LETTER TO DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE(Sanitized)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2004
• Sequence Number: 42
• Publication Date: September 8, 1975
• Content Type: LETTER

Exeoutiva Registry
Approved For R 2004/11/03: CIA-RDP89B00552R 100 4
rIirector of Centr= 1 Inte' ligence
Central inte'ligence Acency
L'cngley. Va.
Attention: C-ngrecsi.onal L,aison
Attenti.'n: Security Cle?rance for ManuscrInts
8 Sentomber 1975 d
STATINTL
Dear Sir:
Last Thursday I received a call fr-rn fir. Greg R;.;shfo-rd -f
-e House Select Committee )n intelligence asking me to have
an informal chat vwith him 'an the Tet Offensive. He cnnfrmed
my Guess that he had received my name from t.-Ir. Samuel Adams.
I talked ,frith him for about half an hour this n^on and
gave him a copy -if the encl-sed rnanuscriot. He alr-ady knew
STATINTL
STATINTL
abdtt the Rostov cable ^ur answer to Rnnstow, and the names
-
of F
I He plans to talk to both
and before hearings r'sume this Thursday.
I
I fortiard a cony of my~imanuscri.pt for y'ur inf'rmation
our chat Hid not stray far from it exce-t when ?-4r. Rushford
volunteered a criticism of Opersonnel policies. STATSPEC
.It may happen, in the course of events, that I micht seek.
a publisher ror the attached? manuscript. in which case I would
appreciate a security clearance fox it.
Since'-ely,
STATINTL
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
 Approved For ReiW~2004/11/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552Rf0100042-2
A STATEMENT FREPARED FOR TI?E USE OF THE HOUSE
INTELLIGENCE COQ" MITTEE, 8 SEPI'EI?7BER 1975,
CONCERNING THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING TIME
CIA PREDICTION OF THE 1968 EET OFFENSIVE IN
VIETNAM ILLUSTRATING THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE
INTELLIGENCE PROCESS AND THOSE ENGAGED IN IT
Iierb]1ock's cartoon shows an American officer` hiding under a desk in
STATINTL
a shattered office grinding out reports: "We now have the initiative... The
enemy offensive has been foiled... Besides, we knew about it in advance."
Perhaps I should take this opportunity to try, as so many have tried, to
set the public record straight. We did know out it in advance. The
enemy offensive was foiled. We did seize the initiative. Nobody will ever
believe it. Because nothing is real.
I believe my name was given to the Committee by my friend and former
colleague Sant Adams. I am flattered that he still remembers me and continues
tp hold.me in such high regard. Unlike him, I have not previously sought
any hearing outside the intelligence community. And while l admire Mr. Adams
for his many contributions to intelligence and sincerely hope he will
continue to regard me as a friend, I must say that I donot share his view
of the intelligence conmuni being divided up into "good guys" and "bad
guys." Sometimes the conventional wisdom-is wrong. Sometimes the rebels
that
are right. But I have. foui a spirit of cooperation and compromise does
underlie the adversary relationships which so often fuel the intelligence
process. And in regard to the issue for which Mr. Ad.am.a ?has taken up his
cross I believe he is wrong.
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
 Approved For ReAp2004111/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552R11f1p100042-2
In brief., Mr. Adams has asserted that US estimates of the Vietnamese
Communist Order of Battle were falsified to make it appear that the war
in Vietnam was being won. In fact, the official Order of Battle estimates
prepared by US military intelligence always struck me as accurate and well
founded. The difference with Mr. Adams,lay in the fact the the military
estimates involved classical OB parameters -?- men assigned to units which
could be designated as such. Mr. Adams tried to extrapolate from the
political and economic infrastructure of Communist controlled areas. It i
as if Mir. Adams were to include in a US ".Order of Battle" all civil servan
%. ~ And 4 -
and factory and transportation workers. Mr. Adams assertion
that the Tet Offensive proved that there weEd more men in the field than
the official OB estimates allowed for is *manifestly false. The average
Communist soldier fought only. one or two days per month. At any time,
the effective Communist strength could have been increased 15 or 30 times
simply by ordering all soldiers to fight on the same day. Something like
this did happen at the time of the Tet Offensive.
