Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: After we got married, we got an apartment on Hibachung,
Speaker 2: near the Tending Market. It's not the best part of town,
Speaker 2: but not the worst either. Very lively, bustling, noisy area.
Speaker 3: That's my Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now,
Speaker 3: a graceful, elegant, middle aged woman. She's talking about her
Speaker 3: life in Saigon in the early nineteen sixties, the first
Speaker 3: days of the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: I had an apartment of my own. You know, life
Speaker 2: couldn't have been better, I thought.
Speaker 3: My name is Malcolm Glaubla. Welcome to Revisionist History, where
Speaker 3: every week we go back and look at something misunderstood
Speaker 3: or overlooked. This week's episode is about a secret Pentagon
Speaker 3: study that a Vietnamese woman named May Elliott and two
Speaker 3: others became tangled up in and what happened when it ended,
Speaker 3: because there's a lot we can learn from them today.
Speaker 3: The project was run by the Rand Corporation, a think
Speaker 3: tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to an extraordinary
Speaker 3: collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wonks. RAND is
Speaker 3: the kind of place where everyone speaks in complete paragraphs,
Speaker 3: and if you close your eyes as you listen. You
Speaker 3: can almost see the footnotes at the end of each
Speaker 3: one of those perfect paragraphs. The Defense Department were alatting
Speaker 3: them heavily in those years. Still does tell me about
Speaker 3: how you come to work for RAND.
Speaker 2: Dave knew somebody McVie who was an officer, a graduate student.
Speaker 3: Dave is Ma's husband, an American academic. McVie stands for
Speaker 3: a military Assistants Command of Vietnam Headquarters for the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2: So anyway, Dave knew this guy who was also a
Speaker 2: graduate student doing his military stint, and his wife, an American,
Speaker 2: was working at RAND.
Speaker 3: My Elliott is Vietnamese and she ends up working at
Speaker 3: Randon Saigon for a man named Leon Garray, one of
Speaker 3: Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran the Secret Study and
Speaker 3: he's a big part of this story. Here's an interview
Speaker 3: Rand recorded with Garray just before he died in two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: And how did you end up getting into Vietnam?
Speaker 4: I got drafted. Well, I was semi volunteered, but I
Speaker 4: got drafted. The Chief of Air Force Intelligence asked me
Speaker 4: to go.
Speaker 3: Garray set up shop in an old French style villain
Speaker 3: near the Presidential Palace in downtown Saigon, one seventy six
Speaker 3: Rue Pasteur. The house is still there, flame trees and
Speaker 3: tamarin line, the street quiet, discreet. This was in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty four, just when Saigon was beginning to fall apart. Still,
Speaker 3: if you were a Westerner, you might go to the
Speaker 3: exclusive Cerx sportif on the humid afternoons, to sit by
Speaker 3: the pool or by tennis, or have a cocktail in
Speaker 3: the veranda of the Continental Hotel. Maybe you'd hear a
Speaker 3: bomb or two oft in the distance. Later, of course,
Speaker 3: things would get far worse.
Speaker 4: The house we lived in in Saigon was directly under
Speaker 4: the trajectory of the rockets that they yet congo firing
Speaker 4: at the palace, so we had a greative experience of
Speaker 4: ducking under the dining room table.
Speaker 3: Gray had been working in the Santa Monica office of
Speaker 3: RAND when he was summoned to Vietnam. It was a
Speaker 3: job no one really wanted. Who would leave southern California
Speaker 3: for Saigon. The Pentagon wanted him to run a project
Speaker 3: interviewing Vietcong prisoners and defectors. Jumped at the chance.
Speaker 4: I had to organize my own team of Vietnamese we
Speaker 4: were producing interview reports or interrogation reports for the US,
Speaker 4: for Rand and for the Chief of the Intelligence of
Speaker 4: the Vietnamese ARA Forces. They all got copies.
Speaker 3: Later, Leongerrey got into trouble, or at least into an argument,
Speaker 3: and Rand brought in a third person to fix things,
Speaker 3: Conrad Kellen.
Speaker 5: I was supposed to be in Doctor Nathan by Leon Golray.
Speaker 5: He was supposed to tell me about Vietnam. But I
Speaker 5: got very quickly the feeling that he was extremely partisan,
Speaker 5: you know, for the for the South, which of course
Speaker 5: was part of the show.
Speaker 3: That woman's voice, you hear, that's my Elliott again. She
Speaker 3: interviewed Kellen in Santa Monica after he retired from RAND
Speaker 3: for a history she wrote called Rand in Southeast Asia,
Speaker 3: a History of the Vietnam War, A brilliant book.
Speaker 5: By the way, he was sort of mister Vietnam at Rand,
Speaker 5: you know, and missed the saus Vietnam, and I sort
Speaker 5: of became his sort of successor in a way.
