Rand Corporation

The Rand Corporation, whose name is an acronym for Research and Development, is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, with a Washington, D.C., office near the White House. It arose from the partnership between university scientists and the military that developed during the Second World War, established as Project RAND in 1946 with the U.S. Air Force as its primary institutional sponsor and incorporated as an independent nonprofit in 1948. It is not primarily a psychological research organization; economists and political scientists form the largest part of its staff. In the Cold War it was among the first institutions to apply systematic psychological and social scientific methods to military problems, including censorship policy, the psychological effects of weapons, propaganda organization, and, most controversially, the morale and motivation of enemy forces during the Vietnam War.¹

Social Science Division

In the summer of 1946 a committee of Herbert Goldhamer, Olaf Helmer, Frederick Mosteller, Leo Rosten, W. Allen Wallis, Warren Weaver and Samuel Wilks began to consider which social scientists to bring to Project RAND. In September 1947 Project RAND held a Conference of Social Scientists in New York (September 14 to 19; RAND R-106, June 9, 1948) to recruit leaders for its planned Social Science and Economics divisions. The thirty-five participants included Ernst Kris, Franz Neumann, Harold Lasswell, Bernard Brodie, Ruth Benedict, Charles Dollard and Pendleton Herring of the Carnegie Corporation, Donald Young of the Social Science Research Council and Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, an early RAND consultant. Weaver told the group that every piece of knowledge in sociology, economics and political science would be forged into "weapons" for the defense of democracy; Frank Collbohm told them that the Air Force "makes available to RAND information in other fields, intelligence, plans, etc."²

Rosten, who had served in the Office of War Information as liaison between Washington and Hollywood, was one of the committee's members. Bessner says Rosten came to RAND through W. Allen Wallis, who had worked with Helmer and Williams on the Applied Mathematics Panel during the war.³

Hans Speier came to RAND from the New School for Social Research, where from April 1, 1941 he had co-directed with Kris the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication under Rockefeller Foundation grants. At the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service he was offered the post of Senior Political Analyst by Goodwin Watson in February 1942 and became Principal Political Analyst in November 1942; after Watson left he became Acting Chief Analyst, and on May 22, 1944 he transferred to the Office of War Information's Overseas Operations Branch.⁴ A connection he made at the OWI with Rosten brought him to RAND's attention.² He consulted from May 1948 and headed the Social Science Division from July 1948, keeping it in Washington until 1957. He hired Alexander George, Nathan Leites, Phil Davison and William Kaufmann, several of them colleagues from the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, used Leon Gouré, John Herz and Otto Kirchheimer as consultants, held a "Q" clearance, and opened a RAND office in Wiesbaden. In October 1960 the divisions were reorganized into departments, Goldhamer succeeded him, and Speier joined the Research Council (chairman 1961 to 1962).²⁵

Incorporation and Ford Loan

RAND was incorporated as an independent nonprofit on May 14, 1948. H. Rowan Gaither and Collbohm arranged the separation from Douglas Aircraft with a $100,000 interest-free loan and a $300,000 credit guarantee from Henry Ford II of the Ford Foundation, plus a $150,000 Wells Fargo credit line; the loan was extended to $1,000,000 in 1950 and later converted to a grant. The Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were among RAND's other early financial supporters.⁶

Superstitions Study and Korea

The division issued Jean M. Hungerford's RM-365, "The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare" (April 14, 1950, marked a working paper). It surveys superstition in wartime Germany (astrologers, fortune-tellers, chain letters, with a Security Service report of May 21, 1942 on chain letters translated in an appendix), in other belligerent countries and in the postwar Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; it records Goebbels's 1942 diary entries on counter-horoscopes and a plan for occultist propaganda, German agents posing as astrologers in France in 1940, and the OSS black radio program Operation Hermit, which used astrology and fortune-telling in broadcasts to Nanking. It proposes astrology and fortune-telling to predict dire events likely to befall the enemy, chain letters to burden the enemy postal system, and word-of-mouth rumors introduced by agents, and it states that the files of wartime "black" propagandists were not examined. Its sources include the FCC's weekly reports on Nazi propaganda for 1943 and early 1944, Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service Central European Analysis reports, and Kris and Speier's German Radio Propaganda.⁷

After the outbreak of the Korean War a team including Goldhamer, George, Davison, Ewald Schnitzer and a Hungerford (Bessner writes "Jay Hungerford"; RM-365 is credited to Jean M. Hungerford, and records found do not establish whether they are the same person) visited Korea; from August 24, 1951, Goldhamer advised the American armistice delegation at Kaesong and circulated Speier's papers and Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (RAND, 1951) to the negotiators. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy was reported to carry the Operational Code on helicopter trips.⁸

