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For Kevin
  

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

—Erich Fromm
 PROLOGUE

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA as it is

known, is the most powerful and most productive military science agency
in the world. It is also one of the most secretive and, until this book, the
least investigated. Its mission is to create revolutions in military science and
to maintain technological dominance over the rest of the world.
DARPA was created by Congress in 1958 and has functioned ever since
as the central research and development organization of the Department of
Defense. With an annual budget of roughly $3 billion, DARPA is unlike any
other military research agency in the United States. DARPA as an agency
does not conduct scientific research. Its program managers and directors
hire defense contractors, academics, and other government organizations to
do the work. DARPA then facilitates the transition of its successful results
to the military for use. It acts swiftly and with agility, free from standard
bureaucracy or red tape. DARPA maintains an extraordinarily small staff.
For six decades now the agency has employed, on average, 120 program
managers annually, each for roughly five years’ tenure. These
entrepreneurial leaders, the majority of whom are accomplished scientists
themselves, initiate and oversee hundreds of research projects—involving
tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working inside national
laboratories, military and defense contractor facilities, and university
laboratories—all across America and overseas.
DARPA program managers maintain an unusual degree of authority in
an otherwise rigid military chain of command. They can start, continue, or
stop research projects with little outside intervention. Once ready for
fielding, the resulting weapons and weapons-related systems are turned over
to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and to intelligence agencies
including the CIA, NSA (National Security Agency), DIA (Defense
Intelligence Agency), NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency),
NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), and others.
DARPA carefully controls its public persona. Stories about DARPA as
America’s cutting-edge science agency appear regularly in the press, while
the bulk of DARPA’s more consequential and sometimes Orwellian
programs go largely unreported. “Tiny DARPA implants could give humans
self-healing powers,” headlined CBS News in the fall of 2014. That same
week, Business Insider ran the headline “DARPA’s Incredible Jumping
Robot Shows How the US Military Is Pivoting to Disaster Relief.” These
and other DARPA stories angle toward health and wellness, when in fact
DARPA’s stated mission is to create weapons systems. This book reveals
why. Many news stories remind readers that DARPA created the Internet,
Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and stealth technology. But to describe
DARPA this way is to describe Apple as the computer company that built
the Macintosh 512K. These DARPA milestones are forty-year-old
inventions. Why has so much else about America’s most powerful and most
productive military science agency been shrouded in mystery? This book
shines a light on DARPA’s secret history.
Until 1972, DARPA was located inside the Pentagon. Today the agency
maintains headquarters in an unmarked glass and steel building four miles
from the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia. DARPA’s director reports to the
Office of the Secretary of Defense. In its fifty-seven years, DARPA has
never allowed the United States to be taken by scientific surprise. Admirers
call DARPA the Pentagon’s brain. Critics call it the heart of the military-
industrial complex. Is DARPA to be admired or feared? Does DARPA
safeguard democracy, or does it stimulate America’s seemingly endless call
to war?
DARPA makes the future happen. Industry, public health, society, and
culture all transform because of technology that DARPA pioneers. DARPA
creates, DARPA dominates, and when sent to the battlefield, DARPA
destroys. “We are faced with huge uncertainties and shifting threats,”
DARPA director Arati Prabhakar stated in a press release in 2014, “but we
also have unparalleled opportunities to advance technologies in a way that
can provide the nation with dramatic new capabilities.” But what if some of
these “dramatic new capabilities” are not such great ideas?
To research this book, I interviewed seventy-one individuals uniquely
affiliated with DARPA, going back to the earliest days of the agency. The
list includes presidential science advisors, DARPA program managers and
scientists, members of the esoteric and highly secretive Jason scientists,
captains, colonels, a Nobel laureate, and a four-star general. In interviewing
these individuals, I heard stories about pushing known scientific boundaries
in the name of national security, about weather warfare, social science
experiments, and war games. I heard about brilliance and hubris, about
revolutionary triumphs and shortsighted defeat. One concept stands out.
DARPA, by its mandate, pioneers advanced military science in secret. A
revolution is not a revolution unless it comes with an element of surprise.
Once DARPA technology is revealed on the battlefield, other nations
inevitably acquire the science that DARPA pioneered. For example, in the
early 1960s, during the Vietnam War, DARPA began developing unmanned
aerial vehicles, or drones. It took three decades to arm the first drone, which
then appeared on the battlefield in Afghanistan in October 2001. By the
time the public knew about drone warfare, U.S. drone technology had
advanced by multiple generations. Shortly thereafter, numerous enemy
nations began engineering their own drones. By 2014, eighty-seven nations
had military-grade drones.
In interviewing former DARPA scientists for this book, I learned that at
any given time in history, what DARPA scientists are working on—most
notably in the agency’s classified programs—is ten to twenty years ahead of
the technology in the public domain. The world becomes the future because
of DARPA. Is it wise to let DARPA determine what lies ahead?
 PART I

THE COLD WAR

 CHAPTER ONE

The Evil Thing

One day in the winter of 1954, a group of American scientists found

themselves entering into a time when a machine they had created could
trigger the end of the world. It was March 1, 1954, 4:29 a.m. local time on
Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a small island chain in the vast Pacific
Ocean, 2,650 miles west of Hawaii. Some of the scientists in the group had
warned of this moment. Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, both Manhattan
Project scientists, called this machine an “evil thing,” and they told
President Truman it should never be created. But it was built anyway, and
now it was about to explode.
The machine was a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb, small enough to
be loaded onto a U.S. Air Force bomber and dropped on an enemy city like
Moscow. Because the bomb’s existence had been kept secret from the
American public, the test that the scientists were about to witness had been
given a code name. It was called Castle Bravo.
On one end of Bikini Atoll, ten men, each with a top secret Q clearance
for access to nuclear secrets, waited inside a concrete bunker, facing an
unknown fate. In a little more than two hours, the most powerful bomb in
the history of the world to date was going to be detonated just nineteen
miles away. No human being had ever before been this close to the kind of
power this bomb was expected to deliver. With a predicted yield of 6
megatons, Castle Bravo would deliver twice as much power as all the
bombs dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II together,
including both atomic bombs.
Thanks to recent advancements in defense science, by 1954 machines
were being miniaturized at an astonishing rate. Nuclear weapons in
particular were getting smaller and more efficient in ways that scientists
could not have imagined a decade before. The Castle Bravo bomb would
likely explode with one thousand times the force of the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, and yet it weighed just a little more
than twice as much.
The light had not yet come up on Bikini. An intense tropical rainfall the
night before had left the fronds on the coconut palms and pandanus trees
soaking wet. Salt-loving sea lavender plants covered the lowlands, and little
penny-sized geckos scampered across wet white sands. The bunker, code-
named Station 70, was an odd sight to behold, squat, rectangular, with blast-
proof doors and three-foot concrete walls. Everything but the bunker’s
entrance had now been buried under ten feet of sand. A freestanding
concrete-block seawall stood between the bunker and the lagoon,
engineered to help protect the men against a potentially massive tidal wave.
A three-hundred-foot-tall radio tower built nearby made it possible for the
men in the bunker to communicate directly with U.S. defense officials and
scientists running this secret operation from aboard the Task Force
Command ship USS Estes, sixty miles out at sea.
The men inside the bunker were members of the bomb’s firing party, a
team of six engineers, three Army technicians, and one nuclear scientist.
Miles of waterproof submarine cable connected the racks of electronic
equipment inside the bunker to the Castle Bravo bomb, which was located
on a separate island, nineteen miles across Bikini’s lagoon.
“In the bunker we felt secure,” recalled Bernard O’Keefe, one of the
nuclear weapons engineers who had advocated for this test. Like Fermi and
Rabi, Barney O’Keefe had worked on the Manhattan Project. But unlike
those two nuclear physicists, O’Keefe believed this hydrogen bomb was a
good thing. That it would keep Americans safe. Defense science is, and
likely always will be, a debate.
“At 4:30 a.m. we heard from the scientific director,” O’Keefe later
remembered. Dr. William Ogle, Los Alamos scientific director, used a ship-
to-shore radio link to relay messages from the USS Estes. Zero Hour grew
near.
“Start the countdown,” Ogle said.
“The Time is H minus two hours,” O’Keefe announced. Beside him,
another member of the firing party pushed the red button marked “TWO
HOURS.” The machinery took hold.
Inside the bunker, time marched on, and as it did, the general tenor
shifted from bearable to “agonizing,” O’Keefe recalled. The interior of
Station 70 was rough and ugly, with the damp baldness of new concrete.
Pool hall–style reflector lights gave off a harsh fluorescent glare. There was
a laboratory table covered with tools of the engineering trade: radio tubes,
bits and pieces of wire, a soldering iron. On one wall hung a blackboard. On
it someone had written a mathematical equation then erased part of it so it
no longer made sense. A clock ticked toward Zero Hour. For a long stretch
no one said a word, and a heavy and foreboding silence filled the room. Just
sixteen minutes before detonation, someone finally spoke. One of the
Army’s radio technicians wondered aloud how tonight’s steak dinner, stored
in a meat locker at the back of the bunker, was going to taste after the bomb
finally went off.
“H minus fifteen minutes,” said O’Keefe, his voice sounding out across
dozens of loudspeakers now broadcasting the information to more than ten
thousand scientists, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and government officials
spread out across fourteen seagoing vessels, forty-six aircraft, and two
weather stations. There was no turning back now. Zero Hour was just
fifteen minutes away.
Out at sea, aboard another vessel, the men on the USNS Ainsworth
heard Barney O’Keefe’s voice “loud and clear,” recalls Ralph “Jim”
Freedman, a twenty-four-year-old nuclear weapons engineer. Standing
beside Freedman on deck was a group of scientists from Los Alamos. These
were the physicists who had designed and built this bomb. They were here
now to witness the results of their engineered creation—the machine that
Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi had warned President Truman was an “evil
thing.” The sun had not yet risen. Outside, all around, it was dark.
“All observers having high-density goggles put them on,” O’Keefe’s
voice boomed. Freedman was feeling anxious and uneasy. He had not slept
well the night before. “I was in the same bunkroom as the Los Alamos
scientists, some who were up all night, drinking Chivas Regal and
discussing the bomb test,” Freedman recalls. “They were discussing things
they were not supposed to be discussing but did anyway, because who could
sleep the night before the test?” Castle Bravo had been built according to
the “Teller-Ulam” scheme—named for its co-designers, Edward Teller and
Stanislaw Ulam—which meant, unlike with the far less powerful atomic
bomb, this hydrogen bomb had been designed to hold itself together for an
extra hundred-millionth of a second, thereby allowing its hydrogen isotopes
to fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy, called fusion,
producing a potentially infinite amount of power, or yield. “What this
meant,” Freedman explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million
chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the earth’s atmosphere, when
Castle Bravo exploded, it could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some
scientists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about the end of the
world.”
This was not Freedman’s first atmospheric nuclear bomb test. By 1954
he had worked on more than a dozen nuclear tests at the continental atomic
test site located in Nevada, seventy miles north of Las Vegas. Freedman had
witnessed atomic explosions before, through dark welder’s glasses. He had
seen mushroom clouds form. But Castle Bravo was different. It was going
to be colossal. Titanic. A history-making bomb test. With his goggles in
place over his eyes, Freedman turned to face the bomb. There was less than
two minutes to go when a Los Alamos scientist standing beside him let out
a frustrated cry.
“He’d left his goggles down below deck,” Freedman explains. “And
there wasn’t enough time for him to go get them and make it back up.”
Freedman took off his goggles and handed them to the man. “I was
young,” he says, “not so important to the test.” Without eye protection, Jim
Freedman had to turn his back to the bomb. So instead of watching Castle
Bravo explode, Freedman watched the scientists watch the bomb.
The prerecorded voice of Barney O’Keefe came over the loudspeaker,
counting down the last seconds. Everyone fell silent. “Five. Four. Three.
Two. One.” Zero Hour. A flash of thermonuclear light, called the Teller
light, sprang to life as a flood of gamma radiation filled the air. The
presence of x-rays made the unseen visible. In the flash of Teller light,
Freedman—who was watching the scientists for their reactions—could see
their facial bones.
“In front of me… they were skeletons,” Freedman recalls. Their faces no
longer appeared to be human faces. Just “jawbones and eye sockets. Rows
of teeth. Skulls.”
 Out at sea and in the distance, the world’s largest-ever nuclear fireball—
nearly four-and-a-half miles in diameter and nine miles tall—lit up the sky.
So intense was that fireball that Navy personnel manning a weather station
155 miles to the east watched, awestruck, as the dark sky remained alight
for sixty agonizing seconds. Next, the mushroom cloud started to form.
Freedman’s eyes remained on the Los Alamos scientists, his own
perspective now returned to normal in the absence of the Teller light. “I was
watching their faces,” he recalls, “to see their reaction. Most had their
mouths open, with the eyeballs darting back and forth. I remember the eyes.
The eyeballs kept moving. There was fear and terror, I think. The
mushroom cloud just kept getting bigger.” The scientists knew something
was wrong.
One scientist held two fingers up in front of his eye, trade craft among
nuclear weapons engineers to roughly measure the rate of expansion of a
mushroom cloud. What was predicted to be a 6-megaton explosion had
gone out of control. Castle Bravo was a 15-megaton explosion. No one had
any idea the explosion could be this big.
“The mushroom cloud should have been fifteen [or] twenty miles wide
at this point. Instead it was forty,” Freedman explains. “As the cloud kept
growing behind me, I could see in the faces that [some] of the scientists
thought the atmosphere was catching on fire. The look said, ‘This is the end
of the world.’”
Time passed. Freedman stared at the horrified scientists. Then, finally,
the rapid expansion of the mushroom cloud began to slow. To Freedman’s
eye, the scientists’ expression of intense terror and despair suddenly lifted
and was gone. “The look on their faces went from fear to satisfaction,”
Freedman recalls. “The world didn’t end and they were triumphant. Self-
satisfied with what they had accomplished. With what they had done.”
Within sixty seconds, the top of the mushroom cloud reached fifty
thousand feet, roughly twice as high as commercial airplanes flew back
then. Its cap would eventually grow to an astounding seventy miles across.
The cloud’s colossal stem was sucking millions of tons of pulverized coral
up from the ocean and into the atmosphere, where it would be dispersed
into the jet stream as radioactive dust. The remains would leave a footprint
of fallout on every corner of the earth.
An unexpected ninety-degree shift in wind direction meant that weather
forecasters had been wrong about which way the wind would blow. Intense
fallout was now heading in an easterly direction, where it would pass over
several of the Task Force vessels and the inhabited atolls of Rongelap and
Rongerik. And it was headed directly for Station 70, on Enyu Island.
Back inside the bunker, the firing party was silent. They could not feel
or see the fireball. They’d missed the Teller light. All the ten men had to go
by, to gauge what might be going on outside, was the violent electronic
chatter on the equipment racks.
“The explosion had to have been a big one to cause that much electrical
commotion,” O’Keefe later recalled. O’Keefe had also calculated that it
would take another forty-five seconds for the shock wave to travel the
nineteen miles from ground zero across the lagoon and hit the bunker head-
on. And so when, after only ten seconds, the bunker began to shudder and
sway, O’Keefe knew instantly something unexpected had happened.
“The whole building was moving,” O’Keefe recalled, “not shaking or
shuddering as it would from the shock wave that had not arrived yet, but
with a slow, perceptible, rolling motion, like a ship’s roll.”
O’Keefe felt nauseated. He wanted to throw up. “I was completely
unable to get it through my head that the building was moving,” he said,
trying to push away the sickening feeling that the bunker might be sinking
into the sea. “The walls are three feet thick,” he told himself. “It’s anchored
like a rock on this island.” But things were most definitely moving outside.
Objects on the surfaces and walls began to rattle, slide, and crash to the
floor. O’Keefe looked at the clock. He knew how long it was supposed to
take for the shock wave to travel from ground zero to the bunker. “It was
impossible for the shock wave to have reached Enyu Island yet,” he recalled
thinking. “But the bunker was moving. The motion was unmistakable as it
built up.”
Lights flickered. The walls appeared to bulge. Then there was a loud and
frightening crash, like a thunderclap, as the giant steel door beat like a
drumhead. A “slow, sickening whoosh” sounded through the bunker “as the
air found its way out after the shock wave had passed.” One of the men was
thrown to the ground, and O’Keefe watched him stagger as he struggled to
his knees. Sparks were flying. There was the sputter of electronic batteries.
A vapor cloud began to fill the room. Then the worst possible element in
this catastrophic mix appeared.
 “Water!” someone yelled. “There’s water coming in!”
O’Keefe’s legs went rubbery. It was too early for a tidal wave, he told
himself, and began to think that perhaps the whole ocean had erupted
around them. That soon he and his colleagues would be jettisoned to the
bottom of the lagoon, their concrete bunker a watery tomb. The scientist in
charge, Dr. John Clark, dispatched one of the Army technicians to
investigate. The technician walked to the single round porthole built into
the blast-proof steel doors and looked outside. Station 70 was not
underwater. It was still anchored to the land. The water in the bunker was
coming from burst water pipes. O’Keefe volunteered to take a Geiger
counter and venture outside. Several others followed along, Geiger counters
in hand.
The situation outside looked far worse than anyone had anticipated.
Palm trees were on fire. Dead birds littered the land. There was no visible
life, and they sensed that there might not be life anywhere. The sun was
blotted out behind the nuclear mushroom cloud. “The air was filled with a
whitish chaff,” O’Keefe recalled. “I stuck out my hand, which was soon
covered with a substance like talcum powder.” When O’Keefe turned on his
Geiger counter to check for radiation, the needle spiked. Someone else
shouted out a dangerous radiation level. If a human were exposed to this
level of radiation for twenty-five minutes, he would be dead.
The men ran back into the bunker. But inside, behind three-foot concrete
walls, there were also life-threatening radiation levels. The group retreated
to a region far back in the bunker, behind a second concrete-block wall
where the urinals were. Jack Clark called for an emergency evacuation but
was told it was too dangerous to send a helicopter pilot to Enyu Island just
yet. Station 70 had been designed with a ten thousand factor of radiation
shielding. Whatever was going on inside the bunker, outside it was ten
thousand times worse. The firing party would have to wait it out. Eventually
the deadly radiation levels would subside, they were told.
Eighty miles to the east another calamity was unfolding. A Japanese
fishing trawler, called the Lucky Dragon Number Five, had been caught
unawares roughly fifteen miles outside the designated U.S. military
restricted zone. After the Castle Bravo bomb exploded, many of the
Japanese fishermen on the trawler ran out on deck to behold what appeared
to be some kind of mystical apparition, the sun rising in the west.
Awestruck, they stood staring at the nuclear fireball as it grew, until a
chalky material started falling from the sky. This was pulverized coral,
made highly radioactive by the thermonuclear blast. By the time the
fishermen returned to Japan, all of them were suffering from radiation
poisoning. Six months later, the Lucky Dragon’s chief radio operator,
Aikichi Kuboyama, died.
Castle Bravo was a weapon of unprecedented destruction. It was 250
percent more powerful than the force calculated by the scientists who had
engineered it. In time Castle Bravo would become known as the worst
radiological disaster in history. Radioactive contamination became so
consequential and widespread that two days after the explosion, the Navy
evacuated Rongelap, Rongerik, Ailinginae, and Utirik atolls, which lay
between seventy-five and three hundred miles to the east of ground zero.
Many of the islanders living there were powdered in radioactive dust.
In the days that followed, the world’s 2.7 billion inhabitants remained
ignorant of what had happened in the Marshall Islands. The Atomic Energy
Commission ordered a news blackout on the aftereffects of the bomb,
including that no mention be made of the extensive fallout or the evacuation
of the four atolls. Castle Bravo was only the first explosion in a series of
U.S. hydrogen bomb tests, a series that had been obliquely announced to the
public as “weapons tests.” All other information was classified. This was
1954, before the invention of communications satellites. It was still possible
to move ten thousand men and a fleet of warships and airplanes unobserved
to an obscure corner of the earth to conduct a secret hydrogen bomb test.
Americans back home remained in the dark. On March 10, a full nine
days after the United States had exploded what would turn out to be a 15-
megaton hydrogen bomb, causing deadly fallout to circle the earth,
President Dwight Eisenhower took to a podium in the White House press
room. In his weekly presidential news conference to the nation, he had this
to say: “I have only one announcement. It is very inconsequential.
Sometime during the coming week I shall probably go on the air to discuss
the general contents of the tax program.”
But in Japan the Lucky Dragon fishing trawler had returned to port, and
news of the radiation-poisoned fishermen was making international
headlines. The Atomic Energy Commission issued a terse statement saying
that some individuals had been “unexpectedly” subjected to “some radiation
[during a] routine atomic test in the Marshall Islands.” On March 17, at the
weekly news conference from the White House, reporter Merriman Smith
asked the president to shed light on this mysterious, all-powerful weapon.
“Mr. President,” said Smith. “The Joint Congressional Atomic Energy
Commissioner said last night that we now have a hydrogen bomb and can
deliver it anywhere in the world. I wonder if you could discuss that?”
“No, I wouldn’t want to discuss that,” the president said. And he did not.
It was the Cold War, and secrecy reigned.

