The Pentagon's Brain (19 page)

Leon Gouré settled into the RAND Saigon villa previously occupied by the Zasloffs and got to work. His first report for the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project drew conclusions that were diametrically opposed to what Zasloff and Donnell had found.

“By and large,” wrote Gouré, “Vietnamese farmers hold no strong political views.” Indeed, it was “the ideological apathy of the peasant” that allowed most Vietnamese to concentrate on “personal survival,” not political aspirations, Gouré wrote. The majority of the Vietnamese were neutral, he said, and unlike people from the West, they did not adhere to the democratic notion that “they have a real freedom of choice.” Gouré argued that bombing was the pathway to victory in Vietnam. Bombing weakened the morale of the Vietcong, he said.

“Gouré gave the Pentagon exactly what the Air Force wanted to hear, about bombing [Vietnam],” Zasloff said. But to Zasloff, what was particularly egregious was that Gouré used the transcripts of Zasloff and Donnell’s prisoner interviews to draw his own conclusions. These conclusions, said Zasloff, “simply were not there.” Gouré did not interview any Vietcong prisoners on his own for his original report.

In the winter of 1965, RAND’s Guy Pauker flew to Washington to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to sell an expanded idea for the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, now being run by Leon Gouré. The premise, Pauker said, was to determine how best to “break the backbone of the VC [Vietcong] hard core.” In this new study, Gouré would interview Vietcong prisoners himself, and by doing so, he would best be able to determine the psychological effect that airpower and heavy weapons were having on the Vietcong. “Judicious exploration” of this concept, Pauker said, “offered considerable promise” about the way to win this war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed, and the ARPA project was expanded. With no previous experience studying Southeast Asia, Leon Gouré, RAND’s leading Sovietologist and civil defense expert, was put in charge of the expanded Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project.

The villa at Rue Pasteur was now a regular meeting place for RAND anthropologists and social scientists working on various ARPA projects over the course of the long war. This group included Gerald Hickey, now back in Saigon to work on studies about how Special Forces worked with Montagnards and how Vietnamese beliefs in “cosmic forces” factored into the war. In his memoir, Hickey recalled how a rising star at the Pentagon named Dan Ellsberg regularly came around the RAND villa. Hickey had met Ellsberg the previous summer and was aware of his reputation as a brilliant Harvard economist who had written a fascinating paper on how diplomacy was similar to blackmail. Ellsberg was now working in Vietnam for the Defense Department, with the mysterious title of “special liaison” to the Pentagon. One particular evening with Daniel Ellsberg stuck in Hickey’s mind.

“In November 1965, I was invited to have an informal dinner with Dan Ellsberg at his Saigon villa next to the heavily guarded villa of General Westmoreland,” Hickey recalled. “Dan was affable as we talked about many subjects relating to Vietnam, and then he
produced a packet of photos taken on trips into the countryside with [Lieutenant Colonel] John Paul Vann. In the photographs he carried an automatic weapon, which he said he often fired into the thick foliage along the road where the Vietcong might be hiding. Talking about these trips,” recalled Hickey, “Dan became more excited by the bravado, the adventure, something I had seen in other such men (
combattant manqué
[frustrated fighter], the French called them) who came to Vietnam for reasons I could never understand.”

Vietnam was a complicated, labyrinthine place to work and to live, with professionals serving many masters on many projects about whose real meaning they had no idea. This was the nature of classified defense work, with individual scientists and soldiers given but a sliver of the truth, just enough to be able to do the job without always knowing the reason behind it. Ellsberg’s bravado may not have made much sense to Hickey in 1965. In the fall of 1972, things would become illuminated when Ellsberg took actions against the Pentagon that would force him to go underground as, for a time, the most wanted man in America.

Leon Gouré continued to produce reports for ARPA, almost all of which promised the Pentagon that Vietcong fighters were rapidly losing motivation and morale. In “Some Impressions of Viet Cong Vulnerabilities: An Interim Report,” Gouré and co-author C. A. H. Thomson declared that Vietcong soldiers had become “discouraged and exhausted,” and that “life in the Viet Cong has become more dangerous and that the hardships are greater than in 1964.” These findings, Gouré said, drew upon a record of 450 interviews with Vietcong captives, “a body of evidence yielding more or less reliable impressions… of the Viet Cong’s current vulnerabilities.” Furthermore, wrote Gouré, Vietcong cadres had confided in him that they had lost hope. In recent months, as he put it, Vietcong
“soldiers have spoken more often of their probable death in the next battle, of never seeing their families again.” There is no mention in these reports that Vietcong fighters also expressed a willingness to die for their nationalist cause. Instead, Gouré’s reports served as pithy endorsements for continued U.S. Air Force bombing campaigns. “Fear of air power,” Gouré promised, would “bring the VC to their knees.”

