War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 251 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Press (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642469
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642464
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #750,015 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One For Intelligence Analysts, April 26, 2002

By	William Gawthrop (APO, AE USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

War of Numbers is an essential book for intelligence analysts as well as students of the Vietnam War. Adams provides key insight to strategic policy failure. In order to fully appreciate Adam's contribution to the intelligence history of Vietnam, it is important to understand that wars are fought by nations in the pursuit of interests and that for Americans, the decision to go to war should address seven considerations: Problem Identification, Interests Assessment, Objective Identification (including End State Assessment), Strategic Self Appraisal, National Power Assessments of The Enemy, Strategy Development, and the Identification of Gaps between Policy and Means.
Adam's book addresses errors in the National Power Assessment phase which had a negative cascading effect in subsequent decision making. Flawed enemy strength calculations contributed to flawed strategy development which contributed to a gap between policy and means. When Adams identified the flaw, the Johnson Administration was too heavily committed to a war of attrition to tolerate public exposure of the gaps between policy and means. Strategically, telling the truth about the numbers of enemy forces would have required larger commitments of U.S. forces increasing the strain on public support for the war. The strength of Johnson's political will and McNamara's quantitative analysis approach to war deeply affected the way the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, counted the enemy (called, Order of Battle).
MACV kept three sets of books; The first set of OB was the official version sent to Washington. The second set belonged to the OB Analysts themselves, and the third set was a blend of the first two. The first set was an undercount to keep official Washington placated; the second set was the honest count but did not go anywhere, and the third set went to Westmoreland who kept it close hold.
Adams contribution to the intelligence discipline is his description of how he found the flaw in OB accounting and the political correctness that resisted him within the intelligence community. The key to his breakthrough was to have actually gone to Vietnam, worked the Order of Battle issues on the ground, understand the enemy from "the enemy's" perspective and then double check how U.S. reporting of enemy strength matched that of how the enemy was reporting his own strength. This is when Adams discovered that MACV was undercounting troop strength. He performed a validity and reliability check on MACV and found their procedures and results wanting. The technique he used is described in detail and serves as a lesson learned for today's OB analysts.
The second lesson is how Adams' persistence caused a rift between the CIA and MACV over the integrity of the OB counting. The CIA is evenhandedly portrayed in the book. Individual analysts who looked at the numbers invariably sided with Adams; those in responsive political positions and vulnerable to the political influence of the Johnson-McNamara Administration behave in the subtle manner normally associated with behind the scene politics. Adams illustrates how assessments were watered down, reports delayed, egos clashed in the briefing rooms, and all of the suppressive efforts were brought to bear to keep him muffled and how he countered them. Basically, his operating principle was that the truth should be allowed to surface and he describes how he created those opportunities; back channel copies of reports; boot leg copies of reports, analyst to analyst contacts (CIA to DIA, for example), as well as maintaining contact with the honest brokers at MACV.
This is an important book for students of Intelligence Analysis. It serves as a guide on how to double check the validity and reliability of Order of Battle data; it gives insight to how politics heavily filtered ground truth under the Johnson Administration, and it lets the world see that the CIA wasn't evil incarnate. Like every other agency in Washington, it simply surrendered to political pressure from the White House.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible and Exciting, June 9, 1998

By A Customer

As a student in Political Science, it is rare to find and interesting and faithful account of Vietnam. Adams gives us both in this book. I thought it was going to be a purely statistical book of this and that. What I got was the story of a man's mission to find the truth in a sea of deceit. Adams methodically plots out the discrepancies in the Order of Battle and tells of his own fight to get the numbers somewhere close to realistic. It was also heart-wrenching in a way becasue Adams was driven from a profession that he loved. He was as much a war hero as the brave young men who actually fought, because his fight was to give 'our boys' a level playing field. I would strongly recommend this book to any student of political science, Vietnam, or anyone who likes a good spy novel.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligence with integrity!, June 21, 1999

By	Michael Allison (Layton, UT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir (Hardcover)

Adams' book is not so much a book about Vietnam as a chronical of what happens when intelligence units and agencies report what the commanders WANT to hear. The CIA and J2 of MACV in Adams' book become pawns in the politics of Vietnam. They ignored facts and basic tenents of intelligence reporting. The agencies feared reaction to the facts and its possible effect on public sentiment to US involvement. Because of that they purposely, according to Adams, reported and knowingly maintained false information.

Even more disturbing are Adams' insights into the CIA of the middle and late Sixties. Though deeply entrenched in war in Vietnam, they seemed to take an overall cavalier approach to the mission. Adams notes after Tet-1968 there were "considerably less than 6" CIA agent handlers in Vietnam who spoke vietnamese. These same case officers received a grand total of 2 hours orientation on Vietnam and their enemy prior to assignment.

This book is a MUST read for intelligence personnel, policy makers and anyone who wants to learn how, the hard way, not to run an intelligence organization.