemy, you didn't
especially count on the CIA's work on this score, you stood by
the work of General McChristian and his staff.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, sure. The CIA was very
remote. We were on the scene.
WALLACE: What Westmoreland failed to tell us in our
interview was that here at the Millitary Assistance Command,
Vietnam -- MACV, as it was called -- his intelligence chiefs had
come to agree with the CIA's growing conviction that we were
fighting a far larger enemy. They had been studying the captured
enemy documents. And when Westmoreland returned to MACV head-
quarters, General McChristian and the military's leading expert
on the Viet Cong, Colonel Gaines Hawkins, presented him with the
bad news. Hawkins began the briefing.
COLONEL GAINES HAWKINS: The figures that I briefed on
that particular occasion were the new strength figures on the
political order of battle, as we called it -- this is the Viet
Cong's political bureaucracy -- and the raw strength.
WALLACE: Colonel Hawkins told us MACV intelligence had
determined that there were a lot more VC out there than had pre-
viously been recognized. In fact, he says that these major intel-
ligence reports pointed to a dramatic increase in enemy strength
estimates; in fact, something on the order of 200,000 more VC.
Do you remember that?
I remember such a report. Yes.
HAWKINS: I don't want to read anybody's mind, George.
But there was a great deal of concern about the impact that this
new figure would have. And General Westmoreland appeared to be
very much surprised at the magnitude of the figures.
WALLACE: According to Colonel Hawkins, he said that
the General seemed to be taken by surprise. He remembers your
first words after listening to that briefing were, "What am I
going to tell the press? What am I going to tell the Congress?
What am I going to tell the President?" True?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I do recall a session with
Hawkins. Yes. But I was very, very suspicious of this particu-
lar estimate. And the reason was that you come to a shade of
gray. You get down at the hamlet level and you've got teen-agers
and you've got old men who can be armed and can be useful to the
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enemy, and who are technically Viet Cong.
WALLACE: Right.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: But they don't have any military
capability of consequence.
COLONEL HAWKINS: There was no mistaking the message.
GEORGE CRILE: Which was?
COLONEL HAWKINS: That there was great concern about the
impact of these figures, that their being higher.
CRILE: They didn't want higher numbers.
COLONEL HAWKINS: That was the message.
WALLACE: This is the way General McChristian remembers
Westmoreland's reaction to the briefing.
GENERAL JOSEPH MCCHRISTIAN: And when General Westmore-
land saw the large increase in figures that we had developed, he
was quite disturbed by it. And by the time I left his office, I
had the definite impression that he felt if he sent those figures
back to Washington at that time, it would create a political bomb-
shell.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I was not about to send to Wash-
ington something that was specious. And in my opinion, it was
specious.
WALLACE: But General Joseph McChristian, a man whom
you call a superb intel I igence chief, he's the fel low who comes
in and says, "General, we've been wrong. There are twice as many
people out there."
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, I have great admiration
for General McChristian, and he did a good job. But in this case,
I disagreed with him, with him, and other members of my staff dis-
agreed with him.
WALLACE: Consider Westmoreland's dilemma. If he ac-
cepted his intelligence chief's findings, he would have to take
the bad news to the President. If he didn't, well, there was
only General McChristian to deal with.
GENERAL MCCHR ISTIAN: Evidently, people didn't l i ke my
reporting, because I was constantly showing that the enemy strength
was increasing. I was constantly reporting that the North Viet-
namese and the Viet Cong had the capability and the will to con-
tinue a protracted war of attrition at the same level of operations
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as were currently going on for an indefinite period. And I per-
sonally wrote that paragraph in every estimate I sent in and in-
sisted that that be known. Maybe there was objections to that.
CRILE: Sir, that was running strongly against the
grain of popular wisdom at that time.
GENERAL MCCHRISTIAN: But not against fact.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I did not accept his recommen-
dation. I did not accept it. And I didn't accept it because of
political reasons. That was -- I may have mentioned this. I
guess I did. But that was not the fundamental thing. I just
didn't accept it.
WALLACE: What's the political reason? Why would it
have been a political bombshell? That's really...
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Because the people in Washington
were not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate this
thing, and neither was the media.
WALLACE: We underscore what General Westmoreland just
said about his decision. He chose not to inform the Congress,
the President, not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the evidence
collected by his intelligence chief, evidence which indicated a
far larger enemy.
CRILE: In a time of war, when you're talking about
enemy strength estimates, what are you thinking, General McChris-
tian, when you confront your responsibility?
GENERAL MCCHRISTIAN: Well, I feel this way: that
decision-making in time of war not only involves the lives of the
people on the battlefield, but involves the future liberty of your
people at home, and that there's not place -- and that's why the
West Point motto has "honor" in it -- there's no place for an
officer in any executive department of government, much less the
military, who cannot conduct his public duty honorably.
WALLACE: Shortly after Westmoreland suppressed his
intelligence chief's report, General Joseph McChristian was trans-
ferred out of Vietnam.
It was at this point, we believe, that MACV began to
suppress and then to alter critical intelligence reports on the
strength of the enemy.
WALLACE: By the summer of 1967, the American Army had
grown to a force of almost 500,000 men. We were now everywhere
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in Vietnam. And the elaborate intelligence network that General
McChristian had created was continuing to discover more and more
of the Viet Cong's elusive guerrilla army. Only now, the soldiers
in the field started to find that when they identified enemy sol-
diers, even when they discovered entire new Viet Cong units, MACV's
new intelligence chiefs were not including them all in their esti-
mates of enemy strength.
One of the first to be confronted by this strange phe-
nomenon was MACV's newly appointed guerrilla analyst, Richard
MacArthur.
