CBS Fails to Back Charge, Westmoreland Lawyer Says : It Has Proven Only That There Was Dispute With CIA on Enemy Strength, He Claims

After three weeks of defense testimony in retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s $120-million libel suit against CBS, Westmoreland’s chief lawyer Thursday argued that the network has produced nothing to back up its charge that the general conspired to deceive Washington on the strength of enemy forces during the Vietnam War.

Instead, attorney Dan Burt told a federal jury, CBS has produced evidence only that there was a bitter dispute between Westmoreland’s command and the Central Intelligence Agency over enemy troop counts.

The assertion that Westmoreland was involved in a conspiracy to underestimate enemy forces at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967 “just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Burt made his remarks as CBS called more witnesses to back its 1982 documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.”

The program contended that in the months just before the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched the January, 1968, Tet offensive, Westmoreland caused enemy strength to be underestimated so that it would appear that the war was going well.

CBS still has several major witnesses to call, including Army intelligence officers, CBS correspondent Mike Wallace and producer George Crile, but under rules laid down by U.S. District Judge Pierre N. Leval, Westmoreland’s attorneys were permitted Thursday to give a brief interim summation.

CBS has contended that one of the devices used to keep the enemy strength estimates down was to remove Viet Cong self-defense forces from the count.

Burt told the jury that while the self-defense forces were not specifically counted in a national intelligence estimate prepared for policy-makers, the units were described in the report.

“People who are trying to deceive do not give the people they are trying to deceive the evidence of the deception,” he said.

Burt’s remarks came after former CIA analyst Joseph Stumpf told the jury of talking with intelligence analysts in Vietnam who were disgruntled because the enemy troop estimates that they submitted to their superiors were being cut.

“They told me,” Stumpf said, “that they were angry, frustrated, and disgusted at being part of an intellectually dishonest estimating process.”

Stumpf said that when he returned from Vietnam, he told fellow CIA analyst Sam Adams that he believed Westmoreland’s command was producing “a set of contrived numbers used to show we were winning the war at the time.”

Gregory Rushford, a former congressional investigator who studied the Tet offensive for a Select House Committee on Intelligence in 1975, testified that he told Adams during the investigation that he considered the enemy estimates “a sham.”

Recent testimony by CBS witnesses has concentrated on what Adams was told during the years that he researched the issue and while he worked on the CBS documentary.

Adams, who had once been responsible for counting enemy irregulars for the CIA, quit the agency in 1973. He then spent much of his time looking for evidence to support his belief that the enemy strength figures had been altered for political purposes.

He was a paid consultant on the contested documentary, and is a co-defendant with the network in the suit.