SAMUEL ADAMS: FROM C.I.A. ANALYST TO KEY FIGURE IN WESTMORELAND TRIAL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150111-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 13, 2010
• Sequence Number: 111
• Publication Date: January 7, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2010/08/13: CIA-RDP90-00552R000707150111-0
: EARE
N M YORK TITLES
7 January 1985
Samuel Adams: From C.I.A. Analyst tO
Key Figure-in Westmoreland Trial
J; By M- A. FARBER _I-
would appear on "The Uncounted
Enemy: A Vietnam Deception."
This week or next, as the lead-off wit-
ness J or CBS, the 51-year-old Mr.
Adams will tell his story to the jury.
For months, he has sat in his rumpled
tweed sportjackets at the edge of the
defense table in courtroom 318, taking
notes as a?siduously as ever,
his testimony and passig a
battery -of .-CBS lawyers
at'Mr. Adams says"from the
s~arid, and the-manner in which be says
this case. Was he a man, as General
Westmoreland's lawyers have por-
trayed him, who (was "obsessed" as
well as mistaken - a man who was
Qenin error but seldom in doubt," as
orgeCarver, a former superior in
the C.I.A., told the jury. Or was he, as
other former C.T.A. associates and Mr.
? Crile have described him, a "brilliant"
analyst who, at fatal cost to his career,
refused to compromise his integrity.
No matter which, Mr. Adams's life
has been radically changed by his
quest, and so has the life of the retired
four-star general whom he had never
met before this litigation and who now
sits,,day after day, just in front of him.
Of the three individual defendants -
including Mr. Crile and Mike Wallace,
the narrator of the documentary -
only Mr. Adams. exchanges more than
nods with 'the plaintiff, who com-
manded American forces in Vietnam
from 1964 to 1968. General Westmore-
land asks after Mr. Adams's 21-year-
old son, Clayton, who attends court oc-
casionally, and chats about how his
ern father wanted him to be a lawyer.
"He's a pleasant in , I really tend
to like him," Mr. Adam ;said in an
in- terview last week. "Wb' tever the hell
Mr. alle to most of, be people who,.,
On an August morning 20 years agd
Samuel A. Adams, a fourth cousin
seven times removed of President John
Adams, walked around a partition on
the sixth floor of Central Intelligence
Agency headquarters in the suburbs of
Washington and took up a new assign-
meat that moved him from the Congo
section of the agency to the Vietnam
dqk.
Though neither be nor anyone Else
could have suspected it, that move. Q ua
few feet was the beg nnlng of a long and
twisting odyssey' to Federal District
Court in Manhattan, where Mr.. Adams
is now a defendant in the trial of Can.
William C.,Westmoreland's $120 mil
liod libel suit against CBS and others,A
Without Mr. Adams, it is widely'
agreed, the i982 documentary that is,
the subject of the suit would never-.
and perhaps could never - have been
done. If it was George Crile, a CBS pro-
ducer, who promoted and constructed,
the broadcast that alleged a "conspir
acy" by General Westmoreland's com-
mand in Saigon to minimize enemy.
strength in 1967, it was Mr. Adams who
made the program possible.
It was Mr. Adams - an intelligence
analyst, not a spy - who first came to
believe that the military had deliber-
ately "faked" data on the size of North
Vietnamese and Vietcong forces; who
took documents, now used in the trial,
from his office and buried them in leaf
bags in the Virginia woods; who re-
signed from the C.I.A. in 1973 and
roamed the country looking for former
officers who might shed light on the
fading events of 1967; who compiled
massive `'chronologies" handwritten
in hl tight'script; and who, ultimately,
providqd CBS with.his search and led
The New Yoet limes/Doh Gras',
Samuel A. Adams
happened back then in Vietnam, I think
he always, from his own point of view,
had good motives. He's clearly not lago
in any sense."
Of his own actions, Mr. dams ex
presses no
"I think somebody had to do what f
did, and it's been a damn interesting
experience," he said., "Integrity in in-
telligence work is a very important
thing. A number was done on intelli=
gence in Vietnam, and we're only now
recovering from it."
For a man who later became so
dogged, Mr. Adams cameto the C.I.A.
almost serendipitously.
? He' was born in Bridgg,ort, Coon.,
and raised in Connectic & and New
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York. His father, Pierrepunt, had a
seat on the New York Stock Exchange
and, for a time, was a partner of Ells-
worth Bunker, who later became an
Ambassador to South Vietnam.
Young Sam attended the Buckley
School in New York and the St. Mark's
School in Massachusetts before enter-
ing Harvard College in 1951, where he
studied modem European history.
