This piece was reprinted by OpEdNews with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Contextual Introduction by John Prados (Senior Fellow, National Security Archive)
Edited by Thomas S. Blanton (Director, National Security Archive)
Embargoed for release, Sunday, May 2, 2004
Two months after the leak of the Pentagon Papers generated front page headlines and a landmark Supreme Court case, TIME magazine reported:
"State's Secrets. The Pentagon, it seems, was not the only Government department to make a top-secret retrospective study of the nation's decisions in Vietnam. In 1968 Tom Hughes, then director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, ordered another report, far less voluminous and ambitious but with considerable potential impact.
"Composed by two State Department Asia analysts, the study compared the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations' key Vietnam decisions with the bureau's own major judgments during the same period. In almost every case, the intelligence reports called the shots perfectly about such matters as the ineffectiveness of the bombing campaign, Vietnamese political upheavals and North Vietnamese troop buildups. Daniel Ellsberg is said to have read the study as a consultant for Henry Kissinger in 1969 and reacted: 'My God, this is astonishing. I thought the CIA stuff was great, but these papers are even more accurate.'
"After publication of the Pentagon papers, the two known copies of the State study have been locked away. Ray Cline, the intelligence bureau's current director, has forbidden subordinates to admit their existence."
-- TIME magazine, August 9, 1971, p. 16
Secrecy and bureaucratic inertia kept this historic study hidden in State Department vaults for nearly 35 years, until Freedom of Information Act requests by Clemson University professor Edwin E. Moise and the George Washington University's National Security Archive forced the release of the bulk of the study in November 2003. Missing from that initial release because of a processing mistake was a significant part of the sources for section A-VI, which the National Security Archive obtained from the State Department on April 27, 2004. Still missing from the 596-page study are a number of questionable deletions on national security grounds, which the Archive has appealed.
In late 1968, Thomas L. Hughes, the director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), commissioned this study, intended as an in-house classified review and evaluation of INR's performance on the subject of Vietnam during the eight years of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. As Mr. Hughes explains in the retrospective preface he generously provided for this posting, he tasked two former INR analysts who were intimately familiar with INR's product but no longer serving in the Bureau - W. Dean Howells and Dorothy Avery - to produce the study. They wrote the chronological review of INR reporting, compiled the annexes of source material, and wrote the thematic summaries as well. Recently retired INR staffer Fred Greene then reviewed the material and wrote the critique section. Mr. Hughes refrained from supervising or editing the results. All of this material except for the "B" section, the 265-page "Annexes Quoting Sources," is included in this posting.
Then-INR director Hughes comments in his retrospective preface for this posting: "INR's analysis on Vietnam stood out as tenaciously pessimistic from 1963 on, whether the question was the viability of the successive Saigon regimes, the Pentagon's statistical underestimation of enemy strength, the ultimate ineffectiveness of bombing the North, the persistence of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, or the danger of Chinese intervention." Mr. Hughes contrasts INR's consistency with that "of leading actors who were hawks by day and doves by night." Mr. Hughes laments that "while we [in INR] were heeded, we were unable to persuade, sway, or prevail when it came to the ultimate decisions."
Archive senior fellow John Prados, who edited the Archive's forthcoming documentary collection on Vietnam, gives INR more credit in his contextual introduction, calling the Bureau "the mouse that roared." Dr. Prados concludes that INR "helped hone U.S. intelligence conclusions, called attention to the poor data and inadequate intelligence collection taking place in Vietnam, saved the CIA and other agencies from going even farther out on a limb than they climbed, and " also helped limit the war by contributing to the reluctance of top officials to escalate too far."
Archive director Thomas Blanton commented that "Lessons from the Vietnam experience with intelligence run directly counter to today's reform proposals for the U.S. intelligence community. Instead of a centralized 'czar,' this history suggests we need a multiplicity of competing agencies and analyses. Instead of policymakers who cherry-pick only the intelligence they want to hear, we need to encourage dissents and force closer examination of contrary findings. Instead of covering up with the cloak of secrecy, we need to open the insider critiques in real time and enrich the public debate."
Preface: INR'S Vietnam Study in ContextA Retrospective Preface Thirty-five Years Later
by Thomas L. Hughes, Director of INR 1963-69
Since the completion of this study in 1969, dozens of books and memoirs on Vietnam have appeared. A striking pattern has emerged from their disclosures. To a far greater extent than was imagined in the 1960's, prominent officials in Washington engaged in a combined patriotic, political, and careerist suppression of their strong personal doubts about the war. Cumulatively, another tragic dimension has thus been added to the Vietnam tragedy itself-the unveiling of a dramatis personnae of split personalities, of leading actors who were hawks by day and doves by night-a plethora of public hawks who were private doves.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