Speaker 3: The story that follows is about these three people, May
Speaker 3: Elliott leungar Ray Conrad Kellen, and how their lives intersected
Speaker 3: over a minor and forgotten episode in the Vietnam War
Speaker 3: called the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project. I say minor
Speaker 3: because what happened in that French villa on one seven
Speaker 3: six Rue Pastor didn't swing the war one way or another.
Speaker 3: Nobody who was part of the study ever fired a
Speaker 3: gun or dropped a bomb. But the story of the
Speaker 3: Morale Project says a lot about something that has obsessed
Speaker 3: us ever since intelligence failure. Why is it so hard
Speaker 3: to tell what your enemy is thinking? That question came
Speaker 3: up after nine to eleven during the Two Gulf Wars,
Speaker 3: It came up again in Afghanistan in It comes up
Speaker 3: today with ISIS. And every time we get it wrong,
Speaker 3: every time our enemies take us by surprise, we always say,
Speaker 3: if only we knew more about them, If only we
Speaker 3: had more information about our adversaries, more spies in the ground,
Speaker 3: more satellite images, more intercepted communications, more of everything. Do
Speaker 3: you know how many federal government organizations there are just
Speaker 3: devoted to counterterrorism? Twelve hundred and seventy one and another
Speaker 3: nineteen hundred and thirty one private companies. Do you know
Speaker 3: how many Americans hold top secret security clearances? Eight hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty four thousand. Those numbers all come from an
Speaker 3: extraordinary washed and post investigation from six years ago. And
Speaker 3: here's the most incredible statistic of all. Just since nine
Speaker 3: to eleven, just to Howe's top secret intelligence work, and
Speaker 3: just in the Washington, DC area, seventeen million square feet
Speaker 3: of new office space has been built to house intelligence operations.
Speaker 3: Seventeen million. We want to know everything about our enemies.
Speaker 3: But what the viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project tells
Speaker 3: us is this, you can know everything there is to
Speaker 3: know about your enemy, everything, and that still won't solve
Speaker 3: your problem. Vietnam was a French colony from eighteen eighty
Speaker 3: seven until nineteen fifty four. Then the French lost control
Speaker 3: of the country. It was split in half. Communists took
Speaker 3: over the north, an American backed regime came into power
Speaker 3: in the south. Over the next decade, conditions inside South
Speaker 3: Vietnam slowly deteriorated. The government was unpopular, they were protests
Speaker 3: in the streets, a military coup, and the North Vietnamese
Speaker 3: started setting guerrillas known as the Viet Coong over the
Speaker 3: border to try and recruit South Vietnamese to their cause.
Speaker 3: That's why the Vietnam War at least the US and
Speaker 3: there starts in the nearly nineteen sixties because the United
Speaker 3: States feels compelled to help the South turn back the.
Speaker 1: Via con.
Speaker 3: Wars are usually about territory. A country X invades country
Speaker 3: Y country why fights back? But this is a weird
Speaker 3: kind of war. The US and the South Vietnamese have
Speaker 3: no intention of invading the North. They decide instead that
Speaker 3: they'll just bomb the North Vietnamese until they give up,
Speaker 3: until they realize that exporting gorillas over the border isn't
Speaker 3: worth it. The Vietnam War is a war of persuasion,
Speaker 3: a crude kind of persuasion. The goal is to break
Speaker 3: the other side's will.
Speaker 2: The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
Speaker 2: on paper, but.
Speaker 6: Nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military might.
Speaker 4: And alive horse of more than eight thousand men.
Speaker 2: Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
Speaker 2: central coast.
Speaker 3: But if your goal is to break someone's will, how
Speaker 3: do you know if his strategy is working? In the
Speaker 3: earth early nineteen sixties, when the US first starts sending
Speaker 3: troops to fight the Viatkong, there was a problem. No
Speaker 3: one knew anything about the Viat Coong. Almost known of
Speaker 3: the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Vietnamese. The
Speaker 3: special advisor to the American General in South Vietnam at
Speaker 3: the time was an Australian called Colonel Sarong. And you
Speaker 3: know what he said. I'll quote him directly. These people
Speaker 3: are simply what we call in many countries juvenile delinquents.
Speaker 3: That's the best he could offer in terms of intelligence
Speaker 3: about the Viet Kong. So what do you do if
Speaker 3: you're bombing someone you know nothing about and you want
Speaker 3: to know how this unknown person feels. You call in
Speaker 3: the Rand Corporation. So Rand rents Sevilla on Ruepasteur and
Speaker 3: brings in Leon Garray to run the show. Gray was
Speaker 3: Russian by birth. His family history was remarkable. His parents
Speaker 3: were Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were the socialist moderates who split
Speaker 3: off from Lenin during the Bloshebic Revolution.
Speaker 6: They were in Russia during the revolution.
