WESTMORELAND VERSUS 60 MINUTES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100660019-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 14, 2007
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: April 21, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 656-4068
PROGRAM STATION
Inside Story WETA-TV
PBS Network
April 21, 1983 8:30 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
AMBASSADOR ROBERT KOMER: It may be good television, but
it's lousy journalism. And it's exceedingly non-objective. I
thought that they did a hatchet job on poor Westmoreland.
GEORGE CARVER: I think that they had a thesis that they
wanted to prove, and they were acting like the lady in the famous
Helen Hokinson (?) New Yorker cartoon who says, "My mind is made
up. Don't confuse me with facts."
VAN GORDON SAUTER: Was it accurate? Yes. Was it fair?
Yes. Was it well supported by the documents? Yes. And we stand
by the accuracy and fairness of that broadcast.
NODDING CARTER: These people are arguing about a CBS
documentary called "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,"
reported by Mike Wallace.
MIKE WALLACE: 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 offensive.
Story.
CARTER: Hello. I'm Hodding Carter. And this is Inside
It's been more than a year since CBS aired "The Un-
counted Enemy," but it continues to attract attention and create
controversy. Many of the arguments are as much about the war as
about journalism. On that score, I wrote a column for the Wall
Street Journal praising the show for reminding us of the appal-
ling lies of the Vietnam era. But the show has also drawn
Material supplied by Radio N Reports, Inc. may be used for file and reference purposes only. It may not be reproduced, sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
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withering fire, starting with a four-star press conference three
days after the broadcast.
GENERAL WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: It was all there: the
arrogance, the color, the drama, the contrived plot, the close
shots. Everything but the truth.
CARTER: Four months later, a sensational magazine
article seemed to support the General. By now, Westmoreland's
complaints were attracting wide attention.
DAN RATHER: In a memo to staff members today, CBS
CARTER: An internal investigation at CBS acknowledged
some journalistic errors. There was an offer of free air time.
SAUTER: We'll give you, General Westmoreland, 15
minutes of unedited prime-time network television to say whatever
you want to say.
DAN BURT: That wasn't worth the powder to blow it to
hell. I was sitting right there when that offer came through.
It came through Friday afternoon by messenger at four o'clock in
the afternoon, when we'd scheduled a press conference to file the
suit the following Monday.
CARTER: Westmoreland did indeed file a lawsuit, still
pending, for $120 million.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: There is no way left for me to
clear my name, my honor, and the honor of the military.
CARTER: George Crile produced the documentary, and he's
more than willing to defend it.
GEORGE CRILE: The key aspect of the whole story is that
the deception took place, that it was systematic, that it
involved the heart of a key intelligence command in the middle of
the only war we ever lost, that it had disastrous consequences.
CARTER: The question I keep asking you is, did you
allow the case for those who were implicated, directy or indi-
rectly, as being major players in that conspiracy, did you allow
them a chance to respond?
CRILE: And I keep asking you to tell me what you have
learned from these people that you feel would have been an
effective piece of information.
CARTER: That's what I'd like you to see tonight, some
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of the people who were in the film and some people who were at
the highest levels of American military intelligence who were not
interviewed, or, if interviewed, were not seen.
Two words before we start. One is about an unseen
witness tonight who played a central role in the broadcast, Mike
Wallace. He was not available to our cameras.
The other point is about the word conspiracy. CBS
President Van Gordon Sauter now says it was the wrong word to
use. But take away conspiracy, in word or concept, and you have
a far different, less provocative program. Certainly, the
network wasn't shy about pushing it in its ad campaign.
The central figure in this alleged conspiracy was
General William Westmoreland, head of the Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam, known as MAC-V. The goal: suppression of
information that the Communists were a far larger force than
Americans had been told. The accuser: former CIA analyst Sam
Adams, who studies indicated we were fighting a force twice as
large as official counts. Adams lost bureaucratic battles over
the numbers in 1967, but he continued researching the subject.
He was a paid consultant to CBS who was both interviewed by CBS
and did interviews for the program, an unusual situation.
To help you keep track of the argument, from here on
we're going to put a gray border around footage from the CBS
film. When we do this, it means we've cut a part of that film.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: It seems to me that the strategy
we are following at this time is the proper one, and that is
producing...
