VIETNAM COVER-UP: PLAYING WAR WITH NUMBERS

Document Type: 
Collection: 
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5
Release Decision: 
RIPPUB
Original Classification: 
K
Document Page Count: 
49
Document Creation Date: 
December 9, 2016
Document Release Date: 
June 21, 2001
Sequence Number: 
3
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
May 1, 1975
Content Type: 
MAGAZINE
File: 
AttachmentSize
PDF icon CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5.pdf7.52 MB
Body: 
Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R00010036GO03-5 CONFIDENTIAL INTERNAL USE ONLY This publication contains clippings from the domestic and foreign press for YOUR BACKGROUND INFORMATION. Further use of selected items would rarely be advisable. No . 2 May 1975 G^~- ;r?"_ T AFFAIRS 1 EAST ASIA 24 Destroy after backgrounder has served its purpose or within 60 days. Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 ILARPERtS ,May 1975 Sam Adams is a fourth cousin, seven times re- moved, of President John Adams. His great- great-great-great-gran d- father, also named John, lost an ear at the Bat- tle of Bunker Hill. Mr. Adams raises cattle in Leesburg, Virginia, and is writing a book about his now-aborted CIA career. A CIA conspiracy against its own intelligence building adding and subtracting the number of defectors. He called me into his office. "Those statistics aren't worth a -damn," he said. "No numbers in Vietnam are, and, besides, you'll never learn anything sitting around Saigon." He told me I ought to go to the field and start reading captured documents. I followed Jorgy's advice. The captured documents suggested a phenom- enon that seemed ,incredible to me. Not only were the VC taking extremely heavy casualties, but large numbers of them were deserting. I got together two sets of captured papers concerning desertion. The first set consisted of enemy unit rosters, which would say, for example, that in a certain seventy-seven-man only sixty men were "present for duty." Of the seventeen ab- sent, two were down with malaria, two were at training school,. and thirteen had deserted. The other documents were directives from various VC headquarters telling subordinates to do something about the growing desertion rate. "Christ Almighty,"they all seemed to say."These AWOLs are getting out of hand. Far too many of our boys are going over the hill.''-' - I soon collected a respectable stack of rosters, some of them from large units; -arid I began to extrapolate. I set up an equation. which went like this: if A, B, and C units (the ones- for which I had documents) had so many deserters in such and such a period of time, then the number of deserters per year for the whole VC Army was X. No matter how I arranged the equation, X always turned out to be a very big number.- I could never get it below 50,000. Once I even got it up to 100,000. - The significance of this finding in 1966 was immense. At that time our official estimate of the strength of the enemy was 270,000. We were killing, capturing, and wounding VC at a rate of almost 150,000 a year. If to these casu- alties you added 50,000 to 100,000 deserters- well, it was hard to see how a 270,000-man army could last more than a year or two longer. I returned in May to tell everyone the good news. No one at CIA headquarters had paid much attention to VC deserters because cap- tured documents were almost entirely neglected..- The finding created a big stir. Adm. William F. Raborn, Jr., then director of the CIA, called me in to brief him and his deputies about the Vietcong's AWOL problem. Right after the briefing, I was told that.the Agency's chief of Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 1 N LATE 1965, WELL AFTER the United States had committed ground troops to Vietnam, the CIA assigned me to study the Vietcong. Despite the almost 200,000 American troops and the advanced state of warfare in South Vietnam, I was the first intelligence analyst in Washington to be given the full-time job of researching our South Vietnamese enemies. Incredible as it now seems, I remained the only analyst with this as- signment until just before the Tet offensive of 1963. At CIA headquarters in 1965 nobody was studying the enemy systematically, the principal effort being geared to a daily publication called the "Sitrep" (Vietnam Situation Report), which Concerned itself with news about the activities of South Vietnamese politicians and the location of Vietcong units. The Sitrep analysts used the latest cables from Saigon, and tended to neglect information that didn't fit their objectives. The Johnson Administration was already wondering bow long the Vietcong could stick it out, and since this seemed too complicated a question for the Sitrep to answer, the CIA's research depart- ment assigned it to me. I was told to find out the state of enemy morale. Good news and bad news LOOKED UPON THE NEW JOB as something of a promotion. Although I had graduated from Harvard in 1955, 1 didn't join the Agency until 1963, and I had been fortunate in my first as- signment as an analyst of the Congo rebellion. My daily and weekly reports earned the praise of my superiors, and the Vietcong study was given to me by way of reward, encouraging me in my ambition to make a career within the CIA. Without guidance and not knowing what else to do, I began to tinker with the. VC defector statistics, trying to figure out such things as where the defectors came from, what jobs they had,*and why they had wanted to quit. In short order I read through the collection of weekly reports, and so I asked for a ticket to Vietnam to see what other evidence was available over there. In mid-January 1966, I arrived in Saigon to take up a desk in the U.S. Embassy. After a couple of weeks, the CIA station chief (every- one called him "Jorgy") heard I was in the Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Sam Adams Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 research, it Jack Smith, had called me "the out- standing analyst" in the research directorate. But there were also skeptics, particularly among the CIA's old Vietnam hands, who had long since learned that good news was often illusory. To be on the safe side, the Agency formed what was called a "Vietcong morale team" and sent it to Saigon to see if the news was really true. The team consisted of myself, acting as a "consultant," and four Agency psy- chiatrists, who presumably understood things like morale. IIE PSYCHIATRISTS had no better idea than U I'd had, when I started out, how to plumb the Vietcong mind. One of the psychiatrists said, "We'll never get Ho Chi Minh to lie still on a leather couch, so we better think up something else quick." They decided to ask the CIA men in the provinces what they thought about enemy morale. After a month or so of doing this, the psychiatrists went back to Washington con- vinced that, by and large, Vietcong spirits were in good shape. I went back with suitcases full of captured documents that supported my the is about the Vietcong desertion rate. But I was getting uneasy. I trusted the opin- ion of the CIA men in the field who had told the psychiatrists of the Vietcong's resilience. The South Vietnamese government was in one of its periodic states of collapse, and somehow it seemed unlikely that the Vietcong would be falling apart at the same time. I began to sus- pect that something was wrong with my predic- tion that the VC were headed for imminent trouble. On reexamining the logic that had led me to the prediction, I saw that it was based on three main premises. Premise number one was that the Vietcong were suffering very heavy cas- ualties. Although I'd heard all the stories about exaggerated reporting, I tended not to believe them, because the heavy losses were also reflect- ed in the documents. Premise two was my find- ing that the enemy army had a high desertion rate. Again, I believed the documents. Premise three was that both the casualties and the de- serters came out of an enemy force of 270,000. An old Vietnam hand, George Allen, had al- ready told me that this number was suspect. In July, I went to my supervisor and told him I thought there might be something radi- cally wrong with our estimate of enemy strength, or, in military jargon, the order of battle. "Maybe the 270,000 number is too low," I said. "Can I take a closer look at it?" He said it was okay with him just so long as I handed in an occasional item for the Sitrep. This seemed fair enough, and so I began to put to- gether a file of captured documents. The documents in those days were arranged in "bulletins," and by mid-August I had collect- ed more than 600 of them. Each bulletin con tained several sheets of paper with summaries in English of the information in the papers taken by American military units. On the after- noon of August 19, 1966, a Friday, Bulletin' 689 reached my desk on the CIA's fifth floor. It contained a report put out by the Vietcong headquarters in Binh Dinh province, to the ef- fect that the guerrilla-militia in the province numbered just over 50,000. I looked for our own intelligence figures for Binh Dinh in the order of battle and found the number 4,500. "My God," I thought, "that's not even a tenth of what the VC say." In a state of nervous excitement, I began searching through my file of bulletins for other discrepancies. Almost the next document I looked at, the onp for Phu Yen province, showed 11,000-,guerrilla-militia. In the official order of battle we had listed 1,400, an eighth of the Vietcong estimate. I almost shouted from my desk, "There goes the whole damn order of battle!" Unable to contain tuy excitement. I began walking around the office, telling anybody who would listen about the enormity of the over- sight and the implications of it for our conduct of the war. That weekend I returned to the of- fice, and on both Saturday and Sunday I searched through the entire collection of 600- odd bulletins and found further proof of a gross underestimate of the- strength of the enemy we had been fighting for almost two years. When I arrived in the office on Monday a colleague of mine brought me a document of a year earlier which he thought might interest me. It was from Vietcong headquarters in South Vietnam, and it showed that in early 1965 the VC had about 200,000 guerrilla-militia in the south, and that they were planning to build up to 300,000 by the end of the year. Once again, I checked the official order of battle. It listed a figure of ex- actly 103,573 guerrilla-militia-in other words,. half as many as the Vietcong said they had in early 19665, and a third a., many as they planned to have by 1966. No official comment HAT AFTERNOON, August 22, 1 wrote a mem- orandum suggesting that the overall order of battle estimate of 270,000 might be 200,000 men too low. Supporting it with references to numerous bulletins, I sent it up to the seventh floor, and then waited anxiously for the re- sponse. I imagined all kin' cli'of sudden and dra- matic telephone cally_%' M'Ir. Adams, come brief the director." "The President's got to be told about this, and you'd better be able to defend those numbers." 1 wasn't sure what would hap- pen, but I was sure it would be significant, be- cause I knew this was the biggest intelligence find of the war-by far. It was important be- cause the planners running the war in those days used statistics as .a basis-for everything they did, and the most important figure of all was the size of the enemy army--that order of battle number, 270",000. All our other inteli- gence estimates were tied to the order of battle: how much rice the VC ate, how much ammuni- tion they shot off, and so forth. If the Vietcong Army suddenly doubled in size, our whole statis- tical system would collapse. We'd be fighting a war twice as big as the one Nye thought we were fighting. We already had about 350,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and everyone was talking about "force ratios." Some experts maintained that in a guerrilla war our side had to outnum- ber the enemy by a ratio of 10 to 1; others *A document was later captured which showed the Vietcong not only reached but exceeded their quota. Dated April 1966, it put the number of guer- rilla-militia at 330,000. - Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 said 5 to 1; the most optimistic said 3 to 1. But even if Nye used the 3 to 1 ratio, the addi- tion of 200,000 men to the enemy order of bat. tle meant that somebody had to find an extra 600,000 troops for our side. This would put President Johnson in a very tight fix-either quit the war or send more soldiers. Once be was informed of the actual enemy strength, it seemed inconceivable that he could continue with the existing force levels. I envisioned the President calling the director on the carpet, asking him why this information hadn't been found out before. Nothing happened. No phone calls from any- body. On Wednesday I still thought there must have been some terrible mistake; on Thursday I thought the news might have been so impor- ying to decide what tant that people were still tr to do with it. Instead, on Friday, the memoran- dum dropped back in my in-box. There was no comment on it at all-no request for amplifica- tion, no question about my numbers, nothing, just a routine slip attached showing that the entire CIA hierarchy had read it. I was aghast. Here I had come up with 200,000 additional enemy troops, and the CIA hadn't even bothered to ask me about it, let alone tell anybody else. I got rather angry and wrote a second memorandum, attaching even more references to other documents. Among these was a report from the Vietcong high com- mand showing that the VC controlled not 3 mil- lion people (as in our official estimate) but 6 million .(their estimate). I thought that this h elped to explain the origins of the extra 200,000 guerrilla-militia, and also that it was an extraordinary piece of news in its own right. A memorandum from my office-the of- fice of Current Intelligence-ordinarily would be read, edited, and distributed within a few (lays to the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. It's a routine procedure, but once again I found myself sitting around wait- ing for a response, getting angrier and angrier. After about a week I went up to the seventh floor to find out what had happened to my memo. I found it in a safe, in a manila folder marked "Indefinite Hold." I wrnt heck clown to the fifth floor, and wrote still another IUrrno, refr -ncing even more docu- -men's; This time I didn't send it up, as I had the others, through regular channels. Instead, I carried it upstairs with the intention of giving it to somebody who would comment on it. Wherr I reached the office of the Asia-Africa area chief, Waldo Duberstein;- he looked at me and said: `,'It's that Goddamn memo again. Adams, stop being such a prima donna." In the next office, an official said that the order of battle was General Westmoreland's concern, and we had no business intruding. This made me event angrier. "We're all in the same government I said. "If there's a discrepancy this big, it doesn't matter who points it out. This is no joke.. We're in a war with these guys." My remarks'; were dismissed as rhetorical, bombastic, and irrelevant. On the ninth of September, eighteen days af~ ter I'd written the first memo, the CIA agreed to let a version of it out of the building, but with very strange restrictions. It was .to be called a "draft working paper," meaning that it lacked official status; it was issued in only 25 copies, instead of the usual run of over 200; it could go to "working-level types" only-ana- lysts and staff people---but not to anyone in a policy-making position--to no one, for exarnple, on the National Security Council- One copy went to Saigon, care of Westmoreland's Order of Battle Section, carried by an official who worked in the Pentagon for the Defense Intelli- gence Agency. Y THIS TIME I was so angry and exhausted L) that I decided to take two weeks off to sim- mer down. This was useless. I spent the whole vacation thinking about the order of battle. When I returned to the Agency, I found * that it came out monthly and was divided into four parts, as follows: Communist regulars About 110,000 (it varied by month) Guerrilla-militia Exactly 103,573 Service troops Exactly 18,553 Political cadres . Exactly 39,175- That is, 271,301, or about 270,000 The only category that ever changed was "Communist regulars" (uniformed soldiers in the Vietcong