#Counterinsurgency
13 entries tagged Counterinsurgency.
People (6)
- Alberto Lleras Camargo Alberto Lleras Camargo served as Colombia's president twice (1945-46, 1958-62) and as the first secretary-general of the OAS, and was a key member of Nelson Rockefeller's inter-American political network from the 1940s onward.
- Anthony Russo Rand Corporation field analyst who conducted Viet Cong interviews in South Vietnam from 1965, prepared the first documented report of American complicity in systematic torture of prisoners, saw his findings suppressed by Rand's VC study director, and later co-conspired with Daniel Ellsberg to copy and release the Pentagon Papers.
- Edward Lansdale Major General Edward Lansdale was the U.S. Air Force's preeminent counterinsurgency theorist, credited with suppressing the Huk insurgency in the Philippines by backing Ramon Magsaysay (1950-1953), advising Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam (1954-1956), and directing Operation Mongoose against Castro (1961-1962) under Robert Kennedy's oversight, becoming the partial model for the protagonists in both The Quiet American and The Ugly American.
- General William P. Yarborough Brigadier General William P. Yarborough led the February 1962 Special Forces survey team to Colombia whose classified report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended building a secret paramilitary network to 'execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,' a foundational document for what became Operation Condor-era state terror.
- Konrad Kellen Rand Corporation analyst and former World War II psychological warfare professional who, working from the same Viet Cong interview transcripts as Leon Gouré, reached the opposite conclusions: that VC morale was high, organizational cohesion was strong, and the war was unwinnable; his findings were formally published but ignored by policymakers.
- Leon Goure Rand Corporation social scientist who led Phase II of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study from 1965, redirected its findings to support an air power thesis through systematic selection and suppression of contrary data, forged colleagues' signatures on a policy memorandum, and supplied the optimistic briefings on VC morale that Walt Rostow and Robert McNamara consumed while the war escalated.
Organizations (3)
- CRESS An Army-funded social science research organization at American University that ran from 1956 through the 1960s under the name SORO before being reorganized as CRESS following the Project Camelot scandal, maintaining two analytical divisions focused on counterinsurgency intelligence and area handbooks.
- JAARS The Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, SIL's aviation and communications arm, which provided missionary logistics in Amazonian interior while serving as dual-use infrastructure for US government personnel and intelligence operations in the region.
- Rand Corporation The Rand Corporation is the US Air Force's principal Cold War nonprofit think tank in Santa Monica, founded as Project RAND in 1946 and incorporated in 1948, whose Vietnam-era Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study produced critical findings that were suppressed at the time and later vindicated by Rand's own official history.
Programs (4)
- Chieu Hoi A South Vietnamese government defection program running throughout the Vietnam War that offered amnesty to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers who surrendered, and became the primary distribution channel for US psychological operations leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts.
- Phoenix Program The Phoenix Program was the CIA-organized counterinsurgency targeting program in Vietnam (1968-1972) that used intelligence-driven identification and systematic neutralization - through capture, defection, or killing - of Viet Cong political and military infrastructure, resulting in the reported neutralization of 81,740 people including approximately 26,369 killed, under the direction of William Colby and later Ted Shackley.
- Project Agile An ARPA-sponsored series of military science studies in Asia during the Vietnam era that included, among other programs, a Battelle Memorial Institute study developing olfactory weapons calibrated to trigger fear responses in specific ethnic populations.
- Project Camelot A 1964 US Army project run through SORO at American University under contract ARO-7 and a budget Secretary of State Rusk described as 'more than $4,000,000' that attempted to build a predictive social science model for revolution in developing countries; cancelled in July 1965 after its exposure by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung provoked a Chilean diplomatic protest, congressional hearings, and a permanent rupture between the military and academic social science communities.