STATEMENT BY W. E. COLBY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE TO THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE 3 DECEMBER 1975

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 01482461
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 28, 2022
• Document Release Date: August 7, 2017
• Case Number: F-2007-00094
• Publication Date: December 3, 1975

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Statement by
W.E. COLBY
Director of Central Intelligence
to the
House Select Committee on Intelligence
3 December 1975
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Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:
I welcome this opportunity to appear before your Committee and respond
to the testimony presented to this Committee by Mr. Samuel Adams on
September 18th.
Mr. Chairman, as you know, I have filed with the Committee a lengthy
statement which presents in some detail the Agency's response to the allegations
made by Mr. Adams. I would like at this time, however, to make a brief oral
statement to the Committee speaking more specifically to some of those allegations.
The Conspiracy Charge
In his public writings and in testimony before this Committee, Mr. Adams
has charged that CIA conspired with the Department of Defense to produce false
and misleading estimates. Or, as he puts it, CIA participated in a cover-up
undertaken to produce estimates of Vietnamese Communist strength that would
be politically acceptable.
I reject this charge as unfounded and unsupportable.
Let's take a look at the record. The record shows clearly that from 1965
onward CIA consistently advised the senior policymaking officials of this
Government that there was a strong likelihood that the official military estimates
of the size of organized enemy groups in South Vietnam were understated. The
CIA also presented its own independent estimates of the proper magnitude of these
groups.
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To start at the beginning, Mr. Adams' initial questioning of the correctness
of the official estimates was done in his draft report dated 22 August 1966 on
"The Strength of the Viet Cong Irregulars." On 26 August �just four days later �
the CIA in a special assessment prepared for the Secretary of Defense and also
sent to the President, the Secretary of State and other senior officials advised:
"Recently acquired documentary evidence now being studied in
detail suggests that our holdings on the numerical strength of these
Irregulars (now being carried at around 110,000) may require drastic
upward revision."
Let me quote from other CIA documents:
� On 27 June 1966:
"If the reports are accurate, and past experience suggests that many
of them are, the total number of North Vietnamese troops now in South
Vietnam would be well over 50,000 men instead of approximately 38,000
as is now carried by MACK"
� On 22 November 1966 in a memorandum to Robert W. Komer,
Special Assistant to the President:
"A reappraisal of the strength of Communist irregular forces which
is currently underway indicates that accepted (i.e., MA CV) estimates of
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the strength of Viet Cong irregular forces may have drastically understated
their growth, possibly by as much as 200,000 persons."
The same message was conveyed in special reports prepared for the Secretary
of Defense in December 1966 and in a January 1967 memorandum prepared by
CIA's Board of National Estimates.
In May and June 1967, CIA reports to officials in the State and Defense
Departments contained our estimates that the size of organized Viet Cong
manpower was on the order of 500,000.
The May 1967 report � a special assessment prepared for Secretary
McNamara � explicitly outlined our differences with each of the components in
MACV's Order of Battle and concluded:
... we believe the Viet Cong paramilitary and political organization
is still probably far larger than official US order of battle statistics
indicate ... . Thus, the overall strength of the Communists organized
force structure in South Vietnam is probably in the 500,000 range and
may even be higher."
The 500,000 figure presented by the CIA in this report could be compared
with an official military number at that time of 292,000.
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Mr. Chairman, I believe that these quotations from official CIA publications
show clearly that the CIA did not shrink from pushing the case for higher figures
and made no attempt to produce "politically acceptable" estimates.
The Order of Battle Conference in Saigon
Much of Mr. Adams' case seems to hinge on his charges that the CIA "sold
out" or "caved in" at the order of battle conference held in Saigon in September
1967. A few observations about this conference are in order.
The final agreed figures resulting from the conference, particularly those for
the VC/NVA combat forces, represented a significant move on the part of MACV,
most notably regarding the category of Administrative Services or Support groups.
In regard to the Irregular Forces, it is true that the conference agreed that
they could be removed from the conventional order of battle. The significant point
to note here is that even though they were not quantified, we had produced a
National Intelligence Estimate, in which the military concurred, which
acknowledged these Irregular Forces to be a very sizable factor in total enemy
capabilities and one with which senior policy levels of this Government should
be greatly concerned. To illustrate this point, I should like to quote from that
estimate.
After noting that the VC/NVA Military Force is estimated as "at least
223,000-248,000" the estimate makes this key judgment:
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"It must be recognized, however, that this Military Force constitutes
but one component of the total Communist organization. Any
comprehensive judgment of Communist capabilities in South Vietnam
must embrace the effectiveness of all the elements which comprise that
organization, the total size of which is of course considerably greater
than the figure given for the Military Force."