In 1965 Leon Gouré became an advisor to Secretary McNamara. It was not unusual for him to be picked up at the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur and helicoptered to an aircraft carrier stationed off the coast of Vietnam, where he would brief field commanders on the studies that RAND was doing for ARPA and the Pentagon. When summoned to Washington, Gouré was treated with equal fanfare. The word among defense intellectuals was that President Johnson walked around the White House with a copy of Gouré’s findings in his back pocket.

“When Gouré would return from Vietnam to [RAND headquarters in] Santa Monica, he would stay long enough to change shirts, then fly off to Washington to brief McNamara,” recalled Guy Pauker, who had begun to sour on the truthfulness of Gouré’s findings. For as much as Gouré was respected by the Pentagon and the White House, he was creating enemies inside RAND. Gouré’s undoing began in late 1965, when RAND’s work on the Viet Cong Motivation and Moral Project came under scrutiny by Congress. During a hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, Congressman Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen demanded to know why the RAND Corporation had been hired to do so much work on the Vietcong when it seemed that what they were gathering was “straight military intelligence.” That work “should be done by the military,” Frelinghuysen said, not “highly-paid consultants like Rand.”

“As a matter of convenience, [we] gave the contract to the Rand Corporation, as an instrument of the military systems, to perform
the study,” ARPA’s Seymour Deitchman said. ARPA did not want to send its own people into the field—people like Deitchman—because they were “heavily occupied with operational problems associated with the war, and would not have time to spend several months on these detailed questions—important as they were,” Deitchman explained. A think tank like Rand had the manpower, the expertise, and the time.

Congressman Frelinghuysen did not agree. Not only was the work expensive, but also its conclusions were puerile, he said. He quoted from one of Gouré’s reports, calling the work so banal “it was something a child could have come up with.”

Frelinghuysen’s accusations caught the attention of Senator J. William Fulbright, who in turn made himself familiar with Gouré’s reports and was appalled by what he saw as Gouré’s manipulation of prisoner of war interviews. “[We have] received reports of recent surveys conducted by the RAND Corporation and others concerning the attitudes of the Viet Cong defectors and prisoners,” Fulbright wrote to Secretary McNamara. It appeared to him that “those in charge of the project may have manipulated the results in such a way as to affect the results.” Senator Fulbright demanded that the entire RAND effort be reviewed.

When McNamara assigned an Air Force officer to investigate, the Air Force found nothing wrong with the RAND work. But the national attention that Congress had directed at RAND made the corporation look bad. Despite RAND’s initial support of Leon Gouré, the controversy surrounding him could no longer be ignored. Gouré needed to be removed. RAND president Frank Collbohm sent analyst Gus Shubert to Saigon to take over the ARPA contract. Gouré was relieved of his duties while the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project continued on. By 1968, RAND analysts had conducted more than 2,400 interviews related to Vietcong fighters, which were typed up into 62,000 pages of text and compiled into more than fifty ARPA reports.

Leon Gouré was not alone in his downfall. William Godel, the man responsible for Project Agile to begin with, was arrested by the FBI in August 1964 on charges that he had siphoned ARPA monies into his own personal bank account. On December 16, a federal grand jury indicted Godel and two former Pentagon colleagues for defrauding the U.S. government and embezzling a total of $57,000 in Defense Department funds. Godel and his attorney worked hard to clear Godel’s name. Depositions were taken on his behalf from U.S. ambassador to Vietnam general Maxwell Taylor and others. A judge granted Godel permission to travel to Vietnam to take depositions from a Vietnamese general and Thai prince, but to no avail. At trial, the government produced 150 exhibits and a large number of eyewitnesses to testify against him. After eight days of testimony and ten hours of jury deliberation, William Godel was convicted on two counts of embezzlement and conspiracy to mishandle government funds. The judge ordered that he serve concurrent five-year prison terms on both counts.

