THE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE THAT LOST VIET NAM

this is the inside story of a scandal one of the worst of the Vietnam War a systematic effort by US officials to manipulate intelligence about our South Vietnamese allies to cover up their weaknesses and their inability to correct them Colonel Henry Shockley and I saw the scandal unfold in real-time in early 1974 he became a top intelligence officer at the defense at s JS office in Saigon known as Dao he done two previous tours in-country for the US Army the first in 1961 I was a staff officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and spent nearly six years in Vietnam interrogating agents and prisoners and chasing enemy secrets I became the agency's senior intelligence analyst at the u.s. embassy our shared experiences Shockley's and mine covered the last years of the war the period after the Paris peace agreement in 1973 that agreement resulted in a tenuous ceasefire and withdrawal of the last US support troops it also left a large enemy force in the south and condemned our allies to deal with that threat on their own without US military backing but the cover-up at the heart of this story extended throughout the war the US officials responsible for it were hoping to keep our allies looking pristine pure to the US Congress and the American people and worthy of their continued support but in the process these officials blinded themselves to the very things that led to Saigon defeat in April 1975 widespread official corruption and the collapse of leadership morale and security within the South Vietnamese government and military after the fall of Saigon I left the CIA and wrote two books about what I'd witnessed Shockley stayed in the army but filed official reports criticizing our intelligence practices and our failure to report honestly on our allies Shockley's now long retired from the army he agreed to let me interview him about lessons learned and what he told Pentagon officials and congressional investigators right after the war was over after a Jew returned to Washington and delivered harsh criticism of your former colleagues at the US Embassy in Saigon you said the Ambassador and his staff were guilty of quote the deliberate and reflexive manipulation of intelligence and censorship of reporting the net result you said was to lure Washington level officials into a false sense of security concerning Vietnam is that still your view absolutely still and more reinforced by a reading that I've done since then you also said quote we were never able to get a meaningful look at friendly forces unquote and that you knew little of their weaknesses still my view we were being blocked and what we were trying to report by the embassy anytime there was anything that appeared to be detrimental to either the Vietnamese military or the Vietnamese political system your writings contradicted those like Henry Kissinger who would argue that blamed for the fall of Vietnam rests squarely on the US Congress because of its unwillingness to vote additional aid for South Vietnam you suggest that we really didn't know enough about our allies to be sure whether additional aid might have made any difference true that is correct during the height of the warm shockley was assigned to the US military assistance command in Vietnam known as Mac V it was replaced after the ceasefire by the DAO the defense attache z' office Shockley headed its intelligence collection unit he didn't think much of his own staff or Dao as a whole I don't know if Rube Goldberg set up the system but somewhere along the line it did not match up with the needs that we had at that time it was too much a microcosm of the old Mac V system without the resources and also without the proper leadership though we've been in Vietnam at the same time we seldom crossed paths the various agencies including the US military were too isolated from each other was this endemic to the American presence in Vietnam the isolation of various agencies yes it was and it goes back to my first tour in Vietnam all the way back to 1961 where we were told you cannot talk to the embassy you cannot talk to the press we and worst of all you couldn't talk to the French who I thought might have known something about what was going on Shockley thought better of my organization the CIA than he did his own we saw the CIA presence in Vietnam to be far more superior in terms of professionalism than we were we have thrown together people who had sort of remained in Vietnam for various reasons and we brought in some young people from DIA who did not necessarily have a proper background for this and we try to make a team out of them but nobody really pulled the team together and I thought the product was pretty mediocre as Shockley settled into his new job at the DAO he found there was little reliable intelligence about the South Vietnamese our allies many estimates of their capabilities were outdated written by US military advisers during the final US troop pullout nearly two years before those advisers had been under pressure to make the South Vietnamese look good otherwise US forces could not leave the country on schedule and to meet the schedule in Vietnam during Vietnam ization required that you had to certify that the unit was prepared to deal with the enemy the same way yours did so 69 to 73 that's correct as we're leading up to the ceasefire you are saying these advisors in the field you're the American advisors were feeling the heat to report well on their counterpart units now this is not to imply that you have deliberate lying or anything that nature what you have is again a set schedule