War of numbers
After he left the CIA in 1973, Adams sat down to write an account of his years in the agency. Adams loved intelligence work and that enthusiasm shines throughout the unfinished book he left when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1988. He had planned[...]to write a definitive account of the numbers controversy and the failure of American intelligence during the Vietnam war. Scholars will regret that Adams did not live to carry out his plan, but what he left is perhaps more precious still - a book wonderfully alive, full of vivid characters, crisp dialogue, and a special feel for the strange world of intelligence analysis, where the only thing worse than being right too late is being right too soon. There have been many accounts of the Vietnam war by the soldiers who fought it and the Washington officials who ran it. Adams watched the war from a unique vantage point; for years the secret intelligence documents all crossed his desk. By the end of 1967 Adams knew the war was unwinnable, and he spent the next fifteen years explaining what had gone wrong to anyone who would listen. With the exception of a few brief editors' notes, War of Numbers is exactly the way Adams put it down on paper - as readable as a novel, and perhaps the best single account yet written about the politics of intelligence.
Stats for nerds
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What Hacker News says
- If you're looking for a specific example of this, you might look at 'War of Numbers' by Sam Adams, a CIA analyst during the Vietnam War. It was published posthumously. It should be on the Internet Archive.
The book is about the US intelligence community, the military / DOD / Whitehouse in coming up with an "Official" Order of Battle about the Viet Cong, and his and some of his colleagues efforts to get an honest / accurate number. Ultimately he couldn't do it internally through the CIA and resigned, there was a CBS series on it in the 1980s that led to a lawsuit.
Essentially the number of Enemy troops was set by official policy at a certain level, while the actual number was at least double this. The numbers were fudged to make it work, including removing entire categories of troops. If the real numbers came out it would make people look back, and lead the public to make some bad conclusions.
- It's really a shame War of Numbers isn't better known, even among scholars. I think the lack of attention is because it was published after most of the generation who really cared had passed on. My cohorts in the 1980s talked a good deal about Frank Snepp's Decent Interval (1977) and its revelations about intelligence work. Sam Adams' book would have been a bombshell.