I don't suppose the results of the Saigon order of battle conference were
completely acceptable to any of the parties. The military had a point in its argument
that their concern was with the combat threat represented by the order of battle
in the classic sense. CIA had a point, namely, that a responsible national intelligence
assessment of enemy capabilities would have to include consideration of the much
broader insurgency threat represented by all organized political, military and
quasi-military groups.
Mr. Adams was never able to make or to appreciate this distinction. He always
seemed, and apparently still seems, to persist in lumping all of these disparate
groups together into a total number of 500,000 or whatever its size and to describe
this aggregate as the enemy army. His persistence in this position is what led one
observer to say of the September 1967 conference that it produced more heat
than light.
Thus, I find it difficult to perceive the conference as the cover-up or sell-out
claimed by Mr. Adams. CIA continued to maintain its independence on the
question of enemy strengths. In an effort to make its judgments more effective
and more persuasive, CIA created in August 1967 a new unit to concentrate more
resources on the problem, particularly the more important question of the general
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adequacy of Vietnamese manpower resources and their ability to continue with
the war.
It is true, as Mr. Adams states, that in December 1967 CIA prepared a special
report for Secretary McNamara which used the numbers for Military Forces agreed
at the Saigon conference and used in the estimate. We do try to live up to our
agreements. Mr. Adams fails to point out, however, that in that same report CIA
noted that the estimates for Military Forces did not include other sizable
components (the self-defense or Irregular Forces) in the Communist structure.
Mr. Adams also fails to note that by February 1968 CIA and DIA had produced
a joint memorandum in which a CIA estimate of the size of a total insurgency
base in South Vietnam of 500,000 persons was used. The Joint Staff concurred
in this memorandum and General Wheeler sent it to the Secretary of Defense.
The Tet Offensive
In his testimony regarding the performance of the Intelligence Community
prior to the Tet Offensive, Mr. Adams maintains that the Intelligence Community
was caught by surprise by the Tet Offensive and that this surprise was due to
the fact that the Community had so denigrated the size of the Viet Cong that
we simply could not have predicted the scope of the Tet attack. He then goes
on to make rather sweeping claims that the losses of thousands of American lives
and hundreds of military aircraft were due to the poor performance of the
Intelligence Community.
I have already provided the Committee with a copy of a post-mortem done
in 1968 by the Intelligence Community on its performance at the time of the
Tet Offensive. This report acknowledges quite frankly that warning of the Tet
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Offensive had not fully anticipated the intensity, coordination and timing of the
enemy attack. But the report found quite unequivocally that clear warnings
regarding the imminence of an offensive � whether it would occur just before,
or just after, or during Tet � were sufficient that the military command in Saigon,
on the basis of these intelligence reports, was able to take alerting measures
throughout the country.
I would submit that rather than being the cause of the loss of thousands
of lives and hundreds of planes, the Intelligence Community provided the warnings
that enabled the military commands in Vietnam to meet and to defeat the enemy
forces during the Tet Offensive and to minimize losses of lives and resources.
I would submit, moreover, that it was in large part due to these intelligence
warnings that the Vietnamese Communists failed to attain their goal of a decisive
victory for the Communist cause. The fact of the matter as we look back in history
is that the Tet Offensive was a calamitous setback for the Communist forces in
1968.
The 30,000 Agents
Mr. Adams makes much of his role in the production of a CIA estimate that
the Viet Cong had 30,000 agents in the South Vietnamese government and army.
His testimony gives the impression that Agency work on this subject was almost
exclusively an Adams' effort. He also makes the assertion that his estimate of 30,000
agents should be compared with an official estimate on the part of CIA's Directorate
of Operations of only 300 agents. Finally, he asserts that the Agency attempted
to suppress the report.
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I should like to make a few comments on these statements:
First, I would observe that Mr. Adams' testimony about his famous
estimate of 30,000 agents reflects his well-known tendency to make
sweeping and unqualified generalizations. Mr. Adams fails to note or to
inform his audience that the text of a CIA report he drafted made it
quite clear that the total numbers presented were to be viewed only
as "a broad order of magnitude." The basic question that had to be
answered was, "What is an agent?" Even by Mr. Adams' own description
of the network of agents, when he separated "fencesitters" or people
with varying degrees of sympathy for the Communist cause, his estimate
of hardcore effective agents amounted to only some 10% of the total,
that is, 3,000 rather than 30,000.
Mr. Adams was the principal analyst in the Intelligence Directorate
working on this problem. The effort to publish finished intelligence on
this subject was modest, but it was consistent with the availability of
the data to be exploited. More to the point, other parts of the Agency
were more directly concerned with the question of Communist
subversion. During the same period in which Mr. Adams was doing his
work, our Station in Saigon had 14 people assigned to this activity. They
were backstopped by a five-person team in CIA Headquarters.
