Conflicting Advice

He who is not sage and wise, humane and just, cannot use secret agents. And he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them.

--Sun Tzu, The Art of War

On the battlefield in Viet Nam and at the peace talks in Paris, the counsel of U.S. intelligence analysts weighs heavily. For it is as true today as it was around 400 B.C., when Sun Tzu wrote China's oldest manual of arms, that those whose trade is to uncover an enemy's secrets "receive their instructions within the tent of the general and are intimate and close to him." Yet when Richard Nixon becomes Commander in Chief, he will need an extraordinary measure of sagacity, wisdom, humanity and justice--not to mention delicacy and subtlety--to discern the truth in the reports prepared for him by Washington's intelligence operatives. As Inauguration Day approaches, the capital's cloak-and-dagger community is bickering furiously over Viet Nam.

Each group is preparing to offer conflicting advice to the new President. "Within a few weeks," an official predicts, "there is going to be one hell of a battle." At stake in what some observers call the War for Nixon's Ear is the direction the President-elect will take in his search for peace.

One group of analysts is convinced that the Communists, bloodied by 180,000 battlefield deaths so far this year, have battered themselves to the brink of impotence. If this reading is accurate, concessions can be wrung from Communist negotiators in Paris through astute haggling, reinforced by military muscle against a weakened Viet Cong.

But if a second group is right, no amount of tough talk is likely to budge Hanoi. While the pessimists concede that the enemy has been hurt, they insist that he still has plenty of fight left, with the will and capability for a prolonged struggle. The most drastic division of opinion concerns the part-time guerrillas known as hamlet guards. Pessimists set their strength at 250,000; optimists contend that they are not effective troops and should not be counted at all.

Optimism and Gloom. The intelligence quandary would be easier for Nixon to unsnarl if each segment of Government argued with one voice--with, say, the State Department citing political considerations to counterpoint the military contentions of the Pentagon. That has been known to happen. In 1963, after listening to conflicting reports from a general and a diplomat who had just returned from a joint mission to Viet Nam, President Kennedy was moved to inquire: "Have you two gentlemen been in the same country?"

Unfortunately, this time the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department are all split themselves. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research wears a gloomy mien that irks Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the optimistic deskmen of the East Asian bureau. In the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency are assembling a rosy picture of a seriously weakened enemy and a greatly improved South Vietnamese military machine, a vision shared by U.S. Commander General Creighton Abrams and his headquarters in Saigon. But the Defense Department's civilian-dominated Bureau of International Security Affairs is far more skeptical.

At CIA headquarters, a number of intelligence evaluators disagree with the optimists who report directly to Director Richard Helms on Viet Nam. The CIA does, nevertheless, unite to take potshots at the DIA's overly hopeful judgments. The two intelligence agencies are in such sharp discord that when Lyndon Johnson recently ordered them to come up with a figure on the size of Communist forces, they were unable to comply.

Futile Talks. In both Paris and Viet Nam, Communist actions last week served to confound optimists and pessimists alike. In a swampy paddyfield 50 miles northwest of Saigon, five unarmed American officers faced Viet Cong envoys dressed in grubby khakis during a 24-hour Christmas Day truce. Their futile talks, lasting two hours and 22 minutes, were supposed to deal with the release of three G.I.s. The Communists, who met with the Americans beneath a Viet Cong flag, seemed principally concerned with obtaining some form of U.S. recognition of the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong. The American prisoners remained in captivity after it was all over. The Viet Cong want another meeting in the same paddy at 9 a.m. on New Year's Day.

In Paris, negotiators from Hanoi and the N.L.F. seemed to be moving away from their previously intransigent insistence that the regime of South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu must go. "If the [Saigon] Administration does not change its policy," declared N.L.F. Spokesman Tran Hoai Nam, "it will be overthrown by the people." The implication was that Thieu's government might be an acceptable negotiating partner if it softened its equally stubborn nonrecognition of the N.L.F.

There were signs that Saigon was moving in the same direction. South Viet Nam's flamboyant Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, in a TV interview in Paris, stated that the Saigon regime might sit down with the N.L.F. to work out South Viet Nam's political future once Washington and Hanoi begin negotiations on withdrawing U.S. and North Vietnamese troops from the war zone. The new line was closely attuned to the views of Henry Kissinger, Nixon's White House Assistant for National Security Affairs, who believes that a two-track parley--involving parallel talks between the U.S. and North Viet Nam and between South Viet Nam and the guerrillas--may prove the quickest route to peace.

Table Talk. U.S. intelligence agencies, as usual, were at loggerheads with one another over the significance of the latest ever so slight shifts by both sides. The conferees in Paris remained at loggerheads too over the shape of the negotiating table around which they are to sit. That point has deadlocked the peace parley for almost two months, and last week the Communists announced that there would be no negotiations unless all parties sat down at a round table. Saigon has balked at such an arrangement, because it would accord equal status to the guerrillas. Thus the squabble over the shape of the table -- or tables -- remained as far as ever from resolution. "It is likely," sighed one exasperated letter writer to the New York Times, "that the next winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be a furniture designer."

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