RICHARD MACARTHUR: I found that someone was changing
the numbers, the numbers that were reported by the sector advisers
in the field.
CRILE: Changing the numbers.
MACARTHUR: Uh-huh.
CRILE: You mean the actual totals were not getting
translated into official figures.
MACARTHUR: Exactly.
WALLACE: In one province, an angry colonel confronted
MacArthur, accusing him of changing the numbers.
MACARTHUR: He had listed 500 guerrillas.
CRILE: Right.
MACARTHUR: Right? So I said, "Fine. All right. Five
hundred guerrillas in the province." Then he said to me, "Now I
want you to look at the OB summary." I didn't have a copy with
me, but he happened to have one there. The OB summary showed 250
guerrillas.
CRILE: The total in the official estimate, the order
of battle, OB...
MACARTHUR: Exactly.
CRILE: ...has half of the number...
MACARTHUR: Right. And he was quite disturbed, to say
the least. What could I say to him?
WALLACE: While this new problem was developing in
Vietnam, back in Washington, the CIA was at last forcing a full-
scale confrontation with General Westmoreland over his estimates
of the size of the Viet Cong's army.
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CRILE: What was at stake in this battle between the
CIA and the military over enemy strength?
GEORGE ALLEN: It was a fundamental question of the
soundness of our policy, of our whole approach to the war in
Vietnam, a question of whether we ultimately, finally were going
to come to grips with the nature of the war and the scale of the
enemy forces we were up agains, or whether we were going to con-
tinue this process of self-delusion.
WALLACE: George Allen was the CIA's number two man
on Vietnam. Back in 1967, he was the government's leading ex-
pert on the enemy.
ALLEN: The scale of effort was conditioned to our
understanding of the enemy forces that we were up against. And
as long as we underestimated the size of the enemy forces, it
seemed to me and to others that we were going not to be taking
the kind of effort, the scale of effort required to attain the
goal that had been set, which was to prevent the Communists from
overruning South Vietnam, to maintain a non-Communist government
in the South.
CRILE: And if you were to have confronted reality, as
you saw it, a far larger enemy, as the CIA saw it, an enemy al-
most twice as large as what we had previously thought?
ALLEN: This would mean that forces on our side, re-
sources on our side would have to be committed on a far larger
scale than people were thinking of in order to attain our objec-
tive.
WALLACE: And that's what the CIA's battle with the
military was to be all about: How many Viet Cong were we figh-
ting? Could we win with the numbers of American troops com-
mitted to the war?
The confrontation took place here at CIA Headquarters
in Langley, Virginia at something called the National Intelli-
gence Estimate Board. And the man designated to present the
CIA's case was George Allen's protege, Sam Adams, the man who
had first discovered evidence of a larger enemy army.
WALLACE: Let me understand something. This is a
meeting of what is called the National Intelligence Estimate
Board.
ADAMS: That's right.
WALLACE: Which, in effect -- it's been called the
supreme court of the CIA.
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ADAMS: Yeah. That's right.
WALLACE: Who takes part in those meetings?
ADAMS: Well, they take place on the CIA's seventh
floor. And you have members of the Board of National Estimate,
the judges, so to speak. And then you have representatives from
all the other agencies, including CIA, and then the Pentagon has
people going over, the State Department, and so forth.
WALLACE: All intelligence types.
ADAMS: All intelligence types. It takes place in a
room. There's about 40 people in the room.
WALLACE: And ironically, the man sent to represent
General Westmoreland's position was none other than Colonel
Gaines Hawkins, MACV's leading expert on the Viet Cong, the same
Colonel Hawkins who had tried to convince General Westmoreland
to accept the evidence of a far larger enemy.
ADAMS: I was quite relieved when I saw him. You know,
here's old Gaines Hawkins, who I'd known for quite a while by this
time. And I figured, you know, we're on board now. Everything's
going to be all right. He agrees that the numbers are way higher.
And then he gives a presentation the first day. And he
had changed all the order of battle around. And the bottom line
of it, the number that he was coming up with was 294,000, almost
exactly what it had been all along.
And, you know, I did double take. I said, "What's going
WALLACE: I mean you'd had conversations with him...
ADAMS: I'd had conversations with him.
WALLACE: ...in which he had suggested that it may be
100 or 200 thousand more than that.
ADAMS: Yeah. Right. In which he'd -- you know, he'd
basically agreed with me. And then here he is, he comes out with
this number which is exactly, almost exactly the same it had been
before.
CRILE: Did you generally agree with Sam Adams that the
official estimates needed to be dramatically increased?
COLONEL HAWKINS: Absolutely. And I told him so.
CRILE: At the meeting?
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COLONEL HAWKINS: I believe so, that I told him at the
CRILE: At the National Intelligence Estimates meeting,
when you were carrying MACV's position?
COLONEL HAWKINS: Yes. Yes. As I recall, I did tell
him that I thought our figures were lower than they actually
should be.
CRILE: Well, how could you have done that?
COLONEL HAWKINS: Schizoid, dealing from both sides of
the deck, or Sam and I had an analyst-to-analyst relationship.
ADAMS: It was one of the most unusual performances I've
ever seen in my whole life anywhere. Colonel Hawkins was on this
one side of the table arguing for the lower numbers, and I was on
the other side arguing for higher. And the problem was, old
Colonel Hawkins, whom I knew so well and whom I admired, looked
sick, looked like he didn't believe what he was saying.
COLONEL HAWKINS: Well, there was never any reluctance
on my part to tell Sam or anybody else who had a need to know
that these figures were crap, they were history, they weren't
worth anything.
