June 22, 2016 • 41 mins
In the early 1960s the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure the effect of relentless U.S. bombing on their morale. Yet despite a wealth of great data, even the leaders of the study couldn’t agree on what it meant.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. After we got married, we got an apartment on Hibaichung,
near the Attending Market. It's not the best part of town,
but not the worst either. Very lively, bustling, noisy area.
That's My Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now,
a graceful, elegant, middle aged woman. She's talking about her
(00:38):
life in Saigon in the early nineteen sixties, the first
days of the Vietnam War. I had an apartment of
my own. You know, life couldn't have been better, I thought.
(01:00):
My name is Malcolm Glauber. Welcome to Revisionist History, where
every week we go back and look at something and
misunderstood or overlooked. This week's episode is about a secret
Pentagon study that a Vietnamese woman named my Elliott and
two others became tangled up in and what happened when
(01:23):
it ended, because there's a lot we can learn from
them today. The project was run by the Rand Corporation,
a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to
(01:44):
an extraordinary collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wonks.
RAND is the kind of place where everyone speaks in
complete paragraphs, and if you close your eyes as you listen.
You can almost see the footnotes at the end of
each one of those perfect paragraphs. The Defense Department willot
on them heavily in those years. Still does tell me
about how you come to work for RAND. Dave new
(02:08):
somebody at macvie who was an officer, a graduate student.
Dave is my husband, an American academic. Macwee stands for
a Military Assistance Command of Vietnam headquarters for the Vietnam War.
So anyway, Dave knew this guy who was also a
graduate student doing his military stint, and his wife, an American,
(02:32):
was working at RAND. My Elliott is Vietnamese, and she
ends up working at Randon Saigon for a man named
Leon Garay, one of Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran
the Secret Study and he's a big part of this story.
Here's an interview Rand recorded with Garay just before he
died in two thousand and seven. And how did you
end up getting into Vietnam? I got drafted. Well, I
(02:56):
assume I volunteered, but I got drafted. The Chief of
Air Force Intelligence asked me to go. Garay sat up
shop in an old bench style villain at the Presidential
Palace in downtown Saigon, one seventy six Rue Pasteur. The
house is still there, flame trees and tamarin line, the
street quiet, discreet. This was in nineteen sixty four, just
(03:21):
when Saigon was beginning to fall apart. Still, if you
were a Westerner, you might go to the exclusive sex
portif on the humid afternoons, to sit by the pool
of by Tennis, or have a cocktail in the veranda
of the Continental Hotel. Maybe you'd hear a bomb or
two off in the distance. Later, of course, things would
get far worse. The house we lived in in Saigon
(03:43):
was directly under the trajectory of the rockets that the
Vietong were firing at the Palace, so we had a
greative experience of ducking onto the dining room table. Gray
had been working in the Santa Monica office of RAND
when he was summoned to Vietnam. It was a job
no one really wanted. Who would leave southern California for Saigon.
(04:03):
The Pentagon wanted him to run a project interviewing Vietcong
prisoners and defectors. Great jumped at the chance. I had
to organize my own team of Vietnamese. We were producing
interview reports or interrogation reports for the US for Rand,
and for the chief of the Intelligence of the Vietnamese
(04:24):
are reforces. You all got copies. Later, Leon Grey got
into trouble, or at least into an argument, and Rand
brought in a third person to fix things, Conrad Kellen.
I was supposed to be indoctor NATed by Leon Go Ray.
He was supposed to tell me about Vietnam, but I
got very quickly the feeling that he was extremely partisan
(04:47):
for the South, which of course was partims. Show that
woman's voice. You here, that's my Elliott again. She interviewed
Kellen in Santa Monica after he retired from RAND for
a history she wrote called Rand in Southeast Asia, a
History of the Vietnam War. A brilliant book. By the way,
he was sort of missed Vietnam at Rand, you know,
(05:10):
mister sauciet man, and I sort of became his sort
of successor in a way. The story that follows is
about these three people, my Eliot leungare Conrad Kellen, and
(05:31):
how their lives intersected over a minor and forgotten episode
in the Vietnam War called the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project.
I say minor because what happened in that French villa
on one seven six route Pasteur didn't swing the war
one way or another. Nobody who was part of the
study ever fired a gun or dropped a bomb. But
(05:52):
the story of the Morale Project says a lot about
something that has obsessed us ever since intelligence failure. Why
is it so hard to tell what your enemy is thinking?
That question came up after nine to eleven during the
Two Gulf Wars, It came up again in afghanist It
comes up today with ISIS. And every time we get
(06:12):
it wrong, every time our enemies take us by surprise,
we always say, if only we knew more about them,
If only we had more information about our adversaries, more
spies in the ground, more satellite images, more intercepted communications,
more of everything. Do you know how many federal government
(06:33):
organizations there are just devoted to counter terrorism? Twelve hundred
and seventy one and another nineteen hundred and thirty one
private companies. Do you know how many Americans hold top
secret security clearances? Eight hundred and fifty four thousand. Those
numbers all come from an extraordinary Washington Post investigation from
(06:53):
six years ago. And here's the most incredible statistic of all.
Just since nine to eleven, just to Howe's top secret
intelligence work, and just in the Washington, DC area, seventeen
million square feet of new office space has been built
to house intelligence operations. Seventeen million. We want to know
(07:15):
everything about our enemies. But what the Vietcong Motivation and
Morale Project tells us is this, you can know everything
there is to know about your enemy, everything, and that
still won't solve your problem. Vietnam was a French colony
(07:36):
from eighteen eighty seven until nineteen fifty four. Then the
French loss controlled the country. It was split in half.
Communists took over the north, an American backed regime came
into power in the south. Over the next decade, conditions
inside South Vietnam slowly deteriorated. The government was unpopular, they
were protests in the streets, a military coup, and the
(07:59):
North Vietnamese started setting guerrillas known as the Vietcong over
the border to try and recruit South Vietnamese to their cause.
That's why the Vietnam War, at least US involvement there
starts in nearly nineteen sixties. Because the United States feels
compelled to help the South turn back the Vietcong. Wars
are usually about territory. Country X invades country, why country
(08:22):
WI fights back? But this is a weird kind of war.
The US and the South Vietnamese have no intention of
invading the North. They decide instead that they'll just bomb
the North Vietnamese until they give up, until they realize
that exporting guerrillas over the border isn't worth it. The
Vietnam War is a war of persuasion, a crude kind
(08:43):
of persuasion. The goal is to break the other side's will.
The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
on paper, but nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military
might and a live horse of more than eight thousand men.
Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
Central coast. But if your goal is to break someone's will,
(09:06):
how do you know if his strategy is working. In
the early nineteen sixties, when the US first starts sending
troops to fight the Vietcong, there was a problem. No
one knew anything about the Vietcong. Almost no one of
the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Vietnamese. The
Special adviser to the American General in South Vietnam at
the time was an Australian called Colonel Srong. And you
(09:28):
know what he said, all quote him directly. These people
are simply what we call in many countries juvenile delinquents.
That's the best he could offer in terms of intelligence
about the Vietcong. So what do you do if you're
bombing someone you know nothing about and you want to
know how this unknown person feels. You call on the
(09:50):
Rand Corporation. So Rand rents the villa on Rue Pasteur
and brings in Leon Garay to run the show. Garay
was Russian by birth. His family history was remarkable. His
parents were Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were the socialist moderates who
split off from Lenin during the Alshebek Revolution. They were
(10:11):
in Russia during the revolution. This is Leon Gary's son, Daniel.
