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Posted to www.oss.net Intelligence Reform portal page.
CONFERENCE NOTES
Intelligence in the Viet-Nam War 20-21 October 2006
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Intelligence Studies of the Central Intelligence Agency, and The Vietnam Center of Texas Tech University
General Comment: The organizers hit this out of the park. This is one of the most extraordinary gatherings of serious people who were either there, or have studied the matter ardently, or both. While short on Chinese and Vietnamese participants with deep perspective, I consider this event so significant that it is my hope China, or Viet-Nam (the correct rendition of the name), or Singapore might host a follow-up event, this time featuring North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and Chinese officers.
Ah ha Moment: I came here largely to hear George Allen (NONE SO BLIND) and C. Michael Hiam (Who the Hell Are We Fighting?) but the catalyst for my thinking ended up being Mark Moyar (TRIUMPH FORESAKEN). My reviews of each of these three amazing books are at Amazon (click on the titles to reach the Amazon page for each book).
First-Rate Documents
Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968 (GPO, 2000)
Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam (U), Local Reproduction.
National Intelligence Council, Estimative Products on VIETNAM 1948-1975 (GPO, 2005)
DAY ONE HIGHLIGHTS
James Rockner, Director of the Vietnam Center. Don’t just study history, draw conclusions relevant to the present. See my reviews of Lost History, Fog Facts, The Landscape of History, and Lessons of History (Will and Ariel Durant) by clicking on the respective titles
CIA in Vietnam
David Robarge, CIA Historian. We lack a comprehensive collection of studies of intelligence in Viet-Nam for the varied national and factional perspective. [NOTE: History is the first quadrant in modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), something not yet understood by those nominally responsible for OSINT within the secret intelligence world. Funding such multi-cultural histories will be an important part of the mission of the new Open Source Agency.]
Tom Ahern, Author (see Documents). No one ever did a comparative estimate of South versus North Vietnam with respect to overlapping family, rural networks, and the political legitimacy of the Diem-Nhu regime was never examined. At the same time, the US policy-intelligence leadership (as opposed to the working desk analysts) was seeing the conflict in a global context, in context of Korea, the Bay of Pigs, fear of China, rather than as a civil war where Viet-Nam was a coherent counter-culture to China in its own unyielding right.
George Allen, Author (see Ah ha Moment). Policy making can often NOT be a process, but rather a private discussion by a handful of private individuals that shut out the entire bureaucracy and its experts (shades of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld!) Even when intelligence is delivered to policymakers, they will tend to read the final judgments and not have time for the nuanced full text. At this point in his presentation, he commented, “missing page” and the perhaps unintended reference to how the White House makes policy aroused great laughter). China was unquestionably a great concern.
Merle Pribennow, Case Officer. Absolutely delightful all-too-short discussion of three of the most famous unknown agents of the war, one Ba run by CIA after recruitment by the South Vietnamese, the French doctor Hottie (sp?) run by the GRU and Viet Cong, and Ming, run by the Viet Cong. In shades of déjà vu, he also mentioned in an aside that Eisenhower and the Army did not want to get into a Vietnam land war, while the Air Force was hot to bomb. His recollection is that the White House decided to support Diem despite intelligence saying Diem could not win (see Hiam’s book for direct quotes from the Vietnam analysts at the time).
Phung Hoang (PHOENIX) Program
LtGen Patrick Hughes, USA (Ret). I learned from this individual and the two others who followed him that the literature on the PHOENIX Program misrepresents the program as an assassination program, and that not only was it focused on capturing key people alive, for their intelligence value, but that very high standards—a requirement for three separate distinct sources—were met before deciding to capture someone. He also pointed out that since both sides considered this a very dangerous operation, there were a number of those being raided who decided to die defending themselves.
John Haseman. Reiterated his experience that it was not an assassination program, it was very successful, and it needs to be applied in Afghanistan and Iraq today. He found that informal liaison was more effective than formal (this is also taught in the CIA Mid-Career Course), and that it was helpful to keep the roles of those capturing individuals completely separate from those doing the interrogating.