ADAMS: Some things happened that gradua l l y made me
understand what was going on. One of the things he was doing is
every time he would argue for lower numbers, he would say, "The
command position is" such-and-such. And then -- and this hap-
pened on a number of occasions -- he would come around and say
to me, "The command posision is" such-and-such, "but my personal
opinion, Sam, is there are a lot more out there."
CRILE: So Gaines Hawkins, the man, was going to tell
the truth to...
COLONEL HAWKINS: The analyst.
CRILE: The analyst, Gaines Hawkins, was going to tell
Sam Adams the truth, but...
COLONEL HAWKINS: Sam Adams, the analyst.
CRILE: But Colonel Gaines Hawkins, MACV's representa-
tive, was going to battle CIA's Sam Adams.
WALLACE: Did you never say to him, "Colonel, Gaines,
look, if I am right and you knowledge that I am right, and Amer-
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ican troops are going to have to face a much larger enemy than
they're being told, a lot of them are going to get slaughtered"?
Did you never say that to him?
ADAMS: I knew he knew it. I knew also that he was
in -- must have been in a terrible position. He would never have
done that himself. I knew the guy too well. Obviously, he was
under orders, somehow.
WALLACE: CBS Reports has learned that Colonel Hawkins
was in fact carying out orders that originated from General West-
moreland. Westmoreland says he doesn't recall these orders. But
the head of MACV's delegation told us that General Westmoreland
had in fact personally instructed him not to allow the total to
go over 300,000.
CRILE: Wasn't there a ceiling put on the estimates by
General Westmoreland? Weren't your colleagues instructed, ordered
to not let those estimates exceed a certain amount?
COLONEL GEORGE HAMPSHIRE: "We can't live with a figure
higher than so-and-so" is the message...
COLONEL HAMPHHIRE: ...is the message we got.
WALLACE: Colonel George Hampshire was one of several
members of the military delegation troubled by having to carry
out General Westmoreland's command position.
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: I was uneasy because of the bar-
gaining characteristics. That's not the way you ought to do it.
You don't -- you know, you don't start at an end figure and work
back. But we did.
WALLACE: You should know that these men that I've men-
tioned felt very uncomfortable carrying out your order. They
felt that this arbitrary ceiling, you're not to go above 300,000...
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, what if -- if they felt
that way about it, why didn't they forthrightly tell me that?
They didn't.
WALLACE: That's a pretty good question.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: They didn't.
WALLACE: And they take the responsibility for it. And
they say, "We were wrong."
COLONEL HAWKINS: I am a staff officer and I defended
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the command position. I did it with full knowledge. And if
there's any -- if it were immoral or illegal or reprehensible,
the fault is here. It doesn't go anywhere else. I defended
the command position on the figures.
WALLACE: Colonel Hawkins assumes full responsibility
for his actions. But we went to General McChristian, his old
intelligence chief, to ask what we should think of General West-
moreland's instructions.
CRILE: To put a ceiling on enemy strength estimates,
to tell an intelligence operation that it is not permitted to
report enemy strength estimates over a certain number, what does
that constitute, sir?
GENERAL MCCHRISTIAN: From my point of view, that is
falsification of the facts.
CRILE: Are there statutes in the Uniform Code of Mili-
tary Justice that would speak to that situation?
GENERAL MCCHRISTIAN: Not that I'm aware of. But there
is something on a ring that I wear from West Point, that the motto
is, "Duty, Honor, Country." It's dishonorable.
WALLACE: In the summer of 1967, the war in Vietnam was
escalating, and so too was the intelligence war between the CIA
and the military over the number of Viet Cong we had to contend
with. In that invisible war hidden from the American public,
General Westmoreland's officers were in trouble. They had been
instructed to argue for estimates far lower than they believed to
be true. And they were still finding it next to impossible to
keep the enemy strength totals under 300,000.
It was at this point that General Westmoreland pursued
a new tactic. He proposed that an entire category of the Viet
Cong army, the self-defense militia, a force of more than 70,000,
simply be dropped from the order of battle. Those Viet Cong had
been included in the military's estimates of enemy strength ever
since the beginning of the war. Westmoreland had included them
in his briefing to the President. But now he was suddenly saying
they no longer posed a military threat, and henceforth should be
treated as if they didn't exist.
Reporter George Crile asked the CIA's George Allen what
part these Viet Cong soldiers played in the war.
CRILE: What was your position on the military potency
of the self-defense militia, their part in this war?
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ALLEN: Well, they were an integral part of the military
potential of the Communist forces in South Vietnam. In fact, the
guerrilla militia forces are a fundamental part of Communist forces
in any people's war. They were the ones that ambushed our forces
when they would enter VC-controlled areas. They were the ones who
booby-trapped. They were the ones who helped the populace in
general build the punji stakes and other devices that inflicted
losses on our forces encroaching in their area. The self-defense
militia were responsible for a large proportion of our casualties.
They did have military potential. They did engage in activities
which did inflict losses on U.S. forces.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: The fact is that these village
defenders had a minimum to do with the outcome of the war. The
punji sticks. Sure, there were people hurt by punji sticks.
bility.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: But they had no offensive capa-
ADAMS: When they defect or come in, you count them as
a casualty. If they defect to the government or surrender, you
count them and you put them in the POW cases. If you knock one
off, if you ki I I them, they join the body count.
And I said, "Look, if you're going to count these peo-
ple when they're dead, why can't you count them when they're
still alive?"