Speaker 3: This is Leon Garrey's son, Daniel. He's a national security
Speaker 3: and policy expert with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
Speaker 6: They participated in the revolution. In fact, my grandparents met
Speaker 6: in prison. My grandmother used to smoke unfiltered cigarettes and
Speaker 6: a little holder and cut them in half.
Speaker 3: They were living in Moscow.
Speaker 6: Are at Moscow, Yeah, are at Moscow, and they were,
Speaker 6: you know, fighting the system. He my grandfather ran an
Speaker 6: I legal printing press and the whole thing.
Speaker 3: In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born, the
Speaker 3: Garrays are kicked out of the country.
Speaker 6: They ended up next in Berlin, and in nineteen thirty
Speaker 6: three they shut the doors, locked the building up and left,
Speaker 6: just walked away and went to Paris. And then they
Speaker 6: got out of Paris on the same train that Humphrey
Speaker 6: Bogart did in Castle Blanca, heading south and meandered south,
Speaker 6: went through Spain to Portugal and then got to the
Speaker 6: US after that. So they stayed on one step ahead
Speaker 6: of the tide of evil for about almost twenty years. Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which of the bolsheviksty He must have known some
Speaker 3: of the in person.
Speaker 6: Oh, he knew Albin person if they knew Trotsky, they
Speaker 6: knew Lenin, they knew Stalin, they knew the whole, the
Speaker 6: whole crowd. Man, Your left is royalty, Yeah right.
Speaker 3: The Grays end up in New York City, ninety sixth
Speaker 3: and Broadway, deep in the world of Eastern European emigreys.
Speaker 3: Leon serves in the army, fights in the Battle of
Speaker 3: the Bulge, and ends up in counterintelligence. How do you
Speaker 3: think the refugee experience shaped your father?
Speaker 6: Number of ways. I think the overriding one was we've
Speaker 6: retreated this far and no farther. So it was it
Speaker 6: was a view of sort of America, not just as
Speaker 6: city on the hill, not just but you know, there's
Speaker 6: nowhere left to retreat to. The country needs to be
Speaker 6: truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
Speaker 6: he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important.
Speaker 3: So this is who Ran puts in charge of the
Speaker 3: Vietnam operation. Leon Garay a patriot in the way that
Speaker 3: only an immigrant can be a patriot.
Speaker 2: He was suave, he was very charming. He had a
Speaker 2: great sense of humor, very articulate, energetic, enthusiastic. So personally
Speaker 2: I liked him. The only thing I didn't like about
Speaker 2: him was the fact that he was a great ladies man,
Speaker 2: and there were a lot of rumors about that. But
Speaker 2: as a person I liked him.
Speaker 3: Gray spoke, German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
Speaker 3: of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
Speaker 3: of the European intellectual.
Speaker 6: He had an amazing kind of research all of his life,
Speaker 6: where there would be stacks of documents in Russian innings
Speaker 6: on his desk and he literally re talking to you
Speaker 6: and it would sort of be, well, you know, there
Speaker 6: was this recent thing, and it's an idetic memory. But
Speaker 6: he was certainly kind of librarian encyclopedic in that kind
Speaker 6: of set.
Speaker 3: Gray meets Robert McNamara, President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and
Speaker 3: tells him what he thinks needs to be done. That
Speaker 3: is to really answer the question of how the bombing
Speaker 3: is affecting the Viet Cong.
Speaker 4: That's the question I remembered very clearly.
Speaker 3: Again, this is from the interview Garray did with the
Speaker 3: Rand Archives a decade ago at the end of his life.
Speaker 4: And he said, what is your funding? I told him
Speaker 4: he had one hundred thousand dollars. He said, what would
Speaker 4: you do with a million? That was his question. I said,
Speaker 4: that's a new moral of this stuff, and I have
Speaker 4: more people doing the interviewing, says, you have it.
Speaker 3: A million dollars in Saigon in the mid sixties was
Speaker 3: a king's ransom. So Gray hires a team of locals
Speaker 3: to fan out across the South Vietnamese countryside to interview
Speaker 3: defectors from North Vietnam and captured via Cong guerrillas. That's
Speaker 3: where my elliot comes. She was one of Garay's interviewers,
Speaker 3: and her story is every bit as fascinating as Leon Garays.
Speaker 2: My father was appointed to Haifhog. He became mayor of Haiphong.
Speaker 3: She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
Speaker 3: Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and.
Speaker 2: As mayor he had a lot of authority. He was
Speaker 2: almost like the king of that little town. And we
Speaker 2: live in an enormous house with an enormous garden front
Speaker 2: and back, with a staff of servants and even a
Speaker 2: platoono guards, you know, who stood guard outside our gate.
Speaker 2: So that was really the best time of my life.
Speaker 3: Then the French get defeated in the north by the communists.
Speaker 3: Vietnam is divided in two.
