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, whi
ch 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.
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.”