In Saigon in early 1965 the CIA completed two massive intelligence estimates on the situation in Vietnam and the possibilities for the future. The man in charge of them for the Agency was an experienced analyst who had spent more than ten years working on the country and who had been consistently prophetic about events. Now in his estimates he predicted that the Vietcong, and in particular the North Vietnamese, had an enormous capacity to escalate if the United States bombed. Not only that, but on the basis of everything known about them in the past, their responses to Western pressure, it was
...more
