SAM ADAMS' VIETNAM OBSESSION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605370017-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 17
• Publication Date: January 10, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

.4
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605370017-6
am
dams'
Vietnam
Obsession
At \''estmoreland Trial, the
Ex-CIA Man & His Theoiy
`B.y E or Randolph?
Wa~hmgten-Post-Staff` Writer= )
NEW YORK-What is most striking about
Samuel Alexander Adams-the man whose
theory about Vietnam has been on trial here
for the last three months-is that there is no
discernible anger in his manner.
Day after day, the former CIA analyst, one
of the codefendants in retired general Wil-
liam C. Westmoreland's $120 million libel
action against CBS, has listened to the gen-
eral's friends and lawyers describe Adams as
obsessed, monomaniacal. Or, as his former
l9 boss at the CIA, George Carver, told the
court in November, Adams "was very intol-
erant of people who did not share the con-
clusions to which he jumped."
It has become clear that this multimillion-
dollar trial would not have occurred without
his fixation, his dedication to what is now
widely known as the "Adams theory," born
17 years ago in a cubicle at CIA headquar-
ters when he first suspected that the U.S.
government was suppressing the truth about
enemy troop strength in Vietnam. It is that
theory, central to a 1982 GBS documentary,
that Westmoreland asserts libeled him.
For three months, Adams, who takes the
stand today, has sat at the end of the defense
table in U.S. District Court. Wearing rum-
pled tweeds, scribbling notes on his volumi-
nous chronologies or "chronos." even taking
down slurs on his own character, he shows
WASHINGTON POST
10 January 1985
only serenity. Outside the courtroom, he has
joked with reporters, saying, for example,
that Carver is "a nice funny guy, who, of
course, was wrong."
Perhaps Adams' ease stems from a satis-
faction that his views have finally received
the public forum he has been yearning for, or
perhaps it' is from his belief that he is abso-
lutely right.
"In fact, to be honest, for me this trial is a
bonanza," he said during one of the periods
when his: motives were under strongest at-
tack here. "I'nra researcher, but when have
researchers ever had the power of subpoe-
na?" he added, his soft voice difficult to hear
even when talking about what is clearly his
life's passion. "It is almost unique in
that usually when these things are
released, all the principals are dead."
Now, when Adams testifies as the
first live witness for CBS in defense
of the documentary, it will be his day
in court, the ultimate airing of one of
the nation's best-researched intel-
ligence theories.
And Adams, who was a paid con-
sultant to CBS Reports for the pro-
gram, will have to convince the jury ,
that he is stubborn only because he is
principled, a man at odds with his
government's leaders only because
he believed they were not doing
their jobs and certainly not doing
their best.
Says one of his closest friends, au-
thor John Rolfe Gardiner, "I think the
man is incredible-a hero of our
time. I hope they will be able to rec-
ognize it."
In some. ways Sam Adams is the
most fascinating and least known of
the parade of characters who have
been a part of this long, complicated
courtroom drama over the CBS show
"The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam
Deception."
Shy, handsome, his humor almost
always at his own expense. Adams
has a gentle way, like a befuddled
professor who recognizes that even
some of his friends see his fondness
for one thin slice of time and history
as amusingly eccentric.
But underneath that shambling ex-
terior, Adams is as obdurate as Ply-
' mouth Rock, a man as caught up
with his version of the truth as some
of his famous forebears. A fourth
cousin, seven times removed, of
President John Adams, the living
Sam Adams (no direct kin to the
American revolutionary Samuel Ad-
ams) has bloodlines deep in the
American establishment.
His father, Pierpont Adams, who
was probably named after Pierpont
Morgan, had a seat on the New York
Stock Exchange. And in one of the
odd ironies of this trial. Pierpont's
partner was the late Ellsworth Bun-
ker, former ambassador to Vietnam
who, had he Jived, might have tes-
tified against his former partner's
son.
The list of Adams' schools is,con-
sistent with such connections. He
went to St. Mark's School in Mas-
sachusetts and on to Harvard (his-
tory) '55. "The same year as Teddy
Kennedy, whom I didn't know," Ad-
ams says. Then there was the Navy,
and after that, as if reconnoitering
for the troubled young in the 1960s,
there was his lost period, a youth's
thrashing around to determine
where to use his formidable ener-
gies.