He's a national security and policy expert with the Lexington
Institute in Arlington, Virginia. They participated in the revolution. Effect
My grandparents met in prison. My grandmother used to smoke
unfiltered cigarettes and a little holder and she cut him
in half. They were living in Moscow. They were in Moscow. Yeah,
(10:32):
they were in Moscow and they were fighting the system.
He my grandfather ran an illegal printing press and the
whole thing. In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born,
the Garrays are kicked out of the country. They ended
up next in Berlin in nineteen thirty three. They shut
the doors, locked the building up and left, just walked
(10:55):
away and went to Paris. And then they got out
of Paris on the same train that Humphrey Bogart did
in Castleblanca, heading south, and he andered south, went through
Spain to Portugal and then got to the US after that.
So they stayed one step ahead of the tide of
(11:15):
evil for about almost twenty years. Wow. Yeah, which of
the Bolsheviks? He must have known some of them person
or knew album personal if they knew Trotsky, they knew Lenin,
they knew Stalin, they knew the whole, the whole crowd. Man,
you're leftist royalty. Yeah, well right. The Grays end up
in New York City ninety six and Broadway deep in
(11:37):
the world of Eastern European emigreys. Leon serves in the army,
fights in the Battle of the Bulge, and ends up
in counterintelligence. How do you think the refugee experience shaped
your father number of ways. I think the overriding one
was we've retreated this far and no farther. So it
(11:59):
was it was a view of sort of America, not
just a city on the hill, not but you know,
there's nowhere left to retreat to. The country needs to
be truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important. So
this is who Ran puts in charge of the Vietnam operation.
(12:22):
Leon Garay a patriot in the way that only an
immigrant can be a patriot. He was suaved. He was
very charming, He had a great sense of humor, very articulate, energetic, enthusiastic.
So personally I liked him. The only thing I didn't
like about him was the fact that he was a
(12:43):
great ladies man, you know, and there were a lot
of rumors about that. But as a person I liked him.
Gray spoke German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
of the European intellectual. He had an amazing kind of
research all of his life. Where there will be stacks
(13:05):
of documents in Russian innings were on his dad, and
he literally be talking to you and it would sort
of be, well, you know, there's this recent thing, and
he's sort of it's an idetic memory, but he was
certainly kind of librarian cyclopedic in that kind of set.
Gray meets Robert McNamara, President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and
tells him what he thinks needs to be done. That
(13:25):
is to really answer the question of how the bombing
is affecting the Vietcong. That's the question I remembered very clearly. Again,
this is from the interview Gray did with the Rand
Archives a decade ago at the end of his life,
and he said, what is your funding? I told him
we had one hundred thousand dollars. He said, what would
you do with a million? That was this question. I said,
(13:45):
that's a new moral of this stuff, and I have
more people doing the interviewing. Says, you have it. A
million dollars in Saigon in the mid sixties was a
king's ransom. So Gray hires a team of locals to
fan out across the South Vietnamese countryside to interview defectoris
from North Vietnam. And captured Vietcong guerrillas. That's where my
(14:08):
elliot come in. She was one of Grey's interviewers, and
her story is every bit as fascinating as Leon Grey's.
My father was appointed to Haifang. He became mayor of Haifang.
She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and
as mayor he had a lot of authority. He was
(14:30):
almost like the king of that little town. And we
live in an enormous house with an enormous garden in
front and back, with a staff of servants and even
a platoon of guards, you know, who stood guard outside
our gate. So that was really the best time of
(14:50):
my life. Then the French get defeated in the north
by the Communists. Vietnam is divided in two. It happened.
So suddenly we just packed up and left everything, and
we lost everything. So when it happened, we were in
a panic. I didn't know what to do. My father had,
(15:11):
of course, collaborated with the French. I didn't know, you know,
I didn't stand a thing. But my father was a
faith that the Communists would come in and kill him.
My Eleigot didn't come to the RAND project as a
blank slate. She came with a history. She had to
(15:32):
flee for her life from the communists in the North.
Now she's been hired by RAND to figure out the communists,
the same people who chased her family away. The interviewers
would go out in teams of three or four. Sometimes
the groups would stay in Saigon and go to the
prison where captured Viacong were held. Other times they would
head out into the countryside, hitching a ride on military
(15:55):
planes to the Mekong Delta. The interviews were taped, did
offer their subject cigarettes. Sometimes they'd sit outside under the trees.
It was friendly, not confrontational. The interviewers made it clear
that they were only doing a research project. If the
subject was uninteresting or reluctant, the sessions would be short.
(16:15):
Other times they might last for days. Then it was
back to the villa on Route Pasteur, where the interviews
would be transcribed, translated, and edited. That's my Elliott in
the Central Mekong Delta into being a former company commander
(16:36):
for the two hundred and sixty first Battalion of the
North Vietnamese Army, there was a lot of questions about bombing,
what weapons do you feel the most, what had the
most effect on your unit and your operations? And with
the North Vietnamese who infiltrated into the South, tell us
about conditions. Are you march from the North to the
(16:57):
South with their bombings you know along the way? Thanks
like that. The Morale Project would eventually deduce sixty two
thousand pages of transcripts interviews with captured Vietcong and others.
Sixty two thousand pages. This isn't some focus group conducted
(17:20):
by a PR firm where a few dozen people are
interviewed for an hour. This is one of the most
extraordinary encyclopedic detailed portraits of an enemy ever created. Remember,
no one in Washington really knew anything about Vietnam in
nearly nineteen sixties. Now there was a million dollar operation
on the route pasteur painting a living, breathing portrait of
(17:43):
the other side. The stuff was gold. Gray takes the
results and makes the rounds. His favorite statistic was this.
When RAND started its study, sixty five percent of defectors
and prisoners believed the Vietcong could win. After a year
of heavy US bombing, that number was down to twenty
(18:05):
percent the enemy was on the ropes. Gray used the
Air Force Army US Embassy, then off to Honolulu, to
the headquarters of the Army of the Pacific RAND in
Santa Monica, Washington, d C. To the Pentagon, and to
the White House. Helicopters would pick him up in Saigon
and whisk him to aircraft carriers at the Villa en
(18:26):
Rue Pasteur. He holds cocktail parties for everyone who is
anyone in South Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, Walter Mondale, the US
Senator later to become Jimmy Carter's Vice president. Gray meets
with visiting journalists, CIA officers. His stuff goes right to
the top. Well, we've had an interesting report from a
man named Gorey who works for the Rand Corporation. That's
(18:50):
Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary. From tapes made of White
House conversations in nineteen sixty five and sixty six, President
Lyndon Johnson decides to pull the United States deeper and
deeper into Vietnam, and the story was that LBJ used
to walk around with a summary of Gray's dings in
his back pocket. Wars require public justification. If you're going
(19:15):
to put thousands of lives at risk. You need to
explain to your citizens just what you're doing. And that's
what Leon Garrey offered. In the crucial early years of
the Vietnam War. He offered justification. Enter Conrad Kellen, the
third person in our story. When did I come to round? Oh? Well,
(19:41):
I lived in New York at sixty four, I think
it was. Kellen was a battered veteran of World War
Two and a little bit of a legend. I once
spent two weeks in Los Angeles just going from one
person's house to the next asking for their memories of Kellen.