Speaker 2: It happened, so suddenly we just packed up and left
Speaker 2: everything and we lost everything. So when it happened, we
Speaker 2: were in a panic, didn't know what to do. My
Speaker 2: father had, of course collaborated with the French. I didn't know,
Speaker 2: you know, I didn't understand a thing, but my father
Speaker 2: was a fait that the communists would come in and
Speaker 2: kill him.
Speaker 3: My Elliott didn't come to the RAND project as a
Speaker 3: blank slate. She came with a history. She had to
Speaker 3: flee for her life from the communists in the north.
Speaker 3: Now she's been hired by RAND to figure out the communists,
Speaker 3: the same people who chased her family away. The interviewers
Speaker 3: would go out in teams of three or four. Sometimes
Speaker 3: the groups would stay in Saigon and go to the
Speaker 3: prison where captured Via Kong were held. Other times they
Speaker 3: would head out into the countryside, hitching a ride on
Speaker 3: military planes to the Mekong Delta. The interviews were taped,
Speaker 3: did offer their subjects cigarettes. Sometimes they'd sit outside under
Speaker 3: the trees. It was friendly, not confrontational. The interviewers made
Speaker 3: it clear that they were only doing a research project.
Speaker 3: If the subject was uninteresting or reluctant, the sessions would
Speaker 3: be short. Other times they might last for days. Then
Speaker 3: it was back to the villa on Route Pasteur, where
Speaker 3: the interviews would be transcribed, translated, and edited. That's my
Speaker 3: Elliott in the Central Mekong Delta into being a former
Speaker 3: company commander for the two hundred and sixty first Battalion
Speaker 3: of the North Vietnamese Army.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of questions about bombing, What weapons
Speaker 2: do you feel the most, what had the most effect
Speaker 2: on your unit and your operations? And with the North
Speaker 2: Vietnamese who infiltrated into the South, tell us about conditions
Speaker 2: you march from the North to the South with the
Speaker 2: bombings you know along the way. Things like that.
Speaker 3: The Morale Project would eventually put sixty two thousand pages
Speaker 3: of transcripts interviews with captured via Kong and others sixty
Speaker 3: two thousand pages. This isn't some focus group conducted by
Speaker 3: a PR firm where a few dozen people are interviewed
Speaker 3: for an hour. This is one of the most extraordinary
Speaker 3: encyclopedic detailed portraits of an enemy ever created. Remember, no
Speaker 3: one in Washington really knew anything about Vietnam in the
Speaker 3: early nineteen sixties. Now there was a million dollar operation
Speaker 3: on the Rue pasteur painting a living, breathing portrait of.
Speaker 1: The other side.
Speaker 3: The stuff was gold. Gray takes the results and makes
Speaker 3: the rounds. His favorite statistic was this. When Rand started
Speaker 3: as study, sixty five percent of defectors and prisoners believed
Speaker 3: the Via Kong could win. After a year of heavy
Speaker 3: US bombing, that number was down to twenty percent. The
Speaker 3: enemy was on the ropes. He's the Air Force Army
Speaker 3: US Embassy, then off to Honolulu, to the headquarters of
Speaker 3: the Army of the Pacific RAND in Santa Monica, Washington,
Speaker 3: d C. To the Pentagon, and to the White House.
Speaker 3: Helicopters would pick him up in Saigon and whisk him
Speaker 3: to aircraft carriers at the Villa and Rupasteur. He holds
Speaker 3: cocktail parties for everyone who is anyone in South Vietnam,
Speaker 3: Henry Kissinger, Walter Mondale, the US Senator later to become
Speaker 3: Jimmy Carter's Vice president. Gray meets with visiting journalists, CIA officers.
Speaker 3: His stuff goes right to the top.
Speaker 4: Well, we've had an interesting report from a man named
Speaker 4: Goray who works for the Rand Corporation, and wemired.
Speaker 3: That's Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary. From tapes made of
Speaker 3: White House conversations in nineteen sixty five and sixty six,
Speaker 3: President Lyndon Johnson decides to pull the United States deeper
Speaker 3: and deeper into Vietnam, and the story was that LBJ
Speaker 3: used to walk around with a summary of Grey's fine
Speaker 3: in his back pocket. Wars require public justification. If you're
Speaker 3: going to put thousands of lives at risk, you need
Speaker 3: to explain to your citizens just what you're doing. And
Speaker 3: that's what Leon Garret offered in the crucial early years
Speaker 3: of the Vietnam War. He offered justification. Enter Conrad Kellen,
Speaker 3: the third person in our story.
Speaker 5: When did I come to rand Oh? Well, I lived
Speaker 5: in New York at sixty four. I think it was.
Speaker 3: Kellen was a battered veteran of World War Two and
Speaker 3: a little bit of a legend. I once spent two
Speaker 3: weeks in Los Angeles just going from one person's house
Speaker 3: to the next, asking for their memories of Kellen. Everybody
Speaker 3: remembers Conrad Keillen. If you took the absolute best of
Speaker 3: nineteenth century Central Europe and put it in a time
Speaker 3: machine that opened its doors in nineteen sixties southern California,
Speaker 3: that would be Kellen.
