After he left the CIA in 1973, Adams sat down to write an account of his years in the agency. Adams loved intelligence work and that enthusiasm shines throughout the unfinished book he left when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1988. He had planned[...]to write a definitive account of the numbers controversy and the failure of American intelligence during the Vietnam war.

Scholars will regret that Adams did not live to carry out his plan, but what he left is perhaps more precious still - a book wonderfully alive, full of vivid characters, crisp dialogue, and a special feel for the strange world of intelligence analysis, where the only thing worse than being right too late is being right too soon.

There have been many accounts of the Vietnam war by the soldiers who fought it and the Washington officials who ran it. Adams watched the war from a unique vantage point; for years the secret intelligence documents all crossed his desk. By the end of 1967 Adams knew the war was unwinnable, and he spent the next fifteen years explaining what had gone wrong to anyone who would listen.

With the exception of a few brief editors' notes, War of Numbers is exactly the way Adams put it down on paper - as readable as a novel, and perhaps the best single account yet written about the politics of intelligence.