Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

I read Sam Adams first book War of Numbers and this is a great follow up too bad this great American has passed on. The author has taken a work started by Adams before his death and finished it superbly. In this work you get a glimpse of Adams and his blind commitment to truth. Who among us would spend our whole lives trying to get the American people to see the truth of what went on behind the scenes in Vietnam. As a former Marine with two consecutive tours in Nam I always knew Westmoreland was a loser and the one who officially brought politics into the Joint Chiefs but Sam Adams makes it official. And McNamara, he is as arrogant in this book as he was in real life. This book takes you through the treachery that is at the high levels of the government and military during times of war - think today! I wish every American would read this and vote accordingly and get America the leadership it deserves. Read it and tell others.

This wonderfully written book is a must-read for anyone wishing to learn about the Vietnam War and how it was mishandled, but is also must reading for those seeking to understand what is now happening to us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sam was a one-of-a-kind analyst -- exacting, dedicated (almost obsessive), talented, and most of all, RIGHT -- and he was ignored and pushed aside. Michael Hiam's book deserves much wider media coverage, and I hope it will eventually receive it. Although this book shows Sam, warts and all, it is still a marvelous tribute to Sam and his work. (I should add that my husband Dana and I knew Sam well)

The U.S. intelligence system is driven as much by personality as by so called `requirements' as this book so well demonstrates. Sam Adams was a self taught order of battle specialist with the CIA who became involved in a major confrontation with the Military Advisory Command of Vietnam (MACV) over the number and organization of the South Vietnamese Communist (Viet Cong) combat forces. Adams believed, and marshaled the evidence to prove it, that the Viet Cong number of combatants were over 400,000, twice the number that MACV had estimated. The MACV estimate was politically driven rather than being based on objective evidence, but in the end prevailed. Adams throughout the confrontation and afterward was a strong and effective voice for maintaining the integrity of the intelligence process and providing the most accurate intelligence possible. For his efforts he was widely ignored by both his superiors at the CIA and especially by the military. In the end he was forced to resign from the CIA. Yet this book is considerably more than the account of one man's struggle to provide the best truth possible. It is a fascinating look at some specific aspects of the intelligence process and how that process can be subverted for political ends. This reviewer suspects that the current Iraqi WMD uproar if looked at in detail would be found to be analogous to the need by MACV to demonstrate military success in Vietnam by fabricating artificially low numbers of Viet Cong fighters and ignoring evidence to the contrary. Sam Adams worked as an analyst in the CIA, Directorate of Intelligence and from the time he begin work in 1963 (on the former Belgian Congo) he was clearly an engaged and hard working analyst. As it turned out he also had a passion for accuracy which in the end ill-served him in his career. This reviewer was a contemporary of Adams, but at time was serving in Military Intelligence. Among those of us who were fairly far down the intelligence food chain, when Sam Adams engaged in his fight for accuracy with MACV, we all considered him a real hero. This is the first book by C. Michael Hiam and it is a brilliant debut. He is an excellent researcher and a good writer. In this book he presents a fair and accurate picture of what is now a mostly forgotten controversy that is both relevant and vitally important to any discussion of reforming the U.S. intelligence system.

Edit of 15 Jun 09 to add the following additional links: The Trial of Henry Kissinger Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers On the Psychology of Military Incompetence Pathology Of Power There are other books on this issue of "cooking the books" and the strategic consequences of falsifying or prostituting intelligence, but this book by a first-time author, C. Michael Hiam, jumps to the head of the line. This is one of the most exciting and absorbing books on intelligence it has ever been my privilege to read. It is not a substitute for Sam Adams' own book, War of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir nor for George Allen's None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam or Bruce Jones' War Without Windows or Jim Wirtz The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Stemme) or even Orin de Forest's book Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam. I am especially moved by this book because it treats Sam Adams, who was reviled as often as he was a hero, in a gentle fashion, and makes it clear that the bottom line was that Adams was right and Adams had integrity. The book is superb at explaining why General Westmoreland had to back down when he threatened CBS with libel because too many witnesses were prepared to say that it was Westmoreland who ordered that the number of "enemy combatants" never go above 300,000. The military officers who loyally but stupidly followed that order, and the CIA bureaucrats who unethically "folded" on this important issue of "who are we fighting and how many" are tarred and feathered by this book, and right so, as it applies to the run up to war in Iraq and the planned bombing of Iran. There are other CIA heroes in this book, notably Ed Hauch who got it right on the first day--he and others who actually knew Ho Chi Minh knew him to be a nationalist and knew we could not win, but it would take us 10 years to figure that out. Same same Iraq only we did not have any CIA people with both the knowledge and the integrity to speak out, just George "slam dunk" Tenet, the world's greatest intelligence prostitute. As we consider tactical nuclear weapons for Iran, it is instructive to read in this book that the military planned for nuclear missile batteries to be inserted into Da Nang and Nha Trang. As we reflect on how the Army Chief of Staff was ignored when he spoke of the need for major land forces to stabilize Iraq, only to be ignored, it is instructive to read in this book that Walt Rostow and others knew full well the standard rule of thumb for insurgencies, the need for a 27:1 ratio. McNamara was deceived by Westmoreland--fast forward to Iraq and we have on the one hand a prostitution of intelligence, and on the other a series of truthful wise Army generals whose advice was ignored by civilians. The author has done a really first rate job of capturing the nuances of the CIA and the military. His discussion of the hours spent on chit-chat unrelated t