DIA: Intelligence to Please

McGarvey, Patrick J.

Intelligence to Please Patrick J. McGarvey From 1964-65, when U. S. involvement in Vietnam began to be considerable, until late 1966 or early 1967, the generals in Saigon worked to build up...

...It rarely offers any evidence to support this request...
...Then they become a little more circumspect, letting individual issues slide by and rationalizing that it wasn't a crunch question anyway...
...Find Us a Target As the air campaign crept northward, the Operations people on the Joint Staff wanted bigger and better targets...
...They had a TV-guided missile, and they wanted to use it...
...They presented the findings of their paper at a briefing, much to the amusement of all present...
...It made little effort to perceive the enemy's view of the war...
...In 1967 a second period began...
...They avoid committing themselves or making decisions...
...It paid little or no attention to what Hanoi was saying on the radio, discounting it as propaganda...
...This has resulted over the years in the reduction of DIA's long-term research capability to near zero...
...It refused to accept that the North Vietnamese man-packed arms across the Chinese border and imported little by sea...
...As far as the military men who manage the agency are concerned, their guilt or incompetence results simply from the fact that they are uniformed men with a parent service...
...Of course it was the same as the General's-blue...
...It is sure to close with a veiled threat that the recipient's career is in jeopardy if he doesn't play the game and "get on the team...
...During all this time DIA was thoroughly enmeshed in the numbers game...
...This includes the military who run it, the civilians who staff it, the Secretary of Defense, the JCS, and the individual service staffs...
...Such a cable is likely to start off complimenting the recipient for the fine job he is doing and then work in high-sounding phrases which evoke motherhood, apple pie, the American flag, and, of course, the uniform...
...It sent photo-interpreters scurrying to their scanners to find, say, a two- or three-story building in an area open to U. S. raids...
...But strong pressures usually come in through the back door...
...Therefore, they wanted every bit of evidence brought to the fore that could show that infiltration was increasing...
...It is unthinkable for an officer to tell his superior that he cannot complete a task...
...Take a mechanism known as the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which is supposed to represent the best judgment of the intelligence community on a particular issue and is used by the President and his Cabinet in formulating policy...
...The JCS was never given a copy, and it was never cabled to Saigon...
...More than 95 per cent of the effort expended in DIA on Vietnam, for example, is on current problems...
...Then it was taken down quietly...
...He knows or soon learns that he will be thrust into a position in which, on occasion, his professional judgment will vary markedly from that of h s parent service...
...DIA could have told the JCS this was the wrong approach, but it played the game...
...They refuse to tackle the agency's long-term organizational ills because doing so would make too many waves...
...These officers are interested largely in getting good performance out of staff while they are there, not in building up long-run staff or agency capabilities...
...In one instance the Air Force Chief of Intelligence called my boss at DIA about a nearly completed estimate on U. S. bombing in Laos...
...The Pent ago n 's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) obliged and also emphasized in all reports the enemy's capability to recruit forces from the South Vietnamese population...
...Yes sir, can do...
...Officers accept a requirement for four or six extra hours' work a day when they know their staff already puts in 12- or-14-hour days...
...They want to impress the General, let him know that he's running a "crackerjack" outfit...
...He will be expected to defend a position that could enrage his chief of staff-but officers who do so more than once get known fast and are accorded an appropriate "reward" at a later date in terms of promotion and assignment...
...They outlined a likely -enemy course of action designed to draw American forces to the Khe Sanh area so that the populous coastal plains would be left thinly defended and concluded that perhaps it would be unwise to react to the Khe Sanh build-up...
...Rarely, if ever, does anyone say no, or point out that certain jobs take time...
...Intelligence to Please Patrick J. McGarvey From 1964-65, when U. S. involvement in Vietnam began to be considerable, until late 1966 or early 1967, the generals in Saigon worked to build up U. S. troop strength...
...The tune and emphasis of Adapted from an article in the July, 1970, issue of The Washington Monthly...
...reports from the field changed radically, and so did those put out by DIA...
...The result is an attitude among DIA staff members that is captured in their motto, "If you want it real bad, you're gonna get it real bad...
...The paper hung there until late in March, 1968, after the Tet Offensive, which occurred largely on the coastal plain, and after the enemy ended the siege of Khe Sanh without ever assaulting it...
...they were asked...
...Well before the Tet Offensive of January, 1968, when the enemy buildup at Khe Sanh first became obvious, two DIA analysts who had been studying enemy tactics and strategy for four years sat down and wrote a paper that concluded that the enemy was planning a feint at Khe Sanh...
...Another problem is the "can do" attitude that prevails among the officer corps...
...DIA is well aware that many service judgments are biased and don't reflect reality...
...During the build-up period, infiltration data and recruitment data came in via General Westmoreland's daily cablegram...
...Long-term study groups have been disbanded and the staffs reassigned to the current problem area...
...If they saw no signs of military activity around the building they would dub it a "possible military storage area," a description that gave Intelligence the right to go hunting...