ALLEN:
By
excluding the paramilitary forces
and
militia
and so forth from
the
order of battle, we were skewing
our
concept
of the kind of war
we
were involved. We were skewing
our
stra-
tegy. We were not acknowledging that indeed there was
an
impor-
indigenous South Vietnamese component, that indeed it
was
a civil
war.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: This is a non-issue, Mike.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I made the decision. It was my
responsibility. I don't regret making it. I stand by it. And
the facts prove that I was right. Now, let's stop it.
WALLACE: All right, sir. Question -- and this goes
to something that you talked to me earlier. We're moving ahead
now. One wonders. You told me earlier that commanders-in-chief
don't like to hear bad news, Presidents don't like to hear bad
news.
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16
WALLACE: Nobody does.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Who does?
WALLACE: Right.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I mean you're talking about
human nature.
WALLACE: Of course.
Isn't it a possibility that the real reason for sud-
denly deciding in the summer of 1967 to remove an entire category
of the enemy from the order of battle, a category that had been
in that order of battle since 1961, was based on political con-
siderations?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: No. Decidedly not. That...
WALLACE: Didn't you make this clear in your August
20th cable?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: No. Yeah. No.
WALLACE: I have a copy of your August 20th cable.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, sure. Okay. Okay.
WALLACE: ...command position on the self-defense con-
troversy. As you put it in the cable, you say the principal rea-
son why the self-defense militia must go, quote, was press reac-
tion.
That cable, dated August 20th, 1967, spelled out General
Westmoreland's predicatment: "We have been projecting an image
of success over the recent months. The self-defense militia must
be removed," the cable explained, "or the newsmen will immediately
seize on the point that the enemy force has increased." The
cable went on to say that no explanation could then prevent the
press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, sure. They would have
drawn an erroneous conclusion because it was a non-issue. It was
a false issue. It would have totally clouded the situation, which
would have been detrimental. But the fact is that since it was
wrong, since it was not accurate, since it was not sound, would
have brought about that impact. Yes.
WALLACE: And so went the intelligence war.
Back in that summer of 1967, the CIA knew how unpopular
its cause was, trying to force a reluctant Washington to accept
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 the reality of a far larger war. But it had no idea to what
lengths the military was prepared to go to keep the estimates
of enemy strength under 300,000 men.
CBS Reports has learned that in the midst of the National
Intelligence Estimate, General Westmoreland's representatives met
here at the Pentagon and commenced arbitrarily to slash MACV's
own official estimates of Viet Cong units. It may be that West-
moreland knew nothing about these specific cuts, but they were
carried out by his officers, who were attempting to keep the total
at the level dictated by their commander.
One of those who reluctantly participated in that cut-
ting was Colonel George Hampshire.
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COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: I was a light colonel.
CRILE: You were a light colonel with a lot of respon-
sibility in a time of war, in a small room in the Pentagon, and
you were sitting there with five people who were trying to pro-
vide the President with accurate intelligence on the enemy.
figures?
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: It was a group grope.
CRILE: And it was a group grope to do what? To fake
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: To arrive at a set of figures that
MACV could live with.
CRILE: To fake intelligence estimates.
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: That's your characterization, and
that's too strong for me. My misgiving was that we were faking
it. There was manipulation. Yeah.
CRILE: Is it fair to say that you got together and
went unit-by-unit and arbitrarily decided to reduce the numbers
of VC enemy in those categories?
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: The operative word being arbitrarily,
WALLACE: Colonel Hampshire of DIA, didn't you, in fair-
ness, we asked, in fairness to your own position, sit back in
amazement when you watched this performance of arbitrarily cut-
ting certain numbers out of...
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18
WALLACE: No. I know you didn't.
WALLACE: Well, people in your command did.
WALLACE: It was during your watch.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well...
WALLACE: And he says, "I was aghast."
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: It was lousy strength estimation.
It was shoddy. But we did it.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Now, who actually did the cut-
ting, I don't know. It could have been my chief of staff. I
don't know. But I didn't get involved in this personally.
COLONEL HAMPSHIRE: This boiled down to another one
of the uncomfortable little jobs that you do for your commander,
and these vary in degree.
WALLACE: The battle between MACV and the CIA went on
for weeks. Before it was over, it would become the most bitterly
fought battle in the history of American intelligence. But in
the end, the CIA suddenly, without explanation, reversed its
position and gave in to all of General Westmoreland's demands.
George Allen explains why the CIA gave up the fight.
ALLEN: It was strictly a political judgment, a poli-
tical decision to drop CIA's opposition and to go along with the
modified set of figures.
CRILE: But once you make that decision, once you offi-
cial ly say that the enemy is a size you don't believe in, how do
you go about making intelligence reports on the enemy subsequently?
ALLEN: That was the source of my frustration.
WALLACE: CIA Director Richard Helms declined to talk
to us for this broadcast. But without his authorization, MACV
could not have prevailed. It was on Helms's authority that the
CIA finally accepted Westmoreland's figure as the official esti-
mate to be sent to the President.
ALLEN: As I say, I didn't talk to Mr. Helms about why
he thought we should drop our opposition to the MACV figures.
But the feeling was, naturally, there was a political problem,
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and he didn't want the agency to be persisting -- to be perceived
as persisting in a line which was contravening the policy interests
of the Administration.
WALLACE: General Westmoreland had now won the intelli-
gence war. And so instead of being told of an enemy army of more
than half a million, the President, the Congress, and the American
public were told there were only 248,000 Viet Cong left, that the
enemy was running out of men.
CRILE: If the military had accepted the CIA's new posi-
tion, if the National Intelligence Estimate had come out with a
claim that the Viet Cong army was almost twice as large as we'd
previously thought, what would the consequence have been? What
would the reaction be?
