Memorandum for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger Regarding Communist Military Aid to North Vietnam

Digitized from Box 19 of the NSA. Presidential Country Files: East Asia and the Pacific at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library SECRET 2 Analysts are generally quite conservative and will usually not go beyond the available data base, no matter how small it might be. In essence this new paper, in addition to hurting our case, gives Congress less reliable figures than did the first one. Moreover, what really counts most are the goods delivered. That it costs us more to ship military hardware to Vietnam than it costs the Soviets, for example, is no help to the South Vietnamese and probably of little interest to Congress. We want to go back to square one. The costs will at least be comparable in some ways. We recommend that Congress be sent the military aid figures in Tab A, which are based on Communist prices (though using the recalculated ammunition figures in Tab B which lower the Communist cost $50 million based on a reassessment of U. S. equivalent costs). The paper for Congress should also make clear that these are commodity costs and should be compared with our commodity costs not with total aid. This leaves us with $295 million (DRV) versus $337. 5 million (GVN). We should also tell the Congress that we simply cannot produce even partially reliable figures on the remainder of Communist military aid, though we guess that the Communist total might be less than our total because, for example, our transport and handling costs are higher. The paper would explain why the GVN needs more military aid than does the DRV. As you know, we face two basic problems in dealing with these figures: first, everybody trys to manipulate the figures to suit their own political purposes while accusing others of doing the same; a calculation based on commodity prices is still far from perfect, but it at least compares things that can be roughly compared, even though our opposition will obviously try to contrast the Communist commodity aid figures against our overall aid total. Second, there is what we might call the Sihanoukville syndrone. CIA will not say anything which it cannot prove. At a time of declining intelligence capacity in Southeast Asia, this means that they are probably underestimating Communist aid to the DRV just as they once underestimated the importance of Sihanoukville as a transit point. But we have to live with that reality even though it clearly leads not only to political problems but also to the production of figures that tend to mislead the Congress and (when they are promptly leaked) everybody else. The commodity figures, which include equipment, ammunition, and weaponry, are still not accurate, but we think they are the best we can use under the circumstances. FORD a SECRET ONEY JORAS