CBS PRODUCER SAYS GENERAL PLAYED 'SHELL GAME'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000707160007-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 12, 2010
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: December 19, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/08/12 : CIA-RDP9O-00552ROO0707160007-5
RT T LE f. 0117 MR M1
NE17 YORK TIMES
19 December 1984
CBS Producer Says General
Played `Shell Game'
.9 1
S By M. A. FARBER
George Crile, the producer of a dis-
puted CBS documentary on the Viet-
nam War, yesterday described the cal-
culation of enemy strength by Gen.
William C. Westmoreland's command
in 1967 as "akin to an intelligence
atrocity."
Mr. Crile-testifying for the seventh
day at General Westmoreland's $120
million libel suit against the network in
Federal Court in Manhattan - said the
general's command had engaged in a
"shell game" in its estimates of North
Vietnamese and Vietcong troop
strength in the months preceding the
Communists Tet offensive of January
He said the command's low fig-
Mfor the enemy misled American
leaders and deprived them of the abil-
ity to reassess policies at a "critical
juncture" of the war.
His eyes fixed on the jury, his hands
cupped and flapping in supporting ges-
tures, the 39-year old producer spent
the afternoon being cross-examined by
David Boles, the lawyer for CBS. Mr.
Crile had been called as a "hostile wit-
ness" by Dan M. Burt, General West-
moreland's lawyer, who completed his
questioning of the witness at 11:30 A.M.
Using an. August 1967 cable from
General Westmoreland's headquarters
to high-ranking military and civilian
officials, Mr. Burt attempted to show
that Washington had not been kept in
the dark about Saigon's decision to de-
lete the Vietcong's self-defense forces
from the official listing of enemy
strength known as the order of battle.
Cable Widely Distributed
Mr. Crile conceded that the cable had
been widely distributed, even perhaps
to the White House, but insisted that it
incorporated "fake and dishonest intel-
ligence."
Under cross-examination Mr. Crile
was adamant that military leaders had
provided a "distorted picture", of a
t, It U -A
Mr. Burt had accused Mr. Cn1e of
fabricating parts of that program,
"The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam
Deception," and, yesterday, Mr. Boles
pic$d up that line of questioning.
connection with the broadcast?
A. Absolutely not.
General Westmoreland, now 70 years
old and . retired, commanded United
States forces in Vietnam from January
1964 to June 1968.
In his suit, the general contends that
CBS defamed him by saying he had de-
ceived President Johnson and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff about the true size and
nature of the enemy in late 1967.
The broadcast alleged a "conspir-
acy by General Westmoreland's com-
mand to minimize the strength of the
enemy to make it appear that America
and its allies were winning "a war of
attrition." It said that, for political and.
public relations reasons, General West-
moreland had imposed an "arbitrary
ceiling" of 30Q,000 on reports of enemy i,
strength -partly by dropping the part-
time, hamlet-based, self-defense forces
from the order of battle.
The estimated strength of those
units, previously figured at 70,000, was
revised to 117,000 in May 1967, when
General Westmoreland decided to de-
lete the category from the order of bat-
tle. Some military intelligence officers
also argued that other categories of
enemy forces, including Vietcong guer-
rillas and political cadre, had also been
underestimated.
At this trial, General Westmoreland
testified that he ordered the self-de-
fense forces removed from the order of
battle - and the political cadre listed
separately - because he did not be-
lieve these forces were a significant
military threat and because their inclu-
sion would mislead the press and offi-
cials in Washington into thinking the
size of the enemy's "real fighters" had
risen substantially.
Besides CBS, the defendants in the
degraded enemy who soon s ow are Mr. (:rile, Mike Wallace, the
his real capabilities during the Tet of- 66case -year old narrator of the broadcast,
ive. The A and Samuel A. Adams, a 51-year old
The offensivemight not have been a former Central Intelligence Agency
military victory for the North Vietnam- . analyst who served as a paid consult-
but and Vietcong forces, Mr. Crile said,
but it dealt a "devastating psychologi- ant fpr the documentary.
cal" blow to the "aura of optimism" Mr. Adams, who sits at the defense
fostered by the Administration of table making copious notes, was a
President Johnson. C.I.A. specialist on Vietnam in -1967,
Many of Mr. Criles's replies to Mr. when the agency clashed with General
Boies - including an eight-minute an- Westmoreland's command over the
swer that was the longest given in the estimates of enemy strength in South
11-week old trial - amounted to small Vietnam. Mr. Adams, who once de.
lectures on the history and importance scribed himself to Mr. Crile as "a gal-
of wartime intelligence and on the in, loping Paul Revere," had argued for a.
tegrity of the documentary he total estimate of about 500,000 - nearly
produced in 1982. twice the figure the military command
was willing to accept as valid.
In 1975, two years after he resigned
from the C.I.A., Mr. Adams wrote an
article about the dispute in Harper's
magazine, containing many of the
charges that would be aired in the CBS
documentary. The article was edited
by Mr. Crile, who then worked for the
magazine, and it prompted an investi-
gation by the House Select Committee
on Intelligence.
The committee, before which Mr.j
Adams testified, concluded that "the.
.numbers game not only diverted a di.
rect confrontation with the realities of
the war in Vietnam, but also prevented
the intelligence community, perhaps
the President, and certainly members
of Congress, from judging the real
changes in Vietnam over time."
Yesterday, Mr. Boles questioned Mr.
Crile about the committee's report
Judge Pierre N. Leval cautioned the.
jury that it could not consider the'
"truth" of the report's findings, but
only whether Mr. Crile had relied upon
them in preparing the documentary.
The only relevance of the report, the
judge said, was its influence on Mr.
Crile's "state of mind" in 1981.
Mr. Crile called the committee's re-
port "the foundation stone, or certainly
the jumping off point for our investiga-
tion" and said it. completely under-
mined the "light at the end of the tun-
nel" or "end has come into sight" intel-
ligence reporting of General West-
moreland's command in 1967.
The producer said that if the com-
mand had been correct in its low esti-
mates of enemy troopvrength and the
number of enemy troops killed during
the Tet offensive, "we had not only won
the war but killed more of the enemy
than existed."
Mr. Crile said he agreed with the con-
clusion in a West Point-textbook -
shown to him by Mr. Boles - that the
Tet offensive was "an allied intelli-
gence failure ranking with Pearl Har-
bor in 1941."
The producer said his own research,
and that of the House committee,
clearly established that the self-de-
fense forces and other categories Gen-
eral Westmoreland did not -consider
1'real fighters" were, in fact, responsi-
ble for many casualties in Vietnam.
In intelligence reporting, the Mr.
Crile said, "You begin from the founda-
tion and work up" to arrive at a total of
enemy strength. "What you never do,
and which there is never any justifica-
tion for," he said, "is to begin with the
total and work down to make the evi-
dence conform."
Approved For Release 2010/08/12 : CIA-RDP9O-00552ROO0707160007-5