Behind the scenes, what President Eisenhower was just now learning about
the Castle Bravo bomb was horrifying beyond most people’s
comprehension. The president’s scientific advisors showed him a top secret
map of the fallout pattern made by the Castle Bravo bomb across the
Marshall Islands. The scientists then superimposed that same fallout pattern
onto a map of the east coast of the United States. If ground zero had been
Washington, D.C., instead of Bikini Atoll, every resident of the greater
Washington-Baltimore area would now be dead. Without a Station 70–style
bunker for protection, the entire population living there would have been
killed by 5,000 roentgens of radiation exposure in mere minutes. Even in
Philadelphia, 150 miles away, the majority of inhabitants would have been
exposed to radiation levels that would have killed them within the hour. In
New York City, 225 miles north, half of the population would have died by
nightfall. All the way to the Canadian border, inhabitants would have been
exposed to 100 roentgens or more, their suffering similar to what the
fisherman on the Lucky Dragon had endured.
But President Eisenhower had no intention of relaying this information
to the public. Instead, he said there was nothing to discuss. The physical
fallout map would remain classified for decades, but even the president
could not control the escalating international outrage over the Castle Bravo
bomb. Soon he would be forced to address the issue.

The secret decision to engineer the thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb

began five years earlier when, on August 29, 1949, the Soviets exploded
their first atomic bomb. Suddenly, the United States lost the nuclear
monopoly it had maintained since World War II. The question of how to
respond took on great urgency. Should America reply with powerful
counterforce? Or was restraint the more suitable reply?
One month after the Soviet atomic bomb test, the General Advisory
Committee (GAC) of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—an elite group
of nuclear scientists—convened, in secret, to identify whether or not the
United States should pursue a crash program to build the hydrogen bomb.
The chairman of this committee was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former
scientific director of the Manhattan Project and a man known as the father
of the atomic bomb. In “unanimous opposition,” the scientists agreed that
the United States should not move forward with the hydrogen bomb, and
they stated so in no uncertain terms. The reasons were uncomplicated, they
said. “It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the
destruction of innumerable human lives,” they wrote. “Its use would
involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians.” Tens of
thousands of people had been killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki; a hydrogen bomb would kill millions in a single strike. The
hydrogen bomb was a weapon with a built-in “policy of exterminating
civilian populations,” the GAC members warned.
Two committee members, the physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi,
felt compelled to add a letter, or “annex,” for then President Truman to read.
“It is clear that such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground,”
they wrote. “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this
weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a
danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in
any light.” While there was unanimity among the scientists on the General
Advisory Committee—the official advisory committee on all matters
related to nuclear weapons—the GAC members were not the only nuclear
scientists with power and persuasion in Washington, D.C.
As in any serious scientific race, there was fierce competition going on
behind the scenes. There existed another group of nuclear scientists who
were deeply committed to engineering a hydrogen bomb. Leading this team
were the Hungarian-born Edward Teller and his mentor, the American-born
Ernest O. Lawrence, both former members of the Manhattan Project.
Neither Teller nor Lawrence had been elected to the General Advisory
Committee, nor did they take part in the unanimous decision to advise
President Truman against building the hydrogen bomb.
 Teller and Lawrence had extraordinary power and influence in
Washington, at the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. Mindful
that the GAC had plans to stymie their efforts for a hydrogen bomb, Edward
Teller met personally with the chairman of the congressional committee on
nuclear energy. “We must know more about principles of thermonuclear
devices to make a decision about [the] military implications,” said Teller,
who felt that Oppenheimer was foolishly being guided by moral arguments
in a fight against an atheistic communist enemy. Senator Brien McMahon,
the powerful chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, agreed.
The view of the Oppenheimer group “just makes me sick,” McMahon told
Teller.
Ernest Lawrence met with David E. Lilienthal, the chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission. “If we don’t get this super [i.e., the hydrogen
bomb] first,” Lawrence warned, “we are sunk, the U.S. would surrender
without a struggle.” Lawrence considered the atomic bomb “one of
mankind’s greatest blessings,” and felt that the hydrogen bomb was “a
technical means of taking profit out of war.” He met with Lewis Strauss,
chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee. Lawrence took umbrage at the
idea of anyone’s bringing moral principles into the mix. Their conversation
inspired Strauss to appeal directly to the president. “A government of
atheists is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on ‘moral’
grounds,” Strauss wrote. The “super” must be built. “If we let the Russians
get the super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain,” Brien McMahon
told the president and his national security advisors. “It’s either we make it
or we wait until the Russians drop one on us without warning,” said
National Security Committee member Admiral Sidney Souers.
In January 1950 President Truman authorized a crash program to build
the hydrogen bomb. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy decided that a
second national nuclear weapons laboratory was needed now, in order to
foster competition with Los Alamos. This idea—that rivalry fosters
excellence and is imperative for supremacy—would become a hallmark of
U.S. defense science in the decades ahead. Lawrence was put in charge of
the new lab, with Teller acting as his special scientific advisor. The lab, a
branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, was located in
Livermore, California, about forty miles southeast of the university’s
Berkeley campus.
 Livermore, which opened in the spring of 1952, began with 123
employees. Three of them, all graduate students at the Berkeley Radiation
Laboratory, were Edward Teller protégés. Their names were Herb York,
Harold Brown, and John Foster. Herb York, age thirty, was Livermore’s first
scientific director. Harold Brown, age twenty-four, was put in charge of its
A Division, for hydrogen bomb work. John Foster, age twenty-nine, headed
up the B Division, which worked on smaller and more efficient atomic
weapons. In retrospect, it seems that York, Brown, and Foster were all
remarkably inexperienced young men to be put in charge of developing the
most powerful nuclear weapons in the world. Each scientist would play a
major role in the history of DARPA and leave footprints on U.S. national
security that are ineradicable and absolute.
Nuclear weapons work at Livermore went slowly at first. For all the
ambition and big ideas, Livermore’s first nuclear weapons tests, detonated
at the Nevada Test Site in 1953, were duds. One exploded with such a low
yield—equivalent to just two hundred tons of TNT—that the steel tower on
which it detonated was left standing in the desert, merely bent and
crumpled. A photograph of the misshapen tower was published in
newspapers around the country, accompanied by jokes about Livermore’s
impotence.
“Los Alamos scientists filled the air with horse laughs,” scientific
director Herb York later recalled. And so, despite the Livermore team’s
desire to shepherd the world’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb into
existence, scientists at Los Alamos were instead given scientific authority
over the Castle Bravo bomb. Edward Teller had designed the bomb before
Livermore existed, which is why he is considered the father of the hydrogen
bomb. But Los Alamos was in charge of the test.
In that fateful winter of 1954, there were additional hydrogen bomb tests
planned for Bikini Atoll. The Bravo bomb was only the first of what would
be a six-bomb thermonuclear test program in the Castle series, from March
1 to May 14. Five of the six bombs had been designed and built by Los
Alamos. One, called Koon, was designed at Livermore. Like the new
laboratory’s previous two efforts, Koon was a failure. Instead of exploding
in the megaton range, as was planned, Koon was a 110-kiloton dud. The
new Livermore laboratory project was now at serious risk of being
canceled. What good is a competition if one side cannot seem to compete?
 Teller and his protégé Herb York would not accept failure. Fueled by
humiliation, they planned to outperform the competition at Los Alamos.
Four months after Castle Bravo, the General Advisory Committee met in
Los Alamos for classified discussions about how to move forward with the
hydrogen bomb. The majority of these men were the same ones who had
opposed the creation of the super bomb just four and a half years before.
One person missing was Robert Oppenheimer. He had been stripped of his
security clearance, on the grounds that he was a communist, and banished
from government service for life. Oppenheimer’s forced exile sent a strong
message to defense scientists. There was little room for dissent, and
certainly not for objection on moral grounds. Gone was any further
discussion of ethics, or of the fact that the super bomb was a dangerous
machine. The hydrogen bomb was part of the U.S. military arsenal now. As
commissioners, these scientists had much work to do.
Isidor Rabi replaced Oppenheimer as committee chairman. Rabi now
embraced the super bomb as having created a “complete revolution… in
atomic weapons.” Science had fathered a new generation of technologically
advanced weapons and had paved the way for a whole new “family” of
thermonuclear weapons, Rabi said, “from tactical to multi-megaton
strategic weapons, which would render some stockpile weapons obsolete or
of little utility.”
In an atmosphere of such rapid scientific advancement, the Livermore
laboratory remained in a precarious position. Its first three weapons tests—
code-named Ruth and Ray, at the Nevada Test Site, and Koon, in the
Marshall Islands—had been failures. During the July 1954 meeting in New
Mexico, the General Advisory Committee discussed whether or not creating
the second laboratory had been a mistake. Isidor Rabi called the Livermore
tests “amateurish,” a failure highlighted by the fact that all Livermore had
to do was work on the hydrogen bomb. The lab didn’t even have to share
any of the national security burdens that Los Alamos shouldered, Rabi said,
including responsibility for building the nation’s stockpile. In the summer
of 1954, it looked as if the Livermore laboratory might be closed down.
But Livermore’s chief scientist Herb York, and Edward Teller, acting as
special advisor to Ernest Lawrence, had already crafted a bold response,
and they had come to New Mexico to present their idea to the General
Advisory Committee. On day three of the meeting, York and Teller
presented an idea for a new weapon on Livermore’s behalf. Castle Bravo
had been a 15-megaton bomb. Livermore had drawn plans for two mega-
super bombs, which they had code-named Gnomon and Sundial. This was a
play on words; gnomons and sundials are two of the oldest scientific
devices known to man, used in the ancient world to measure shadows cast
by the sun. Livermore’s mega-super bombs were each designed to have a
10,000-megaton yield, York and Teller said. This weapon was capable of
destroying an entire continent in a single strike.
The idea was met with laughter. Scientists on the General Advisory
Committee were appalled. In the only surviving record of the meeting, one
committee member, Dr. James Whitman, expresses shock and says that a
10,000-megaton bomb would “contaminate the earth.” Teller defended his
idea, boasting that Lawrence had already approached the Air Force, and the
Air Force was interested. Rabi called the idea “a publicity stunt,” and plans
for a 10,000-megaton bomb were shelved. But Livermore was allowed to
keep its doors open after all.
Decades later, Herb York explained why he and Edward Teller had felt it
necessary to design a 10,000-megaton bomb when the United States had,
only months earlier, achieved supremacy over the Soviets with the 15-
megaton Castle Bravo bomb. The reason, York said, was that in order to
maintain supremacy, American scientists must always take new and greater
risks. “The United States cannot maintain its qualitative edge without
having an aggressive R&D [research and development] establishment that
pushes against the technological frontiers without waiting to be asked,”
York said, “and that in turn creates a faster-paced arms race. That is the
inevitable result of our continuing quest for a qualitative edge to offset the
other side’s quantitative advantage.”
For Herb York, the way for America to maintain its position as the most
militarily powerful country in the world was through the forward march of
science. To get the most out of an American scientist was to get him to
compete against equally brilliant men. That was what made America great,
York said. This was the American way of war. And this was exactly the
kind of vision the Department of Defense required of its scientists as it
struggled for survival against the Soviet communists. The age of
thermonuclear weapons had arrived. Both sides were building vast arsenals
at a feverish pace. There was no turning back. The only place to go was
ahead.
It was time to push against technological frontiers.
 CHAPTER TWO

