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was the enfant terrible of the CIA and indeed the entire intelligence community. He wrote one of the best books ever written on the politics of intelligence analysis, but, like most “best books,” it has been read by very few and understood by even fewer.⁸ Sam was the model of the crusading intelligence analyst. He had conclusively established that the intelligence community, led by the military, had severely and deliberately undercounted the numbers of Viet Cong with the prodding of military commanders who wanted to make the war effort appear successful. The bureaucratic infighting took place at the highest levels of the policy and intelligence communities, and the eventual release of thousands of documents supported Adams.

      Many of these documents were available because Adams simply decided to take them home, which is far removed from standard security procedures at the CIA. The end-of-the-day security drill was a simple one that included taking paper bags of classified trash to the appropriate burn chutes; tugging at safe and file drawers to make sure they were locked; and combing the area for stray pieces of classified trash. But in 1969, when the CIA’s deputy director, Admiral Rufus Taylor, delivered a letter that suggested Adams should “submit his resignation” if he could not be a “helpful member of the intelligence team at CIA,” Adams tried a new drill.

      

      Adams had no intention of quitting, so he began to remove documents in a daily paper, usually the Wall Street Journal, and bury them on a neighbor’s heavily wooded property in a wooden box that once held cheap Spanish wine. Like other whistleblowers, Adams walked the halls of Congress to interest our representatives in the intelligence failure that had destroyed so many lives in Vietnam, but he encountered a deafening silence, the same silence that would confront whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas Drake, and William Binney years later. When Adams and other contrarians were accused of exaggerating the numbers of Viet Cong, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow would typically add, “I’m sorry you won’t support your president.” Too many Republican senators on the intelligence committee dismissed my testimony because they thought it was nothing more than a reflection of a personal rivalry between two former friends at the CIA.

      A good contrarian, Adams took his protests to the highest levels, circulating blistering criticism on various National Intelligence Estimates and accusing drafters of “self delusion.”⁹ The head of the Board of National Estimates was no longer a fellow contrarian such as Sherman Kent, but a more academic leader, Abbot Smith, who was not a bureaucratic infighter with sharp elbows, but someone who believed that National Intelligence Estimates should present agreed judgments and not sharp alternative views. This is exactly why so many policymakers choose to ignore the substance of these estimates. Helms knew that any estimate dealing with enemy strength could become a sensitive political document and told President Johnson that he considered not publishing some of them.¹⁰ There was one estimate on Vietnam that Helms simply didn’t carry to the White House. The dereliction of duty had reached every level of the policy and intelligence communities.

      Like Ellsberg and Drake, Adams eventually chose to go public. First, there was an article in Harper’s magazine that I used in my courses on the CIA at American University, and then a CBS documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception. The article hit the stands only a few days before the fall of Saigon, but it had no impact. The CBS documentary had the lowest ratings of any national program for the week. The Adams saga is a reminder that the job of the intelligence analyst is not to ease the job of policymakers, but often to complicate it and to provide information they don’t want to hear. That is why whistleblowers are needed, and why messengers (i.e., whistleblowers) are shot.

      Adams gained notoriety because General William C. Westmoreland, who was charged with a “conspiracy” to hold down the numbers of Viet Cong, sued the network for $120 million, with Adams named as a defendant because he was a consultant to the show. So a middle-level intelligence analyst found himself guiding the evidentiary search at a trial that turned into the only major investigation of the Vietnam War. It is difficult to prove conspiracy but, thanks to Adams and his purloined documents, Westmoreland withdrew his suit before the case was scheduled to go to the jury.

      The Institute of Defense Analysis, a think tank for the Pentagon, corroborated Adams’s work and added its own pessimistic assessment of the bombing program, which was the “most categorical rejection of bombing as a tool of our policy in Southeast Asia to be made by an official or semiofficial group.”¹¹ CIA publications led to President Johnson’s decision after the Tet Offensive to curtail U.S. bombings in the North. Unlike Louis Sarris, who became a non-person at the Department of State with a windowless office that lacked a phone, Adams was treated as a hero by some of us at the CIA, because not only did he stick his finger in the eye of the policymaker, he was right to do so. The Adams affair sent a positive message to me about the importance of an independent intelligence service, an analytic corps prepared to tell truth to power, and the importance of tenacity in the process. It requires taking evidence where it leads and then standing up for it.

      

      Just as Gene Wicklund got it right on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Sam Adams got it right about the numbers of Viet Cong in Vietnam in the 1960s, another young colleague whom I admired—Bob Layton—got it right on the Tet Offensive of December 1968 that destroyed the Pentagon’s phony estimates of enemy strength. Layton was an intelligence analyst detailed to Saigon in mid-1967, and he prepared three major assessments in November and December 1967 that warned of a powerful, nationwide enemy offensive. One of the assessments uncannily predicted that the offensive “would in all likelihood determine the future direction of the war.”¹² These three assessments marked the finest predictive performance of any intelligence agency prior to Tet, but they had no impact on senior White House and CIA officials.

      Layton was the best kind of contrarian, because he strived to get the attention of Walt Rostow, the war’s chief cheerleader in the White House. Just as George W. Bush got a completely distorted picture of the Iraq War from Dick Cheney, Lyndon Johnson got an incorrect assessment of Vietnam from Rostow. This is exactly why analysts need to be tenacious in getting the attention of obtuse decision makers, and this is exactly what Gates worked to prevent. He constantly warned against “sticking your finger in the eye of the policymaker.”

      Layton was prophetic. In his third and final assessment, he predicted an all-out Viet Cong–North Vietnamese push and a willingness to accept “staggering losses” to accelerate a sharp decline in the American will to continue the war. In other words, the war was nearing a “turning point” that would determine the future direction of the country.¹³ The CIA’s special assistant for Vietnam, George Carver, gave this assessment to Rostow, and distanced himself and the CIA from the conclusions, which paved the way for the surprise in Washington when Tet hit. Carver was helped by the Intelligence Directorate’s North Vietnam analysts, who continued to believe Hanoi would follow a careful policy of attrition and resented a radical new assessment from outside their ranks.

      The official histories of President Johnson and Walter Rostow want you to believe they read Layton’s assessments, and agreed with them. President Johnson claimed that he “agreed heartily with one prophetic report from our Embassy in Saigon [that the war was probably nearly a turning point]. I was increasingly concerned by reports that the Communists were preparing a maximum military effort and were going to try for a significant tactical victory.”¹⁴ Rostow even quoted Layton’s assessments at length and disingenuously claimed they indicated the extent to which the White House “appreciated” the structure of the Tet Offensive and the “data available to Johnson” as early as December 1968.¹⁵

      This is why the U.S. intelligence community must protect the contrarian, often the best source for premonitory intelligence. During the worst days of Cold War McCarthyism, when the leading diplomatic voices such as those of Ambassadors George Kennan, Tommy Thompson, and Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen were muffled because of their conciliatory slant, it was the CIA and the Board of National Estimates that ignored McCarthyism and pursued “new thinking.” The ambassadors believed that the Soviets were more concerned with maintaining their own power than with expanding communism. CIA assessments supported this view, but McCarthyism ensured that hard-line neoconservatives

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