In 1961, few Americans outside elite government circles knew what was happening in Vietnam. Inside Washington, the power struggles over how best to handle the communist insurgency were becoming contentious as the rift between the White House and the Pentagon widened. Just three months after taking office, Kennedy experienced the bitter low point of his presidency when a CIA-sponsored, military-supported paramilitary invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba failed. More than a hundred men were killed and twelve hundred were captured. The fiasco damaged the president’s relationship not only with the CIA but also with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Publicly, President Kennedy assumed full blame. “I’m the responsible official of the government,” he famously said. But to his closest White House advisors, he said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had failed him.
“The first advice I’m going to give my successor,” Kennedy told Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, “is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinion[s] on military matters were worth a damn.” The situation seemed to strengthen his perception that his group of intellectually minded White House advisors and civilian Pentagon advisors, the so-called McNamara whiz kids, not only were more trustworthy but also had better ideas on military matters than did the military men themselves.
After the Bay of Pigs, in the summer of 1961 President Kennedy created a new position on his White House staff called military representative of the president. The post was created specifically for General Maxwell Taylor, a dashing multilingual World War II hero who had written a book critical of the Eisenhower administration. According to a memo that outlined General Taylor’s duties as military representative of the president, he was to “advise and assist the President with regard to those military matters that reach him as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.” General Taylor was also to “give his personal views to assist the President in reaching decisions,” and he was to have a role in offering “advice and assistance in the field of intelligence.” It was a position of enormous influence, particularly in light of the coming war in Vietnam. General Taylor was to advise the president on all military matters, and yet he was part of the White House staff, not the Pentagon.
General Taylor was dispatched to Vietnam as head of a delegation that would become known as the Taylor-Rostow mission. The purpose of the mission was to investigate what future political and military actions were necessary there. Accompanying Taylor on this trip was William Godel. The two men shared similar views on counterinsurgency programs; in fact, Godel would write major portions of Taylor’s trip report. Godel took General Taylor to ARPA’s new Combat Development and Test Center and showed him some of the gadgets and techniques being developed there. In Taylor’s report to President Kennedy, he praised the CDTC’s work, noting “the special talents of the U.S. scientific laboratories and industry” on display.
The Taylor-Rostow mission left Washington on Sunday, October 15, 1961, stopped for a briefing in Honolulu, and arrived in Saigon on October 18. Godel joined the party in Saigon. General Taylor wore civilian clothes and requested that there be no press briefings, no interviews, no social functions, and most of all no military formalities. To the president, General Taylor described the Vietnam situation as “the darkest since the early days of 1954,” a reference to the year when the French lost Dien Bien Phu. Taylor warned how dangerous the terrain had become, noting that the “Vietcong strength had increased from an estimated 10,000 in January 1961 to 17,000 in October; they were clearly on the move in the delta, in the highlands, and along the plain on the north central coast.” He painted the picture facing the government of South Vietnam in the bleakest of terms. President Diem and his generals “were watching with dismay the situation in neighboring Laos and the negotiations in Geneva, which convinced them that there would soon be a Communist-dominated government in Vientiane,” the capital of Laos, Taylor wrote, and proposed that President Kennedy take “vigorous action” at once.
“If Vietnam goes, it will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to hold Southeast Asia,” Taylor warned. “What will be lost is not merely a crucial piece of real estate, but the faith that the U.S. has the will and the capacity to deal with the Communist offensive in that area.” General Taylor’s message was clear. The United States needed to expand its covert military action in Vietnam. In his report to President Kennedy, Taylor suggested making use of ARPA’s gadgets and techniques, most notably “a very few ‘secret weapons’ on the immediate horizon” at the CDTC. One such “secret weapon” was herbicide. As the program moved forward, however, there was a hitch.
In the fall of 1961, Radio Hanoi in North Vietnam made public ARPA’s secret defoliation tests. The United States had “used poisonous gas to kill crops and human[s],” Radio Hanoi declared in a condemnatory broadcast. The revelatory radio program was then rebroadcast on Radio Moscow and Radio Peking, but surprisingly, it did not produce the kind of international uproar that the Vietnam Task Force had cautioned against in the July 17 meeting. But the president’s advisors agreed that a formal decision had to be made about whether to proceed with ARPA’s defoliation program or to halt it. The Vietnam Task Force asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to weigh in.
On November 3, they expressed their opposition. Mindful of the Geneva Protocols, they wrote, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff are of the opinion that in conducting aerial defoliant operations [against] food growing areas, care must be taken to assure that the United States does not become the target for charges of employing chemical or biological warfare.” Echoing earlier concerns from the Vietnam Task Force, the Joint Chiefs warned that the world could react with solemn condemnation, and that “international repercussions against the United States could be most serious.”
Even deputy national security advisor Walt Rostow, just back from the trip to Vietnam with General Taylor and William Godel, felt compelled to point out to the president the reality behind spraying defoliants. In a memorandum with the subject line “Weed Killer,” Rostow told President Kennedy, “Your decision is required because this is a kind of chemical warfare.” There was no uncertainty in Walt Rostow’s words.
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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RAND and COIN
At the RAND Corporation in sunny Santa Monica, Cal
ifornia, 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 aw
ay 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.