War Games and Computing Machines

On the west coast of California, in the sunny Santa Monica sunshine, the
defense scientists at RAND Corporation played war games during
lunchtime. RAND, an acronym for “research and development,” was the
Pentagon’s first postwar think tank, the brains behind U.S. Air Force brawn.
By day, during the 1950s, analysts inside RAND’s offices and conference
rooms churned out reports, mostly about nuclear weapons. Come lunchtime
they moved outdoors, spreading maps of the world across tabletops, taking
game pieces from boxes and playing Kriegspiel, a chess variant once
favored by the powerful German military.
Competition was valued and encouraged at RAND, with scientists and
analysts always working to outdo one another. Lunchtime war games
included at least one person in the role of umpire, which usually prevented
competitions from getting out of hand. Still, tempers flared, and sometimes
game pieces scattered. Other times there was calculated calm. Lunch could
last for hours, especially if John von Neumann was in town.
In the 1950s, von Neumann was the superstar defense scientist. No one
could compete with his brain. At the Pentagon, the highest-ranking
members of the U.S. armed services, the secretary of defense and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, all saw von Neumann as an infallible authority. “If anyone
during that crucial period in the early and middle-fifties can be said to have
enjoyed more ‘credibility’ in national defense circles than all the others,
that person was surely Johnny,” said Herb York, von Neumann’s close
friend.
Born in 1903 to a well-to-do Hungarian Jewish family, John von
Neumann had been a remarkable child prodigy. In the first grade he was
solving complex mathematical problems. By age eight he had mastered
calculus, though his talents were not limited to math. By the time von
Neumann graduated from high school, he spoke seven languages. He could
memorize hundreds of pages of text, including long numbers, after a single
read-through. “Keeping up with him was impossible,” remarked the
mathematician Israel Halperin. “The feeling was you were on a tricycle
chasing a racing car.”
“Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of,” said his childhood
teacher, George Pólya, also a famous mathematician. “If in the course of a
lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he’d come to me at
the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of
paper.”
By all accounts, von Neumann was gentle and kind, beloved for his
warm personality, his courtesy, and his charm. “He was pleasant and plump,
smiled easily and often, enjoyed parties and other social events,” recalled
Herb York. He loved to drink, play loud music, attend parties, and collect
toys. He always wore a three-piece banker’s suit with a watch chain
stretched across his plump belly. There exists a photograph of von
Neumann traveling down into the Grand Canyon on a donkey’s back,
outfitted in the legendary three-piece suit. It is said that the only things von
Neumann carried in his pants pockets were unsolvable Chinese puzzles and
top secret security clearances, of which he had many.
To his core, von Neumann believed that man was violent, belligerent,
and deceptive, and that he was inexorably prone to fighting wars. “I think
the USA-USSR conflict will very probably lead to an armed ‘total’ collision
and that a maximum rate of armament is therefore imperative,” von
Neumann wrote to Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission,
three years before the Castle Bravo bomb exploded—a weapon that von
Neumann helped engineer.
Only in rare private moments would “the deeply cynical and pessimistic
core of his being” emerge, remarks his daughter Marina von Neumann
Whitman, a former economic advisor to President Nixon. “I was frequently
confused when he shifted, without warning…. [O]ne minute he would have
me laughing at his latest courageous pun and the next he would be telling
me, quite seriously, why all-out atomic war was almost certainly
unavoidable.” Did war stain him? During World War II, when his only
daughter was a little girl, John von Neumann helped decide which Japanese
civilian populations would be targeted for atomic bombing. But far more
revealing is that it was von Neumann who performed the precise
calculations that determined at what altitude over Hiroshima and Nagasaki
the atomic bombs had to explode in order to achieve the maximum kill rate
of civilians on the ground. He determined the height to be 1,800 feet.
At the RAND Corporation, von Neumann served as a part-time
consultant. He was hired by John Davis Williams, the eccentric director of
RAND’s Mathematics Division, on unusual terms: Von Neumann was to
write down his thoughts each morning while shaving, and for those ideas he
would be paid $200 a month—the average salary of a full-time RAND
analyst at the time. Von Neumann lived and spent most of his time working
in New Jersey, where he had served as a faculty member at the Princeton
Institute for Advanced Study since the early 1930s, alongside Albert
Einstein.
To the RAND scientists playing lunchtime war games, less important
than beating von Neumann at Kriegspiel was watching how his mind
analyzed game play. “If a mentally superhuman race ever develops, its
members will resemble Johnny von Neumann,” Edward Teller once said.
“If you enjoy thinking, your brain develops. And that is what von Neumann
did. He enjoyed the functioning of his brain.”
John von Neumann was obsessed with what he called parlor games, and
his first fascination was with poker. There was strategy involved, yes, but
far more important was that the game of poker was predicated on deception:
to play and to win, a man had to be willing to deceive his opponent. To
make one’s opponent think something false was something true. Second-
guessing was equally imperative to a winning strategy. A poker player
needs to predict what his opponent thinks he might do.
In 1926, when von Neumann was twenty-three years old, he wrote a
paper called “Theory of Parlor Games.” The paper, which examined game
playing from a mathematical point of view, contained a soon-to-be famous
proof, called the minimax theorem. Von Neumann wrote that when two
players are involved in a zero-sum game—a game in which one player’s
losses equal the other player’s gains—each player will work to minimize
his own maximum losses while at the same time working to maximize his
minimum gains. During the war, von Neumann collaborated with fellow
Princeton mathematician Oskar Morgenstern to explore this idea further. In
1944 the two men co-authored a 673-page book on the subject, Theory of
Games and Economic Behavior. The book was considered so
groundbreaking that the New York Times carried a page one story about its
contents the day it was published. But von Neumann and Morgenstern’s
book did more than just revolutionize economic theory. It placed game
theory on the world stage, and after the war it caught the attention of the
Pentagon.
By the 1950s, von Neumann’s minimax theorem was legendary at
RAND, and to engage von Neumann in a discussion about game theory was
like drinking from the Holy Grail. It became a popular pastime at RAND to
try to present to von Neumann a conundrum he could not solve. In the
1950s, two RAND analysts, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher, came up
with an enigma they believed was unsolvable, and they presented it to the
great John von Neumann. Flood and Dresher called their quandary the
Prisoner’s Dilemma. It was based on a centuries-old dilemma tale. A
contemporary rendition of the Prisoner’s Dilemma involves two criminal
suspects faced with either prison time or a plea deal.
The men, both members of a criminal gang, are believed to have
participated in the same crime. They are arrested and put in different cells.
Separated, the two men have no way of communicating with each other, so
they can’t learn what the other man is being offered by way of a plea deal.
The police tell each man they don’t have enough evidence to convict either
of them individually on the criminal charges they were brought in for. But
the police do have enough evidence to convict each man on a lesser charge,
parole violation, which carries a prison sentence of one year. The police
offer each man, separately, a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against the
other man, he will go free and the partner will do ten years’ prison time.
There is a catch. Both men are being offered the same deal. If both men
take the plea deal and testify against the other, the prison sentence will be
reduced to five years. If both men refuse the deal, they will each be given
only one year in jail for parole violation—clearly the best way to minimize
maximum losses and maximize minimum gains. But the deal is on the table
for only a finite amount of time, the police say.
Von Neumann could not “solve” the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It is an
unsolvable paradox. It does not fit the minimax theorem. There is no
answer; the outcome of the dilemma game differs from player to player.
Dresher and Flood posed the Prisoner’s Dilemma to dozens of RAND
colleagues and also to other test subjects outside RAND. While no one
could “solve” the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the RAND analysts learned
something unexpected from the results. The outcome of the Prisoner’s
Dilemma seemed to depend on the human nature of the individual game
players involved—whether the player was guided by trust or distrust.
Dresher and Flood discovered the participants’ responses also revealed their
philosophical construct, which generally correlated to a political
disposition. In interviewing RAND analysts, almost all of whom were
political conservatives, Dresher and Flood discovered that the majority
chose to testify against their criminal partner. They did not trust that partner
to follow the concept of self-preservation, gamble against his own best
interests, and refuse to talk. Five years in prison was better than ten, the
RAND analysts almost universally responded. By contrast, Dresher and
Flood found that the minority of game players who refused to testify against
their criminal partner were almost always of the liberal persuasion. These
individuals were willing to put themselves at risk in order to get the best
possible outcome for both themselves and a colleague—just a single year’s
jail time.
Dresher and Flood saw that the paradox of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
could be applied to national security decisions. Take the case of Robert
Oppenheimer, for example, a liberal. As chairman of the General Advisory
Committee, Oppenheimer had appealed to Secretary of State Dean Acheson
to try to persuade President Truman not to go forward with the hydrogen
bomb. To show restraint, Oppenheimer said, would send a clear message to
Stalin that America was offering “limitations on the totality of war and thus
eliminating the fear and raising the hope of mankind.” Acheson, a
conservative, saw the situation very differently. “How can you persuade a
paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example?’” he asked.
Von Neumann became interested in the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a means
for examining strategic possibilities in the nuclear arms race. The Prisoner’s
Dilemma was a non–zero sum game, meaning one person’s wins were not
equal to another person’s gains. From von Neumann’s perspective, even
though two rational people were involved—or, in the case of national
security, two superpower nations—they were far less likely to cooperate to
gain the best deal, and far more likely to take their chances on a better deal
for themselves. The long-term implications for applying the Prisoner’s
Dilemma to the nuclear arms race were profound, suggesting that it would
forever be a game of one-upmanship.