William Godel, war hero, spy, diplomat, and the architect of many of ARPA’s most controversial programs in Vietnam, including its counterinsurgency efforts and the Agent Orange defoliation campaign, was sent to a low-security federal correctional institution in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. His personal financial benefit from the embezzlement scheme was determined to have been $16,922, roughly $135,000 in 2015.

D
uring the Vietnam War, the RAND Corporation handled soft science programs for the Advanced Research Projects Agency. For hard science programs, in fields characterized by the use of quantifiable data and methodological rigor, ARPA looked to the Jason scientists. The Jasons were an elite, self-selected club mostly of physicists and mathematicians interested in solving problems that seemed unsolvable to the rest of the world. All throughout the 1960s, their only client was ARPA, which meant that all of their reports—the majority of which were classified secret, top secret, or secret restricted data (involving nuclear secrets)—wound up on the desk of the secretary of defense. The Jasons were quintessential defense scientists, following in the footsteps of John von Neumann, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. The core group, including Murph Goldberger, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, and William Nierenberg, had been closely intertwined, academically, since the Manhattan Project during World War II. In the early 1960s, the Jasons began expanding, bringing some of their
Ph.D. students on board, including a young geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald.

In the Jason scientists’ first four years they had performed scientific studies for ARPA covering some of the most esoteric problems facing the Pentagon, including high-altitude nuclear explosions, electromagnetic pulse phenomena, and particle beam lasers. Their reports had titles like “The Eikonal Method in Magnetohydrodynamics” (1961), “Radar Analysis of Waves by Interferometer Techniques” (1963), and “The Hose Instability Dispersion Relation” (1964).

“We were interested in solving defense problems because they were the most challenging problems to solve,” Murph Goldberger explained in 2013 in an interview for this book, and for the first several years this was generally the case. Then came Vietnam. “The high goals set by the originators of the Jason concept were being met when the Vietnam War intervened,” said Gordon MacDonald, who joined the Jasons in the summer of 1963. “Murray Gell-Mann called to ask if I’d like to join Jason. I respected Murray a great deal,” and said yes to joining. The first year as a Jason, MacDonald recalled, “my contribution was principally related to [nuclear effects]—what happens to the ionosphere when you set off nuclear explosions, things of that sort.” But as individual Jasons became interested in Vietnam, so did the group. The first Jason to be very interested was Murray Gell-Mann.

Gell-Mann was one of the most respected thinkers in the Jason group, and one of the most esoteric. In 1969 he would win the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of quarks, a subatomic particle the nature of which is far beyond the grasp of most people. But Gell-Mann’s areas of interest were also incredibly plebeian; he liked to think about things common to all men, including mythology, prehistory, and the evolution of human language. During the 1961 summer study in Maine, Gell-Mann led a seminar called “White Tiger.” It addressed the growing counterinsurgency
movement in Vietnam from the standpoint of “tribal warfare.” This was well before any of the other Jason scientists were thinking about the Vietnam problem, Goldberger recalled.

Gell-Mann had unsuccessfully tried to get the California Institute of Technology, where he was a professor, to open a department of behavioral sciences. To Gell-Mann, guerrilla warfare was a topic well worth examining. “Because he was intrigued, the Jasons became intrigued,” Goldberger recalled. “We thought, well, if the Jasons can understand the sociology behind counterinsurgency, perhaps the Vietnam problem” could be solved. And so in the summer of 1964, ARPA asked the Jasons to conduct a formal summer study on Vietnam. William Nierenberg, a former Manhattan Project scientist, was chosen to lead the study, which was conducted in La Jolla. This was not the first time the Jasons examined what Goldberger called “the Vietnam problem,” but it was the first time they wrote a report about it.

Murray Gell-Mann invited the revered war correspondent and political scientist Bernard Fall to come and speak to the Jason scientists that summer in La Jolla. In 1964 Fall was considered one of the most knowledgeable experts on Southeast Asia. His book
Street Without Joy
, published in 1961, chronicled the brutal eight-year conflict between the French army and the Vietnamese communists, ending with the staggering defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. “Street Without Joy” was the name given by French troops to the communist-held stretch of road between the villages of Hue and Quang Tri.