that says get out of here and if you didn't meet that schedule then someone said well perhaps you're not looking at it properly we had a number of reasonably good officers who were relieved from their jobs because they didn't come up and say their units were as good as they should have been and surprise surprise the people who came in and took their place suddenly found the unit had improved tremendously there was another problem with the estimates most had been written in 1972 during a major communist offensive when US ground and air support was still available to our allies now all that support was gone but these estimates had not been updated to show how the South Vietnamese might operate on their own if you base everything on the 72 offensive you're looking at US air support you're looking at a logistic system run by the US you're looking at a fairly large US president still in country we didn't really wait on the basis of what had happened in the loss of the various things we had given them before so what you were these assessments to you there could be a baseline but not a very good one and when it amounted to is if you accepted that the South Vietnamese Army and Air Force were adequate to their to our needs then you simply sat back and said well they were able to handle the enemy before clearly they can do it again but this was this was not really realistic there was another distortion in the intelligence picture hostile activity went down right after the ceasefire as communist forces concentrated on stockpiling supplies this encouraged the false impression that they'd been beaten into a standstill I don't think our people realized that that was deliberate policy on the part of the North Vietnamese not simply a matter of the South Vietnamese being that much better the DAO the defense attache x' office for all of its trappings was essentially a glorified supply depot responsible for moving military aid to the South Vietnamese during the ceasefire its staff did collect information on the supply situation and related issues but most of the information came from the South Vietnamese themselves who often hid their problems I don't know of anyone who sits down and says we'll look at all my problems here and look how bad I am and certainly not in terms of your professionalism as military Shockley says reporting from the South Vietnamese included lots of exaggeration to puff up their capabilities for them it was all about putting on a good appearance it's a matter of face if you were Vietnamese and in a battle and you lost 10 people then from your standpoint the other side had to lose at least 3 times that number or at least that's what you told the Americans often times the commanders would say I have a good unit and we killed this many enemy you ask where are the bodies don't see the bodies but there's their blood marks on the ground this means that that many were killed again I hate to use a term face because it's used too often but it was a matter of pride we don't want to be seen as not adequate and as a result there was this building up of their own capability well beyond what they were really able to do the South Vietnamese had another credibility problem according to a CIA estimate from earlier in the war 30,000 enemy spies were planted inside the South Vietnamese government and military structure some of these spies undoubtedly remained active after the ceasefire one more reason to question the reliability of reporting from possibly compromised South Vietnamese sources we had major problems with that particular problem Shockley vowed to upgrade the intelligence available on our allies but there was an obstacle a bureaucratic one right in his own office under a long-standing pentagon directive intelligence officers from the US Armed Services uniformed spies like Shockley himself were limited in how they could get and analyze intelligence about the South Vietnamese they could spy on the enemy but not on our friends normally a defense attache or have a say of any sort responsibility is to look at the friendly forces and to evaluate them in our case we were told that you can't make reports on them at least of any depth the rule was a holdover from the mid-1960s when US troop advisors have given chief responsibility for keeping track of the South Vietnamese US military intelligence officers were told to focus on the enemy now the advisors were gone but military intelligence officers were still barred from running spy operations against the South Vietnamese and the irony is the CIA and other intelligence agencies were relying on you guys in military intelligence to tell us about friendly forces but here and you discovered that you couldn't do it with his hands tied bureaucratically Shockley decided to improvise you sent your staff into the field to get whatever information they could so I stretched the point of saying we can observe and we can ask questions but not to go further than that what did you discover well particularly in the continent area we found out that the unit's there were using their trucks to support local businesses that the foxhole strength was about 50% of what was carried on the books that you had a number of people who just never showed up but their money was being siphoned off by the commanders it's simply trash on the company streets there's always an indication that you have low morale and you have low discipline and that's what we saw tell me more about those absentee recruits the so-called ghost soldiers this is someone who has signed up who is on your list as being there who doesn't show up it's not there so the ghost soldier phenomena means that assumed strength