Andrew Finlayson. It worked, but there were three persistent obstacles: 1) organizational jealousies; 2) individual personal intransigence; and 3) US versus VN “Iron Rice Bowl” issues.
Luncheon Speaker Rene Defourneaux, Major USA (Ret), Office of Strategic Services. He spoke earlier than scheduled and I missed his presentation. As with the other presentations, his will appear on the web site of the Vietnam Center in a few weeks and is well worth waiting for. I was able to buy his book, The Tracks of the Fox: Uncovering Secrets of Wartime Covert Operations (Indiana Creative Arts, 2000) and at first glance it looks very interesting.
Early French and US Intelligence Operations and Issues
Alexander Zervoudakis on French Intelligence. Suspend any pre-conceptions. Both HUMINT and SIGINT were good, but confidence of the French was exaggerated during optimal output times. Higher command mind-sets prevented the absorption of good intelligence. The military was left hanging at Dien Bien Phu with a course change at the national level that was not discussed with either the CINC or the intelligence people. He also notes that Dien Bien Phu, like the Tet Offensive, was a psychological victory rather than a real one, but lack of intelligence and policy will on both occasions prevented exploitation of the thinning out and lack of mobility of the opposing forces.
Geoffrey Shaw on Terrorism as Tactic within Insurgency. Lovely comments on the deliberate decision of the North Vietnamese to create strategic paralysis using terrorism, and especially random terrorism that could be predicted nor defended against. He noted that Diem was more stable than some thought, as a Confucian leader with a mandate from heaven via the captive Emperor. [My own reading is that Diem was a mandarin, and Nhu was a murderous thief all too willing to commit genocide on the Buddhists and to steal everything she could by force.] He commented—and this resonates—that the Americans were Diem’s Achilles heel. With their increased engagement, he lost what legitimacy he might have had from providing order.
Mark Moyar (see Ah ha Moment). See my review at the Amazon page for his book. His summary briefing was somewhat simplistic but very pointed, and it aroused passion on the part of the audience. Suffice to say that he has done an extraordinary job of original research at the document level, but as we all know, documents lie, as do individuals, and the next edition should be much improved if his book inspires an outpouring of oral histories, not just from Americans, but from Chinese and Vietnamese as well.
Technology and Intelligence. I skipped this to attend to business. It covered SIGINT to the cockpit (this at a time when pilots were not allowed to actually look at IMINT); Chinese anti-aircraft radar intelligence, and U.S. efforts to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail with technology.
Dinner Speaker MajGen Oleg Kalugin, KGB (Ret), former Deputy, Supreme Soviet. MajGen Kalugin, while avoiding reference to today, drew two very clear analogies between today and the Vietnam era. Bottom line: the invasion and occupation of Iraq has created today, as it created during the Vietnam era, a very large population of disenchanted individuals eager to work with foreign intelligence services and foreign diplomats to oppose US policies and behaviors, and this creates an excellent environment for all foreign services to develop Americans as fellow travelers. In response to a public question, he suggested that sanctions do not work, and the Marshall Plan idea is a better strategy. In response to a private question, he acknowledged that the Soviets scored their greatest successes against the U.S. Intelligence Community by recruiting contractors, and laughed when asked if the current flood of thousands of contractors doing jobs normally assigned to government civil servants might have made it easier for the Chinese and others to penetrate the U.S. Intelligence Community. Click here to see his books at Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-6731894-2082442?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Oleg+Kalugin&Go.x=8&Go.y=9
DAY TWO HIGHLIGHTS
Strategic and Tactical Intelligence and the Formulation & Execution of Policy
John Sullivan, author Of Spies and Lives. Polygraph does work especially when local allies try to pass off frauds to distract or deceive US Government. Best information came from ralliers (those who accepted amnesty and surrendered), the others being polygraphed were prisoners of war, road watchers, and actual clandestine sources. He learned that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were superior to US and essentially broke and discovered most if not all “line crossers” sent by USG or SVN. Polygraph works best when US has custody and the person being tested does not face torture by locals in aftermath of test. Saddest aspect of the job was the very real use of suicide by hard core to avoid revealing information, along with sexual assault and murder by the South Vietnamese when they did not get what they wanted in the way of information.