Everybody remembers Conrad Kellen. If you took the absolute best
(20:02):
of nineteenth century Central Europe and put it in a
time machine that opened its doors in nineteen sixty southern California,
that would be Kellen. I read the paper said some
people in Washing, some smart bowers, had showered the North
with millions of leaflets in which they had told the
(20:22):
Vietnamese they should lay down their arms because we were
good people, and they were leaders were bad people, you know,
the ordinary nonsense, and they should stop fighting the war.
Kellen served in US Army Intelligence in the second World War,
specializing in psychological warfare. So later when he reads how
(20:44):
the US we're using leaflets in Vietnam, he gets angry,
We're doing it all wrong. And so I wrote a
letter to the New York Times and said it was
obvious nonsense to shower large numbers of soldiers with a
leaflet saying stopped that war. Soldiers some stopballs. So there's
some begin wars and soldiers stopballs. So if you want
(21:06):
to stop a war, you have to do it differently.
So I got a call from them here, from the
RAM people, and they wanted me to come and be
part of the system, and I said okay, So it
came came to Los Angeles. Kellen grew up in Berlin,
wealthy cultured. His father owned a big brewery. His full
(21:27):
name was kats and ellen Bogen, and the kats and
ellen Bogans were one of the great Jewish families of Europe.
But when Hitler came to power, Kellen packed his bags.
He said later that he knew on some instinctive level
that things would not end well for the Jews in Germany.
He goes to Paris becomes friends with the French writer
Jean Cocteau. His life is full of moments like this.
(21:50):
He gets on a boat to America and meets the
mobster Dutch Schultz, who offers him a job. He arrives
in New York and works for the legendary investor Benjamin Graham,
who was the mentor of Warren Buffett. He goes to
California and is the private secretary of the Nobel Prize
winning novelist Thomas Mann. Kellen was impossibly handsome, dashing over
(22:12):
six feet tall. He was an expert in Gulf handwriting
analysis and ferraris. Both his sisters earned PhDs from Berkeley,
one in chemistry, the other in biology. His brother escapes
from Nazi Germany lands in New York, and if you
go online and look up the assets of his personal foundation,
it's six hundred and sixty five million dollars. His stepmother
(22:34):
was painted by Renoir, a family friend. He was cousins
with Einstein. I mean, after a bit, it gets ridiculous.
The craziest story about Callen is when he was in
Paris in nineteen forty five. The war has just ended
and he's sitting in the Cafe Select near the Cham's
Elise when a young woman approaches him. She says, are
(22:57):
you an American gi He says yes. She says, you
going back to the States. He says yes. She says,
you have to do me a favor. My father's an artist.
I have to get his work safely to America, because,
of course Europe was in chaos. And Kellen says, by
all means. But then she goes away and comes back
with this massive stack of canvases, and he says, there's
(23:19):
no way I can take that, and she says, you
have to. Whereupon Kellen embarks on this epic month long
struggle to get these paintings safely across the ocean, which
includes being trapped in the back of an open truck
during a rainstorm and throwing his coat over the pile
of paintings to keep them for being ruined, and staying
up all night, night after night because he's terrified someone
(23:41):
will steal them. Who's the painter, Mark Chagal, I should
say Mark Schagal, of course, because only Conrad Keellen would
end up transporting the collected works of one of the
most famous artists of the twentieth century to America in
a rainstorm on the back of a truck. The deal
Chagal's daughter made with him was that he could take
(24:03):
one picture and keep it for himself. So he takes one,
a famous one. Then he sells it in the nineteen fifties.
But what seemed like a lot of money at the time,
But of course it's a Chagal, a famous Chagal. And
every now and again over the years he'd spot his
old painting in an auction catalog worth more and more
(24:24):
and more, and he buried his head in his hands
and say oh. By late nineteen sixty six, when Conrad
Kellen gets to RAND, the place is in turmoil. The
Vietnam War has split its ranks down the middle. This
(24:45):
is the think tank that the Pentagon has been relying
on to make sense of the war. But there's a
group inside RAND that believes the war is a terrible mistake.
I don't know if you remember the story of the
Pentagon Papers. This was the secret forty seven volume study
of US political and military involvement in the Vietnam War.
It was commissioned by the Pentagon. The Pentagon Papers showed
(25:06):
that the White House had been misleading Congress and the
American people for years about how well the war was going.
A copy of the Pentagon Papers was famously leaked to
the New York Times in nineteen seventy one by Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg's league was really the beginning of the end of
public support for the war. And who was Ellsberg? An
employee of Rand? And where did he get his copy
(25:28):
of the Pentagon papers? He took it from the safe
at Rand. And guests who was one of Ellsberg's best
friends and confidants at Rand, Conrad Kellen, of course, as
always in the thick of things. But the moment we're
talking about is well before the Pentagon Papers controversy. It's
(25:48):
at the beginning of the divisions within Rand nineteen sixty
five sixty six. Rand is a place that prides itself
on objectivity and rigor. Everything is checked and double checked
and fact checked and reviewed in house before its released.
But the Rand brass is beginning to worry that when
Leon Garay gets whisked by helicopter to aircraft carriers or
(26:09):
huddles with generals at his cocktail parties at the Villa
on Rue Pasteur, he's bypassing all that. They worry that
he's gone rogue, so they bring in Conrad Kellen to
be a second set of eyes. Kellen comes in and
reads a thousand of the Vietcong interviews. Remember many of
these interviews ran to fifteen or twenty single space type pages.
(26:31):
It's a huge amount of work. And Kellen decides Garray
has it all wrong. The Vietcong are not crumbling. On
the contrary, here's Kellen again from his interview with my Elliott.
I could see from the interviews that we were not
going to win this war. That was Michael Duz. I
(26:53):
was one of the very few people that Rand who
had that idea. Most of from Buegang, who they were,
they couldn't understand. To this day, they don't understand how
a nation was two million million soldiers out of ships
airplanes cannot win over Vietnam. So here we have two men,
(27:15):
two sophisticated European intellectuals with access to the richest trove
of intelligence in the entire war. Grey goes first and
says we're winning. Callen comes along, looks at exactly the
same evidence and says we're never going to win. Then
there's my Elliot. If Gray is at the Villa en
(27:35):
rue Pasteur and Callen is back in Santa Monica Elliott
is actually in the field, in the jungles and villages,
talking to actual defectors and Viet Cong guerrillas. And what
does she think will happen? She doesn't know. She's confused.
I walked into this sale and I didn't know what
to expect. And then in walked this man, middle aged,
(28:01):
very briskly, and he looked, you know, like a man
like although I he stopped dead in his tracks. Elliott
is talking about an early interview she did that had
a huge impact on her, but she never forgot. You
have to remember what I looked like at the time.
(28:22):
I was young. I was dressed in western clothes and
I didn't look like the military interrogators he had seen.
So he was surprised to see me, and he was
kind of guarded, suspicious. He didn't know what to expect,
and I was afraid. I didn't know what was going
to happen because I had grown up believing that the
(28:45):
Communists were bloodthirsty. They started to talk, and gradually he
relaxed and she relaxed. You know, I had never met
a Communists before face to face, so I just my
curiosity just took over and I just asked him a
lot of questions about him and his family and his
background and his beliefs. And he had devoted his whole
(29:08):
life to fighting the French, and now he was fighting
the Americans. And he seemed to have a lot of integrity.
