The Pentagon's Brain (17 page)

“Thailand was the laboratory for the soft side and Vietnam was the laboratory for the hard side, or things that go boom,” explained
James L. Woods, an ARPA officer who worked at the CDTC in Thailand.

There was a bigger plan in play, until now unreported. Secretary McNamara was eager to have ARPA create additional Combat Development Test Centers around the world, something he considered an important part of the president’s national security policy of flexible response. Insurgent groups, also called terrorist organizations, were on the rise across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. “The U.S. would need to support Limited Wars in these remote areas,” one Project Agile report declared, adding that “similar representation is being considered by OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] in other areas of the world.” ARPA called its worldwide program “Remote Area Conflict” and hired the defense contractor Battelle Memorial Institute to open and operate two “Remote Area Conflict Information Centers,” one in Washington, D.C., and the other in Columbus, Ohio, to keep track of programs at the Combat Development Test Centers in Saigon and Bangkok and all future CDTCs, and to write summary reports and produce analyses of progress made. As early as 1962, ARPA drew up plans for CDTCs in Beirut and Tehran under this new “Remote Area Conflict” banner. The declassified CDTC files housed at the National Archives have been miscataloged and are lost. The only known copies remain with Battelle. Though the copies are more than fifty years old, Battelle declined to release them, stating that “unfortunately, it is Battelle policy not to release copies of Battelle reports.”

In Thailand, the new CDTC flourished. ARPA engineers in Licklider’s Behavioral Sciences Program office believed that computers could be used to model social behavior. Data could be collected and algorithms could be designed to analyze the data and to build models. This led Licklider to another seminal idea. What if, based on the data collected, you could get the computer to predict
human behavior? If man can predict, he can control. “Much of the work is theoretical and experimental,” stated T. W. Brundage, the first director of the CDTC in Bangkok, “and for the time being is mainly non-hardware oriented.” Brundage was referring to one of the first tests of Licklider’s theory to be conducted at the new center. It was called “Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces,” and involved 2,950 Thai soldiers, sailors, and pilots. It was an example of a CDTC program with a public face but a classified motive. The Thai government was told that the purpose of the program was “to provide information on the body size of Thai military personnel,” which could then be used for “design and sizing of clothing and equipment” of the Thai armed forces in the future. ARPA technicians took fifty-two sets of measurements from each of the 2,950 Thai participants, things like eye height, seated height, forearm-to-hand length, and ankle circumference. But the Thai participants were also asked a bevy of personal questions—not just where and when they were born, but who their ancestors were, what their religion was, and what they thought of the king of Thailand.

The true purpose of the “Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces,” and dozens of other surveys like it, was “data collection and data processing.” The information was sent back to the Computer Branch of the U.S. Army Natick Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts. “After coding the background information, all of the data were transferred from the data sheets to punched cards,” reads a declassified report. A digital profile was then made “on each of the men in the series.” ARPA wanted to create a prototype showing how it could monitor third world armies for future use. The information would be saved in computers stored in a secure military facility. In 1962 Thailand was a relatively stable country, but it was surrounded by insurgency and unrest on all sides. If Thailand were to become a battle zone, ARPA would have information on Thai soldiers, each of whom could be tracked.
Information—like who deserted the Thai army and became an enemy combatant—could be ascertained. Using computer models, ARPA could create algorithms describing human behavior in remote areas. Eventually these patterns could lead to predictive computer modeling, Licklider believed.

There were other individuals working with and for Licklider in his predictive modeling programs. One was Ithiel de Sola Pool, a left-leaning revolutionary in the field of social science. Doing contract work for ARPA, Pool became one of the first social scientists to use computers to create models for analyzing human behavior. He would become the world’s first authority on the social impact of mass media. J. C. R. Licklider and Ithiel de Sola Pool put together a series of proposals for ARPA to consider. Computer models could be used to answer important questions, the men said. They proposed that studies be done on “peasant attitudes and behavior,” “‘stability and disorder’ in several countries,” and “cultural patterns.”

Pool and Licklider both served on ARPA’s Behavioral Sciences Panel, and in that capacity they examined Hickey and Donnell’s study of the Strategic Hamlet Program. “They [Hickey and Donnell] have yielded much useful information and opened up promising areas for investigation,” Licklider and Pool wrote, “but with regard to the solution of these important, complex problems, they have barely scratched the surface.” The two behavioral scientists recognized that the information Hickey and Donnell had collected on the villagers could also be used to create computer models and to predict how these kinds of individuals might act in future conflicts. “These are important tools,” said Licklider, for they can lead to a better understanding of the “inexorable flow from conditions to consequences.” With baseline data in a Defense Department computer system, the behavior of the villagers could be covertly monitored, analyzed, and modeled. This was an effective means of command and control.

