War Of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir

by Sam Adams, David H. Hackworth (Contributor)

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

Genres: History, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, War, Biography, Politics

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sam Adams had a problem. The numbers just didn't make sense. As a low level CIA analyst in 1966 working on a study on Viet Cong morale, his numbers of defections and desertions suggest the enemy would be gone in a year--a trend at odds with their growing strength on the ground. As he tracked down the source of this discrepancy, he realized that the MACV Order of Battle Estimate, the official count of the enemy at about 250,000, was a fiction based on the flimsiest of evidence. Adams struggled for years to get the right numbers out-his own estimate was that there were at least 250,000 more Viet Cong than on the list. In 1968 he was proven right, when during the Tet offensive 250,000 enemy soldiers that officially did not exist swarmed over American positions and dealt the greatest political blow of the war. But Adams was not vindicated, he was an embarrassment, and after five more years of spinning his wheels he quit the CIA for good in 1973.

War of Numbers somehow makes bureaucratic infighting as exciting as any battle. The OBE was the cornerstone of Westermoreland's strategy of attrition; the number upon which all other assessments of logistics and destruction were based. The clash between Adams' evidence based methods (even if the statistical inferences would make a professional cry) and MACV; who ignored small units, large numbers of logistics troops, and even entire classes of the enemy (guerrilla-militia) responsible for the mines and scouting that wore American forces down tactically, is a great story of deceit and failure in American leadership. The perpetrators shift; General Westmoreland (Adams was later the target of a libel suit by Westmoreland for his role in a CBS documentary), CIA Director Richard Helms, MACV J-2, other parties in the White House. Ultimately, Adams comes down to the conclusion that it was a mass collective delusion. A whole group of people responsible for running the war decided to run it on what was politically tenable rather than what was true.

Along with that grand narrative, War of Numbers has some great anecdotes about the life of a spy in the 60s and 70s. Its a lot of overstuffed arm-chairs, endless cables, 5x8 index cards, meetings with people trying to bury you. Two incidents stick out--one where Adams ran all over town looking for a Vietnam expert who worked at the next desk (he had started with her), and a second where he had to specially request a Viet Cong map of South Vietnam for one of his reports (the Viet Cong and government maps had different districts). How could we win if we we're not even on the same map? There's also a lot of black humor: parody songs in the Cosmos Lounge, quotes from Giap in the Saigon office. Adams would probably be the first to admit that he had an easy war, all he staked was his reputation, but his attempts to inform strategy with actual numbers were as a brave of a contribution as anything else.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Want to know what really happened to DJT - read War of Numbers, a revealing insight to the power of the nameless, faceless yet ubiquitous bureaucracy designed to served us but which like every breathing organism is focused first on self-preservation. Sam Adams, RIP, was a CIA analyst who revealed himself in his memoir as driven by quest for truth...after all isn't decluttering the landscape to expose the enemy the quest of all intelligence analysts? Adams' analysis of the Viet Cong's capabilities and intentions were at odds with the military under General Westmoreland's command but Adams, a lowly CIA analyst, refused to abandon fact based analysis and then took on the bureaucracy which had circled around Westmoreland in order to shine light on the truth the bureaucrats buried. Adams was crushed. Had his warnings been acted on, many American and Vietnamese lives would have been saved. But the cost of truth was to much for the bureaucracy and those at its pinnacle whose duty, as they saw it, was to protect it from all threats...even truth. Fast forward to DJT. He too was/is a grave threat to the ruling bureaucracy and therefore must be crushed. When we elevate the survival of the bureaucracy over truth we pay...not the bureaucracy. General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the North Vietnamese, put it like this "The U.S. has a strategy based on arithmetic. The question the computers, add and subtract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn't work here. If it did, they would have already exterminated us." ("War of Numbers", page 184.)

[S Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sam Adams, the author, served in the CIA in the Analysis department (not Plans: the spies). After serving as an officer in the Navy, he joined the CIA. He analyzed the conflict in the Congo in the early 1960s, then transferred to the section on Viet Nam in 1964 – just as the war was heating up. His task was to develop an Order of Battle (OB) for the Viet Cong: how many troops they had (regular VC, support troops, guerilla-militia, special ops). He soon encountered resistance to the truth: the military wanted to show it was winning the war, that the number of VC was shrinking. So right from the start (even before Westmoreland succeeded Harkins), the books were cooked. The CIA managers did not want to contradict the military, so dissent – the truth – was stifled. Adams had volumes of evidence, but nobody cared (except at low levels, both CIA and military). Adams writes about the bureaucratic struggles – which (in my judgment) he handled poorly. Adams gives an insider’s perspective of the inner workings of the CIA (circa 1964-1971), explaining why American policy was so disastrously and tragically misguided.

[Ronald M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book in hardback in a used book store for $1.64. The dust cover had great recommendations by Mike Wallace and Ward Just along with an introduction by Colonel David Hackworth. I'm working on a project involving the Vietnam War and how the military tried to control the news, and so I thought this might be informative as a first person account. I had no idea what I was buying!

To say this book was a bargain and a pleasant surprise would be an understatement. It is full of wit, irony, humor, telling details, very good writing, great narrative, and is full of mini-scenes interspersed with a great tale of analysis, doggedness, and a relentless struggle to find and tell the truth in a way that statistics can tell the truth in the hands of an honest data analyst.

This is a great read on any level!

[Kayes Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

The delusions On the delusions

This is a great book on Vietnam. A war of choice that killed 56,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. From the beginning the whole dang structure was rotten and based on lies. This is an important book. Good read too.

[Alexander Temerev · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story of passing a single number through all loops and hurdles of CIA, MACV, DIA and the like. An exploration of the notion of "inconvenient truth" in excruciating detail.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic story of the fight over the OB in Vietnam, highlighting the impacts of political pressure on the intelligence process.

[Patrick Eddington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within the overall controversy that was the Vietnam war was one of the largest scandals in the history of American intelligence. By the spring of 1967, young CIA analyst Sam Adams had reached a startling and profound conclusion: the official U. S. government claims of the total number of Vietcong guerillas were were facing were wrong, and as Adams would come to believe, deliberately wrong. The culprit? None other than America's commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, who Adams (and others) would ultimately publicly charge with deliberately suppressing the true, higher number of enemy troops our army was facing in the rice paddies, jungles, and mountains of Vietnam. Adams book--which was published six years after his untimely death in 1988--chronicles his odyssey to bring the truth to light. Perhaps the greatest book on the intelligence business ever written.