The Pentagon Papers’ Missing Chapter

Tony Russo and the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study

He achieved a measure of fame — and notoriety — as Daniel Ellsberg’s co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers trial. But Anthony (Tony) Russo was a whistleblower in his own right who exposed a case of intelligence gone wrong and its outsized impact on the rush to war.

He had been sent to Vietnam to get to know and analyze the enemy. What he didn’t expect was that instead of winning their hearts and minds, they would win his.

Russo would have thrived in this historical moment. He once told me that his first stirring of political consciousness occurred when he heard the screams of a black man being beaten behind the Suffolk, Virginia courthouse. As he came to know and identify with Vietnamese who had been brutalized, he saw the systemic nature of the crimes he was witnessing.

I picture him standing at the head of the march for Black Lives Matter. And I picture him arguing that the U.S. has yet to come to terms with a panoply of crimes committed in our name.

Leaders of conscience called out eloquently in the 1970s for a national reckoning — what today we term “truth and reconciliation” — and worried that America’s collective conscience would be scarred without it. That reckoning never took place.

No where is it more needed than in relation to the seminal U.S. counterinsurgency effort of the 20th century: Vietnam. As such, the legacy of Vietnam stands alongside Black Lives Matter as one of the central issues of our historical moment. I feel confident, having known him, that Russo would concur.

So bear with me as I take you back to the exposé that Russo attempted in 1972 with little effect. It offers a cautionary tale: of how intelligence can go terribly wrong and how, a half century later, the consequences continue to haunt our national identity.

Russo and Ellsberg met in 1968 at RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica. Both were RAND analysts, putting them at the center of intelligence operations in service of the Department of Defense. Both were disaffected, Russo chastened by what he had witnessed in Vietnam and Ellsberg reeling from his insider’s view of the Department of Defense’s secret history of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, which he had read from cover to cover. After months of long talks, Ellsberg confided in Russo that he had access to the devastating cache of documents now known as the Pentagon Papers. “You’ve got to get those out,” Russo replied.

The events that followed are well known, along with their lasting impact on first amendment law — the Supreme Court decision on prior restraint — and their example to other would-be whistleblowers that putting one’s own life and career on the line can have a real impact. Edward Snowden, for one, cites Ellsberg as his inspiration. But Russo’s own exposé, released by Ramparts Magazine in 1972, was ignored.

He called it the “The RAND Papers.”

Though the real world impact of the intelligence debacle he tried to expose was enormous, Russo would never convince the press or the public that the inner workings of the RAND Corporation’s Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study really mattered.

The Motivation and Morale Study (known as the M&M) is referenced briefly in the Pentagon Papers. Under Secretary of State George Ball, in his lone, eleventh hour effort to counsel de-escalation of the war in July, 1965, cites the M&M as the source of intel that the Viet Cong* was “deeply committed.” Six months later, Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton cites the Motivation and Morale Study again, this time saying that “VC spirit was lagging and their grip on the peasantry growing looser.”

The gap between the two intels is where Russo’s story takes place. Noam Chomsky and others have documented the gaping holes in the Pentagon Papers — the story of the M&M is one of those missing chapters.

The Motivation and Morale Study

After finishing a double Masters program at Princeton, Russo was eager to go to Vietnam, to take up the fight for democracy on the front lines, as he saw it at the time. Working for RAND was a logical choice. RAND analysts cycled in and out of the Department of Defense (DoD) and, in Vietnam, RAND acted as a civilian intelligence arm, the “brain trust,” of the DoD.

RAND had close Air Force ties. It had been launched in 1946 as a private research arm of the Army Air Forces, whose successor, the Air Force, remained its primary financier and client. Russo’s double interest in aeronautics and politics likely influenced his choice. They assigned him a rank equivalent to Major.

Russo joined Leon Gouré, the new head of the Motivation and Morale Study in Saigon in February, 1965, just two weeks before the first Marine landing at Danang. Their mission — defined by a question posed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — was to figure out “What makes the Viet Cong tick?”

Gouré, a Russian émigré renowned for his work on Soviet civil defense — work that helped incite the 1950s bomb scare and that was called into question under scrutiny — was the M&M Study’s second team leader. The first study team, led by analysts Joe Zasloff and John Donnell, briefed McNaughton in January, 1965, describing the Viet Cong as a unified, disciplined — and unbeatable — force.

The Viet Cong was already carrying out government social welfare functions in the countryside, Zasloff and Donnell said, where they enjoyed widespread popular support from a peasantry interested in social justice, education, eradication of poverty and land distribution.

Zasloff and Donnell’s report was the first instance of RAND intel cited in the Pentagon Papers.