ALLEN: Well, it would have scuttled entire the effort
that had been going on that summer to convince the people that
the Administration's policy was on the right track. It would have
meant that Vietnam would be a very important issue in the election
in the coming year, 1968, and would have produced all sorts of
congressional inquiry and reaction to the war, and would have fed
the popular opposition to the war.
WALLACE: But now the CIA had capitulated; and instead
of a reevaluation, the Administration launched a week-long public
relations campaign to convince the American public once and for
all that we were winning the war.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: ...very, very encouraged. I've
never been more encouraged during my entire almost four years in
country. I think we're making real progress. Everybody is very
optimistic, that I know of, who is intimately associated with our
effort there.
MAN: We are winning in Vietnam militarily.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: It's difficult to conceive of
a surrender, but it is not difficult to conceive that the enemy
may decide that he can't win. And the longer he holds out, the
weaker he will get. This is in fact happening. But he does not
yet, apparently, realize this.
WALLACE: Ironically, it was at the same time that
General Westmoreland was pronouncing an enemy all but defeated
that a momentous decision had been taken in Hanoi. The Viet
Cong were ordered to prepare the major offensive of the war. It
was to be an all-out attack to, quote, split the sky and skake
the earth. It was to begin a few months hence during the Viet-
namese holiday known as Tet.
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WALLACE: These were the North Vietnamese regulars,
among the most effective combat troops in the world. They were
the enemy soldiers trained in the North, armed by the Russians
and Chinese, who infiltrated down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight
in the South.
Up until the fall of 1967, the faking and suppression
of estimates of enemy strength had focused on the Viet Cong's
local troops in the South, but never on these soldiers. Everyone
agreed that every effort must be made accurately to report how
many of them were moving south to join the battle.
Throughout 1967, General Westmoreland's reports never
indicated an infiltration rate higher than 8000 per month. But
CBS reports has learned that during the five months preceding the
Tet offensive, Westmoreland's infiltration analysts had actually
been reporting not seven or eight thousand, but more than 25,000
North Vietnamese coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail each month.
And that amounted to a near invasion. But those reports of a
dramatically increased infiltration were systematically blocked.
The man in charge of MACV's infiltration analysts,
Colonel Russell Cooley, explained what happened to those reports.
COLONEL RUSSELL COOLEY: They never got past the higher
headquaters. Every time these figures went up, they came back
and we were given another figure to use for infiltration figures.
WALLACE: In our interview, General Westmoreland sur-
prised us by contradicting his official record and confirming
what Colonel Cooley had told us about a massive increase in in-
filtration prior to Tet.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I would say it was in the magni-
tude of about 20,000 a month that actually -- and this tempo
started in the fall and continued.
WALLACE: Twenty thousand a month?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Yes. Of that order of magnitude.
WALLACE: We then reminded General Westmoreland that
back in 1967 he had told Congress and the President just the
opposite about infiltration, including this statement which he
made on Meet the Press in November of that year.
LAWRENCE SPIVAK: What about infiltration? A year ago
you said they were infiltrating at the rate of about 7000 a month.
What are they doing today?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I would estimate between 5500
and 6000 a month.
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WALLACE: And so we asked General Westmoreland to ex-
plain that contradiction.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: It sounds to me like a misstate-
ment. I don't remember making it. But, certainly, I could not
retain all these detailed figures in my mind.
WALLACE: Well, that's not...
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: And if I said that, I was wrong.
I was wrong.
WALLACE: But how could General Westmoreland have been
wrong about the most critical factor in the war? Could he have
bean misled by his own intelligence chiefs? That seems unlikely,
since he says he knew about the increased infiltration.
And so the question he could not answer for us? Why
didn't MACV alert Washington?
So somebody was not sending the proper information.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, I, I -- I have no knowledge
that they were sending improper information, inaccurate informa-
tion. And I -- well, this is a perpexing thing, if true. And I
can't believe it is true.
WALLACE: It's all the more puzzling when you consider
what was happening at Westmoreland's headquarters on the very
day he left for Washington in November 1967 to tell the American
public that the enemy was running out of men. On that day, a
senior intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Everett Parkins,
a West Point graduate who planned to make a career of the Army,
had become so incensed by MACV's refusal to send on the reports
of an enemy infiltration of 25,000 a month, that he lost his
temper and shouted at his superiors.
CRILE: Lieutenant Colonel Parkins was fired for trying
to get this report through.
COLONEL COOLEY: He was relieved from his position.
The word f !red. Yes, he was.
CRILE: And the estimates didn't go through.
COLONEL COOLEY: No.
CRILE: What was the message that you all drew from
this incident?
COLONEL COOLEY: Well, the message, sitting back, be-
came very clear. If you're going to go to the extent of being
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that forceful, you'll just be removed from the job.
WALLACE: You did not know that these reports were
being blocked, that a West Pointer had been fired for insisting
for sending this report about...
WALLACE: ...considerably greater infiltration to the
Joint Chiefs?
COLONEL COOLEY: There was one particular individual who
was a keystone behind us and he had a very, very rapid rise to
fame in our higher headquarters in estimating enemy strength and...
CRILE: And his name was what?
COLONEL COOLEY: His name was Danny Graham.
CRILE: He was the one who was blocking the infiltration
estimates from going through. Is that what you're saying?
COLONEL COOLEY: Yes, I'd have to say that.
WALLACE: The man Colonel Cooley was talking about was
General Westmoreland's chief of estimates, Colonel Daniel Graham.
We put Colonel Cooley's charges directly to Graham.
You did not block any reports?
GENERAL DANIEL GRAHAM: I never blocked any reports.
WALLACE: Who did?
