Intelligence: The god that failed

On October 22, 1963, US President John F. Kennedy invited the publisher of the New York Times for lunch. During the meal he suggested that the Times transfer its correspondent in South Vietnam, David Halberstam, to another posting.

Halberstam’s reporting indicated that the Saigon regime was losing the war against its communist Vietcong adversary. This contradicted the reports that Kennedy was getting from official American sources, which all claimed that the Saigon regime had the upper hand.

Halberstam was not removed from his position, and Kennedy would have done well to pay more attention to his reporting. But the president did not, preferring to depend on official channels that provided him, one must assume, with the news that he wished to hear, namely that Saigon, Washington’s ally, was winning the war.

It was obvious that Halberstam as a journalist and a civilian did not have anywhere near the volume of first-hand knowledge that was available to the government. However, he had numerous sources within the American counter-insurgency community, operating at the grass roots level, who shared with him, albeit confidentially, their misgivings about how the war was progressing.

Those misgivings were available to the government but they were systematically disregarded both by the American military and by the American Embassy in Saigon. In other words, the intelligence collecting system at the grass root level worked.

What did not work was the processing of the information at the level of Saigon, be it by the American military or by the diplomats. Thus the onward communication to Washington of the conclusions to be drawn from this locally generated information was flawed.

The flawed information was uncritically received by