CARTER: As CBS tells the tale, Westmoreland got bad
news shortly after this optimistic speech. Back in Saigon, his
top intelligence officer told him the enemy was larger than he
had thought.
GENERAL JOSEPH MCCHRISTIAN: He was quite disturbed by
it. And by the time I left his office, I had the definite
impression that he felt that if he sent those figures back to
Washington at that time, it would create a political bombshell.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I did not accept his recommenda-
tion. I did not accept it. And I didn't accept it because of
political reasons -- I may have mentioned this. I guess I did.
But that was not the fundamental thing. I just didn't accept it.
CRILE: If there's ever one interview which created a
whole shift in the approach of a documentary or a reporting job,
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it was that one with General Westmoreland, in which he explained
why he did it.
GENERAL WESTMORELAND: I did not accept it, and I didn't
accept it because of political reasons. That was...
CRILE: He didn't accept the report. He didn't allow it
to be passed on to Washington, and he didn't do it for political
reasons.
CARTER: Those are the two times he spoke of his actions
being for political reasons?
CRILE: Well, they're in the transcript. You've read
it. You know, in two instances, and placed quite closely
together.
CARTER: What's also in the transcript are three
separate occasions that General Westmoreland said politics was a
non-issue, and three times that he said accuracy or an accurate
appraisal was his main concern.
But CBS implies that the deception really begins after
McChristian leaves Vietnam. He was replaced by General Phillip
Davidson. Davidson was MAC-V's chief intelligence officer during
the entire period the documentary claims a conspiracy took place.
GENERAL PHILLIP DAVIDSON: If anybody was going to cook
the books, if anybody was going to manipulate enemy strength
figures, I had to be the pivotal man to do it.
CARTER: No one at CBS contacted Davidson at any point
during the 15 months the documentary was in production.
CRILE: We called him a number of times. It was our
understanding that Davidson was very sick, supposedly on his
death bed.
GENERAL DAVIDSON: In 1981, I remarried. Certainly not
the actions of a dying man. I played golf and I do play golf
every day.
CRILE: You've probably talked to him by now, I assume.
What is it that Davidson has to say that we should have included
in there?
GENERAL DAVIDSON: Just to set the record straight,
neither General Westmoreland nor anybody else in a position of
authority over me ever gave me any order, any directive, any
hint, any indication to manipulate enemy strength figures, to
minimize enemy strength figures, or to suppress them. Nor did I
ever give any such order to the people who worked for me.
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CARTER: That's what the man says. You don't have to
believe him. But if you want to make the case that CBS did,
that, quote, there was a conspiracy at the highest levels of
military intelligence, he deserves a hearing.
CBS found people who supported its thesis that enemy
strength numbers were arbitrarily changed. One is a young
officer who made a strong impression.
LT. RICHARD MCARTHUR: I found that someone was changing
the numbers, the numbers that were reported by the sector
advisers in the field.
GENERAL DAVIDSON: I do recall a Lieutenant McArthur
briefed me one day, and he simply had not done his work.
CARTER: General Davidson recalls rejecting a McArthur
report, along with estimates from many others.
GENERAL DAVIDSON: My job was not to accept everything
some colonel or captain came up and gave me. My job was to look
at that in the light of my experience and to see whether I think
it's right or wrong.
CARTER: McArthur sticks by the story as he saw it. But
he was low in the chain of command.
Let's look at some more evidence, this time from a much
higher source.
COLONEL GAINS HAWKINS: There was no mistaking the
COLONEL HAWKINS: That there was a great concern about
the impact of these figures, that they're being high.
CRILE: The whole thing centers around your ability to
understand the experience of Colonel Gains Hawkins, a man who
wanted to do his job and who wanted to win the war, and found
that in the spring of 1967, as order of battle chief, the man
that the whole country relied on to tell them who the enemy was,
that he was no longer permitted to use the evidence available to
him.
CARTER: Hawkins is a key figure. So I went to see him
in West Point, Mississippi.
COLONEL HAWKINS: Mark Hazzard likes to say that I count
Republican votes like I counted guerrillas in Vietnam.
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[Laughter]
COLONEL HAWKINS: I wish to hell we had as many Republi-
[Laughter]
CARTER: I asked Hawkins to describe his encounters with
General Westmoreland.
