The Pentagon's Brain (18 page)

“We interviewed all kinds of prisoners,” Zasloff recalled. “Some from the North and some from the South.” Most of the northern-born fighters had made their way to the South along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While their histories unfolded, the initial assumptions of the interpreters from Saigon began to change, including the preconception that all a Vietnamese farmer wanted was to own a small plot of land and be left in peace. As work progressed, the RAND researchers started to learn more about what was actually fueling the insurgency. It was a relatively simple answer that was echoed among the prisoners. What motivated Vietcong fighters, the prisoners said, was injustice, “grievances the peasants held against the Saigon government.” The prisoners told Zasloff and Donnell they believed that through communism, they could have a better life, one that was not based on corruption. The prisoners expressed “ardent aspirations they had for education, economic opportunity, equality and justice for themselves and their descendants,” Zasloff and Donnell wrote.

The POWs also talked of being tortured by the government of South Vietnam. Some prisoners showed the RAND analysts scars they claimed were the results of incessant torture by prison guards. They spoke of being forced to watch summary executions of fellow prisoners, without explanation or trial. There was no way to verify the veracity of what they were told, but Zasloff and Donnell felt compelled to report these Geneva Convention violations to Guy Pauker at RAND. When Pauker forwarded the information on to the Pentagon in a memo titled “Treatment of POWs, Defectors and Suspects in South Vietnam,” Seymour Deitchman got involved.

He asked questions: How did Zasloff and Donnell know that the prisoners were not lying? Why believe a prisoner in the first place? Instead of looking into Zasloff and Donnell’s claims, Deitchman later commissioned a RAND study on how to detect when a
Vietcong prisoner was telling a lie. In “Estimating from Misclassified Data,” RAND analyst S. James Press used a probability theorem called Bayes’ theorem to refute the idea that POW interviews could always be trusted. “The motivation for the work had its genesis in a desire to compensate for incorrect answers that might be found in prisoner-of-war interviews,” Press wrote. After forty-eight pages of mathematical calculations that placed Vietcong POWs’ answers in hypothetical categories, Press concluded, “It is clear that if hostile subjects were aiming at an optimal strategy, they would lie independently of all the categories.”

The same summer that Zasloff and Donnell presented their concerns to Seymour Deitchman, something totally unexpected happened at the Pentagon, a situation that still confounded Joseph Zasloff after more than fifty years. His earlier RAND monograph,
The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency,
began making its way around the upper echelons of the Pentagon. In this report Zasloff had concluded that the North Vietnamese were responsible for most insurgent activity in the South. “Much of the strength and sophistication of the insurgent organization in South Vietnam today is attributable to the fact that North Vietnam plans, directs, and coordinates the over-all campaign and lends material aid, spiritual leadership and moral justification to the rebellion,” Zasloff had written. A copy went to the Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay. The overall war policy at the time called for “graduated pressure,” a strategy that Robert McNamara had developed for President Johnson to avoid making the war in Vietnam official. Only a few months remained until the November presidential election; Johnson desperately wanted to maintain what was known at the Pentagon as his “hold until November” policy. This strategy allowed for so-called tit-for-tat bombing raids, small-scale U.S. Air Force attacks against communist activity. Up to this point in the conflict, Hanoi, the capital of the North, had not been targeted.

Reading Zasloff’s
The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern
Insurgency,
General LeMay decided the paper was the perfect report on which to base his argument to bomb North Vietnam. Unknown to Zasloff, his RAND report would now become the centerpiece of LeMay’s new strategy for the secretary of defense. In this unconventional war, which America was still not officially fighting, the role of bombing had been fraught with contention. In the summer of 1964, the U.S. Air Force was playing a subordinate role to the U.S. Army, which led efforts on the ground. General LeMay had been arguing that airpower was the way to quell the insurgency, but his arguments had been falling on deaf ears. As LeMay geared up to use Zasloff’s RAND study in a new push with Secretary McNamara, a major incident and turning point in the war occurred.