Fall had personal experience with insurgency and counterinsurgency groups. A Jew born in Vienna in 1926, he fled with his parents to Paris after the Nazis annexed Austria. Fall’s father joined the French resistance but was captured, tortured, and murdered by the Gestapo. Fall’s mother was deported to Auschwitz, then murdered in the gas chamber there. An orphan by the age of sixteen, Fall joined the French resistance and learned firsthand what
a resistance movement was about. After France was liberated in 1944 he joined the French army, and after the war he worked as an analyst for the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals. Fall won a Fulbright scholarship and moved to America, where he was initially known as a scholar and political scientist. But wanting to see the guerrilla war in Indochina up close, he became a war reporter. Still a French citizen in the 1950s, he was allowed to travel behind enemy lines with French soldiers and reported from the battlefield. Bernard Fall knew what it was like to be a soldier. Soldiers and scholars alike admired him. He became a U.S. citizen and was one of the few Americans ever invited to Hanoi to interview Ho Chi Minh.

Fall believed in and advocated for U.S. development of counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam. Asymmetrical warfare was a formidable foe; Fall had seen it in person. At Dien Bien Phu, French forces had far more sophisticated weaponry, but the communist Viet Minh won the battle with the crafty use of shovels, a Stone Age tool. The communists literally dug a trench around French forces and encircled them. Then they brought in the heavy artillery and bombarded the French soldiers trapped inside. The battle of Dien Bien Phu marked the climactic end of the French occupation of Vietnam, and with the signing of the Geneva Accords, Vietnam was divided at the seventeenth parallel. Control of the North went to Ho Chi Minh, and control of the South went to Emperor Bao Dai, with Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister.

Fall believed that unless the Americans wanted to repeat what had happened to the French in Vietnam, their efforts had to match guerrilla warfare tactics in ingenuity. After Fall’s briefing, the Jasons wrote a report titled “Working Paper on Internal Warfare.” It has never been declassified but is referred to in an unclassified report for the Naval Air Development Center as involving a “tactical sensor system program.” The information in this report—the Jasons’ seminal idea of using “tactical sensors” on the battlefield in
a counterinsurgency war—would soon become central to the war effort. In 1964 this was considered just too long-term an idea and it was shelved.

Two and a half years after he participated in the Jason summer study in La Jolla, educating physicists and mathematicians about counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam, Bernard Fall was killed by a land mine in Vietnam. With terrible irony, the place where Fall was killed was the same stretch of road that had given his book its title,
Street Without Joy.
Fall’s book would become one of the most widely read books among U.S. officers during the Vietnam War. In 2012 General Colin Powell, now retired, told the
New York Times Book Review
that Fall’s book was one that deeply influenced his thinking over the course of his career from a young soldier to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to secretary of state. “
Street Without Joy,
by Bernard Fall, was a textbook for those of us going to Vietnam in the first wave of President Kennedy’s advisors,” Powell said.

The Jason scientists were expanding their work and commitment to the Vietnam War, and in the process, there was growing discord among them about how to proceed, specifically in the scientific gray area called social science. Some, like Murray Gell-Mann, saw promise in understanding human motivation. Others believed that using advanced technology was the only way to win the war. In Gordon MacDonald’s opinion, ingenuity needed to be applied across the board, including the use of weather as a weapon. Climate change is, and always has been, “a driver of wars,” he believed. Drought, pestilence, flood, and famine push people to the limits of human survival, often resulting in war for control over what few resources remain. With war escalating in Vietnam, the Pentagon sought new ways to use weather as a weapon. As a Jason scientist, MacDonald had a rare front-row seat at these events. Most of what occurred remains classified; but some facts have emerged. They
come from the story of Gordon MacDonald, one of the most influential and least remembered defense science advisors of the twentieth century.

Gordon MacDonald was born in Mexico in 1929. His father, a Scotsman, was an accountant at a Canadian bank in Mexico City. His mother, a secretary, worked in the American embassy down the street. His first passion was rocks, which he embraced as a child with the enthusiasm of a geologist until his childhood was shattered by illness. In the second grade, MacDonald contracted a mysterious disease that left him temporarily paralyzed in both legs and one arm. He had polio, an acute, virulent infectious disease that was not immediately diagnosable in Mexico in the 1930s. He was transported by railcar to Dallas, where, like so many child polio sufferers, he was left alone in a hospital, feeling abandoned. This was “not a pleasant experience,” he confided to a fellow scientist in 1986, in a rare discussion about his childhood trauma. From tragedy springs inspiration. While recovering in the Texas hospital, MacDonald developed two skills that would shape his life: reading everything made available to him, then discussing and debating the contents with a person of equal or greater intellect.

