Mission to Niger and a Cautionary Tale from Vietnam

While nearly all the attention in the Wilson matter is focused on the leak of his wife's CIA employment, his original mission to Niger and the resulting intelligence are accepted as successful and accurate. He, clearly, believes that he has discovered the truth about Iraq's nuclear program and those that disagree are dishonest.

Rep. Peter King is one of the few who who has been willing to address this other critical issue. In an op-ed in the NY Post, he points out that

Wilson's investigation never addressed what the president said in his State of the Union speech, that the British source was separate from the CIA's and that the British stand by their finding to this day. In other words, that despite Wilson's posturing and outrage, everything the president said about Niger was true.

Blogger Lawrence Auster has also addressed this point.

it is evident from Joseph Wilson’s infamous op-ed in the July 6 New York Times that the tempest he stirred lacks any substantive basis. He established to his (patently unprofessional) satisfaction that Iraq could not have succeeded in purchasing uranium from Niger. He did not establish that Iraq did not attempt to purchase uranium from some other African country. Yet that was the assertion made by British intelligence and referenced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union. So Wilson’s op-ed, supposedly showing that the administration had ignored his intelligence finding in its supposed rush to war, actually shows no such thing.


They are the exceptions. The mainstream press and the pundit class have templated this story as brave whistle-blowing expert versus deceptive bureaucrats. It is one of their favorite themes going back to the Vietnam War.

One of the most famous Honest David/Lying Goliath battles went on for fifteen years. It concerned the 1967 intelligence estimates of Viet Cong strength and the TET offensive of 1968. The TET battles were over by the summer of 1968, but the battle of the estimates lasted far into the post-war period.

CIA analyst Sam Adams became convinced that the military was underestimating the VC Order of Battle. While the Pentagon and Westmoreland's staff put the VC combat strength at around 250,000, Adams insisted that it was nearer to 600,000.

Writing in the January 1995 number of Intelligence and National Security Ronnie Ford wrote of Adams:

Adams's 'gut feeling' was that he knew the enemy strength better than the military intelligence officers at USMACV. Instead of being satisfied that he had made his analysis known (to the White House, in fact), Adams pushed the issue of the enemy order of battle until it eventually consumed the entire US intelligence community, jeopardizing the US war effort.

After TET, Adams was convinced that the strategic surprise was due to the military's dismissal of his analysis of the OOB. As Ford puts it:

A man of honesty, integrity and loyalty to his country, he believed in his analysis so strongly that he became obsessed with being heard when his views were not accepted with the enthusiasm he thought they deserved. The obsession festered until Adams felt compelled to steal hundreds of classified documents from CIA headquarters to support his case when he finally found someone who would listen. Adams ultimately told his story to the House Select Committee on Intelligence, television producers, cheering crowds at the US Army War College, and publishers.

Adams was key source for CBS in its documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" that aired on 23 January 1982. This led to the (unsuccessful) libel suit against CBS by Gen. Westmoreland.

So far this follows the Hollywood script. Brave analyst using the free press to bring the truth to the nation.

Unfortunately, the story goes of the rails at this point. In the post-war period, North Vietnamese military histories were written and documents released. American historians got a peek on the other side of the curtain. As Ford notes:

The Vietnamese debate their defeat/victory, their strategy, their tactics and timing, but they do not debate their strength.

And that strength was roughly 235,000 Viet Cong. Sam Adams fought ferociously for a flawed analysis that was wrong by 150%. The men he accused of deception were right. The surprise of TET did not flow from underestimating enemy strength. But it may well have been exacerbated by Adam's relentless effort to get his 'gut feeling' accepted. The resources of the intelligence community forced to debate numbers were unavailable to assess enemy intentions.