GENERAL GRAHAM: Nobody that I know blocked any reports.
If anybody had blocked information going forward, it would have
been me. But I never blocked any information going forward. I'm
not that dumb.
WALLACE: But someone was blocking them. You heard
General Westmoreland himself tell us the infiltration rate was
at least 20,000 a month. The official reports, however, issued
by General Graham's shop never showed a rate higher than 7000.
And so the question: Why would MACV block such critical reports.
Colonel Cooley offers this explanation.
COLONEL COOLEY: That headquarters itself was under
very, very strong pressure, very strong pressures of General Westmore-
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land, who had publicly announced that we were entering into what he
termed phase four, the light is at the end of the tunnel, where
we're about to wrap this up and we're all going to be home for
Christmas type of logic.
All of a sudden, now you have an element bringing in
higher figures into a system that is so geared up, that says,
"We're winning." It was a dichotomy here that couldn't exist.
WALLACE: What seems to have happened by the fall of
1967 is that the vast and diffuse machinery of American intelli-
gence began, simply, to break down.
In November, after exhaustive monitoring of captured
enemy documents, the CIA predicted the Tet offensive. It was
one of the most notable intelligence breakthroughs of any war.
But Joe Hubble, the man who predicted it, was not told about
the increased enemy infiltration. So although he could write
a memo predicting what the enemy intended to do, he had no idea
that the Viet Cong had the ability, the numbers to pull it off.
CRILE: What was the message in the memo? What were
you trying to get across?
JOE HUBBIE: All hell was going to break loose. Okay?
Up until now, the war had been going along at a steady pace, very
violent, but still at a steady, relatively low-keyed long-term
pace. Now, suddenly, what you're talking about is Armageddon.
You know, the walls are going to come crashing in. They're
coming at us with everything they've got.
WALLACE: Hubble wrote that report in Saigon. And
before sending it on to the White House, the CIA had Sam Adams
review it.
ADAMS: I read it and I said, "My Lord, something big
is happening." But then, as I read it more closely, I noticed
that it didn't mention the fact that there were twice as many
guys out there.
WALLACE: Let me understand. Hubble is forecasting a
big offensive.
ADAMS: Yeah, a big offensive.
WALLACE: By the North Vietnamese, the VC.
ADAMS: That's right.
WALLACE: But he is not talking about the fact that
there may be, instead of 300,000, 400 or 500 or 600 thousand.
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ADAMS: No, he isn't talking about that.
WALLACE: He's not talking about the infiltration num-
bers or anything of that sort.
ADAMS: He doesn't mention infiltration. He doesn't
mention anything.
CRILE: Did it make sense to you, what the VC were
about to do?
HUBBIE: Actually, it did not, because I was still --
again, I had no knowledge of these large reinforcements pouring
down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And from what I knew of enemy strength
estimates, and compared with the kind of power that the American
Army had in country, it just seemed to me insane.
WALLACE: Did your comment, along with that prediction
of Tet, did your comment go along to the White House or to West-
moreland or to anybody?
ADAMS: No, it did not. Just the memo which said some-
thing big is coming. Not my comment saying that there were twice
as many of them to do it.
WALLACE: Didn't anyone feel the need -- well, obviously,
no one did feel the need to alert the President of the fact that
there was -- the enemy had a considerably greater capability than
was imagined.
ADAMS: Apparently not.
WALLACE: Shouldn't someone from MACV have told the
President that not only were the VC planning a massive attack,
but that they were flooding the South with North Vietnamese regu-
I ars?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, sure. That was known.
That was known.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I have no idea of whether the
President knew or not.
WALLACE: Secretary McNamara said in January, to the
Congress, about 6000 people a month are coming down. Richard
Helms of the CIA said the same thing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff
were never told of an infiltration rate of 20,000 a month. Your
command history does not mention 20,000 a month coming down. The
White House was not told about 20,000 men a month coming down.
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25
Where's the record of this infiltration having been
reported to higher authority?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I could not tell without re-
viewing the records and the messages that were sent.
CRILE: So, from September through late January, when
the Tet offensive erupts, there are over 100,000 North Vietnamese
regulars that have come into the South that have not been reported.
MAN: That's basically correct.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: All the challenges have been met.
The enemy is not beaten, but he knows that he has met his master
in the field.
For what you and your team have done, General Westmore-
land, I award you today an Oak Leaf Cluster.
[Applause]
WALLACE: And so the President of the United States,
the American Army in Vietnam, and the American public back home
were destined to be caught totally unprepared for the size of
the attack that was coming the following month. The President
had been alerted to the enemy's intentions, but no one had been
able or willing to inform him of the enemy's capabilities.
WALLACE: This was Saigon, command headquarters for
the half-million American troops in Vietnam. In January 1968,
a totally secure city, the heart of an increasingly secure South
Vietnam. If you accepted the government at its word, 68 percent
of the country was now pacified, meaning the enemy could not
operate in those areas. All the cities of South Vietnam were
considered secure. And General Westmoreland had just declared
that the enemy was on the run, with only 224,000 men left. It
was a moment when American power stood at its zenith. No one
was prepared for what was about to happen.
The enemy launched the Tet offensive in the early mor-
ning hours of January 30th, 1968. They attacked everywhere at
once. And what caught everyone by surprise was that they struck
in the middle of all of South Vietnam's cities.
Suddenly, American soldiers were fighting in the streets
of Saigon, desperately trying to keep the Viet Cong from over-
running the city. Everywhere in South Vietnam, American soldiers
were on the defensive. The Viet Cong actually captured the ancient
capital of Hue. They were on attack in 40 of the 44 provincial
capitals. The enemy was demonstrating a capability that no offi-
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cial report had previously acknowledged. But three weeks after
the Tat offensive, this is what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
wrote to the President:
"To a large extent, the Viet Cong now control the coun-
tryside. The initial attack nearly succeeded in a dozen places.