Speaker 5: I read the paper said some people in Washington, some
Speaker 5: smart boys, had showered the North with millions of leaflets
Speaker 5: in which they had told the Vietnamese they should lay
Speaker 5: down their arms because we were good people and their
Speaker 5: leaders were bad people. You know the ordinary nonsense, and
Speaker 5: they should stop fighting the war.
Speaker 3: Kellen served in US Army intelligence in the Second World War,
Speaker 3: specializing in psychological warfare. So later when he reads how
Speaker 3: the US was using leaflets in Vietnam, he gets angry,
Speaker 3: We're doing it all wrong.
Speaker 5: And so I wrote a letter to the New York
Speaker 5: Times and said it was obvious nonsense to shower large
Speaker 5: numbers of soldiers with a leaflet saying stop that war.
Speaker 5: Soldiers don't stop wars, so this would begin wars. And
Speaker 5: soldiers don't stop wars. So if you want to stop
Speaker 5: a war, you have to do it differently. So I
Speaker 5: got a call from them here, from the RAM people,
Speaker 5: and they wanted me to come and be part of
Speaker 5: the system, and that I said, okay, So came to
Speaker 5: Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: Kellen grew up in Berlin, wealthy cultured. His father owned
Speaker 3: a big brewery. His full name was Katzen ellen Bogan,
Speaker 3: and the Cats and ellen Boguns were one of the
Speaker 3: great Jewish families of Europe. But when Hitler came to power,
Speaker 3: Kellen packed his bags. He said later that he knew
Speaker 3: on some instinctive level that things would not end well
Speaker 3: for the Jews.
Speaker 1: In Germany.
Speaker 3: He goes to Paris becomes friends with the French writer
Speaker 3: Jean Cocteau. His life is full of moments like this.
Speaker 3: He gets on a boat to America and meets the
Speaker 3: mobster Dutch Schultz, who offers him a job. He arrives
Speaker 3: in New York and works for the legendary investor Benjamin Graham,
Speaker 3: who was the mentor of Warren Buffett. He goes to
Speaker 3: California and is the private secretary of the Nobel Prize
Speaker 3: winning novelist Thomas Mann. Kellen was impossibly handsome, dashing over
Speaker 3: six feet tall. He was an expert in golf, handwriting analysis,
Speaker 3: and ferraris. Both his sisters earned PhDs from Berkeley, one
Speaker 3: in chemistry, the other in biology. His brother escapes from
Speaker 3: Nazi Germany lands in New York, and if you go
Speaker 3: online and look up the assets of his personal foundation,
Speaker 3: it's six hundred and sixty five million dollars. His stepmother
Speaker 3: was painted by Renoirs, a family friend. He was cousins
Speaker 3: with Einstein. I mean, after a bit, it gets ridiculous.
Speaker 3: The craziest story about Kellen is when he was in
Speaker 3: Paris in nineteen forty five. The war has just ended,
Speaker 3: and he's sitting in the Cafe Select near the chan
Speaker 3: Zilise when a young woman approaches him. She says, are
Speaker 3: you an American gi He says yes. She says you
Speaker 3: going back to the States. He says yes. She says,
Speaker 3: you have to do me a favor. My father's an artist.
Speaker 3: I have to get his work safely to America, because,
Speaker 3: of course Europe was in chaos. And Kellen says, by
Speaker 3: all means. But then she goes away and comes back
Speaker 3: with this massive stack of canvasses and he says, there's
Speaker 3: no way I can take that, and she says, you
Speaker 3: have to. Whereupon Callen embarks on this epic month long
Speaker 3: struggle to get these paintings safely across the ocean, which
Speaker 3: includes being trapped in the back of an open truck
Speaker 3: during a rain storm and throwing his coat over the
Speaker 3: pile of paintings to keep them from being ruined, and
Speaker 3: staying up all night, night after night because he's terrified
Speaker 3: someone will steal them. Who's the painter, Mark Chagal, I
Speaker 3: should say Mark Chagal, of course, because only Conrad Kellen
Speaker 3: would end up transporting the collected works of one of
Speaker 3: the most famous artists of the twentieth century to America
Speaker 3: in a rainstorm on the back of a truck. The
Speaker 3: deal Chagall's daughter made with him was that he could
Speaker 3: take one picture and keep it for himself. So he
Speaker 3: takes one, a famous one. Then he tells it in
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties for what seemed like a lot of
Speaker 3: money at the time, But of course it's a Chagall,
Speaker 3: a famous Chagall. And every now and again over the
Speaker 3: years he'd spot his old painting in an auction catalog
Speaker 3: worth more and more and more, and it'd bury his
Speaker 3: head in his hands and say oh. By late nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty six, when Conrad Kellen gets to Rand, the place
Speaker 3: is in turmoil. The Vietnam War has split its ranks
Speaker 3: down the middle. This is the think tank that the
Speaker 3: Pentagon has been relying on to make sense of the war.