In addition to game theory and nuclear strategy, the RAND Corporation

was interested in computer research, a rare and expensive field of study in
the 1950s. The world’s leading expert in computers was John von
Neumann. While no one person can accurately claim credit for the
invention of the computer, von Neumann is often seen as one of the fathers
of modern computers, given the critical role he played in their early
development. His work on computing machines goes back to World War II,
a time when “computer” was the name for a person who performed
numerical calculations as part of a job.
During the war, at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland,
scores of human computers worked around the clock on trajectory tables,
trying to determine more accurate timing and firing methods for various
battlefield weapons. Bombs and artillery shells were being fired at targets
with ever-increasing speed, and the human computers at Aberdeen simply
could not keep up with the trajectory tables. The work was overwhelming.
Von Neumann, one of the nation’s leading experts on ballistics at the time
and a regular presence at Aberdeen, got to talking with one of the proving
ground’s best “computers,” Colonel Herman Goldstine, about this very
problem. Goldstine was an Army engineer and former mathematics
professor, and still he found computing to be grueling work. Goldstine
explained to von Neumann that on average, each trajectory table he worked
on contained approximately three thousand entries, all of which had to be
multiplied. Performed with paper and pencil, each set of three thousand
calculations took a man like Goldstine roughly twelve hours to complete
and another twelve hours to verify. The inevitability of human error was
what slowed things down.
Von Neumann told Colonel Goldstine that he believed a machine would
one day prove to be a better computer than a human. If so, von Neumann
said, this could profoundly impact the speed with which the Army could
perform its ballistics calculations. As it so happened, Colonel Goldstine was
cleared for a top secret Army program that involved exactly the kind of
machine von Neumann was theorizing about. Goldstine arranged to have
von Neumann granted clearance, and the two men set off for the University
of Pennsylvania. There, inside a locked room at the Moore School,
engineers were working on a classified Army-funded computing machine—
the first of its kind. It was called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer, or ENIAC.
ENIAC was huge and cumbersome: one hundred feet long, ten feet high,
and three feet deep. It had 17,468 vacuum tubes and weighed sixty
thousand pounds. Von Neumann was fascinated. ENIAC was “the first
complete automatic, all-purpose digital electronic computer” in the world,
von Neumann declared. He was certain ENIAC would spawn a revolution,
and that, indeed, computers would no longer be men but machines.
Von Neumann began developing ideas for creating an electronic
computer of his own. Borrowing ideas from the ENIAC construct, and with
help from Colonel Goldstine, he drew up plans for a second classified
electronic computer, called the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic
Computer, or EDVAC. Von Neumann saw great promise in a redesign of the
ENIAC computer’s memory. He believed there was a way to turn the
computer into an “electronic brain” capable of storing not just data and
instructions, as was the case with ENIAC, but additional information that
would allow the computer to perform a myriad of computational functions
on its own. This was called a stored-program computer, and it “broke the
distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things,”
writes von Neumann’s biographer George Dyson, adding, “Our universe
would never be the same.” These “instructions” that von Neumann
imagined were the prototype of what the world now knows as software.
Von Neumann believed that this computer could theoretically speed up
atomic bomb calculations being performed by his fellow Manhattan Project
scientists at Los Alamos, in New Mexico. He and the team at the Moore
School proposed that the Army build a second machine, the one he called
EDVAC. But the atomic bomb was completed and successfully tested
before EDVAC was finished, and after the war, EDVAC was orphaned.
Von Neumann still wanted to build his own computer from scratch. He
secured funding from the Atomic Energy Commission to do so, and in
November 1945, John von Neumann began building an entirely new
computer in the basement of Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton. Colonel Goldstine arrived to assist him in the winter of 1946,
and with help from a small staff of engineers, von Neumann first
constructed a machine shop and a laboratory for testing computer
components. Officially the project was called the Electronic Computing
Instrument Computer; von Neumann preferred to call the machine the
Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer, or MANIAC.
MANIAC was smaller and much more advanced than ENIAC, which
weighed thirty tons. ENIAC was rife with limitations; gargantuan and
cumbersome, it sucked power, overheated, and constantly needed to be
rewired whenever a problem came along. ENIAC technicians spent days
unplugging tangled cables in order to find a solution for a numerical
problem that took only minutes to compute. MANIAC was compact and
efficient, a single six-foot-high, eight-foot-long machine that weighed only
a thousand pounds. But the most significant difference between ENIAC and
MANIAC was that von Neumann designed his computer to be controlled by
its own instructions. These were housed inside the machine, like a brain
inside a human being.
Indeed, von Neumann had consciously modeled MANIAC after the
human brain. “I propose to store everything that has to be remembered by
the machine, in these memory organs,” von Neumann wrote, including “the
coded, logical instructions which define the problem and control the
functioning of the machine.” In this way, MANIAC became the world’s first
modern stored-program computer. Von Neumann’s friend and colleague
Edward Teller saw great promise in the computer and used MANIAC to
perform calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
After two and a half years of work, the team at Princeton tested
MANIAC against von Neumann’s own brain. Initially, von Neumann was
able to compute numbers in his head faster than the machine. But as his
assistants entered more and more complicated computational requests, von
Neumann finally did what human beings do: he erred. The computer did
not. It was a revelatory moment in the history of defense science. A
machine had just outperformed a brain the Pentagon relied on, one of the
greatest minds in the world.
The Pentagon’s strategy for nuclear deterrence in the 1950s was based on a
notion called mutual assured destruction, or MAD. This was the proposition
that neither the Soviets nor the Americans would be willing to launch a
nuclear attack against the other because that action would ensure a
reciprocal action and ultimately guarantee both sides’ demise. At RAND,
analysts began applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy to a nuclear
launch, keeping in mind that the driving principle of the dilemma was
distrust. This led a RAND analyst named Albert Wohlstetter to start poking
holes in the notion that MAD offered security. The way Wohlstetter saw it,
MAD most definitely did not. He argued that if one side figured out a way
to decapitate the other in a so-called “first strike,” it might be tempted to
launch an unprovoked attack to ensure its superiority. The only solution,
said Wohlstetter, was to develop a new nuclear strategy whereby the United
States had more nuclear weapons in more hardened missile silos secreted
around the American countryside than the Soviets could decapitate in a
preemptive strike. Wohlstetter’s famous theory became known as “second
strike.” U.S. policy regarding second strike deterrence took on the acronym
NUTS, for nuclear utilization target selection.
President Eisenhower began to see the madness of it all. The year after
Castle Bravo, the Soviets successfully tested their own deliverable
hydrogen bomb. If something wasn’t done to stop it, the arms race would
only continue to escalate. Speaking to his cabinet, Eisenhower wondered if
it was possible to put an end to nuclear weapons tests. He launched his
administration’s first investigation into the possibility of stopping nuclear
science in its tracks. His vision was short-lived. After a month of study and
discussion, the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA,
and the Department of Defense were all unanimous in their opposition to
ending nuclear tests. Atmospheric nuclear weapons tests must continue,
they all said. The safety and security of the country depended on more
nuclear weapons and more nuclear weapons tests. The president’s advisors
instead encouraged him to focus his attention on strengthening a national
effort to protect civilians in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, an
unpopular program called civil defense. This job fell to the Federal Civil
Defense Administration, a three-year-old agency with headquarters in
Washington, D.C.
The plan for civil defense in the mid-1950s was to have people prepare
to live underground for a period of time after a nuclear attack. An effort to
build a national network of underground bunkers had been moving forward
in fits and starts. The president’s advisors told him that his endorsement
would boost morale. But the very idea of promoting civil defense put
Eisenhower in an intractable bind. Ever since he had been shown the fallout
map from the Castle Bravo bomb, Eisenhower knew how implausible a
civil defense program was—how many tens of millions of Americans were
destined to die in the first few hours of a nuclear attack. The idea that there
was safety to be found in a civilian underground bunker program was
apocryphal. One needed to look no further than what had happened to the
men in the Station 70 bunker. Station 70 was a windowless bunker carefully
constructed of three-foot-thick concrete walls with steel doors, buried under
ten feet of dirt and sand. It was surrounded by a moat and had a secondary
blast buttress wall. And even with a 10,000 factor of shielding, the radiation
nearly killed the men inside; they barely made it off Enyu alive. After
taking cover in the bunker’s urinal for eleven hours, the men were
ultimately evacuated from the death zone by two Army helicopters in a
carefully orchestrated military operation. The helicopter pilots were part of
a ten-thousand–man task force, with unlimited access to state-of-the-art
rescue and communication equipment. The rescue teams had fewer than one
dozen rescue operations to perform, the majority of which had been
rehearsed. Castle Bravo was a highly organized scientific test. In a real
nuclear attack, there would be carnage and mayhem. Each person would be
on his or her own.
To be caught outside, en route to a civil defense shelter, even forty miles
away from ground zero, would be life threatening. The bomb blast and
shock waves would rupture lungs, shred eardrums, and cause organs to
rupture and bleed. Debris—uprooted trees, sheets of metal, broken glass,
electrical wires, wood, rocks, pipes, poles—everything would be ripped
apart and hurled through the air at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour. How,
in good conscience, could the president urge the public to support a
program he knew was more than likely going to kill so many of them?
Paradoxically, in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, there was a fully
formed plan in place to keep the president and his cabinet alive. An
executive branch version of the Station 70 bunker had recently been
completed six miles north of Camp David, just over the Pennsylvania state
line. This underground command center, called the Raven Rock Mountain
Complex, was buried inside a mountain of granite, giving the president
protection equivalent to that of walls a thousand feet thick. The Raven Rock
complex, also called Site R, had been designed to withstand a direct hit
from a 15-megaton bomb. The idea of an underground presidential bunker
was first conceived by U.S. Army military intelligence (G-2) during
postwar examination of the underground bunker complexes of the Third
Reich. The survival of so many of the Nazi high command in Berlin was
predicated on the underground engineering skills of a few top Nazi
scientists, including Franz Xaver Dorsch, Walter Schieber, and Georg
Rickhey, all three of whom were hired by the U.S. Army to work on secret
U.S. underground engineering projects after the war, as part of Operation
Paperclip.
Plans for Raven Rock were first drawn up in 1948, including some by
Rickhey. Work began shortly after the Russians detonated their own atomic
bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, in August 1949, and by 1950,
construction crews with top secret clearances were working around the
clock to build the first underground presidential bunker and command post.
Site R was a three-story complex with living quarters for the president and
his advisors, a hospital, chapel, barbershop, library, and water reservoir. By
the time the bunker was finished, in 1954, the costs had reached $1 billion
(roughly $9 billion in 2015).
In the event of a nuclear strike, the president would be helicoptered from
the White House lawn to the landing pad at Raven Rock, a trip that would
take roughly thirty-five minutes. But the prospect of retreating underground
in the event of a nuclear strike made President Eisenhower despondent. To
his cabinet he expressed his view of what governance would be like after a
nuclear attack: “Government which goes on with some kind of continuity
will be like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind.”
While the president lived with his conundrum, the civil defense program
grew. The details of the Castle Bravo test remained classified, as did the
existence of the Raven Rock command center, leaving the public in the dark
as to the implausibility of civil defense. Nuclear tests continued unabated,
in Nevada and in the Marshall Islands. But the press attention created by the
Castle Bravo fallout debate began to generate strong negative responses to
the viability of civil defense.
 In February 1955 the Senate Armed Services Committee opened a
federal investigation into what civil defense really meant for the American
people. The investigating committee was headed by a Tennessee Democrat,
Senator Estes Kefauver, known for his crusades against organized crime
and antitrust violations. The Senate sessions would become known as the
Kefauver hearings, and in the course of them, shocking new information
came to light.
Civil defense had a two-pronged focus: on those who would stay in the
city and seek shelter, and on those who would try to leave. In the event of a
nuclear attack, which would likely target a big city, some people living in
urban centers were advised to hurry to air-raid-type shelters that had been
built underground. As for those who could leave, the Federal Civil Defense
Administration said that they should evacuate the cities, promising that this
was a better alternative. During the hearings, the senators had questions. In
the mid-1950s, most land outside big cities was little more than open
countryside. Where were citizens supposed to evacuate to? And what were
they supposed to eat?
The director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, Frederick
“Val” Peterson, took the stand. The former Nebraska governor was under
oath. He revealed that the plan of the administration was to dig roadside
trenches along public highways leading out of all the big cities across the
nation. The trenches were to be three feet deep and two feet wide. When the
bombs hit the cities, Peterson said, people who had already made it out
were to stop driving, abandon their automobiles, lie down in the trenches,
and cover themselves with dirt. Senator Kefauver, learning this along with
the public for the first time, was dumbfounded. The government could use
science and technology to create power as great as that generated by the
sun, but when it came to civil defense, this was the best they could come up
with? What about “food, water [and] sanitation in [these] trenches?” the
incredulous Kefauver asked. Peterson fumbled for an answer. “Obviously,
in these trenches, if they are built on an emergency basis, there would be no
provisions for sanitation,” he admitted. But there was an alternative plan.
Instead of the dirt trenches, another idea being discussed involved using
concrete pipes, four feet in diameter, to be laid down alongside the
highways. When the bombs hit the cities, Peterson said, people who had
already made it out would stop driving, abandon their automobiles, and
crawl into the pipes. Sometime thereafter, Peterson explained, federal
emergency crews would come along and bury the pipes with earth.
Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a Republican from Massachusetts,
expressed astonishment. He told Peterson that he found it impossible to
imagine millions of “shell-shocked evacuees waiting out a nuclear war
inside concrete pipes,” without fresh air, water, sanitation, food, or medical
care. And for who knew how long. Senator Saltonstall said he would rather
lie down in a dirt ditch “than get into a concrete pipe a mile long, with no
exit.” Saltonstall shared his vision of being crushed in the mayhem by
fellow American citizens fighting to stay alive.
Next came the issue of food. Committee members wanted to know how
the government was going to help feed evacuees after a nuclear exchange.
Peterson replied that the United States would open food kitchens, but there
would be little food to be served. “We can’t eat canned foods,” he
explained, because radiation could penetrate tin cans. “We won’t eat
refrigerated foods,” he conceded, because most electricity would be out.
The truth was not pretty, he acknowledged, but was “stark, elemental,
brutal, filthy and miserable,” he said under oath. “We will eat gruel made of
wheat cooked as it comes out of the fields and corn parched and animals
slaughtered as we catch them before radioactivity destroys them.” The
committee told Peterson his agency’s plans for evacuation were inadequate.
In a matter of hours, the notion of civil defense became the subject of
national ridicule. And yet the nuclear tests continued unabated.
Over the next two years, the United States exploded eighteen nuclear
weapons; the Soviet Union exploded twenty-five. Nuclear spending was at
an all-time high, and design originality was key. The Pentagon ordered
hundreds of high-yield hydrogen bomb warheads, like the one detonated
during Castle Bravo, but also smaller, lighter-weight tactical atomic bombs.
Herb York flew to Washington, D.C., with a full-scale mockup of
Livermore’s newest design, the forty-eight-pound Davy Crockett nuclear
weapon, in his carry-on bag. The Davy Crockett had the same yield as the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but advances in science meant that the
powerful weapon was small enough to be handheld. Thanks to ambition and
ingenuity, the Livermore laboratory had begun to pull ahead from behind.
The computer designed by John von Neumann played an important role in
allowing Livermore scientists to model new nuclear weapons designs
before building them.

In the summer of 1955, John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer. He
had slipped and fallen, and when doctors examined him, they discovered
that he had an advanced, metastasizing cancerous tumor in his collarbone.
By November his spine was affected, and in January 1956 von Neumann
was confined to a wheelchair. In March he entered a guarded room at Walter
Reed Hospital, the U.S. Army’s flagship medical center, outside
Washington, D.C. John von Neumann, at the age of fifty-four, racked with
pain and riddled with terror, was dying of a cancer he most likely developed
because of a speck of plutonium he inhaled at Los Alamos during the war.
Two armed military guards never left his side.
For a while, von Neumann’s mind remained sharp, but as the end grew
near, his mental faculties began to degrade. Beside him at his bed, von
Neumann’s brother Michael read aloud from Goethe’s tragic play Faust.
Michael would read a page and then pause. Lying on the hospital bed, eyes
closed, faculties failing, for some time von Neumann could still pick up in
the text precisely where his brother left off. But soon, even John von
Neumann’s indomitable memory would fail. Friends said the mental decline
was excruciating for him to endure. An atheist all his life, von Neumann
used to joke about people who believed in God. In a limerick for his wife,
Klara, he’d once written, “There was a young man who said, Run! / The
end of the world had begun! / The one I fear most / Is that damn Holy
Ghost. / I can handle the Father and Son.” Now von Neumann sought God
and he called upon the services of a Roman Catholic priest.
But death grew near. In von Neumann’s final, frightened last days, even
the priest could not offer a reprieve. Weeks before von Neumann died, Herb
York went to Walter Reed hospital to pay his final respects. “Johnny was in
a bed with high, criblike sides, intended to keep him from falling out or
otherwise getting out on his own,” York recalled. “I tried to start a
conversation about some technical topic I thought would interest and divert
him, but he would say no more than a simple hello.” Von Neumann’s brain
was failing him. Cancer was robbing him of the thing he valued most, his
own mind. Soon he would not remember. In weeks there would be nothing
left of him. John von Neumann died on February 8, 1957.
 He left behind a single unfinished manuscript that he had been working
on in his final months of life. It was called “The Computer and the Brain.”
A copy was made for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory library, where it
remains today. In this paper, von Neumann draws a comparison between the
computer and the human nervous system. He theorizes that one day the
computer will be able to outperform the human nervous system by infinite
orders of magnitude. He calls this advanced computer an “artificial
automaton that has been constructed for human use.” John von Neumann
believed computers would one day be able to think.
 CHAPTER THREE

