General Creighton W. Abrams returned to the United States in the summer of 1972 to become Army chief of staff, bringing with him certain highly classified materials relating to his service in Vietnam. When, in the autumn of 1974, Abrams died in office, his successor ordered that these materials be sequestered, with both their existence and their location classified top secret. For two decades they reposed in a vault at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, unknown to all but their Army custodians. Eventually, however, I learned of these materials from sources in the Army hierarchy who were friendly to my work, and subsequently I was granted access to them.

The heart of the collection turned out to be 455 tape recordings made over the four years of General Abrams’ tenure in command of MACV. It took almost exactly a year of weekdays to listen to the tapes, which contained an estimated 2,000 hours of recorded material, and to transcribe selected portions. These amounted to nearly 3,200 pages of single-spaced handwritten notes, most of them verbatim records of what was said — about 835,000 words in all — culled from the literally millions of words on the tapes. Recently just over half of that material has been published by Texas Tech University Press as Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972.

The result may be something unique in the field of military history, a contemporaneous account that enables us to listen in on periodic councils of war, and on the briefings and discussions that took place when high-level visitors came to Vietnam. It is as though, in an earlier era, we could have heard Napoleon and his marshals plotting their strategy, or George Washington and his generals laying plans for battles of the Revolutionary War.

The historical record of the Vietnam War is very rich, but only on these tapes do we get to hear senior participants and their supporting staffs interact on a continuing basis as they seek to deal with the challenges of the war in its every aspect. These participants are a collection of fascinating personalities, many of them larger than life — Abrams, Ellsworth Bunker, William Colby, Earle Wheeler, Melvin Laird, Stanley Resor, John McCain, Thomas Moorer, Fred Weyand, Sir Robert Thompson, plus a collection of usually anonymous and often brilliant briefers and analysts.

The topics with which they wrestle are equally interesting — a diverse and comprehensive picture of the war in all its aspects. Thus a number of engrossing stories run through the tapes and the years they reflect.

These include changes in concept of the nature of the war and of strategy and tactics for its conduct, development of South Vietnam’s armed forces, the pacification program and neutralization of the enemy infrastructure among the rural populace, progressive withdrawal of American forces, intelligence breakthroughs in monitoring infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, interdiction of traffic on the trail, combat incursions into Cambodia and Laos, major battles culminating in the 1972 NVA Easter Offensive, land reform, enemy adaptations to changes in their battlefield fortunes, maturation of South Vietnam’s leadership, resumption of the air campaign against North Vietnam, political-military relations in Washington as they affected American leaders in Saigon, increasingly difficult budget strictures, the impact of negotiations in Paris on conduct of the war and, of course, the interplay of colorful and sometimes volatile American and Vietnamese personalities. In short, the tapes reveal new secrets, resolve old arguments and provide fresh insights into the latter years of America’s participation in the Vietnam War.

INTELLIGENCE

General Abrams was called home for consultations with President Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey (left) before being named commander of U.S. MACV in 1968. After Abrams took command, President Johnson instructed him to ‘follow the enemy in relentless pursuit’ (LBJ Library).

The single most prominent topic pervading the material through all four years is intelligence. Major General Phillip B. Davidson had the interesting experience of being MACV J-2 during the last year General William C. Westmoreland commanded American forces in Vietnam, then continuing in that post for the first year General Abrams was in command. Davidson was thus in a position to offer some interesting comparative insights into the importance accorded intelligence and its use in the early and later periods of American involvement.

In early October 1968 Davidson told a high-level visitor, ‘I think the intelligence is many times better than it was six months ago.’ He attributed this to several factors: ‘In the first place, the breakthrough that we got on infiltration gave us a great lead on the enemy we never had before.’ Davidson was referring to an extremely important development in signals intelligence, the newly acquired ability to intercept and decrypt message traffic detailing enemy movements down the Ho Chi Minh Trail so that, as General Abrams once remarked, they could ‘arrange a proper reception for them.’

And, said Davidson: ‘For the first time, there are agents placed in the right places, and they are giving invaluable information. I think our analytic capability has increased immeasurably over the last few months.’ He also acknowledged that the benefits of MACV’s computer capability were just beginning to be felt.

A couple of weeks later Davidson told a regional conference on intelligence collection, ‘The commander is pleased with his intelligence, acts upon it, and has forced the staff to act upon it — that is what has changed in the last four or five months.

‘I think,’ Davidson continued, ‘unquestionably one of the things that’s caused success is communications intelligence, perhaps the biggest.’ But also, he said, ‘I think the most dramatic proof has been the breakthrough in the high-level agents. The COSVN guy, the A-22, Superspook, 23, 24 — the guys that are really giving it to you the way it is!’ Someone commented, ‘That’s something ARVN’s done,’ to which Davidson responded, ‘That is an ARVN contribution first rate, you’re right.’

When General Charles Bonesteel, then commanding U.S. forces in Korea, visited Saigon, Abrams emphasized that having good intelligence was crucial to his success. Bonesteel asked, regarding intelligence, ‘Which is — what — half the game over here?’ Replied Abrams: ‘We-e-ell, sometimes I get it up around 90 percent. But I’ve never gotten below 50! This is your lifeblood. It’s your lifeblood! When I look back on my service, and especially my times in the Pentagon, I wish I had seen this as clearly. And I regret it.’

But, added Abrams: ‘I think the intelligence corps, the branch, and the quality has really been functioning. We’re getting some fine talent. Another place that I think they’re strong — there’re some warrant officers in these radio research units that are really first-class professionals. Been at it a long time, and they’re dedicated to it….The field is far more up on the step on intelligence than they were then [in 1967, when Abrams first arrived] — far more.’

In a session with his senior subordinate commanders, Abrams stressed: ‘Everything good that happens seems to come from good intelligence. A lot of this galloping around produces nothing because the intelligence [is lacking].’

And in a conference with General Cao Van Vien, chief of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff, Abrams said of the application of air power: ‘I think the targeting keeps improving. That’s very important. If the targeting is of good quality, then it lands on the enemy or his supplies. No good to land in the jungle, you know — nothing but monkeys or elephants. That’s all intelligence — it’s the only way.’

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