COLONEL HAWKINS: No, sir. No, sir. I never got any
direct order.
CARTER: There was no order from Westmoreland, "Reduce
these numbers."
COLONEL HAWKINS: "Take another look," I think was the
expression was used.
CARTER: What did you think that meant?
COLONEL HAWKINS: Bring 'em down.
CARTER: Bring 'em down because of what?
COLONEL HAWKINS: Because of the reaction, the public
reaction to them. This is what I interpreted. There was no
direct order. This is my interpretation.
CARTER: And you went back and you cut the figures?
CARTER: Hawkins admits he faked the figures. Hawkins
also repeatedly told me there was no direct order, as he repeat-
edly told George Crile. That seems to make it difficult to prove
a conspiracy.
CRILE: Oh, look, Hodding. I mean you're too experi-
enced in government and in military to get involved in semantical
questions like that. Sure, if you're talking about whether or
not General Westmoreland, General Davidson, Colonel Morris ever
wrote out an order and signed it and told somebody to go do
something wrong, okay, maybe there was no conspiracy, if that's
the way you want to put it.
CARTER: But "orders" is the word CBS repeatedly uses.
It comes up when the network describes MAC-V's position during a
series of heated meetings of the National Intelligence Estimate
Board. At these meetings, representatives of the various U.S.
intelligence agencies tried to agree on the size of the enemy.
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There was a battle between Westmoreland's people and the CIA.
The CIA arguing that a true count of the enemy meant including
people who were not in regular armed units.
Gains Hawkins was a military delegate, and CBS said he
had to play out a charade because Westmoreland had ordered a
ceiling on the military's numbers.
MIKE WALLACE: Westmoreland says he doesn't recall these
orders. But the head of MAC-V's delegation told us that General
Westmoreland had in fact personally instructed him not to allow
the total to go over 300,000.
CARTER: Were you ordered by General Westmoreland to
hold to a set of figures, come what may?
GENERAL GEORGE GODDING: No, I was not ordered to hold
any set of figures.
CARTER: This is General George Godding, the head of the
MAC-V delegation, and the man Mike Wallace said received a direct
order to hold to a ceiling. CBS interviewed Godding, but not on
camera.
CRILE: As General Godding told us repeatedly on the
telephone...
CARTER: On camera, General Godding denies it. On
camera, General Godding, with a transcript available, says that
is not so.
CRILE: All right. But was he ever told to keep within
the parameters of the May order of battle, which was a number,
which was 296,000? If you'd asked him it that way, he might...
CARTER: We asked him a whole set of questions on
CRILE: Did you ask him it that way?
CARTER: It has been said in papers that the order of
battle figures upon which you must settle could not exceed the
parameters of the May order of battle. Did General Westmoreland
instruct you to that effect?
GENERAL GODDING: No, he did not.
CARTER: If Westmoreland didn't give those instructions,
did anyone?
GENERAL DAVIDSON: I don't recall giving George Godding,
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General Godding, any particular instructions. Looking back on
it, I probably told him, "This is our figure. We've gone over
all of these things. This is the best figure we can determine.
Now, if these people have information we don't have, let us know
about it. Maybe we can adjust, one way or the other."
CARTER: Did General Westmoreland impose a ceiling? I
don't know. But now you've heard from the man who was supposed
to have received the order and from the man who would have given
it to him. And they tell a different story from the one Mike
Wallace told.
It was during the intelligence board meetings that
General Westmoreland realized he had a problem, according to CBS.
A true count of the enemy would be embarrassing to the Presi-
dent's claim of progress.
Here's what Mike Wallace says happened next.
WALLACE: 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.
GEORGE CARVER: There was an intense debate about how we
ought to keep books on the Viet Cong.
CARTER: George Carver was the CIA's top man for
Vietnamese affairs. CBS did not interview him until the film was
completed.
CRILE: What did George Carver have to say, in your
opinion, that was significant, that would have changed the
picture of this whole story?
CARVER: What finally broke the impasse was a session, a
private session that I had with General Westmoreland.
CARTER: At that session, Carver proposed describing the
disputed Viet Cong forces in words instead of the numbers the
military had trouble accepting.