I joined the Central Intelligence Agency in September 1956, selecting
and translating information of intelligence value from journals and.newspa
until June 1967 at which time I volunteered to go to Saigon. This. new
assignment was-part of a unique experiment in putting analysts in the fiel
close to the scene of action and the sources of information. It was a
rewarding experience and I believe we proved the utility of such an exerci
I am not aware that it was ever tried again. On my return in February 196
I served two years, on loan, in the Office of the Deputy Director for Inte.
When my loan was finally terminated e..nd I found myself back at my old job
reading newspapers I began to suffer the career fr.ustraticns of middle age
and when Agency morale began to crumble under the impact of the reductions
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
..
 Approved For R 2004111/03: CIA-RDP89B00552RQ(IfI?100042-2
in force of April 1973 I resigned.
I took with me no files or records of any sort. In reconstructing the
events described below I have relied on two excellent books, already part
of the public record, Robert Shaplen's Time Out of Eand and. Don Oberdorfer's
Tet. These books provide a. detailed account of Communist planning for the
Tet Offensive, of the offensive itself, and of the political aftermath on
both sides. All I can add are certain personal anecdotes; an insider's view
of how the reports already summarized in these books were written. Perhaps
there are lessons to be learned from such an account.
ti.
WE" EXAM L i TROSP.ECT
by training and experience and ideological committment as to reject any
It is as easy and as true to say that the Vietnam war could never have
been won as it is to say that victory was_; .n our grasp in 1,068 -- after Tet.
t could never have been won because the North Vietnamese society and the
Communist troops in the South (who rarely had. L with the local populace)
were so structured as to carry out the orders of their leaders without
question or hesitation until they were annihilated. The leaders in turn
the Politburo of the North Vietnamese Oom* m st Party) were so constituted
compromise short of total victory.
philosophies change, the world evolve so that options would retain open. in
Nevertheless, ]mowing this, there were those of, ui who' cherished some
hope. If the Communists could have been convinced that they could best
attain their ends by political means (always mixed with some military effort)
and if the. United States could maintain a very high level of investment in
economic and military aid (and sometimes blood),,- it might have been possible
to buy time 5, 10, 15,. 20 years (and lirays living with the possibility
of total collapse at any moment) --time in which leaders would die,
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 : CIA-R.DP89B00552R000100100042-2
 Approved For Rciw 2004/11103: CIA-RDP89B00552R~ppip~100042-2
THE TET OFFENSIVE
On Thanksgiving Day 1967, presidential adviser Wait Rostov cabled
Southeast Asia, options now closed.
In retrospect, the Johnson-McNamara strategy of inch by inch escalation
was the least likely to succeed. The Communists could always go us one
better on this road. The Nixon-hissenger strategy of sudden violence
combined, with ostensible compromise might have been better suited to turning
the Co:cmunist effort in the desired direction -- had the US com4mittment been
maintained.
basis for the propaganda campaigns which prepared the cadres and troops for
Two general observations regarding Vietnamese Communism should be made
at this point. The war was fought on the basis of the secret annual resolutions
of the Central Committee of the Lao Dong (North Vietnamese Cpmznunist) Party.
These resolutions defined. the strategy for the coming year and provided the,
each new phase of the "revolution." And the revolution was always viewed as
following a unique Vietnamese path.
The Soviet revolutionary model involved the coming to power of workers?
soviets in the cities which then forced Communism on an u-swilling peasantry.
The Chinese model involved a Communist peasantry surrounding the cities,
forcing their capitulation. The Vietnamese model involved ever increasing
pressure from an increasingly Coiiunist countryd.ide until the cities yielded
to a dramatic "conversion" and the urban General Uprising signaled the end
of the revolution.
..;rp.ign plans. It is my impression that the cable was directed to the
Saigon asking for an evaluation of the upcoming Communist Winter-Spring
Ambassador. In any case, it was passed to the CIA Chief of Station who
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 t CIA-RDP89B00552R00010h0100042-2
passed it to the CIA Research and Analysis Branch of whic. was a member.
 Approved For Re20Q4/11/03 : CIA-RDP89BQ0552ROQp0100042-2
This. cable was the catalyst for one of those reversals of .the conventional
wisdom which illustrate the intelligence process at its most productive.