And what effect did listening to him have on you? Well,
it really confused me because I had believed that the
Communists were sort of like pugs we call we call
(29:29):
them tho choema, meaning pugs, and it's a literal translation
of that. No choe minga the head of a buffalo
and the body of a horse. So somebody who's not,
you know, quite human, a thug. What the captured Vietcong
(29:50):
officers said was straightforward, The intelligence was straightforward. But my
Elliott's reaction was anything but straightforward. And so I left
with more questions and answers, and I began to see
that the picture was not black and white like I
had believed at the beginning. But then Elliott says something crucial.
(30:12):
She says, it didn't change her mind. She saw the
evidence with her own eyes. She did the interview with
the general, but it wasn't enough. Remember her circumstances. She
comes from a family of privilege, and the rise of
the Communists in the north takes all that away. They
end up living in a little hot and Saigon. The
(30:33):
Vietcong is not some abstract force. They were a personal
threat to her family. I think for people whose backs
were against the wall, who thought that their survival depended
on the commonness not winning, then seeing the evidence doesn't
mean that you change your mind. Seeing the evidence doesn't
(30:58):
mean that you change your mind. Seeing the evidence just
increases your fear, because you fear that you know that
the Communess would win and it would be the end
of you and your family, and you don't want to
face it. You know, you don't want to think about it.
(31:27):
Leon Garay might well have read the transcript of that
same interview that my Elliott did with the Vietcong officer,
and his interpretation would be that guy's going to give up.
If we just bomb people like him some more, will
destroy their will in retrospect, completely wrong. But think about
this from Garay's perspective. Well, look, if you want to
(31:49):
understand that I am a professional refugee, I win a
refugee from Russia to Germany, from Germany to France, and
from France to the United States, so three times. So
as far as I was concerned, this was going to
be my country and whatever way, what's the defense that
no interest of the United States, it was sufficient reason
(32:13):
to pursue this thing. By this thing, he means fighting Communism,
the enemy that forced Gray out of his home in Russia.
And in the nineteen sixties, this thing, Communism is still
out there. It's spread to Vietnam. Think how much Gray
had to believe that America was winning the war. Leon
(32:33):
Garay felt there was nowhere left to retreat to. You
don't pick and choose your wars. Your country's at war.
It's at war period. You don't pick and choose whether
you approval it or not. That's nonsense, that's chaos. There's
(32:56):
a moment in my Eliot's interview with Conrad Kellen where
he talks about Gray about what it means to be
a refugee. I think, like many eventually became great opportunists.
What else could they do? I mean, if you were
an opportunist, at least said the American establishment on your side.
(33:17):
You know, the refugee is an opportunist because he is
at the mercy of whatever country will take him, and
I can't help but think that Kellen is also talking
about himself here. He's acknowledging the biases that he brought
to the interviews because he's a refugee too. He escaped
(33:43):
from the Nazis. He witnessed the destruction of everything he
once knew, his home, his community, his family, his privilege.
How can that not scar you? At one point, Kellen
explains to Elliott why he never actually traveled to Vietnam,
even though he was working on a project about Vietnam.
I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
(34:05):
enough for me. One war was enough for me. I
imagine Kellen read that same interview Elliot did, the one
with the Vietcong officer. Kellen sees the man's determination, and
when he thinks about that resolve through the prism of
his own experience, he realizes, I can't match that, not anymore.
(34:27):
One war was enough for me. Over and again in
his interview with my Elliott, Kellen comes back to this
war wasn't some conceptual abstraction for him. It wasn't an
intellectual question like it was for so many at RAND.
It was real. He lived through it. There were an
(34:48):
awful lot of civilians around in this whole thing and
this whole Vietnam thing, who talked about casualties character They
didn't give a damn about anything. If somebody came back
and said, you know, we took and took such and
such a place which I don't know sixty category, well,
(35:11):
a casualty is not that that person. A casualty is
something theoretical for these people. One interview with the Vietcong officer,
one fantastic bit of intelligence, an insight into the enemy's mind,
and yet everyone was in disagreement on what it meant
because everyone was looking at it through a different set
of eyes. That's why intelligence failures happen. It's not because
(35:35):
someone screws up or is stupid or lazy. It's because
the people who make sense of intelligence are human beings
with their own histories and biases. So what happens to
the three people in our story? Gray gets recalled from
Vietnam in April of nineteen sixty seven. Clearly, Rand asked
(35:55):
me to stop going there, to stop going to Vietnam,
to return to Santa Monica. I went back, and then
Ibas told that my presence was an embarrassment. I don't
know why you suggest, she was very clear that they
should for something else. How do you feel about that?
Were you disappointed? Of course, I like grand he was
(36:16):
hung out to dry. His son, Daniel is a lot
more blunt. My sense of it was they wanted, you know,
to cut loose from anything having to do with Vietnam,
and the way to cut loose from this project and
from him was to try and discredit the analysis and
sort of then again, okay, you're now no longer a
(36:39):
legitimate analyst, Well you really do need to go kind
of thing. And how can you describe your father in
those years? So? I think he was feeling quite beaten down. Frankly,
I suspect there was a degree of just physical exhaustion.
It may have been not that different than you know,
when he and his family kept getting driven out of
(37:00):
cities in Europe and had to restart the whole process
and restart the fight. I think there was a certain
degree of that. Gray eventually moved to Florida take supposed
to the University of Miami, fights the Cold War from
Coral Gables. As from my Elliott, she eventually moves to America,
lives in Ithaca, and it's only then from the safety
(37:20):
of upstate New York that she finally accepts what the
Vietcong officer was telling her. I wish it would have
been easier for me to come to the conclusion earlier,
because it was just use of agonizing and being ambiguous.
She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
determined the war was wrong and unwinnable. I think that
(37:47):
it's easier to be objective when you will not you
don't have a personal steak in a situation, and you
can see the evidence and say, oh, yeah, the war
is not working less ended. But when you have a
very deep, strong personal steak, it's a lot harder because
(38:10):
you're talking about survival of your family, your relatives. Myke
Elliot finally faced the difficult truth. As for Kellen, Kellen
sounds the alarm almost from the beginning of his time
at RAND. He says, the intelligence tells us the war
cannot be won. But of course, if you know even
the slightest bit about the Vietnam War, you know that
(38:32):
no one listened to him, at least until it was
too late. He suffered, like all of them did. I
can only say that the people that I knew were
talked a lot about scientific talk. Scientific listened that we're
the most unscientific people. You can imagine. They just picked
somebody and then if they agreed with him, or he
agreed with them, then he was an expert, and if
(38:54):
he didn't agree with him, he was not an expert,
and then they would it out the most unscientific people
you can imagine. I'm not sure it's any different today,
is it. And everybody reports for everybody else, and it
was It wasn't almost like a comedy, you know, it
was so stupid. I got very angry about that. Kellen
(39:25):
died in two thousand and seven, and not long ago
I went to see his wife in that same house
up in the hills. His daughters were there as well.
They talked about how the Second World War never left him.
He had terrible memories, and at the very end of
his life, all those memories came back with a vengeance.
Kellen would lie in his bed in sunny, beautiful Santa
(39:47):
Monica and he would dream that the Nazis were coming
up the hill to take him away. You've been listening
(40:20):
to revisionist history. If you like what you've heard, do
us a favor and rate us on iTunes It helps.
You can get more information about this in other episodes
at revisionist history dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
Our show is produced by mel La Belle, Roxanne Scott
and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
(40:44):
composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flan Williams is
our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Saraca. Peneply
management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm
Malcolm Gladwell.
