Hiam, C. Michael

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Hiam, C. Michael

PERSONAL:

Married; children: two daughters.

ADDRESSES:

Home— Brookline, MA.

CAREER:

Author.

WRITINGS:

Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars, Steerforth Press (Hanover, NH), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

C. Michael Hiam's Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars is an in-depth look at a key part of the Vietnam War that still has relevance today. As is now well known, U.S. government agencies and the military kept hidden the true strength of Vietcong forces in order to provide less ammunition for war protestors at home. When the Tet Offensive came about in 1968, spurring on the eventual withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam, it was startling to most citizens in the U.S. who were kept in the dark about the true odds of winning the war. One of the lone insiders who tried to bring this fact to light was Central Intelligence Agency analyst Sam Adams. Hiam, whose father went to Harvard University with Adams, decided to tell this story, years after Adams's death at the relatively young age of fifty-five.

Adams first joined the CIA in 1965, and his skills with statistics and research were highly praised by his superiors. When he discovered that important information about the numbers of North Vietnamese troops and their strengths were being kept a secret for political reasons, however, he believed the truth should be known, even though he was not personally opposed to the war. After the Tet Offensive, Adams's "subsequent actions would have gotten him fired and probably arrested today," reflected Robert Sinclair on the Central Intelligence Agency—Studies in Intelligence Web site. Sinclair then wrote that "Hiam gives a blow-by-blow account of those battles, starting with Sam's demand that CIA essentially find itself guilty of cowardice. He smuggled classified documents out of the Agency and hid them. Some he buried in the woods near his farm; others he hid about in various places, including a neighbor's attic. The buried trove was almost unreadable by the time Sam dug it up—the paper worm-eaten and water damaged. Those he could salvage and other hidden copies he passed to the media and to congressional committees."

Under pressure from his bosses in the CIA, and leaders in the military, to keep the information under wraps, Adams was defeated in his efforts until 1982, when he served as a consultant to a CBS story that accused General William Westmoreland of the cover-up. He knew other key figures were involved, but he supported the story to try and bring the truth to light. The broadcast resulted in a lawsuit against CBS, which was settled in 1985. Still unsatisfied about what had been told to the public, Adams was writing about it in his memoirs when he died unexpectedly.

Who the Hell Are We Fighting? "offers a rich oral history relying upon the recollections of many key players," according to Library Journal contributor Patti C. McCall. "Hiam succeeds in making a forty-year-old dispute over the strength of America's Vietnamese enemy seem both timely and relevant," asserted Scott Laderman in History: Review of New Books. Laderman further stated, "While perhaps not a major contribution to scholarship,Who the Hell Are We Fighting? nevertheless offers a nice synthesis of our extant knowledge." Greg Rushford, writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review, appreciated that Hiam also writes about other key players in the scandal besides General Westmoreland, including Colonel Gaines Hawkins and CIA agent George Allen, who was Adams's superior. "Hiam provides a rich picture of the Viet Cong numbers debate, the people involved in Sam's battles, and the controversies that took up the rest of Sam's life," commented Sinclair. "He includes too much tedious play-by-play when he comes to the Westmoreland trial, but his account of Sam's earlier struggles is excellent." Sinclair concluded that Hiam's "story raises important questions about the relationship between intelligence and policy that persist to this day."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Far Eastern Economic Review, July 1, 2006, Greg Rushford, review of Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars, p. 65.

History: Review of New Books, summer, 2006, Scott Laderman, review of Who the Hell Are We Fighting?, p. 110.

Library Journal, March 15, 2006, Patti C. McCall, review of Who the Hell Are We Fighting?, p. 82.