Army). In the last two years, this figure had more than doubled. The numbers for the other three categories had remained pre- cisely the same, even to the last digit. There was only one ' conclusion: no one had even looked at them! I decided to do so right away, and to find out where the numbers came from and whom they were describing I began by collecting more d,)cutnrnts on the guerrilla-militia. These,were "the soldiers in black pajamas" the press kept talking about; lightly armed in some areas, armed to the teeth. in others, they planted most of the VC's mines and booby traps. This was important, I discov- ered, because in the Da Nang area, for example, mines and booby traps caused about two-thirds of all the casualties suffered by U.S. Marines. I also found where .the number 103,573 came from. The South Vietnamese had thought it up in 1964; American Intelligence had accepted it without question, and hadn't checked it since. "Can you believe it?" I said to a fellow analyst. "Here we are in the middle of a guerrilla war, and we haven't even bothered to count the num- ber of guerrillas." The service troops were harder to locate. The order of battle made it clear that these VC sol- diers were comparable to specialists in the American Army-ordnance sergeants, quarter- masters, medics, engineers, and so forth. But despite repeated phone calls to the Pentagon, to U.S. Army headquarters, and to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1' couldn't find anyone who knew where or when we'd hit upon the number 18,553. Again I began collecting VC documents, and within a week or so had come to the astonishing conclusion that our official estimate for service troops was at least two years old and five times too low-it should not have been 18,553, but more like 100,000. In the pro- cess I discovered a whole new category of sol- Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 diers known as "assault youths" who weren't in the order of battle at all. I also drew a blank at. the Pentagon regard. ing political cadres, so I started asking CIA analysts who these cadres might be. One ana- lyst said they belonged to something called the "infrastructure," but he wasn't quite sure what it was. Finally, George Allen, who seemed to know more about the VC than anyone else, said the "infrastructure" included Communist party members and armed police and people like that, and that there was a study around which showed how the 39,175 number had been arrived at. I eventually found a copy on a shelf in the CIA archives. Unopened, it had never been looked at before. The study had been published in Saigon in 1965, and one glance showed it was full of holes. Among other things, it left out all the VC cadres serving in the countryside- where most of them were. By December 1966 1 had concluded that the number of Vietcong in South Vietnam, instead of being 270,000, was more like 600,000, or over twice the official estimate.' The higher number made many things about the Vietnam war fall into .place. It explained, for instance, how the Vietcong Army could have so many de- serters and casualties and still remain effective. Nobody listens J IND YOU, DURING ALL THIS TIME I didn't keep this information secret-just the op- posite. I not only told everyone in the Agency who'd listen, I. also wrote a continuous sequence of memorandums, none of which provoked the least response. I'd write a memo, document it with footnotes, and send it up to the seventh floor. A week would pass, and then the paper would return to my in-box: no comment, only the same old buck slip showing that everyone upstairs had read it. By this time I was so angry and so discour- aged with the research directorate that I began looking for another job within the CIA, prefer- ably in a section that had some use for real numbers. I still believed that all this indifference to unwelcome information afflicted only part of the bureaucracy, that it was not something characteristic of the entire Agency. Through George Allen I met George Carver, a man on the staff of Richard Helms, the new CIA direc- tor, who had the title "special assistant for Viet- namese affairs." Carver told me that I was "on the right track" with the numbers, and he seemed an independent-minded man who could circumvent the bureaucratic timidities of the research directorate. At the time I had great -hopes of Carver because, partly as a result of his efforts, word of my memorandums had reached the White House. Cables were passing back and forth between Saigon and Washington, and it had become fairly common knowledge that something was very wrong with the enemy strength estimates. In mid-January 1967, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for an order-of-battle conference to be held in Hono- 'lliii was broken down as follow: Communist regulars, about 100,000; guerrilla-militia, about no,. 000; service troops, about 100,000; political cadres, about 100,0()0. lulu. The idea was to assemble all the analysts from the military, the CIA, and the Defense In- telligence Agency in the hope that they might reach a consensus on the numbers. I went to Ionolulu as part of the CIA delegation. I didn't trust the military and, frankly, I expected theta to pull a fast one and lie about the numbers. What happened instead was that the head of Westmoreland's Order of Battle Section, Col. Gains B. Hawkins, got up right at the beginning of the conference and said, "You know. there's a lot more of these little ba'tards out there than we thought there were." He and his analysts then rai.ed the estimate of enemy s trengtlt in each category of the order of battle; instead of the 103,573 guerrilla-militia, for example, they'd come up with 193,000. Haivkins's remarks were unofficial, but nevertheless, I figured, "the fight's over. They're reading the saute documents that I am, and everybody's beginning to use real numbers." .1 couldn't have been more wrong. After a study trip to Vietnam, I returned to Washington in May 1967, to find a-new CIA report to Secretary of Defense Robert McNa- mara called something like "Whither Vietnam?" Its section on the Vietcong Army listed all the discredited official figures, adding up to 270,000. Dumbfounded, I rushed into George Carver's office and got permission to correct the. num- bers. Instead of my own total of 600,000, I used 500,000, which was more in line with what Colonel Hawkins had said in Honolulu. Even so, one of the chief deputies of the research directorate, Drexel Godfrey, called me up to say that the ill rectorate couldn't i lSe ~-('0,-U 1 cause "it wasn't official." I said: "That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. We're going to use real numbers for a change." Much to my satis- faction and relief, George Carver supported my figures. For the first time in the history of the Vietnam war a CIA paper. challenging the pre- vious estimates went directly to McNamara. Once again I said to myself: "The battle's won; virtue triumphs." Once again, I was wrong. SOON AFTER, I attended the annual meeting of the Board of National Estimates on Viet- nam. Held in a windowless room on the CIA's seventh floor, a room furnished with leather chairs, blackboards, maps, and a large confer- ence table, the meeting comprised the whole of the intelligence community, about forty people representing the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the State Department. Ordinarily the meeting lasted about a week, its purpose being to come to a community-wide agreement about the prog- ress of. the war. This particular consensus re- quired the better part of six months. The procedure of these estimates requires the CIA to submit the first draft, and then every- one else argues his group's position. If one of the services violently disagrees, it is allowed to take exception in a footnote to the report. The CIA's first draft used the same 500,000 number that had gone to McNamara in May. None of us expected what followed. George Fowler from DIA, the same man who'd carried my guerrilla memo to Saigon in September 1966, got up and explained lie was speaking for the entire military. "Gentlemen, Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 :-CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5, we cannot agree to this estimate as currently written. What we object to are the numbers. We feel we should continue with the official order of battle." I almost fell off my chair. The official 013 figure at that time, June 1967, was still 270,000, with all the old components, in- cluding 103,573 guerrilla-militia. In disbelief I hurried downstairs to tell my boss, George Carver, of the deception. He was reassuring. "Now, Sam," he said, "don't you worry. It's time to bite the bullet. You go on back up there'and do the best you can." For the next two-and-a-half months, armed with stacks of documents, I argued with the military over the numbers. By the end of August, they no longer insisted on the official order of battle figures, but would not raise them above 300,000. The CIA numbers remained at about 500,000. The meetings recessed for a few weeks at the end of the month, and I left Washington with my wife, Eleanor, to visit her parents in Ala- bama. No sooner had we arrived at their house when the phone rang. It was George Carver. "Sam, come back up. We're going to Saigon to thrash out the numbers." I was a little cynical. "We won't sell out, will we?" - "No, no, we're going to bite the bullet," he said. - Army estimate WE WENT TO SAIGON in early September to yet another order-of-battle meeting, this one convened in the austere conference room in Westmoreland's headquarters. Among the offi- cers supporting Westmoreland were Gen. Phil- lip Davidson; head of intelligence (the military calls it G-2) ; General Sidle, head of press rela- tions ("What the dickens is he doing at an OB conference?" I thought); Colonel Morris, one of Davidson's aides; Col. Danny Graham, head of the G-2 Estimates Staff; and, of course, Col. Gains B. Hawkins, chief of the G-2 Order of Battle Section. There were also numerous lieutenant colonels, majors, and captains, all equipped with maps, charts, files, and pointers. The military dominated the first day of the conference. A major gave a lecture on the VC's low morale. I kept my mouth shut on the sub- ject, even though I knew their documents showed a dwindling VC desertion rate. Another officer gave a talk: full of complicated statistics which proved the Vietcong were running out of men. It was based on something called the cross- over memo which had been put together by Colonel Graham's staff. On the second day we got down to business-the numbers. It was suspicious from the start. Every time I'd argue one category up, the military would drop another category down by the same amount. Then there was the little piece of paper put on everybody's desk saying that the mili- tary would agree to count more of one type of VC if we'd agree to eliminate another type of VC. Finally, there was the argument over a subcategory called the district-level service troops. I stood up to present the. CIA's case. I said that I had estimated that there were-about seventy-five service soldiers in each of the VC's districts, explaining that I had averaged the numbers in a sample of twenty-eight documents. I briefly reviewed the evidence and asked whether there were any questions. "I have a question," said General Davidson. "You mean to tell me that you only have twen- ty-eight documents?" `'Yes sir," I said. "That's all I could find." "Well, I've been in the intelligence business for many years, and if you're trying to sell me a number on the basis of that small a sample, you might as well pack up and go home." As I resumed my seat, Davidson's aide, Colonel Mor- ris. turned around and said, "Adams, you're full of shit." A lieutenant colonel then got up to present the military's side of the case. He had counted about twenty service soldiers per district, he said, and then he went on to describe how a district was organized. When he asked for ques- tions, I said, "How many documents are in your sample?" He looked as if somebody'had kicked him in the stomach. Instead of answering the question, he repeated his description of how the VC or- ganized a district. Then George Carver interrupted him. "Come, come, Colonel," he said. "You're not answering the question. General Davidson has just taken Mr. Adams to task for having only twenty-eight documents. in his sample. It's a perfectly legiti- mate question. How many have you in yours?" In a very low voice, the lieutenant colonel said, "One." I looked over at General David- son and Colonel Morris to see whether they'd denounce the lieutenant colonel for having such a all sax-41e. Both of them were looking at the ceiling. "Colonel," I continued, "may I see your document?" He didn't have it, he said, and, besides, it wasn't a document, it was a POW report. Well, I asked, could he please try and remem- ber who the twenty service soldiers were? He ticked them off. I kept count. The total was forty. - "Colonel," -1 said,,. you have forty soldiers here, not twenty. How'did you get from forty to twenty?" - "We scaled down the evidence," he replied. "Scaled down the "evidence?" "Yes," he said. "We cut out the hangers-on." "And how do you determine what a hanger-on is?" "Civilians, for example." Now,I knew that civilians sometimes worked alongside VC service troops, but normally the rosters listed them separately. So I waited until the next coffee break to ask Colonel Hawkins how he'd "scale down" the service troops in a document I had. it concerned Long D,t Dis- trict in the southern half of South Vietnam, and its 111 service troops were broken down by components. We went over each one.- Of the twenty in the medical Component, Hawkins would count three, of the twelve in the ordnance section, he'd count two, and so forth, until Long Dat's 111 service soldiers were down to just over forty. There was no indication in the docu- ment that any of those dropped were civilians. As we were driving back from the conference that day, an Army officer in the car with us explained what- the real trouble was: "You Approved For Release 2U01~08%08 : `CIA=il~p~=0043IafT'100300033 Approved For Release 2001/08/ know, our basic problem is that we've been told to- keep our numbers under 300,000.' TER, AFTER RETIRING from the Army, Cal- L: onel Hawkins confirmed that this was basi- cally the: case. At the start of the conference, he'd been told to stay below a certain number- He could no longer remember what it was, but he recalled that the person who gave it to him was Colonel Morris, the officer who had told me I wag "full of shit." The Saigon conference was in its third day, when we received a cable from Helms that, for all its euphemisms, gave us no choice but to. accept the military's numbers. We did'so, and the conference concluded that the size of the Vietcong force in South Vietnam was 299,000. We accomplished this by simply marching cer- tain categories of Vietcong out of the order of battle, and by using the military's "scaled- down" numbers. I left the conference extremely angry. Anoth- er member of the CIA contingent, William Hy- land (now head of intelligence at the Department of State), tried to explain. "Sam, don't take it so hard, You know what the political climate is. If you think they'd accept the higher numbers, you're, living in a dream world-" Shortly after the conference ended, . another category was frog-marched out of the estimate, which dropped from 299,000 to 248,000. I returned to Washington, and in October I went once again in front of the Board of Na- tional Estimates, by this time reducLd to only its CIA members. ! told them exactly what had happened at the conference__how the numbers had been scaled down, which types of Vietcong had left the order of battle, and even about the affair of Long Dat District. They were sympa- thetic. "Sam, it makes my blood boil to see the mili- tary cooking the books," one of the board members said. Another asked, "Sam, have we gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishon- esty?" And I said, "Sir, we went past them last. August." Nonetheless, the board sent the esti- mate forward for the director's signature, with the numbers unchanged. I was told there was no other choice because Helms had committed the CIA to the military's numbers. "But that's crazy," I said. "The numbers were faked." I made one last try. My memoran- dum was.nine pages long. The first eight pages told how the