Pushkin. After we got married, we got an apartment on Hibaichung,
near the Attending Market. It's not the best part of town,
but not the worst either. Very lively, bustling, noisy area.
That's My Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now,
a graceful, elegant, middle aged woman. She's talking about her
(00:38):
life in Saigon in the early nineteen sixties, the first
days of the Vietnam War. I had an apartment of
my own. You know, life couldn't have been better, I thought.
(01:00):
My name is Malcolm Glauber. Welcome to Revisionist History, where
every week we go back and look at something and
misunderstood or overlooked. This week's episode is about a secret
Pentagon study that a Vietnamese woman named my Elliott and
two others became tangled up in and what happened when
(01:23):
it ended, because there's a lot we can learn from
them today. The project was run by the Rand Corporation,
a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to
(01:44):
an extraordinary collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wonks.
RAND is the kind of place where everyone speaks in
complete paragraphs, and if you close your eyes as you listen.
You can almost see the footnotes at the end of
each one of those perfect paragraphs. The Defense Department willot
on them heavily in those years. Still does tell me
about how you come to work for RAND. Dave new
(02:08):
somebody at macvie who was an officer, a graduate student.
Dave is my husband, an American academic. Macwee stands for
a Military Assistance Command of Vietnam headquarters for the Vietnam War.
So anyway, Dave knew this guy who was also a
graduate student doing his military stint, and his wife, an American,
(02:32):
was working at RAND. My Elliott is Vietnamese, and she
ends up working at Randon Saigon for a man named
Leon Garay, one of Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran
the Secret Study and he's a big part of this story.
Here's an interview Rand recorded with Garay just before he
died in two thousand and seven. And how did you
end up getting into Vietnam? I got drafted. Well, I
(02:56):
assume I volunteered, but I got drafted. The Chief of
Air Force Intelligence asked me to go. Garay sat up
shop in an old bench style villain at the Presidential
Palace in downtown Saigon, one seventy six Rue Pasteur. The
house is still there, flame trees and tamarin line, the
street quiet, discreet. This was in nineteen sixty four, just
(03:21):
when Saigon was beginning to fall apart. Still, if you
were a Westerner, you might go to the exclusive sex
portif on the humid afternoons, to sit by the pool
of by Tennis, or have a cocktail in the veranda
of the Continental Hotel. Maybe you'd hear a bomb or
two off in the distance. Later, of course, things would
get far worse. The house we lived in in Saigon
(03:43):
was directly under the trajectory of the rockets that the
Vietong were firing at the Palace, so we had a
greative experience of ducking onto the dining room table. Gray
had been working in the Santa Monica office of RAND
when he was summoned to Vietnam. It was a job
no one really wanted. Who would leave southern California for Saigon.
(04:03):
The Pentagon wanted him to run a project interviewing Vietcong
prisoners and defectors. Great jumped at the chance. I had
to organize my own team of Vietnamese. We were producing
interview reports or interrogation reports for the US for Rand,
and for the chief of the Intelligence of the Vietnamese
(04:24):
are reforces. You all got copies. Later, Leon Grey got
into trouble, or at least into an argument, and Rand
brought in a third person to fix things, Conrad Kellen.
I was supposed to be indoctor NATed by Leon Go Ray.
He was supposed to tell me about Vietnam, but I
got very quickly the feeling that he was extremely partisan
(04:47):
for the South, which of course was partims. Show that
woman's voice. You here, that's my Elliott again. She interviewed
Kellen in Santa Monica after he retired from RAND for
a history she wrote called Rand in Southeast Asia, a
History of the Vietnam War. A brilliant book. By the way,
he was sort of missed Vietnam at Rand, you know,
(05:10):
mister sauciet man, and I sort of became his sort
of successor in a way. The story that follows is
about these three people, my Eliot leungare Conrad Kellen, and
(05:31):
how their lives intersected over a minor and forgotten episode
in the Vietnam War called the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project.
I say minor because what happened in that French villa
on one seven six route Pasteur didn't swing the war
one way or another. Nobody who was part of the
study ever fired a gun or dropped a bomb. But
(05:52):
the story of the Morale Project says a lot about
something that has obsessed us ever since intelligence failure. Why
is it so hard to tell what your enemy is thinking?
That question came up after nine to eleven during the
Two Gulf Wars, It came up again in afghanist It
comes up today with ISIS. And every time we get
(06:12):
it wrong, every time our enemies take us by surprise,
we always say, if only we knew more about them,
If only we had more information about our adversaries, more
spies in the ground, more satellite images, more intercepted communications,
more of everything. Do you know how many federal government
(06:33):
organizations there are just devoted to counter terrorism? Twelve hundred
and seventy one and another nineteen hundred and thirty one
private companies. Do you know how many Americans hold top
secret security clearances? Eight hundred and fifty four thousand. Those
numbers all come from an extraordinary Washington Post investigation from
(06:53):
six years ago. And here's the most incredible statistic of all.
Just since nine to eleven, just to Howe's top secret
intelligence work, and just in the Washington, DC area, seventeen
million square feet of new office space has been built
to house intelligence operations. Seventeen million. We want to know
(07:15):
everything about our enemies. But what the Vietcong Motivation and
Morale Project tells us is this, you can know everything
there is to know about your enemy, everything, and that
still won't solve your problem. Vietnam was a French colony
(07:36):
from eighteen eighty seven until nineteen fifty four. Then the
French loss controlled the country. It was split in half.
Communists took over the north, an American backed regime came
into power in the south. Over the next decade, conditions
inside South Vietnam slowly deteriorated. The government was unpopular, they
were protests in the streets, a military coup, and the
(07:59):
North Vietnamese started setting guerrillas known as the Vietcong over
the border to try and recruit South Vietnamese to their cause.
That's why the Vietnam War, at least US involvement there
starts in nearly nineteen sixties. Because the United States feels
compelled to help the South turn back the Vietcong. Wars
are usually about territory. Country X invades country, why country
(08:22):
WI fights back? But this is a weird kind of war.
The US and the South Vietnamese have no intention of
invading the North. They decide instead that they'll just bomb
the North Vietnamese until they give up, until they realize
that exporting guerrillas over the border isn't worth it. The
Vietnam War is a war of persuasion, a crude kind
(08:43):
of persuasion. The goal is to break the other side's will.
The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
on paper, but nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military
might and a live horse of more than eight thousand men.
Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
Central coast. But if your goal is to break someone's will,
(09:06):
how do you know if his strategy is working. In
the early nineteen sixties, when the US first starts sending
troops to fight the Vietcong, there was a problem. No
one knew anything about the Vietcong. Almost no one of
the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Vietnamese. The
Special adviser to the American General in South Vietnam at
the time was an Australian called Colonel Srong. And you
(09:28):
know what he said, all quote him directly. These people
are simply what we call in many countries juvenile delinquents.
That's the best he could offer in terms of intelligence
about the Vietcong. So what do you do if you're
bombing someone you know nothing about and you want to
know how this unknown person feels. You call on the
(09:50):
Rand Corporation. So Rand rents the villa on Rue Pasteur
and brings in Leon Garay to run the show. Garay
was Russian by birth. His family history was remarkable. His
parents were Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were the socialist moderates who
split off from Lenin during the Alshebek Revolution. They were
(10:11):
in Russia during the revolution. This is Leon Gary's son, Daniel.
