Date

Sep 2, 1974

Description

These dueling dissent cables on intelligence reporting in Vietnam serve as a notable encapsulation of the strains of the State Department that led to the creation of the Dissent Channel. In the first dissent message, a foreign service officer warns that "a consistent distortion of the flow of foreign service reporting from Vietnam exists and is serious enough to call into question the Department's ability to reach any policy decision based on this reporting." Due to "tendency by higher-level officers to accept optimistic appraisals at face value, but to demand careful documentation of any unfavorable statement," the dissenter alleges that reports sent to Washington often included "frequent, significant, omissions," and included "a consistent distortion" where cables were "slanted" towards a positive interpretation of events. To combat this, the cable asked for the State Department to "reaffirm to all posts its commitment to insuring an accurate flow of reporting from the field" and to convene a panel to investigate inaccuracies in Foreign Service reporting.

Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll responded that a State Department inspection of the activities of the Embassy in Vietnam was already being carried out and that the concerns stated in the dissent cable were transmitted to the inspectors.

Two months later, the initial dissent cable and the Department of State's response to it elicited a furious twelve-page dissent cable from the Ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Graham Martin. Martin personalized the dissent cable about reporting from Vietnam as "a most serious charge against the most valued item any diplomat can carry in his professional baggage - his reputation for total professional integrity." Martin believed that the author of the dissent cable was remiss for not confronting the ambassador personally before filing the cable, which Martin believed was an "ad hominem attack on the integrity of a fellow officer" that "marked the Department's further descent into the neo-McCarthyism."

The Ambassador lambasted this use of the Dissent Channel as "not the opportunity for legitimate and reasoned dissent, but licensed anarchy." He also took issue with Policy Planning's suggestion that the forthcoming inspection of the Embassy in Saigon would study this issue as "an implication I rather think the Secretary [of State Kissinger] may find both distasteful and absurd" as Kissinger "has already directed that it be publically announced that the Department has complete confidence in the integrity and completeness of the reporting of the Saigon Mission."

Ultimately, the warning of faulty and slanted reporting from the Embassy in Saigon to be correct. Less than five months after Ambassador Martin's polemic, he oversaw the abrupt departure of American personnel from Vietnam after Saigon unexpectedly fell to the North Vietnamese.

Source

FOIA lawsuit, National Security Archive v. Department of State (17-cv-0770)

Document published in following posting(s):

Department of State’s Dissent Channel Revealed

Mar 15, 2018