CBS-WESTMORELAND TRIAL: A REPRISE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000707160002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 12, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: December 31, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/08/12 : CIA-RDP9O-00552ROO0707160002-0
t
By M. A. FARBER
The way Ira Klein tells the story, it
was when he encountered Samuel A.
Adams in an editing room at CBS stu-
dios soon after the broadcast of the net-
work's now disputed 1982 documentary
on the Vietnam War that Mr. Adams
said: "We have to come clean, we have
to make a statement that the premise
of the show is inaccurate."
Mr. Adams, a former Central Inteili-..
geese Agency analyst, was a paid con-
sultant for the CBS Reports
which charged that Gen. W=m.
Westmoreland's command in Saigon
had conspired for "political" reasons
to deceive President Johnson, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the Amer-
ican public about the size of North Viet-
namese and Vietcong forces in 1967.
Mr. Adams, who will testify as the
lead witness for CBS, denies making
the statements attributed to him by
Mr. Klein, the film editor for much of
the 9(-minute broadcast.
'L.B.J. Had to Know'
But as Mr. Klein recalled the ex-
change an that day in February 1982,
shortly after General Westmoreland
had assailed the program, Mr. Adams
went onto say, "L.B.J. had to know."
"Sam," Mr. Klein said he replied,
"isn't it a little late? Why weren't you
telling George about this all along."
Mr. Adams, according to Mr. Klein,
said he had repeatedly informed
George Crile, producer of "The Un-
counted Enemy: A Vietnam Decep.
tion."
On Thursday General Westmore.
land's libel trial against CBS over the
documentary will resume in Federal
District Court in Manhattan, with the
general's lawyers winding up their
three-month effort to show not only
that the broadcast was false but also
that CBS and three other defendants,
including Mr. Adams and Mr. Crile,
knew that or acted with reckless disre.
gard as to whether the program was
true. To prevail, the plaintiff must
prove malice as well as falsity.
Mr. Klein is expected to be examined
about his exchange with Mr. Adams
and much else that he recounted during
a recent deposition when be testifies as
the general's 19th and final witness;'
Mr. Adams - who, as a C.I.A. Viet.
namese specialist in 1967 tmsuc ceas-
fully em opposed strengtthand dc call leed, It a on
een
"moon
ment of deceit" - is scheduled to fol-
low him early next month as the first of
a dozen witnesses for the network.
Questions of Intent
So far, the trial has produced 6,013
pages of densely detailed testimony
about the calculation of enemy
strength and the making of a documen
tary: why some statistics were used by
the military in 1967 and others were
not, why some interviews by CBS were
used in 1982 and others were not. .
7
NEW YORK TIMES
31 December 1984
CBS-Westmoreland Trial: A Reprise
behind the reams of newly declassified
military reports and cables that were
as much concerned with how the press
was interpreting the war as with how it
was going in the field, behind the rolls
of unused CBS film that flicker from a
half-dozen television sets in the court-
room-behind all of what has emerged
at this trial are questions of intent and
credibility.
In nine.days on the stand, General
Westmoreland offered an impassioned
rationale for his actions as commander
of American forces in' Vietnam be. I
tween January 1964 and June 1968. And
Mr. Crile, called as a "hostile witness"
by the plaintiff, defended with equal
fervor his editorial decisions regarding
.the documentary for which he was
chiefly responsible. But which side, if
either, is winning the hearts and minds
of the jury is no clearer now than it was
in early October, when the trial began.
Although they differ on most other
points, lawyers for CBS and General
Westmoreland agree that if Mr. Klein
proves to be a persuasive witness, he
cold "damage" the network's case.
While Mr. Adams denies having said
"we have to come clean," or anything
like it, in his conversation with Mr.
Klein, the former C.I.A. employee had
touched on the same subject in a letter
to Col. Gains Hawkins on Jan. 20,1982,
three days before the broadcast.
Overall, Mr. Adams wrote to Colonel
Hawkins, a retired intelligence officer
who had given a key interview for the
documentary, the forthcoming pro-
gram was "reasonably good."
,' "But as I mentioned before," he
wrote,-."there's a major problem: the
documentary seems to pin the rap on
General Westmoreland, when itprob-
ably belongs. higher than that."
Dan M" Burt, General Westmo e
land's principal attorney, plans 'tO use
both this letter and the editing room ex-
change to argue that CBS harbored
doubts about the general's role in the
handling of enemy strength estimates.
But Mr. Adams is expected to testify
thr'. while he suspected the White
Ht of having originated the "decep-
tion" and be "talked endlessly" about
that to Mr. Crile, he always believed
the generaIs command had partici-
ted is "massive falsification" of
data. ,And Westy," he said in an inter-
view last week, "certainly knew about
aspects of it."
