War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir

Aruges that the CIA provided false numbers in order to convince American leadership that the United States was winning the Vietnam War

Adams, an intelligence analyst with the CIA, discovered evidence in 1966 that the number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in Vietnam was closer to 600,000 than the 280,000 count made by the Pentagon. Unable to persuade CIA director Richard Helms to convene a board of inquiry, he unsuccessfully took his appeal to Congress and the White House, then resigned from the agency in '73 to write this account of the affair. His central argument is that General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, had deliberately overlooked some 300,000 Vietcong militiamen in order to buttress the government line that the U.S. was winning the war. In 1980 Adams was hired as a consultant for the CBS documentary The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception , based largely on the evidence he had uncovered; the film caused Westmoreland to file a much-publicized libel suit against the network, with Adams a co-defendant. Westmoreland dropped the suit before it went to jury. Adams died in 1988, leaving the memoir unfinished, but far enough along to explain how the CIA and top military brass--with White House encouragement--misled the Congress and the American people about enemy strength before the 1968 Tet Offensive. The expose offers a convincing inside look at CIA analytical techniques during the Vietnam war.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

At the time of Adams's death in 1988, he had almost completed this book, which recounts his side of a major controversy regarding Vietnam in measured fashion and affords instructive insights into the lot of a lower-echelon operative in the spook trade. An intelligence analyst for the CIA from 1963 to 1973, Adams gained a modicum of fame (or notoriety) in the early 1980s as the principal source for a CBS TV documentary entitled The Uncounted Enemy, which exposed intelligence failures in the Vietnam War. General William Westmoreland sued for libel, and although the widely publicized case never reached a jury, trial disclosures supported claims long made by Adams. Under terms of a flexible roving brief, he had in the 1960s made himself the CIA's resident expert on the Vietcong's order of battle. On the evidence of captured documents and data gathered during frequent field trips to combat zones, it soon became evident to Adams that the US military was deliberately underestimating the VC's troop strength. In the face of political opposition, the CIA failed to defend his findings; the Pentagon figures were accepted by President Johnson, who was eager to reassure the electorate that an unpopular war was going well. Early in 1968, the unacknowledged cadres went into action with VC regulars during the Tet offensive, which turned the tide of the war and destroyed LBJ's re-election bid. Although Adams had been proved right in his calculations, he remained a prophet without honor in a government bureaucracy willing to accommodate its political masters; ultimately he quit the agency. In this tellingly detailed and evenhanded account of how vital intelligence may be collected, collated, interpreted, and ultimately ignored, Adams (who never opposed America's involvement in Vietnam) leaves yet another reproachful monument to a conflict in which truth was a constant casualty. David Hackworth, the retired Army colonel who wrote About Face (not reviewed), provides the volume's introduction. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Adams was the CIA analyst whose persistence led to the making of the controversial CBS documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," the program that landed CBS in an equally famous lawsuit with Gen. William Westmoreland. In this memoir, he takes us behind the scenes to see what might be called "The Making of a Deception: The Inside Story." Initially, Adams charged that the CIA had underestimated Vietcong military strength. Quitting the agency in 1973, he undertook his own investigation, a lengthy labor cut short by his death in 1988. Though not completed, his book is more than a rehash of yesteryear's bureaucratic battles-and more even than delicious inside gossip. Adams paints a fascinating and personalized picture of the back-room, political wartime CIA. While experts and ex-spooks will debate the reliability of Adams's story, readers will find it fascinating. Some of his tales are worth the price of the book alone. Recommended for informed readers.
Henry Steck, SUNY Coll. at Cortland
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.