None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam - Political booknotes: 20/20 hindsight - Review

NONE SO BLIND:
A Personal Account of the
Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
by George W. Allen
Ivan R. Dee, $22.50

MOST OF US HAVE LONG since tired of rehashing the "lessons of Vietnam." But with America now waging war against another little-understood enemy, a refresher course isn't a bad idea. What is striking about this well-timed book by a former intelligence analyst who specialized in Vietnam during the entire course of the war is how intelligence failures lay at the heart of the problem.

A 30-year veteran of the intelligence community, George Allen attacks U.S. policymakers for willfully ignoring the gravity of the Vietnam situation--specifically Allen's own repeated attempts to alert them to the many problems. Although the if-they'd-only-listened-to-me tone of the book grows a bit tiresome, there's little doubt that Allen's main contention is right: Overwhelming hubris and a foolish belief in American invincibility led military leaders to discount these warnings and plunge ahead. And he provides fresh, fascinating insider detail on how the misuse of intelligence contributed mightily to America's greatest military failure.

A patriotic Army brat raised on Coastal Artillery posts, Allen volunteered for the Navy on his 17th birthday at the height of World War II. After three years as a radioman in the Pacific Theater, Allen studied political science, international relations, and history at the University of Utah, before accepting a position on Army intelligence's Far East desk in 1949. By the time Dien Bien Phu fell in 1954, Allen had developed grave concerns about Vietnam, and gotten his first taste of military indifference.

Allen's intelligence bureau had discovered a massive buildup by the Viet Minh (predecessors to the Viet Cong) near the French garrison months before the attack. Allen had briefed his commanding officer, but the general took the mobilization to be the result of a French strategy to trap the enemy's main force. Allen's attempts to convince the general otherwise were brushed aside as "nonsense"

This early episode followed a pattern that would mark Allen's career, in which his warnings were ignored or censored to increasingly dire effect. Early on, Allen shrewdly identified two handicaps he believes sabotaged his career: the U.S. government's insistence on accentuating the positive and his own lack of access to sought-after intelligence. Allen's stubbornly realistic assessments in the wake of the mounting Vietnam nightmare seem only to have built up these roadblocks.

A 1962 episode epitomized Allen's frustration. In preparation for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's visit to Saigon, Allen's intelligence team prepared a map showing which side controlled which parts of the country. Allen's superiors were concerned that the map displayed "altogether too much red," signifying Viet Cong control, and not enough blue. So Col. James Winterbottom began stripping off areas of red, thereby converting Viet Cong territories to "status unknown" in an effort to portray the situation as less dismal. In spite of this, General Paul Harkins, commander of the American troops in Vietnam, introduced it to McNamara as his "horrors" map, complaining it was too generous to the enemy. "With another day of editing," writes Allen, "Colonel [Winterbottom] might have achieved a victorious end of the insurgency throughout the rural areas."

Allen's determination to influence American involvement in Vietnam led him to pinball between Army intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA throughout the late 1950s and '60s. As supervisors denied him access to sensitive information, Allen was consigned to mid-level positions from which he was unable to sound the alarm. He managed to get closer to the action, transferring from Honolulu to Washington and later to Saigon. But his prescient reports on Viet Cong military buildups, the deficient ideological base of the South Vietnamese government, and the need to combat guerrilla warfare were trivialized by higher-ups as "gloom and doom." By 1970, Allen's will had been broken. Asked what he wanted to be reassigned after a two-year leave in London, Allen replied, "Anywhere but Vietnam."

Allen's bitterness frequently gets the better of him, turning well-supported criticisms into childish finger-pointing. But what's astonishing about None So Blind is how often Allen was right. As early as 1966, in a meeting with McNamara, Allen declared that America could not win the war because the Viet Cong had sufficient resources and superior determination. Allen believed an immediate ceasefire that put the problem into a "broader regional and international context" was the only move that would allow the U.S. to save face while still preventing the spread of Communism into Cambodia and Laos. But Allen's analysis didn't persuade McNamara to change.

Allen is also adept at exposing the government's cynical propaganda campaign to reinforce Americans' support for the war. He reported at the time what has since become received wisdom: Virtually everyone was misled. Policy-makers were denied hard-to-swallow intelligence estimates, the press was fed overly sunny information, and the American people were the target of a White House campaign to manipulate public opinion.