numbers had got that way. The ninth page accused the-military of lying. If we accepted their numbers, I argued, we would not only be dishonest and cowardly, eve would be stupid. I handed the memo to George Carver to give to the director, and sent copies to every- one I could think of in the research branch. Al- though I was the only CIA analyst working on the subject at the time, nobody replied. Two days later Helms signed the estimate, along with its doctored numbers. That was that. I went into Carver's office and quit Helms's staff. He looked embarrassed when I told him why I was doing so, but he said there was nothing he could do. I thanked him for all he had done in the earlier part of the year and for his attempt at trying to deal with real rather than imaginary numbers. I thought of leaving the CIA, but I still retained some faith in the Agency, and I knew that I was the only person in the government arguing for higher numbers, with accurate evidence. I told Carver that the research directorate had formed a VC branch, in which, I said, I hoped to find somebody who would listen to me. Facing facts 5 N NOVEMBER General Westmoreland returned to Washington and held a press conference. "The enemy is running out of men," he said. He based this on the fabricated numbers, and on Colonel Graham's crossover memo. In early December, the CIA sent McNamara another "Whither Vietnam?" memo. It had the doc- tored numbers, but this time I was forbidden to change them. It was the same story with Helms's New Year briefing to Congress. Wrong numbers, no changes allowed. When I heard that Colonel Hawkins, whom I still liked and ad- mired; had been -reassigned to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, I went to see him to find out what he really thought about the order of battle. "Those were the worst three months in my life," he said, referring to July, August, and September, and he offered to do anything he could to help. When he had been asked to lower the estimates, he-said, he had retained as many of the front- line VC troops as possible. For several hours we went over the order of battle. We had few disagreements, but I began to see for the first time that the Communist regulars, the only cate- gory I'd never looked at, were also seriously understated-perhaps by as many as 50,000 men. No one was interested, because adding 50,000 troops would have forced a reopening of the issue of numbers, which everyone thought was settled. On January 29, 1968, 1 began the laborious job of transferring my files from Carver's office to the newly formed Vietcong branch. The next day the VC launched the Tet offen- sive. Carver's office was chaos. There were so many separate attacks that someone was as- signed full.time to stick red pins in the: map of South Vietnam just to keep track of there. Within a week's time it was clear.that the scale of the Tet offensive was the biggest surprise to American intelligence since Pearl Harbor. As I read the cables coming in, I experienced both anger and a sort of grim satisfaction. There was just no way they could have pulled it off with only 248,000 men, and the cables were begin- ning to show which units had taken part. Many had never been in the order of battle at all; others had been taken out or scaled down. I made a collection of these units, which I showed Carver. Two weeks later, the CIA agreed to re-open the order-of-battle controversy. SUDDENLY I WAS ASKED to revise and extend the memorandums that' I had been attempt- ing to submit for the past eighteen months. People began to congratulate me, to slap me on the back and say what a fine intelligence analyst I was. The Agency's chief of research, R. Jack Smith, who had once called me "the outstanding analyst" in the CIA but who had ignored all my reporting on the Vietcong, came down from the seventh floor to shake my hand. Approved For Release 2001/08/08: CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved, For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 "We're glad to have you back," he said. "You. know more about Vietnam than you did about the Congo." All of this disgusted me, and I ac- cepted the compliments without comment. What was the purpose of intelligence, I thought, if not to warn people, to tell them what to expect? As many as 10,000 American soldiers had been killed in the Tet offensive because the generals had played politics with the numbers, and here I was being congratulated by the people who had agreed to the fiction. In February the Agency accepted my analy- sis, and in April another order-of-battle confer- ence was convened at CIA headquarters. West- moreland's delegation, headed by Colonel Gra- ham (now a lieutenant general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency) continued to argue for the lower numbers. But from that point forward the White House stopped using the military estimate and relied on the CIA estimate of 600,000 Vietcong. All along I had wondered whether the White House had had anything to do with fixing the estimates. The military wanted to keep them low in order to display the "light at the end of the tunnel," but it had long since occurred to nie that maybe the generals were under pres- sure from the politicians. Carver had told me a number of times that he had mentioned my OB figures to Walt Rostow of the White House. But even now I don't know whether Rostow ordered the falsification, or whether he was merely re- luctant to face unpleasant facts. Accepting the higher numbers forced the same old, decision: pack up or send a lot more troops. On the evening of :'larch 31, the question of the White House role became, in a way, irrele. vant. President Johnson made his-announce- meat that he- wasn't going to run again. Who- ever the next President was, I felt, needed to be told about the sorry state of Americanintelli- gence so that he could do something about it. The next morning, April 1, I went to the CIA inspector general's office and said: "Gentlemen, I've come here to file a complaint, and it in- volves both the research department and the director. I want to make sure that the next ad- ministration finds out what's gone on down here." On May 28 1 filed formal charges and asked that they be sent to "appropriate mem- bers of the White House staff" and to the Pres- ident's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I also requested an investigation by the CIA in. spector general. Helms responded by telling the inspector general to start an investigation. This took two months. The director then appointed a high-level review board to go over the inspector general's report. The review board was on its way to taking another two months when I went to the general counsel's office and talked to a Mr. Ueberhorst. I said, "Mr. Ueberhorst, I wrote a report for the White House about three months ago complaining about the CIA manage- ment, and I've been getting the runaround ever since. What I want is some legal advice. Would I be breaking any laws if I took my memo and carried it over to the White House myself?" A few days later, on September 20, 1968, the ex= ecutive director of the CIA, the number-three man in the hierarchy, called me to his office: "Mr. Adams, we think well of you, but Mr. Helms says he doesn't want your memo to leave the building." I took notes of the conversation, so my reproduction of it is almost verbatim. "This is not a legal problem but a practical one of your future within the CIA," I was told. "Because if you take that memo to the White House, it will be at your own peril, and even if you get what you want by doing so, your use- fulness to the Agency will thereafter be iiil." The executive director carried on this conversa- tion for thirty-five minutes. I copied it all out until he said, "Do you have anything to say, Mr. Adams?" "Yes sir," I said, "I think I'll take this right on over to the White House, and please tell the director of my intention." I ti~rote a nie:norandeun of the conversation, and sent it hack up to the executive director's office %,ith a covering let!er saying. "1-hope I'm quot- ing you correctly; please tell :ale if I'm not."A short while later .he called me back- to his office and,said, "I'm afraid there's been a mis- understanding, because the last thing in the world the director wanted to do was threaten.. He has decided that this thing can go forward." I waited until after the Presidential election- Nixon won, and the next day I called the sev- enth floor to ask if it was now okay to send on my memo to the White House. On November 8, 1.968, Mr. Helms summoned me to his office. The first thing he said to me was "Don't take notes." To The best of my recollection, the con- versation then proceeded along the following lines. He asked what was bothering me; did I think my supervisors were treating me unfairly, or weren't they promoting me fast enough? No, I said. My problem. was that he caved in on t c numbers right before Tel. I enlarged on the theme for. about ten minutes. He listened with- out expression, and when I was done he asked what 1. would have had him do-take on the whole military? I said, that under the circum- stances, that was the only thing he could have done; the military's numbers were faked. He then told me that I didn't know what things were like, that we could have told the White House that there were a million more Vietcong out there, and'it wouldn'thave made. the slight- est bit of difference in our policy. I said that we weren't the ones to decide about policy; all we should do was to send up the right numbers and let them worry. He asked me who I wanted to see, and I said that I had requested appropri_- ate members of the White House staff and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in my. memo, but, frankly, I didn't. know. who the appropriate members were. He asked wheth- er Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rol;tow would be all right. I told him that was not only accept- able, it was generous, and he said he would arrange the appointments for me. With that I was sent around. to see the deputy directors. The chief of research, R. Jack Smith, asked me what the matter was, and I told him the same things I had told Helms. The Vietnam war, he said, was an extraordinarily complex af- fair, and the size of the enemy army was only- his exact words----"a small but significant byway of the problem." His deputy, Edward Procter, now the CIA's chief of research, remarked, "Mr- Adams, the real problem is you. You ought to look into yourself." FTF,R MAKING THESE ROUND'S. I wrote letters Ato Rostow and Taylor, telling them who I Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 was and asking that they include a member of Nixon's staff in any talks we had about the CIA's shortcomings. I forwarded the letters, through channels, to the director's office, asking his permission to send them on. Permission was denied, and that was the last I ever heard about meeting with Mr. Rostow and General Taylor. In early December I did manage to see the executive secretary of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, J. Patrick Coyne. He told me that a few days earlier Helms had sent over my memo, that some members of PFIAB had read it, and that they were asking me to enlarge on my views and to make any recommendations I thought were in order. Coyne encouraged me to write a full report, and in the following weeks I put together a thirty- five-page paper explaining why I had brought charges. A few days after Nixon's inauguration, in January 1969, I sent the paper to Helms's office with a request for permission to send it to the White House. Permission was denied in a letter from the deputy director, Adm. Rufus Taylor, who informed me that the CIA was a team, and that if I didn't want to accept the team's decision, then I should resign. There I was-with nobody from Nixon's staff having heard of any of this. It was far from clear whether Nixon intended to retain the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. J. Patrick Coyne said he didn't know. He also said he didn't intend to press for the release of the thirty-five-page report. I thought I had been had. For the first time in my career, I decided to leave oftcial channels. his had never occurred to me before, not even when Helms had author- ized the doctored numbers in the month before Tet. I had met' a man named John Court, a member of the incoming staff of the National Security Council, and through him I hoped for a measure of redress. I gave him my memoran- dum and explained its import-including West- moreland's deceptions before Tet-and asked him to pass it around so that at least the new administration might know what had gone on at the CIA and could take any action it thought necessary. Three weeks later Court told me that the memo had gotten around, all right, but the decision had been made not to do anything about it. So I gave up. If the White House wasn't in- terested, there didn't seem to be any other place I could go. I felt I'd done as much as I possibly could do, and that was that. NCE AGAIN I THOUGHT about quitting the Agency. But again I decided not to, even though my career was pretty much in ruins. Not only had the deputy director just suggested that I resign, but I was now working under all kinds of new restrictions. I was no longer permitted to go to Vietnam. After the order-of-battle confer- ence in Saigon in September 1967, Westmore- land's headquarters had informed the CIA sta- tion chief that I was persona non grata,, and that they didn't want inc on any military in- stallations throughout the country. In CIA head- quarters I was more or less confined to quar- ters, since I was no longer asked to attend any meetings at which outsiders were present. I was even told to cut back on the lectures I was giving about the VC to CIA case officers bound for Vietnam." I suppose what kept me from quitting this time was that I loved the job. The numbers busi- ness was going along fairly well, or so I thought, and I was becoming increasingly fascinated with what struck me as another disturbing question. Why was it that the Vietcong always seemed to know what"i"ve were up to, while we could never find out about them except through captured documents? At the time of the Tet offensive, for example, the CIA had only a single agent in the enemy's midst, and he was low-level. At about this time, Robert Klein joined the VC branch. He had just graduated from college, and I thought him one of the brightest and most delightful people I had ever met. We began bat- ting back and forth the question of why the VC always knew what was going to happen next. Having written a study on the Vietcong secret police in 1967, 1 already knew that the Com- munist's had a fairly large and sophisticated es- pionage system. But I had no idea how large, and, besides, there were several other enemy organizations in addition to the secret police that . had infiltrated the Saigon government. Klein and I began to sort them out. The biggest one, we found, was called the Military Proselyt- izing Directorate, which concentrated on re- cruiting agents in the South Vietnamese Army and National Police. By May 1969 we felt things were beginning to fall into place, but we still hadn't answered the fundamental question of how many agent.; the VC had in the South Vietnamese government. l decided to do the oh- vious thing, which was to start looking in the captured documents for references to spies. Klein and I each got a big stack of documents, and we began going through then), one by one. Within two weeks we had references to more than 1,000 VC agents. "Jesus Christ!" I said to Klein. "A thousand agents! And before Tet the CIA only had one." Furthermore, it was clear from the documents that the thousand we'd found were only the top of. a very big iceberg. Right away I went-off to tell everybody the bad news. I had begun to take a perverse plea- sure in niv role as the man in opposition at the Agency- The first person I spoke to was the head of the Vietnam branch of the CIA Clandes- tine Services. I said, "Hey, a guy called Klein and I just turned up references to over 1,000 VC agents, and from the looks of the documents tlt:e,,overall number might run into the tens of thousands." He said, "For. God's sake, don't open that Pandora's box. We have enough trou- bles as it is." The next place I tried to reach was the Board of National Estimates, which was just conven- ing its annual meeting on the Vietnam draft. Because of the trouble I'd made the year before, and because the meeting included outsiders, I wasn't allowed to attend. By now, Klein and I had come to the very tentative conclusion, based mostly on extrapolations from documents, that the Military Proselytizing Directorate alone had * In mid-1968 I had discovered that Agency officers sent to Vietnam received a total of only one hour's instruction on the organization and methods of opera. tion of the Vietcong. Disturbed that they should be sent tip against so formidable a foe with so little training, I had by the end of the year increased the hours from one to twenty-four. I gave nto.t of the 8 lectures myself. Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved-.For Release 2001/08/08 CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 20.000 agents in the South Vietnamese Army and government. This made it by far the biggest agent network in the history of espionage, and I was curious to know whether this was known in Saigon. I prompted a friend of mine to ask the CIA's Saigon station chief-back in Wash- ington to give another briefing I wasn't allowed to attend-just how many Vietcong agents there were in the South Vietnamese Army. The sta- tion chief (a new one; Jorgy had long since moved) was taken aback at the question. He'd never considered it before. He said, "Well, the South Vietnamese Military Security Service has about 300 suspects under consideration. I think that about covers it." If Klein and I were any- where near right with our estimate of 20,000, that made the station chief's figure too low by at least 6,000 percent. New discoveries Y-ft ECIDING THAT WE DIDN'T yet know enough to make an issue of the matter, Klein and I went back to plugging the documents. The more we read, the wilder the story became. With a great deal of help from the CIA counterintelli- gence staff, we eventually found that Vietcong agents were running the government's National Police in the northern part of the country, that for many years the VC had controlled the coun- terintelligence branch of the South Vietnamese Military Security Service (which may explain why the station chief's estimate was so low), and that in several areas of Vietnam, the VC were in charge of our own Phoenix Grogram. Scarcely a clay passed without a new discovery. The most dramatic of them concerned a Viet- cong agent posing as a South Vietnamese ord- nance sergeant in Da I, ang. The document said that the agent had been responsible for setting oft explosions at the American air base in April 1969, and destroying 40,000 tons of ammuni- tion worth $100 million. The explosions were so big that they attracted a Congressional in- vestigation, but the military managed to pass them off as having been started accidentally by a grass fire. %* The problem with all these reports was not that they were hidden, but that they'd never been gathered and analyzed before in a system- atic.. manner. Although CIA men in the field were aware of VC agents, Washington had failed to study the extent of the Vietcong network. This is exactly what Klein and I attempted in the fall of 1969. By this time we had con- cluded that the total number of VC agents in the South, Vietnamese Army and government .was in the neighborhood of 30,000. While we admitted that the agents were a mixed bag most of them were low-level personnel hedging their bets-we nonetheless arrived at an ex- tremely bleak overall conclusion. That was that the agents were so numerous, so easy to recruit, and so hard to catch that their existence "called into question the basic loyalty of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces." This, in turn, brought up questions about the ultimate chances for success of our new policy of turning the war over to the Vietnamese. % In late November Klein and I had just about finished the first draft of our study when we were told that under no circumstances was it to leave CIA headquarters, and that, specificali , it shouldn't go to John Court of the White House staff. Meanwhile, however, I had called Court a number of times, telling him that the study existed, and that it suggested that Viet- namization probably wouldn't work. For the next two-and-a-half months, Court called the CIA front office asking for a draft of our memo on agents. Each time he was turned down. Finally, in mid-February 1970, Court came over to the VC branch, and asked if he could have a copy of the agent memorandum. I told him he couldn't, but that I supposed it was okay if he looked at it at a nearby desk. By closing time Court had disappeared, along with the -nemo. I phoned him the next morning at the Executive Office Building and asked him if lie had it. "Yes, I took it. Is that okay?" he said. It wa.:n't okay, and shortly after informing my superiors I re- ceived a letter of reprimand for releasing the memo "to an "outsider." (Court, who worked for the White House, was the "outsider.") All copies of the study within the CIA-several were around being reviewed-were recalled to the Vietcong branch and put in a safe. Klein was removed from working on agents, and told that if lie didn't "shape up," he'd be fired. T II}: HESF.AIti:II DEI'AItT1iFNT and perhaps even Iclins (I don't know) apparently were ap- palled by the agent memo's reaching the White House. It was embarrassing for the CIA, since we'd never let anything like that out before. To suddenly say, oh, by the way,-'our ally, the South Vietnamese government, is crawling with spies, might lead someone to think that maybe the Agency should have noticed them sooner. We'd been in the war, after all, for almost six years. -- Court later wrote a precis of the memo and gave it to Kissinger. Kissinger gave it to Nix- on. Shortly thereafter, the White House sent a directive to Helms which said, in effect: "Okay, Helms, get that damn agent paper out of the safe drawer." Some months later, the Agency coughed it up, almost intact.' Meanwhile, Klein quit. I tried to talk him out of it, but he decided to go to graduate school. He did so in September 1970, but not before leaving a letter of resignation with the CIA in- spector general. Klein's letter told the complete story of the agent study, concluding with his opinion that the White House would never have learned about the Communist spies had it not been for John Court's sticky firigers. By now my fortunes had sunk to a low ebb. For . the first time in seven years, I was given an unfavorable fitness report. I 'was rated "max- ginal" at conducting research; I had lost my "balance and objectivity" on the war, and, worst of all, I was the cause of the "discontent lead- ing to the recent resignation" of Klein. For these shortcomings I was being reassigned to a position where I would be "less directly involved in research on the war." This meant I had to leave the Vietcong branch and join a small his- torical staff, where I was to take up the relative- ly innocuUUS job of writing a history of the Cambodian rebels. Once again, I considered resigning from the Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 CIA, but the job still had me hooked, and ever since the c'otp that del;o-eel Sihanouk in March 1970 1 had b.-en wondering what going fill :n Cambodia. Within a few weeks of that coup, the Communist army had begun to dis appear from the sotahern half of South Viet- Want for Service next B oor, and 1 was curious to find out -.vital it was up to. When I reported to the historical staff, I began, as usual, to Col- lect donuntents. This was toy !Hain occupation for almost the next five mouths. I knew so lit- tle about Cambodia that I was fairly indiscrim- inate, and therefore grabbed just about every- thing I could find. By late April 1971, 1 had gathered several thousand reports, and had di- vided them into broad categories, such as "mil- itary" and "political." In early May, I began to go through the "military" reports. One of the first of the-.e was an interroga- tion report of a Vietcong staff officer who had surrendered in Cambodia in late 1970. The staff officer said he belonged to a Cauul odian Com- munist regional command with a code name I'd never heard of: C40. Apparently C :0 had several units attached to it, including regiments, and I'd never heard of any of these, either. And., it seemed, the units were mostly composed of Khmers, of whom C-40 had a total of 18,000. Now that appeared to me to be an awful lot of Khmer-soldiers just for one area, so I decided to check it against our Cambodian order of battle. Within a month I made a startling dis- covery: there was no order of battle. All I could find was a little sheet of paper estimating the of V to size t)S the 1st tiler L.vriiaT.iilli?t a Army at 5,400.9' 10,000 men. This sheet of paper, with, exactly the same numbers, had been kicking around since early 1970. It was'the same story as our Vietcong esti- mate of 1966, only worse- In Vietnam we had neglected to look at three of the four parts of the Vietcong Army; in Cambodia we hadn't looked at the Khmer Communist Army at all. It later turned out that the 5,000-to-10,000 fig- ure was based on numbers put together by a sergeant in the Royal Cambodian Army in 1969. From then on, it was easy. Right in the same room with me was every single intelligence re- port on the Khmer rebels that had ever come in. Straightaway I found what the VC Army had been doing in Cambodia since Sihanouk's fall: it had put together the largest and best advi- sory structure in the-Indochina war. Within two weeks I had discovered thirteen regiments, sev- eral dozen battalions, and a great many coin- panies and platoons. Using exactly the same methods that I'd used on the Vietcong estimate before Tet (only now the methods were more refined), I came to the conclusion that the size of the Cambodian Communist Arnty was not 5,000 to 10,000 but more like 100,000 to 150,000. In other words, the U.S. government's official estimate way Ile.tween ten and thirty tit::e5 too low. My metro was ready in early June, :uul thi? time I gave a copy to John Court of the White House the day before I turned it in at the Agen. cy. This proved to have been a wise move, be- cause when I turned it in I was told, "Under no circum=tances does this go out of the room." It was the best order-of-battle paper I'd ever lP done. It had about 120 footnotes, referencing about twice that many intelligence reports, and it was solid as a rock. A week later, I was taken off the Khmer Com- munist Army and forbidden to work on num- bers anymore.A junior analyst began reworking my memo with instructions to hold the figure below 30.000. The analyst puzzled over this for several months. and at last settled on the same method the military had used in lowering the Vietcong estimate before Tet. He marched two whole categories out of the order of battle and "scaled down" what was left. In November 1971, he wrote up a memo placing the size of the Khmer Communist Army at 15,000 to 30,000 men. The CIA published the memo, and that number became the U.S. government's official estimate. More distortions THE PRESENT OFFICIAL ESTIMATE of the Khmer rebels-65,000-derives from the ear- lier one. It is just as absurd. Until very recently the Royal Cambodian Army was estimated at over 200,000 men. We are therefore asked to believe that the insurgents, who control four- fifths of Cambodia's land and most of its peo- ple, are outnumbered by the ratio of 3 to 1. In fact, if we count all the rebel soldiers, including those dropped or omitted from the official esti- mate, the Khmer Rebel Army is probably larger than the government's-perhaps by a consider- able margin. dThe trouble with this kind of underestimate is not simply a miscalculation of numbers. It also distorts the meaning of the war. In Cam- bodia, as. in the rest of Southeast Asia, the struggle is for allegiance, and the severest test of loyalty has to do with who can persuade the largest number of peasants to. pick up a gun. When American intelligence downgrades the strength of the enemy army, it ignores the Com- munist success at organizing and recruiting peo- ple. This is why. the Communists call the strug- gle a "people's war" and- why the government found it difficult to understand. I spent the rest of 1971 and a large part of 1972 trying to get the CIA to raise the Cam- bodian estimate. It was useless. The Agency was busy with other matters, and I became in- creasingly discouraged. The Cambodian affair seemed to me to be a repeat df the Vietnam one;. the same people made the same mistakes, in precisely the same ways, and everybody was allowed to conceal his duplicity. In the fall of 1972 I decided to make otie last attempt at bringing the shoddiness of American intelli- gence to the attention of someone, anyone who could do anything about it. Between October 1972 and January 1973 I approached the U.S. Army inspector general, the CIA inspector general,. and the Congress-- all to no avail. To the Army inspector general I delivered a memorandum setting forth the de- tails of what had happened to the VC estimate before Tet. I mentioned the possibility of Gen- eral Westmoreland's complicity, which might have implicated him in, three violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The memo- randum asked for an investigation, but the in- spector general explained that I was in the Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 200-1/08108 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 wrong jurisdiction. Of the CIA inspector gen- eral I requested an investigation of the Cambo- dian estimates, but he adopted the device of neglecting to answer his mail, and no inquiry took place. In a last desperate measure-des- perate because my friends at the CIA assured me that Congressional watchdog committees were a joke-I even appealed to Congress. To committees in both the House and Senate that watch over the CIA I sent a thirteen-page memorandum with names, dates, numbers, and a sequence of events. A stall assistant to the Senate Armed Services Committee thought it an inter- esting document, but he doubted that the In- telligence Subcommittee would take it up be- cause it hadn't met in over a year and a half. Lucien Nedzi, the chief superintendent of the CIA in the House, also thought the document "pertinent," but he observed that the forth- coming elections obliged him to concern him- self primarily with the question of busing. When I telephoned his office in late November, after the elections had come and gone, his ad- ministrative assistant told me, in effect, "Don't call us; we'll call you." By mid-January 1973 1 had reached the end of the road.'I happened to read a newspaper account of Daniel Ellsberg's trial in Los An- geles, and I noticed that the government was alleging that Ellsherg had injured the national security by releasing estimates of the enemy force in Vietnam: I looked, and damned if they weren't from the same order of battle which the military had doctored back in 1967. Imagine! Hanging a man for leaking faked numbers! In late February I went to Los Angeles to testify at the trial and told the story of how the num- bers got to be so wrong. When I returned to Washington in March, the CIA once again threatened to fire me. I complained, and, as usual, the Agency backed down. After a de- cent interval, I quit. One last word. Some day, when everybody has returned to his senses, I hope to go back to the CIA as an-analyst. I like the work. 11 THE MORAL OF THE 'FACE Readers interested in the question of integrity in Amer- ican government might take note of three successful bureaucrats mentioned in this chronicle. All of them ac- knowledged or abetted the counterfeiting of military intelligence, and all of them have risen to high places with- in their respective apparats. Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham,.who hel?ed to lower the U.S. Army's estimate of the Vietcong WAS11-1114 rTCN POST 27 April 1975 ~By JOYCE ILLIG Company Man PHILIP AGEE, the ex-CIA agent living in England,-has finally found a publisher and filmmaker to get his book.Inside the Company: CIA Diary out to the American public. Stonehill Publishing Company will publish the book and Emile de Anto- nio has purchased the film rights. . Stonehill, a small, relatively unknown New York trade house distributed by George Braziller & Co., signed a contract with Scott Meredith, Agee's literary agent,.giving Agee essentially the same deal'he'd turned down with Straight Ar- row Books: a $12,000 advance and a 6040 split on the paperback sale. Stonchill is a four-year-old company run by Jeffrey Steinberg. Steinberg is young (late 20s), enthusiastic and persist- ent. He was a founder of Chelsea House publishers. and was hired in 1970 by Jann Wenner to start Straight Arrow Books with Alan Rinzler. He said that he didn't., strength, is now the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; Edward Procter, who steadfastly ignored accu- rate intelligence, is now chief of the CIA research director- ate; and William Hyland, who conceded the impossibility of contesting a political fiction, is now the head of State De- partment Intelligence. Theircollective docility might also in- terest readers concerned with questions of national security. last long because of personality differ- ences with Wenner. Steinberg started Stonehill and is backed by "a consortium of European bankers." Stonehill's current schedule for Agee's book is to ship a first printing of 30,000 copies in June for July publication. The probable price: $12.95. Steinberg is also planning to add an index for the Ameri- can edition. "We're going to hold off on the mass market paperback sale until we've com- pleted our legal review and can deliver a ;reasonably meaningful warranty," said Steinberg. The American Civil Liberties Union has given Steinberg a letter "agreeing to provide as much legal assistance, at no cost, as we warrant." This is in case all. the rumors become fact concerning gov ernment suppression of the book here and threats of libel suits. "There will definitely be a libel and in- vasion of privacy review by our law firm," said Steinberg, "and there will probably be a minor number of changes in the man= uscript, but I don't think we'll have trou- ble with Agee on them." Scott Meredith said that Agee Is pre- pared to warrant very little because he has no money. "In the book deal as well as the movie deal, the only warranty that Agee is providing is the warranty that he has.the rig t to sell these rights and that the government doesn't own them," said Meredith. I . " Stonehill's biggest seller is a recently published book called The Cocaire Pa- pers. It's a $12.95 volume documenting, Freud's use of cocaine. Emile de Antonio, the underground Marxist filmmaker, plans to make a fic- tion film of Agee's.book, using different names for everyone- except the author. De Antonio, creator of the controversial and highly praised documentaries "Point of Order" (the Army-McCarthy hearings), "In the Year of the Pig" (an overview of the Vietnam war) and "Millhouse" (a sa- tiric look at Nixon), has agreed to pay $25,000 dollars against five per cent of the profits-the producer's gross, not the net -of the picture. Agee will receive $7500 when fie signs the contract and $17,500 in the first day of principal photography, which has to be within a year. Haskel_Wexler has agreed to be the di- rector of cinematography and De Antonio 'said that Jane Fonda has volunteered to be in it. JOYCE ILLIG writes regularly on the publishing scene for Book World. Approved For Release 2001108/08 : CId-R 77-b0432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 NEW YORK TIMES 30 April 1975 Bomb .fasts Home .Of a C.I.A. Official in a Denver Suburb: DENVER, April 29 (UPI)-Al pipe bomb explosion outside the suburban home of a Central Intelligence Agency official may have been caused by radi- cals inspired by the bombing of a bank hours earlier, or may have been the work of a "crackpot", the police said today. The bomb exploded in front! of the home of James Sommer- ville a C.I.A. regional director, 30 minutes before midnight Monday, shattering windows ar)d shredding portions of the roof on the one-story brick house in South Denver. Win- dows in a house next door were also broken. Bricks were blown from the front wall and a sprinkler sys- tem inside the house were da- maged, but neither Mr. Som- merville's wife, Allane, nor their 14-year-old son, asleep att. the time of the blast, were hurt. Mrs. Sommerville, who said that her husband was in Texas, added: "I know people are con- n^cting this with his job but, there's no real proof. I really) can't say what happened; Il was asleep at the time. The explosion woke me up." ,A bomb squad detective, Fred Stevenson, said that the blast tlid not appear related to the explosion of a satchel of dyna- mite at the American National Bank in Denver 12 hours ear- lier. Six employes received min- or: injuries in that explosion. But he said that the pipe bomb, pushed against the foundation of ? the Sommerville home, might have been planted by radicals who got the idea from the bank explosion. "You get one bombing an there immediately follows a rash of other," he said. "What with all the publicity in the papers about the C.I.A., it could have been a radical group. Who can say?" The police said that they were checking with other cities in 6 which terrorists have set off explosions to see if there was a pattern to the bombings.:. CHICAGO TRIBUNE 27 April 1975 Our anti-intelligence agency.. President Ford has advised Ameri- cans not to go on "refighting" a war that is now finished for us. That seems good advice, but h qualification goes with it: We had better think over that war at least long enough to learn from Perhaps the basic lesson to be learned Is that self-deception does not work. We have heard a great deal about efforts by the Johnson and Nixon administra- tions to mislead the public. Less well known, but even more disastrous, were the determined and largely successful efforts of government agencies to de- ceive themselves. than government estimates. it in a safe a week later, marked "in- definite hold." Over the next six and a half yearsi Mr. Adams amassed hundreds of docu- ments c l e a r l y indicating- that Com- munist'strength in Indochina was vastly greater than American officials thought. He concluded, for instance, that there were actually 600,000 Viet Cong-not 270,000--in the south; that.V. C. agents were in control of the South Vietnamese Military Security Service, and in some areas were running the CIA's own "Phoenix" program of political assassi- nation; that Communist strength in Cambodia was 10 to 30 times greater A horrifying example. appears in.Bar? Each attempt to get this information per's Magazine this month.. Taken at thin official c h a a n e l s to the White face value; the 'story of Sabi. Adams, House was met with silence,- inaction, former chief analyst of Viet Nam affairs or specific warnings to keep quiet, Mr. for the -Central Intelligence Agency., Adams managed to convey his findings shows that unwelcome facts were con- to the inspectors-general of the CIA and sistently' covered up instead of reported. the army and the CIA "watchdog""com- Accurate data on enemy strength would mittees of House and Senate.- Nothing .have faced the White House with a happened. In 1973, after his superiors painful dilemma, says Mr. Adams;' it would , either have had to pull out .of Viet Nam or throw.far more men and materiel into an unpopular war. So the reports were suppressed. Our policy makers continued to make decisions on the basis of information which intelli- gence had reason to know was vwronao o- . again threatened to fire him-this time for testifying in the Ellsberg trial-Mr. Adams resigned. It appears, then, that since 1966 our intelligence establishment had access to information that could have radically changed this government's policies in Southeast Asia-policies that have now proved ruinously wrong. The information Mr... Adams reports that in August,.. _ was kept. quiet and the man who. tried 1966, he found strong evidence in cap- to warn government leaders of it was tured Viet Cong documents that. the treated as a troublemaker. official estimate of V. C. strength in The questions now are [11 how- our South Viet Nam-270,000 men-might be . intelligence system came to function as 200,000 too low, Mr. Adams sent this a protector and promoter of disastrous explosive information to the CIA direc- ignorance, and [21 whether it is still tor's office.. Nothing happened; it was functioning that way. The least that read and' returned without questions or should result from Mr. Adams' dis- comment. A. second memorandum closures- is a congressional inquiry to simply disappeared. Mr. Adams found find the answers. NATIONAL REVIEW 28 MARCH 1975 THE WASHINGTONIAN MAY, 1975 ? Talk about a responsible press. The media gave con- siderable play a few weeks back to Dick Gregory .and Ralph Schoenman when they dug up an old and very blurred photograph taken the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. They claimed that two of the men in the background were Watergaters Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, and, on the basis of that, made the sweeping assertion that JFK had been the victim of a CIA assassination attempt. Both AP and CBS News refused to carry a 300-word statement by Hunt which included the sentences: "I was not in Dallas, Texas, No- vember 22, 1963; in fact I never visited" Dallas until eight years later. I did not meet Frank Sturgis until 1972, nine years after we were allegedly together in Dallas." Finally no one in sight bothered to inform 'the' reader or listener of ' the antecedents of Schoenman. Ralph Schoenman was the guru who got hold of the senescent Bertrand Russell back in the Sixties and staged that war crimes tribunal in Stockholm that indicted Lyn- don Johnson and the United States of America for every atrocity in the book. Schoenman was identified 'only as "an associate" of Dick Gregory in the assassination in- vestigation. EXCERPTED: ...Parade maga- zine recently ran a Personality Parade item asking if New York Times reporter Sy Hersh was ever a CIA agent, and the an- ser was no. But then George Lardner of the Post was told that Hersh actually did once have CIA ties. Lardnerchecked it out and finally called Hersh to ask him pointblank:?Bov. you finally got me," Hersh told Lardner. "I was posted to the Belgrade station in the 1950s but was dismissed for homo- sexual tendencies." Lardner, according to friends of Hersh, was set to run with the story until he was told it was all a put-on. Don't invite Hersh and Lardner to the same party. 12 - Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R00010Q360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 :CIA=RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Peer de Silva od Fleas the C1 All article appeared in this space a few 4 weeks ago entitled "Abolish the CIA!" it began by describing in some considerable detail the Viet Cong bomb- ing of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1965. 1 was the CIA chief of station at that time. I have a different perspective on what happened that morning and on the way Americans should be thinking about the CIA these days. The American Embassy was indeed bombed on March 30, 1965, by a Viet Cong terrorist squad who packed an old sedan with about 350 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive and then rolled the car up under my window in the embassy. They set off a time-pencil detonator, began a fire fight with local police on the sidewalk and were blown up with them when the car detonated just a few sec- onds later. One of my secretaries was killed in- stantly, two of my officers were perma- nently and totally blinded, and many others on my staff were injured to one degree or another, myself included. I was let, away from the embassy. bleed- ing like a stuck pig because that's the way all head wounds bleed. Besides the American casualties, more than a score of innocent South Vietnamese passers-by were killed by the blast and many wounded. GRIM PROPOSAL This incident apparently served to provide the author of the other article with the notion that I had lied to him. He reported that the Viet Cong terrorists had finally opened his eyes and thus led him to the grim proposal that the real way to celebrate America's Bicentennial is by abolishing the CIA entirely. I find this proposal singularly frivolous and downright dangerous. Whether one likes the notion or not, the fact remains that there are many tigers roaming loose in the world today; they are unfriendly to the United States and eagerly await the opportunity to leap upon us if the risk is not too great. In certain quarters it has bec had a significant military preponde.r:.' ante in the two southernmost: milita. ry regions. Even at that point, Soui:, Vietnam might have saved its hear-r, land, although it had dissipated ?.l- -- most half its military aseets - -`-~ - But almost all combat-wort},y troops were gathered into a static perimeter defense around Saigon it- self. .Thieu did not use the arriving units to mount spoiling attacks against the encroaching enemy, who often simp- Approved or ReTeasd 20Q1708IU8-: CIA-RDP77-0043'2R0001003-60003s5--- Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 ly.-walked into major provincial capi- tals. He did not even use the new ar- rivals to replace other units for such attacks, which were the only possible hope of halting the Communist jug- gernaut that was rolling forward vir- tually unopposed. Instead, he deployed the entire South Vietnamese army as if it were an: immense bodyguard intended to protect himself and his clique-and to. ensure that they would escape with as much of their wealth as pos- sible. unknown, although it Is almost cer- tainly in Europe and probably in Switzerland, where Thieu is likely to settle down. By last week, the South Vietnamese forces were totally demoralized. Even those honest, patriotic officers who had neither fled nor looted saw no possible future in resistance. One- star generals complained openly that they had no idea what was happen- ing and that they were receiving no U,dcrs from their superiors. The Vietnamese navy was concen trated in the approaches to Saigon. There could be only one conceivable purpose, and it was not tactical Those ships were to serve as a back- up evacuation force for Thieu, his clique and their loot. Already a sub- stantial, if unknown, portion of the three tons of gold presumably re- maining had been distributed among the clique. Ironically, the high-ranking officer- defectors did not appreciate that. When the time came, the naval crews would probably save them- selves and their families. Large bribes may, possibly, buy the senior officials passages. But, some infor- mants predict, the' angrily resentful crews could well dishonor any agree- ments they make. , . Demoralization has been intensified by the rapid, visible American eva- cuation. Ambassador Graham Martin resisted the move for that reason. He. , may have waited too long to save tens of thousands of Vietnamese whom Washington considers particu- larly worthy or imperiled. `'Mme. Thieu had already left the country when Thieu announced his resignation last Monday. Otherwise, -70.4 tons of gold. bars, treated as if they were private property, were the clique's chief concern, as were a few millions in foreign-currency reserves. ,.Some informed estimates, inciden. tally, are vastly larger, ranging up to 10 times as much. However, those magnitudes appear most improbable -not necessarily because much greater sums were not diverted, but because it would have been im- prudent to retain them in Vietnam. However, the true figures are, at this ,point, impossible to establish. After failing to induce air carriers to move the gold, the clique reported- ly shipped three tons on a freighter bound for Europe. The ship's name and its exact destination are not known to the informants. An additional ton of gold was, ac- cording to some informed reports? moved by Air Vietnam, the national airline, late last week and early this week. Again, the exact destination is NEW YORK TIMES 1 May 1975 In that atmosphere, Thieu was fi- nally forced to step down. He was succeeded, in violation of the strict provisions of the Vietnamese consti- tution, by 71-year-old former Premier Tran Van Huong. The presidency should have gone to Speaker of the Assembly Tran Van Lam, but he wanted no part of it. A small group of senior Vietnamese officers and officials, anticipating Thieu's forced resignation, began sev- eral months ago to press Huong, an honest, capable, patriot, despite his ,years, to assume the responsibility. That group promised Huong its full support and counsel. Even optimists, who predict that Saigon could still hold out for a few more weeks as a result of the politi- cal shifts, now fear civil disorder more than they do the immediate im- pact of the Communist takeover. Sai- gon, they predict, could become a Da Nang on a much greater scale-with