He's a national security and policy expert with the Lexington
Institute in Arlington, Virginia. They participated in the revolution. Effect
My grandparents met in prison. My grandmother used to smoke
unfiltered cigarettes and a little holder and she cut him
in half. They were living in Moscow. They were in Moscow. Yeah,
(10:32):
they were in Moscow and they were fighting the system.
He my grandfather ran an illegal printing press and the
whole thing. In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born,
the Garrays are kicked out of the country. They ended
up next in Berlin in nineteen thirty three. They shut
the doors, locked the building up and left, just walked
(10:55):
away and went to Paris. And then they got out
of Paris on the same train that Humphrey Bogart did
in Castleblanca, heading south, and he andered south, went through
Spain to Portugal and then got to the US after that.
So they stayed one step ahead of the tide of
(11:15):
evil for about almost twenty years. Wow. Yeah, which of
the Bolsheviks? He must have known some of them person
or knew album personal if they knew Trotsky, they knew Lenin,
they knew Stalin, they knew the whole, the whole crowd. Man,
you're leftist royalty. Yeah, well right. The Grays end up
in New York City ninety six and Broadway deep in
(11:37):
the world of Eastern European emigreys. Leon serves in the army,
fights in the Battle of the Bulge, and ends up
in counterintelligence. How do you think the refugee experience shaped
your father number of ways. I think the overriding one
was we've retreated this far and no farther. So it
(11:59):
was it was a view of sort of America, not
just a city on the hill, not but you know,
there's nowhere left to retreat to. The country needs to
be truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important. So
this is who Ran puts in charge of the Vietnam operation.
(12:22):
Leon Garay a patriot in the way that only an
immigrant can be a patriot. He was suaved. He was
very charming, He had a great sense of humor, very articulate, energetic, enthusiastic.
So personally I liked him. The only thing I didn't
like about him was the fact that he was a
(12:43):
great ladies man, you know, and there were a lot
of rumors about that. But as a person I liked him.
Gray spoke German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
of the European intellectual. He had an amazing kind of
research all of his life. Where there will be stacks
(13:05):
of documents in Russian innings were on his dad, and
he literally be talking to you and it would sort
of be, well, you know, there's this recent thing, and
he's sort of it's an idetic memory, but he was
certainly kind of librarian cyclopedic in that kind of set.
Gray meets Robert McNamara, President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and
tells him what he thinks needs to be done. That
(13:25):
is to really answer the question of how the bombing
is affecting the Vietcong. That's the question I remembered very clearly. Again,
this is from the interview Gray did with the Rand
Archives a decade ago at the end of his life,
and he said, what is your funding? I told him
we had one hundred thousand dollars. He said, what would
you do with a million? That was this question. I said,
(13:45):
that's a new moral of this stuff, and I have
more people doing the interviewing. Says, you have it. A
million dollars in Saigon in the mid sixties was a
king's ransom. So Gray hires a team of locals to
fan out across the South Vietnamese countryside to interview defectoris
from North Vietnam. And captured Vietcong guerrillas. That's where my
(14:08):
elliot come in. She was one of Grey's interviewers, and
her story is every bit as fascinating as Leon Grey's.
My father was appointed to Haifang. He became mayor of Haifang.
She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and
as mayor he had a lot of authority. He was
(14:30):
almost like the king of that little town. And we
live in an enormous house with an enormous garden in
front and back, with a staff of servants and even
a platoon of guards, you know, who stood guard outside
our gate. So that was really the best time of
(14:50):
my life. Then the French get defeated in the north
by the Communists. Vietnam is divided in two. It happened.
So suddenly we just packed up and left everything, and
we lost everything. So when it happened, we were in
a panic. I didn't know what to do. My father had,
(15:11):
of course, collaborated with the French. I didn't know, you know,
I didn't stand a thing. But my father was a
faith that the Communists would come in and kill him.
My Eleigot didn't come to the RAND project as a
blank slate. She came with a history. She had to
(15:32):
flee for her life from the communists in the North.
Now she's been hired by RAND to figure out the communists,
the same people who chased her family away. The interviewers
would go out in teams of three or four. Sometimes
the groups would stay in Saigon and go to the
prison where captured Viacong were held. Other times they would
head out into the countryside, hitching a ride on military
(15:55):
planes to the Mekong Delta. The interviews were taped, did
offer their subject cigarettes. Sometimes they'd sit outside under the trees.
It was friendly, not confrontational. The interviewers made it clear
that they were only doing a research project. If the
subject was uninteresting or reluctant, the sessions would be short.
(16:15):
Other times they might last for days. Then it was
back to the villa on Route Pasteur, where the interviews
would be transcribed, translated, and edited. That's my Elliott in
the Central Mekong Delta into being a former company commander
(16:36):
for the two hundred and sixty first Battalion of the
North Vietnamese Army, there was a lot of questions about bombing,
what weapons do you feel the most, what had the
most effect on your unit and your operations? And with
the North Vietnamese who infiltrated into the South, tell us
about conditions. Are you march from the North to the
(16:57):
South with their bombings you know along the way? Thanks
like that. The Morale Project would eventually deduce sixty two
thousand pages of transcripts interviews with captured Vietcong and others.
Sixty two thousand pages. This isn't some focus group conducted
(17:20):
by a PR firm where a few dozen people are
interviewed for an hour. This is one of the most
extraordinary encyclopedic detailed portraits of an enemy ever created. Remember,
no one in Washington really knew anything about Vietnam in
nearly nineteen sixties. Now there was a million dollar operation
on the route pasteur painting a living, breathing portrait of
(17:43):
the other side. The stuff was gold. Gray takes the
results and makes the rounds. His favorite statistic was this.
When RAND started its study, sixty five percent of defectors
and prisoners believed the Vietcong could win. After a year
of heavy US bombing, that number was down to twenty
(18:05):
percent the enemy was on the ropes. Gray used the
Air Force Army US Embassy, then off to Honolulu, to
the headquarters of the Army of the Pacific RAND in
Santa Monica, Washington, d C. To the Pentagon, and to
the White House. Helicopters would pick him up in Saigon
and whisk him to aircraft carriers at the Villa en
(18:26):
Rue Pasteur. He holds cocktail parties for everyone who is
anyone in South Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, Walter Mondale, the US
Senator later to become Jimmy Carter's Vice president. Gray meets
with visiting journalists, CIA officers. His stuff goes right to
the top. Well, we've had an interesting report from a
man named Gorey who works for the Rand Corporation. That's
(18:50):
Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary. From tapes made of White
House conversations in nineteen sixty five and sixty six, President
Lyndon Johnson decides to pull the United States deeper and
deeper into Vietnam, and the story was that LBJ used
to walk around with a summary of Gray's dings in
his back pocket. Wars require public justification. If you're going
(19:15):
to put thousands of lives at risk. You need to
explain to your citizens just what you're doing. And that's
what Leon Garrey offered. In the crucial early years of
the Vietnam War. He offered justification. Enter Conrad Kellen, the
third person in our story. When did I come to round? Oh? Well,
(19:41):
I lived in New York at sixty four, I think
it was. Kellen was a battered veteran of World War
Two and a little bit of a legend. I once
spent two weeks in Los Angeles just going from one
person's house to the next asking for their memories of Kellen.
