War of Numbers Read Online Free Page B

intelligence had hardly considered. While other people worried about the “big issues” of the war, as riots broke out on the streets at home, and as American soldiers continued to fight in Vietnam, I read the Vietcong documents. In them I was to answer to my own satisfaction the question about who we were fighting. Perhaps the recounting of what these documents said will help others understand why America lost the war in Vietnam.
    * Never formally issued, the Pike Report was leaked to the Village Voice, which published it in 1976. The furor over the leak far overshadowed what the report said.

1   THE SIMBAS
    SEVEN DAYS AFTER I sat down at the CIA’s Congo desk, a rebellion broke out in Kwilu. It was January 1964, and according to an urgent coded message from the agency’s Leopoldville Station, the revolt’s leader was the Congolese politician, Pierre Mulele.
    “Who’s Pierre Mulele?” I asked my new boss, Dana Ball. “Damned if I know,” he said. “But you better write up this Kwilu ruckus before it gets out of hand. How about doing a quick piece for tomorrow’s Bulletin?”
    By “Bulletin,” he meant the Central Intelligence Bulletin, put out each morning except Sunday at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. That’s where we were, agency headquarters, in one of a row of sunlit cubicles on the sixth floor. Dana was chief of the Southern Africa Branch, which I had just joined. He was short, with salt-and-pepper hair, a tweed suit, and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. His father had run a hardware store in New Hampshire.
    I set to work. First I checked the National Geographic map scotch-taped to the partition wall next to my desk to see exactly where Kwilu was; it was a province whose seat was 247 miles east of Leopoldville, the Congo’s capital. Then I phoned Biographic Register downstairs to find out what they had in their dossier on Mulele: a good deal—he’d trained as a guerilla in communist China before becoming the Congo’s ministerof education and fine arts. Next I got from the Congo desk’s built-in safe drawer the Leopoldville Station’s latest aardwolf on the Congo’s prospects; the prospects were grim, the aardwolf said—“aardwolf” being the agency’s code word for a think piece from the field. And finally I wrote out an article in longhand on a single sheet of legal-size yellow paper.
    The aardwolf set the tone of the piece, which put forth the basic facts of the revolt, such as I could make them out, and concluded that the Congo government—whose main backer was the United States—was so shaky and inept that even a small rumble in a far off place like Kwilu “would probably be difficult to contain.” The branch secretary, Colleen King, a pretty twenty-one-year-old from North Dakota, typed it up, and I handed it to Dana.
    “Close enough for government work,” he told me after he’d crossed out several words with his fountain pen. “Now you call up State and Defense to see what they have to say. Bet you a dollar State’s going to weasel. It’s a fact of life around here you might as well get used to. The department doesn’t like climbing out on limbs.”
    Checking Bulletin articles with the State Department and Pentagon was standard procedure, because the Bulletin was supposed to be fully agreed upon before it left the CIA building early the next morning. At that time special couriers rushed it to the top hundred or so people in the government, including President Johnson, so they could read it before breakfast. I picked up the telephone on Dana’s desk and began dialing.
    “OK by me,” said the woman who handled the Congo for the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon. “I’m only surprised Leopoldville didn’t go down the tubes a couple of months ago.”
    “I think you ought to tone it down,” said the Congo analyst at State. Leopoldville aardwolfs were often alarmist, he explained, and besides, the Congolese were always holding little revolts that