Though impressed by the report, with McNaughton even wondering aloud if the U.S. might have aligned with the wrong side, the DoD deemed the Zasloff/Donnell report “un-actionable.”

Zasloff and Donnell’s report had come too late for an administration that was well along the road to war. The Pentagon had been conducting war games with an emphasis on the role of air power since the Spring of 1964. In March, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had sent President Johnson recommendations for an expanded war that included the mining of Haiphong Harbor and bombing of North Vietnam — war acts that would require Congressional approval. The Tonkin Gulf Incident in August 1964 — revealed by the Pentagon Papers to likely have been both provoked by U.S. actions and exaggerated for effect — had provided the Congressional blank check for that escalation. And the Air Force was angling for a broader role in the war.

Gouré entered at a propitious moment, nearly simultaneous to the Zasloff report. After visiting the RAND operation in Saigon while on a fact-finding mission, he proposed a reinvention of the Motivation and Morale Study that would shift its emphasis to the study of which weaponry, especially air power, could demoralize the enemy. That was found actionable.

Goure Holds Sway

Gouré became the “go to” intelligence man in Saigon. His message, reported directly to General William Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, was unambiguous: the Viet Cong were losing their resolve in the face of U.S. military might, especially air power. He quickly established himself as the Air Force’s best pitchman, with ever-growing influence.

His preliminary report (December, 1964) included advocacy for the use of defoliants (Agent Orange) and the advantage air power could offer in the generation of refugees to deprive the guerillas of their food supply and popular base. Themes that would carry through his tenure.

In his 1972 exposé, Russo described Gouré as a “snake oil salesman” who excelled on the briefing circuit and whose primary contribution was linking his message of diminishing Viet Cong morale to the air war. Russo’s boss would be the source of the second instance of M&M “intel” cited in the Pentagon Papers.

Though Gouré gets little mention in the Pentagon Papers, it’s hard to overstate his influence. The RAND Villa in Saigon became a prestige stop for policy makers visiting Saigon. Everyone wanted to know what Leon thought. His analysis first reached Westmoreland in January 1965. McNamara, who was said to lap up Gouré’s work “like good scotch,” was so enamored of the message upon first hearing that he offered to up the M&M budget from $100,000 to $1,000,000. And Goure’s conclusions reached President Johnson at least as early as June 1965.

The President’s phone records show McNamara using Goure’s February, 1966 report to offer encouragement to Johnson that the American counterinsurgency operation was having its desired impact.

Johnson, who reportedly sometimes carried a summary of Gouré’s conclusions in his pocket for discussions with journalists, rode a wave of optimism in this period. Influential Washington columnist Drew Pearson would capture Gouré’s effect on the president in his famous May 1966 comment: “For the first time [he] sees light at the end of the tunnel.”

Intelligence Gone Wrong

Gouré liked to say that the RAND villa in Saigon churned out the “best damned intelligence” in Vietnam. But his analysis, though seductive to decision-makers in the throes of escalation, didn’t match the data, according to the analysts who worked with him.

After debating their action for nearly a year, in the summer of 1966, Russo and two other Saigon-based analysts wrote the head of RAND’s Social Science department, charging that their boss had skewed the data drawn from thousands of interviews of captured enemy soldiers to bolster his air war thesis.

Russo was particularly incensed that Gouré had signed Russo’s name to the February 1966 memorandum mentioned earlier. It extolled the benefits of the air war, with its calculated strategy to target the Viet Cong’s civilian base; proposed that Agent Orange helped control the population while denying food to the guerillas; and said that the refugee crisis offered “a major opportunity to pacify” the population. Russo fought to get his name removed from the report without success.

Also damning, the analysts charged that Gouré had demanded sanitization of the interview reports, removing all mention of torture conducted by U.S. forces and their allies that the analysts had uncovered in their research.

Around the time the whistle-blowing letter hit Santa Monica, Gouré was amplifying his thesis with a proposal that the U.S. adopt a deliberate program to generate refugees.

RAND sent three waves of envoys to investigate, but it would take a year to depose Gouré from leadership of the M&M.

The Military Half

The second iteration of the M&M Study had more than methodological problems — it contributed to an unprecedented human rights problem. To a holocaust.

Journalist Jonathan Schell, then just 23 years old, reported his observations of the air war in Quang Ngai Province in South Vietnam to McNamara in August, 1967, which Schell revealed after McNamara’s death. Based on the book Schell published in 1968, The Military Half, we can presume that he reported that the air war was creating a humanitarian crisis of unseen proportions. That seventy percent of the civilian homes had already been totally destroyed. And that there was insufficient infrastructure in place to service the survivors. Schell also reported that since U.S. forces had arrived in Vietnam, approximately 50,000 civilians had been killed each year in Quang Ngai province alone. (That’s the equivalent of 100 My Lais each and every year.) Six months later the My Lai massacre would occur — in Quang Ngai.