For a while, there was ski bum-
ming, but, as Adams put it, "I quit
when the snow melted, and I didn't
know, what else to do." Then, like
many of his old associates, he tried
law school, but found Harvard's at-
torney factory not to his liking. Then
there was banking until Aug. 16,
1962, the day after he married El-
eanor McGowen, the elegant daugh-
ter of a patrician Alabama family.
"Mr. McGowen must have. been in
shock-this jerk ... quit his banking
job the day after he married his
daughter," Adams recalled.
Having then run through most of
the professions of America's gentle-
manly class, Adams looked to the
government, the Agency. It was an
era, much like today, when the
Agency lured many of the brightest
and most sensitive young men out of
the nation's elite colleges.
"I had no idea I would like 'it or
that I was likely to be good at it," Ad-
ams said recently of the junior officer
trainee job that he landed 'in March
1963.
A year later Adams be an working
on the Congo desk. Acknowledging
that he skimmed through Harvard
and dawdled at other jobs, Adams
suddenly hit intellectual pay dirt at
the CIA.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605370017-6
 '1 f u Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0605370017-6 2-
1 ,- -,. 1?1 ,I~~, . "Mv law just clattered to the
4.iiv iov d the place. I'd love to go floor," he likes to recall. "I started
rick." he said, carefully adding, as he galloping around the CIA headquar-
,vays does, "although I realize ters like Paul Revere."
'
"
:hat
s totally quixotic.
Adams began studying the tribes
in tiie Congo, following the basic rule
of good intelligence that, first, one
learns everything available on the
subject. Everything, he stressed, his
soft voice rising only slightly for em-
phasis. Then, you can begin predict-
ing, extrapolating from the known to
the expected.
Adams said that such a mountain
of research allowed him to predict
such things as that Uganda would in-
vade the Congo-a notion that
brought snickers, he recalled, from
the State Department.
When Uganda did invade the
Congo-fulfilling his prediction
about the.area Adams knew only by
maps and documents he memorized
with a watchmaker's eye for detail-
Adams became the golden boy at the
CIA.
"It was like rockets going off. It
was terrific-one of the high points
in my life," he remembered recently.
"There's no crystal ball. It isn't
luck." Adams said of the analyst's
job. "The key to good intelligence is
good files, knowing what's in them
and how to retrieve them."
From the Congo, Adams was pro-
moted to the Vietnamese affairs sec-
tion at the CIA's Langley headquar-
ters, trying to sift through docu-
ments that sometimes lie and some-
times don't, to figure out how many
people were really out there fighting
the United States in the early stages
of this long war.
What became his 17-year-old bat-
tle with the government started in
the Vietnamese town of Tan An in
1966 as he sat in a hot, dusty room
looking through dossiers about com-
munist defectors to the South Viet-
namese side. When he counted the
defectors in that area there were
120, but when he happened to look
at the official U.S. document that
showed how many Viet Cong guer-
rillas there were supposed to be. it
said 160, he says. That should have
left a scant 40 in the field-a fact he
remembers as being merely puzzling,
at that stage.
A few months later, back in Wash-
ington, Adams says, he began com-
paring Army figures in one province
that showed 50,000 Viet Cong guer-
rillas and militia. The official order of
battle, though, said . there were
4,500. He did not shout "Eureka!,"
but for Adams it was The Moment,
the discovery that sent him hurtling
into a life and obsession, seemingly
against his own best interests.
In retrospect, it may Ex that Paul
Revere wouldn't make such a good
bureaucrat. Within the agency, until
he resigned in 1.973. Adams became
like a sorcerer's apprentice, toting
enemy troop data to bosses already
drowning in his carefully researched
but politically troublesome numbers.
Adams kept pushing for enemy troop
totals that the military said were too
high, that the brass believed were
wrong and would turn an already
skittish public permanently against
this war.
When they didn't listen, Adams
didn't retreat submissively to his cu-
bicle. At first he protested, resigning
from the Vietnam Affairs staff in
1968 and calling the agency's com-
promise on enemy data with the
.~.rmy in 1967 a "monument of de-
ceit."
