Dear colleagues with RAND and Vietnam War expertise! In an interview in the book *Talking Nets*, Paul Werbos, an earlier developer of backpropagation algorithms, tells a story (excerpted below) about a project he worked on for RAND that got leaked to the New York Times. I've emailed with Werbos, but he doesn't seem to have a handy citation for the NY Times report. Does anyone happen to know the report he has in mind or tips on how to locate the report or a gloss on his work for RAND? There are a few comments in Boden's two volume study of AI, but it appears her reconstruction is imprecise. Alternately, I'm not planning a RAND archives deep-dive or site visit, but maybe someone has advice for a well targeted remote search request I could file? This is just a little footnote for a larger project, so I'm trying to not get too sidetracked. Werbos reports: “I went back to Harvard to get a PhiD. in applied math. Having been fortified with humanity from London, I then descended into the bowels of the machine , stopping off at the RAND Corporation for the summer of 1968 along the way....Actually, I did learn a thing that summer that surprised me. It turned out one of their problems was coming up with a measure of success in the Vietnam War....I looked for stable invariants , and they were things like Vietcong attacks on Americans. That was the best stable invariant underlying measure. I used that as a success measure and came to the conclusion that we' should radically change our policy and do things like small unit actions instead of these large sweeps...Of course , it was all classified , and I read it on the front page of the New York Times two weeks later, which immediately made me very cynical about American security. The minute it’s useful , it’s on the front page of the New York Times. That made me very cynical- that event plus a few other things that happened at the RAND Corporation.” Best wishes, Bernard