Vast Weapons Systems of the Future

It was October 4, 1957, 6:00 p.m. Cocktail hour at the Officers Club at the
Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, or “Rocket City,
USA.” Neil H. McElroy, a corporate executive soon to be confirmed as
secretary of defense, had just arrived in a military jet with an entourage of
defense officials from the Pentagon. Inside the Officers Club, drinks flowed
freely. Appetizers were passed among the men. McElroy stood chatting
with Wernher von Braun, the famous German rocket scientist who now
served as director of development operations at Huntsville, when a press
officer named Gordon Harris rushed into the room and interrupted the party
with an extraordinary announcement.
“The Russians have put up a successful satellite!” Harris shouted.
The room fell silent. For several moments only the background music
and the tinkling of ice cubes could be heard.
“It’s broadcasting signals on a common frequency,” Harris said. “At
least one of our local ‘hams’ has been listening to it.” A barrage of
questions followed.
It did not take long for news of Sputnik to become official. The Soviet
news agency, TASS, released a statement providing technical information
and specifics about Iskusstvennyy Sputnik Zemli, or “artificial satellite of the
earth.” The Soviets had beaten the Americans into space. Not since Pearl
Harbor had the Pentagon been caught by a surprise of such consequence.
The nation slipped into a panic over what was seen as superior Soviet
scientific prowess. Eisenhower’s attempts to minimize the significance of
Sputnik had a reverse effect, with many Americans accusing the president
of trying to conceal U.S. military weakness. Sputnik weighed only 184
pounds, but it had been launched into space by a Soviet ICBM. Soon the
Soviet ICBM would be able to carry a much heavier payload—such as a
nuclear bomb—halfway across the world to any target in the United States.
The situation was made worse when, on December 20, 1957, someone
leaked a top secret analysis of the Soviet threat, called the Gaither Report,
to the Washington Post. The report “portrays a United States in the gravest
danger in its history,” wrote the Post. “It shows an America exposed to an
almost immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviet Union.” If Sputnik
had caused mild panic, the Gaither Report produced national hysteria.
But the Gaither Report had its own controversial backstory, one that
would remain classified for decades. In the spring of 1957, seven months
before Sputnik was launched, President Eisenhower asked his National
Security advisors to put together a team that could answer one question:
how to protect the American people in an all-out nuclear war. A RAND
Corporation co-founder, the venture capitalist H. Rowan Gaither, was
chosen to chair the new presidential research committee. Making up the
body of the panel were officials from NORAD (North American Air
Defense Command), the Strategic Air Command, the office of the secretary
of defense, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the Weapons Systems
Engineering Group, and the CIA. There were representatives from the
defense contracting industry, including Livermore, Sandia, Raytheon,
Boeing, Lockheed, Hughes, and RAND. The corporate advisors on the
panel were from Shell Oil, IBM, Bell Telephone, New York Life Insurance,
and Chase Manhattan Bank.
In the resulting top secret Gaither Report, officially titled “Deterrence
and Survival in the Nuclear Age,” the defense contractors, industrialists,
and defense scientists concluded that there was no way to protect U.S.
citizens in the event of a nuclear war. Instead, the panel advised the
president to focus on building up the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons. The
most menacing threat came from the Soviet ICBMs, they said. The
individuals who calculated the exactitude of the Soviet missile threat were
Herb York, scientific director at the Livermore laboratory, and Jerome
Wiesner, a presidential science advisor and MIT engineering professor.
No figure mattered more. The Soviets had just successfully launched
their first long-range missile from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in what is
now Kazakhstan, all the way across Siberia—a distance of three thousand
miles. To determine how many ICBMs the USSR could produce in the
immediate future, York and Wiesner set up shop inside the Executive Office
Building, next door to the White House, in the summer of 1957 and got to
work doing calculations.
“The issue was both real and hot,” York later recalled. “We took the best
data there were on the Soviet rocket development program, combined them
with what we could learn about the availability of factory floor space [in
Russia] needed for such an enterprise, and concluded that they [the Soviets]
would produce thousands [of ICBMs] in the next few years.”
One Castle Bravo–size bomb dropped on Washington, D.C., would take
out the Eastern Seaboard in a single strike. York and Wiesner’s ICBM
analysis indicated that the Soviets wanted to be able to strike America a
thousandfold. The information was shocking and alarming. If the Soviets
were trying to produce a thousand ICBMs in only a few years, clearly there
was only one rational conclusion to draw. The Soviet Union was preparing
for total nuclear war.
It would take years to learn that the number York and Wiesner submitted
to the Gaither Report was nothing more than a wild guess. In the summer of
1957 the Soviets had a total of four ICBMs built, and in the “next few
years” they would build roughly one hundred more. This was a far cry from
the thousands of missiles York and Wiesner said the Soviets would be
producing in the next few years.
“The estimate was quite wrong,” York conceded thirty years later. In
defense of his error, York said, “The problem was simple enough. I knew
only a little about the Soviet missile development program and nothing
about the Soviet industry. In making this estimate, I was thus combing two
dubious analytical procedures: worst-case analysis and mirror imaging.”
How could such an egregious error have happened, York was asked? “My
alibi is that I was new to the subject and that, like the rest of the panel, I
was an easy victim of the extreme degree of secrecy that the Russians have
always used to conceal what they are doing.” York also pointed out that no
one on the Gaither Report panel questioned his and Wiesner’s math. “I
don’t remember [the others] arguing with our views,” York said.
When President Eisenhower received his copy of the Gaither Report on
November 7, 1957, the timing could not have been worse. The Sputnik
launch had taken place a mere month before. Eisenhower disagreed with the
findings of the report. He had much better intelligence, from the CIA, but it
was highly classified and no one but a small group of individuals knew
about it. CIA pilot Hervey Stockman had flown a classified mission over the
Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane the year before. Stockman returned from
his dangerous mission with thousands of photographs of Soviet Russia, the
first ever (this was before the Corona satellite program), showing that the
Russians were not preparing for total war. There was only one person on the
Gaither panel who had knowledge of this information, and that was CIA
deputy director Richard Bissell. It was Bissell who was in charge of the U-2
program, which he ran out of a secret base called Area 51, in Nevada. No
one else on the Gaither panel had a need to know about the top secret U-2
program and the multiple missions it had been flying over the Soviet Union.
All the Gaither panel had to go by was what York and Wiesner told them, in
error, about Soviet ICBMs.
After President Eisenhower rejected most of the findings of the panel,
someone leaked the top secret report to the press. It was York and Wiesner’s
findings about the missile threat that the public focused on, which was what
caused the Sputnik panic to escalate into hysteria. Eisenhower responded by
creating the President’s Science Advisory Committee to advise him on what
to do next. Among those chosen was Herb York, the youngest member of
the group. It remains a mystery whether or not the president knew that York
was responsible for the most consequential error in the Gaither Report.
York soon left Livermore for Washington, D.C. He would remain there for
the rest of the Eisenhower presidency.
With the narrative of Soviet aggression spinning out of control, the
president authorized Secretary of Defense McElroy to proceed with a bold
new plan. McElroy was a master of public relations. A thirty-two-year
veteran of Procter & Gamble, McElroy is considered the father of brand
management. He began as a door-to-door soap salesman and worked his
way up through management. In the mid-1950s, P&G had four major soap
brands—Ivory, Joy, Tide, and Oxydol. Sales were lagging until McElroy
came up with the concept of promoting competition among in-house brands
and targeting specific audiences to advertise to. It was McElroy’s idea to
run soap ads on daytime television, when many American housewives
watched TV. By 1957, P&G soap sales had risen to $1 billion a year, and
McElroy would be credited with inventing the concept of the soap opera.
“Soap operas sell lots of soap,” he famously said. Now McElroy was the
U.S. secretary of defense. He took office with a clear vision. “I conceive the
role of the Secretary of Defense to be that of captain of President
Eisenhower’s defense team,” he said. His first job as captain was to counter
the threat of any future Soviet scientific surprise.
On November 20, 1957, just five weeks after assuming office, Secretary
McElroy went to Capitol Hill with a bold idea. He proposed the creation of
a new agency inside the Pentagon, called the Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or ARPA. This agency would be in charge of the nation’s most
technologically advanced military projects being researched and developed
for national defense, including everything that would be flown in outer
space.
“What we have in mind for that agency,” McElroy told lawmakers, was
an entity that would handle “all satellite and space research and
development projects” but also have “a function that extends beyond the
immediate foreseeable weapons systems of the current or near future.”
McElroy was looking far ahead. America needed an agency that could
visualize the nation’s needs before those needs yet existed, he said. An
agency that could research and develop “the vast weapons systems of the
future.”
Congress liked the idea, and McElroy was encouraged to proceed. The
military services, however, were adamantly opposed. The Army, Air Force,
and Navy were unwilling to give up control of the research and
development that was going on inside their individual services, most
notably in the vast new frontier that was space. McElroy called the most
senior military leaders into his office in the E-Ring of the Pentagon to
discuss how best to handle “the new dimension of outer space.”
In separate meetings, Army, Air Force, and Navy commanders each
insisted that outer space was their service’s domain. To the Army, the moon
was simply “the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain. Air Force
generals, claiming that space was “just a little higher up” than the area they
already controlled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in their plans
for “creating a new Aerospace Force.” The admirals and vice admirals of
the U.S. Navy argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a natural
extension of the “underwater, surface and air regime in which [the Navy]
operated” and should therefore be considered the Navy’s domain. General
Bernard Schriever of the U.S. Air Force told the Senate Preparedness
Subcommittee that he wanted to state on record his “strong negative against
ARPA.”
The Atomic Energy Commission had its own idea about this new agency
McElroy was proposing. Ever seeking more power and control, the Atomic
Energy Commission lobbied to remove authority over outer space from the
Defense Department entirely and have it placed under AEC jurisdiction.
The AEC chairman had a bill introduced in Congress to establish an “Outer
Space Division.” Defense contractors also lobbied hard against McElroy’s
idea for a new agency. Many feared that their established relations with
individual military services would be in jeopardy. Ernest Lawrence of
Livermore rushed to the Pentagon to meet personally with Defense
Secretary McElroy and present his alternative idea to ARPA.
Accompanying Lawrence was Charles Thomas, the president of Monsanto
Chemical Company, a nuclear defense contractor that would be vilified
during the Vietnam War for producing the herbicide Agent Orange, and
made notorious in the 1990s for being the first agrochemical company to
genetically modify food crops. Lawrence and Thomas met with McElroy in
his private office and shared their idea “to adopt some radical new
measures… to meet the Sputnik challenge and cope better with problems of
science and technology in the Defense Establishment.” They proposed that
McElroy allow the two of them to create and administer a new government
agency, classified top secret and modeled after the Manhattan Project. The
meeting lasted several hours before McElroy rejected the two defense
contractors’ idea as “infeasible in peacetime.” Lawrence had a second
suggestion. If this new agency was to work, it would need a brilliant
scientist at the helm. Someone who understood how the military and
industry could put America’s best scientists to work solving problems of
national defense. The perfect person, said Lawrence, was Herb York.
McElroy promised to give the suggestion some thought.
McElroy had one last hurdle to overcome, involving colleagues just one
floor away at the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff hated the idea of an
Advanced Research Projects Agency and registered a formal
nonconcurrence on December 7, 1957. But the attack against ARPA by the
military services was bound to fail. “The fact that they didn’t want an
ARPA is one reason [Eisenhower] did,” said Admiral John E. Clark, an
early ARPA employee.
President Eisenhower was fed up with the interservice rivalries. Having
commanded the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in
Europe during World War II, he held deep convictions regarding the value
of unity among the military services. As president, he had been a crusader
against the excessive waste of resources that came from service duplication.
“The Army and Air Force ‘race’ to build almost duplicate CRBMs
[Continental Range Ballistic Missiles] incensed him,” wrote presidential
historian Sherman Adams.
On January 7, 1958, President Eisenhower sent a memorandum to
Congress authorizing $10 million in the 1958 fiscal year “for expenses
necessary for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, including
acquisition and construction of such research, development and test
facilities, and equipment, as may be authorized by the Secretary of Defense,
to remain available until expended.”
In his State of the Union message two nights later, Eisenhower
announced to the nation the creation of this new agency. “Some of the
important new weapons which technology has produced do not fit into any
existing service pattern,” Eisenhower explained. These new weapons
should “cut across all services, involve all services, and transcend all
services, at every stage from development to operation.” The rapid
technological advances and the revolutionary new weapons this technology
was producing created a threat as revolutionary to warfare as the invention
of the airplane, Eisenhower said. But instead of working together, the
services had succumbed to petty “jurisdictional disputes” that “bewilder and
confuse the public and create the impression that service differences are
damaging the national interest.” This was why ARPA had been created,
Eisenhower said, in “recognition of the need for single control in some of
our most advanced development projects.”
That the president would publicly admonish the services outraged top
officials, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “So the Agency was
controversial even before it was formed,” wrote Lawrence P. Gise, ARPA’s
first administrator, in an unpublished history of the agency’s origins. “Beset
by enemies internally, subjected to critical pressures externally, and starting
from scratch in a novel area of endeavor, ARPA was a tumultuous and
exciting place to be.”

It was the second week of February 1958, and Washington, D.C., was
blanketed in snow. A severe blizzard had wreaked havoc on the nation’s
capital. Subzero wind chills and five-foot snow drifts paralyzed traffic. On
Monday morning, the Eisenhower administration advised all nonessential
government workers to stay home. Herb York received a telephone call at
his house. It was the personal secretary to Neil McElroy, asking York to
come to the Pentagon right away for a meeting with the secretary of
defense, alone. Never mind the storm, York recalled. He was determined to
get to the Pentagon.
Herb York was in a remarkable position. If he did not have time to
reflect on this now, he would pay homage to his humble background later in
life. Here he was, living in Washington, D.C., and advising the president of
the United States on scientific matters, when he had been the first person in
his family to attend college. York’s father was a New York Central Railroad
baggage man. His grandfather made caskets for a living; his specialty was
lining a customer’s permanent resting place with satin bows and carved
velvet trim. Herb York had been born of humble means but had a brilliant
mind and plenty of ambition. To think he was only thirty-six years old.
“From the earliest times,” York recalled, “I remember [my father] saying
he did not want his son to be a railroad man. He made it clear that that
meant I should go to college, even though he knew little about what that
actually entailed.” York followed his father’s advice, spending most of his
free time at the Watertown, New York, public library reading newspapers,
books, and science magazines. He attended the University of Rochester on a
scholarship and excelled in the field he chose for himself, physics. Like
many other top university physics graduates of his generation, York was
recruited into the Manhattan Project during the war. In the spring of 1943
he traveled by bus to faraway Berkeley, California, where, as circumstance
would have it, he was assigned to work under Ernest O. Lawrence. During
the war, York helped produce uranium in Lawrence’s cyclotron, material
that would eventually make its way into the core of the Hiroshima atomic
bomb. After the war York returned to Berkeley to get his Ph.D. During his
doctoral research, he co-discovered the neutron pi meson, which elevated
him to elite status among nuclear scientists. In 1952 York became chief
scientist at Livermore. Now, during the February 1958 nor’easter, Herb
York wondered what lay ahead.
“I made my way with difficulty across the river to the Pentagon and did
a lot of walking in deep snow,” York recalled. He had tried to hail a taxi, but
there were none around. The parking lot at the Pentagon was almost empty.
But the man he had come to see, Secretary of Defense McElroy, was in his
office, busy at work. York had a feeling he was being considered for the
position of chief scientist at ARPA. Because of the snowstorm, he would
benefit, he said, from having an “unhurried, hour-long, one-on-one
conversation that I could not have had with the secretary on an ordinary,
busy day.”
After the meeting York went home and McElroy weighed his options.
There was one other contender for the position of ARPA chief scientist, and
that was Wernher von Braun. Von Braun and his team had just launched
America’s first successful satellite, Explorer I, and as far as the public was
concerned, von Braun’s star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had
information on von Braun that the rest of the world most definitely did not,
namely, that he had been an officer with the Nazi paramilitary organization
the SS during the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of thousands
of slave laborers forced to build the V-2 rocket, in an underground labor-
concentration camp called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.
While McElroy weighed his options for scientific director, new
information came to light. Von Braun was nothing if not entitled, and in his
discussions regarding the new position, he insisted that were he to transfer
his services over to the Pentagon, a sizable group of his German rocket
scientist colleagues would have to accompany him there. Army intelligence
had classified dossiers on each of von Braun’s 113 German colleagues.
They were all part of Operation Paperclip, the secret intelligence program
that had brought Nazi scientists to America after the war. Many of von
Braun’s rocket team members had been ardent Nazis, members of ultra-
nationalistic paramilitary organizations, including the SS and the SA.
“For a while Wernher von Braun appeared to have the job but to get him
it was necessary to take his 10–15 man package of [German] associates and
that was not acceptable,” wrote ARPA administrator J. Robert Loftis in a
declassified report. Secretary McElroy offered Herb York the job. York
accepted. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, he said.
York moved into his office in the Pentagon the following month, in
March 1958. He would remain on the president’s scientific advisory board.
On the wall of York’s new office he hung a large framed photograph of the
moon. Next to it he hung an empty frame. When people visited they would
ask, why the empty frame? York told them he would leave the frame empty
until it could be filled with a photograph of the backside of the moon, taken
from a spacecraft to be developed by ARPA. This new agency Herb York
was in charge of at the Pentagon would be capable of phenomenal things.

With his new Advanced Research Projects Agency in place, President

Eisenhower was more determined than ever to put an end to nuclear
weapons tests. The week after York hung the moon photograph on his office
wall, Eisenhower took all of his scientific advisors, including Herb York, to
Ramey Air Force Base, in Puerto Rico, to discuss banning nuclear weapons
tests. The president wanted to know, was this good for national security, and
if so, could it be done? Everyone voted yes on both counts, except Herb
York, who abstained.
Decades later, York explained his bias. “I might well have responded
‘no’ but abstain was the most I could do under the circumstances.” Just
weeks on the ARPA job, York felt conflicted. He now served the president
of the United States and the secretary of defense. But he also remained
loyal to Ernest Lawrence, whom he had worked for his entire adult life, and
who was something of a father figure to him. Edward Teller was York’s
mentor, the teacher who had taught him most of what he knew about
nuclear physics. “Lawrence and Teller were all participants in the nuclear
weapons program,” York later explained. “It was their ox that was about to
be gored.” If the president was able to ban nuclear weapons tests, the
Livermore laboratory would most likely cease to exist.
The following day, after hearing arguments from the other scientists,
York changed his position and voted in favor of a nuclear weapons test ban.
It did not take long for word to reach Livermore, where Edward Teller
became enraged. “Traitorous!” Teller said of York to his Livermore
colleagues.
Just two weeks after the Puerto Rico trip, President Eisenhower took
action. In his memoirs the president wrote, “I formally proposed to
Chairman Khrushchev a measure we had been considering—a meeting of
experts whose technical studies would precede any political conference.”
Come summer, scientific experts from the United States and the Soviet
Union would meet in Geneva to discuss how to put an end to nuclear
weapons tests once and for all. The centerpiece was test detection. ARPA
would be in charge of overseeing this new technology, which included
seismic and atmospheric sensing, designed to make sure no one cheated on
the test ban. The program was called Vela. Its technology was highly
classified and included three subprograms: Vela Hotel, Vela Uniform, and
Vela Sierra.
The leaders of the world’s two superpowers each had a vested interest in
making this test ban happen. Each man was tired of having to live and
govern under the nuclear sword of Damocles. Both Eisenhower and
Khrushchev would send their most qualified scientists to Geneva, with a
mission to sort out any differences and to make the moratorium happen.
President Eisenhower made a bold and brilliant move with his choice.
Instead of sending one of his science advisors who wanted nuclear weapons
tests to stop, he chose a scientist who did not: Ernest Lawrence. So
committed to nuclear weapons tests was Ernest Lawrence that he had
recently told Congress, “If we stop testing…. Well, God forbid… we will
have to use weapons that [will] kill 50 million people that need not have
been killed.”
President Eisenhower was determined to bring about a test ban, but he
was also determined to ensure that the Soviets could not and would not
cheat. In sending Lawrence on his behalf, Eisenhower knew that the Soviet
scientists’ intentions would be under intense scrutiny. For the first time
since Castle Bravo, there was a sense of hope in the air.
Meanwhile, at ARPA, Herb York was about to get to work on the Vela
programs. Vela would soon become ARPA’s second-biggest program after
Defender, which was ARPA’s colossal effort to advance antiballistic missile
technology. Vela was a joint effort with the Atomic Energy Commission,
the Air Force, and later NASA to advance sensor technology so the United
States could certify that no nuclear weapons were being detonated in secret.
Vela Hotel developed a high-altitude satellite system to detect nuclear
explosions from space. Vela Uniform developed ground sensors able to
detect nuclear explosions underground, and produced a program to monitor
and read “seismic noise” across the globe. Vela Sierra monitored potential
nuclear explosions in space.
So much rested on the success of the Geneva Convention of Experts.
Putting an end to nuclear weapons tests would slow the arms race and
dramatically reduce the chances for all-out nuclear war. But could it be
done?
 CHAPTER FOUR