revenge-inspired, loot-seeking mobs rampaging through the streets, kill- ing their countrymen and foreigners indiscriminately. The millions of Vietnamese crowd- ed. into the Saigon enclave have no place to go, unlike the Chinese Na- tionalists in Shanghai, who had Tai-, wan. As a re" ult, even die-hard anti- Communists now hope chiefly for an orderly transfer of power to avoid a final orgy of slaughter and destruc- tion. e N NP t.EUr,0j--y...Cd,1X_ns Scu Fall e-%f S e, uron - -Shift of Policy Bxpected{ North Vietnamese Army. You Polk y do anything against a unanimous people Communist ? of ster Role of ATo or not, the idea of patriotism is an incentive to which nobody has found the equal." America's allies in Western By CRAIG R. WHITNEY Europe confined their official Special to The New York Tlmes reactions to a hope that, now BONN, April 30--Saigon'sl moderation, a sobriety to the that the fighting was over, the surrender after 30 years ofl tone of the news from South- Vietnamese people would be al- struggle in Vietnam was seen east Asia. lowed to heal their wounds in in Europe today as a chasten-i , The news was commented peace, in defeat for American policy,! upon and evaluated by bureaus ,France Defers Recognition -bun there were hopes that it. of The New York Times in nine France, with. the only em- might prove salutary. capitals of Europe and the bassy still functioning in Privately, many in the Eu- Middle East, which gathered Saigon, was understood to have ropean community believe that reactions through interviewsI decided to go slowly before the United States now will be and statements by officials, shifting formal recognition to able to turn from what they newspapers and individuals. the new government, a step always considered a morbidl Almost exactly 21 years ago; that neutral Sweden took preoccupation with Vietnam to! Gen. Marcel Bigeard was com- today. more important issues of re-, manding paratroops ir. Dien - In West Germany, officials lations between the United Bien Phu, the battlefield where said relations with South Viet States and Europe. ; France lost her colonial hold: nam had not been broken even From London to the eastern over Indochina. . : though its diplomats evacuated Mediterranean, 'there was a. Today, from the defense, Saigon, last week. sense of a historic event, pos- ministry in Paris, he said: . . Among officials in London sibly a turning point. Even in "This defeat' was unavoid- and Bonn, there was a sense Moscow, a day before the May able. On the one side, people of a strong need to overcome Day celebration of the Com- who lived in a sort of cocoon the shock of the American loss, munist ideals that Hanoi's softly woven by the Americans. of face in Saigon with a dem? troops fought for, there was a On the other, a young, tough onstration in Europe of soli-i darity with the United States.j A meeting of all leaders ofl members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization except President Va;ery Gdidasc rvzily President Valery Giscard d'Es- taing of France to be held in Brussels May 29 and 30, will fill this purpose. The defeat of Saigon's Gov- ernment, in a view often heard here, was not so much a sign of American weakness as it was of American illusions. The defeat did not come, West Ger- many's Social Democratic party declared a few days ago, be- cause of insufficient American military aid. It was a product of an unpopular policy that failed to take account of the interests of "broad masses" ofj the South Vietnamese. Little Gloating in Moscow ; j In Eastern Europe and in Moscow, those who have long supported Hanoi and the Na- tional Liberation Front in South 'Vietnam welcomed the victory. But today at least, there was little official Soviet gloating. "The events in South Viet- nam," commented Tass, the of-, 42 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R0001003C0003-5 ficial Soviet press agency, more the old savage truth t.hatllpeace treaties were just paper,l "again confirm the truth that tools of war, no matter how -and I think it's dumb to argue! in th presnt time a regime that powerful, are no substitute for 1 that onlv the Americans or the not inevitable. The Western rests only on foreign bayonets spirit, without which an army ~ South Vietnamese were to world must be more concerned] is utterly nonviable." is nothing but a huge mass of blame for breaking them." to defend social justice. This) Important and influential panic-stricken people." 11 Brandt Emphasizes Ties justice which is often synony4 voices in West Germany, Brit-, In Cairo, officials said pri-'I" Former Chancellor Willy mows with independence, in ain and France seemed to agree vately that they thought the !Brandt put some thoughts Asia as in Europe." with Moscow that the funda- American "defeat" was a major !about Vietnam into a domestic American diplomats in Bonn mental error of the United blow for Secretary of StateKis- ipolitical campaign speech in believe that recent visits to' States was in trying to defend ! I singer and for President Anwar Dortmund last week. Europe by 'members of Con- a,country' that would not de-: ! el-Sadat, who has been trying ' "We will not allow ourselves gress have dispelled some of fend itself. to use his "American connec- to be separated from the United the concern in West Ger- . But Moscow does not emerge tion" to ease the threat of an- I States," he said. "Our sympa- many that the Congress might in triumph from the humilia- (other war with Israel. !thy belongs to the victims of now be able to force the Ad- tion that its allies inflicted on The outcome in Vietnam, de both sides and we should not ministration to reduce the num- the United States. Officials and 1 scribed by the Cairo radio as ; deny our help to refugees and ber of American troops in ordinary people in Western "a victory for all peace-loving I children. A European mercy Europe. Europe believe, as the Conserv- ;people" will limit Mr. Kissin- mission is also called for he "There is a vague fear," said ative former Foreign Secretary, jger's influence in Cairo, ac- cause this war resulted from one, "that there could be some telex Douglas-Home, said in the cording to Egyptian diplomats the heritage of the European lasting effect after Vietnam in British House of Lords today: land others. colonial period." the United States, a neoisola- "The free world has reached I The importance of the Amer- In London, the new Ameri- tionisrn, but I think the over- a point of insecurity where the ican commitment to the defense can Ambassador, Elliot L. Rich- riding feeling is relief that the -democracies must require proof:1 of Western Europe against ag- ardson, said that British offi- fighting is over." of Communist Russia's intbn-;Igression is especially stressed cials had gone out of their way:, Der Spiegel, the left-center tions and deeds which are com- in West Germany, whose east- to tell him that the defeat in, West German news magazine, patible with cooperation and !ern border with East Germany Vietnam should "not affect) said: partnership." is the dividing line between op- American commitments in; "America bids farewell to I Euro e." Vietnam with a Israelis Are Concerned ,posing social and political sys- P guilty con- tems. As in West Germany, some' science but glad the darkest ! ' There is no country more From the lowliest stonework- British newspapers have been j hours of U.S. history are end- dependent on United States mil- !er in the Rhine Valley to Chan- less confident. The Daily Tele-i ing." itary assistance for protection);cellor Helmut Schmidt, there! graph said today: "America has; In Rome, Pope Paul VI issued against aggression than Israel. Iseems to be little inclination received a fearful jab in the! a cautious statement through There was some nervousness 'towards equating Vietnam and face, from which it will takeI the Vatican spokesman, Feder- among Israelis today that the an count years to recover." ^ ico Alessandrini, who said that turn of events in Indochina Y ry in Europe. "It is world Communism's! the Pontiff shared the "anxiety My friends and I used to ! could weaken the credibility ofj talk about it a lot," said a biggest victory, the free) and trepidation" Roman American su pport for Israel. : worker in Cologne, "but even world's-- biggest defeat,.. it, Catholics in South Vietnam and The Israeli newspaper Maarivl there, you had 500,000 trot s added: hoped tba real peace could ,.ommented, however: "The fi- P Jacques Faris, editor of y: I now be brought about in Viet- , we said, "The same thing Monde in Paris, wrote toda nam in strict respect of civil, nal sad chapter of the Vietnam I -m happen to their. as hap- r rugg!e demonstrated once)"' rr-~' "Contra aitu roll i6u5 ri ii`s." ?Y to the vronhecies. . 6 ,' r! tti~ pen--- - to the Frenci ate .. ai,nrv ... BALTIMORE SUN 1 May 1975 US?t o Stop the dothines Washington-The United goal can be achieved. Jtion that the United States, giv- States, which for years has been Mr. Kissinger said in his en the feelings of Congress on arguing the validity of the dom--? Tuesday press conference that Indochina, will neither guaran- recognize the new government I ino theory in one form or anoth- it is too early to assess the con- tee the defense of other non- in Saigon. er, now must persuade its re- sequences of the fall of South Communist nations in the area Mr. Kissinger said American maining Asian allies that it isn't Vietnam on the rest of Asia., nor expect commitments from officials will confer soon with necessarily so. ! But he added: them. Indonesia, Singapore, Australia President Ford and Henry A. "There is no question that Further, since the "sustain- and New Zealand. The first two, Kissinger, Secretary of State, the outcome in Indochina will able" commitments to Asia are while enjoying stable govern- had argued with increasing vig- have consequences not only in 'obviously severely limited, giv- ments and a comfortable geo- or in the weeks before the fall! Asia, but in many other parts of 1 'en the mood of both the nation graphical distance from Indo- of South Vietnam and Cambod- the world. To deny these conse and the Congress, the United china, are nevertheless anxious is to the Communists that the quences is to miss the PossiblitY States to work out a method of living might be expected to failure of the American Con- of dealing with them." give its unofficial blessing to with a bigger Communist pres- ; gress to appropriate emergency Then there was the parting whatever in the area can make accommodations ence in the area and in neutral- aid to those countries could fill-up of optimism, obligatorY I izing the destablizing effects it l have disastrous consequences as counterpoint to the secret- with Communist regimes. might have. for American foreign policy ary's public pessimism "But I; Many non-Communist coun- Australia and New Zealand around the world. am confident that we can deal tries, including some stanch enjoy the additional comfort of Allies, they argued, would with them, and we are deter- American io long, strong ties with the United believe they no longer could de- mined to manage..." ed allies en, to States, reinforced by common encouragement pend on American promises of One of the lessons to draw move in th;.t direction. Thai- Anglo-Saxon beginnings. But support. Enemies would probe from the United States's Indo- land is scrambling toward a they, too, are trying to adjust to for weak spots. I china experience, Mr. Kissinger! neutral stance, ordering South the new realities of the growing Mr. Kissinger has made it said, is that "foreign policy Vietnamese refugees to move power of non-Anglo, non-demo- clear that the chief objective must be sustained over decades, on quickly, guaranteeing the re- cratic regimes in Asia. Austral- for American foreign policy in if it is to be effective, and if its turn to Cambodia and South ! ia, significantly, already has Asia now will be to reassure the, cannot be, then it has to be tai-l Vietnam of war materiel taken I announced its intention of rec- allies and warn the enemies. lie) lured to what is sustainable." , from those countries by the ref- ! ognizing the new government in has not made it clear how that: I That seemed a clear indica-' ugees, and moving quickly to I South Vietnam. 43 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 WASHINGTON STAR 30 April 1977 Arthur Goldb erg was American ties, by the extent of the destruction permanent representative to th e United Nations, 1965-68, and was as- sociate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1962-65. He is now in the private practice of law. of life and property in Vietnam, and In reassessing our commitments, by reports that requests have been we must d i eterm ne by constitutional made of the President for substantial processes and candid, public discus- troop reinforcements in South Viet- sion what our real interests are, Warn.... Public support is e i p rma- nterests which would truly justify By Arthur J. Goldberg nently and substantially eroded.... commitment of American forces. The war in Vietnam is finished. And never has a serious move to- Public opinion polls which indicate The cost is incalculable - in lives, wards a political settlement been that the American people support our American and Vietnamese; in dol- more necessary." commitments to Europe, to. Japan, to Jars; in divisiveness among our peo- The thesis of this and prior memo- Israel, areas of vital interest, are not ple; in disruption of our economy; randa and statements by me to the public opinion n on the ot really oand in disaster for the people of National Security Council was a sim- Are opinion ed thhard t Am question. South Vietnam. Are we prepared to commit Ameri- The dead have died with vbut pie one: Our government, we are can forces, suffer substantial casual- The have, tied with valor a have taught by the,Declaration of Inde- ties, spend huge sums of money, and bsquandered, a new isolationism pendence, depends upon the consent dislocate our economy in order to been e n q our vital naewnonest of the governed; consent of the gov- support mother parts vital the bona. iHnterests erned increasingly became lacking in whose ose other nations -even those in of world. ours? the Vietnam war, not because of interests are vitally linked ness and disruption of the economy overexposure by the media, but for saver would with would have Before been clear. been clear. the not have corroded the quality of Ameri- good and solid reasons. It is,not can life. And the plight of the South so now. Vietnamese people is beyond com re- The people were not fooled; long ? pension. p before their leaders, the people Reassessment dictates that we re- There is no need for a commission in recognized our Vietnam po policy was not righter DeGaulle did for France after its de to assess responsibility; we know It is said that this is not the time feat in Algeria. This will not be easy, where the fault lies. All administra- for recriminations; I agree. This is a not only because of disillusionment tions, past and present, however well tir e, however, to ponder whether -intentioned; which ha :'e either with Vietnam, but because of the ... in- we have indeed learned the lessons of state of our do estic affa ti OivP; ..~ iii try tnr~ w2r or >..i.. .i ,.? 