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9 —————————— THE ADAMS PHENOMENON By the spring of 1968 CIA director Richard Helms realized the numbers debate with MACV would have to be reopened. The figures he’d acceded to the previous fall had proven, of course, to be unsupportable in light of the Tet Offensive. On the sixth floor at Langley, George Carver informed Adams. “I went ‘whoo-ee!’ and dashed downstairs and wrote a cable to Saigon,” Adams recalled. “And then all hell broke loose.”1 The inevitable conference got under way at CIA headquarters on April 10, 1968. Adams was not invited to attend but except for his absence the scene in the conference room at Langley was similar to past order of battle affairs, with the usual CIA, DIA, CINCPAC, and MACV crowd present. Helms appeared to make a brief opening appeal. “We’ve got to be honest,” he said, “we’ve got to be above board, we’ve got to put our best stuff on the table, we’ve got to negotiate these common needs so our best people can put this in print.” Helms left and the head of the MACV delegation , Colonel Daniel Graham, stood up. “I don’t care what the fuck Mr. Helms says,” Graham told the conferees, “the MACV position is going to prevail.”2 The DIA representatives at the talks were attempting to be the “honest brokers” between CIA and MACV, but to no avail. Both sides were clinging to intractable positions. “It was just a terrible, terrible situation,” recalled J. Barrie Williams, who was again with the DIA group. But MACV was in no mood for compromise, and in fact now sought a larger chasm between its numbers and those of the CIA. “I can remember,” Williams said, “Danny Graham just unilaterally striking strengths off of units to get within a given range.” General Phillip Davidson monitored the proceedings with concern from Saigon, but in the end he had nothing to fear. His chief of estimates, Graham, 144 Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 144 never let things slip Stateside. According to Williams, “Graham was given a mission to do, and he did it very well. I can’t approve of his integrity or anything like this, but he was going to keep the numbers down, and he was rewarded for it.” Soon-to-be-General Graham would henceforth enjoy rapid advancement. “One star, two stars, three stars,” said Williams of Graham’s subsequent promotions. “Davidson took care of his boy.” * Snubbed from the negotiations with the military, Adams learned of the outcome secondhand. “At the end of the conference,” he said, “the agency’s top count of VC was just below 600,000. Among other things, we’d marched the self-defense militia back into the estimate.” This hardly mollified Adams; the damage, he knew, had already been done. An agency colleague explained that “I think one of the things that really drove him — in fact he said it on a number of occasions — was he felt so sorry for the young guys who were conscripted, the people who were being killed unnecessarily because some politicians and bureaucrats tried to protect themselves and wouldn’t listen to the truth. That was a major, major thing for Sam; he would talk about the body counts all the time; the U.S. casualties and the tragedy of it all.” There had to be, Adams believed, accountability. Douglas Parry was a young economist and one of Adams’s new colleagues at the OER. Parry shared Adams’s sense of outrage. “You realize that in most other trades,” he told Adams, “these people would be in deep trouble. They lied about the OB before Tet, which caught them by complete surprise as a result, and now they’re trying to think up ways to get out of it. There ought to be an investigation. Somebody should be told about this.” Parry was idealistic. “I had been a Mormon missionary in Austria,” he said of his youth, “but I remember years before that, in ’56, it was the Hungarian Revolution and I remember going home at night and just getting in front of the radio and hearing what was going on. I was terribly emotional over that; we had promised those people, ‘If you strike for freedom we’ll back you’ — and we just let them get slaughtered.” As a Mormon missionary Parry went to Austria at age nineteen; at the end of his assignment he...

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