Mr. Klein, a 34-year-old freelance
film editor who was brought Into the
Vietnam project by Mr. Crile, will be
the only person who worked on the
documentary to voluntarily testify for
General Westmoreland. David Boles,
the chief lawyer for CBS, is expected to
portray him as a man who developed a
vendetta against Mr. Crile and who
was ignorant of much of the off-camera
material gathered for the program.
In his $120 million suit, General
Westmoreland accuses CBS of saying
he had imposed an "arbitrary ceiling"
of 300,000 on reports of enemy strength
in South Vietnam, suppressed reports
from his officers of a higher enemy
presence and a higher infiltration rate
than was made known, and engineered
a cover-up of the truth after the Tet of-
fensive of January 1968.
The CBS documentary, which cost
about x250,000 to produce and has cost
at least 10 times that to defend in court,
sought to "offer an explanation for one
of the great mysteries of the war -
why for so long our Government appar-
ently believed, and wanted us all to be-
lieve, that we were winning the war."
The broadcast said that the "conspir.
acy" by General Westmoreland's com-
mand to minimize enemy strength had
left the President, American troops
and the public "totally unprepared" for
the scope of the Tet offensive.
"The President," said Mike Wallace,
the narrator of the program and a do.
Pendant at this trial," 'had been alerted
to the enemy's intentions, but no one
had been able or willing to inform him
of the enemy's capability.",_
Eight Supported Thesis
Of the nine people other than Mr.
Adams and General Westmoreland,
who appeared on the program - some
of whom will now testify for CBS -
eight basically supported its thesis.
Some of the eight, including Colonel
Hawkins and other intelligence offi-
cers, said that, while they had no direct
orders from General Westmoreland,
they had reduced figures or had wit-
nessed others doing it because they be-
lieved, from briefings with the general
or contacts with his aides, that he
would not accept higher numbers.
From the testimony and other evi-
dence to date, it appears that the size of
the enemy in South Vietnam - except
perhaps for the regular, uniformed
troops known as "main and local
'forces" - was uncertain long before
1967, if not thereafter as well.
The official American military list-
ing of enemy strength, normally pub-
lished each month by General West
moreland's command, was known as.
the order of battle.
But for months, even years, its fig-
ures for such categories as political
cadre and "irregulars" - which in-
cluded both full-time guerrillas and
part time, hamlet-based self-defense
forces -- remained static. These statis-
tics seem to have been obtained in the
early 1960's from South Vietnamese of-
ficials, who, in turn, had inherited
them from the French in 1954. And,
however widely these figures were cir-
culated and publicized by President
Johnson and others after his Adminis-'
tration made a major military commit-
ment in Vietnam in 1965, they appear to
have been given little credence by
American intelligence analysts.
Approved For Release 2010/08/12 : CIA-RDP9O-00552ROO0707160002-0
 Approved For Release 2010/08/12 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000707160002-0
In late 1956, Mr. Adams and some of 'rated enough to understand and evalu-
his C.I.A. colleagues concluded __--
enemy documents and other material
provided by General Westmoreland's
command - that the size of the irregu-
lar forces had been seriously underesti-
mated and was now more than twice
the 112,000 carried in the order of bat-
t1 Th C I A #4 44-1
id i
'
l
media," Mr. Wallace said:
"We underscore what General West-
moreland 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 indi-
sa
n
a
e, a .. V c s so m- rated a far larger army."
ternal memorandums that the total
General Westmoreland also said.
enemy strength figure of 280,000 was I d
haps doubled."
Meanwhile, the Pentagon, confused
by "apparent discrepancies" in the
estimates but under pressure to satisfy
what Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called "an
insatiable thirst for hard numbers here
in Washington," ordered a review of
methodology that would allow the mill-
, Lary, the C.I.A. and other agencies to
"play off the same sheet of music."
The result was a conference in Hono-
lulu in February 1967, attended by Maj.
Gen. Joseph A. McChristian, who had
been General Westmoreland's chief of
intelligence since 1965, and by Colonel
Hawkins, who as head of General
McChristian's order of battle section.
While the conferees noted the difficulty
of measuring the irregulars with preci-
sion, they agreed to continue including
that category in the order of battle.
That spring, Colonel Hawkins's unit
completed a 70-page analysis of the ir-
regulars, one-third of whom had previ-
ously been considered to be guerrillas
and two-thirds, self-defensetorces. The
new study found 61,000 guerrilla-sand
124,000 self-defense militia.,'Although
the total of 185,000 was less than the
250,000 estimated by Mr. Adams, it was
substantially higher than the 112,000 in
the order of battle.