At that time, the conventional wisdom was that the Communists would
have to revert to small unit guerrilla warfare.. The optimists viewed this as
proof that we were "winning." The pessimists viewed it as proof that the
war would be long 'and indecisive. One of my colleagues; Joe, had just
finished a paper in support of the conventional wisdom. But he was trpubled.
i'he raw material supporting his thesis represented an increasingly small
part of the daily traffic. More and more, there was talk of increased violence,
of a supreme struggle, of something that would happen "once in a thousand
years." With years on the ground in Vietnam, be had seen nothing like it
before.
In c~~J Cici'>
conventional wisdom it was unlikely that either one of them would sell. k,rladaac3., )
you tended to ignore them. Joe and I had two new puzzles, but given the
I was trying to make sense of a quite different kind of evidence. It
was increasingly a.pparen,; that tl? Communistswere IfLanning to create a new
front organization, an urban, inte lectual, mItcL' a-bass- front with an
ostensibly neutralist ideology. It began to look to me t. ~ h th""they y were
seriously considering negotiations to end the war.
There was never a "shortage" of intelligence in Vietnam. There was
always too much i ioo many low-level bits and pieces. As in all intellectual
endeavors, if the bits and pieces didn't fit the puzzle you were working on
Called in to answer Mr..fostow's cable, our immediate superviser, Bob,
asked Joe and me. for quick summaries. Using a year old speech of General
1`Iguyen Van Vinh on the doctrine of "negotiating while fighting" be put the
two summaries together. The Winter-.Spring Campaign, he hypothesized, would
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 :ICIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
r'~
 Approved For Release 2004/11/03 CIA-RDP89800552R000100100042-2
it
involve increased levels of violence aimed at an improved.Communist
negotiating position. Our initial answer to Mr. Rostow was followed two
weeks later by a 40 page cable which was the "prediction" of the Tet
Offensive.
We regarded our final product as a reconstruction of the 13th Resolution
of the Lao Dong Party, a reconstruction based on exhortations to the troops:
on orders to units in the field, on
anyone who served in the White House, that when President Johnson,daid a
instructions to political cadres in the -
South, and on the interrogations of a few high level prsoners who had
exposed thetznselves in the initial attempts to set up the new urban front.
.It is still my impression, although I have never had personal contact with
few days after Tet that he had "Ho Chi Minh's' order for the offensive in
hand well-before the fact he was referring to our cable two weeks after
Thanksgiy ing.
I do not know to this 8ay'by what. channels official CIA estimates were
conveyed to Presidnnt Johnson. But it seems to be true that our c'hble
using Embassy channels direct to Mr. Rostow, was considered by some to be
a bri~ch of etiquette.
When CIA Headquarters finally published our cable
ds a CIA report it was with the cover sheet caveat that it did not represent
an "official". CIA.analysis. There may be those who would view this as a
"suppression" of intelligence. I never considered it in this light. Our
. cable had already gone directly to the White House. It was distributed
within the intelligence community. The cover sheet was a matter of no
? t ?
significance -- except in so far as it provedan embarassment to its authors
It is also true, as Oberdorfer points out, that the senior intelligence
analysts in the J?Silitary Assistance, Command Vietnam "protested and dissented"
Approved For Release 2004/1/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
 Approved For Relerre tO04/11/03: CIA-RDP89BOO552ROG O13042-2
on the grounds that what we hypothesized. would be suicidal for the Commun
But MACV intelligence actually contributed an important element to our re It was a 14ACV n a jor who called our attention to the fact that the require(
level of readiness for such an attack could not be achieved until mid-Jant
nor maintained beyond mid-February. Thus even the earliest version of the
"prediction" j5a_ve.the date of the attack plus or minus 15 days;.
As the evidence mounted, our cables became more precis,d in regard to
the timing of:'the attack. Three days before the attack the Saigon police
captured a document giving the last possible moment for political cadres t
be in place in Saigon -- midnight. January thirtyfirst. I regarded this as
last piece in the puzzle and drafted a cable -to that effect.' This icable w
never sent, however, for the petty bureaucratic reason that the translatio
of the captured document had not yet been assigned a combined document
exploitation number and so did not
pass the tests e up to avoid double
reporting.