Speaker 3: But there's a group inside RAND that believes the war
Speaker 3: is a terrible mistake. I don't know if you remember
Speaker 3: the story of the Pentagon Papers. This was the secret
Speaker 3: forty seven volume study of US political and military involvement
Speaker 3: in the Vietnam War. It was commissioned by the Pentagon.
Speaker 3: The Pentagon Papers showed that the White House had been
Speaker 3: misleading Congress and the American people for years about how
Speaker 3: well the war was going. A copy of the Pentagon
Speaker 3: Papers was famously leaked to the New York Times in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy one by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg's leak was really
Speaker 3: the beginning of the end of public support for the war.
Speaker 3: And who was Elsburg? An employee of Rand? And where
Speaker 3: did he get his copy of the Pentagon Papers? He
Speaker 3: took it from the safe at Rand and guests who
Speaker 3: was one of Ellsburg's best friends and confidants at Rand,
Speaker 3: Conrad Kellen, of course, as always in the thick of things.
Speaker 3: But the moment we're talking about is well before the
Speaker 3: Pentagon Paper's controversy. It's at the beginning of the divisions
Speaker 3: within Rand nineteen sixty five sixty six. Rand is a
Speaker 3: place that prides itself on objectivity and rigor. Everything is
Speaker 3: checked and double checked and fact checked and reviewed in
Speaker 3: house before it's released. But the Rand brass is beginning
Speaker 3: to worry that when Leon Garray gets whisked by helicopter
Speaker 3: to aircraft carriers or huddles with generals at his cocktail
Speaker 3: parties at the Villa and Rupestur he's bypassing all that.
Speaker 3: They worry that he's gone rogue, so they bring in
Speaker 3: Conrad Kellen to be a second set of eyes. Kellen
Speaker 3: comes in and reads a thousand of the Via Kong interviews.
Speaker 3: Remember many of these interviews ran to fifteen or twenty
Speaker 3: single space type pages. It's a huge amount of work.
Speaker 3: And Kellen decides Gray has it all wrong. The Via
Speaker 3: Kong are not crumbling. On the contrary, here's Kellen again
Speaker 3: from his interview with my Elliott.
Speaker 5: I could see from the interviews that we were not
Speaker 5: going to win this role. That was Michael Koos. I
Speaker 5: was one of the very few people that ran who
Speaker 5: had that idea, and most of from Bergang Ho they
Speaker 5: were going and they couldn't understand. To this day, they
Speaker 5: don't understand how a nation was two million million soldiers
Speaker 5: out of ships airplanes cannot win over Vietnam.
Speaker 3: So here we have two men, two sophisticated European intellectuals
Speaker 3: with access to the richest trove of intelligence in the
Speaker 3: entire war. Grey goes first and says we're winning. Kellen
Speaker 3: comes along, looks at exactly the same evidence and says
Speaker 3: we're never going to win. Then there's my Elliot. If
Speaker 3: Gray is at the villa on Rue Pasteur and Kellen
Speaker 3: is back in Santa Monica, Elliott is actually in the field,
Speaker 3: in the jungles and villages, talking to actual defectors and
Speaker 3: via cong guerrillas. And what does she think will happen?
Speaker 3: She doesn't know. She's confused.
Speaker 2: I walked into this sale and I didn't know what
Speaker 2: to expect. And then in walked this man, middle aged,
Speaker 2: very briskly and he looked, you know, like a man,
Speaker 2: and he stopped dead in his tracks.
Speaker 3: Elliott is talking about an early interview she did that
Speaker 3: had a huge impact on her that she never forgot.
Speaker 2: You have to remember what I looked like at the time.
Speaker 2: I was young. I was dressed in western clothes and
Speaker 2: I didn't look like the military interrogators he had seen.
Speaker 2: So he was surprised to see me, and he was
Speaker 2: kind of guarded, suspicious. He didn't know what to expect,
Speaker 2: and I was afraid. I didn't know what was going
Speaker 2: to happen because I had grown up believing that the
Speaker 2: Communists were blood thirsty.
Speaker 3: They started to talk, and gradually he relaxed and she relaxed.
Speaker 2: You know, I had never met a Communist before face
Speaker 2: to face. So I just my curiosity just took over,
Speaker 2: and I just asked him a lot of questions about
Speaker 2: him and his family and his background and his beliefs.
Speaker 2: And he had devoted his whole life to fighting the
Speaker 2: French and now he was fighting the Americans, and he
Speaker 2: seemed to have a lot of integrity.
Speaker 3: And what effect did listening to him have on you?