Emergency Plans

For Herb York, the sense of hopefulness that followed him back home
from Puerto Rico did not last long. Shortly after the president announced
his plans for a nuclear test ban, a twenty-two-page secret document called
“The Emergency Plans Book” arrived on York’s desk at the Pentagon. Its
classified contents were nothing short of apocalyptic. They would remain
classified for the next forty years. When, in 1998, the Defense Department
learned that an author named L. Douglas Keeney had discovered a copy of
“The Emergency Plans Book” inside a declassified U.S. Air Force file at the
National Archives, the Pentagon immediately reclassified the report.
Keeney made public the contents of the copy he had come across, but the
original document remains classified.
For defense officials, “The Emergency Plans Book” served as the “only
approved guidance to departments and agencies” regarding what to expect
before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack on U.S. soil. Issued by the
Office of Emergency Planning, a federal agency whose function was to
coordinate and control wartime mobilization activities, the book was not a
hypothetical war game. It was official protocol. To those familiar with its
contents, it would become known as the Doomsday scenario.
The scenario begins on a hypothetical “D-Day” in the not-so-distant
future. Because of the inadequacy of U.S. capabilities at the time, the first
strike comes as a surprise. Soviet sleeper cells have managed to “emplace
by clandestine means” several hydrogen bombs inside the continental
United States, and these weapons are the first to explode. Thermonuclear
war has begun.
 In quick succession, Soviet submarines swarm the Eastern and Western
Seaboards, firing nuclear missiles at dozens of inland targets. At roughly the
same time, the Soviets launch a catastrophic air attack against the United
States using bombers and fighter jets. The U.S. Air Defense Command
destroys a substantial portion of the attacking swarms, but at least half of
the Soviet aircraft are able to fire off their tactical nuclear weapons before
being shot down. The opening salvo comes to a climax as hundreds of
incoming ICBMs, launched from the Soviet Union, reach the U.S.
mainland. The majority of these nuclear-armed missiles are able to outfox
the Army’s Nike-Ajax missile batteries and strike military and civilian
targets across the nation. In less than one hour, 25 million Americans are
dead.
The Soviets have all but decapitated U.S. military installations, write the
authors of “The Emergency Plans Book,” including most atomic weapons
facilities, naval bases, airfields, and Army bases. All major communication
centers, financial districts, and transportation hubs have been targeted for
attack, and the majority of them have suffered catastrophic losses.
America’s infrastructure has been obliterated. Virtually nothing remains of
Washington, D.C. Even those living in rural America experience death and
destruction on a cataclysmic scale. Because of automated-targeting errors,
many of the nuclear weapons miss their intended targets and instead strike
at random across the heartland.
Though crippled, the U.S. military has not been destroyed and the
counterattack begins. “Notwithstanding severe losses of military and
civilian personnel and materiel,” the authors predict, “air operations against
the enemy are continuing and our land and naval forces are heavily
engaged. Both sides are making use of atomic weapons for tactical air
support and in the land battle.” Lightweight portable nuclear weapons, like
Livermore’s Davy Crocket bomb, are deployed across the nation by the
thousands as Soviet ground forces invade. Next comes a final full-scale
nuclear exchange. ICBMs rain down from the skies by the hundreds.
Coastal naval bases are pummeled with hydrogen bombs. Ports are clogged
with sinking ships. Merchant shipping comes to a halt. Surface
transportation and airlift capacity are nonexistent.
There are now hundreds of ground zeros across America, and everything
within a five-to ten-mile radius of each one has been obliterated. The
confluence of fireballs has created a series of major firestorms. Forests and
cities are in flames. Those who escape being burned to death are subjected
to varying degrees of deadly radiation. “The surface bursts have resulted in
widespread radioactive fallout of such intensity that over substantial parts
of the United States the taking of shelter for considerable periods of time is
the only means of survival.”
In the document’s “Post-Attack Analysis,” things get much worse. One
hundred million American survivors now live in a nation entirely without
the rule of law. The government is paralyzed. Roughly 50 million people
are in need of immediate emergency medical attention, half of whom will
require hospitalization for up to twelve weeks. Twelve and a half million
others have received lethal doses of radiation and will die in the next few
days, regardless of treatment. Health resources are in a critical state. The
doctors and nurses who survived the first strike cannot begin to handle what
is now being asked of them. Of a pre-attack total of 1.6 million U.S.
hospital beds, 100,000 remain. Radiation is but one malady.
“Communicable diseases, including typhoid fever, smallpox, tetanus and
streptococcal diseases, begin to run rampant.” Day-to-day production of
food comes to a halt. Most salvageable food stocks have been
contaminated. Widespread looting has begun, with survivors hoarding what
little remains.
The housing system has gone critical. Millions of homes were destroyed
in the nuclear exchange; millions of people now have nowhere to live.
Fallout has made vast portions of the Eastern Seaboard uninhabitable. There
is no electricity, no refrigeration, no transportation, and no community
water systems. Another deadly health menace emerges with the inability of
the survivors to dispose of human waste or the dead bodies of millions
killed in a single day. Then comes the knockout punch. “Along the coasts,
bubonic plague, cholera and typhus are expected to emerge,” write the
authors, “part of a Soviet biological warfare secondary attack.” The authors
of the secret document clearly believe the Soviets to be the kind of enemy
who will stop at nothing. Americans who managed to survive nuclear
Armageddon must now prepare for the emergence of incurable diseases like
bubonic plague.
By the twenty-first century, catastrophic narratives like the Doomsday
scenario would become a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction, films, and video
games. But in 1958 this was the first and only known official document of
its kind. Out in Santa Monica, RAND analysts regularly gamed out first-and
second-strike scenarios as war games, which Air Force officials would then
use to persuade Congress to allocate more funds for the Strategic Air
Command. But “The Emergency Plans Book” was not a “what if”; it was a
“here’s when.” It was doctrine. An official reference manual.
It was also not a report that could be ignored. “The Emergency Plans
Book” was sent to the highest-ranking defense officials in each of the
military services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of ARPA, the
secretary of defense, each of the assistant secretaries of defense, and the
director of the National Security Agency. In a cover letter, the director of
the Office of Emergency Planning instructed recipients to submit changes or
indicate they had none. As for Herb York, when faced with this portrait of
extreme cataclysm, the ARPA director did not lose sight of the agency’s
mission to prevent strategic surprise. Submitting or not submitting notes to
the Office of Emergency Planning was, for York, a moot point.
Herb York had another plan in play, a seemingly preposterous idea that
was already several years in the making. What if ARPA could create a
defensive shield over the entire United States and stop incoming Soviet
ICBMs in their tracks? York believed it could be done on account of a
theory that had been proposed to him by an eccentric, brilliant, and obscure
scientist named Nicholas Christofilos. As York later explained, Christofilos
believed it was possible to create “an Astro-dome like defensive shield
made up of high-energy electrons trapped in the earth’s magnetic field just
above the atmosphere.” It sounded ludicrous. Something straight out of a
Marvel comic book. But York thought it just might work.
Which is why, in the summer of 1958, Herb York gathered together a
group of the nation’s top scientists and had them briefed on this radical,
classified idea. York wanted to know what the top men of science thought
of what he called the “Christofilos effect.” The top secret program had
already been given the go-ahead by the president of the United States. In
March 1958 York met with Eisenhower and personally briefed him on plans
for an ARPA operation to test the Christofilos effect. By summer, the idea
was no longer just an idea but ARPA’s first full-scale operation. The top
secret, restricted data, limited distribution Operation Order 7-58 went by the
cover name Project Floral. Its real name, which was classified, was
Operation Argus—for the mythological giant with one hundred eyes.

On July 14, 1958, with top secret clearances in place, twenty-two defense
scientists gathered at the National War College at Fort McNair in
Washington, D.C., with the goal of producing “ARPA Study No. 1.” The
gathering went by its own code name, Project 137. Its purpose, explained
York, was “to identify problems not now receiving adequate attention” in
the national security domain.
“Fort McNair was a delightful place to work,” remembered Marvin
“Murph” Goldberger, one of the Project 137 scientists. The facility was one
of the oldest Army posts in the nation and one of the most genteel. Each
morning the scientists gathered in Roosevelt Hall, a grand neoclassical
building of red brick with granite trim overlooking the Potomac. There they
listened to Defense Department officials deliver briefings on America’s
“defense problems selected for their urgency.” Then the scientists gathered
in groups to discuss what had been said and brainstorm science-based
solutions. Afternoons were spent writing. In the early evening, everyone
would dine together, in the War College mess hall, and discuss Soviet
threats. They were dealing with a total of sixty-eight national security
problems and programs, from submarine warfare and balloon warfare to
biological weapons, chemical sensing, and the possibility of inventing a
laser beam weapon. But the most interesting program by far, as Goldberger
recalled, was the Christofilos effect.
“Hearing about it required its own special clearance,” Goldberger said.
The Project 137 group was led by John Wheeler, a Princeton University
physicist famous for coining the term “black hole.” Working alongside
Wheeler were five others from Princeton, four from Berkeley, three from
the University of Illinois, one from Stanford, one from the University of
Chicago, and one from Cal Tech. Four scientists came from the federally
funded nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge, and
Sandia. Two scientists came from the defense industry, one from General
Dynamics and the other from the DuPont chemical company.
These were advanced scientific thinkers of the most serious kind. The
Supermen of hard science. Among them were particle physicists, theoretical
physicists, astrophysicists, chemists, mathematicians, an economist, and a
nuclear weapons engineer. They were men who coined terms like
hexaquark, wormholes, and quantum foam. Two of them, Eugene Wigner
and Val Fitch, would win the Nobel Prize in physics. All of the scientists
were experienced in Defense Department work, and many had been part of
the Manhattan Project during World War II. Stated requirements for
membership in Project 137 were “ingenuity, practicality and motivation.”
“We listened to Nick [Christofilos] discuss the [Christofilos] effect,”
recalled Goldberger. “He was a strange kind of genius.”
Christofilos’s theoretical Astrodome-like shield was the hoped-for result
of exploding a large number of nuclear weapons in space as a means of
defending against incoming Soviet ICBMs. By Christofilos’s count, this
likely meant “thousands per year, in the lower reaches of the atmosphere.”
These explosions, he said, would produce “huge quantities of radioactive
atoms, and these in turn would emit high-energy electrons (beta particles)
and inject them into a region of space where the earth’s magnetic fields
would trap and hold on them for a long time.” Christofilos figured that this
electromagnetic field could last months, or perhaps longer, and that “the
trapped electrons would cause severe radiation—and even heat damage—to
anything, man or nuclear weapon, that tried to fly through the region.” In
short, the idea was that the arming and firing mechanisms on the incoming
Soviet ICBMs would be fried.
Christofilos had presented the idea a few years earlier, back when York
was the chief scientist at Livermore. “His purpose was of epic proportions,”
York recalled. “His idea was the most amazing and original of all not only
at Livermore but, to my knowledge, in the entire country,” a plan to create
“an impenetrable shield of high-energy electrons over our heads, a shield
that would destroy any nuclear warhead that might be sent against us.” But
exploding thousands of nuclear weapons in space each year was an
impractical proposition. “At the time Nick presented these proposals, I
could not conceive of a procedure for actually carrying them out,” said
York. “In sum, there was simply no place to take an invention like Nick’s.”
Then York became chief scientist at ARPA.
Nicholas Christofilos had an unusual backstory. He was born in Boston
to Greek immigrant parents but at the age of seven returned with his family
to Athens, where he went to school, dreamed about science, and became an
amateur radio operator. He graduated from the National Technical
University in Athens in 1938 and went to work in an elevator factory. His
first job was as an elevator installer. When the Nazis took over Athens,
Christofilos’s elevator factory was converted to a truck repair facility. Left
with “very little to do,” Christofilos kept himself busy learning German.
Eventually he was able to read the German-language physics textbooks and
scientific journals that his new Nazi bosses left lying around the factory.
According to Herb York, Nick Christofilos began “focusing his attention on
the design of high-energy accelerators—cyclotrons and the like.”
With no formal training, and in a matter of a few years, Christofilos
transformed himself from an elevator technician into one of the most
ingenious scientists in the modern world. There are almost no details about
his work during this dark time of occupation and war, but three years after
the end of the war, in 1948, he wrote a letter to the University of California
Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, “purporting to describe a new invention,”
according to York. “The letter was, apparently, not easy to decipher.” But
when a scientist at Livermore finally did “puzzle it out,” says York, “he
discovered that it was only another way of describing the
synchrocyclotron,” a device that had been invented independently several
years before by Edwin McMillan, a chemist at Berkeley, and Vladimir
Veksler, a physicist in the USSR. “Papers describing that invention had
already been published more than a year before Nick’s letter arrived, so it
was set aside and forgotten,” said York. The supposition was that the letter
writer could have gotten the information from the academic paper. Then,
two years later, scientists at Livermore received a second letter from
Nicholas Christofilos, this one describing another type of particle
accelerator. “It was considerably more complex than the first,” said York,
“and whoever was assigned to read it could not make out what it was trying
to say.” Same as the first letter, it was cast aside.
Two years later, two nuclear physicists at the Brookhaven National
Laboratory on Long Island published a paper describing an accelerator, this
one so technologically advanced that for the first time in the history of
science, a machine could “produce particles with more than one billion
electron volts of energy,” noted York. As it so happened, Christofilos had
recently moved to the United States. When he read the article in a science
journal, he contacted the authors to tell them he had already invented that
machine in his mind, and had described it in a letter that was on file with the
Livermore lab. When Christofilos demanded due credit for the invention, a
search of the records was made. Sure enough, according to York,
Christofilos had a clear priority of invention. “Naturally,” recalled York, the
discovery that a Greek elevator installer had priority in this very
sophisticated invention produced a flurry of interest and reaction.” In 1954
Christofilos was offered a job at Brookhaven, where a huge accelerator
based on his invention was being built. But soon Christofilos became bored
with the invention he had imagined years before. He was already well on to
other ideas. When Herb York learned the strange story of Nicholas
Christofilos, he saw great potential and hired him.
Resistance came from the federal security clearance people. “They
found it hard to believe that an ‘elevator mechanic’ had accomplished all
that Christofilos had claimed,” said York. “He must be, they thought, some
sort of mole that the Russians had pumped full of ideas not his own.”
Clearance officers finally authorized Christofilos to work at Livermore,
giving him access to top secret information. But he was denied the coveted
Q clearance, which allows a scientist access to nuclear secrets. At
Livermore, Christofilos produced one seminal idea after another. Eventually
he was granted higher clearances than just about everyone else around him.
When Sputnik flew, Christofilos became convinced that the Russians had
gained a too significant scientific advantage over the United States. That
they were likely planning a surprise attack. He threw all his energy and
ingenuity into finding a way to keep this from happening. Now the Project
137 scientists were at a crossroads. It was risky and expensive. But if the
Christofilos effect worked, it would be a magic bullet answer to ballistic
missile defense.
At Fort McNair, the scientists agreed that the Christofilos effect was
worth investigating. In practical terms, it was the best idea anyone had
come up with. The scope of national security threats facing the nation left
many of the Project 137 scientists with a deep sense of foreboding. It
caused “responsible people sleepless nights,” John Wheeler said. Although
all of the scientists had worked on Defense Department programs before,
learning of sixty-eight threats concurrently “weighed heavily on the
conscience,” Goldberger recalled.
“Many of the members of Project 137 were deeply disturbed and others
even shocked by the gravity of the problems with which they found
themselves confronted,” Wheeler wrote in his after-action report for ARPA.
“The group has developed a strong feeling for and deep appreciation of the
great crisis with which the nation is faced. The group senses the rapidly
increasing danger into which we are inexorably heading.”
Much rested on the success of Operation Argus, now set to unfold at the
bottom of the world.

