July-August 2006

Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and The Vietnam Intelligence Wars
by C. Michael Hiam
Steerforth Press, 316 pages, $25.95

Reviewed by Greg Rushford

America is at war. The president’s men stand accused of pressuring U.S. intelligence officials to cook the books, persuading the public into believing that the enemy is on the wane. Prodded by a brilliant CIA analyst—a man who courageously refuses to go along with the falsifications, even at the cost of his career—a few honest military and civilian intelligence officers try to resist the pressures. Alas, the intrepid spooks stand by helplessly as their politically compliant leaders cave to powerful White House and Pentagon operatives. Only after the lies and bureaucratic cowardice have contributed to the tragic loss of American lives on the battlefield do the CIA’s top leaders tell a shaken president the unvarnished truth.

Although the story has a disconcerting déjà vu quality to anyone following today’s headlines, Michael Hiam’s account involves events during the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, it is a timely reminder that clashes between strong-willed policy makers and intelligence officials who dare to report politically inconvenient facts are not a recent phenomenon to Washington.

Mr. Hiam tells the story of CIA analyst Sam Adams, whose brilliant research in 1966-67 uncovered an awkward fact: American forces were facing, at a minimum, at least a half million Viet Cong guerrilla fighters. This was decidedly unwelcome news. President Lyndon Johnson and his military command in Saigon, led by Gen. William Westmoreland, had been telling the American people that there were only about 285,000 Viet Cong forces, which were “declining at a steady rate.”

Worse, Gen. Westmoreland had seen—and suppressed—intelligence findings showing enemy forces hardly in decline. “We have been projecting an image of success over recent months,” Gen. Westmoreland’s deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, candidly acknowledged. The “command position,” Gen. Abrams emphasized, was that some categories of irregular fighters, called “self-defense” and “secret self-defense” forces—folks who were in the business of killing Americans with everything from hand grenades to booby traps—must be dropped from the official order of battle. Under no circumstances was the military to allow the official estimate of Viet Cong forces to rise above 300,000.

At the CIA, working-level analysts were incensed. As an incredulous Adams put it, “Here we are in the middle of a guerrilla war, and we haven’t even bothered to count the number of guerrillas.” Some military officers shared that outrage. As Col. Don Blascak, then a Special Forces major on assignment with the CIA, rightly put it, 10-year-old kids with AK-47s could kill Americans just as dead as the enemy’s main forces.

Adams and his working-level colleagues at the CIA fought a vigorous rear-guard battle to keep the Order of Battle honest. But CIA Director Richard Helms and his top analyst for Vietnam, George Carver, ultimately decided in September, 1967 to keep the estimate below 300,000, as the military command demanded. This was “nothing less than the prostitution of intelligence,” Mr. Hiam writes. But calculating that the Johnson administration did not want to hear the unvarnished truth anyway, Messrs. Helms and Carver decided to go along until a more suitable opportunity arose to wage bureaucratic warfare with the military.

That opportunity came four months later, during the Tet lunar holidays on January 30, 1968. The Viet Cong—including the couple hundred thousand irregular forces the Westmoreland command had pretended did not exist—launched a surprise attack that targeted nearly every major provincial capital, setting South Vietnam aflame and even sending a sapper team into the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The Tet Offensive ultimately failed, at least in a military sense, as the guerrillas were beaten back—but a disillusioned American public would never again support the war.

After Tet, Gen. Westmoreland asked the White House for 206,000 additional troops; the request was denied. Helms promptly sent Mr. Carver to brief the president on the true extent of the Viet Cong force. Lyndon Johnson announced soon after that he would not stand for re-election.

I have a special feeling for this book. Sam Adams became my friend. In 1975, as an investigator for the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I pored through reams of formerly secret documents from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the National Security Agency that confirmed Adams’ findings. At the time, however, very few of Adams’s colleagues in the CIA—some of whom were to eventually express their shame—were willing to step forward. Mr. Hiam reports that CIA Director William Colby encouraged potential congressional witnesses to toe the company line and downplay the significance of Adams’s discoveries.

The official cover-up finally came apart in 1982 when “CBS News” broadcast “The Uncounted Enemy,” a documentary in which a number of former key military and CIA officials finally went public. Proclaiming his innocence, Gen. Westmoreland then sued CBS for libel. But the general withdrew the lawsuit before it was put to a jury, after what Mr. Hiam calls “lethal” testimony from a series of former CIA officials and highly decorated military intelligence officials, including Gen. Joseph McChristian and Col. Blascak.

While Sam Adams has never been officially honored for his service to his country, there are still some at Langley who remember. Mr. Hiam relates that a bunch of flowers showed up at Adams’ funeral in 1988, with an unsigned note:

Oh hey Sam,
A truer friend of his country,
a better analyst and warrior
is yet to come.

Mr. Rushford is editor of the Rushford Report, an online newsletter that specializes in national security and trade politics.