But as with the history of warfare, the desire to control and the ability to control are often at odds. Despite inventive government efforts to influence a population, events occur that are beyond military control. What happened next in Vietnam had consequences that could not be undone.

May 8, 1963, marked the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, and a group of religious followers gathered in the village of Hue to celebrate. Protest was in the air. Buddhists were being repressed by President Diem’s autocratic Catholic regime. The villagers of Hue had been told not to fly Buddhist flags, but they did anyway. The mood was festive, and a large crowd of nearly ten thousand people had assembled near the Hue radio station when eight armored vehicles and several police cars arrived on the scene in a show of force. Police ordered revelers to disperse, but they refused. Police used fire hoses and tear gas, still with no effect. Someone threw a grenade onto the porch of the radio station, killing nine people, including four children. Fourteen others were severely injured. A huge protest followed. The event became a catalyst for people across South Vietnam to express widespread resentment against President Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was head of the secret police. The Buddhists demanded the right to fly their own flags and to have the same religious freedoms accorded to members of the Catholic Church. When the government refused, more than three hundred monks and nuns convened in Saigon for a protest march, including an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc. The group made its way silently down one of Saigon’s busiest boulevards to a crossroads, where everyone stopped and waited. Thich Quang Duc sat down on a cushion in the middle of the street and assumed the lotus position. A crowd gathered around him, including
New York Times
reporter David Halberstam. Two other monks, each carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline, walked
up to Thich Quang Duc and poured gasoline on him. One of them handed Thich Quang Duc a single match. He struck the match, touched it to his robe, and set himself on fire.

David Halberstam described the devastation he felt watching the monk catch fire and burn to death right in front of him on the Saigon street. “Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring,” Halberstam wrote. “In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered even to think…. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”

During the self-immolation, somehow the monk was able to remain perfectly still. He did not writhe or scream or show any indication of pain. Even as he was consumed by fire, Thich Quang Duc sat upright with his legs folded in the lotus position. His body burned for about ten minutes until finally the charred remains toppled over backwards.

Journalist Malcolm Brown, the Saigon bureau chief for the Associated Press, took a photograph of the burning monk, and this image was printed in newspapers around the world. People everywhere expressed outrage, and overnight President Diem became an international pariah.

But instead of showing empathy or capitulating to the Buddhists’ wishes, President Diem, together with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu’s wife, the glamorous Madame Nhu, began to slander the Buddhists. Madame Nhu went on national TV in pearls and a black dress, fanning herself with a folding fan, to say that Buddhist leaders had gotten Thich Quang Duc drunk and set him up for suicide as a political ploy.

“What have the Buddhist leaders done?” asked Madame Nhu on television. “The only thing they have done, they have barbecued one of their monks whom they have intoxicated…. Even that barbecuing was done, not even with self-sufficient means because they used imported gasoline.” By the end of summer, the crisis was full-blown. The White House advised President Diem to make peace with the Buddhists immediately. Diem ignored the request and instead, in August 1963, declared martial law.

In late October, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., told President Kennedy that a coup d’état was being organized against President Diem by a group of Diem’s own army generals. In the now famous “Hillman cable,” the president, the ambassador, and diplomats Averell Harriman and Roger Hillman agreed not to interfere with the overthrow of Diem by his own military. In the cable, Ambassador Lodge gave secret assurances to the South Vietnamese generals that it was fine with the White House for them to proceed with the coup.

On November 1, 1963, a group of Diem’s generals overthrew the government of South Vietnam. President Diem and his brother escaped to the Saigon district of Cholon, where they hid inside a Catholic church. The following morning, November 2, the brothers were discovered. Diem and Nhu were thrown into the back of an American-made armored personnel carrier and driven away. Sometime shortly thereafter, President Diem and his brother were executed. Their bullet-riddled bodies were photographed, then buried in an unmarked grave in a plot of land adjacent to Ambassador Lodge’s house.

When the leader of the Vietnamese communist movement, Ho Chi Minh, learned of the assassination, even he was surprised. “I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid,” he said.

