The Warning That Left Something to Chance: Intelligence at Tet

John Prados, “The Warning that Left Something to Chance: Intelligence at Tet,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations (1993) 2:2, 161-181

John Prados has written many books and articles on subjects regarding government leaders and how their decisions have impacted the world. They range from John Kennedy and the Diem coup in which he lays out the case against Kennedy and his knowledge of the coup, to William Colby, former CIA director, whom was involved with Vietnam and many other communist hot spots around the world, and finally to charges that the Bush Administration fixed the intelligence on Iraq and is doing the same with Iran. There is one common thread that ties these articles and books together, and that is the mistakes made by those involved.

In “The Warning that Left Something to Chance: Intelligence at Tet,” Prados examined whether the Tet offensive involved a failure of intelligence comparable to that of Pearl Harbor, or if there was any truth behind General Daniel Graham’s, the head of MACV’s intelligence, assertion that, “We were not surprised by the fact of the Tet Offensive. We were not surprised by the massiveness of the number of troops committed. What surprised us was the rashness of the Tet attacks.”

Prados presented information like the amount of men and trucks observed infiltrating the south during the buildup to the offensive. He used documents captured by ARVN and US units during their operations that pointed to a large scale attack. He also related the story of a Vietnamese person hoping to become an American agent that told US Army Intelligence Officers about a “Spring Offensive” that would require participation from every battalion and would incorporate modern weapons and expert advisers.

Prados implies that these documents, interrogations, and other evidence should have made it overwhelmingly obvious to US intelligence and military officers that an attack was imminent. This was easy to see for an...