CBS Readies Star Witnesses in Libel Case

CBS launched its defense against Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit here Wednesday, introducing testimony about altered enemy troop estimates, units wiped out with the stroke of a pencil and behind-the-scenes squabbling to get estimates of enemy strength beneath a “ceiling” acceptable to Westmoreland’s headquarters.

Laying the groundwork for testimony from their star witnesses, who will begin to take the stand today, network lawyers produced sworn statements from several intelligence officers describing the intelligence process as abused and misused during the height of the Vietnam War.

In a sworn statement read to the jury, retired Army Col. George Hamscher of Mineral Wells, Tex., testified he had come to feel himself a prostitute for his own role in manipulating the estimates.

‘Became a Whore’

“Specifically,” he said in the deposition taken two months ago, “I felt during that time, before it was over, and I certainly feel now, that I became a whore during the process.

“I feel that I prostituted my own previous integrity during this period in order to serve what I recognize certainly now as a wrongful process, because I got into it partly through admiration and respect for some individuals.”

Westmoreland is suing CBS over a 1982 documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” which asserted that he conspired to reduce estimates of enemy troop strength so it would appear that the United States was doing better than it really was in the war.

In addition to hearing Hamscher’s sworn statement Wednesday, the jury saw an interview with him, filmed for the program.

In both the interview and his formal deposition, the former officer described a 1967 meeting at CIA headquarters where representatives of the U.S. high command in Vietnam clashed with CIA analysts over the strength of enemy forces in Vietnam, and a subsequent session at the Pentagon where pressured intelligence officers struggled to whittle down the total count of enemy forces.

In both instances, Col. Daniel Graham, who later rose to lieutenant general and commander of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was described as the principal military figure.

Though Hamscher said he felt compelled to carry out orders from his superiors, he said he found Graham’s action “so unprofessional that it amounted to a falsification of intelligence.”

It was, Hamscher said at one point, “going down the line and crossing out units, wiping them out bloodlessly.”

He testified he had told Graham: “ ‘Look, Danny, we can’t do this; this is wrong.’

“And he looked at me and said: ‘Hamscher, if you’ve got a better way of doing this, let’s have it.’ ”

Westmoreland, who spent nine days on the witness stand at the outset of the trial last October, has contended that his differences with the CIA over enemy troop strength was that CIA figures included irregular units of “old men, women and boys” who were of no military importance.

But in another statement presented to the jury at the outset of the CBS case, CIA analyst Dwain Gatterdam estimated that at the time the behind-the-scenes intelligence controversy was raging, the CIA thought as many as 20,000 enemy troops were infiltrating into South Vietnam each month, while the U.S. military command put the figure at 5,000.

The Tet offensive, a psychological and political turning point in the war, followed in 1968.

Under the law, Westmoreland has to show that the documentary not only was inaccurate but that it was done with malice and with reckless disregard for the truth.

‘Dishonesty’ the Key

The complexity, not only of the intelligence issue but of the law, has caused U.S. District Judge Pierre N. Leval to frequently stop the proceedings to offer guidance to the jury.

“Dishonesty is what the case is about,” he told the jury once again on Wednesday, “not inaccuracy . . . (but) whether Gen. Westmoreland acted with honesty or dishonesty.”

CBS lawyers showed several other interviews Wednesday that did not make their way into the broadcast, among them one with a former intelligence officer named Marshall Lynn. Lynn said in the interview the handling of enemy estimates had created a deep cynicism among intelligence officers working in the field in Vietnam.