THE CIA AND VIETNAM

   McNamara, Robert Strange. (1995). IN RETROSPECT: THE TRAGEDY AND
LESSONS OF VIETNAM. NY: Times Books. A superficial and selective 
mea culpa. The former Secretary of Defense claims our governing 
elite had little understanding of the Vietnamese and the war -- and 
from the perspective of 25 years -- explains all that they did (do) 
not know. McNamara decries the Vietnamese lack of resolve to fight, 
he still does not realize that they won, repelling the world's 
strongest military force. McNamara was the best and brightest of the 
"best and brightest," but his book does not cite a single communist 
source.  The shallowness of his analysis exposes the intellectual 
prostitution demanded of America's academic elite. Asian communist 
leaders set forth in their writings the plans and programs of 
their revolutions but I doubt if any member of the best and brightest, 
or any officer of the CIA, ever read or, if so, understood those 
writings.  Sam Adams, a CIA analyst, who fought the CIA at every step, 
said the Agency in undercounting the VC refused to use until late, what 
should have been its primary source -- captured enemy documents. In my 
own experience I discovered that the CIA buried any information that 
did not support its pro-war policies. The CIA recruited and paid 
agents to tell it what it wanted to hear, ignoring the mass of overt 
information that so disproved its rationales for the war. This practice
epitomizes Agency operations from the beginning to the present.   

David Corn, BLOND GHOST: TED SHACKLEY AND THE CIA'S CRUSADES, published
by Simon & Schuster in New York in 1994.  This is one of the few excellent
books on the CIA.  Corn follows the career of Theodore Shackley from the
environs of Cold War Berlin, to various other world hot spots as he
tries to overthrow Castro's Cuba and we end up in a near nuclear conflag-
ration with the Soviets; to Laos where he directs CIA's hilltribe Hmong
guerrillas to act like regular troops -- leading to their destruction; to
Vietnam where after three years of Shackley-declared "intelligent successes" 
[one high-level officer says "it seems pretty obvious Saigon (CIA) doesn't 
know what the fuck's going on"] he leaves for another adventure elsewhere.  
His can-do persona convinces the CIA's hierarchy of his ability and he
progresses up the career ladder.  Shackley's legacy lives today in the
CIA's like-thinking, can-do, tunnel-visioned, rigid-thinking, team players. 
One of the more disturbing aspects of Corn's book is the claimed recognition 
at the time by various high-level CIA officials that our intelligence on 
Vietnam was at best, of no value, and at worst manipulated to show 
non-existent progress -- yet none of these officials protested.

   Robert Manning, (Editor-in-Chief, 1988).  WAR IN THE SHADOWS: THE
VIETNAM EXPERIENCE.  Boston Publishing Company, Boston, MA.  A number of
scholars and participants in the war wrote individual chapters of WAR
IN THE SHADOWS.  The book in many aspects is the most informative, concise
and accurate of many of the books on Vietnam in regard to the clandestine 
operations of the Special Operating Groups (SOGs) and the CIA's various
programs.  The United States' leading wartime writer/scholar on the Vietcong, 
Douglas Pike, wrote the chapter, "The Vietcong Secret War."  He states the 
liberation associations of the VC were villagers molded into tight-knit, 
self-controlled, self-contained associations.  Mao Tse-tung of China and 
Vo Nguyen Giap of Vietnam called liberation associations the initial phase 
and the sine qua non of their revolutions.  In 1963, the VC announced that
seven million South Vietnamese (generally rural civilians) had joined
these associations.  Pike's article avoids numbers but those massive 
figures were the intelligence community's most sacrosanct secret or most
egregious failure (one that I have rallied against for a quarter of a century).
If the CIA had known and/or reported the seven-million-person-strong 
association structure -- it would have invalidated all U.S. justifications 
for the war and revealed that the war was an American invasion of 
that country. Liberation association members -- or to put it another way -- 
most of the South Vietnamese -- and their dedication, caused our defeat in 
Vietnam.  Victory was never a possibility.  William Colby, the CIA's main 
man on Vietnam, called the liberation associations the skeletal organizations 
of no real power that came into existence late in the fighting.

   In WAR IN THE SHADOWS, Pike outlines the spy networks of the Vietnamese
communists -- his coverage of counterespionage operations where I had a
direct role are generally accurate and detailed.  The communists penetrated
the Thieu Government at every level and a CIA study written by the 
courageous intelligence analyst who fought the CIA at every step, Sam Adams,
said the communists had 30,000 spies in Thieu's government with a target
of 50,000 in a few years.  The Chapters, "Dawn of the War," and "Operation
Phoenix," are also detailed.