The CIA’s time in Vietnam was one of chaos and confusion. Beneath all of the war’s political miscalculations and flawed military strategies lay an equally troubled and controversial intelligence effort. The Agency not only confronted an impenetrable Hanoi politburo and a resilient National Liberation Front about whom they understood little. They also grappled with their own quarrelsome generals and demanding presidents. Unequipped to acquire valuable intelligence and impotent in the bureaucratic battles, the CIA’s problems in South-East Asia amounted to an almost perfect storm. And in the eye of that storm stood Langley’s Special Assistant for Vietnamese Affairs, George Carver.

Worldly and sophisticated, Carver was the CIA’s best man for the job. With deep experience in East Asia – he had grown up in China, served in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan for the Department of the Army, and then in South Vietnam with the International Cooperation Administration – he possessed a wealth of regional knowledge. Bureaucratically savvy and a graduate of both Yale and Oxford, where he had received a DPhil in political theory and authored a monograph entitled Aesthetics and the Problems of Meaning, Carver also fitted seamlessly into the 1960s CIA, an agency renowned for picking up well-connected, well-to-do recruits from the East Coast social elite.

Nevertheless, as Carver’s career flourished throughout the 1960s, both he and the Agency found themselves caught in perilously tangled webs. His rise from junior officer to Langley’s principal Vietnam analyst saw him meddle in Saigon’s infamously unstable politics, squabble with stubborn generals and White House officials, and tussle – sometimes physically – with dominating presidents. And, as his solutions for solving the ever-deepening crisis in Vietnam yielded little success, Carver became emblematic of the broader American failure: despite all their power and talent, Washington’s ‘best and brightest’ met only disaster in South-East Asia.

Carver’s early days at the CIA foretold much of the coming trouble. Thrust out into the streets of Saigon in 1962 with his ‘horn-rimmed glasses [and] puckish grin’, the young case officer soon realised how volatile the city’s politics were. Carver had quickly made contact with a group of rebellious generals who were conspiring to overthrow the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem; but, after the plot was foiled, he found himself named as a co-conspirator in a Saigon newspaper. With his cover blown, the Agency transferred him back to Langley and made him a member of the Office of National Estimates (ONE). Carver, though, was undeterred, and his short-lived brush with Saigon began a years-long obsession.

Immediately making himself ONE’s most important East Asia analyst, the ambitious Carver frequently argued for the removal of the South Vietnamese president over the following months. Sending a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor, in August 1963, Carver claimed that Diem was incapable of organising a legitimate or popular government in Saigon. Pressing the administration to support any military officers willing to stage a coup, he also argued that it must install a new, Buddhist-led government as soon as possible. Bundy was so impressed by Carver’s recommendations, which breached the supposedly sacrosanct line between intelligence and policy, that he passed the note on to President John F. Kennedy.

With the White House’s patience with Diem already waning, Carver’s recommendations were unlikely to have significantly influenced its policy. Nonetheless, with Diem assassinated in a bloody coup while the US looked on only a few weeks after Kennedy had read his memorandum, at the very least Carver provided intelligence backing to the belief that the continuation of the Saigon regime was no longer tenable. Indeed, his recommendations had even received the explicit endorsement of his superiors at Langley. With Diem gone and a new, but still tumultuous era in South Vietnamese politics beginning, Carver continued his quest to shape American foreign policy.

Seeking a larger audience for his ideas, Carver took to the pages of Foreign Affairs in April 1965 after his latest visit to Saigon, and attempted to explain the political havoc he had witnessed. Reaching back as far as the 11th-century Ly dynasty, Carver argued that South Vietnamese society was a densely interwoven landscape of regional, religious, ideological, factional, and demographic divides that were prey to the manipulation of the communists. There were few in the US at the time that had such deep knowledge of Vietnamese history as Carver, and readers may have been left wondering if Washington had found itself trapped in a country it could never truly understand. Yet Carver was boldly optimistic, believing that the ‘real revolution’ in Vietnam could still nurture a stable, nationally-unified government aligned with the West even if one had never existed before – all the US had to do was escalate the war.