In short, it was a very near thing." He concluded, "MACV does
not have adequate reserves against the contingency of another
large-scale enemy offensive." That's what the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs was saying.
But from the beginning of the attack, General Westmore-
land insisted that Tet was a major defeat for the enemy. He began
making this claim on the second day of the fighting, just after
the American Embassy compound had been recaptured from a Viet
Cong terror squad andwhile battles were still raging everywhere
in the country.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Now, yesterday the enemy exposed
himself, by virtue of this strategy, and he suffered great casual-
ties.
WALLACE: But General Westmoreland's pronouncements of
an enemy on the run were now being questioned. And back home,
some of our most trusted voices were openly challenged official
assurances that this enemy could be defeated.
WALTER CRONKITE: For it seems now more certain than
ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale-
mate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in
real give-and-take negotiation or terrible escalation. And for
every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us. And
that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons,
or the mere commitment of 100 or 200 or 300 thousand more American
troops to the battle.
WALLACE: Walter Cronkite was articulating the sentiment
growing in the country that Tet was a devastating setback. But
General Westmoreland was insisting that Tet was a great victory.
And it was left to his intelligence officers to document that
claim by demonstrating massive losses in the enemy's army.
It was at this point, in the weeks after Tet, that
things began to careen out of control at MACV intelligence.
Guerrilla analyst Richard MacArthur told us what happened after
Tet when he tried to defend the integrity of his figures.
MACARTHUR: It was called to my attention by a good
friend of mine who sat across the desk from me, and he said,
"Mac, did you see what they did to your figures?" Or, "Do you
know what they did to your figures?"
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' 27
And I said, "No. What do you -- what is it you're
trying to say?"
And he didn't say anything else. And so I just reached
down and looked at my f igures and saw that they had been cut
drastically. They had been cut in half.
CRILE: Your guerrillas have now been reduced by half
without your okay.
MACARTHUR: Absolutely. It was done, apparently, while
I was on vacation, while I was on R&R.
CRILE: So, by this time, you just say this is business
MACARTHUR: No. As a matter of fact, I exploded. I
stormed down to the other end of the hall and walked in and said,
"Colonel Wyler," I said, "Hi," you know. And I said, "What -- who
changed my figures?"
And the Colonel said to me, "Mac, I ie a I ittl e, Mac.
Lie a little."
Well, I said, "I'm not going to lie a little." And I
did an about-face, turned around and marched out of his office.
It was a very strange time for me. Because, you see,
I really didn't know who to complain to. I didn't know whose
attention to bring this to, because I didn't know -- don't forget,
this was a pretty high -- this combined intelligence center was
really the intelligence arm of MACV. And I didn't know, honestly,
who to speak to. I mean it wasn't as though you could go and see
the chaplain or somebody, you know. I mean I didn't know how --
who was really involved in this thing. I'll tell you, honetly,
I didn't know if someday I might wind up in the Saigon River be-
cause I said, "Hey, look," you know, "something's gone wrong.
People are changing these numbers. What's happening here?"
CRILE: The atmosphere was that intense?
MACARTHUR: It was that intense. Yes.
WALLACE: Shortly after, MacArthur was transferred.
MACV intelligence, meanwhile, went ahead and produced
its first official estimate of enemy strength after Tet. This
is that document, sent on to the Pentagon and the White House,
listing an enemy reduced to 204,126 men.
And this is Commander James Meacham, the officer in
charge of putting out that report. So troubled was Meacham that
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28
he wrote home every night confessing to what he was being asked
to do.
He's writing in March of 1968, telling his wife about
how MACV was going about faking the first order of battle report
after Tet. I quote from his letter: "We started with the answer
and plugged in all sorts of figures until we found the combination
which the machine could digest. And then we wrote all sorts of
estimates showing why the figures were right which we had to use,
and we continue to win the war."
Did you believe, sir, that the OB reports coming out
after Tet were honest?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: What an individual writes to
his wife may or may not be an objective account. Now, it was
the prerogative of General Davidson, who was my intelligence
chief, to introduce some logic and some common sense into esti-
mates.
WALLACE: But as we shall see, after Tet there was
nothing logical about MACV's statistics on the enemy.
How many troops did he lose, General?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, in the first week, out
of a commitment, according to our intelligence, of about 84,000
that were committed in the early days of the Tet offensive, he
lost 55,000.
WALLACE: Killed?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Killed.
WALLACE: And how many wounded?
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: Well, we have no way of knowing
that. But usually the ratio is about three-to-one, about three
wounded for one that is killed.
WALLACE: If you take General Westmoreland at his
word, here is the logical problem you run into. It begins with
MACV's official estimate of total combined enemy strength in the
South just before Tet, 224,000. Five weeks later, on March 7th,
Westmoreland reported 50,000 of those enemy had been killed.
Now, according to his own standard ratio, for every one killed,
three were wounded. So even disregarding the enemy soldiers who
defected or were captured, the bottom-line figure just didn't
make sense. If so many Viet Cong had been taken out of action,
the question had to be asked: Whom were we fighting?
MACV's intelligence officers discovered the problem
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when they started to feed the enemy loss figures into their com-
puters.
Colonel Cooley explains.
COLONEL COOLEY: When we put those figures in, the enemy
loss figures were so high, we had almost no enemy left in country.