of a unit doesn't really exist that's correct but from what we saw in the first military region and in the second military reason it was pretty endemic to most military units as Shockley staff went about gathering intelligence in the field informally they faced a number of obstacles surprisingly enough many of them from the ambassador's own field representatives the consuls general or conscience there were four of them based in the four military regions of the country in deference to the ambassador's orders they were highly protective of the South Vietnamese making it difficult for Shockley and his team to report honestly on their problems especially in the Central Provinces known as military region - and in the Saigon area military region 3 I had about five people in each of the military regions and that is Americans and they were in some cases given good support and so forth but in two of the military regions they were not allowed to talk to any senior officers in the Vietnamese military how can you collect intelligence from them if you can't talk to him you can't okay Shockley says the Consul General for Military Region three the Saigon area was particularly obstructive he would not love the reports go through his particular system without vetting them first we were not allowed to meet with any senior officers by this I mean full colonel or in general and in addition to that we were oftentimes restricted in the movement that they could make where they could go and what they could see if the ambassador's field officers interfered with honest reporting the ultimate censor was the Ambassador himself Graham Martin Martin told us when he arrived in Saigon in early 1973 right after the ceasefire you will not engage in any proctological of the South Vietnamese body politic that meant that you CIA you state department you Dao you will not report on anything that makes the South Vietnamese look bad was that your experience with him it was I didn't have a direct influence by him until about six months after I was there but your boys in the field saw it yes so through the council journey nothing else a word about ambassador Graham Martin I knew him well I was his principal intelligence briefer and close to him personally he was a cold warrior of the old stripe he lost a son to combat in Vietnam he was not about to lose the country to the Communists some of us referred to him as the next best thing to a b-52 because he was so uncompromising and when it came to reporting on South Vietnamese weaknesses he simply wasn't going to have it for fear it would leak to the press and undermine public support for the South Vietnamese and their chances of getting additional aid from the US Congress my own boss CIA station chief Tom Pogue are told the ambassador's lie I tried to push back but like Shockley I was overridden there were many topics Martin put off-limits to intelligence reporting by everybody including problems that would ultimately cost the South Vietnamese nearly anything that related to corruption we were not supposed to report anything that related to gain the ghost soldiers which is a part of the corruption factor anything that appeared that the South Vietnamese Army our air force was not operating as it should anything that related to the political side whether it was local or whether it was a national level we were not supposed to report a if it was detrimental this was a systemic or systemic crackdown on the flow of honest reporting and information correct absolutely and it was this is why I use the term I believe mendacious pointing out that this was something that was deliberately done it was done with the intention of making sure that either South Vietnamese looked better than it was or that we did not report anything the crackdown on reporting extended directly - the defense attache z' office says Shockley the operational officers they're those responsible for getting supplies to the South Vietnamese demanded that he clear all of his intelligence reporting with them to protect their record and to please the Ambassador your reports were sent to the operations for people for review and they heavily caveated your reporting with statements that were designed to make it appear supplies were being delivered and everybody was happy in the field that censorship or manipulation of intelligence that's correct who were these people these were predominantly military officers excuse me who had been brought in with some combat experience and they were supposedly being able to check on whether the the materials actually got to where they were supposed to go they had no capability to go they were simply taking the word of those who said I shipped it out therefore it's there that is not necessarily the way you checked on supplies particularly in an area where there is a history of siphoning off things and selling them on the local market you were not able to verify that the stuff was there yet they did so without seeing it without going to look at it simply on the basis of what the Vietnamese told them that they had Shockley says the defense attache himself the first one he served under General John Murray took part in manipulating inconvenient reports by adding qualifying remarks to them to soften their negative impact usually there was a statement put at the end to clarify on the basis of the logistics I'd oftentimes by General Murray who was the defense attache would say okay you know this report is in but clearly it is incorrect because of the following we know that they got this much supply and so forth you wrote of several instances where he interceded to try to correct something that suggested