CARVER: Forcing someone to read a couple of sentences
because there wasn't a damn number would give him more enlighten-
ment and more understanding of what we were dealing with than a
number which, no matter what you picked, was liable to be
spurious.
CARTER: George Carver says he volunteered the solution,
which he felt was a sensible compromise. Mike Wallace said:
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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.
CARVER: That's pretty strong stuff. It would have been
dreadful if it were true. It doesn't happen to be true.
Congress.
CARTER: So, who was in the dark? Let's start with
OTIS PIKE: I was on the Armed Services Committee at the
time, and they gave us numbers every month.
CARTER: This is former Congressman Otis Pike. He
chaired a committee that conducted a lengthy investigation of the
intelligence community in 1975.
PIKE: I think there was a tendency to fudge the
numbers, to put the best possible face on things. Nobody wants
to be the bearer of bad news. But I don't think we took the
numbers too seriously.
CARTER: And what about the people? Were they unin-
formed? In the summer and fall of the alleged conspiracy, there
was a steady flow of stories on the debate over the strength of
the enemy, all laid out for Americans to see: numbers, units,
manpower. And it's impossible to believe that Lyndon Johnson, a
voracious reader, wasn't seeing them as well. What President
Johnson may not have been seeing, CBS says, were reports that the
North Vietnamese were pouring southward during the fall of 1967.
MAC-V's official numbers were five to six thousand a
month. CBS found an officer who was reporting figures as high as
25,000 a month.
WALLACE: And that amounted to a near invasion. But
those reports of a dramatically increased infiltration were
systematically blocked.
CARTER: Blocked, we are led to believe, from getting to
the President, with tragic consequences.
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 capability.
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gence?
CARTER: No one? What about MAC-V's chief of intelli-
GENERAL DAVIDSON: In mid-November 1967, through a
highly sensitive source, which is classified to this day, we
began to see the preparation for movement of major North Vietna-
mese divisions. But this was ominous, particularly since we knew
a major offensive was in the offing, you see. Gee, here are the
guys that are going to do it.
CARTER: But was the word getting to Washington?
CARVER: My in box was cascading every day, as was
everybody else's in Washington concerned with this, with cables
on this particular thing.
CARVER: Of course the President knew it. I talked
almost daily to Walt Rostow, who was his assistant for national
security affairs.
WALT ROSTOW: I generated a flow to him of all manner of
information, including, you know, reports that didn't come from
high-level sources. And he absorbed it all.
CARTER: Rostow says his CBS interview lasted three
hours. Crile used none of it.
CRILE: Where in the interview, from your reading, do
you find Walt Rostow making points that you think should have
been included because they would have challenged the thesis of
the broadcast?
CARTER: In his interview with us, and with Mike
Wallace, Rostow repeatedly made this point.
ROSTOW: We had from communications intelligence quite
adequate information on the movement of regular North Vietnamese
units. We could track them from their bases down the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. And we saw them moving. They didn't come marching down
the Ho Chi Minh Trail with flags flying and a band playing. They
came down in -- but in big units. We knew the regiments and the
battalion numbers. And they were coming down, and they had to be
dealt with.
CARTER: Did the message get through? Ten years before
Crile began work on his documentary, Lyndon Johnson wrote about
watching a mammoth buildup of enemy troops and supplies: "Our
intelligence apparatus informed us conclusively that the Commun-
ists were preparing for an all-out assault." What's more, in
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December of that year, he told the Australian Cabinet that he,
quote, foresaw the North Vietnamese using kamikaze tactics in the
weeks ahead.
ROSTOW: I think that if he had told the American people
what he had told the Australian Cabinet, that people would have
been very much prepared -- better prepared for what was coming.
CARTER: The American Embassy under enemy control. U.S.
commandos battling for our Saigon stronghold. Pictures that
shocked those who believed we were winning the war. It all took
place on the first day of the sacred Vietnamese holiday Tet. How
could the enemy be so bold? How could we be so suprised?
According to Wallace and Crile, the answer was simple:
The intelligence deception had left us unprepared for the size of
the attack at Tet. And Tet, they implied, was a military defeat
that ultimately brought down Lyndon Johnson and may have cost us
the war.