5::...,.... ..I. o. ..Jr Prolonged this great tragedy in American histo- economy is in a shambles, present our involvement, are responsible for ry which has caused us such incalcu- unemployment intolerable, inflation the consequences of Vietnam. - lable damage. I WRITE NOT from hindsight. In rampant, crime still growing, our Let state what I conceive these cities squalor, our racial problems lessons s to be. unresolved, any cynicism about our 1965, when I first assumed a position There shall be no more Vietnams. political process widespread. of responsibility in foreign affairs as This is a catchy phrase which only It is a first priority that we put our our ambassador to the United Na- partially illuminates the teaching. It domestic house in order if America is tions and ever since, I have stead- means that we must not fight wars or to return to a viable foreign adhered to the view that there make major military commitments NO AMERICAN president de poand was no justification for our involve- without the underlying consent of the Congress can any longer assume that tent in this war. people and their in cans will, as they often have Inasmuch as President Lyndon B. Congress. Under rthee Constitution, doneiin the past, adhere to the notion Johnson declassified my memoran- Congress, not the President, declares that: "Our country . may she dum to him of March 15, 1968, which war. Congress must assume and dis- always be in the right; but our coun- summarized my consistent viewpoint charge this responsibility. The peo- try, right or wrong." throughout my tenure at the U.N., I ple's representatives in Congress This slogan is no longer on the _ am at liberty to quote from this slo memorandum: must see to it that this constitutional masthead of the Chicago Tribune. It "Developments in our counts command is not infringed by the,' is no longer on the masthead of the country President. American people. They are patriotic have demonstrated that there is grave concern among the American America cannot be the world's po. Our ' but roco ng ry will people whether the course we have liceman. The end of the war in Viet- t ntry ol henceforth have is set in our Vietnam policy is right .. and gam calls for a realistic reassess- right in its foreign involvements concern which has been deepened by ment of our commitments - both commBefog wrong, as the reverses we and the South Viet- legal and moral. A great nation mand the teaches, ct of nh longer com_ namese suffered during the Tet often- should make only realistic commit- And o the consent question the governed. se the apparent lack of energy, ments, but it should keep the ones it and nd on the waging vital war, the of imat te eclesson effectiveness pna a makes. We committed far more in that ultimate of sive, ppeal of the South Vietnam than we should have, but of Vietnam is that the consent of the Vietnamese government, by the mounting rate of American casual- less than we had led the Vietnamese governed is imperative. NEW YORK TIMES to expect. 30 April 1975 S c Participants Look Back By R. W. APPLE Jr. Spedal to The New York Votes WASHINGTON, April 29- For many Americans it may have been a day of simple emotions - relief, perhaps, that the long war in Vietnam was near an end, or bitter- ness that the United States and its ally had in the end lost. 44 But for many Americans who played prominent parts in the long Indochinese strug- gle - senior officials in Washington, leaders of the antiwar movement, reporters who covered the war, offi- cials who served in the American Embassy in Saigon - reactions were more com- plex: volvement of -two decades st Some talked of fear for their friends' well-being; some dwelt on mistakes they felt they and their country had made; some expressed. hope that the future would be better. Here are what some of them had to say on the day the last American officials left Vietnam, ending an in- a cost of vast blood and treasure: ROBERT W. KOMER, for- mer chief of the pacification program in Vietnam and ad- viser to President Lyndon B. Johnson: "I feel terrible frustration and depression about all the things that we should have done and could have done and didn't do. In hindsight, it was a disaster, but that's Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R0001003`80003-B easy. "I haven't thought about much -in. the last month ex- cept the people who are still there-waking up in the mid- dle of the night, worrying about people like Colonel Be [a Vietnamese pacification expert]. We'll recover. But will they?" WILLIAM J. PORTER, for- mer Deputy Ambassador in Saigon and chief negotiator at the Paris peace talks, now Ambassador to Canada: "All of my worries of all these years about how it was going to end have material- ized. We didn't understand the place, we didn't know how to fight there. It was a :sad epoch. "There are lessons to he drawn from it, very clear les- sons. We should never have tried to get by with half- measures, because you can't do that and control the out- come. The national moral is that you apply power if you have it." .BARRY ZORTHIAN, for- mer chief information officer for the United States Em- bassy in Saigon, now an ex- ecutive of Time Inc.: :'I feel a real sense of hor- .? ror about the awful way, in which we had to get out com- bined'with a sense of relief that it's finally over. But then there are the beginnings of analysts, second thoughts, recriminations, distillations. "Where did things gn wrong? Coulid there have been a different result? I'm not sure, but I sometimes think we would have been better to have let them solve it their way 10 years ago. To what degree was it our desires, our ambitions, our pressures that- kept putting them through this?" - ANTHONY LLAKE. former Foreign Service officer in Vietnam and aide to Secre- tary of State Kissinger who resigned to protest the Amer- ioan invasion of Cambodia: "I'm glad the fighting is coming to an end, but I feel shame that It took so long and that we played the role we did in extending it for so long. It has been inevitable that they would win the war for so many years. - WASHINGTON POST 29 April 1975 Marquis Childs "Now here's a chance to figure out what kind of for- eign policy we should have instead of having Vietnam rip us apart. That hasn't been possible before, not when anyone who objected to military aid for Saigon au- tomatically was being called neo-isolationist." MORTON HALPERIN, for- mer Defense Department of- ficial and aide to Secretary Kissinger, whose telephone was tapped: "I'm relieved that It's over and that we didn't go back again. My fear was that Viet- nam was a film that would keep running backwards and forwards and would never end. "Then dismay that people talk of losing Vietnam or the fall of Vietnam. That country has not fallen and we didn't have it to lose. Vietnam will now be independent." RICHARD HOLBROOKE, former Foreign Service offi- cer in Vietnam who now edits Foreign Policy, a quar- terly: "I'm just sort of weary. We never belonged there even though so many people .tried to do so many good things. "And I'm angry at the gul- libility of Nixon and Ford and Kissinger for believing that the South Vietnamese could survive this offensive without the vertebra of cr, American fire - _.._ power, they couldn't survive any of the earlier ones without us. By this colossal foreign pol- icy failure we provided for our own humiliation, we made the worst of a bad situ- ation. "Why did we never go to Thieu, after Paris and the Congressional arms cutoff, and tell him that this was a new world and'he had better negotiate unless he wanted defeat?" W. AVERELL HARRIMAN, long-time participant in American foreign policy, who turned against the war in the late nineteen-sixties: "It is tragic that President Roosevelt's determination not to let the French back into Indochina after World War Il was not carried out. It would have saved France, the United States and the Vietnamese people this des- perate experience." DEAN RUSK, Secretary of State under President John- son and President John F. Kennedy: "Obviously, I'm very sad- dened by ,recent develop- ments, but also concerned where the story ends. We haven't seen the final bill yet. The American people around 1968 decided that if we couldn't tell them when the war would end, we might as well chuck it. Part of this decision was to take the con- sequences, and that's what we are going to have to do now. "I can't avoid my responsi- bility for what happened in Southeast Asia, but I don't. think others, including the the destinies of other coun-. tries; we only think our tac- tics were bad in Vietnam. We're in for a period not of real soul-searching, which we need, but of blame-assess--- ing." PROF. RICHARD FALK of' Princeton University, a key. antiwar theoretician: "It goes back to the Paris? cease-fire accords. We were.: caught in a trap. "We couldn't get our pris- oners back without Thieu's agreement, and we could only-; get Thieu's agreement if we - promised to support his op- position to bringing about peace. The result was an unnecessary added interlude WARD S. JUST, a former Washington Post correspond- ent in Vietnam, now a novel- ist: - "I was asked the other day: ther for what will happen this and it just wouldn't go, - now.,, it just wouldn't write. I had CORA WEISS, antiwar ac nothing helpful or enlighten-' tivist who hplnpd astah1ish ing or ameliorative to say;, contact with anoi concerning American prisoners of war: "It's a very exciting and tragic moment at the same time. Exciting because no more lives will be wasted, because the people of Viet- nam will be able to determine.: their lives without foreign in- terference. Tragic because one can't forget the need:ess. death and destruction. I "For 25 years the united States has tried to control 25. million people on a tiny strip, of land and we couldn't do it- and we- should never try to? do it again anywhere else." ' SAM' BROWN, one of the, organizers of the Vietnam moratorium demonstrations; now Treasurer of the State .of Colorado: .11 "There were some people- here today suggesting a cele- bration. That's so far from what I feel. We started that era with great hopes and ex- pectations, and Vietnam crushed them and our sense of the future. Now I feel no sense of rebirth; something ' has ended but nothing has . started. "Unfortunately, we still think we should play with, with a kind of horrified fas cination. I don't believe the`- cultures mix. It was a kind of failure of our national temperament; we felt that if. we kept plugging away even if we were on the wrong course, by. the -triumph of` American innocence every- thing would come out $11': right. It didn't." MORLEY SAFER, a CBS news correspondent in Viet. nam: . "I feel a deep unhappiness,. a sense that surely there, must have been a better way, sorrow for the Vietnamese, who saw the momentary ad- vantage of going along with, us. ,. "It's vital to refight this war for a long time to come so that we understand just; what we did over there, not, only to ourselves but to. them, and why we did it. We don't understand it yet, and we have to make the effort." Some of those who sup- ported the American effort to, the end, including both jour-' nalists and military officers, said they were either too bit ter or too sensitively situ- ated professionally to com-? ment on the day's events. 9 Sk - Writing and Carpet liombill Y. rD Sifting the true from the false the Vietnam disaster, for that would in military supplies not yet sent td in examining the fall of South Viet be to pass a large share of the blame Saigon. Of this, $200 million was in nam will be an endless pursuit. As to his immediate predecessor, Richard the pipeline and up'to $700 million reflected in Congress and the Public Nixon. And it was Nixon-who made was obligated but not expended. The opinion polls, most people would like him President, bureaucratic process being as cum- to get it over with and forget it. So much of Ford's motivation in bersome as it is, the committed ma- But while repeatedly declaring that pounding on Congress again and again to ch much oammunition, e fi fohas he has no intention of for more military aid must seem a Y recently been pointing t.'ie futile political gesture. Knowing Con- warding stage. What Ford surely r finger of blame, President Ford contin- gress out of his long experience, he knew, too, was that even if Congress ncs to worry the -issue with an un must have understood from the be. in, say, early March had appropriated comfortable awareness that lie is the ginning that it was no more than sky the $722 million he was requesting, commander-in-chief at the moment of writing. - it would have been. not weeks but this gritn climax. He can hardly speak months before the bulk of it, pantie ,the truth, which is that he inherited As he began to make his appeals, 4s Approved For Release 2001/08/08 CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5~ Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 on the way. . As one official put it, the real rea- son was moralcN Congress could have told Nguyen Van Thieu and the world that the United 'States- intended to stand behind the South Vietnamese and with tlfis pledge Thleu's armies would have fought on. In my opinion that is a highly doubt- ful proposition. The only thing that -would have changed the situation is /direct American intervention with bombers and troops. That is the morale-builder Thieu had apparently continued to hope for, which was un- derstandable in a man trapped in the blind alley of his own past. It is truly remarkable that President Ford shared this view, as he revealed in the CBS interview. The Congress, he said, "unfortunately" 'took away from the President in August 1973 (by the Cooper-Church amendment) "the power to move in a military way to enforce the agreements that were signed in Paris." That can only mean that if he had not been hobbled by NEW REPUBLIC 3 May 1975 Congress he would have reopened American participation in the war as the only way to save Thieu. We shall hear a great deal as the noose tightens and the end draws near about blood baths. Already we have seen nightly on television the desperate plight of the refugees. The horrors of the Communist' takeover in Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968, burial alive for many victims, were written large. But in any accounting of blood hatreds it is well to remember there is much on both sides of the blood- stained ledger.' When Secretary Kiss- inger's peace negotiations with Hanoi broke down in Paris in mid-December 1972 President Nixon gave the Com- munists 72 hours to go back to the table. When that deadline passed, he unleashed terror bombing on a scale never known before with fleets of B-52s, Phantoms and Navy fighter- bombers. was razed. . In the suburb of Thai Nguyen, nearly a thousand civilians were dead or wounded. The two prin- cipal hospitals and a dispensary were destroyed. On the walls left standing angry slogans were chalked: "We will avenge our compatriots massacred by the Americans." "Nixon, you will pay this blood debt." Opinion around the world was re- volted. Le Monde, the Paris news- paper, compared the bombing to the Nazi levelling of Guernica in the Spanish civil War. The revulsion pub- licly expressed reflected the intense feeling in almost every chancellery in the West. At the end of two weeks of carpet bombing, which by its very nature could have little relation to military targets, the Communists agreed to resume negotiation. At the end of the 24th round of talks in 42 months the accords were signed - accords that have proved no barrier at all against a resumption of the war. p 1475. United Feature Synd. The Secret Way by George McT. Kahin . In assessing American policy in Cambodia it is not sufficient to judge the legitimacy of Lon Nol's regime simply on the basic of its having been overwhelmingly dependent from, the outset upon the US Treasury. More important is the fact that its origins were tied to a covert and subversive American intervention aimed at displacing Sihanouk's neutralist government by one willing to align itself with US strategic objectives. The key features in this Nixon-Kissinger policy can best be understood against the background of earlier American attempts to destabilize Sihanouk's govern- ment. These go back at least to 1958 and were centered on building up an oppositionist military force known as the Khmer Serei (Free Cambodians), led by Son Ngoc Thanh, a bitter opponent of Sihanouk. Recruited primarily from South Vietnam's large Cambodian minority (Khmer Krom), this force was armed, financed and trained by the CIA and later supervised by US army special forces. Operating from bases in Thailand and South Vietnam, these troops were by the mid-1960s successful enough in penetrating Cambo- dia's frontiers to tie up a substantial part of the small 30,000-man Royal Cambodian Army. On a visit to Cambodia in 1967, during which I visited one of the 'border areas, I found that these Khmer Serei opera- tions were regarded by the diplomatic community in Pnompenh as aimed at keeping a counterforce available in case the United States might want to use it against Sihanouk, while more immediately keeping pressure on him to ensure against his departing too far from an international posture acceptable to the United States. In fact this policy had already backfired and become a major reason for Sihanouk's decision in 1965 to break diplomatic relations with the United States. During the last year of the Johnson administration, the counterproductivity of American support of military opposition to Sihanouk had become evident, and although the Khmer Serei were not disbanded, 146 Washington and Pnompenh moved toward a rapprochement. Sihanouk, worried over Cambodia's