supplies hadn't been delivered more hadn't come and Murray changed that or caveat yep Shockley's immediate superior Colonel William will grow let the censorship happen without doing anything about it he never told me that I should fight it or I should do anything he simply allowed the reports to go out with the caveats that were on them and he saw them also he could have put a second comment on it if he wanted to or he could have simply said we will not accept the comment from the Operations Division but he never did that he was a facilitator yes he was a facilitator in keeping certain information at least attuned to the needs of general Murray and presumably the Ambassador as well that's correct Shockley says lagrosse sometimes changed reports about South Vietnamese ceasefire violations to shift the blame to the enemy I had several reports that came in that indicated ceasefire problems on our side and I dutifully reported them only to have them sent back at times says Shockley lagron Seale South Vietnamese raged into Laos and Cambodia by ordering him to change mat coordinates to make it appear they'd occurred inside South Vietnam we were told you know you alter the coordinates why refused to do it but it was done over my over my head that struck me as being really sort of a sick way of doing things you accept it or you don't you report it honestly or you don't and if you don't you're going to be caught up and later trying to explain it and you can Shockley also thought Silla grow for trying to keep him isolated and ill-informed so he wouldn't challenge his authority he didn't think we were important enough to get the information or he saw it as sort of retaining his single role of being talking to the defense at assay and to the ambassador and being that particular conduit of information I don't think he thought we needed to know it I thought we did I want to pause for a moment on a word he used a moment ago mendacious you said policies practiced by the Ambassador with respect to reporting were mendacious that means they were lies you believe in retrospect that the Ambassador his staff and the acolytes out at Dao that were involved in mendacious policies I think so and it depends if you want to go back to the question of whether it's the sin of omission or the sin of commission I think in many cases it was the sin of omission leave it out because nobody needs that or it won't be important but in many cases it is that little piece of information that may make the difference in how you evaluate the Vietnamese forces and that to me is as dangerous as if you say okay thou shalt lie and if you leave it out or you say well this doesn't need to be reported then you're also making sure that the full picture doesn't ever be seen given the problems we've been discussing the censorship by the Ambassador the manipulation of intelligence the editing of reports by daos own staff given all of this how in the world could you have developed a realistic picture of South Vietnamese capabilities and needs if you're short on facts who then do speculate and the speculation is much simpler to say well look what they did in 72 look what they did in 73 how good they comported themselves in combat and you can sit back and say really they're really doing a good job you wrote to your wife and you said in mid 1974 we just do not know enough about the capabilities of our Vietnamese allies to make a pertinent military judgment so how could you justify a demands on Saigon behalf you tend to take their word for it without any way of evaluating and I think that if they say I need a billion dollars we were going to go ahead and say well that's what you're going to get Shockley says pressure to justify military aid to South Vietnam led to dishonest reporting as far back as he could remember you said in 1965 you learned that the US military was padding US aid requests inflating them by 10 to 15% to compensate for corruption on the part of the recipients the South Vietnamese this was fabrication yeah it meant that the American taxpayer was paying for stuff that really wasn't needed do you think that was a tendency if not an established policy in 1974 the time of the ceasefire after the ceasefire I would say it was there was always a question of will ask for more than we're then we need because we're not going to get it therefore we will do that so I think that created a problem Shockley says some of his dao colleagues conjured up purely arbitrary aid requests for the south vietnamese just because the US military had always gotten what it wanted in vietnam never mind if the requested aid items weren't needed and never mind if it meant bending intelligence to justify them in 1974 he says this mindset led one of his airforce colleagues to order up expensive Mach 2 jet aircraft for Saigon Zaire force even though Saigon zone commanders didn't want to waste the money on them we were going to ask for all of these nice goodies for the South Vietnamese but the South Vietnamese already had decided they didn't need them the South Vietnamese a decided yeah he decided they didn't need an ffiv aircraft at Mach 2 aircraft yet we were as of mid 1974 you wrote continuing to press for them I think it was probably more of a political gesture than it was a need for something in reality they needed rifles they needed bullets they needed that sort of thing some of the other stuff was just nice to have not necessary the military essentially for a very long period of time didn't have a clue how government worked they were simply sitting there saying well you know we asked for it that means we need it and we've got to have it and if Congress doesn't give