Did we lose at Tet? A key CBS witness:
COLONEL HAWKINS: We did not lose militarily. We didn't
-- I think we whipped the shit out of 'em at Tet.
AMBASSADOR KOMER: It was a genuine tactical surprise.
CARTER: Robert Komer was the number three man at MAC-V
when Tet broke out. He was not interviewed by CBS.
AMBASSADOR KOMER: We won militarily, and the Vietnamese
won psychologically, the North Vietnamese.
CARTER: Interestingly, an important former Viet Cong
leader agrees. Last fall Truong Nhu Tang (?) wrote, "The Tet
offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. Irony of the
Vietnamese War that our propaganda transformed this military
debacle into a brilliant victory." Just how bad was the debacle?
Tang says it cost "one-half our forces."
No one ever accused Westmoreland of undercounting enemy
bodies. And at the end of Tet, MAC-V counted 50,000 enemy dead.
Even allowing for wounded, the enemy forces seemed closer to
MAC-V's estimates than the CIA figures CBS supports.
GENERAL DAVIDSON: As a matter of fact, both CIA and
ourselves had given the enemy the capability of mounting 118-120
thousand troops. He didn't use that many.
CARTER: George Allen, the highest-ranking CIA man
presented by CBS, agrees that numbers weren't the problem at Tet.
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GEORGE ALLEN: The scale of the offensive, in reality,
was consistent with either the 300 or 500 thousand number. We
just don't know how many. I can't say how many were involved. I
know it was more than 86,000.
CARTER: So, in any case, whatever the problem was with
Tet, it was not a case of cooked figures leaving us unprepared
for the scope of the attack.
ALLEN: That's my view.
CARTER: Let's go back to the beginning, to the CBS
premise. What is it that CBS was going to prove?
WALLACE: 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 offensive.
CRILE: If you go collect the pieces of this puzzle and
you talk to the individual officers in charge of different areas
of estimating enemy strength and you see the connections between
them, what unfolds is a pattern which constitutes a deception
campaign, which I felt, still feel, is appropriate to label a
conspiracy to deceive.
CARTER: That isn't the way the man who admitted he
cooked figures sees it.
COLONEL HAWKINS: I never have subscribed to the
conspiracy theory that the documentary brought out.
ALLEN: ...that I would not have characterized the
episode as a conspiracy, per se; but more as a conflict between
technicians attempting to do an intelligence kind of assessment
and policy people who have political objectives they're trying to
satisfy.
AMBASSADOR KOMER: Westy had his flaws. We did lose the
war. Not just his responsibility, but that of many of the rest
of us, myself included. But the one thing that no one would ever
think Westmoreland would do would be to engage in deception and
conspiracy. All of us called Westy an Eagle Scout.
GENERAL DAVIDSON: The conspiracy, if any existed, to be
effective, had to be far beyond the confines of MAC-V. It would
have had to spread into the top of CIA, into the top of the State
Department, into the Pentagon, the Defense Department, the Joint
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Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, the National
Security Agency, and into the White House and to the President
himself.
PIKE: If there was one person responsible, he is now
deceased, and that would have to have been the President of the
United States.
CARTER: And from the man who led CBS to the story,
their paid consultant and witness, former CIA analyst Sam Adams.
SAM ADAMS: There was an intention to deceive the
American public. I find it less plausible that there was an
intention to deceive the President. I find it even less plaus-
ible that there was an intention to deceive the troops out in the
field. Which isn't to say it didn't happen. But I think that,
you know, this in fact did result; there people were deceived.
But I think it was an unintended deception.
CARTER: That's not a bad starting point for what could
be a fascinating documentary. But it wouldn't be the clean-cut
morality tale of good and evil, conspirators and victims spun out
by Wallace and Crile.
History may yet decide there was indeed a conspiracy in
Saigon to fake the numbers. But at this point, the evidence is
less compelling, the witnesses are more contradictory, and the
possible conclusions less obvious than the documentary suggests.
CBS is entitled to its opinion. But we're entitled to a
more balanced presentation. Even if you're sure of guilt,
there's a vast difference between a fair trial and a lynching.
It's a distinction that was badly blurred when CBS made "The
Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception."
For Inside Story, I'm Hodding Carter.
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