Out in the countryside across South Vietnam, the garrison state constructed by President Diem and the U.S. Department of Defense began to crumble. The local people, be they paddy rice farmers or
committed Vietcong, began tearing down the fabricated enclaves the Diem regime had forced them to build as part of the Strategic Hamlet Program. News footage seen around the world showed farmers smashing the fortifications’ bamboo walls with sledgehammers, shovels, and sticks, as the strategic hamlets disappeared. Seizing the opportunity, the communists began sending thousands of Vietcong fighters to infiltrate the villages of South Vietnam. They came down from the North by way of a series of footpaths and jungle trails, which would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Soon it would be impossible to tell a neutral farmer from a committed communist insurgent.

Command and control was an illusion in Vietnam. Despite millions of dollars, hundreds of men, and the use of lethal chemicals as part of a herbicide warfare campaign, ARPA’s Project Agile—with its cutting-edge gadgets and counterinsurgency techniques—was having little to no effect on the growing communist insurgency spreading across South Vietnam. Perhaps Americans in Saigon might have been able to foresee the fall of President Ngo Dinh Diem, but it is unlikely that anyone could have predicted what happened shortly thereafter, halfway around the world in Texas. Twenty days after the execution of Diem and his brother, while riding in an open car through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, President John Kennedy was shot dead by an assassin.

Another president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would inherit the hornet’s nest that was Vietnam.

T
he anthropologist Gerald Hickey leaned out the side of a low-flying military aircraft watching the sea snakes swimming below. The weather was warm, the sea calm, and as the aircraft he shared with a team of ARPA officials approached Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Siam, the water was robin’s egg blue. It was the winter of 1964, and Hickey was back in Vietnam, working for the RAND Corporation on another ARPA contract, this time studying how U.S. military advisors got along with their Vietnamese counterparts. The war that did not officially exist marched on.

The ARPA officers were heading out to the island to test weapons and gear which they would then turn over to their junk fleet commander counterparts, local Vietnamese fishermen paid by the Pentagon to patrol the coasts and keep an eye out for Vietcong. Hickey was here to interview participants on both sides. “En route, the ARPA officers tested the new AR-15, an early version of the M-16, by shooting at long sea snakes, which when hit, flew into the air,” Hickey recalled.

Once on the island the group set up a beachfront camp, stringing ARPA-engineered hammocks between palm trees and setting up ARPA-engineered tents before heading over to the steep sea cliffs, where they tested the ruggedness of ARPA-designed military boots. Hickey tagged along, notebook in hand, taking notes and asking questions, as he always did. After the day’s work, the men sat around a fire pit eating grilled shark and giant sea turtle, washing it down with rice and La Rue beer.

After the Phu Quoc Island trip, Hickey headed back to Saigon and then up to the U.S. military facility at Da Nang, conducting dozens of interviews along the way. On July 4, 1964, he caught a ride in an H-34 Marine helicopter and headed into the Ta Rau Valley to a Special Forces camp located at Nam Dong.

“Known as deep VC territory,” Hickey noted in his journal.

Captain Roger Donlon, commander of the unit at Nam Dong, met Hickey at the dirt landing pad when his helicopter touched down. Hickey noted how heavily fortified the camp was, its perimeter ringed with anti-sniper sandbags, machine gun posts, mortar pits, and concrete bunkers. Hickey was here at Nam Dong to interview each member of the twelve-man Special Forces team as well as their Vietnamese counterparts, young men who were mostly Nung people, an ethnic minority of Chinese descent.

The team at Nam Dong was here in the Ta Rau Valley to protect five thousand Vietnamese who lived in the surrounding area. In addition to patrolling the jungle, the Special Forces team organized locals’ efforts to dig wells and build schools. There was little else to do here, and Hickey recalled that “the A-team members were happy to have an anthropologist in town.”

His first day in Nam Dong, Hickey accompanied Captain Donlon out to one of the villages where there had been reports of chemicals being sprayed out of aircraft. “Rice crops had been destroyed and villagers were sick,” Hickey noted. Captain Donlon told the sick villagers that he would send their complaints up the
chain of command. Hickey had no way of knowing that the organization paying for his report, ARPA, was the same organization behind the science program that had sprayed the chemicals on the villagers and their rice crops.

The men drove back to the base in an Army jeep, careful to get to the camp before nightfall. Once the sun disappeared behind the mountains, the valley was plunged into darkness, making travel dangerous and difficult. Back at Nam Dong, Hickey filled out a timesheet, required by RAND to be submitted each week, and dropped it in the command center’s U.S. mailbox. He ate dinner with the Nung soldiers, interviewing them in their native language. The Nung soldiers told Hickey they believed a Vietcong attack was imminent, and he took the news to Captain Donlon. A team meeting was organized, and Donlon ordered the Vietnamese strike force to double its outer perimeter security and also ordered the helicopter landing zone to be fortified. Donlon gave Hickey an AR-15 and told him to sleep with it close by his bed.