In the first week of August 1964, U.S. naval forces clashed with North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. It served as a casus belli, an act or event used to justify war. President Johnson went on national television, interrupting regular programming across the country to announce North Vietnamese aggression and request from Congress the authority to take military action. This was the official beginning of the Vietnam War. In a matter of days, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving President Johnson the authority to take whatever actions he saw necessary, including the use of force. At the Pentagon, Zasloff’s study was now at the center of a perfect storm. On August 17, 1964, General LeMay sent a memorandum to General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The best chance” for winning the war in Vietnam, LeMay wrote, was to choose ninety-four targets in North Vietnam already identified by the Pentagon as “crucial” to the communists and therefore necessary to destroy. Zasloff’s study, also sent to General Wheeler, was the centerpiece of LeMay’s argument. At the time, Zasloff had no idea.

In Saigon, Zasloff and Donnell were getting close to the end of their prisoner of war study, the first of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project reports for ARPA. The men had conducted 145
interviews over five months, in multiple CIA prisoner facilities. In December 1964, Guy Pauker flew to Saigon to help compile the information. In the downstairs mezzanine of the ARPA villa on Rue Pasteur, the three men labored for weeks to put together Zasloff and Donnell’s final report, which was fifty-four pages long.

Once it was completed, the RAND analysts briefed General William Westmoreland, at MACV headquarters just down the street. The Vietcong insurgents, Zasloff and Donnell said, saw the Americans as invaders and would do anything they could to make them give up and leave. Ten years earlier, participants from the same movement had fought to kick the French out, and had succeeded. Now they were fighting for the same cause. The insurgency was not an insurgency to the locals, Zasloff and Donnell said. It was a nationalist struggle on behalf of the people of Vietnam. The insurgents saw themselves as being “for the poor,” the analysts said, and they saw the Americans as the villains, specifically “American imperialists and their lackeys, the GVN [Government of Vietnam].” Zasloff and Donnell said that in their POW interviews they had learned that very few fighters understood what communism meant, what it stood for. Hardly any of the Vietcong had even heard of Karl Marx. It was a fact that the Vietcong had patrons among the Chinese communists and that the same patrons had been helping the North Vietnamese, giving them weapons and teaching war-fighting techniques. But what the local people were after was independence. South Vietnamese peasants had aspirations, too. They wanted social justice, economic opportunity. And they wanted their land back—land that had been taken from them during dubious security operations like the Strategic Hamlet Program. That was what made the Vietcong tick, Zasloff and Donnell told General Westmoreland.

Next, the men briefed General Maxwell Taylor, whom Johnson had made U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. After that, it was back to MACV headquarters to brief the senior staff, as well as the ARPA officials at the Combat and Development Test Center. In
each facility, to each person or group of people, they said the same thing. The Vietcong were a formidable foe. They “could only be defeated at enormous costs,” Zasloff and Donnell said, “if at all.”

Under the aegis of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, the Advanced Research Projects Agency sought to determine what made the Vietcong tick. But the agency did not want to hear that the Vietcong could not be defeated. Seymour Deitchman took the position that Zasloff and Donnell had gone off the rails, same as Hickey and Donnell had done with the Strategic Hamlet Program report a few years before. According to other RAND officers, Deitchman perceived the POW report as unhelpful. RAND needed to send researchers into the field whose reports were better aligned with the conviction of the Pentagon that the Vietcong could and would be defeated. Frank Collbohm took to the hallways of the RAND headquarters he was in charge of in Santa Monica. “I am looking for three senior, imaginative fellows to go over to Vietnam,” he said, and to get a handle on the chaos in Southeast Asia. He needed to replace Zasloff and was looking for a quality analyst to take over the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project. Collbohm found what he was looking for in a controversial nuclear strategist named Leon Gouré.

Leon Gouré, born in Moscow in 1922, was a Sovietologist who loathed Soviet communism. He was born into a family of Jewish socialist intellectuals who were part of a faction called the Mensheviks, who came to be violently persecuted by the Leninists. When Gouré was one year old, the family went into exile in Berlin, only to flee again a decade later when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The Gourés moved to Paris but in 1940 were again forced to flee. Gouré once told the
Washington Post
that his family left Paris on the last train out, and that only when he arrived in America did he finally feel he had a home. Gouré enlisted in the U.S. Army, became a citizen, and was sent back to Germany to fight the Nazis
in the Battle of the Bulge. As a member of the Counterintelligence Corps, America’s Army intelligence group, he became fluent in German and French. He also became a valuable interrogator, learning how to draw information out of captured prisoners, and to write intelligence reports.