Everybody remembers Conrad Kellen. If you took the absolute best
(20:02):
of nineteenth century Central Europe and put it in a
time machine that opened its doors in nineteen sixty southern California,
that would be Kellen. I read the paper said some
people in Washing, some smart bowers, had showered the North
with millions of leaflets in which they had told the
(20:22):
Vietnamese they should lay down their arms because we were
good people, and they were leaders were bad people, you know,
the ordinary nonsense, and they should stop fighting the war.
Kellen served in US Army Intelligence in the second World War,
specializing in psychological warfare. So later when he reads how
(20:44):
the US we're using leaflets in Vietnam, he gets angry,
We're doing it all wrong. And so I wrote a
letter to the New York Times and said it was
obvious nonsense to shower large numbers of soldiers with a
leaflet saying stopped that war. Soldiers some stopballs. So there's
some begin wars and soldiers stopballs. So if you want
(21:06):
to stop a war, you have to do it differently.
So I got a call from them here, from the
RAM people, and they wanted me to come and be
part of the system, and I said okay, So it
came came to Los Angeles. Kellen grew up in Berlin,
wealthy cultured. His father owned a big brewery. His full
(21:27):
name was kats and ellen Bogen, and the kats and
ellen Bogans were one of the great Jewish families of Europe.
But when Hitler came to power, Kellen packed his bags.
He said later that he knew on some instinctive level
that things would not end well for the Jews in Germany.
He goes to Paris becomes friends with the French writer
Jean Cocteau. His life is full of moments like this.
(21:50):
He gets on a boat to America and meets the
mobster Dutch Schultz, who offers him a job. He arrives
in New York and works for the legendary investor Benjamin Graham,
who was the mentor of Warren Buffett. He goes to
California and is the private secretary of the Nobel Prize
winning novelist Thomas Mann. Kellen was impossibly handsome, dashing over
(22:12):
six feet tall. He was an expert in Gulf handwriting
analysis and ferraris. Both his sisters earned PhDs from Berkeley,
one in chemistry, the other in biology. His brother escapes
from Nazi Germany lands in New York, and if you
go online and look up the assets of his personal foundation,
it's six hundred and sixty five million dollars. His stepmother
(22:34):
was painted by Renoir, a family friend. He was cousins
with Einstein. I mean, after a bit, it gets ridiculous.
The craziest story about Callen is when he was in
Paris in nineteen forty five. The war has just ended
and he's sitting in the Cafe Select near the Cham's
Elise when a young woman approaches him. She says, are
(22:57):
you an American gi He says yes. She says, you
going back to the States. He says yes. She says,
you have to do me a favor. My father's an artist.
I have to get his work safely to America, because,
of course Europe was in chaos. And Kellen says, by
all means. But then she goes away and comes back
with this massive stack of canvases, and he says, there's
(23:19):
no way I can take that, and she says, you
have to. Whereupon Kellen embarks on this epic month long
struggle to get these paintings safely across the ocean, which
includes being trapped in the back of an open truck
during a rainstorm and throwing his coat over the pile
of paintings to keep them for being ruined, and staying
up all night, night after night because he's terrified someone
(23:41):
will steal them. Who's the painter, Mark Chagal, I should
say Mark Schagal, of course, because only Conrad Keellen would
end up transporting the collected works of one of the
most famous artists of the twentieth century to America in
a rainstorm on the back of a truck. The deal
Chagal's daughter made with him was that he could take
(24:03):
one picture and keep it for himself. So he takes one,
a famous one. Then he sells it in the nineteen fifties.
But what seemed like a lot of money at the time,
But of course it's a Chagal, a famous Chagal. And
every now and again over the years he'd spot his
old painting in an auction catalog worth more and more
(24:24):
and more, and he buried his head in his hands
and say oh. By late nineteen sixty six, when Conrad
Kellen gets to RAND, the place is in turmoil. The
Vietnam War has split its ranks down the middle. This
(24:45):
is the think tank that the Pentagon has been relying
on to make sense of the war. But there's a
group inside RAND that believes the war is a terrible mistake.
I don't know if you remember the story of the
Pentagon Papers. This was the secret forty seven volume study
of US political and military involvement in the Vietnam War.
It was commissioned by the Pentagon. The Pentagon Papers showed
(25:06):
that the White House had been misleading Congress and the
American people for years about how well the war was going.
A copy of the Pentagon Papers was famously leaked to
the New York Times in nineteen seventy one by Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg's league was really the beginning of the end of
public support for the war. And who was Ellsberg? An
employee of Rand? And where did he get his copy
(25:28):
of the Pentagon papers? He took it from the safe
at Rand. And guests who was one of Ellsberg's best
friends and confidants at Rand, Conrad Kellen, of course, as
always in the thick of things. But the moment we're
talking about is well before the Pentagon Papers controversy. It's
(25:48):
at the beginning of the divisions within Rand nineteen sixty
five sixty six. Rand is a place that prides itself
on objectivity and rigor. Everything is checked and double checked
and fact checked and reviewed in house before its released.
But the Rand brass is beginning to worry that when
Leon Garay gets whisked by helicopter to aircraft carriers or
(26:09):
huddles with generals at his cocktail parties at the Villa
on Rue Pasteur, he's bypassing all that. They worry that
he's gone rogue, so they bring in Conrad Kellen to
be a second set of eyes. Kellen comes in and
reads a thousand of the Vietcong interviews. Remember many of
these interviews ran to fifteen or twenty single space type pages.
(26:31):
It's a huge amount of work. And Kellen decides Garray
has it all wrong. The Vietcong are not crumbling. On
the contrary, here's Kellen again from his interview with my Elliott.
I could see from the interviews that we were not
going to win this war. That was Michael Duz. I
(26:53):
was one of the very few people that Rand who
had that idea. Most of from Buegang, who they were,
they couldn't understand. To this day, they don't understand how
a nation was two million million soldiers out of ships
airplanes cannot win over Vietnam. So here we have two men,
(27:15):
two sophisticated European intellectuals with access to the richest trove
of intelligence in the entire war. Grey goes first and
says we're winning. Callen comes along, looks at exactly the
same evidence and says we're never going to win. Then
there's my Elliot. If Gray is at the Villa en
(27:35):
rue Pasteur and Callen is back in Santa Monica Elliott
is actually in the field, in the jungles and villages,
talking to actual defectors and Viet Cong guerrillas. And what
does she think will happen? She doesn't know. She's confused.
I walked into this sale and I didn't know what
to expect. And then in walked this man, middle aged,
(28:01):
very briskly, and he looked, you know, like a man
like although I he stopped dead in his tracks. Elliott
is talking about an early interview she did that had
a huge impact on her, but she never forgot. You
have to remember what I looked like at the time.
(28:22):
I was young. I was dressed in western clothes and
I didn't look like the military interrogators he had seen.
So he was surprised to see me, and he was
kind of guarded, suspicious. He didn't know what to expect,
and I was afraid. I didn't know what was going
to happen because I had grown up believing that the
(28:45):
Communists were bloodthirsty. They started to talk, and gradually he
relaxed and she relaxed. You know, I had never met
a Communists before face to face, so I just my
curiosity just took over and I just asked him a
lot of questions about him and his family and his
background and his beliefs. And he had devoted his whole
(29:08):
life to fighting the French, and now he was fighting
the Americans. And he seemed to have a lot of integrity.