it to us then they're not patriotic they're not doing what they should do without realizing that we should be able to fully justify anything we ask for even if it's a little painful to say maybe we don't need that we should say that but military oftentimes never really understood the relationship between the Congress the president and themselves it was always the matter of you know we're here we're alone we've got to be protected and protect ourselves and I think they were unrealistic totally in the way they were looking at things in mid August 1974 General John Murray retired as defense attache his replacement General Homer Smith seemed equally preoccupied with supply problems and little interested in intelligence issues there was also a come-to-jesus moment at the DAO the US commander in chief in the Pacific Admiral Noll Guyler arrived to tell Dao staffers it was time for a belt tightening because of US aid cutbacks the problem with after Guyler left that was almost a matter of simply saying okay well he's gone now we can go ahead and look at what we need for the vietnamese and still keep all of the requests then during the same period in august 1974 president richard nixon resigned amid the chaos of Watergate Gerald Ford took over in the White House and soon began pressing for new supplemental aid packages for Saigon but were these proposals really necessary or just pull from thin air they were from everything I could tell not necessarily needed some of your colleagues at DEA oh you wrote to your wife considered these aid requests talk of supply shortages as cynicism they claimed that the Ambassador was baiting Congress and the press so that he would have a scapegoat if Saigon was lost he can blame Congress what did you think about this theory at the time I took it as just another bitter person making comments I'm not so sure anymore it was not that we had to have the Supplemental but if you put everything forward as this is the important thing we have to have and if we don't get it then you find yourself a scapegoat as part of the new aid campaign the US Congress was told falsely that the South Vietnamese were desperately short of petroleum even though shortages were no longer urgent so that was a fabrication to at least a nicely contrived myth a good way to put it without calling it out why do you think Congress is failure to vote supplemental aid for Saigon in 1974-75 destroyed the country No the major thing that Congress has for is give us a legitimate accounting of what you need don't give us four and five sets of data that don't match up we never did that and as a result of that they were fully justified and not giving us what we asked for and from any standpoint there was no justification for this other than to try to pin something on Congress the big problem says Shockley was the lack of any solid intelligence to back up the final aid requests how do you ask for something that is going to support them when you don't know whether they need it or not you don't know how they would use it you don't know what they still have in the pipeline Shockley became so concerned about intelligence problems that he twice asked the Pentagon in the summer of 1974 to change the rules to allow him to begin spying directly on the South Vietnamese those who agreed with him at the Pentagon could not get a green light from their superiors this was a major problem that I kept trying to raise that wasn't heard because they couldn't get anyone to change the laws of the rules meanwhile Nixon's resignation altered strategic thinking in Hanoi the North Vietnamese had long been intimidated by Nixon's unpredictability and viewed his departure as creating new opportunities for them but they were wary of President Ford and decided to test his reflexes by turning up the heat gradually in South Vietnam as hostilities increased in the fall of 1974 Shockley began preparing a net threat assessment to determine how the South Vietnamese would respond to various enemy initiatives it was a major undertaking the first analysis of its kind at Dao it was made all the more difficult because of the shortage of good intelligence about our allies it was like pulling teeth getting information in most cases I had to go back and rewrite everything that I was given by the intelligence people and by the operations people in October 1974 at a conference of top security officials in Washington Shockley presented his analysis the ultimate package was - and this is in non-military terms that the South Vietnamese were likely to fold like a cheap tent once they were faced with any type of concerted attack that was not liked by anybody but nevertheless that's what I told him and I also said that's based on the best information I could get which isn't good enough let's pause here to consider what Shockley's telling us his threat assessment predicted disaster for the South Vietnamese in a concerted enemy attack exactly what would happen six months later his audience didn't take him seriously in fact the defense attache --zz office with Colonel aggros approval presented a second analysis at the conference that was more upbeat and more in keeping with what policymakers wanted to believe based on no reliable intelligence about the South Vietnamese and that wasn't all at the end of the October conference you've written one of kissinger's aides Winston Lord came to you and gave you his ideas on Saigon future and these sobered you he had no concerns and he privately talked to me and said we know all this we don't really care as long as they hold out for a term that you may have heard before called a decent interval we don't want them to embarrass