deteriorating relations with China during the Cultural Revolution and desirous of keeping the mounting air and ground war in Vietnam away from his border areas, welcomed improved relations with the United States, and ultimately on June 11, a resumption of diplomatic ties was announced. Under continual US prodding during the last months of the Johnson and the first months of the Nixon administrations Sihanouk began to take actions helpful to the US military position in Vietnam. Although not extensive, these included public criticism of Commu- nist Vietnamese occupation of border base enclaves and actions calculated to reduce the flow of overseas supplies to them via Cambodian ports. Ironically, however desirous he may have been to reduce the flow of military supplies and food to NLF and Hanoi forces, Sihanouk could in fact do little because of the deep involvement in this traffic by Lon Nol, Sosthenes Fernandez and other highly placed Cambodian army officers who were unwilling to give up their lucrative roles as middlemen. While Sihanouk apparently acquiesced to. American demands that the US be permitted to carry out hot pursuit of Vietnamese Communist troops a short distance into Cambodia. it is quite certain that he would never have tolerated anything like the all-out American military invasion against the border bases of the PRG and North Vietnam subsequently -approved by his successor, Lon Nol. In any case Sihanouk's concessions were evidently not sufficient to satisfy the Nixon administration. By at least the early fall of 1969 plans had been set in motion that led to the ousting of Sihanouk. There is no doubt that there was considerable dissatisfaction with his rule among much of Cambodia's urban civilian elite, as well as in the officer corps. But it is inconceivable that those who mounted the coup of March 18, 1970 against Sihanouk would have dared move against him had they not believed that prompt US recognition and support would be forthcoming. However irrational Lon Nol may have seemed in recent years, it is impossible to Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 i believe that without advance assurance of American military backing he would have acted immediately after the coup to challenge Hanoi and the PRG by sacking their embassies and ordering their military forces to leave Cambodian soil within 48 hours. But this move was necessary to set the stage for the American invasion aimed at ousting North Vietnamese and PRG forces from their border bases, for which the US military command in Saigon had been pressing. Whether or not American personnel were directly involved in the coup against Sihanouk, US mercenaries were. During the course of the year preceding it, under the aegis of Gen. Lon Nol there occurred a series of what were officially described as "rallyings" of some 2000 of the CIA-supported Khmer Serei to the Royal Cambodian Army and police. Infiltrated under Lon Nol's direction into a number of key army and police units, they were later to emerge. as the main activists among the anti-Sihanouk forces which sacked the Hanoi and PRG embassies and applied the pressure necessary to cow some of the Cambodian deputies into voting for Sihanouk's removal. These CIA mercenaries were in fact rallying not to Sihanouk , but to Gen. Lon Nol, and on terms worked out between Lon Nol and the head of the Khmer Serei, Son Ngoc Thanh, in negotiations that probably began as early as September 1969 (soon after the unsuspect- ing Sihanouk had appointed Lon Nol as his prime minister). It is appropriate that these Khmer Serei "'rallier s" have been termed a "Trojan Horse"-but a Trojan Horse, it should be noted, that w..s paid for by the United States and presumably directed by its agents. That there had been an understanding respect- ing further US support if Lon Nol should encounter difficulties is suggested by the promptness with which the United States sent him military reinforcements of additional US-trained and financed Khmer Krom from South Vietnam after the coup. Within a few weeks approximately 4800 of these men, seconded from either Saigon's army or directly from the American-led Khmer Krom Mike Forces, were flown into Pnompenh aboard US planes. ("Mike Force," short for Mobile Strike Force, was an elite military element trained and advised by US special forces, and often drawn from NEW YORK TIMES 29 April 1975 Australians Disturbed by Ha .i n. Closing Embassy in Saigon! South Vietnamese minority groups-Cambodian or Montagnard.) Presumably the Khmer Krom involved in the riots against the PRG in the Cambodian border province of Svey Rieng 10 days before the coup were also US Mike Force personnel, sent directly across the border from US bases in South Vietnam. According to Son Ngoc Thanh, the Khmer Serei's leader with whom I spoke in mid-1971, the total American-trained and financed Khmer Krom-including Khmer Serei, Mike Force and others-who had by then been infused into the Royal Cambodian Army were in excess of 10,000, with the US still providing their pay. Ngo Cong Duc, former Saigon government congressman from South Vietnam's Vinh Binh province, recently told me that from his province alone approximately 7000 Khmer Krom soldiers from the ARVN, led by three lieutenant colonels, were dispatched to Priompenh shortly after the anti-Sihanouk coup. IF Mike Forces are included, he estimates that ultimately a total of 30,000 Khmer Krom soldiers from South Vietnam were sent to fight in Cambodia. United States intervention in Cambodian affairs helped cut out the middle ground and push people of a variety of political convictions toward the standard of opposition provided by Prince Sihanouk and the National United Front. This was reflected as early as August 1971 in a talk I had with Gen. In Tam, then Minister of Security and Internal Affairs in Lon Noi's government. He estimated the existing strength of the armed opposition at about 10,000, of whom he classified 3000 to 4000 as Khmer. Rouge (pro- Comrauni t). i or the other 6000 to 7 000 he used a term that he translated for me, a little sheepishly, as "Cambodians striving against being under American occupation." The whole of this Cambodian opposition is now bound together in a' broad coalition-the National United Front of Cambodia-that must enjoy a political base far broader than Lon Nol ever had. If the present administration is now to approach Cambodia in terms of political reality, it should acknowledge this and act accordingly. George McT. Knkin, professor of government, directed the Southeast Asia program at Cornell. SYDNEY, Australia, April 28 have qualified for entry were I! profoundly ashamed of it in' to Australia, but even they] -The Australian Government left behind when Ambassadors Saigon on Friday." 1had not left with the Austra- has been strongly y criticized Geoffrey Price and his Austral- Malcolm Fraser. leader of lians. here for closing stro embassy ian staff flew out of Saigon: the opposition Liberal and.I Mr. Morrison also said the; its Friday. Country parties, said Prime i ! Saigon authorities had been' in Saigon before all the Vietna- The reports said those left Minister Gough Whitam stoodi "making it very difficult fort mese eligible to enter Australia in Saigon included embassy em-; indicted for procrastinaiton and'' Vietnamese to leave the coun- were evacuated. ployes who had asked to be; heartlessness. I try." He added that Australia; Earlier this month the; taken to Australia. One of them William Morrison. acting Min- had sought without success Government announced that i? f was reported to have told a i ister for Foreign Affairs, who to influence the Saigon Gcv~rn-, would permit the entry of Viet-1 correspondent of the Sydney last week said the United Iment to liberalize its formali-! namese who were spouses or, Morning Herald: States was "acting illegally" 'ties. I children of Vietnamese study-1 "It is shameful and Autral- in taking planeloads cf Vietna- ing in Australia or who had; is s' name will never be forgot- mese out of South Vietnam, I long and close association with: ten because of it." asserted that there was ''no Australia and considered, their: In an article in the Herald question" of the lives of embas- lives in danger. today, the correspondent, Mi- sy employes being in danger.; According to newspaper re- I chasl Richardson, said: "I have He said only two of the 64; ports oublished here, at least I; never felt ashamed of my ;Vietnamese connected with the' 250 Vietnamese who would, ~ Government before. But I felt I embassy had asked to be taken, 47 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA=RDP77-00432R000100360003-5 NEW YORK TIMES! 23 April 1975 ipcli c' Postscript By Paul P. Brocchini reer considerations and conformist RIO DE JANEIRO-In purest bureau- pressures. It cratese it was labeled "the pipeline." was strange there in the base ment. While great moralizing and One entered it in Washington and hard-sell campaigns emerged from emerged in Saigon. I went in the pipe- myriad Administration sources, ped- line in January, 1966, as a junior Of- dling dominoes, World War II fears ficer in the United States Information and Red threats to the public, there Agency. was no one trying to sell us, the pipe- In those days a selected number of line people. On the contrary, in an age State Department, Agency for Inter- of institutionalized deceit, it was a national Development, Central Intelli-.' refreshingly honest place, that base- gence Agency, U.S.I.A. and military ment. No pep talks; No rah-rah about people were sent to the Foreign Serv- saving democracy and freedom in ice Institute in Arlington, Va., for in- places where neither had ever existed. tensive Vietnamese-language training. But lots of straight talk. In the basement of Arlington Bernard Fall, the writer and'histor- Towers, a dreary complex of.red-brick !an who had devoted his life to the apartment buildings facing the Poto- mac,. we wrestled with exotic pho- nemes, studied Vietnamese history and culture, and had access to an amazing amount of intelligence that painted an accurate picture of ? what was really - happening throughout Indochina. . In 1966, tunnel-gazers who never failed to see that terminal light, were still in vogue in the upper echelons of the United States Government. But down at our basement level, at the level of truth, we knew that was no light. Yet most of us accepted our assignments, pulled forward by the inexorable forces of bureaucracy, ca- BALTIMORE SUN 28 April 1975 Clfir k& f Yazt affairs of Indochina, would come in every week or two to tell it like it was. Rand Corporation confidential re- ports on Vietcong morale made it devastatingly clear who was motivated in Vietnam, who fought with convic- tion and who did not. Foreign Service officers coming back from Southeast Asia rarely. cov- ered up: It was bad out there . and getting worse. But they had finished their tours and were relieved to be able to pass on the mess to us. Everyone who passed through that basement, and there were thousands of People Didn't Accept Vietnam `Obligations" New York In speaking before a joint -`'session of Congress April 10. President Ford gave an ac- "tount of United States "obli- 'gations" toward Vietnam. ar- "Ising from the Paris agree- ?.-ments of two years ago. which may well have represented .the private intentions of the -Nixon administration to main- ;,.tain the Thieu regime at any ,.cost. ;... These Intentions, however, slid not reflect in any sense ob- ligations or commitments ac- - cepted by the United States ,congress and people either in ? January, 1973. or today The US decision to with. draw from the untenable posi- ;tion which it had unwisely as- sumed in Indochina was taken "March 31. 1968. when Presi- dent Johnson conceded in ef- fect both the failure of his pol- icy and his own political de- anise The die was cast at that "time, and consequent disen- gagement should have been prompt and unequivocal. . = Yet the Nixon administra- ?"tion continued for four more years our military Involve- -'ment, extending it into Cam- bodia in 1970 and escalating it in 1972 with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. The agree- ments concluded a month lat- er in Paris were recognized by almost everyone (except unfortunately the American negotiators) as no more than an elaborate screen behind which United States with- drawal could be completed and United States prisoners 'liberated Nor was the ultimate out- come ever in any serious doubt, though it came more :quickly than most expected What has been lost this month -is not American-honor or credibility, but the last shreds of this illusion It is therefore with con- sternation that one bears the President charging that, if Congress had only supplied more aid, "this present tragic situation in South Vietnam would not have occurred " Or the secretary of state insist- ing, "We cannot abandon friends in one part of the world without jeopardizing the security of friends every- where." To put one's country's pos- ture, in tragic but inexorable circumstances, in the worst possible light is an act of sin- gular irresponsibility If our leaders claim we are unwor- sensitive, reasonably well-educated people, knew the score. But few, if any, did anything about it. We, pro- ducts of immense advantages, pos- sessors of hosts of, academic degrees, persons trained for careers in inter- national. relations, sat on our hands. Our training failed us, our country and mankind, insofar as we had the opportunity to influence events-and I am convinced that even at our base- ment level we did-because it lacked the most essential element of civilized life, a system of values. Our credo was pure American: "To get along, go along." All our lives, parents, teachers, supervisors had told us to shine our shoes, brush our teeth, comb our hair, if we wanted to fit in, to reap the rewards c f American life. "Don't rock the boat. Don't make waves. Go along." And so we did, in spite of the bright light of truth that shone in our base- ment. We, the pipeline people, shut our eyes and ears, turned off our minds as easily as the evening news on tele- vision, and moved through our figura- tive pipe as surely as water downhill. Paul P. Brocchini, who had been a cul- tural officer with the U.S.I.A. in Co- lombia and Brazil, left the pipeline- and the foreign service-after six months at' the Foreign Service Insti- tute. He is now a businessman in Brazil. thy of trust, how can they themselves expect to be be- lieved? Of course the claim is pre- posterous. The American Con- gress and people have kept and will keep commitments they themselves have under- taken Had our final exit from Vietnam been more timely. it would have been more grace- ful, but it had to be made We will be stronger. not weaker, when it is at last completed and this consuming obsession is dissolved. James R. Schlesinger, the Secretary of Defense, said in a recent article in the Philadel- phia Bulletin that the out- come in Southeast Asia is "primarily psychological" and the impact of losing that part of the world to the Commun- ists would be "a very slight weight indeed." What is needed now from our leaders and ourselves is the sober confidence our basic circumstances warrant We remain the world's strongest military power We remain. despite a depression already heeinntng to lift, the world's strongest economic power We remain the world's most con- spicuous and stable democra- cy. our institutions confirmed 118 and strengthened by Water- gate We remain unequivocal- ly committed by formal treat- ies to our North Atlantic al- lies, Japan. the Philippines and others, and by strong pub- lic sentiment to Israel. These commitments will be deemed unreliable only if we persist in saying they are. We no doubt shall find it expedient from time to time during coming years to make our exit from other parts of the world Let us prepare to do so gracefully and in timely fashion, not as though each disengagement were the end of the world. Let us judge coolly and realistically what in the 1970's our truly vital interests are, and adjust our priorities and strategies accordingly. Nothing could be more fatal, and more likely over time to undermine confidence at home and abroad, than to overreact out of fear of seem- ing "weak," to hold on where we are not wanted until we are squeezed out,. to equate solid commitments to com- patible partners with some imagined need, to maintain a universal status quo. Approved For Release 2001/08/08 : CIA-RDP77-00432R000100360003-5