Project Camelot

Project Camelot was a US Army research initiative launched in July 1964 through the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University in Washington, D.C., under the Army's existing contract ARO-7 with a budget Secretary of State Rusk described to President Johnson as "more than $4,000,000" over three to four years. Its formal goal was to develop a general social systems model that could predict the internal conditions leading to revolution in developing countries and assess actions available to host governments to suppress that potential. Chile was designated the initial pilot study country, with planned fieldwork expansion to Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The project was publicly cancelled July 8, 1965, following its exposure in Chile, a diplomatic protest from the Chilean government, and the eruption of a major controversy within American academic social science.¹

Origins and Design

The concept emerged from a 1964 Defense Science Board report identifying gaps in Department of Defense behavioral science programs with respect to small wars and revolutionary movements. It was formulated by the Army's Office of the Chief of Research and Development (OCRD) and assigned to SORO, where the project director was Rex Hopper, chairman of the sociology department at Brooklyn College, a Latin American area specialist. SORO director Theodore Vallance sent formal invitations to academic researchers on December 4, 1964.¹

The project's three stated research objectives were: to devise procedures for assessing internal war potential within national societies; to identify actions a government might take to relieve the conditions assessed as generating that potential; and to assess the feasibility of designing a system for collecting and using the necessary information. The methodology was explicitly multidisciplinary, engaging sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, and area specialists. A computer simulation component, designated POLITICA, was contracted to Clark Abt of Abt Associates, designed to analyze forty or more variables including institutional trust, cultural values, and political attitudes to simulate revolutionary dynamics.¹

The target country list documented in Army memos of December 5, 1964, included twelve Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela), the Middle East (Egypt, Iran, Turkey), the Far East (Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand), and others including France, Greece, and Nigeria. Proposed initial fieldwork sites were Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, Iran, and Thailand. The Defense Science Board and the Army Research and Development Office provided oversight above the SORO contracting level; review also ran through the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.¹

Intellectual Lineage through the Rockefeller Network

Camelot's counterinsurgency social-science framework grew from doctrines developed in the Rockefeller policy network. William Kintner, Nelson Rockefeller's collaborator on the 1955 Quantico seminars and "Open Skies" proposal, co-founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he argued for folding "private voluntary organizations, including religious personnel" into Cold War operations, the same logic Camelot applied to academic social scientists. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project, on which Kintner worked alongside future Kennedy national-security officials, produced 1958-1959 reports that became the template for the Kennedy counterinsurgency expansion.²

Colombia as Laboratory and the Yarborough Mission

The Kennedy administration's choice of Colombia as its principal counterinsurgency laboratory under the Alliance for Progress coincided with Camelot's conception. Colombia had a pro-U.S. government under Alberto Lleras Camargo (who had endorsed Plan Lazo, the 1959 U.S.-influenced framework), and IBEC and AIA, Rockefeller's development corporations, already operated there. The February 2-13, 1962 survey mission of Brigadier General William P. Yarborough produced a report to the Joint Chiefs whose secret supplement recommended creating a "civil and military structure" for "paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents," the operational framework that Camelot-style social science was expected to feed with predictive target data.³

The Special Group CI and NSAM 124/182

Camelot's institutional patron was Kennedy's Special Group (Counter-Insurgency), established by NSAM 124 on January 18, 1962 under General Maxwell Taylor and including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the DCI, and McGeorge Bundy; it was the successor to the Special Group Nelson Rockefeller had chaired under Eisenhower. NSAM 182 (August 24, 1962) approved the "U.S. Overseas Internal Defense Policy" and required each agency to formulate its own counterinsurgency doctrine for Special Group review, the mandate under which the Army's Office of the Chief of Research and Development commissioned SORO's modeling program. The project's full projected authorization was about $6 million over five years, described at the time as the largest single social-science grant ever, of which the "more than $4,000,000" Rusk cited reflected funds committed at cancellation.⁴

Exposure in Chile

On April 8, 1965, SORO project director Hopper sent formal invitations to academics worldwide, including Johan Galtung, a Norwegian sociologist then working at FLACSO (the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santiago under UNESCO funding. On April 22, 1965, Galtung replied to Hopper formally declining and condemning the project's "imperialist features" in writing. He then shared the SORO invitation letter with Chilean academic colleagues, including Alvaro Bunster of the University of Chile.¹

Simultaneously, Hugo Nutini, an Italian-born, Chilean-raised American citizen and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, received authorization from Hopper to make informal preliminary approaches to Chilean scholars. When those scholars asked about funding sources, Nutini falsely claimed the project was funded by the National Science Foundation, a misrepresentation of the Army source. When Eduardo Fuenzalida of FLACSO confronted Nutini with the SORO materials Galtung had shared, exposing the deception, the resulting alarm spread quickly through Chilean academic and political circles. Eduardo Hamuy, director of the Center of Social and Economic Studies at the Faculty of Economics, University of Chile, characterized Camelot as a plan of "systematized espionage."¹

