Film Editor Supports Gen. Westmoreland

The last witness for Gen. William C. Westmoreland in his $120-million libel suit against CBS testified Monday that he tried on several occasions to raise warning flags about the network documentary implicating Westmoreland in doctoring of enemy troop estimates during the Vietnam War.

But Ira Klein, 33, a free-lance film editor hired by program producer George Crile to work on the documentary, told a federal court jury that all of his warnings went unheeded.

Specifically, he said he had questioned the credibility of former CIA analyst Sam Adams, who was a consultant to the program. He said he also had suggested that Crile ask executives for more time to research the program and had objected to a former intelligence official’s being allowed to see tapes of interviews that had been conducted.

Testified Voluntarily

Klein was the only person who worked on the documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” to voluntarily testify in support of Westmoreland.

His daylong appearance on the witness stand came after nearly three months of testimony.

At the close of Klein’s testimony, the trial was adjourned until today,cq when Westmoreland’s attorneys are expected to rest their case.

Nearly all of Klein’s account had been previously reported in the press, and chief CBS attorney David Boies immediately sought to show that he had been motivated by personal animosities and that his knowledge about the production and the issues involved was seriously flawed.

Potentially most damaging to CBS was Klein’s testimony that Adams, who is a moving force in the production, had said in retrospect that “the premise of the show was inaccurate.”

Shortly after the broadcast, Klein testified, Adams had come into his editing room and remarked: “We have to come clean. We have to make a statement. The premise of the show was inaccurate.”

The documentary’s thesis was that Westmoreland, as commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam at the height of the war, had conspired to doctor enemy troop estimates to make it appear that the war was going far better than it really was.

A magazine article by Adams first interested Crile in doing the documentary, and Adams, a co-defendant with Crile and CBS, provided much of the crucial information.

Adams, who has already denied the account given to the jury by Klein Monday, is expected to be one of the first defense witnesses.

Klein spent most of the day on the witness stand describing his work with Crile.

‘Jeopardizing the Project’

He said that when Crile brought George Allen, a former intelligence official who appeared in the program, into a cutting room to view taped interviews, he had warned the producer that he was “compromising me and jeopardizing the project.”

On another occasion, Klein testified, Crile ordered him to turn the sound down during a screening of material for the program so network executives would not hear a comment by Gen. Westmoreland that the infiltration of enemy troops could be stepped up.

On cross-examination, Klein acknowledged that his personal relationship with Crile had been difficult and that he had come to harbor animosity toward the producer who had hired him.

He had, he acknowledged, told a reporter that “I couldn’t stand to look at him,” that he considered Crile “a social pervert” and “devious and slimy.”

After the airing of the program and Klein’s emergence as a critic of it, he rejected overtures by the network’s attorneys to interview him.

During his testimony Monday, Klein sat hunched forward with his arms resting on his knees, glancing at the jury occasionally, but never looking toward Crile and Adams, who sat only a few feet away from Westmoreland.