Backs Contention Westmoreland Deceived President : CBS Witness Tells a Stronger Story

On the evening in 1981 after CBS had taped its interview with retired Army Col. Gains Hawkins for a documentary on the Vietnam War, the network sent Hawkins and his wife tickets for a Broadway production of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

Hawkins, an old country boy from Mississippi, found more than a little humor in the selection, for he had spent the afternoon discussing what he considered top level “misbehavin’ ” in Army intelligence during the war.

He refused the tickets with thanks because, as he recalled this week, “I was mentally and emotionally exhausted” after the interview. He had not only made serious accusations against others, he had implicated himself in the production of intelligence reports that he considered “crap.” Under the circumstances, he much preferred just “to have two or three martinis and a dinner.”

Producer Visited Him

But that evening CBS producer George Crile came to his room to talk with him, and the subject again turned to what had happened in Vietnam in 1967. “I opened up to him more then because I was pretty tight,” Hawkins told a federal court jury Tuesday. “I mean not martini tight . . . I spoke really more freely with him then than I had before, went into more detail, detail as I recalled from the summer of 1967.”

The CBS documentary that brought Gains Hawkins to New York from West Point, Miss., in 1981 was “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.” It brought him back this week and into the witness chair in federal court as a defense witness in the $120-million lawsuit filed against the network by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. troops during four years of the Vietnam War.

In testimony that took him from jocularity to the verge of tears, Hawkins retold and went beyond the story he had told before CBS cameras, supporting the program’s contention that Westmoreland purposely deceived President Johnson and his superiors on the size of the enemy force faced by U.S. combat troops in 1967.

Tells Stronger Story

He became the third intelligence expert interviewed on the documentary to come into court in recent days and tell a stronger story than he had on camera in the January, 1982, telecast.

Attorneys for Westmoreland launched their cross-examination of Hawkins Wednesday, but will not complete it until the trial resumes next Tuesday.

Before Hawkins reached the stand, retired CIA analyst George Allen, who, according to one colleague, “had more time in Vietnam than Ho Chi Minh,” had already stiffened the CBS defense by going beyond anything he had said before. And, so had retired Maj. Gen. Joseph McChristian, who had once been Westmoreland’s top intelligence officer during his tour as the war commander.

‘A Political Bombshell’

In the broadcast, McChristian said that in 1967 he had gotten “the definite impression” that Westmoreland felt it would “create a political bombshell” in Washington if he forwarded suddenly increased estimates of enemy strength.

But on the witness stand, he flatly contradicted Westmoreland’s account of a key meeting between them. Under oath, before the jury, McChristian said the precise words of his former commander and fellow West Pointer had been: “If I send that cable to Washington, it will create a political bombshell.”

“Are you absolutely positive Gen. Westmoreland used the term ‘political bombshell’ during the meeting?” McChristian was asked.

‘Burned Into Memory’

“I am just as sure of it as I am seeing people in front of me right now,” he replied, looking at the jury. He said the words “burned themselves right into my memory.”

Allen, who was the CIA’s No. 2 expert on Vietnam, acknowledged to the jury that in his own off-camera interviews with the program’s producer, he had been far more candid than he had when he was before cameras.

He confessed that he had been less than forthcoming when he had appeared before a House intelligence committee investigating the issue of the enemy troop count. And, in the climax of his testimony, he characterized his decision to tell all he knew as one of the important moments in his life. He told the jury of lying awake one night before giving a sworn deposition in preparation for the trial. During the night, he said he had thought about “the events of the previous 15 years in which I had been the good bureaucrat, had rationalized, dissembled . . . .”

‘Crossed the Rubicon’

That night, Allen declared, he realized that he “had crossed the Rubicon . . . that I was in fact under oath and that finally the time had come to stop the dissembling, and to stop the rationalizing, the evasiveness and tell the whole truth about what had transpired.”

What finally transpired in the intelligence debate over enemy force strength in 1967, he declared, was a sacrifice of the CIA’s integrity “on the altar of public relations and political expediency.”

Hawkins, who now runs a nursing home in Mississippi, testified that when he was first contacted by CBS about appearing on the program he had agreed that since the war was over, the time had come for an “after-action report” on the intelligence controversy.

Seemed Less Certain

But in a portion of the interview not included in the broadcast, but shown to the jury earlier in the trial, Hawkins appeared less certain than he did on the television screen.

In the CBS “outtake,” the expert on the enemy troop count said he had not been ordered to cut enemy estimates, but had “deduced” that the high command wanted it done.

On the witness stand, however, he swore that he had operated under orders of Brig. Gen. Phillip Davidson, then Westmoreland’s new intelligence chief, and Col. Charles Morris when he arbitrarily reduced enemy strength estimates.

With their testimony, strengthened since the program was broadcast, Allen, McChristian and Hawkins are the foundation of CBS’s defense. Besides defending the program’s content, Hawkins and Allen were also important to defense efforts to show that the production bore no malice toward Westmoreland.

Ignored ‘Party Line’

Wednesday, yet another former intelligence officer, Norman House, a colonel in charge of Army intelligence for Vietnam’s northern provinces in 1967, testified. House, who did not appear on the documentary, was questioned by CBS lawyer David Boies. He said that when he did not follow what he called Westmoreland’s “party line” on enemy troop strength he was transferred to another job with less responsibility.

House said that in late summer of 1967 he was ordered by superiors to prepare a report showing the enemy was cutting its troops in the northern area. He said the day after he reported to superiors that he “could find absolutely no evidence to support the conclusion that was predetermined,” he was told that he was being transferred.