The 30,000 vs. 300 score that Mr. Adams recounts is wrong. The
fact is that the Agency estimate of 30,000 was a fully coordinated report
which had been concurred in by all parts of the Agency, even that part
which Mr. Adams claims to have identified only 300 agents.
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In regard to suppression of the report, I can only state most forcibly
that there was no suppression of the report. The fact of the matter is
that it took Mr. Adams well over 18 months from the initiation of his
report to the completion of a draft that would meet minimum Agency
standards regarding the organization of reports, the quality of their
writing, and the consistency and the soundness of the analysis and
evidence used in making the judgments presented in the report.
Other Aspects
Mr. Chairman, I would like to speak very briefly to two other points made
by Mr. Adams in his testimony. Mr. Adams' testimony gives the impression that
he was the only analyst in CIA working on the Viet Cong and that for a period
of almost two years he was the only analyst working full-time on the problem.
During the years when Mr. Adams was most directly engaged in making his
case for higher figures, the Intelligence Community relied on the Department of
Defense, which had the primary responsibility for order of battle numbers.
Therefore, I do not find it surprising that only one analyst in CIA Headquarters
was working full-time in exploiting captured documents for information on some
very specific aspects of this question.
I would like the record to show also that during the 1965-1968 period, when
Mr. Adams gives the impression he was going it alone, the number of production
analysts working on the Vietnam problem grew from 15 analysts in 1965 to 69
analysts in 1968. I believe that Mr. Adams' testimony on this point and on the
significance of his contribution to the intelligence production effort shows a
surprisingly dim awareness on his part of his own relative position in CIA and
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of the broad range of Vietnam war-related activities on which CIA was conducting
research and analysis.
Finally, in his testimony Adams dramatizes his drafting of a memorandum
of resignation from the Office of the Director on January 30, 1968, the day of
the Tet Offensive. In reviewing the record, I found that Mr. Adams did write such
a memorandum, but I also found that his transfer from the Office of the Director
had been negotiated almost two months before the Tet Offensive and that he had
been in his new CIA assignment a full week before the offensive. This chain of
events and the timing of his memorandum raises questions in my mind as to his
motives for writing the memorandum.
General Observations
Mr. Chairman, I believe that my remarks regarding the testimony of
Mr. Adams make it clear that his charges against CIA are plainly and simply wrong.
I see little profit in engaging in further argument and recrimination about the
Vietnam war. On the whole, I am satisfied that the record of CIA in the Vietnam
war is one in which we can 41t take great pride. There are, however, several
observations that come to mind as a result of my study of Mr. Adams' statement
and my personal review of the performance of CIA.
First, I would observe that our experience in estimating enemy strengths in
South Vietnam is a classic example of many of the intangibles with which
intelligence officers must wrestle in their day-to-day job.
Working from incomplete and often conflicting data, the job of intelligence
on this subject was also beset with additional and complex methodological and
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judgmental factors. These ranged from fundamental conceptual differences on the
threat to be measured, to the choice of the proper methods for extrapolating
uncertain and fragmentary data. Even if agreements could be reached on the groups
to be included, there were problems in deciding on how to measure their strengths,
their attrition, or their success in replacing manpower losses. Even if all of the
definitional and quantitative factors could be resolved, there were any number of
judgmental calls to be made on the qualitative aspects of these forces.
In short, the problem of estimating the numerical strength of many disparate
groups of organized manpower, particularly in the context of the Vietmam war,
was of necessity a highly imprecise art. Even to this day I doubt that there are
experienced observers � in Washington or in Hanoi � who would lay claim to
having precise knowledge of the numerical strengths of most of the organized groups
in South Vietnam on either side.
The problem for intelligence analysts was further complicated during the
Vietnam war by the national obsession for trying to measure the course of the
war in numerical terms. As I look back over the past 10 years, I view this
infatuation with numbers as one of the more trying experiences the Intelligence
Community 41 k had to endure. In the minds of many, the penchant for numbers
created pressures which made a task that was at best difficult almost impossible
to achieve.
Numbers were useful during the war to those of us fighting it, but we had
no illusions as to their absolute precision. I personally am less concerned with
who had the better numbers than I am with the more fundamental question �
did the CIA do its job?
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My answer to this question is a resounding affirmative. CIA did not attempt
to sweep numbers under the rug. When it was necessary, the CIA raised questions,
debated the issues, and provided its own independent assessments without regard
to how they would be received. On some issues we did exceedingly well; on others
we probably could have done better.
Whatever the merits of the argument, my concern is that the members of
the Executive Branch, the Congress, and, indeed, the American public can feel
assured of one fact:
CIA is doing its job. Its analysts are calling the shots as they see them. They
do this as professionals in the intelligence business, not to agree or disagree with
the desires of policymakers.
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