#Vietnam
20 entries tagged Vietnam.
People (9)
- 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.
- Dean Rusk Rockefeller Foundation president from 1952 to 1960 who became Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, sealing the Foundation's pipeline into the State Department and overseeing the diplomatic side of the 1964 Brazil coup and the 1967 Bolivia operation against Che Guevara.
- 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.
- Emmett O'Brien A US Army colonel in military intelligence who produced a 1971 study at the US Army War College on the five-phase defection process, drawing on cases from the Philippines, Malayan, and Vietnam wars and peacetime defections to the US, arguing that the use of already-defected guerrillas as testimonial voices was the most effective technique for inducing further defection.
- Eugene Lessman Eugene 'Gene' Alden Lessman was a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Green Beret Vietnam veteran, and lead recruiter for the Army's Great Skill Program who handled remote viewer Angela Dellafiora and allegedly recruited Luis Elizondo into the program.
- 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.
- Ted Shackley Ted Shackley (1927-2002), ‘The Blond Ghost,’ was a CIA operations officer who served as station chief at JMWAVE, Laos, and Saigon, rose to Associate Deputy Director for Operations, was forced out by DCI Turner in 1979, and became a central node in the Safari Club and Iran-Contra private network.
- Tom Clines CIA career officer who served under Ted Shackley at JMWAVE, Laos, and the Western Hemisphere Division, joined the private Safari Club and Iran-Contra Enterprise network after Shackley's 1979 departure, and was convicted in 1993 of underreporting Iran-Contra income.
Organizations (4)
- 4th Psychological Operations Group A US Army psychological operations unit that developed specialized psyops technology including the Mitralux image projector and the hurricane hustler leaflet delivery device during the Vietnam War.
- 7th Psychological Operations Group A US Army psychological operations unit headquartered in Okinawa that produced weekly classified propaganda analysis documents during the Vietnam War, including Communist Propaganda Highlights and Trends Analysis reports.
- Pacific Architects and Engineers Engineering and construction company identified as a CIA proprietary that provided cover for intelligence officers and built interrogation facilities for the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Employed SLA-connected operative Colston Westbrook.
- 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 (5)
- 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.
- Operation Tintinnabulation A US Army psychological operations campaign conducted in Vietnam using aircraft-mounted loudspeakers and noisemakers at night to erode Viet Cong morale and induce surrenders under the Chieu Hoi program, which reportedly doubled monthly defections.
- 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.
- Wandering Souls A US psychological operations tactic used in Vietnam by the 1st Infantry Division in which helicopters overflew villages between midnight and 6 a.m. broadcasting eerie recordings representing the souls of unburied dead Viet Cong soldiers, designed to exploit Vietnamese superstitions about the fate of those killed in battle far from home.
Events (2)
- Dienbienphu Decisive 1954 battle in the First Indochina War where the Viet Minh defeated French colonial forces, ending French rule in Indochina.
- Gulf of Tonkin Incident The Gulf of Tonkin Incident refers to the August 2 and 4, 1964 incidents in which a genuine North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox was followed by a second 'attack' on August 4 that almost certainly never occurred, yet was used by the Johnson administration to obtain the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing open-ended military escalation in Vietnam - a deception confirmed by NSA declassified documents released in 2005.