El Siglo broke the story on Saturday morning, June 12, with the headline "Yankees Study Invasion of Chile" and the subheadline "Project Camelot Financed by U.S. Army." On June 14, 1965, US Ambassador Ralph Dungan sent a Confidential/Priority telegram to Washington (Telegram 1920, declassified as FRUS 1964-68, Vol. XXXI, Document 279) reporting that "serious anxiety" existed among mainstream Chilean scholars, characterizing the project as "seriously detrimental to U.S. interests in Chile," "politically dangerous," and "a serious duplication of other U.S. Government efforts, and a waste of government funds," and asking explicitly whether the project had been approved by the State Department. On June 17, the State Department replied that it had written to the Secretary of the Army to protest that arrangements for Camelot "fell far short of the kind of coordination that such an ambitious project may require," conveying that the project had made an "unfavorable impression" on Latin American scholars "of considerable political importance." On June 30, 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a confidential memorandum to President Johnson (FRUS Doc. 280) reporting that he and Defense Secretary McNamara had agreed to jointly review Army-sponsored foreign area research, that the countries under intensive study included Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela, and that he planned to coordinate with Dungan and consult Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.¹

Within the government, the Department of Defense separately defended the project internally. In a June 24 memorandum to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Joseph Califano, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, argued that "No Camelot research activities have been authorized or conducted outside the continental United States, including Chile," characterizing the only known foreign contact as "a letter written by a U.S. scientist to a Swedish social scientist presently resident in Chile," a description that misdescribed Galtung's nationality (he is Norwegian) and understated the scope of Nutini's recruiting approaches.¹

The Chilean Senate convened a special session. Deputy Jorge Montes reported that Nutini had attempted to recruit twenty to twenty-five Chilean scholars at $2,000 per month and characterized the project as "systematized espionage." Senator Aniceto Rodríguez contributed to the political response. President Eduardo Frei Montalva protested the project formally to Washington through Foreign Minister Gabriel Valdés. Chile banned Nutini from returning to the country, classifying him as a politically undesirable individual.¹

Cancellation and Congressional Investigations

The Office of the Secretary of Defense publicly ordered cancellation on July 8, 1965. The following day the DoD issued a directive explicitly calling for the underlying social science research to continue, subdivided into smaller tasks under less conspicuous labeling, a signal that the cancellation was a public relations maneuver rather than a policy change.¹

The primary congressional investigation was conducted by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, chaired by Dante B. Fascell (D-FL), in hearings titled "Behavioral Sciences and the National Security" (Report No. 4, Part IX of "Winning the Cold War: The U.S. Ideological Offensive"), held July 8, 13, 14, and August 4, 1965. A Senate Committee on Government Operations hearing on "Federal Support of International Social Science and Behavioral Research" followed in 1966. Senator J. William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on "Defense Department Sponsored Foreign Affairs Research" in May 1968, reviewing the broader pattern of Army-sponsored social science after Camelot.¹

The State Department's internal review established that it had had no prior knowledge of Project Camelot before the Chilean exposure, constituting a serious institutional gap in civilian control of military foreign policy activities. On August 2, 1965, President Johnson directed Secretary Rusk to establish procedures ensuring the propriety of government-sponsored social science research with foreign policy implications, leading to the creation of the State Department's Foreign Area Research (FAR) coordination mechanism.¹

Defense Department budget for behavioral and social science research increased from $27.3 million in 1965 to $34 million in 1966, and by 1969 the Pentagon confirmed that "not a single one" of its social science projects involving foreign areas had been terminated following Camelot's cancellation.¹

Academic Community Response

The definitive scholarly compilation is Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics (MIT Press, 1967; revised edition 1974). The volume includes the original project design documents in Part II, academic responses by Marshall Sahlins, Kalman Silvert, Robert Boguslaw, Jessie Bernard, and Herbert Blumer in Part III, political responses by Fascell, Fulbright, Vallance, Aniceto Rodríguez, and Jorge Montes in Part IV, and analytical essays including contributions by Ithiel de Sola Pool, Johan Galtung ("After Camelot"), and Horowitz himself.¹

The American Anthropological Association passed a resolution against participation in "clandestine intelligence activities" and adopted a nonbinding ethical code for practitioners. This was a direct response to Project Camelot. The controversy drew a lasting division between critics who condemned military-sponsored social science research in foreign areas and accommodationists who defended such funding pipelines, a split that sharpened with the continuation of Vietnam-era research contracts.¹

Concurrent SORO Projects

SORO was simultaneously running related projects that continued after Camelot's cancellation. Project Simpatico conducted fieldwork in Colombia in July and August 1965, over ambassadors' objections, with researchers asking rural residents questions including "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. Operation Task conducted parallel work in Peru.¹

Reorganization as CRESS

SORO was formally renamed the Center for Research in Social Systems (CRESS) in approximately May to July 1966. CRESS comprised two internal analytical divisions: the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) and the Counter-Insurgency Information Analysis Center (CINFAC). American University severed its institutional relationship with CRESS entirely in 1969, ending a twelve-year association. The research function and most personnel were continuous with SORO throughout the transition.¹

The American University Archives holds a five-box collection (contact: [email protected]) documenting SORO's organization and functions, its transition to CRESS in 1965-66, and materials from the Project Camelot affair including "newspaper clippings, publications, and correspondence documenting the Project Camelot Affair scandal."¹