And what effect did listening to him have on you? Well,
it really confused me because I had believed that the
Communists were sort of like pugs we call we call
(29:29):
them tho choema, meaning pugs, and it's a literal translation
of that. No choe minga the head of a buffalo
and the body of a horse. So somebody who's not,
you know, quite human, a thug. What the captured Vietcong
(29:50):
officers said was straightforward, The intelligence was straightforward. But my
Elliott's reaction was anything but straightforward. And so I left
with more questions and answers, and I began to see
that the picture was not black and white like I
had believed at the beginning. But then Elliott says something crucial.
(30:12):
She says, it didn't change her mind. She saw the
evidence with her own eyes. She did the interview with
the general, but it wasn't enough. Remember her circumstances. She
comes from a family of privilege, and the rise of
the Communists in the north takes all that away. They
end up living in a little hot and Saigon. The
(30:33):
Vietcong is not some abstract force. They were a personal
threat to her family. I think for people whose backs
were against the wall, who thought that their survival depended
on the commonness not winning, then seeing the evidence doesn't
mean that you change your mind. Seeing the evidence doesn't
(30:58):
mean that you change your mind. Seeing the evidence just
increases your fear, because you fear that you know that
the Communess would win and it would be the end
of you and your family, and you don't want to
face it. You know, you don't want to think about it.
(31:27):
Leon Garay might well have read the transcript of that
same interview that my Elliott did with the Vietcong officer,
and his interpretation would be that guy's going to give up.
If we just bomb people like him some more, will
destroy their will in retrospect, completely wrong. But think about
this from Garay's perspective. Well, look, if you want to
(31:49):
understand that I am a professional refugee, I win a
refugee from Russia to Germany, from Germany to France, and
from France to the United States, so three times. So
as far as I was concerned, this was going to
be my country and whatever way, what's the defense that
no interest of the United States, it was sufficient reason
(32:13):
to pursue this thing. By this thing, he means fighting Communism,
the enemy that forced Gray out of his home in Russia.
And in the nineteen sixties, this thing, Communism is still
out there. It's spread to Vietnam. Think how much Gray
had to believe that America was winning the war. Leon
(32:33):
Garay felt there was nowhere left to retreat to. You
don't pick and choose your wars. Your country's at war.
It's at war period. You don't pick and choose whether
you approval it or not. That's nonsense, that's chaos. There's
(32:56):
a moment in my Eliot's interview with Conrad Kellen where
he talks about Gray about what it means to be
a refugee. I think, like many eventually became great opportunists.
What else could they do? I mean, if you were
an opportunist, at least said the American establishment on your side.
(33:17):
You know, the refugee is an opportunist because he is
at the mercy of whatever country will take him, and
I can't help but think that Kellen is also talking
about himself here. He's acknowledging the biases that he brought
to the interviews because he's a refugee too. He escaped
(33:43):
from the Nazis. He witnessed the destruction of everything he
once knew, his home, his community, his family, his privilege.
How can that not scar you? At one point, Kellen
explains to Elliott why he never actually traveled to Vietnam,
even though he was working on a project about Vietnam.
I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
(34:05):
enough for me. One war was enough for me. I
imagine Kellen read that same interview Elliot did, the one
with the Vietcong officer. Kellen sees the man's determination, and
when he thinks about that resolve through the prism of
his own experience, he realizes, I can't match that, not anymore.
(34:27):
One war was enough for me. Over and again in
his interview with my Elliott, Kellen comes back to this
war wasn't some conceptual abstraction for him. It wasn't an
intellectual question like it was for so many at RAND.
It was real. He lived through it. There were an
(34:48):
awful lot of civilians around in this whole thing and
this whole Vietnam thing, who talked about casualties character They
didn't give a damn about anything. If somebody came back
and said, you know, we took and took such and
such a place which I don't know sixty category, well,
(35:11):
a casualty is not that that person. A casualty is
something theoretical for these people. One interview with the Vietcong officer,
one fantastic bit of intelligence, an insight into the enemy's mind,
and yet everyone was in disagreement on what it meant
because everyone was looking at it through a different set
of eyes. That's why intelligence failures happen. It's not because
(35:35):
someone screws up or is stupid or lazy. It's because
the people who make sense of intelligence are human beings
with their own histories and biases. So what happens to
the three people in our story? Gray gets recalled from
Vietnam in April of nineteen sixty seven. Clearly, Rand asked
(35:55):
me to stop going there, to stop going to Vietnam,
to return to Santa Monica. I went back, and then
Ibas told that my presence was an embarrassment. I don't
know why you suggest, she was very clear that they
should for something else. How do you feel about that?
Were you disappointed? Of course, I like grand he was
(36:16):
hung out to dry. His son, Daniel is a lot
more blunt. My sense of it was they wanted, you know,
to cut loose from anything having to do with Vietnam,
and the way to cut loose from this project and
from him was to try and discredit the analysis and
sort of then again, okay, you're now no longer a
(36:39):
legitimate analyst, Well you really do need to go kind
of thing. And how can you describe your father in
those years? So? I think he was feeling quite beaten down. Frankly,
I suspect there was a degree of just physical exhaustion.
It may have been not that different than you know,
when he and his family kept getting driven out of
(37:00):
cities in Europe and had to restart the whole process
and restart the fight. I think there was a certain
degree of that. Gray eventually moved to Florida take supposed
to the University of Miami, fights the Cold War from
Coral Gables. As from my Elliott, she eventually moves to America,
lives in Ithaca, and it's only then from the safety
(37:20):
of upstate New York that she finally accepts what the
Vietcong officer was telling her. I wish it would have
been easier for me to come to the conclusion earlier,
because it was just use of agonizing and being ambiguous.
She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
determined the war was wrong and unwinnable. I think that
(37:47):
it's easier to be objective when you will not you
don't have a personal steak in a situation, and you
can see the evidence and say, oh, yeah, the war
is not working less ended. But when you have a
very deep, strong personal steak, it's a lot harder because
(38:10):
you're talking about survival of your family, your relatives. Myke
Elliot finally faced the difficult truth. As for Kellen, Kellen
sounds the alarm almost from the beginning of his time
at RAND. He says, the intelligence tells us the war
cannot be won. But of course, if you know even
the slightest bit about the Vietnam War, you know that
(38:32):
no one listened to him, at least until it was
too late. He suffered, like all of them did. I
can only say that the people that I knew were
talked a lot about scientific talk. Scientific listened that we're
the most unscientific people. You can imagine. They just picked
somebody and then if they agreed with him, or he
agreed with them, then he was an expert, and if
(38:54):
he didn't agree with him, he was not an expert,
and then they would it out the most unscientific people
you can imagine. I'm not sure it's any different today,
is it. And everybody reports for everybody else, and it
was It wasn't almost like a comedy, you know, it
was so stupid. I got very angry about that. Kellen
(39:25):
died in two thousand and seven, and not long ago
I went to see his wife in that same house
up in the hills. His daughters were there as well.
They talked about how the Second World War never left him.
He had terrible memories, and at the very end of
his life, all those memories came back with a vengeance.
Kellen would lie in his bed in sunny, beautiful Santa
(39:47):
Monica and he would dream that the Nazis were coming
up the hill to take him away. You've been listening
(40:20):
to revisionist history. If you like what you've heard, do
us a favor and rate us on iTunes It helps.
You can get more information about this in other episodes
at revisionist history dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
Our show is produced by mel La Belle, Roxanne Scott
and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
(40:44):
composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flan Williams is
our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Saraca. Peneply
management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm
Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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