After graduation, he enlisted in. the
Navy for four years and in 1959 T "still
not knowing what I wanted" - be en-
-tered Harvard Law School.
Mr. Adams quit law school in 1961-
"I didn't have a lawyer's mind" -
worked for two years at the Bank of'
New. York,. married an Alabama
woman from whom he would separate
in 1983, and decided, -finally, that he
'wanted a career in Government.
'I Had Barely Heard of C.LA.'
"I had barelyheardofthe C.I.A.;' he
recalled. "Back -in -those days, the
C.I.A. was sort of like the National Se-
curity Agency today. Nobody inside
talked about it." But, in March 1963,
' Mr. Adams was a as an officer
trainee at C.I.A. headquarters In Lang-
ley, Va., and, after some initiation' on
"the nuts and bolts of espionage,"
found himself writing a study on the
economy of the Congo Republic, Leo-
poldville.
"But I worked harder than anybody
and I had better files."
After .`toying' with the idea of
switching to "clandestine" operations,
Mr.- Adams, in August 1965, joined a
C.I.A. section concentrating on intelli-
gence regarding Vietnam. "It was just
around a partition in the office," he
said. "The first day, my, boss told me
we were going to lose the- war."
Mr. Adams, who visited South Viet-
nam four times in 1966- and 1967, con-
cluded - largely on the basis of cap-
tured documents and other material
supplied by General Westmoreland's
command - that senior military intel-
ligence officers in Saigon were under-
estimating the strength of the enemy,
perhaps by. half. And some of Mr.
Adams's colleagues shared that view.
But in the fall of 1967 - when the
C.IA: reached an agreement with the
===x= res that, among
a current num-
ber for the Vietcong's self-defense
forces ' Mr. Adams wrote a memo-
randum calling the accord "ill-
formed" and "unwise." After the Tet
offensive of January 1968, the C.I.A. -
ut r~es~ of thnot e the
magnitude m originally - adopted advo-
cated by Mr. Adams. But by then, Mr.
Adams had resigned in protest from
the Vietnamese Affairs - staff. .
From early 1968 to 1973 Mr. Adams
worked in the agency's Office of Eco-
nomic Research, eventually concen-
trating on Cambodia. But he never lost
Interest in why the military had acted
as it. had in 1967 and, in 19619, he re-
moved related documents from the
C.I.A. and hid them in bags and empty
Spanish wine cartons in a field near his
250-acre cattle farm in Virginia.
.. By 1972 Mr. Adams was asking the
C.I.A. and the Army to c ondns+ct investi-
gations into the events of 1967, "includ-
"I had read a book about mountain
gorillas in the Congo not quite the
same as the guerrillas in Vietnam," he
said. "Anyway, in early 1964 a rebel-
lion broke out in the Congo and I was on
the ground floor of it. I wrote draft
memos that went to the President, in-
cluding one that accurately predicted
who would become Prime Minister.
"The State Department had said no
way about that prediction, UP it was
dumb," Mr. Adams remembered.
ing the possibility that General West-
moreland may have been ultimately
responsible for the ? fabrication" of
enemy strength figures.
In April 1973, Mr. Adams voluntarily ?
testified at the "Pentagon - Papers"
trial of Daniel Ellsberg in Los Angeles,'
and ? made public his accusations
against the military. The following
month - feeling, he said, that he was .
being pressured out of the C.I.A. he
resigned from the agency, '
-In 1975, Mr. Adams detailed his
views about the events in Vietnam in
1967 in an article in Harper's maga=
tine, for which Mr. Crile, who had ye'k-
to join CBS, was the editor. Mr,
also testified before the Horse ect
Committee on Intelligence, which drew
.conclusions much like his own;,--,". ? .
Mr. Adams then signed a $40,000 coo-
tract with W. W. Norton to write a book
on the subject - still unpublished.. -
and intensified his research. In late. _--
1980, after Mr. Crile approached him-
about a documentary, Mr. Adam be-
came a consultant for the network for a
year, receiving $25,000, plus expenses. .
Mr. Crile would later write Mr. Wal-
lace that "Adams was the thread, he,
s
delivers the indictment to in
Since September 1982, when General '
Westmoreland filed suit, Mr. Adams
has again been a consultant to CBS, at
1;100 a day plus expenses. And since last
October, he has spent most of those:
days in court.
For Mr. Adams, a robust 6-footer
who calls himself "a country boy,' life.
in court has been "debilitating physi-
cally - the worst thing for me." But
when it's all over, he said, he plans to.
reapply to the "C.I.A. I love." -
He smiled. "I'll be sort of interested ?
to see what they do. -
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