
Intelligence: The God That Failed
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.

David Halberstam in Vietnsm
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 the system in Washington and further fed to the political establilshment , which was only too happy to receive information that conformed to its vision of events in Vietnam.
If the assimilation by the ruling establishment of information that comes from parallel or unofficial sources or does not conform to the prevailing opinion is an issue in open societies, the problem is compounded tenfold when a one-party system or a one-man rule prevails. The most glaring example is Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union.
'Shoot him. He lies.'On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to bring down the Soviet Union. The attack took Stalin by surprise but it did not have to be so. For weeks before the attack Stalin had been warned by a number of sources that Hitler was on the point of invading the Soviet Union. In the hours prior to the attack a German soldier crossed the lines to warn the Soviets of what was coming. His message was duly reported by radio to Moscow and the reply came immediately:“Shoot him. He lies.”

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