The Pentagon's Brain (15 page)

On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy approved the chemical defoliation program in Vietnam. The program, said Kennedy, was to be considerably smaller than the Advanced Research Projects Agency had originally devised, and it should instead have a budget between $4 million and $6.5 million. With President Kennedy’s blessing, the genie was out of the bottle. By war’s end, roughly 19 million gallons of herbicide would be sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam. A 2012 congressional report determined that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange.

From his ARPA office at the Pentagon, William Godel sent a memo, marked “Secret,” to Dr. James Brown, the Army scientist at Fort Detrick, asking Brown to come see him at once. During the meeting, Dr. Brown was informed that he was now officially the person in charge of defoliation operations in Vietnam and that he was a representative of the secretary of defense. “He was advised to be ignorant of all other technical matters,” notes a declassified memo. “If friendly authorities requested information on biological anticrop or antipersonnel agents or chemical agents or protective measures or detection kits, etc., etc. he [Dr. Brown] was to state he knew nothing about them and suggest that they direct their inquiries to Chief MAAG [Military Assistance Advisory Group].”

Like much of ARPA’s Project Agile, the defoliation campaign was a “Presidential issue.” Details about the program, what it involved, and what it sought to accomplish were matters of national security, and the narrative around this story needed to be tightly controlled. In the words of Walt Rostow, the Agent Orange campaign was “a kind of chemical warfare.” But it was also a “secret weapon,” and had the potential of serving as a magic bullet against communist insurgents in Vietnam.

A
t the RAND Corporation in sunny Santa Monica, California, by 1961 war game playing had expanded considerably since the days of John von Neumann and the lunchtime matches of
Kriegspiel.
For several years now, RAND had been simulating counterinsurgency war games played out between U.S. forces and guerrilla fighters in Vietnam. These counterinsurgency games were the brainchild of Ed Paxson, an engineer from the mathematics department, who called the game series Project Sierra. Unlike the old lunchtime matches, the Sierra games lasted months, sometimes more than a year, and involved various scenarios, including ones in which U.S. forces used nuclear weapons against communist insurgents. One day back in the mid-1950s, while observing one of the Sierra war games, an analyst named George Tanham made an astute observation. He mentioned that the entire Sierra series was unrealistic because the RAND analysts were assuming Vietnamese communist fighters fought like American soldiers, which they did not.

In the mid-1950s it was generally agreed that Tanham knew
more about counterinsurgency than anyone else at RAND. A Princeton University graduate and former U.S. Air Force officer, Tanham was a highly decorated veteran of World War II. After the war he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford in unconventional warfare and joined RAND in 1955. Tanham’s observations about the Sierra war games impressed RAND president Frank Collbohm, who sent Tanham to Paris to study counterinsurgency tactics, and to learn how and why the French army lost Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Tanham’s study was paid for by the Pentagon and was classified secret. When a sanitized version appeared in 1961, George Tanham became the first American author to publish a book about communist revolutionary warfare.

At the Pentagon, Tanham’s book caught Harold Brown’s eye. Brown, who had taken over Herb York’s job as director of Defense Department Research and Engineering (DDR&E), was the man to whom ARPA directors reported. Like Herb York, Harold Brown had served as chief scientist at Livermore laboratory before coming to Washington, D.C. Harold Brown reached out to Tanham and asked him to pay a visit to ARPA’s Combat Development Test Center in Saigon and write up his assessment of CDTC progress there. Tanham’s 1961 report remains classified, but he referred to some of his observations in a report three years later, since declassified. ARPA’s weapons programs in Vietnam—CDTC’s “gadgets”—needed to expand, said Tanham. And so did psychological warfare efforts—CDTC’s “techniques.” But equally important, said Tanham, was the war’s presentation back home. He suggested that the conflict be presented to the American people as a “war without guns being waged by men of good will, half a world away from their native land.”

When Tanham returned from Saigon, he met with the Vietnam Task Force, the Special Group, and the CIA. The following month Harold Brown sent a classified letter to Frank Collbohm asking the RAND Corporation to come on board and work on
Project Agile in Vietnam. RAND was needed to work on “persuasion and motivation” techniques, programs designed to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

In its “persuasion and motivation” campaign, ARPA began pursuing a less traditional defense science program involving social science research. Accepted as an offshoot of anthropology, and generally looked down upon by nuclear physicists like those in the Jason advisory group, social science concerned itself with societies and the relationships among the people who live in groups and communities. Harold Brown told Frank Collbohm that ARPA needed studies performed that could answer questions that were confounding defense officials at the Pentagon. Who were these people, the Vietnamese? What made one Vietnamese peasant become a communist and another remain loyal to President Diem? How did these foreign people live, work, strategize, organize, and think? The idea was that if only ARPA could understand what motivated Vietnamese people, the Pentagon might be able to persuade them to see democracy as a form of government superior to communism.

