The War: Strayed AID

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One obvious reason for such snafus is that there is only a handful of AID men to monitor the vast commodity program in Saigon. In March, the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information, headed by California Democrat John E. Moss, dispatched a trio of staff investigators to Viet Nam. About the time that the probe began, Washington-based AID administrators were sending in more auditors, and made preparations to install data-processing machines to handle the huge load of paperwork in Saigon.

Last week John Moss and five subcommittee members visited Saigon and held three days of hearings on the sloppy handling of AID shipments. One subcommittee member, Michigan Republican Robert P. Griffin (now that state's junior Senator), said flatly that the Commodity Import Program "has been very inadequately handled, particularly in the number of people involved and the controls on it." He added pointedly: "There has been some improvement in the past six or eight weeks—since it was learned that our subcommittee was coming over here."