us we want this to go on for a bit longer you didn't say how long but he thanked me for my briefing and said I agree with it talk about cynicism so you're being told that all of our commitments are like smoke designed to encourage the South Vietnamese but not really designed to do much more than that that's right meanwhile you were having no problems with ambassador Martin in November 1974 you had what you called a woodshed moment with him we had a report from a lieutenant colonel who was on the Joint General Staff and it was one of those things that is absolutely frightening he was talking about senior officers meaning generals who were presented in South Vietnamese generals providing information to the North Vietnamese trying to make contact with North Vietnamese trying to find ways to protect themselves and their families because they were convinced that there would be an attack and that they would lose and I reported this in a cable and I was called to see ambassador Martin who has three questions the first one was is this a reliable source which I said yes it is we've been getting information from this man for over a year he's always been reliable he is a man deeply concerned about what's happening and then he said well if he's a reliable source why are we reporting it we're reporting it because this is a bombshell this is one of most significant reports I've ever seen in the intelligence booth and he said well who gets it and I said well it goes to CIA goes to Defense Intelligence Agency goes to the Joint Chiefs of Staff goes to the Department of State goes to a Department of Defense he stops me at state and said if you send it to the Department of State it's going to be on the front page of the New York Times and The Washington Post tomorrow and I said I'm sending this through classified channels to your agency and he said they'll still put it on the front pages of the Washington Post and so forth and I started to say so what but at this point I thought not necessary so I was then told any report that reflects badly on the Vietnamese military the Vietnamese government the even the provincial level has to be sent to the embassy and they will send it out for me and did that ever happen No so in effect he created a mechanism which would absolutely stop you you weren't able to do any more reporting on the biggest news of all which was there is collusion apparently between the South Vietnamese command and the enemy yeah and that to me was probably the single most important report I got during the entire year I was there I got a few more like it not quite as devastating as this one but more at the local level sent those down and they were ignored as I don't know what ever happened to him I do know they didn't go out through embassy channels your immediate superior colonel LaGrone was sitting in when Martin chewed you to pieces about your report what did he do nothing and he didn't do anything in the car back to Dao and he never mentioned it to me again and therefore he did not support it wait a minute you said omission you know can amount to censorship that's great by failing to react to the ambassador's direct assault on your truth telling you he became complicit in it I agree I didn't want to agree at the time but yes I felt that I was not supported had all and that particular reporting something else happened in late 1974 to cause you concern about lagrosse professional instincts you've got a report that the North Vietnamese were moving radar controlled anti-aircraft artillery into South Vietnam why was that important well it was important in the sense that the particularly weapon they were sending down had effective range that was greater than any of the reconnaissance aircraft that the South Vietnamese had in other words it meant that you could not fly reconnaissance aircraft and to see what the enemy might be doing in the areas and we depended on aerial reconnaissance and photography for approximately 50 to 60 percent of all reports that went out they suddenly became blind in areas where the North Koreans were operating so I made these points at the meeting and this took place in the morning briefing and it was simply passed over and they went to the next day so I got my boss aside and said this is Colonel Grau and got him aside and said are you aware what this means and it was simply passed over nothing was said when Colonel agro your superior asked you to extend your tour in Vietnam you said no why three reasons the first one that I put and I meant that probably stronger than anything else I love my wife and I love my family and I want to get back to them because they're having a tough time my wife's having to deal with two kids and work full-time and deal with all of family issues and all the financial problems that arise ii have not been supported and what i wanted to do out here and I see no reason to stay because I'm not going to be supported further and in addition to that I have never been at an organization as mixed-up or seemingly poorly led as this one and I don't want to be a part of it other than that I liked it in early March 1975 three weeks before Shockley's departure the North Vietnamese launched their final offensive convinced that the United States would not intervene and aided by information they'd gathered from their own spies within Saigon High Command the South Vietnamese were caught by surprise and outmaneuvered they were handicapped by sagging morale and poor leadership the very problems Martin had excluded from our intelligence reporting within three weeks the bulk of the South Vietnamese Army collapsed like a cheap tent just as Shockley had predicted he left