It was an enticing proposal for RAND. Social science research was far afield from the RAND Corporation’s brand of nuclear war analysis and strategy, and of game theory. But defense contractors need to stay relevant in order to survive, and Frank Collbohm recognized that with President Kennedy in office, there was much new business to be had in counterinsurgency studies and strategy. Here was an opportunity for RAND to expand its Defense Department contracts beyond what it had become famous for.

RAND formed two counterinsurgency committees to strategize how best to handle Harold Brown’s requests. One committee was called the Third Area Conflict board and was run by Albert Wohlstetter, the man behind RAND’s legendary “second strike” nuclear strategy, also known as NUTS. The second committee was run jointly by RAND vice president George H. Clement, an expert on missiles, satellites, and “weapons systems philosophy,”
and Bob Bucheim, head of the aero-astronautics department. Proposals were written, and in a matter of months, ARPA and RAND entered into an initial Project Agile contract for $4 million (roughly $32 million in 2015), to be paid out over a period of four years. With funding secure, RAND was given its own office inside the Combat Development Test Center in Saigon, where a secretary answered telephones, typed letters, and received mail. RAND analysts could reside in a French colonial villa down the street from the MAAG-V headquarters at 176 Rue Pasteur, or they could have their own apartments. In early 1962, RAND began sending academics, analysts, and anthropologists to Saigon. Soon the number of RAND staff working out of the CDTC would more than double the number of Pentagon employees there.

The first two RAND analysts to arrive in Saigon, in January 1962, were Gerald Hickey and John Donnell. Both men were eminently qualified anthropologists and spoke fluent Vietnamese. Hickey had been a professor at Yale University, where he specialized in Vietnamese culture. Donnell taught social sciences at Dartmouth College. Both had spent time working in Vietnam as government consultants. Before working for RAND, Hickey was part of the Michigan State University Group, whose members, at the behest of the State Department, counseled President Diem’s government in how to be better administrators. Donnell, who also spoke Chinese, consulted for the State Department on Asian affairs.

Saigon in January 1962 was a beautiful city, resplendent with French colonial architecture and still called the Paris of the Orient. Its broad boulevards were lined with leafy trees, and the streets were filled with bicycles, rickshaws, and cars. Locals relaxed outside in parks or in European-style cafés. Vendors sold flowers, and President Diem’s police forces patrolled the streets. But for Hickey and Donnell, there was a not so subtle indication that things had changed in Saigon since their last visits in the late fifties. “Signs of
conflict had replaced the feeling of peace,” Hickey later wrote. “Everyone was concerned with security.”

The road from the airport to RAND’s office at the CDTC was crowded with military vehicles. During dinner their first night in Saigon under the ARPA contract, Hickey and Donnell sat in a rooftop café at the Caravelle Hotel listening to mortar explosions in the distance and watching flares light up the edges of the city. “Both John and I were somewhat astonished how the advent of the insurgency had changed the atmosphere of Saigon,” Hickey recalled.

The plan was for the two anthropologists to travel into the central highlands and study the mountain people who lived there, the Montagnards. President Diem told his American counterparts that he doubted the loyalty of the mountain dwellers, and Hickey and Donnell were being sent to assess the situation. Before leaving for the mountains, they checked in with ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center, where they were met by a CIA officer named Gilbert Layton, who told them there had been a change of plans. The CIA was working on its own project with the Montagnards, Layton said, and there was not room for both programs. Hickey and Donnell would have to find another group of people to study.

Hickey and Donnell discussed the situation, consulted with RAND headquarters back in Santa Monica, and agreed on a different study to pursue. There was another important program that the Defense Department and the CIA had been working on with President Diem called the Strategic Hamlet Program, or “rural pacification.” The plan was for the South Vietnamese army to move peasants away from the “Vietcong-infested” countryside and into new villages, or hamlets, where they would allegedly be safe. The Strategic Hamlet Program offered financial incentives to get the villagers to move. Using Defense Department funds, Diem’s army would pay the villagers to build tall, fortress-like walls around their new jungle settlements.