A similar analysis of the political
cadre by Colonel Hawkins's staff con-
cluded that the figure of 39,000 long car-
ried in the order of battle should be in-
creased to at least 90,000.
In the middle of May, two weeks be-
fore his scheduled transfer to Fort
Hood, Tex., General McChristian pre-
sented General Westmoreland with a
one-page cable for Washington contain.
ing Colonel Hawkins's higher figure for
irregulars ; and political cadre. What
happened then, and In the weeks and
months thereafter when General West-
moreland ordered the self-defense
forces removed from the order of bat-
tle altogether and the political cadre di-
verted to a separate listing, has been
much in dispute at the trial.
On "The Uncounted Enemy," Gen-
eral McChrlstian said, that General
Westmoreland was "disturbed" when
he first saw the increased figures for
the irregulars. "And by the time I left
his office," the former intelligence
chief recalled, "I had the definite im-
pression that he felt that if he sent those
figures back to Washington at that
time, it would create a political bomb-
shell."
When General Westmoreland said on
the program that he rejected General
MeC an's estimates for the self-
defense forces because he felt they
were "specious" and because "the peo- ple in Washington were not. sophisti- I
considerations" played no role in his
deletion of the self-defense forces.
In court, the general stressed that,
until he was shown the higher esti-
mates, he had little interest in what he
considered outdated data on civilian
units of "old men, women and boys"
who were of "no military conse-
quence." He then concluded it was
- time to "separate the fighters from the
non-fighters," partly because the press
'would interpret an increased number,
for the self-defense forces as a sign that
his command faced a much larger
armed enemy than he believed it did.
"Sure we were sensitive to press
reaction," the general said. "We would
have been dummoxes if we weren't."
Nonetheless, the general said that,
during and after a full briefing on the
numbers in late May 1967, he informed
his superiors of the new estimates and
ordered that they be reviewed by a
committee of field operations officers
and embassy representatives.
Mr. Burt has introduced several
documents from that period, including
one written by General McChristian,
that appear to. support the general's
statements and to demonstrate that the
Joint Chiefs of Staff concurred in the
removal of the self-defense forces.
After a protracted debate in mid-1967
between General Westmoreland's com-
mand and the C.I.A. - which had
warned Robert S. McNamara, the Sea
retary of Defense, In May that the total
"Insurgent apparatus" in South Viet-
nam may be "in the half-million
.range" - an agreement was reached
in September on.a "special intelligence
estimate for President Johnson.
. The special estimate placed the
enemy's "military force" at 223,000 to.
248,000, plus political cadre of 75,000 to
85,000. The C.I.A., some of whose offl-
cials had their own reservations about
the capabilities of the self-defense
forces, dropped its opposition to their
exclusion from the order of battle, as
cepting a "verbal description" of them
instead. The estimate noted that, while
these forces' may have numbered
150,000 in 1966 and were "still large and
.constitute a part of the overall Commu-
.:nist effort, they are not offensive mill-
forces." No current
them was provided.. figure for. I
To Mr. Burt, this was all part of an
"open" process in which General West-
moreland exercised his prerogative to
take a "command position." It was
"simply not the stuff of a conspiracy to
suppress," he told the jury.
To Mr. Boies - who has underscored
a series of cables in which ' General
Westmoreland and his staff, supported
by ranking American diplomats, were
adamant about the need to preserve
their "image of success" and to avoid
issuing an enemy strength figure
higher than that already "carried by
the press" - the "noise" over the fig-
ures in 1967 is not the issue today. The
issue, he said, "is whether it was an
honest debate or not."
To Mr. Crile, who has testified for
seven days, the answer is plain.
"The only question that was raised
by the documentary," he said in court,
"was whether it was known by the
President, by the Congress, by all the
consumers of this intelligence that it
was a dishonest debate" and that the
military '.'had evidence that supported
the C.I.A.'s position."
"That," Mr. Crile said, "was at the
heart of it. Did anyone know that there
had been arbitrary reductions that,
went into the military's position in sev.
eral categories, did people know that I
intelligence decisions were being made
for purely political reasons, for reasons
of press concerns? These were the
issues."
To Judge Pierre N. Leval, the case
does not pivot. on whether General
Westmoreland's superiors were de.
ceived but whether the general "sought
to deceive" them.
The judge ruled before the trial that
"although a reporter may have suffi-
cient evidence of his charge to fore-
close any material issue of constitu-
tional malice, he may nonetheless
make himself liable if he knowingly or
recklessly misstates that evidence to.
make it seem more convincing or con-
demnatory-than it is."
z
Approved For Release 2010/08/12 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000707160002-0