the warzone on March 22nd 1975 just as the last major South Vietnamese cities north of Saigon fell to the Communists in April ambassador Martin refused a plan for an orderly evacuation because he believed that what remained of the South Vietnamese Army gave him leverage to impose a negotiated settlement on the enemy if only president knew invent you resigned and gave way to a neutralist candidate acceptable to Hanoi I personally drove president to to Saigon air base on the night of April 25th to be smuggled out of the country he expressed thanks to me for everything the Americans had done for his country his departure changed nothing the Communists seized Saigon four days later just as our best intelligence agent had predicted in reports I had gathered from him personally and which the Ambassador had dismissed I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off of the roof of the u.s. embassy Shockley watched the final evacuation from a new job in the Pentagon it's like watching a terminally ill person you know they're going to die but you don't know when and when they do it comes with a shock we had about 500 Vietnamese who work for us in various parts of the country I had left information with my replacement that they needed to be rounded up in some way and gotten out and I found out later that quite a few did not make it it was very hurtful to know that we had not planned well enough for the evacuation that they could have been handled and dealt with during it was very emotional for me at the time and to a certain extent still is that it seemed that having known what was going to happen we could have prepared a lot better for it than we did back at the Pentagon Shockley was assigned to the office of the Undersecretary of defense for intelligence he immediately filed a report with his boss a monograph he called it about the intelligence problems he'd witnessed in Vietnam his message was crystal clear basically when I told you today and that is that the intelligence system we had was greatly hampered and what we could do because we could not collect against the friendlies that no one else was doing it either the Ambassador was at the head the primary blocker of things that were trying to send out pretty heretical stuff yeah it was certainly 180 percent outside of what was being said I got a lot of criticism from former colleagues in Vietnam I got quite a bit of criticism from contemporaries other lieutenant Colonel's and so forth and I got a call from general Murray who was our retired screaming at me over the phone saying that he was going to wreck my career and that he was going to contact the chief of staff of the army and tell him that if I was anywhere near the list for Colonel that I should be taken off of it Shockley's personal mini-crisis played out against the backdrop of a major political storm in Washington Congress was even then investigating past scandals involving the CIA and other intelligence agencies without Shockley's knowledge his monograph intended only for his Pentagon superiors was leaked to a principal investigator congressman Otis Pike a reluctant Shockley was subpoenaed to testify before pikes committee in December 1975 you prepared a five page presentation to deliver to the congressional committee it too was highly critical of the Ambassador what did it say I was saying that essentially he was making sure that we were not sending anything that appeared to be derogatory about Vietnam that could possibly get in the press and in other words I was blinded and my reporting was blinded thereafter during your testimony before the committee William Colby the CIA chief who sat in was friendly towards you but Daniel Graham general Graham head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was hostile as well he might be because he had consistently resisted your efforts to expand your authority to report on the South Vietnamese and you'd criticized him for it right absolutely you did not shake hands with me where Cole be dead and I'm sitting between these two guys and director Colby even asked me to have lunch with him and I did and he invited Graham as well and Graham Whidden wouldn't do it he wouldn't sit with you were pariah yeah in the militants cracked and in case I haven't made the point the day I testified was the day that the board was meeting to consider me for for Colonel not a good day shocked Lee's testimony might have sunk his promotion and his entire career but CIA director Colby came to his rescue writing a letter to the US Army praising his performance as an intelligence officer when you made the promotion you became full colonel that's correct thought maybe cold-eeze letter had had some influence I think it had a major influence because I had done the unpardonable I had stepped out of ranks and I was treated as if I had been a complete traitor to the army the promotion to Colonel and his outstanding performance record earned Shockley several more choice assignments including a posting at NATO headquarters in Brussels he retired in 1984 and for the next 18 years taught International Relations at Boston University his criticism of the embassy and his congressional testimony were largely forgotten meanwhile I quit the CIA and wrote a memoir faulting intelligence abuses in Vietnam and the botched evacuation of Saigon which left so many of our loyal allies stranded and at the mercy of the enemy the federal government prosecuted me for writing the book without CIA approval though it never accused me of leaking any secrets in 1980 the US Supreme Court upheld the decision against me and set new limits on free speech and new obstacles to anyone speaking