War Of Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir of the Vietnam War's Uncounted Enemy

After he left the CIA in 1973, Adams sat down to write an account of his years in the agency. Adams loved intelligence work and that enthusiasm shines throughout the unfinished book he left when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1988. He had planned ... to write a definitive account of the numbers controversy and the failure of American intelligence during the Vietnam war. Scholars will regret that Adams did not live to carry out his plan, but what he left is perhaps more precious still - a book wonderfully alive, full of vivid characters, crisp dialogue, and a special feel for the strange world of intelligence analysis, where the only thing worse than being right too late is being right too soon. There have been many accounts of the Vietnam war by the soldiers who fought it and the Washington officials who ran it. Adams watched the war from a unique vantage point; for years the secret intelligence documents all crossed his desk. By the end of 1967 Adams knew the war was unwinnable, and he spent the next fifteen years explaining what had gone wrong to anyone who would listen. With the exception of a few brief editors' notes, War of Numbers is exactly the way Adams put it down on paper - as readable as a novel, and perhaps the best single account yet written about the politics of intelligence.
In the fall of 1967, political and military leaders in Washington said the Vietnam War was approaching “the crossover point”: More Vietcong soldiers were dying in battle each week than could be recruited. CIA analyst Sam Adams, however, was insisting the good news was an illusion. His estimates of enemy ranks and morale varied wildly from those being released by military intelligence for public consumption, and for use by commanders in the field. Adams' findings indicated the war was unwinnable, and when US leaders failed to acknowledge basic facts, he knew the intelligence was being politicized.   From inside the CIA and then after quitting the agency in 1973, Adams embarked on a one-man crusade to expose the truth. He loved intelligence work, and his enthusiasm for it shines throughout this illuminating memoir. Thanks to Adams, newsman Mike Wallace produced his influential CBS News documentary “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception;” General William Westmoreland was called to account, and his book dramatizes in clear, compelling prose how America’s involvement in Southeast Asia became such a tragedy.