Now regarded as a politically skilful expert on Vietnam, Carver’s reports were read at the highest levels of the new administration of President Lyndon Johnson, with senior advisers such as George Ball and Robert Komer being eager readers. Applying his knowledge of Vietnamese history, Carver attempted to steer the White House away from offering assistance to certain Buddhist leaders and recommended appointing a new civilian government to replace the military junta, ideas which received the advocacy of the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. Many of these recommendations, which again stepped well beyond the remit of intelligence reporting, received frosty receptions from Johnson, who had a notorious distaste for the CIA. Some, however, still captured the administration’s attention, especially when they validated its more hawkish inclinations. In an April 1966 paper delivered to the White House, Carver recommended expanding the bombing campaign to hit a broader range of targets, and this soon became the favoured policy of Johnson and his new National Security Advisor, Walt Rostow.

In that same month, Carver penned a new essay for Foreign Affairs on the strengths and weaknesses of the communist forces. While recognising the difficulty of fighting a well-organised insurgency that had sanctuary in neighbouring countries, Carver still remained brazenly confident. Though he pressed for escalation, he believed that the communists lacked a strategy to win the war and that the South Vietnamese would never succumb to anti-Americanism. The CIA was quick to tell Congress that Carver’s article did not reflect their official line, yet his writing exposed deeper intelligence problems at the Agency. Even with vast resources, Langley were struggling to appreciate the NLF or the Hanoi politburo’s strategic thinking.

Carver’s work won him numerous admirers, perhaps none so important as his new Director at Langley, Richard Helms, who swiftly made him his Special Assistant for Vietnamese Affairs in September 1966. In his memoirs, Helms reminisced about Carver’s ‘boundless enthusiasm for work’, his ability to think ‘fast’ and write ‘voluminously and with great speed’, and his candour when speaking ‘bluntly to the highest officials’. Though his ambition did not endear him to everyone, Helms believed Carver would do a ‘superb job in one of the most difficult assignments CIA had to offer’.

One of Carver’s first tasks as the head of Langley’s Vietnam operations was to return to South-East Asia on a fact-finding mission in early 1967. Since his last visit in 1965 the war had grown rapidly, and there were now almost half-a-million American troops fighting in the cities and jungles of South Vietnam. Nonetheless, Carver remained buoyant. Writing in a memorandum that his ‘overall impression is one of progress and achievement’, the CIA’s man in Vietnam argued that the shift to conventional warfare benefitted the US military and that the new Saigon government was acquiring legitimacy. There was, in Carver’s mind, now a ‘considerably better than even chance’ the US would achieve success – success so grand only the ‘wilfully obtuse’ would not see it – in less than 18 months. Such assessments were welcome news to Rostow. Lauding Carver as ‘one of the three or four most perceptive people in government’, he forwarded the memorandum to Johnson, claiming that it was undeniable intelligence that the US was winning the war.

This accord between the CIA and the Johnson administration did not last, however. Throughout 1967, a dispute over the size of the NLF’s fighting force began to boil, with Langley believing the numbers were much higher than those produced by the military. The young Agency analyst Sam Adams is synonymous with what became known as ‘the order of battle’ statistics dispute, but Carver’s role was arguably just as important. Supporting Adams’ findings and asserting that the military’s statistics needed to be ‘raised, perhaps doubled’, he continued to hold his ground throughout the summer as the Johnson administration refused to accept the CIA’s estimates.

Deciding that a conference was the only way to settle the dispute, Helms dispatched Carver back to Saigon in September 1967 to meet with General William Westmoreland, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and Johnson’s head of counterinsurgency, Robert Komer. Confronted with staunch opposition, Carver found himself at an impasse. Cabling back to Langley, he bemoaned the military’s ‘stonewalling’ and claimed that any real chance for discussion had been ‘torpedoed’ by Westmoreland’s fear of damaging his ‘public relations’ campaign if the US admitted the NLF’s force was so large. Just days later, Carver submitted to the pressure and accepted the military’s numbers.

Why the CIA ultimately rejected its own findings has been a point of dispute. Komer boasted that Carver had ‘caved’ because ‘Helms told him to’, but there is little in the archival record to prove this. Komer himself had been berating Agency staff in Saigon, telling them that it was of ‘paramount importance’ to produce ‘nothing that would distract from the image of progress’. Either way, the result handed the military and the White House a valuable political tool, and they took full advantage of it. A range of television interviews, congressional briefings, and dinners with journalists were organised for senior administration officials to tout the intelligence that proved they were ‘definitely moving ahead’ in the war.