After the war, Gouré earned an undergraduate degree from New York University and a master’s degree from Columbia. In 1951 he became an analyst with RAND, and in no time he was working on post–nuclear war scenarios with the firm’s elite defense intellectuals, including Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn. Gouré’s particular area of expertise was post-apocalypse civil defense, and in 1960 he traveled to Moscow on a civil defense research trip for RAND. In 1961 his findings were published as a book that caused a national outcry.

Gouré claimed that during his trip to Moscow, he had seen firsthand evidence indicating that the Soviet Union had built a vast network of underground bunkers, which would protect the Russian people after a nuclear first strike against the United States. The Soviet action would inevitably be followed by a U.S. nuclear response. The concept of mutual assured destruction was based on the idea that the superpowers would not attack each other, provided they remained equally vulnerable to a nuclear strike. Gouré’s frightening premise suggested that the Soviet Politburo believed they could survive a nuclear war and protect the majority of their population as well. Like Albert Wohlstetter’s second-strike theory, Gouré’s findings suggested that since the Soviets believed they could survive, they might attempt a decapitating first strike.

Gouré’s critics said his work was unreliable. That he hated Soviet communism with such passion that he was biased to the point of being blind. In December 1961 an article attacking Gouré’s work appeared in the
New York Times
under a headline that read “Soviet Shelters: A Myth or Fact?” Reporter Harrison E. Salisbury had taken a month-long trip across the Soviet Union, covering
roughly twelve thousand miles. He said that he “failed to turn up evidence of a single Soviet bomb shelter,” and that the underground bomb shelters purported to have been built across Moscow were nothing more sinister than subway tunnels. He singled out “Leon Gouré, research specialist of the Rand Corporation,” who, Salisbury wrote, “has presented several studies contending that the Russians have a wide program for sheltering population and industry from atomic attack.” Salisbury had interviewed scores of Russians for his article and learned that Gouré’s reports had been “vigorously challenged by observers on the scene.” Close scrutiny of the alleged facts, wrote Salisbury, revealed that no shelters had been constructed. “Diplomats, foreign military attaches and correspondents who have traveled widely in the Soviet Union report that there is no visible evidence of a widespread shelter program.” The Gouré report, Salisbury suggested, served only one master, RAND’s single largest customer, the U.S. Air Force, in its quest for tens of millions more dollars from the Pentagon for its ever-growing bomber fleets.

The acrimonious debate over the legitimacy of Gouré’s civil defense report raged for months and then subsided. Gouré disappeared from the headlines but continued to write reports for RAND. Now, as 1964 drew to a close, Frank Collbohm tapped Leon Gouré to replace Joseph Zasloff as the lead social scientist on the ARPA Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project in Saigon. Zasloff saw this appointment as a disaster waiting to unfold.

“Still, after fifty years, I get red in the face just thinking of what Leon Gouré did,” Zasloff said in 2014. Within a matter of weeks Gouré was in Saigon. And he was ready to take charge.

In Saigon, stability and security were quickly deteriorating as chaos enveloped the city. On Christmas Eve, 1964, two Vietcong fighters drove a car packed with two hundred pounds of explosives into the underground parking garage beneath the Brink Bachelor Officers
Quarters, a seven-story hotel leased by the Defense Department to provide housing for its officers in Saigon. The bomb demolished three floors of the building, killing two U.S. servicemen and injuring sixty-three Americans, an Australian Army officer, and forty-three Vietnamese civilians.

Suddenly faced with the possibility that Saigon could fall to the Vietcong, Secretary of Defense McNamara pressured President Johnson to take action. On February 7, 1965, a limited bombing campaign called Operation Flaming Dart began. Eleven days later, Johnson ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to initiate Rolling Thunder I, the air campaign that General LeMay had been arguing for. On March 8, the Marines landed in the city of Da Nang. It was war. Officially now.