In the weeks immediately before the attack, however, MACV had come ar,
the appropriate plans were made, and when the Communists made the error of
starting 24 hours.early in the northern provinces a full alert was ordered
The enemy offensive was foiled, the initiative was seized -- because we kn+
about it in advance.
And yet we didn't bel&eve it ourselves. Because nothing was real.
I was not an expert on Southeast Asia. I was pretending to be an expo
on Southeast Asia.. And having admitted this and looking around me, I saar
that it reflected a tniversal'truth. Bunker was pretending to be an
arcbassador. Westmoreland was pretending to be a general. The young men
.were pretending to be Marines -- and some of them were dying at it.
We had predicted the Yet Offensive. It was all there, on paper, in ti
Approved For Release 2004/11/03: CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
c les. But we didn't believe it. Bob left on leave January 30th. He cal
 Approved For ReI 004/11/03: CIA-RD089B00552ROeQ(J100042-2
us from the airport: "This may be it, they've hit Nha Tr ng.i"This is it
we answered, "there are already infiltrators in the golf course between here
and'Tan Son Nhutt" But we didn't believe it.
We made no special preparations. I walked back to my hotel through the
holiday. crowds, children throwing firecrackers at.me from a high wall. It
was the first Tet in years that they'had permitted fir crackers. I was
awakened at 3 AM by mortars and small arms fire, only briefly mistaking them
for fire crackers. There were screams in the night. The Armed Forces Network
was playing a taped interview with Natalie Wood. I lay in. bed, staring at tie
ceiling until dawn. There was nothing I could do.
That night, most of us were unarmed. We were armed the next day and
played cowboys and Indians for several weeks thereafter, until the Saigon
police said they would arrest any American civilian s,:e~,acarrying arms in
public. (After that, if I went to an all night poker party away from'my"
hotel I carried my carbine'in a paper bag.) One hotel pausing most of the
CIA female employees was directly opposite a bridge used by the Communists
to enter town. Several actions were fought there and the Communists briefly
set-up a machine gun nest at the intersection. -Once during the night a
Communist squad knocked on the wooden gate in the wall sir unding the
'o
hotel inviting the residents to come out and join the General Uprising..
There was one armed man behind the gate, a civilian ~ii;Ch a souvenir AK 47 and
four rounds of ammunition. He didn`t open the. gate and the Communists went
away.
y early afternoon we were back in our office, a o:n story wooden
building next to the Embassy. It was riddled with bullet holes, there was
a hole in the roof from a Communist rocket. There was bllood all over the
floor of the map room. For just a moment things were real.. "Nov we know
what thgp fq,PodV*1 200Ofe1 @3'vtHA-It
BftO fi2RQ1&i001 dQ0k nea,nt what
 Approved For Reldaee.9004/11/03: CIA-RDP89B00552ROQQ;WdOO4.2-2
they said."
AM MATH
The full scenario of the 13th Resolution was never acted out. The u2
populace did not join the. General Uprising. The US forces were not isolal
in their camps. The.Government of Vietnam forces did not defect.- The nec
urban front did not'open the negotiations for peace. The planeload of
r y
Russian. correspondents waiting in Hanoi to fly to Saigon went back to thei
hotel.
The Tet Offensive was a catastrophic defeat for the Communists. The3
treated it publicly as a victory. The defeat of the Tet Offensiveiwas a
signal victory for the US and GVN forces. The American press treated it E
a-defeat.
Many in the intelligence community still rsaintain that the Communist;
did not really count.on the success of the General Uprising. It is my
conviction that they did. In the weeks and months that followed, they
continued to act out the charade of creating an urban front, the Alliance
of National, Democratic and Peace Forces, which was intended to form a
"coalition" with the National Liberation Front. This ply would have heal.
meaning only if the General Uprising had achieved at least token success,
which it did not. The majority of my reports throughout the rest of 1963
dealt with this effort. A detailed description of the Communist moves ap;
in.Shaplen"s Time Out of Hand.