Halfway across the earth, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, the
men of Task Force 88 were assembled as far away from civilization as man
can get without being in Antarctica. The spot had been chosen because it
was outside shipping lanes, in a remote expanse between the tip of South
America and the tip of Africa, east of a dip in the magnetic field known as
the Brazilian Anomaly. The weather was unpredictable, and there was the
issue of high seas. It was in this rough ocean that the U.S. military planned
to launch three nuclear weapons into space, off the back of a moving
seaplane tender called the USS Norton Sound. The hope was that the
Christofilos effect would create a great enough disturbance in the earth’s
geomagnetic fields, in the layers of the ionosphere, and in radio waves that
it would ruin the delicate electronics housed inside any incoming missile.
An extraordinary number of men and machines were involved in
Operation Argus, the only fully classified test in the history of U.S. nuclear
testing; no part of the operation was made public, nor would the public
know about it until the New York Times broke the story six months after its
completion. There were 4,500 military personnel, hundreds of scientists and
engineers, twenty-one fixed-wing aircraft, eight Sikorsky helicopters, three
destroyers, a fleet oiler, an aircraft carrier, a seaplane tender, more than a
dozen Lockheed X-17A missiles, and three nuclear warheads involved.
ARPA was the agency in charge, with divisions from the Air Force, the
Army, and the Navy shouldering major elements of the operation. Satellites,
each carrying a payload of a hundred pounds of recording instruments,
would be placed in equatorial and polar orbits by the Army Ballistic Missile
Agency shortly before the tests. The sensors would record effects and relay
data. With so many moving parts, on so many different continents, any
number of things could go wrong.
Weather was a major unknown to contend with. Operation Argus
involved firing three nuclear-tipped Lockheed X-17A missiles off the back
of a moving ship. The USS Norton Sound was capable of launching a
missile in winds up to forty-six miles per hour, but no one had expected
waves nearing twenty feet. The ship could make speed corrections to
compensate for the wind, but the waves threatened to dangerously alter the
missile trajectory in its boost stage. The commander of Task Force 88 was
concerned with the safety of his crew, and with good reason.
During a practice run of a missile launch, one of the X-17As failed in
flight, after only twenty-five seconds. Had there been a nuclear weapon in
the nosecone, it would have produced a catastrophic disaster. The missile
would have been just a few thousand feet up, and exploding at that height
would likely have killed or injured many of the crew. Making matters seem
even more precarious, in the following test run, the missile failed again, this
time just three seconds after launch.
Secrecy was paramount to success. If the Christofilos effect was
achieved, it would produce massive disturbances across the earth’s upper
atmosphere. These disruptions would be detected by every nation
monitoring these kinds of phenomena, most notably the Soviets. Total
secrecy meant the disturbances would infuriate the Soviets; they would
have no idea what caused them and would most likely conclude the United
States was working on a top secret high-altitude weapon. This was one of
the desired effects.
Four days before the first nuclear launch, all ships and aircraft were in
place. U.S. reconnaissance aircraft patrolled the skies over the South
Atlantic. Ships carrying antiaircraft rockets were at the ready, in the
unforeseen event of Soviet sabotage. The commander of Task Force 88 sent
his final coded message to the ARPA office at the Pentagon, a prearranged
indication that the operation was a go at his end.
“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” the commander stated clearly into a
ship-to-shore radio microphone. The first test would take place on August
27, 1958. Although no one had a name for it at the time, Operation Argus
was the world’s first test of an electromagnetic pulse bomb, or EMP.

Halfway across the world, in Switzerland, a remarkable series of events was

taking place. It was the height of the summer season, and Ernest O.
Lawrence and his wife, Molly, were attending a party at the historic Parc
des Eaux-Vives, an eighteenth-century mansion on Lake Geneva. Mist rose
off the lake, the weather was magnificent, and from the villa’s terrace where
the couple sat behind protective glass, there were stunning panoramic
views. Ernest and Molly Lawrence dined and watched fireworks. Wine
flowed. And Ernest Lawrence was having a miserable time.
For the first time in the history of nuclear weapons, top scientists from
the United States and the Soviet Union had been meeting here in Geneva,
under the strictest of security provisions, to hash out technical terms so that
a nuclear test suspension could go forward. The Geneva Conference of
Experts marked the ultimate low point in the prolific nuclear weapons
career of Ernest Lawrence. For more than twenty years, Lawrence had been
one of the nation’s most vocal advocates for nuclear weapons development
and testing, along with his deputy Edward Teller. That Eisenhower wanted
Lawrence to represent him distressed Lawrence when he was first asked,
and it upset him even more now that he was attending the conference.
“The President has asked, so I must go!” he told Molly before they left
California. The very thought rendered Lawrence “depressed over the idea,”
according to his biographer Herbert Childs, but still he “felt it was his duty
to accept” and to go to Geneva. The conference lasted all summer, and for
Lawrence the meetings were becoming increasingly stressful. There were
so many important technical aspects to iron out, including ways in which
each side could be certain that the other side would not cheat. For that,
Lawrence brought his Livermore deputy Harold Brown, the young physicist
who had taken over York’s job as chief scientist at Livermore.
Here in Geneva, Brown acted as Lawrence’s technical advisor. In order
to stop testing, both superpowers had to agree to the creation of a network
of 170 seismic detection facilities across Europe, Asia, and North America.
This technology effort was being spearheaded by ARPA through its Vela
Uniform program. Technology had advanced to the point where these
detection facilities would soon be able to monitor and sense, with close to
100 percent certainty, any aboveground nuclear test over 1 kiloton and, with
90 percent certainty, any underground test over 5 kilotons. Both sides knew
that in some situations it was difficult for detection facilities to tell the
difference between an earthquake and an underground test. These were the
kinds of verification details that the experts were working to hash out.
 Ernest Lawrence had been attending meetings by day and social events
by night. The situation was stressful, and now he was exhausted. Lawrence
worried that there was something wrong with his health. He deeply
distrusted the Soviets. Perhaps working with their scientists was making
him ill? He had just returned from a first-class trip across India and Europe,
traveling in private planes and being driven by chauffeurs. He and his
family had visited with statesmen and maharajahs. There, he’d felt fine.
Travel always made him feel better, and Molly suggested a day trip to the
ski resort at Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, in the nearby Alps. Lawrence agreed
and off they went, but upon his return, Lawrence came down with a fever.
The next day he was unable to get out of bed.
“He just didn’t seem to get well, though he didn’t seem terribly sick,”
recalled his colleague Robert Bacher, one of three nuclear scientists
officially representing the United States. Fearing her husband had
pneumonia, Molly Lawrence called for a physician. Dr. Bernard Wissmer
examined Lawrence and noted that he “was cheerful and did not seem
acutely ill, despite fever.”
Lawrence confided in the Swiss doctor. He suffered from colitis, or
inflammation of the bowels, he said, and he relapsed when he became tense.
Dr. Wissmer gave him a proctoscopic exam and said he was in good health.
The following day Lawrence made some effort to attend the conference, but
mostly he had Harold Brown participate on his behalf. Venturing out of his
hotel room, he collapsed in the hallway. Molly suggested they return home.
“I could never live with myself if I left before this conference was over,”
Lawrence told his wife. Dr. Wissmer prescribed penicillin. Then later that
week, after a lakeside lunch with his translator, the Berkeley professor and
Russian émigré Leonid Tichvinsky, Lawrence decided that he had had
enough. “This is it, we’re going home tonight,” he told his wife.
Arriving back in California, Lawrence checked into a hospital. He never
left. He was given a blood transfusion and was told he needed to have his
colon removed. The thought of never being able to defecate like a healthy
human horrified him, his biographer later revealed. Shortly after the
surgery, Lawrence slipped into a coma. On August 27, he died. He had just
turned fifty-seven years old. The Livermore laboratory would be renamed
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Halfway across the world in a far corner of the South Atlantic, outside
shipping lanes and near a dip in the magnetic field, on the same day that
Ernest Lawrence died, the first of the three Argus high-altitude nuclear
weapons was detonated. Argus 1 suffered an errant missile trajectory and
missed its target—which was 340 nautical miles above the earth—by more
230 miles. Three days later Argus 2 also failed to reach its desired altitude
and exploded roughly 84 nautical miles above the task force launching area.
The last and final test, Argus 3, was the most precarious, first with a misfire
in high winds followed by a nuclear explosion on September 6, 1958, at an
altitude of 115 nautical miles. Operation Argus proved to be a grand
disappointment. The results were nothing close to what Nicholas
Christofilos had predicted and Herb York had hoped for. While the
Christofilos effect did occur, it was limited in intensity and very short-lived.
More nuclear tests were needed. But the moratorium was coming.
In Switzerland, at the Geneva Conference of Experts, the scientists
submitted their final report. Given advances in the technology of detection,
American and Soviet scientists now agreed that it was possible to cease
nuclear testing. If one side cheated, they would be caught. President
Eisenhower was delighted. The very next day he held a press conference to
announce that the United States would halt nuclear testing, starting on
October 31, if the Soviets formally agreed to halt testing as well.
At Livermore laboratory in California, Edward Teller was furious. He
had no intention of giving up nuclear testing without protest. Two days after
the death of his colleague and boss Ernest Lawrence, even before Lawrence
was buried, Teller sent a classified telegram to Brigadier General Alfred
Starbird, the defense official at the Pentagon in charge of nuclear weapons
tests. The telegram, marked “Priority,” had the subject heading “Thoughts
in Connection to the Test Moratorium.”
Teller told Starbird that the test ban was a threat to national security.
That it showed weakness and vulnerability and opened America up to a
sneak nuclear attack. “The purpose [of this telegram] is in part to clarify
laboratory plans and in part to point out dangers in connections with future
discussions concerning the test moratorium,” Teller wrote. “The laboratory
must continue research and development of nuclear weapons,” he wrote, “in
order to comply with the [president’s] directive.” More tests needed to be
done in order to make sure that it was safe to comply. Furthermore, he
argued, many of Livermore’s nuclear tests were not tests per se but rather
scientific experiments, as Operation Argus was.
There was a loophole to be explored, Teller suggested. “Explosions
below a kiloton cannot be detected and identified by any of the methods
considered realistic by any of the delegations at the Geneva Conference,”
he wrote. The United States could secretly conduct low-yield tests. Yes, it
would be cheating, but the Russians could not be trusted, and surely they
would cheat too.
 CHAPTER FIVE

Sixteen Hundred Seconds Until

Doomsday

Eugene McManus, an electronics technician, worked at the top of the

world. He had joined the Air Force, at age seventeen, for adventure and to
learn radar technology, and now here he was four years later working at a
classified ARPA-activated outpost just nine hundred miles from the North
Pole. This was the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS)
facility, the world’s first operational missile-detection radar site, and it was
connected directly with the North American Air Defense Command, or
NORAD. McManus and everyone else who worked here knew the remote,
isolated facility as “J-Site.”
“Our job at J-Site amounted to ninety percent boredom and ten percent
panic,” Gene McManus recalls. “The panic was if the power went off or if
there was a missile scare.”
J-Site was part of ARPA’s secretive 474L System Program Office, which
was responsible for developing techniques and equipment to track all
objects in space and any ICBMs that might be coming in over the North
Pole. The Air Force ran the place, and McManus technically worked for
RCA, Radio Corporation of America, under its defense contractor division,
RCA Service Company.
The Arctic environment played a role in everything, McManus explains.
J-Site was located thirteen miles from the main Defense Department base in
Thule, Greenland, an area that was landlocked by ice nine months of the
year. For roughly four of those months, the sun never came up over the
horizon and the temperature stayed around -40 degrees Fahrenheit. There
was darkness all day and all night, the black sky interrupted only by the
low-rising moon. For the two hundred people who worked at J-Site each
day, the commute was called “the coldest thirteen miles on wheels.”
The J-site workers—mostly radar technicians and maintenance crews—
rode to the BMEWS site in a twelve-bus convoy that always traveled in
tight formation. If any bus were to fall behind, get stuck, or have engine
failure, it would not take long for the passengers to freeze to death. In a
phase-one blizzard, which was common, bus drivers battled 70-mile-per-
hour winds and maintained visibility of about fifty feet. But if a phase-three
blizzard hit, the worst kind of storm, with winds up to 120 miles per hour,
visibility was reduced to inches, and the road turned into a giant snowdrift.
Bus drivers had to slow down to a treacherous 10-mile-per-hour crawl.
Driving slower meant the bus engine could stall. Driving faster meant the
bus driver might drive off the road into deep snow. One Christmas, Gene
McManus and his fellow crewmembers got caught in a phase-three
blizzard, and the commute that normally took thirty to forty minutes took
thirteen hours. “The anemometer [wind meter] at the BMEWS site pegged
at a hundred and sixty-five miles per hour,” McManus recalls. He and his
crew got stranded at J-Site, which was particularly unfortunate because the
Bob Hope USO tour was visiting Thule Air Base that holiday, and instead
of seeing the show live, the stranded J-Site workers had to listen to the gala
over the public address system.
J-Site was a futuristic-looking environment with some of the most
modern, most powerful technical equipment in the world, perched high on a
frozen, treeless bluff overlooking the Wolstenholme Fjord. Four massive
radar antennas, each 165 feet high and 400 hundred feet long, were
programmed to track objects three thousand miles out. When McManus
arrived in the spring of 1961, workers were building the radome, a bright
white 150-foot-tall microwave radar dome that looked like a giant golf ball
made of honeycomb pieces in the shape of pentagons and hexagons bolted
together.
In the summer it was beautiful. “We would watch the icebergs calve
from the glaciers, and when the fjord thawed, the water was clear blue,”
McManus remembers. He and other technicians would take summer walks
around J-Site. The landscape was barren above the Arctic Circle, but when
the snow melted, from June to early September the tundra bloomed with
moss, cotton, and poppies. Sometimes you could see arctic foxes and hares
if you had sharp eyes.
At J-Site there were nine buildings attached by enclosed roadways, like
tunnels. Because the ground was permanently frozen, nothing was built
underground. J-Site was a self-supporting facility with its own mess hall,
receiving docks, and machine shop—all in support of the computer rooms,
which were the heart of the BMEWS facility. The outpost required 85
megawatts of electricity “to provide full power to the radar and auxiliary
equipment, lights, and computers,” McManus explains, enough wattage to
power about fifteen thousand U.S. homes. For this, J-Site had its own power
source in the oil-fired turbines on a Navy ship at anchor in the bay. “The
heat generated by the power ship kept the water in the ship’s permanent
mooring thawed, even at minus forty degrees,” says McManus.
It was Gene McManus’s job as an electronics technician to take care of
the cables at J-Site, and these were far from any old cables. “Hundreds of
miles of inch-thick multi-conductor cable carrying control, communication,
and radar receiver information [were] laid perfectly straight in the cable
tray, never crossing over or under another,” McManus recalls. “Each was
tied down at precise intervals, with the knots in the cable ties all facing the
same direction. When the cables had to bend around corners, the radius of
the bends of all the cables in the tray were exactly the same.” Precision was
everything. The information flowing through these cables could start or
prevent World War III.
“The ten percent panic part of the job came when something unusual
was happening with the electricity,” says McManus. “Once we had a water
leak in one of the antennae, in one of the waveguides. The power was down
for about fifteen minutes.” It was nerve-racking, but it was nothing
compared to what happened the third day J-Site went into twenty-four-hour
operational mode, on October 5, 1960.
Three thousand miles from J-Site, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain in
Colorado Springs, a clock on the wall read 3:15 p.m. Air Force colonel
Robert L. Gould was sitting in the NORAD War Room when an alarm light
flashed red. NORAD, or North American Air Defense Command, was an
organization created in 1958 by the United States and Canada to defend
against a Soviet attack. The War Room was where military personnel
monitored airspace for ICBMs and incoming Soviet military aircraft.
Colonel Gould was facing a freestanding, twelve-by-twelve-foot transparent
plastic display board with a map of North America and Eurasia drawn on it.
Above the map was an alarm-level indicator made up of five red lights.
Nearby, Air Force technicians monitored information coming in from the
BMEWS J-Site at Thule.
Suddenly, the Level Three light flashed. Had the Level One light
flashed, NORAD protocol would have required Colonel Gould to “assemble
the battle staff [and] watch closely.” If the light had flashed on Level Two,
Gould would know “the contact is significant. Be ready to move in
seconds.” Instead, the alarm system sounded at Level Three, which required
Gould immediately to contact the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, the
Chiefs of Staff Committee in Ottawa, and Strategic Air Command (SAC)
headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. A flashing Level Four was something
every individual in the War Room knew about from training but dreaded
ever having to deal with because it meant “You are apparently under
attack.” A Level Four flashing light required an officer to “bring defense
weaponry up, warn SAC to prepare its ICBMs for launching, get its
bombers off the ground and turn loose the airborne alert force.” Level Five
was the endgame. It indicated “it is 99.9 percent certain that you are under
ICBM attack.”
With Level Three flashing, Colonel Gould picked up the telephone in the
War Room. As he waited to connect with NORAD’s commander in chief,
Air Force general Laurence Kuter, the alarm level suddenly went to Level
Four, then Level Five. Gould quickly learned that General Kuter was flying
over South Dakota and could not be reached, so he was instead put in touch
with NORAD’s deputy commander, Air Marshal Charles Roy Slemon, of
Canada. By now, also on the line was NORAD’s chief of intelligence, Air
Force brigadier general Harris B. Hull.
“Where is Khrushchev?” Air Marshal Slemon asked Brigadier General
Hull.
“In New York City,” Hull quickly replied.
This changed everything. There was a moment’s pause.
“Do you have any intelligence indications that would tend to confirm the
radar reports” of an ICBM attack? Slemon asked.
“None, sir,” Hull said.
 What was said next remains classified.
To Air Marshal Slemon, it seemed extremely unlikely that the Soviets
would strike North America when Premier Khrushchev was in New York
City, at the United Nations. But Slemon also believed that an attack could
not be ruled out entirely and that it was time to get the BMEWS J-Site on
the phone.
The technicians at J-Site, who were manning the IBM 7094 computers
that received data from the radar, analyzed it, and made calculations were
seeing very strange radar returns. A radar echo from an incoming ICBM
took one-eighth of a second to receive. These radar returns were seventy-
five seconds long. How could anything be that far away? But whatever it
was that was coming over the horizon, according to the computers there
were literally thousands of them. Here at J-Site, where environment was
everything, someone thought of looking outside. There, coming up over the
horizon, over Norway, was a huge rising moon.
The BMEWS had not malfunctioned. It was “simply more powerful than
anyone had dreamed,” said a NORAD spokesman after the story broke on
December 7, 1960. The “BMEWS—thought to have a range up to three
thousand miles—had spotted the moon nearly a quarter of a million miles
distant,” explained reporter John Hubbell. The J-Site computers had not
been programmed to read or express that kind of distance and instead
“divided three thousand miles into the precise distance to the moon and
reported the distance left over—twenty-two hundred miles—as range.”
It was a defining moment in the history of weapons development and the
future of man and machine. A computer had reported that a thousand-strong
Soviet ICBM attack was under way. And a human, in this case Air Marshal
Charles Roy Slemon, used his judgment to intervene and to overrule. At J-
Site, the ARPA 474L System Program Office worked with technicians to
teach the BMEWS computers to reject echoes from the moon.