out about intelligence problems soon afterwards several of Shockley's former dao colleagues published memoirs of their own that were favorable to the embassy and ambassador Martin they ignored Shockley's criticism and my own one Dao veteran who wrote about the war was an Army colonel named Harry summers his book glossed over Shockley's congressional testimony summoners even asked you at one point to prepare an article about what you'd seen in Vietnam intelligence practices and then he spiked it when he saw that the article you had written was so critical so he was part of the suppression of the very message you tried to deliver that's correct Colonel Agro wrote his account I wrote a book also a history for the Pentagon about the fall of Vietnam no mention of Henry Shockley every particular battle that took place it was and went out of its way to point out heroism and courage on the part of the South Vietnamese military even down to the regional forces there is one paragraph sort of almost hidden in there that mentions there was some corruption it doesn't address this at all it doesn't address the fact that the Vietnamese forces were basically a shadow of what they claim to be also it was very self complimentary in the sense that our report at this particular time pointed this out or pointed that out and so forth which was correct but it did not necessarily offer analysis of any sort that I felt was needed and it didn't address your concerns that there had been a censorship of reports about corruption or anything that reflected poorly on the South Vietnamese that's correct 'la grow later told a reporter that the only distortion in the intelligence picture in vietnam was a tendency on the part of the South Vietnamese to fault the enemy for ceasefire violations he said he knew nothing about any efforts to censor reporting any efforts by the Ambassador even though he had sat in on that session you had with Martin where Martin told you that you had to filter all of your reports through the embassy that's correct in 1979 you participated in a conference at the War College you proposed a discussion of intelligence problems in Vietnam one of your Co conferees didn't want that to happen what did he tell you that he didn't want to really know what happened because he had too many friends that died and he could not stand it if it turned out that we were mistaken and what we were doing I said you know that's not what this is all about this is - we all have our own experiences we should pool them for some particular purpose but it was opposed to it and so we were not allowed to do it that's one of the saddest things I've heard you say it suggests that because of our sacrifices we couldn't afford to learn the lessons we should have learned correct Saigon stopped military commander General Calvin Dion declared after the war it would have taken a generation for his countrymen to overcome the morale and leadership problems that led to their defeat such grim prognosis were seldom offered by South Vietnamese officials during the war itself and seldom reported by US intelligence one of the main lessons that Shockley and I took away from Vietnam was the need to know our friends our allies our proxies before committing to them in any future conflict what you're really mainly concerned about is making sure that we do a better job generally in reporting on our friends friendly forces allied forces wherever they that's correct and I later had an opportunity to be in NATO for example and again reporting that was not necessarily as objective as it should be just to be very precise when you talk about reporting on friendly forces you're not talking about counting heads that you could do what you're talking about is a qualitative analysis of how well friendly forces operate their capabilities their morale qualitative analysis right that's what was lacking absolutely and that is what the responsibilities of a defense NSA is but Colonel do you think that there is ever an incentive on the part of US military intelligence officers or certainly military commanders to say you know guys maybe our allies they just aren't very good I don't think that generally seeps into intelligence channels it probably doesn't and this is why most have assays who are sent out or former combat arms types who theoretically should be able to look at the unit and know more I would hope we have enough honest people to do the job I'm never sure we do but I know that you cannot put impediments into it and expect you're going to get good reporting and that's what we were doing in Vietnam just before leaving Saigon in 1975 Shockley sent a tape message to his wife Lila telling her of his disillusionment and despair that so many of his colleagues in Vietnam had lost sight of the truth I've grown apart philosophically in many ways also the idea of what is duty honor and country I find myself continually appalled by those who don't care by those who are content to do their job and get out after a year and go back and you have no thought for the future very little concern about what impact that they make I'm even more concerned about those who are willing to let me abuses to the system go by the boards because it's quote too difficult or too much trouble to get involved and quote I may not be much in this business but I have done what I have done with total honesty I must turn to you once again my help make my whole life and say to you that without you I am without the courage to do these things

Channel: frank snepp

Views: 25,244

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Id: kfswBN2POoc

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019