Following Tet, for the first and. only time in the war, Communist rep(
sent.up from below spoke of defeat and of mistakes. in. general, Communise
reporting from below. was tailored to the expectations of the leaderyhjp at
Approved For Release 2004/11/03: CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2
0
 Approved For Reldww4004/1.1/03 : CIA-RDP89B00552R0100042-2
spoke only of victory and success. It was partly because of this that
Communist decisions were so often wrong. They had no reliable feedback
from the field -- for they severely punished "defeatism."
Did the Communists foresee whence their real victory would come, from.
the erosion of American will? I think not. In a lifetime, of studying Cam
thinking it has b'enmy observation that while the Communists always play
a strong public relations hand, exploiting the free political climate and
free media of.'non-Communist nations, they never count on it. They don't
really understand it. It is completely foreign to them. They do not
believe in the reality of the power of public opinion. Reality, for them,
is in2political power and guns. It was only.months after the Tet Offensiv+
that the Communists finally realized what sort of victory they had really
won, what sort of defeat the United States had really suffered.
EPILOGUE
Are there any general lessons in all this for the. student of the
intelligence-process? Maybe. Maybe it is good to have analysts in the
field. Maybe they can turn more quickly against the conventional wisdom
and articulate new themes when the evidence begins to mount. For it is
true in intelligence (as it is in physics and economics and cancer researel
that the conventional wisdom will filter the facts, draw to it'only the
facts which support it and the new idea has to be. articulated before it
will draw facts and become the new conventional wisdom in its turn. Maybe
a team. of three people is the ideal size to discover and articulate the ne.1
A single man becomes too enamored of-his own discovery; is too likely to
become a crackpot. And if you have more than three, you bog down in'
administration and housekeeping. And, finally, it's real neat to have a
dixec rir
Approved IS or veeSs~ 2b&Z i 3RQ&i -f2 &59B00552R000100100042-'2
 Approved For ReI 004/11/03 : CIA-RDP89BOO552RO ,~r100042-2
Joe resigned within a year of his return to the US. Fully one quart
of the analysinh assigned. to the Saigon branch eventually resigned. For a
Joe worked as a dispatcher for -a security guard service in California. h
now works as .tea accountant at half his old CIA salary. When I finally re
I worked for -fbur months as a bartender in a pizza parlor while I found o
how little a':CFA.resume iw worth. I now work for a computer company at h
my old CIA dsalzry.
-Why did w' resign? There are always personal reasons, of course. B
in no case was it. disillusionment with the US involvement in Southeast As
That can still.be viewed as a great and altruistic adventure. And in rio
case was it disillusionment with CIA -- individuals in CIA., yes, brut when
the CIA is atta ked as a whole, in the abstract, we rise to its defense.
In every case, I think., there has been a strong element cf exictcnti.i ma:
Nothing was real. The peace movement which engulfed us on our return was
even more divorced from reality than the men in Saigon.. McGovern was
divorced from reality. Nixon was divorced from reality. There was no
reality.
I got drunk when flue fell and I stayed drunk until the last ship had
pulled away from the Vung Tau beachy until the last helicopter had.lifted
off the Embassy roof. I called Joe on the Coast (or he called me, we were
both drunk) and I called some of my old. colleagues at the Agency. We shot:
get -together, we said. We did not. Now I'm trying to sober up.
I remember one ev6ning in the cour`yar of the Xa Lai Pagoda. My roar
and I had attended a lece by a Ceylonese monk on the nature of the Real
A tiny Vietnamese lady came up to us and forced a copy of the Dhammapada
into our hands. She had copied it out herself in longhand, in English, as
act
4 1.
e
ti
i
R
e
s
1
con
nu
ng hijeric
IOW 477
el
a
e 20D4/1
/03 GA-R 898OU652ROO
1
Approved
or
presence, perhaIe... She had memorized only one spoken English phrase.
 Approved For R 2004/11/03: CIA-RDP89B00552RM&OW0100042-2
"Do not yield to temptation," she said.
I have yielded to temptation many times since. But I have returned
the Dhammapadaas often:
"An that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is
founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts....9He abused
me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me' -- in those who harbor
such thoughts.hatred will never cease.... For hatred does'not cease
by..hatred at any time.-' Hatred ceases by love -- this is an ancient :
I sometimes wonder where she is today.
Approved For Release 2004/11/03 CIA-RDP89B00552R000100100042-2