CRESS

CRESS, the Center for Research in Social Systems, was the successor organization to SORO (the Special Operations Research Office), an U.S. Army-funded social science research center established in 1956 at American University in Washington, D.C. The organization operated as a federal contract research center, providing the Army with social scientific analysis in support of counterinsurgency, psychological warfare, and civic action programs. Its transformation from SORO to CRESS followed the Project Camelot scandal of 1965, which forced a reorganization and separation from the university.¹

Founding as SORO

SORO was established in 1956 at American University with primary sponsorship from the Army. Its early research focused on Soviet bloc propaganda analysis and psychological vulnerability assessments of Eastern Bloc populations. By the early 1960s the emphasis shifted toward Third World counterinsurgency, driven by the Kennedy administration's doctrine of counterinsurgency as a central Cold War strategy.¹

Theodore Vallance and Charles Windle transferred from HumRRO (the Human Resources Research Office) to SORO, bringing expertise in psychological research methodology and cross-cultural behavioral analysis. The organization maintained classified contracts and produced work directly used by Army Special Forces and related counterinsurgency units.¹

Sponsorship and lineage

SORO belonged to a lineage of Army-funded social research that began with the Operations Research Office (ORO), operated under Army contract by Johns Hopkins University from 1948. ORO studied psychological warfare and unconventional conflict; the Army ended the Hopkins relationship in 1961 and reconstituted the work as the Research Analysis Corporation.² ORO's Korean War studies of defection and disaffection, with those of HumRRO, formed part of the research base on which SORO drew in the early 1960s.¹

Kennedy's Special Group (Counter-Insurgency), established by NSAM 124 on January 18, 1962, under General Maxwell Taylor, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Director of Central Intelligence and McGeorge Bundy, was the patron of SORO's largest project. NSAM 182 of August 24, 1962, approved the "U.S. Overseas Internal Defense Policy" and required each agency to formulate its own counterinsurgency doctrine for the counterinsurgency group's review; under that mandate the Army's Office of the Chief of Research and Development (OCRD) commissioned SORO's modeling program. SORO worked under the Army's contract ARO-7. Above the SORO contracting level, oversight ran through the Defense Science Board, the Army Research and Development Office and the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.³⁴

Project Camelot

The most consequential episode in SORO's history was Project Camelot, an Army-funded initiative begun in 1964 that aimed to develop a predictive social science model for identifying conditions that lead to revolution in developing countries, with Chile as the initial study area. When the project became public in 1965, the resulting political controversy, both in Chile and in the US academic community, was severe. The Chilean government protested officially; US academic social scientists attacked the project as a violation of research ethics and an instrument of political control. The Army cancelled the project. Congressional investigations followed.¹

Camelot correspondence

Project Camelot was launched in July 1964 with a budget that Secretary of State Dean Rusk described to President Lyndon Johnson as "more than $4,000,000" over three to four years; the full projected authorization was about 6 million dollars over five years. The project director was Rex Hopper, chairman of the sociology department at Brooklyn College, and SORO's director, Theodore Vallance, sent formal invitations to academic researchers on December 4, 1964. Army memoranda of December 5, 1964, listed target countries in Latin America, the Middle East and the Far East, as well as France, Greece and Nigeria.³⁴

On April 8, 1965, Hopper sent invitations to academics abroad, among them the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, then at FLACSO in Santiago, who declined on April 22, called the project's features "imperialist," and passed the SORO letter to Chilean colleagues. Hugo Nutini of the University of Pittsburgh, authorized by Hopper to approach Chilean scholars, told them the project was funded by the National Science Foundation. Ambassador Ralph Dungan reported the resulting controversy from Santiago on June 14, 1965, and the project was cancelled on July 8, 1965.³

Concurrent projects

SORO ran related projects that continued after Camelot's cancellation. Project Simpatico conducted fieldwork in Colombia in July and August 1965 over ambassadors' objections, asking rural residents: "If a leader of the people should arise, should he be tall, short, white, black, armed, married, over 40 years of age, or under?" Project Agile, run through ARPA, produced counterinsurgency studies in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Honduras and Peru, and Operation Task conducted parallel work in Peru.³

Reorganization as CRESS

The Camelot scandal, combined with student demonstrations against war research at American University, forced the reorganization of SORO into CRESS. The organization separated from the university, became an independent federal contract research center, and formed a research connection with the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The name change was primarily cosmetic; the research function and much of the personnel were continuous.¹

SORO was formally renamed the Center for Research in Social Systems in approximately May to July 1966. American University severed its relationship with CRESS entirely in 1969, ending a twelve-year association. The university's archives hold a five-box collection on SORO's organization and functions, its transition to CRESS in 1965 and 1966, and "newspaper clippings, publications, and correspondence documenting the Project Camelot Affair scandal."³

Operational Divisions

CRESS maintained two internal analytical divisions. CINFAC (the Cultural Information Analysis Center, also designated the Counter-Insurgency Information Analysis Center) was a rapid-response data retrieval system designed to answer operational queries from counterinsurgency commands on a short turnaround. CINFAC produced reports on demand; one documented example is a report by James Price and Paul Jureidini titled "Witchcraft, sorcery, magic and other psychological phenomena and their implications on military and paramilitary operations in the Congo," dated August 1964.¹

The second division, SSRI (the Social Science Research Institute), was established to carry out studies of unconventional warfare, psychological operations, military assistance programs, and evaluations of foreign cultures. Its products were longer-form: handbooks, area studies, and bibliographies for use in psychological operations planning. SSRI products covered specific countries and regions and included assessments of psychological vulnerability, cultural norms relevant to propaganda, and political conditions.¹

Classified Document Production

CRESS-connected classified documents in the record include a 1962 memorandum on propitious and non-propitious dates in the Vietnamese and Cambodian calendar, produced for use in timing psychological operations. The document illustrates the range of cultural-analytical tasks CRESS performed: translating ethnographic and calendrical data into operational guidance for psywar planners.¹

A 1957 document by A.R. Ashkenasy titled "Analysis and synthesis of information on mass defection," produced by Psychological Research Associates, is closely related to the SORO research environment; Psychological Research Associates was one of several private contractors working in the same counterinsurgency social science space as SORO and later CRESS.¹