Early Psychological Work

Rand produced a classified 1949 conference report on methods for studying the psychological effects of unconventional weapons, one of the earliest institutional contributions to the field. Its early Cold War work on propaganda and psychological operations included studies of censorship policy, the effects of translation and mistranslation on message delivery, and the organization of psywar efforts. Other Rand studies relevant to psychological operations examined folk tales relating to swindling and dishonesty in Third World societies and graft and corruption among government officials in Nigeria, the Philippines, and Brazil. Daniel Ellsberg, then a Rand analyst, produced a paper exploring in theoretical terms how blackmail techniques might prove useful to the military.¹

The VC Motivation and Morale Study

In the early 1960s, ARPA commissioned Rand to study the motivation and morale of the Viet Cong. The project, known as the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study (the M&M Study), ran from late 1964 through end of 1968, jointly sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and ARPA. It produced approximately 2,371 interviews totaling over 60,000 pages of documentation, conducted at approximately forty locations across South Vietnam including CIA detention centers and provincial holding facilities. Respondents were Viet Cong prisoners of war, defectors (Chieu Hoi ralliers), refugees, and others with knowledge of VC activities. Respondents were not informed of the interviewer's affiliation or the project's nature.¹

Phase I: Donnell, Zasloff, and Pauker

The project's first phase (mid-1964 through early 1965) was led by John Donnell, a Dartmouth political scientist fluent in Vietnamese and Chinese; Joseph Zasloff, a political scientist who had taught at the University of Saigon; and Guy Pauker, a Rand political scientist. The preliminary report (RM-4507/3-ISA, March 1965) found that the Viet Cong comprised a unified, disciplined force with widespread popular support among peasants interested in social justice, land reform, and education. It documented that the air war contributed to anti-American hatred, that bombing caused more civilian than VC casualties, and that American military operations gave the VC opportunities to build local trust by providing post-strike support. When Donnell and Zasloff briefed Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton in January 1965, McNaughton reportedly expressed doubt about whether the United States had aligned with the right side. The report was deemed "un-actionable" by the Pentagon, which was already deeply committed to escalation.¹

Phase II: Goure and the Air Power Thesis

Phase II (early 1965 through April 1967) was controlled by Leon Gouré, head of Rand's Social Science Department, previously a Soviet civil defense expert. Gouré redirected the study's emphasis toward identifying which specific weapons and tactics, particularly air power, most eroded VC morale. His published reports concluded that continued bombing pressure would be effective, that VC morale was declining under air assault, and that forces would surrender under sufficient sustained pressure. These conclusions were consumed favorably at senior levels. Walt Rostow, chairman of the State Department Policy Planning Council in 1965 and from April 1966 the President's special assistant for national security affairs, drew on Gouré's work in preparing optimistic briefings.⁹ Robert McNamara was described by colleagues as reading Gouré's reports "like good scotch." Gouré briefed General Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the NSC. Even Westmoreland later found Gouré's optimism excessive.¹

Field analyst Anthony Russo, who arrived in Saigon in February 1965 and conducted interviews across the country, found the interview data so diverse that "it could be used to argue anything." He documented that Gouré's published conclusions required systematic selection of responses supporting his air power thesis while suppressing contradictory material. He also prepared a separate report documenting systematic torture of VC prisoners at detention sites where Rand's interviews were conducted, a document Ellsberg later described as "the first to document American complicity in the routine use of torture." Gouré instituted an informal censorship policy by which interview transcripts were sanitized before analysis, removing all mentions of torture or mistreatment of detainees by US forces and their allies. In February 1966, Gouré signed Russo's and Scott's names to a memorandum promoting increased air strikes, Agent Orange use for population displacement, and refugee generation without their knowledge or permission.¹

In spring 1966, Russo, analyst Douglass Scott, and analyst Russell Betts wrote formally to the head of Rand's Social Science Department documenting these improprieties. Gouré maintained his position through his connection to Walt Rostow at the NSC. Russo's torture documentation paper, his formal methodological critique of the M&M Study, and a defoliation civilian impact analysis he prepared all remain either classified or missing from accessible archives.¹