Speaker 2: Well, it really confused me because I had believed that
Speaker 2: the Communists were sort of like tugs. We call them
Speaker 2: cho mutu, meaning tugs, and.
Speaker 3: It's a literal translation of.
Speaker 2: That cho mingu the head of a buffalo and the
Speaker 2: body of a horse. So somebody who's not quite human
Speaker 2: a thug.
Speaker 3: What the captured Via Kong officer said was straightforward, The
Speaker 3: intelligence was straightforward. But my Elliot's reaction was anything but straightforward.
Speaker 2: And so I left with more questions and answers, and
Speaker 2: I began to see that the picture was not black
Speaker 2: and white like I had believed at the beginning.
Speaker 3: But then Elliott says something crucial. She says, it didn't
Speaker 3: change her mind. She saw the evidence with her own eyes.
Speaker 3: She did the interview with the general, but it wasn't enough,
Speaker 3: remember her circumstances. She comes from a family of privilege,
Speaker 3: and the rise of the Communists in the north takes
Speaker 3: all that away. They end up living in a little
Speaker 3: hot and Saigon. The Vietcong is not some abstract force.
Speaker 3: They were a personal threat to her family.
Speaker 2: I think for people whose the blacks were against the
Speaker 2: wall and who thought that the survival depended on the
Speaker 2: Communists not winning, then seeing the evidence doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: you change your mind.
Speaker 3: Seeing the evidence doesn't mean that you change your mind.
Speaker 2: Seeing the evidence just increases your fear. Because you fear
Speaker 2: that you know that the Communists would win and it
Speaker 2: would be the end of you and your family, and
Speaker 2: you don't want to face it. You know, you don't
Speaker 2: want to think about it.
Speaker 3: Leon Garay might well have read the transcript of that
Speaker 3: same interview that my Elliott did with the Via Kong officer,
Speaker 3: and his interpretation would be that guy's going to give up.
Speaker 3: If we just bomb people like him some more, we'll
Speaker 3: destroy their will in retrospect, completely wrong. But think about
Speaker 3: this from Gray's perspective.
Speaker 4: Well, look, if you want to understand that I am
Speaker 4: a professional refugee, I win a refugee from Russia to Germany,
Speaker 4: from Germany to France, and from France to the United States.
Speaker 4: So three times. So as far as I was concerned,
Speaker 4: this was going to be my country, and what the
Speaker 4: way it was to defend interest of the United States,
Speaker 4: it was sufficient reason to pursue this thing.
Speaker 3: By this thing, he means fighting communism, the enemy that
Speaker 3: forced Gray out of his home in Russia, and in
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties, this thing, Communism is still out there.
Speaker 3: It spread to Vietnam. Think how much Gray had to
Speaker 3: believe that America was winning the war. Leon Garray felt
Speaker 3: there was nowhere left to retreat to.
Speaker 4: You don't pick and choose your wars. Your countries are
Speaker 4: wars at war period. You don't pick and choose whether
Speaker 4: you approval of it or not. That's nonsense, that's chaos.
Speaker 3: There's a moment in my Elliott's interview with Conrad Kellen
Speaker 3: where he talks about Gray about what it means to
Speaker 3: be a refugee.
Speaker 5: I think, like many, it eventually became great opportunists. What
Speaker 5: else could they do. I mean, if you were an opportunitists,
Speaker 5: at least you had the American establishment on your side.
Speaker 3: You know, the refugee is an opportunist because he is
Speaker 3: at the mercy of whatever country will take him. And
Speaker 3: I can't help but think that Kellen is also talking
Speaker 3: about himself here. He's acknowledging the biases that he brought
Speaker 3: to the interviews because he's a refugee too. He escaped
Speaker 3: from the Nazis. He witnessed the destruction of everything he
Speaker 3: once knew, his home, his community, his family, his privilege.
Speaker 3: How can that not scar you? At one point, Kellen
Speaker 3: explains to Elliott why he never actually traveled to Vietnam,
Speaker 3: even though he was working on a project about Vietnam.
Speaker 5: I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
Speaker 5: enough for me. I don't what I have to was.
Speaker 3: Was enough for me? I imagine Kellen read that same interview
Speaker 3: Elliott did, the one with the Vietcong officer. Kellen sees
Speaker 3: the man's determination, and when he thinks about that resolve
Speaker 3: through the prism of his own experience, he realizes, I
Speaker 3: can't match that, not anymore. One war was enough for me.
Speaker 3: Over and again in his interview with my Elliott, Kellen
Speaker 3: comes back to this war wasn't some conceptual abstraction for him.
Speaker 3: It wasn't an intellectual question like it was for so many.
Speaker 3: At Rand it was real, he lived through it.
Speaker 5: There were an awful lot of civilians around in this
Speaker 5: whole thing, in this whole Vietnam thing, who talked about casualties, characters.