In the middle of the night, at 2:26 a.m., a massive explosion knocked Hickey out of bed. More explosions followed, and suddenly the camp was filled with white phosphorus smoke. With the sound of automatic weapons fire coming from every direction, Hickey grabbed his eyeglasses and his AR-15 and started to run. “Suddenly bullets were piercing the bamboo walls,” he later recalled.

Outside his bunkroom, the mess hall and supply room were on fire. “Mortar rounds landed everywhere, grenades exploded, and gunfire filled the air. In a matter of minutes,” Hickey recounted, “the camp had become a battlefield.” For a moment, he felt all was lost. That he would die here in Nam Dong. Instead, the anthropologist raised his AR-15 and assumed the role of a soldier, fighting alongside the Green Berets and the Nung commandos through the night.

When light dawned and the Vietcong retreated back into the jungle, Hickey surveyed the carnage. Sixty Nung, two Americans,
and one Australian had been killed. “There were bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere—on the cluttered parade ground, in the grasses, and on the [perimeter] wires.” One of the Nung soldiers he had eaten dinner with the night before was dead, recognizable only by the insignia on his shirt. “The smoky air was heavy with the odor of death,” Hickey recalled. Overcome by a wave of nausea, he threw up.

“The July 1964 Nam Dong battle foreshadowed the fury of the struggle that would become known as the Vietnam War,” wrote Hickey. “As that war, with its modern technology and armaments and large armies, drew all of South Vietnam into its vortex and captured the world’s attention, the battle of Nam Dong faded into obscurity.” Americans still did not know they were fighting a war in Vietnam. Captain Roger Donlon was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first of the Vietnam War, and Gerald Hickey would continue his work as an anthropologist, writing more than a dozen reports for ARPA, on subjects including the role of the AR-15 in battle and the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese.

Back in America, RAND Corporation president Frank Collbohm had set his focus on securing a lucrative new contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Collbohm and analyst Guy Pauker flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with ARPA officials. RAND’s Third Area Conflict Board believed that the firm’s social scientists could help stop the Vietcong insurgency by researching and analyzing for the Pentagon the “human problems” connected to insurgent groups. The broad-themed contract they sought had enormous potential value and would turn out to be RAND’s single-biggest contract during twelve years of war in Vietnam. It was called the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, and it was secured in a single meeting in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, Collbohm and Pauker met with Seymour
Deitchman, Harold Brown’s new special assistant for counterinsurgency at ARPA. Before Deitchman took over the counterinsurgency reins, ARPA’s Project Agile programs had been overseen by William Godel. But the situation with Godel had taken a bizarre turn. For eighteen months, Godel had received high praise from the White House and the Pentagon for his counterinsurgency work, winning the prestigious National Civil Service League award and being named one of the nation’s ten top government administrators in 1962. But suddenly and mysteriously, financial incongruities within Project Agile’s overseas expense accounts were brought to the attention of Secretary of Defense McNamara, and the FBI was brought in to investigate. Godel was at the very center of the investigation. Counterinsurgency was too significant a program to leave in the hands of a man under suspicion, and Deitchman, an aeronautical and mechanical engineer working at the Institute for Defense Analyses, or IDA, was chosen to replace Godel.

Also present during the meeting was the powerful William H. Sullivan, a career State Department official and the head of President Johnson’s new Interagency Task Force on Vietnam. In a few months’ time, Sullivan would become ambassador to Laos. Between Sullivan and Deitchman, the officials in the room had the power to award a significant counterinsurgency contract to whomever they saw fit, in this case RAND. Which is exactly what the record shows happened next.

William Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper and set it in front of Collbohm and Pauker. On the paper was a list of twenty-five topics that the Interagency Task Force and the Pentagon wanted researched. Down at the bottom, near the end, one topic leaped out at Guy Pauker. It read:

“Who are the Vietcong? What makes them tick?”

Pauker was electrified. “Where did this question come from?” he asked.

“That question came directly from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,” Sullivan said, “who keeps asking the question.”

“Frank and I agreed on the spot that RAND would try to answer the Defense Secretary’s question,” Pauker recalled.