From elsewhere in the agency, by
the early '70s, he had begun to col-
lect what Westmoreland's lawyers
call "the purloined documents" on
Vietnam-a series of papers, many
of which he hid in a leaf bag buried
on his wife's 250-acre cattle farm in
Northern Virginia until one sack
sprang a-leak and his treasured se-
cret data began to decompose.
Friends, many of them neighbors
on the posh Loudoun County farm-
lands, say that this may have been
the period when his marriage
showed early signs of strain. His wife
and son began to suffer from the
fears that their phone was tapped by
the CIA. They shared Adams' ner-
vousness about being followed and
the concern that the CIA might try
to send him to jail or, worse, retai-
iate in less wholesome ways, their
friends recalled.
Still, Adams persisted. Within the
government, he tried to have the
CIA investigate its director, then
Richard Helms, and he wanted the
Army to court-martial Westmoreland
for "fabrication" of enemy strength
figures during Westmoreland's com-
mand in Vietnam. Said R. Jack
Smith, who was deputy director of
intelligence at the agency during Ad-
ams' tour there, "Sam is a very
charming man, extremely persua-.
sive; and it never fails to surprise me
how people who only know him so-
cially get their impression of him.
Our impression in the agency was
rather different."
Describing Adams as stubborn,
difficult to work with, Smith said that
Adams began to believe in 1967 that
his extrapolation about figures, from
one province was the issue the war
would turn on.
"He somehow failed to understand
that he had a hold of part of the prob-
lem, not all of it," Smith said.
After voluntarily testifying for
Daniel Ellsberg at his "Pentagon Pa-
pers" trial, making the case that the
numbers Ellsberg was being tried for
leaking were false anyway, Adams
resigned from the agency, to the ap-
parent relief of some of his superiors
and to the dismay of a few of his fel-
low workers.
One CIA official who knew him
well in those years and who still likes
Adams said that he was one of the
brightest young men the agency had
seen in years. But in the end, he said,
Adams was not a good analyst be-
cause he couldn't let go, he couldn't
move to other fights once he had lost
this one.
If there was a sense at the CIA
that Adams was working at the
wrong place, there is sometimes a
sense with Adams that he is living in
the wrong era.
After one of four visits to the Cloi-
sters Museum and viewing the Uni- 1
corn tapestries there, Adams told re-
porters outside the courtroom: "I'm
afraid I belong in the 12th century."
Adams' audience that day laughed,
but there was an almost eerie reality
to that comment, a realization that
one could easily see Adams in a
monk's robe, toiling in an ancient li-
brary on the most intricate details of
an argument.
Thus, when Adams formally se-
vered his ties with the agency and
retired to the farm more than 12
years ago, he kept his theory afloat.
traveling around the country inter-
viewing participants in the 1967 in-
telligence debate about the enemy,
searching, some say, always for con-
fifmation.
Adams wrote an article in 1975
for Harper's magazine that accused
the CIA of the primary sin in the in-
telligence business-tainting the
facts with political realities. His ed-
itor on that piece was George Crile,
who went to CBS a few years later,
decided to do a show drawing on Ad-
ams' theory, and hired Adams for
$25,000 as a consultant for CBS.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0605370017-6
 Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605370017-6
3.
Now a fellow codefendant in this
case, Crile has said in the courtroom
that he believed Adams is a "man. of
great confidence and in certain re-
spects brilliance." Crile also said in
court that Adams had "extraordinary
integrity." even though memos sug-
gested that Crile also believed Ad-
ants was "obsessed" and that his facts
should be carefully verified else-
where.
An attractive man, especially to
women, one of whom calls him a
"rustic Paul Newman" because of his
compelling blue eyes and high cheek-
bones, Adams said he has few plans
for life after the trial.
For those who knew hini two
years ago, Adams is suddenly gray-
not so much from this trial, they say,
as from an impending divorce that
has moved him.away from the farm
that he said provided him with one of
the true joys in his life since the CIA.
"I guess-I'm the only downwardly
mobile WASP I know," Adams joked
about his uncertain future.
"I guess if I. can't go back to the
agency, I'd like to he a farmer," he
said. "It's the only thing else that is
satisfying."
Sam Adams is due to take the stand today in the Westmoreland case.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605370017-6