Carver and Helms’ willingness to alter the Agency’s intelligence enraged many at Langley. Some threatened to resign, Adams later wrote that his ‘hero had taken a dive’, and the legendary analyst Sherman Kent complained they had ‘gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty’. Yet a greater crisis was looming on the horizon for US intelligence, which again had Carver at its centre. While the Americans had been squabbling over numbers, the communists had been planning for a huge knockout blow offensive to be ready by early 1968.

Though a growing body of evidence revealed Hanoi was readying its troops, Carver told Rostow that any alarming reports were not ‘the considered opinion’ of the CIA. Calling the intelligence ‘doctrinal jargon whose wording cannot always be taken literally’ and ‘handwritten notes taken by students at low-level political indoctrination courses’, he dismissed the Saigon Station’s cables, relying instead on the preconception that the communists were incapable of mounting a large-scale strike. Carver ultimately had unilateral authority to decline the advice of his officers in the field with little recourse for objection. Now possessing great power, his Vietnamese affairs office was described as ‘its own little empire, separate from, and above, the other Agency entities that were working on Vietnam’. And at no point in late 1967 or early 1968 did anyone raise a serious protest against that ‘little empire’. Carver was thus free to prioritise his relationship with the Johnson administration, all while failing to imagine what was lurking in the shadows of Vietnam.

Though he does not bare sole responsibly for the intelligence failure, the outbreak of the Tet Offensive on 30 January 1968 was a jarring moment for Carver. Indeed, he was so stunned that he entirely reversed his opinions on the war: Carver now recommended a total pause to the bombing, the initiation of talks with Hanoi, and the re-organisation of the impotent Saigon government. After Johnson called a meeting of his most trusted advisers in March, Carver also told them that Hanoi’s defeats on the battlefield had done little to dampen their spirits or deplete their troop numbers, and that the American war effort was failing. Those gathered were so convinced that they immediately wrote to the president, urging him to withdraw his troops and work towards a peace settlement. Declaring that Carver had ‘poisoned the well’, Johnson requested that the CIA’s man give him the same briefing the very next day.

Arriving at the White House for his showdown with the president, Carver reiterated his stance and urged the administration to seek negotiations. Appearing incensed, Johnson stormed out of the Cabinet Room and slammed the door behind him, only to come marching right back in again. Looming over the diminutive Carver with his intimidating frame, the president ‘struck him with a resounding clap on the back’, grasped his hand ‘in an immense fist’, and began wrenching the analyst’s arm ‘up and down with a pumping motion that might have drawn oil from a dry Texas well’. Congratulating him on the briefing, Johnson told Carver: ‘Anytime you want to talk to me, just pick up the phone and come on over.’ Helms, who had looked on in fear for Carver’s career as well as his physical wellbeing, described him as looking ‘like a bedraggled sparrow that had taken a shortcut across a badminton court’.

A few days after Carver’s briefing, Johnson sat down at his desk in front of live television cameras and announced to the American public that not only would the bombing of North Vietnam cease while he pursued a peace settlement, but that he would also not seek another term in the upcoming election, all but ending his political career. Vice President Hubert Humphrey later wrote that Carver’s briefing had a ‘profound effect’ on Johnson’s decision.

Carver’s career did not end so suddenly. The war raged on, and his later years at the CIA were spent with the equally formidable Richard Nixon, a president with a pathological hatred of Langley, who did not tell its top South-East Asia analyst that he was imminently invading Cambodia in 1970. Carver then witnessed the humiliating finale of the Vietnam War from West Germany, where he had taken a new senior post, before retiring in 1979 to become a well-respected national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Despite its relatively placid conclusion, Carver’s journey reflected a larger disarray within American foreign policy – a disarray epitomised by the brightest minds of the era who, even with great power and knowledge, were constrained by the inescapable limits of foreign intervention. Some may have conjured up grand designs for Vietnam, others may have even been well-read in the history of the country and spoken its languages. Yet they were still just the meddling civil servants of a distant empire, blinded by their convictions as they lurched from one catastrophe to another in an ultimately unwinnable war. Tragically, no amount of confidence or ambition could ever change that brutal reality.