Guy Pauker, born in Romania, was a staunch anticommunist. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Southeast Asian studies, and was an expert on how Stone Age cultures, such as the Navajo, do or do not adapt to the modern world. He felt excited by this counterinsurgency challenge. The Vietcong were like a Stone Age people, Pauker believed, and he welcomed the opportunity to determine what it was that made them tick. Collbohm and Pauker returned to RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, where they put together an outline for the new project and a bid.

Over at the Pentagon, the question “What makes the Viet Cong tick?” had also been confounding the Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The original intent” of the RAND program, as Seymour Deitchman later explained it, was to understand the nature of the Vietcong revolutionary movement by finding answers “to such questions as, what strata of society its adherents came from; why they were adherents; how group cohesiveness was built into their ranks; and how they interacted with the populace.” By the summer of 1964, the secretary of defense had grown frustrated by the lack of progress being made in the “techniques” area of Project Agile. Three years into the conflict and still no one seemed to have a handle on who these Vietcong insurgents really were. ARPA needed quality information on the enemy combatant, said Deitchman, and for this, to help facilitate the new RAND Corporation study, the secretary of defense made a deal with the CIA.

Joseph Zasloff was the lead social scientist on the original Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, and in 2014 he recalled the premise of the RAND study. “The CIA had detention centers and prisons in South Vietnam,” Zasloff said, facilities that were not
supposed to exist. It was in these secret detention centers that the CIA kept captured communist POWs, from whom various case officers tried to extract information. “We interviewed these prisoners for our study,” explained Zasloff. “We learned a lot from them about what had been going on. Some were old and had fought at Dien Bien Phu. Some were just teenagers. They were all very dedicated. Had great discipline and commitment. They were indoctrinated into the communist way of thinking.”

Joe Zasloff and his wife, Tela, arrived in Saigon for the Motivation and Morale Project in the summer of 1964. Zasloff, an expert on Southeast Asian studies, had spent the previous year at RAND working on a report for the U.S. Air Force called
The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency.
In this report, which he produced from his office in Santa Monica, Zasloff concluded that the North Vietnamese were responsible for fueling the insurgency in the South. Through the lens of history this is hardly news, but in 1964 Zasloff’s findings were considered original. He was sent to Saigon to lead this new RAND study. Zasloff did not have the kind of hands-on social science research experience that Gerald Hickey and John Donnell had, but he had been to Vietnam, in the late 1950s, as a university professor teaching social science at the Faculty of Law in downtown Saigon.

Because Zasloff would be working directly with the highest-ranking members of the MACV, he was given a civilian rank equal to the rank of general, as well as accommodations fit for a general. The Zasloffs settled into ARPA’s elegant two-story villa at 176 Rue Pasteur, just down the street from the Combat Development Test Center. Their front yard had trees and a grassy lawn. A wide wooden veranda and second-story balconies added to the French colonial feel, as did the staff of servants who took care of housekeeping needs. Tela Zasloff had the maids string white lights throughout the garden, said to be inhabited by ghosts. A ten-foot-
tall concrete wall had been constructed around the villa’s perimeter as an added security precaution.

The villa’s first-floor interior was grand, laid out like a posh hotel lobby, with rattan furniture and potted palm trees. The downstairs served as a work area for the RAND researchers who came and went. At night, the Zasloffs frequently hosted dinner parties.

One month after the Zasloffs got the place up and running, John Donnell, the author with Hickey of the unfavorable Strategic Hamlet Program report, arrived. Donnell was to be Zasloff’s partner on the new ARPA project, examining communist motivation and morale. The success of the program relied on getting accurate information from POWs, and Donnell spoke Vietnamese. Zasloff also hired local academics to act as interpreters, French-speaking Vietnamese intellectuals who were considered wealthy by national standards. The Vietnamese interpreters were often invited to the Zasloffs’ dinner parties and were asked to share their thoughts and perceptions. The interpreters were candid and open, admitting freely that they knew almost nothing about Vietnamese peasants who lived in villages outside Saigon. They were all citizens of the same country, but with very little in common. Most farmers, the interpreters said, lacked dreams and aspirations and were generally content. Most had no ambition to do anything but farm. All the peasants wanted out of this life, the interpreters said, was to live with their families in peace, in rural villages, without being harassed or disturbed.

The interpreters set out with Zasloff and Donnell to interview prisoners of war in the secret CIA prisons across the South. The group interviewed prisoners inside the notorious Chi Hoa prison in Saigon as well as in many smaller detention centers out in the provinces. Most of the POW interviews were done with either Zasloff or Donnell and one Vietnamese interpreter, who also acted as a stenographer or note taker. There were no uniformed officials
present, which meant the prisoners often loosened up and spoke freely.