Speaker 5: They didn't give a damn about anything. If somebody came
Speaker 5: back and said, you know, we took and took such
Speaker 5: and such a place which I don't know sixty well,
Speaker 5: a casualty is not a dead person. A casualty is
Speaker 5: something theoretical for these people.
Speaker 3: One interview with the Vietcong officer, one fantastic bit of intelligence,
Speaker 3: an insight into the enemy's mind, and yet everyone was
Speaker 3: in disagreement on what it meant because everyone was looking
Speaker 3: at it through a different set of eyes. That's why
Speaker 3: intelligence failures happened. It's not because someone screws up or
Speaker 3: is stupid or lazy. It's because the people who make
Speaker 3: sense of intelligence are human beings with their own histories
Speaker 3: and biases. So what happens to the three people in
Speaker 3: our story? Gray gets recalled from Vietnam in April of
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 4: Clearly Rand asked me to stop going there.
Speaker 3: To stop going to Vietnam, to return to Santa Monica.
Speaker 4: I went back, and then I was told that my
Speaker 4: presence was an embarrassment. I don't know why you suggest.
Speaker 4: You was very clear that there should love for something else.
Speaker 6: How'd you feel about that?
Speaker 2: Were you disappointed?
Speaker 4: Of course?
Speaker 3: I like grand he was hung out to dry. His son,
Speaker 3: Daniel is a lot more blunt.
Speaker 6: My sense of it was they wanted, you know, to
Speaker 6: cut loose from anything having to do with Vietnam, and
Speaker 6: the way to cut loose from this project and from
Speaker 6: him was to try and discredit the analysis and sort
Speaker 6: of then you know, Okay, you're now no longer a
Speaker 6: legitimate analyst, Well you really do need to go, yeah,
Speaker 6: kind of thing.
Speaker 3: And how can you describe your father in those years?
Speaker 6: So I think he was feeling quite beaten down. Frankly,
Speaker 6: I suspect there was a degree of just physical exhaustion.
Speaker 6: It may have been not that different than you know,
Speaker 6: when he and his family kept getting driven out of
Speaker 6: you know, cities in Europe and had to restart the
Speaker 6: whole process and restart the fight. I think there was
Speaker 6: a certain degree of that.
Speaker 3: Gray eventually moves to Florida take opposed to the University
Speaker 3: of Miami, fights the Cold War from Coral Gables. As
Speaker 3: for my Elliott, she eventually moves to America, lives in Ithaca,
Speaker 3: and it's only then, from the safety of upstate New York,
Speaker 3: that she finally accepts what the Vie Kong officer was
Speaker 3: telling her.
Speaker 2: I wish it would had been easier for me to
Speaker 2: come to that conclusion earlier, because it was just the
Speaker 2: use of agonizing and being ambiguous.
Speaker 3: She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
Speaker 3: determined the war was wrong and unwinnable.
Speaker 2: I think that it's easier to be objective when you
Speaker 2: will not you don't have a personal stake in a situation,
Speaker 2: and you can see the evidence and say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: the war's not working less ended. But when you have
Speaker 2: a very deep, strong personal stake, it's a lot harder,
Speaker 2: because you're talking about survival of your family realities.
Speaker 3: Mi Elliott finally faced the difficult truth. As for Kellen,
Speaker 3: Kellen sounds the alarm almost in the beginning of his
Speaker 3: time at RAND. He says, the intelligence tells us the
Speaker 3: war cannot be won. But of course, if you know
Speaker 3: even the slightest bit about the Vietnam War, you know
Speaker 3: that no one listened to him, at least until it
Speaker 3: was too late. He suffered, like all of them did.
Speaker 5: I can only say that the people that I knew
Speaker 5: talked a lot about scientific scientific Listen that we're the
Speaker 5: most unscientific people you can imagine. They just picked somebody,
Speaker 5: and then if they agreed with him, or he agreed
Speaker 5: with them, then he was an expert, and if he
Speaker 5: didn't agree with him, he was not an expert. And
Speaker 5: then they wrote it.
Speaker 3: Out the most unscientific people you can imagine. I'm not
Speaker 3: sure it's any different today, is it.
Speaker 5: And everybody reports for everybody else, and it was almost
Speaker 5: like a comedy. You know, he was so stupid. I
Speaker 5: got very angry about that.
Speaker 3: Kellen died in two thousand and seven, and not long
Speaker 3: ago I went to see his wife in that same
Speaker 3: house up in the hills. His daughters were there as well.
Speaker 3: They talked about how the Second War War never left him.
Speaker 3: He had terrible memories, and at the very end of
Speaker 3: his life, all those memories came back with a vengeance.
Speaker 3: Kellen would lie in his bed in sunny, beautiful Santa Monica,
Speaker 3: and he would dream that the Nazis were coming up
Speaker 3: the hill.
Speaker 1: To take him away.
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Speaker 3: team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm
Speaker 3: gladwell
Speaker 2: S.