Building these fences required weeks of intense labor. First, a deep ditch had to be dug around each new hamlet. Next, concrete posts needed to be sunk down into the ditch at intervals of roughly ten feet. Finally, villagers were to venture out into the jungle forests, cut down hundreds of thick stalks of bamboo, and make spears, which would then be used to build the fence. The South Vietnamese army would provide the villagers with the concrete posts and also with large rolls of barbed wire, courtesy of the Pentagon. The rest of the labor was for the villagers to do.

Defense Department officials saw U.S. investment in the Strategic Hamlet Program as an effective means of pacification and a way to help President Diem gain control over the region. The idea was that in exchange for their safety, the Vietnamese farmers would develop a sense of loyalty toward President Diem. But there was also a far more ambitious plan in place whereby ARPA would collect enough information on strategic hamlets to be able to “monitor” their activity in the future.

After the CIA canceled Hickey and Donnell’s Montagnard project, the men decided to study the Strategic Hamlet Program. It is unlikely they knew about ARPA’s future monitoring plans. Hickey and Donnell rented a Citroën and set off for a village northwest of Saigon called Cu Chi.

In Cu Chi, at a small shop, they came across a group of village farmers drinking tea. At first they found the villagers to be reticent, but after they spent a few days talking with them in their own language, tongues loosened up. As anthropologists, Hickey and Donnell were familiar with local farming techniques, and they also understood the villagers’ deeply held beliefs in spirit culture, or animism, the idea that a supernatural power organizes and animates the material world. After a few more afternoon visits, the villagers began offering information to Hickey and Donnell about what had been going on in their village as far as the Strategic Hamlet Program was concerned.

“Without our asking, the Cu Chi villagers complained about the strategic hamlet,” Hickey wrote in his report. The program had required villagers to move away from where they had been living, deep in the jungle, to this new village they did not consider their own. The mandatory relocation was having a devastating effect. People were distraught over having been forced to leave their ancestral homes and their ancestors’ graves. Here, in this new village, farmers now faced a new challenge as they struggled to plant crops on unfamiliar land. Villagers were angry with the Diem government because they had been told that in exchange for digging ditches and building walls, they would be paid ten piasters a day and given lunch. President Diem’s forces were supposed to have provided them with concrete posts and barbed-wire fence. Instead, the villagers said, Diem’s soldiers had rounded up groups of men, forced them to work, refused to feed them, and charged them money for building supplies. The forced labor lasted roughly three months, with only one five-day break for the New Year festival. The labor program coincided with the most important planting time of the year, which meant that many farmers had been unable to plant their own crops. As a result, they would likely end up producing only one-tenth of their usual annual yield. “One bad crop year can put a Vietnamese farmer in debt for several years afterwards because [farmers] live on a very narrow subsistence margin,” Hickey wrote. Subsistence farmers live season to season, producing just enough food to feed their families, meaning they rarely have anything left over to spare or save.

In one interview after another, Hickey and Donnell found widespread dissatisfaction with the Strategic Hamlet Program. Most villagers had never wanted to leave their original homes in the first place. The “compulsory regrouping” and “protracted forced-labor” had caused villagers undue emotional suffering. President Diem promised political and economic reforms, but nothing had materialized. Even on a practical level, the program was failing. A
group of villagers showed Hickey and Donnell a deep underground tunnel that had been dug by the Vietcong. It ran directly under the perimeter defense wall and up into the center of the village. Vietcong could come and go as they wished, the villagers said. And they did.

Hickey and Donnell spent three months interviewing villagers in Cu Chi. The conclusion they drew cast the Strategic Hamlet Program in a very grim light. In the winter of 1962, strategic hamlets were being erected at a rate of more than two hundred per month. The Defense Department had set a goal of establishing between ten thousand and twelve thousand hamlets across South Vietnam over the next year.

Hickey and Donnell presented their findings to General Paul Harkins, the new commander of the recently renamed Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV. The anthropologists believed that General Harkins would be unhappy with the news but that he would take seriously the villagers’ legitimate concerns. Years later, when the ARPA report was finally declassified, Hickey recalled the meeting. “I said, in essence, that strategic hamlets had the potential of bringing security to the rural population but they would not work if they imposed economic and social burdens on the population,” he said. If President Diem wanted villager support, he had to hold up his end of the bargain and pay the workers, as agreed. “General Harkins replied that everyone wanted protection from the Viet Cong, so they would welcome the strategic hamlets.” The discussion was over, General Harkins told Hickey and Donnell, and the anthropologists left Harkins’s office in Saigon.