Kellen's Counter-Findings

Rand brought in Konrad Kellen, a Second World War veteran and former psychological warfare expert, to provide an independent second opinion on Gouré's work. Working from the same interview transcripts, Kellen reached the opposite conclusions. He identified a distinction Gouré had missed between "near miss" victims (injured, physically weakened, demoralized by bombing) and "remote miss" victims (those whose homes and families were destroyed but who survived and emerged with intensified hatred of Americans and deepened commitment to the war). Kellen concluded that enemy morale was in fact high, that the VC's ideological commitment was durable, and that the war was unwinnable. His findings were documented in RM-5462-1, A View of the VC: Elements of Cohesion in the Enemy Camp in 1966-1967 (November 1969) and RM-6131-1, Conversations with Enemy Soldiers in Late 1968/Early 1969 (September 1970). These analyses were ignored by the White House and military leadership.¹

The Crop Destruction Sub-Study

Betts and Denton's RM-5446-1, An Evaluation of Chemical Crop Destruction in Vietnam (October 1967), drew on 206 interviews and found that chemical crop destruction had not denied food to the VC in any militarily significant sense, that most destroyed crops belonged to farmers rather than guerrillas, and that the program was generating increasing hostility toward the United States and the South Vietnamese government among the rural population. Russo separately briefed Westmoreland's scientific advisor on a finding that for every pound of food denied a guerrilla, one hundred pounds were denied to civilians. The briefing lasted under fifteen minutes and produced no policy response.¹

Structural Secrecy and Policy Consequences

The central problem with the VC Motivation and Morale Study was not that individual documents were classified in the standard government sense but that Rand's private contracting status placed its findings entirely outside the normal mechanisms of congressional oversight and academic peer review. Because the reports were proprietary documents held by a private contractor, neither Congress nor independent researchers could scrutinize them. Watson concluded that Gouré's conclusions "lay at the heart" of President Johnson's bombing strategy and that the study "cost many lives and millions of dollars and may actually have lengthened the war." The secrecy that insulated the study from criticism was structural rather than bureaucratic: it resulted from the contracting arrangement itself rather than from a formal classification decision.¹

Outcome and Vindication

Gouré was pulled from Vietnam by Rand in April 1967 amid mounting internal criticism and moved to the University of Miami's Center for Advanced International Studies in 1969. He died March 28, 2007. Russo published "Looking Backward: RAND and Vietnam" in Ramparts magazine (October 1972), calling Gouré "a snake oil salesman" and the M&M Study "a whitewash of genocide." Russo was later indicted alongside Ellsberg for their role in copying and disseminating the Pentagon Papers; charges were eventually dismissed. Russo died August 6, 2008.¹

Rand's commissioned institutional history, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Rand CP-564, 2010), validated nearly all of Russo's claims, confirming Gouré had acted as an air war promoter whose analysis did not match the data, and documenting that former Rand president Gus Shubert called Gouré's assignment "a disgrace" suggesting collusion between Gouré's predecessor and the Air Force. The Donnell and Zasloff Phase I findings were subsequently described as the first Rand intelligence cited in the Pentagon Papers.¹

Kellen continued at Rand and became its leading terrorism analyst. His obituary noted his characteristically "contrarian or independent view." He died April 2007, within days of Gouré.¹

Institutional Structure

Rand's Santa Monica headquarters is described in accounts from the period as resembling a small university with prominent security restrictions. The Washington office operates under similar conditions. While Rand is most closely identified with Air Force sponsorship, it took on Army-commissioned work throughout the Vietnam era, and its operational research methods were adopted by HumRRO, ORO-RAC, CRESS, and USARIBSS.¹

Remote Viewing Era References

In accounts of the 1970s parapsychology research milieu, Rand is noted as larger and more prestigious than the SRI among scientific think tanks, and it figures in the French accounts of 1959 and 1960 of a USS Nautilus telepathy experiment, which the U.S. Navy denied and which a 1975 DIA study called rumors.¹⁰¹¹

In Le Matin des magiciens, Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels wrote that at the beginning of 1957 the Rand Corporation laid before President Eisenhower a report proposing telepathy for communicating with submarines, particularly under the polar ice cap, and that the report had no effect for a year. In the same chapter they list Rand among the organizations with parapsychology study laboratories, and a footnote cites a "Rapport de la Rand Corporation, 31 août 1958" in connection with a statement that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission proposed in 1958 to use clairvoyants to guess where Russian bombs would fall.¹² A report to Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky of March 1960, as quoted by I. V. Tsykunov, says that from the end of 1957 Rand, Westinghouse and Bell Telephone had been working intensively on telepathy.¹³