Anthony Russo

Anthony Joseph Russo Jr. was a Rand Corporation analyst who arrived in Saigon in February 1965 as a field researcher for the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study and spent the next several years conducting interviews with captured Viet Cong personnel and defectors across approximately forty locations in South Vietnam. He prepared a report documenting systematic torture of prisoners at the CIA detention centers and provincial holding facilities where Rand's interviews were conducted, which Daniel Ellsberg later described as "the first to document American complicity in the routine use of torture." The report was either destroyed or remains classified in Rand's archives. Russo later co-conspired with Ellsberg to copy and release the Pentagon Papers, and published the most direct insider account of the corruption of the Viet Cong study.¹

The VC Motivation and Morale Study

Russo's first tour in Vietnam ended September 1966; his second ended May 1968. During both tours he conducted interviews across the country under the supervision of Leon Gouré, who led Phase II of the study beginning in early 1965. Russo found the interview data so varied that "it could be used to argue anything," and that Gouré was systematically selecting responses supporting his thesis that continued air power would erode VC morale while discarding contradictory evidence. Gouré also instituted an informal censorship requiring that all mentions of torture or mistreatment of prisoners by US forces or their allies be removed from interview transcripts before analysis. Russo documented these improprieties but could not have them corrected.¹

In February 1966, Gouré signed Russo's name to a memorandum promoting increased air strikes, Agent Orange-based population displacement, and refugee generation, without Russo's knowledge or permission. The analyst Douglass Scott's name was similarly forged. In spring 1966, Russo, Scott, and analyst Russell Betts submitted a formal letter to the head of Rand's Social Science Department documenting Gouré's methodological improprieties and unauthorized use of their names. Gouré maintained his position through his relationship with National Security Advisor Walt Rostow.¹

When Russo briefed Westmoreland's scientific advisor on his finding that for every pound of food denied a guerrilla by chemical crop destruction, one hundred pounds were denied to civilians, the briefing lasted under fifteen minutes and produced no policy response. Russo separately analyzed the civilian impact of defoliation operations; that analysis also remains classified or missing.¹

Pentagon Papers

Russo met Ellsberg at Rand's Santa Monica offices. Ellsberg had returned from Vietnam in mid-1967, having concluded the war was unwinnable, and was working on the classified Pentagon Papers study that Secretary McNamara had commissioned. It was Russo who first proposed copying the Papers and distributing them. Beginning October 1, 1969, Russo and Ellsberg copied the documents at the Los Angeles advertising agency of Russo's girlfriend, Lynda Sinay. Russo was indicted alongside Ellsberg; charges against both were dismissed in May 1973 due to government misconduct including illegal wiretapping and the Watergate-related break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by the White House "plumbers."¹

After Rand

In the October 1972 issue of Ramparts magazine, Russo published "Looking Backward: RAND and Vietnam," which he had titled "Looking Backward: RAND and Genocide" before the editors changed the subtitle. He described Gouré as "a snake oil salesman" and characterized the M&M Study as "a whitewash of genocide." He wrote that the study had been structured to find "body counts of public relations" rather than any genuine assessment of the enemy.¹

Russo died August 6, 2008, at age 71. His three suppressed Rand reports (the torture documentation paper, the methodological critique of the M&M Study, and the defoliation civilian impact analysis) remain either classified at Rand or destroyed. The commissioned Rand history (2010) subsequently validated "nearly all of Russo's claims."¹