...Suddenly it was legitimate to say that the Tet Everybody on the service staffs, with DIA leading the pack, started writing gloomy estimates with unaccustomed forthrightness and clarity...
...Many estimates have been changed or reworded because of an "Eyes Only" cable from a field commander...
...DIA didn't agree with this interpretation, but it watered down every paper it wrote on this subject so that its position was impossible to determine...
...Finally, they resign themselves to "sweating out" their tours and playing every situation by ear...
...In the early weeks of February the JCS insisted that the offensive was total military defeat for the enemy-General Westmoreland told them so in his daily cables...
...It then implies that the sender would like to see a particular judgment or set of figures changed to conform to the command view...
...Its obligation, in those cases, is to assume its responsibility as arbiter among the services and establish a Defense position on the issue, and it works hard at doing just that...
...Their boss, an Army colonel, finally got angry at their persistence and taped the paper to the wall beside his desk, claiming that the analysts had just stuck their professional reputations on the line and adding he hoped they were wrong...
...Usually no more than five people see it...
...Pick out a building for us to hit," they'd say...
...Everyone in the intelligence business has a chance to assert his point of view in these estimates, and it is here that DIA's role is crucial...
...It was all a matter of emphasis...
...Imagine, if you will, what the prospect of a tour with DIA looks like to a military officer...
...The language is always moving...
...is all that is heard...
...The classic example of command influence on intelligence matters occurred just after the Tet Offensive in January, 1968...
...Cables from Westmoreland, of course, were given higher priority in Washington...
...They didn't ask the intelligence people what was worth hitting or what a rational plan of attack might be, On the contrary, they demanded targets that a certain weapons system could attack...
...They stick to their principles through one or two scrapes...
...It is a form of heresy...
...I have seen "Eyes Only" cables come in from the U. S. Commanders in Honolulu and Saigon to the Director of DIA requesting that he give more than a passing consideration to the command viewpoint about this or that...
...The General, of course, is largely occupied with current problems, so his subordinates gear up to service his needs...
...The shortness of the tours of duty of the military managers of the agency (about nine-tenths of management jobs are filled by military officers) causes some long-term problems...
...They based this judgment on their interpretation of General Giap's fighting methods over the past two years...
...Wave-Makers Always Sink Everyone connected with DIA is partially at fault for the agency's shortcomings...
...It was too busy keeping up with the flow of numbers from Saigon...
...The high priests of Saigon decided that we were "winning...
...Then the paramount interest became to show the enemy's reduced capability to recruit and a slowdown in infiltration due to our bombing...
...No one did...
...The military in Saigon sent all the facts back to Washington eventually...
...And so most officers assigned to DIA go through a predictable pattern...
...It made little effort to reason out what the enemy's strategy was, why he believed he was winning, what he was saying publicly about how he was going to fight the war, or how the bombing was affecting his morale...
...The Operations staff's biggest hangup was over the prohibition on bombing the port of Haiphong...
...Consider also that a tour at DIA-normally two to three years-is very short when compared to a 20- to 30-year military career...
...The team arrived, and, over the protests of the DIA analysts, a compromise was reached...
...They come on board as "hard-chargers," ready to set the world on fire...
...When we started "winning," detailed reports highlighting "body counts" and statistics on how many villages were pacified were cabled with Westmoreland's signature...
...Offensive had really "set us back...
...Basic intelligence for detailed studies is simply not getting done or is whipped out with a weekend's furious overtime...
...The managers who choose to cut the long-term staff don't worry about the ultimate effect, because by the time it becomes evident they'll be off on other assignments...
...They suggested that the paper be cabled to Saigon as a DIA assessment of the situation and that the JCS be given the benefit of their thoughts...
...For one thing, there is something called the "Eyes Only" cable that is sent "back channel" and is severely restricted in dissemination...
...recruitment studies were pouched or cabled with the reports on the fluctuating price of rice...
...DIA, bowing to the pressure, came up with a list of several hundred small, insignificant targets in and near Haiphong, listing them as crucial and suggesting that the cumulative effect of hitting all 200 or more barge and ferry landings, rail spurs, bridges, and road intersections would be the same as flattening Haiphongagain a triumph for the art of compromise and no doubt small comfort to the pilots shot down in that heavily defended area...
...It refused to accept the judgment of the CIA that bombing the port wouldn't stop the flow of goods into North Vietnam...
...Then General Wheeler went to Saigon and came back with Westmoreland's request for 206,000 troops to "clean up" the "defeated" enemy...
...He told him that he was sending a team down to change the wording of the estimate and that my boss had better remember what color his uniform was...
...The Colonel never mentioned the subject again...
...It should not be concluded that any one person suppressed evidence...
...Backdoor Pressure The pressures on DIA to conform to the views of the military are hard to resist...
...Data from field contact with enemy units came amid the more mundane cables or by courier up to five weeks later...
...HOW could you possibly know more than General Westmoreland...
...This, too, caused merriment among the assembled...

Vol. 4 • February 1973 • No. 12


 
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