“One very positive thing that came out of that [experience] was an uncle, Dudley Woodward,” who lived not far away from the hospital, MacDonald recalled. “He made it a practice of virtually every day coming by to see me.” Dudley Woodward was a man of many interests, an attorney who also served as chairman of the Board of Regents at the University of Texas. “He subscribed to the
Dallas Morning News
for me,” said MacDonald. “I would read the paper and be ready to discuss world events with him every morning. We did this every single day.” Gordon MacDonald was just nine years old.

The young boy returned home to Mexico, but with an acute physical disability. For seven long years he could not attend school. “There was a gap in my education,” as he put it. “From second to
ninth grade… I had taken my first years [of schooling] in a Mexican school, a church school, and then I had no formal education. I did a great deal of reading at home.” What his uncle Dudley Woodward had taught him in the hospital in Texas had sharpened his ability to learn without formal teaching. His mother also helped, through tutoring. Finally he was well enough to attend school again and “made the leap into high school.” In an understatement he added, “And I was able to do very well.”

He left home for a military boarding school, San Marcos Baptist Academy, in rural Mexico, a day and a half away from Mexico City by train. School “was difficult with the disability.” He explained, “I still continued to suffer from physical deficiency, [while] trying to maintain standing with the corps of cadets.” San Marcos was a religious school, but it also had a football team. “My principal ambition was to overcome my physical defect, and so in the last year I was there, I played football, became a member of their starting team, and that I regarded as a very great achievement.” During summer vacations he worked at the American Smelting and Refining Company plant in San Luis Potosí, by the sea, where it was his job to collect ore samples in the field to bring back for study in the lab. During this time, he refined his interest in rocks to specific minerals and crystals. To keep current with world events, he listened to shortwave radio while he worked. In his junior year in high school, he decided to apply to Harvard University, and was accepted—on a football scholarship.

The year was 1946, and Gordon MacDonald had never been out of Mexico, except when he was in the hospital in Texas. He took the train up from San Luis, stopping for a short stay with an aunt in New York City, never before having visited a city outside Mexico or ridden on a subway. Finally, he arrived at the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “By a very good fortune I had been placed in Massachusetts Hall, which is the oldest of the dormitories at Harvard, and my room was right over the
room of Jim Conant, who was president [of Harvard].” Jim Conant was James Conant, the famous American chemist who had just returned from working on the Manhattan Project. “I got to know [Conant] very well later in life,” MacDonald said, but their first meeting was far more commonplace. “He made a point of letting [me] know I was living over his office, and to be appropriately quiet during the daytime hours.”

MacDonald chose physics as a course of study but soon decided that Harvard had “miserable” physics teachers. “I began to see the difference between memory and understanding when it comes to difficult subjects,” he said, meaning that to learn facts by rote was one thing, but to understand concepts on a fundamental level required serious intellectual discipline. After six months of physics, he decided to shift his concentration to geology and math. Socially he struggled. Many students had matriculated from exclusive boarding schools—St. Paul’s, Andover, and Exeter—and coming from a Bible school in Mexico, he felt outclassed. Playing on the football team proved almost impossible, but he refused to give up and instead persevered.

In his second year at Harvard, his interest in weather peaked during a confrontation with a visiting professor. The venerable Dr. Walter Munk, one of the world’s greatest oceanographers, was giving a seminar on the variable rotation of the earth and, as Munk later recalled, “how that was associated with a seasonal change in the high-altitude jet stream that had just been discovered.” So, “feeling reasonably secure that no one in the audience knew anything about this, I was surprised when a student in the first row interrupted [me] with rude comments about neglect of tides, variable ocean currents, and such like.” Dr. Munk was not amused and dismissed the student’s questions as inconsequential. The student was Gordon MacDonald. “Four years later I gave a much-improved account at MIT; there he was again sitting in the front row, complaining that I had not answered his questions of four years ago.”