And people -- the analysts in our headquarters would look at that
and say, "This is" -- you know, "This is unbelievable. This is
a little too unbelievable."
WALLACE: According to Colonel Cooley, there was a gen-
eral agreement at this time that something had to be done. Cooley
and another senior intelligence officer, Commander James Meacham,
have told CBS Reports that several weeks after Tet, Colonel Daniel
Graham, General Westmoreland's chief of estimates, asked them to
alter MACV's historical record. In effect, they then accused
Graham of personally engineering a cover-up.
First, Commander Meacham.
CRILE: There comes a time when Colonel Graham asked
you and Colonel Wyler to tamper with the computer's memory, to
change the data base in some way.
COMMANDER JAMES MEACHAM: That's it. That's it.
COMMANDER MEACHAM: Well, we didn't say no. I mean
this thing was not private property. It belonged to the intel-
ligence directorate. We were the custodians of it. We didn't
like what Danny Graham proposed to do. We didn't want him to
do it. At the end of the day, we lost the fight and he did it.
CRILE: What was so long about going back into the
memory? What got Meacham so distressed about it?
COLONEL COOLEY: I would -- a little bit of the 1984
syndrome here. You know, where you can obliterate something or
you, you know, can alter it to the point where it never existed
type of logic.
COMMANDER MEACHAM: Up to that time, even though some
of the current estimates and the current figures had been juggled
around with, we had not really tinkered with our data base, if
I can use that jargonistic word. And Danny Graham was asking us
to do it. And we didn't like it.
GENERAL GRAHAM: Oh, for crying out l oud . I never asked
anybody to wipe out the computer's memory. I don't know what --
honestly, I haven't got any idea what he's talking about.
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March that General Westmoreland had requested 206,000 additional
troops, the country was stunned. It seemed to be an admission
that the half-million American soldiers already in Vietnam could-
n't cope with the enemy.
Still, Lyndon Johnson held firm, as he tried desper-
ately to rally support for his war effort.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: But I point out to you the time
has come when we ought to unite, when we ought to stand up and
be counted, when we ought to support our leaders, our government,
our men, and our allies until aggression is stopped.
WALLACE: The President had been determined to see the
war through. But by the end of the month, he could no longer
ignore the mounting criticism. And on March the 25th, he sum-
moned a council of trusted advisers, the so-called wise men.
Their task: to assess the war effort and advise the President.
The wise men had met once before, five months earlier.
They had listened to briefings from the CIA and the military,
and they had advised the President to disregard public criticism
and carry on with the war. But now these same wise men were
about to be given a different set of facts.
ADAMS: On the 20th of March...
ADAMS: ...1968, I was asked -- and obeyed the order --
I was asked to bring together an estimate of how many enemy there
were. And I said there were about 600,000. And I understand it
was used to brief the so-called wise men, Lyndon Johnson's senior
advisers.
WALLACE: Who are we talking about?
ADAMS: They included Dean Acheson, George Ball, Arthur
Goldberg, Maxwell Taylor, and so forth.
WALLACE: What had happened is that after Tet, the CIA
had regained the courage of its conviction. And, among other
things, they told the wise men of the CIA's belief that we were
fighting a dramatically larger enemy. That was at least one of
the reasons why Lyndon Johnson's advisers concluded that despite
the military's insistence that we were winning, the enemy could
not, in fact, be defeated at any acceptable cost. The wise men
then stunned the President by urging him to begin pulling out
of the war.
Five days later, a sobered Lyndon Johnson addressed
the nation.
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PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I shall not seek and I will not
accept the nomination of my party for another term as your Presi-
dent.
WALLACE: Two months after the President's speech,
General William Westmoreland was transferred back to Washington
and promoted to become Chief of the Army.
To this day, General Westmoreland insists that the
enemy was virtually destroyed at Tet.
Be that as it may, the fighting in Vietnam went on for
seven more years after the Tet offensive. Twenty-seven thousand
more American soldiers were killed. Over 100,000 more were woun-
ded. And on April 30th, 1975, that same enemy entered Saigon
once again. Only this time it was called Ho Chi Minh City.
WALLACE: Sam Adams, the man who first alerted the gov-
ernment to the existence of a larger enemy, became increasingly
disillusioned with the CIA after the Tet offensive. He finally
resigned and began a 10-year effort to get his story told.
George Allen completed a long and distinguished career
with the CIA. Today he is retired and still concerned about the
integrity of our intelligence, for he worries that history might
repeat itself.
Richard MacArthur, MACV's guerrilla analyst, had hoped
to make a career in the Army. His stand after Tet dashed those
hopes. Today MacArthur is an investigator for the State of New
York.
Colonel Gaines Hawkins stayed on in Army intelligence
for three years after Tet, a loyal staff officer to the end.
Today he is running a home for the elderly in West Point, Mis-
sissippi.
General Joseph McChristian, the man whose report
General William Westmoreland would not accept, went on to become
the Army's Chief of Intelligence. Today he is retired.
Colonel Russell Cooley stayed on in military intelli-
gence for several years, specializing in protecting the inte-
grity of the Pentagon's top secret computers. Today he is in
charge of computer security for the Fairchild Data Center in
Mountain View, California.
Commander James Meacham has retired. Today he is
chief military correspondent for the respect British journal
The Economist.
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Colonel Daniel Graham left Vietnam a few months after
Tet, at the same time as General Westmoreland. He soon became
General Graham, the head of all military intelligence. Today
Graham continues to be an influential voice in intelligence
circles in Washington.
General William Westmoreland is retired. He is a
popular speaker in this country and abroad. He holds to his
view that we won the war on the battlefield in Vietnam, and only
chose to lose it at home.
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