Schell had experienced the carnage first hand, having flown daily missions with pilots in forward air control planes designed to guide bombers to their strike targets for a month that summer. He had watched air strikes in real time and observed from the air as ground troops burned villages to the ground in Zippo raids. The bombing was designed to generate refugees (the purposeful generation of refugees is illegal under international and U.S. law) in an effort to “pacify” the countryside. Once emptied, the villages became free-fire zones, where U.S. forces were instructed to shoot “anything that moved.” The military termed that the “military half.”

The “civilian half” consisted of resettlement of displaced persons in refugee camps in an effort to win their hearts and minds. On the ground, Schell documented the civilian half’s inadequacy; the camps were squalid, overcrowded and rife with disease. Part-way through his reporting stint, commanders received an order to stop generating refugees (for lack of room to accommodate them), even as destruction of the villages continued. That could only mean destruction of the population itself. (In one area he documented, just 100 of an estimated 17,000 inhabitants were evacuated before total destruction of the villages.)

Here was just one example of Gouré’s prescription put into action.

The concluding paragraph from Fredric Branfman’s essay on the Pentagon Papers, written in 1972, gives a sense of the holocaust wrought by the air war:

“Despite the millions who had already been killed and maimed, the 5 million acres of crop and forest land destroyed, the 10 million refugees, the 100,000 political prisoners, the thousands of villages and towns that no longer exist, the 400,000 prostitutes, the disease and hunger, the 23 million bomb craters, the corruption and degradation of ancient cultures and social systems, it was all far from over.”

The immense real world implications of these policy decisions are still hard to fathom. That these were crimes against humanity is certain.

Rand’s Confession

In a comprehensive 2010 RAND report, RAND in Southeast Asia, A History of the Vietnam War Era, analyst and author Mai Elliott validates nearly all of Russo’s 1972 claims. Her book confirms that Gouré acted as a pitchman for the air war, selling a prescription for military success that didn’t match the data. It details Gouré’s outsized influence on policymakers and Russo’s claim that evidence of torture by U.S. forces and allies was systematically removed under Gouré’s orders. She even quotes former RAND President Gus Shubert’s admission that the assignment of Gouré to the Motivation and Morale Study appeared to represent collusion between his RAND predecessor and the Air Force, which he termed a “disgrace”.

In the end, Elliott, and by extension RAND, corroborate and elaborate on nearly every claim Russo made in his 1972 Ramparts articles.

It is noteworthy that this 2010 RAND report is effectively an admission of corporate guilt. It is also notable that no major news organization has considered it newsworthy, despite the disastrous human consequences of the intelligence debacle conducted by RAND.

No Statute of Limitations

Only one of Russo’s charges was rejected in the 2010 RAND report: that the think tank was complicit in war crimes.

Russo had no doubts on that account. He called the Motivation and Morale Study a “whitewash of genocide” and “a justification of genocide cloaked in the mantle of RAND social science.”

In his foreword to a Pentagon Papers digest, he explained why he had helped Daniel Ellsberg copy the Pentagon Papers. He said his experience in Vietnam had taught him “that America in Vietnam was the opposite of the America I had read about in history books when I was growing up in Virginia. Genocide was not the tradition of Thomas Paine or Patrick Henry. I wanted the American people to discover for themselves what I had come to learn in Vietnam.”

In response to the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute the whistleblowers instead of the perpetrators of war crimes, he identified Richard M Nixon as the real “international outlaw.”

“If we [Ellsberg and Russo] are conspirators, the U.S. Constitution is dead; if we are spies, then the American people are the enemy; if we are thieves, then the government, not the people, owns history,” he said.

We’re still fighting to own our history. Popular histories of Vietnam (Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War is a case in point) continue to skirt the full truth: that the United States was the aggressor in a conflagration that killed millions of people.

How might we change America if kids are taught our real history, if they come to connect the dots between George Floyd’s murder, the 1921 massacre in Tulsa and the savagery that occurred in Vietnam. Would they support future wars of aggression?

Cell phones have sparked a revolution in our nation’s thought as armies of people document the atrocities committed against people of color every single day in America. No longer can these truths be ignored. We need an equivalent scrutiny to reconcile the full legacy of Vietnam. Our collective soul may depend on our willingness to do it.

* The term “Viet Cong,” a pejorative, was commonly used by U.S. forces, including RAND, to describe the indigenous force the U.S. was fighting in the south of Vietnam. They called themselves the National Liberation Front (NLF). When covering RAND documents and U.S. policy, I use the terminology they used.