War of Numbers Read Online Free

falsified the enemy strength estimates in 1967 and 1968. I knew that hundreds of other people had been involved in the falsification. Therefore, I decided to launch an investigation myself. I tossed out most of the first draft of my book, and picked up the telephone to make the first of what became thousands of calls.
    This time I decided to do things the way I had at the agency—methodically and with precision. Using every conceivable source of information—documents, checkbooks, phone records, even medicine bottles, I constructed a day-by-day chronology of my ten-year career at the CIA. I made separate chronologies for specific subjects, such as the enemy strength estimate. With this basic framework complete, I had a place to put every newly acquired fact.
    My initial investigation took five years to complete. There were some three hundred interviews, many of which took several weeks to prepare for. The hardest problem was finding people who would talk. Since the Pentagon refuses to give out names, the most useful device in finding contacts was Christmas-card lists. I went to such places as California (to see Joe Hovey), New York (to see George Hamscher), Florida (to see Joseph McChristian), a bowling alley in McLean, Virginia (to see George Allen), and London (to see James Meacham). Perhaps the most helpful material that I came across was a batch of 322 letters home written by James Meacham to his wife Dorothy over a twelve-month period between 1967 and 1968. The first really unexpected material I found was during an interview with Bernard Gattozzi, once a lieutenant in General Westmoreland’s headquarters, now an official for the Department of Justice. By late 1980 I was in the home stretch of my book and had compiled a chronology of doings in Westmoreland’s headquarters, a chronology that if typed out would have been some seven hundred pages long.
    At one time I planned to call my book “To Square a Circle.” That title (which my editor axed because it sounded too much like a mathematics textbook) derived from the opening line of a cable that my CIAboss, George Carver, sent to agency headquarters from Saigon right after he had caved in to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) during the September order of battle conference at Westmoreland’s headquarters in 1967: “We have squared the circle,” he wrote, “… We now have an agreed set of figures.”
    Carver used the unusual phrase because of his familiarity with the life and works of Thomas Hobbes, on whom he had written a thesis at Cambridge University. Hobbes, the seventeenth century philosopher and geometrician who wrote Leviathan, had spent an inordinately long time trying to solve the geometrical problem of squaring a circle. Hobbes tried and tried, but finally concluded it couldn’t be done. Thus Carver—who was intimately familiar with Hobbes’ effort—was saying in effect, “I have achieved the mathematically impossible.”
    In the fall of 1980 who should pop up in my life again but George Crile, no longer an editor for Harper’s but now a producer of documentaries for CBS News. “What have you been doing with yourself since I saw you last?” he asked. I told him about the interviews and showed him the order-of-battle chronology. Apparently he was impressed with what I’d turned up because in December he submitted a formal proposal for a documentary to CBS Reports, a division of CBS News. The proposal centered on the possibility of getting some of my sources to repeat their stories on camera.
    CBS News gave a tentative okay early the next year and allowed Crile a small budget to see what he could do. Crile hired me on as a consultant, in part to persuade my contacts to come on camera and in part to describe my own activities in the month surrounding Tet.
    The CBS front office was skeptical that we could get anyone to talk, believing that it was one thing for former intelligence officers to share their stories privately with one of