James Wilbanks, Tet 1968—Anatomy of an Intelligence Failure. 1967 NVN and VC uses selected battles to shape the perceptions of General Westmoreland and his staff, to deceive them into thinking the main push would be in I Corps area. They succeeded with Khe Sanh, and this distraction enabled Hue and other surprises. US leaders tended not to believe contradictory intelligence reports, found it difficult to fuse reports from all sources, and subject to bureaucratic infighting between CIA and MACV. However, the NVN and VC also suffered from groupthink, over-estimating their own capabilities and under-estimating US and SVN capabilities. Their major false assumption was that the population in the South was ready to rise up and renounce the US and SVN regimes. NVN and VC also suffered from false reporting from the field. The ultimate result of the Tet offensive, an intelligence failure on both sides, is that the NVN and VC suffered extraordinary huge losses, and were in complete disarray. This tactical weakness, however, was not followed up by US and SVN, and as a result the strategic victory, the end of the war. The author concludes that intelligence is what it is, and ignoring it, abusing it, is not the way to win. See also Jim Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War, and Bruce Jones, War Without Windows.
Michael Hiam, Who the Hell are We Fighting? Spoke on Westmoreland trial as a major vindication of Sam Adams (the subject of the book), and rendered a historical verdict of great importance. There could be no doubt that the 1967 Estimate was a laboriously constructed lie. Laid to rest the false claim that it was an honest disagreement among men of honor. The author’s presentation was articulate and pointed, but in no way a substitute for reading his truly extraordinary book about Sam Adams the war of numbers that helped lose lives in Viet-Nam. Trial, while vindicating Sam Adams, did not give him the jury judgment he so desired, and he died at the age of 58 not feeling fully vindicated.
John Prados, Sihanoukville and Cambodia—The Key Intelligence Issue After Tet 1968.
Click here for Amazon page listing John Prados’ current books in print. Focus on port of Sihanoukville in Cambodia as a means of funneling supplies to the Viet Cong in Viet-Nam. The story includes all of the features of the numbers war with Sam Adams less a trial—deception and lies in the chain of command, inter-agency friction and disagreement, major policy and strategy implications. Ultimate value was for supplies. Troops and some supplies moved down the Ho Chi Minh trail on foot, the bulk of the arms and supplies apart from locally-procured supplies came in through this port. Chinese sign treaty with Cambodia to deliver arms and supplies to Cambodia in early 1960’s. This legal flow of weapons was NEVER secret. What was “sort of” secret was the smuggling via Cambodia to the Viet Cong under the cover of this legal flow. U.S. observed this traffic and tried to address it, with limited success. Study of this arms traffic in 1967 found no evidence of large-scale smuggling. Both IC group report and DIA on its own, largely in agreement that there was not major enemy arms trafficking through this port. BUT from the tactical level in Viet-Nam, reports being generated based on weapons identification as to this traffic being considerable. Westmoreland recommended B-52 bombing to Johnson, who said no, but did send Chester Bowles, them Ambassador to India, to discuss with Cambodian leadership. Shortly thereafter, Tet Offensive, during which NVA and VC demonstrated a whole new level of firepower not previously available and that could be linked to the arms shipments via Cambodia. “Sent us into conniptions.” During Tet got a defector who identified the specific Cambodian Colonel meeting with Chinese and North Vietnamese senior officials and managing the traffic. Disputes emerged between MACV and USN with CIA, which created an econometric model seeking to show that the flow could not be as grave as claimed. A joint field survey ended up splitting the difference—CIA claimed 2000 tons a month, MACV and Navy said 13,000 tons a month, they ended up going with 7000 tons or so.