On October 5, 1960, nuclear Armageddon was averted, but the underlying

reality of national defense was that the scientists who had created the
hydrogen bomb had created a weapon against which there was no defense.
In ARPA’s first years as an agency, its single biggest program was Defender,
with a mission to advance antiballistic missile technology and further
develop “early warning systems” like the one at J-Site in Thule. Defender
began with a publicly announced first-year budget of $100 million, roughly
half of ARPA’s entire budget. This figure was misleading, as Herb York
explained in now declassified memos, because it included only research and
development costs, not operational costs. In its first two years alone, the
Pentagon spent closer to $900 million on Defender, York said, roughly $7.3
billion in 2015.
The Defender program, also called Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD),
was ARPA’s most important national security program and the one that
received the most press. People wanted to believe that the brilliant scientists
who had created weapons of mass destruction in the first place could create
a means to defend against them, especially now that the Soviets had an
arsenal of their own. To Herb York, the situation was dire, mostly because
of the time frame involved. York ordered ARPA scientists to determine the
exact amount of time it would take for a Soviet ICBM carrying a megaton
warhead to travel from a launch pad in Russia to a target in Washington,
D.C.
In a secret dossier, “Assessment of Ballistic Missile Defense Program”
(PPD 61-33), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and
not known to have been reported before, ARPA mathematicians whittled
that number down to an exact figure—a mere 1,600 seconds. It seemed
impossibly fast. Just twenty-six minutes and forty seconds from launch to
annihilation.
The ARPA report chronicled the journey of the nuclear-armed ICBM in
its three stages: boost, midcourse, and terminal phase. The initial boost
stage took three hundred seconds—five minutes. This included the time it
took for the rocket to fire up off the launch pad, head skyward, and reach
cruising altitude. The second stage, called midcourse, lasted 1,200 seconds
—twenty minutes. This stage included the time it took for the missile to
travel in an arc-like trajectory over the planet at an altitude of
approximately eight hundred miles above sea level. The final stage was
called the terminal stage. It accounted for the last one hundred seconds of
flight—1.6 minutes. This terminal phase began when the warhead reentered
the earth’s atmosphere and ended when it struck its target—an American
city. Sixteen hundred seconds. That was it.
The secret “Assessment of Ballistic Missile Defense” came with a stern
forewarning: “The nuclear-armed ICBM threatens us with annihilation; the
stakes are so high that we must explore every alternative of strengthening
our military posture.” One of the great tragedies, or ironies, here was that
defending against a single ICBM was actually not too difficult a task.
According to the authors of the ARPA report, the Army’s antiballistic
missile system, called Nike-Zeus, gave “high confidence that… targets [i.e.,
incoming Soviet ICBMs] could be destroyed.” The problem was numerical,
the scientists said. It was the sheer volume of megaton weapons in existence
—with more still being engineered—that made the situation so hopeless.
“The most important limitation of [Nike-Zeus] is that its firepower will
probably not be able to handle the number of simultaneous targets which
can reasonably be expected in an all-out war with the USSR,” the scientists
wrote.
For Herb York, it was time to go back to the Supermen of hard science.
Several of the men from Project 137 had formed a defense consulting group
of their own. They called themselves the Jason scientists.
“I suppose you could say I started Jason,” said Murph Goldberger in a
2013 interview, at the age of ninety-one. The former Manhattan Project
member, former science advisor to President Johnson, former president of
the Federation of American Scientists, and the first American scientist to
travel to communist China on an official government-sponsored science
mission, among other impressive feats, was living with his full faculties
intact at a retirement home in La Jolla, California, called Casa de Mañana,
or House of Tomorrow. Eating Hungarian goulash in a dining room filled
with people of a similar age, and with a commanding view of the vast
Pacific, Goldberger explained, “I was Jason’s first director or president. It
was an impressive group. We were scientists committed to solving defense
problems.”
Murph Goldberger had been involved in nuclear physics since he was
twenty-two years old. During World War II, as a college student and
member of the enlisted reserves, he was called up to the Army’s Special
Engineering Department—the Manhattan Project—after being singled out
for his scientific talent. After the war he earned a Ph.D. in physics under
Enrico Fermi, the scientist who told President Truman that the hydrogen
bomb was “an evil thing.” Murph Goldberger had been a key player in
Project 137 at Fort McNair. At the time he was working as a professor of
physics at Princeton University, alongside John Wheeler, Oskar
Morgenstern, and Eugene Wigner. A Life magazine article about America’s
most important scientists carried a photograph of the four Princeton
physicists and described them with a kind of reverence. Scientists in the
1950s were seen as modern-day wizards, alchemists who could unlock the
secrets of the universe. American scientists could win wars, defeat polio,
even travel to the moon.
After Project 137 ended, Goldberger returned to Princeton, where he
soon got an idea. He wanted to craft a defense consulting group of like-
minded colleagues. Goldberger contacted four friends outside the university
enclave, scientists whose areas of expertise had been entwined since the end
of World War II. Kenneth Watson, a nuclear physicist at the University of
California, Berkeley, and protégé of Edward Teller, had done a postdoctoral
fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Keith
Brueckner, a physicist, meteorologist, and former Los Alamos weapons
developer, had studied at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory with Watson
and Goldberger and at the Institute for Advanced Study alongside John von
Neumann. Murray Gell-Mann, the youngest member, had been a doctoral
student of Manhattan Project giant Victor Weisskopf, and was someone
Goldberger considered a prodigy. The four physicists agreed to start a for-
profit defense consulting company together. Their first idea was to call it
Theoretical Physics, Inc. “The idea was that we would not work simply as
consultants; we’d work as a formal group, a little business,” Keith
Brueckner recalled, in a 1986 oral history.
Goldberger decided to run the idea by a fourth colleague and friend, the
physicist Charles H. Townes. Two years earlier Townes had published the
first academic paper on what he called the microwave laser, or maser. In
time the maser would become known as the laser, and it is now considered
one of the most significant inventions of the twentieth century, used widely
in both defense and civilian work. Townes had recently taken a leave of
absence from his position as a professor at Columbia University to serve as
vice president of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally
funded research center in Alexandria, Virginia, that served one customer:
the Department of Defense. Specifically, IDA served the Office of the
Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). If another
service wanted IDA’s assistance researching a problem, they had to secure
permission from OSD or JCS first. In the early ARPA years, the salaries of
all ARPA directors and program managers were paid through IDA. Townes
thought Goldberger’s idea of a defense consulting group was excellent, and
he suggested that Goldberger speak with Herb York. Perhaps the Advanced
Research Projects Agency would fund the group itself, Townes said. He
offered to find out.
“Townes called back to say [ARPA] loved the idea,” Goldberger
remembered. The scientists, mostly university professors, were free to
consult during the summer, as they had at the war college at Fort McNair.
The group could remain flexible and independent, detached from any
Pentagon mindset. To avoid red tape or bureaucracy, they could be paid
through IDA; besides, most of their work would be classified. IDA would
provide the group with an administrative assistant.
Goldberger and his colleagues got to work creating a list of scientists
they felt would add to their group of defense consultants. They wanted to
limit membership to theoretical physicists, said Goldberger, generalists who
had knowledge in a wide variety of areas and used mathematical models
and abstractions to understand, explain, and predict phenomena in the
natural world. “It was a very elite operation,” recalled Brueckner. “It was an
honor to be asked.” Goldberger remembered that “everyone was excited,
full of ideas, and very patriotic.” Murph Goldberger, Keith Brueckner,
Kenneth Watson, and Murray Gell-Mann drew up a list of their most
respected colleagues and asked them to participate.
The group’s first meeting took place at IDA headquarters in Virginia on
December 17, 1959. George Kistiakowsky, one of President Eisenhower’s
science advisors, led the meeting. Kistiakowsky kept a daily desk diary in
which he recorded his thoughts. “Met at IDA headquarters with the ‘bright
young physicists,’ a group assembled by Charles Townes to do imaginative
thinking about military problems,” Kistiakowsky noted that day. “It is a
tremendously bright squad of some 30 people.” After the first meeting
Goldberger went home to Princeton University very excited, he recalled.
“We knew the group could contribute significantly to the problems” of
national defense.
Three weeks later, on January 1, 1960, and by ARPA Project
Assignment number 11, the group became an official entity. What to call it,
Murph Goldberger wondered? “The Pentagon had a machine that generated
code names for projects,” he said. Whether the Defense Department naming
process was random or systematic remains a mystery, but the machine
decided that this scientific advisory group was to be called Project Sunrise.
Goldberger felt disappointed. “The name did not fit,” he recalled. That night
he shared his feelings with his wife and fellow scientist, Mildred
Goldberger; the couple had met when they were both working on the
Manhattan Project during the war. “Mildred thought Project Sunrise was a
dreadful name,” Goldberger recalled. This group was going to be doing
dynamic problem solving and groundbreaking consulting work. Project
Sunrise sounded sentimental and bland. Goldberger recalled Mildred
picking up a piece of paper on the table in front of her, a document from
IDA. The header included the image of an ancient Greek Parthenon-style
building. Ancient Greece made Mildred Goldberger think about Jason and
the Argonauts, characters from Greek mythology. Jason, the leader of the
Argonauts, is one of history’s great mythological heroes, the archetype of a
man on a quest. The Argonauts were Jason’s band of warriors who
accompanied him on his journey to find the Golden Fleece.
“You should call yourself Jason,” Mildred Goldberger said. Which is
how one of the most secret and esoteric, most powerful and consequential
scientific advisory groups in the history of the U.S. Department of Defense
got its name. Over the course of the next fifty-five years, the Jason group
would impact ARPA, and later DARPA, with greater significance than any
other scientific advisory group. Jason’s first senior advisors were Hans
Bethe, George Kistiakowsky, and Edward Teller.
In April 1960, each member of Jason was granted a clearance of top
secret or above. The Jason scientists’ first official meeting took place in
Washington, D.C., where they were briefed on a set of challenges to
consider. Ballistic missile defense was at the top of the list. The Jasons were
briefed on the classified elements of the Defender program and asked to
think outside the boundaries of possibility that were currently being
explored by other scientists.
Two months after their first official briefing, the Jason group held a
summer study at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California,
formerly called the Rad Lab. It took place between June 1 and August 15,
1960, and there were about twenty Jason scientists present. Goldberger
recalled that during that meeting they learned that ARPA wanted them to
think about measures and countermeasures, about offense and defense. The
Jason scientists were briefed on the classified results of Operation Argus
and the Christofilos effect. They were asked to think about new programs to
be researched and developed, and also to imagine the programs that Russian
scientists might be working on. The 1960 summer study produced multiple
classified reports.
Goldberger described one concept in general terms. It was a variation of
the Christofilos effect. “The idea was proposed to the [Jason] study group
that the enemy could detonate a nuclear weapon high up [in the
atmosphere] to confuse satellite detection.” The Jasons were to think about
the creation of an effect similar to the electromagnetic pulse seen during
Argus. One of the Jason scientists who was present at that meeting, Sidney
Drell, tried to explain the concept in an oral history in 1986. “If you have a
high altitude explosion of a nuclear weapon, and it makes a [cloud] of NO
[nitric oxide molecules], would that cause a big enough cloud to last long
enough that we wouldn’t see the missile attack launch and we wouldn’t get
the early warning?” In their first summer study, the Jason scientists were
asked to calculate the size of the cloud, the amount of nitric oxide in the
cloud, and the rate of dispensation in the atmosphere required to negatively
impact the electronics on a nearby U.S. satellite system. From their
calculations, said Goldberger, the Jasons concluded that the enemy would
have to explode “many megaton warheads” to have a significant effect on
the signals, and that this was “impractical.” For ARPA, this was good news.
These were the kinds of hard science problems the Jasons were excellent
at solving, and ARPA wanted the group to apply this type of “imaginative
thinking” to the Defender conundrum. They came up with a new idea, one
that involved the age-old warfare concept of using decoys—devices meant
to distract or mislead—like the mythological Trojan horse. The Jasons
suggested the development of a new technology whereby American ICBM
warheads could be equipped with decoys designed to evade, or trick, the
Soviet’s antiballistic missile defense system. If every U.S. warhead was
equipped with five or six decoys, then the entire U.S. arsenal of ICBMs
would have a five or six times greater chance of getting through to a target
in the Soviet Union. The Jasons called this concept “penetration aids.”
On the basis of the Jason scientists’ work, ARPA created a new program
called PENAIDS, short for penetration aids. PENAIDS suggested the
development of a far more aggressive offensive posture in the MAD
dilemma, the inventing of new ways for U.S. missiles to outfox the Soviets’
ballistic missile defense. Starting in 1962, PENAIDS proof tests at the
missile bases at White Sands, New Mexico, and at Kwajalein in the
Marshall Islands delivered promising results, which the Jason scientists
reviewed. PENAIDS led to another ARPA study called “Pen X,” which
endorsed the engineering of a new kind of advanced hydrogen bomb
warhead called MIRVs, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
Their birth initiated a fierce new competition in the nuclear arms race as
both sides rushed to build more accurate, more powerful, more deceptive
MIRVs. The programs were initially classified, but when they were made
public, MIRVs were vilified as dangerous and destabilizing because they
put a premium on a nuclear first strike.
For their second summer study, in 1961, the Jason scientists met in
Maine, on the Bowdoin College campus. Jack Ruina, the new director of
ARPA, called Charles Townes at IDA to coordinate his attending the
summer study. Ruina also wanted to bring several ARPA program managers
along.
“Well, we don’t want anybody from ARPA to attend except you,”
Townes told him.
Ruina was stunned. The Jasons worked for ARPA—and ARPA only.
“What do you mean, we can’t attend?” Ruina said. “We are paying for the
whole thing. You can’t say you’re [going to] have a private meeting when
it’s the government that is paying for it.”
“Sorry, you can’t come to our meetings,” Townes repeated.
“Charlie, you can’t do that,” Ruina told him.
Townes explained to Ruina that this was how the Jason scientific
advisory group worked. The Jasons sought objectivity, and they wanted to
remain free from government bureaucracy and red tape. They did not want
Pentagon interference during any of their summer studies. The Jasons
gathered together to solve problems related to national defense. That was it.
After some back-and-forth, Ruina and Townes reached an agreement of
sorts. As suggested, Jack Ruina, as director of ARPA, could attend a Jason
summer study, alone.
For the Maine summer study, the focus again was on the Defender
program. The Princeton physicist John Wheeler had a summerhouse not far
from the college campus, on a wooded island off the coast called High
Island. Wheeler had the group out to his house for many of the meetings
that summer, where the scientists held clambakes, ate lobsters, and
considered another highly classified program. This one involved the
concept of directed energy. “This was very exotic science,” Ruina recalled.
Directed energy beams come in two forms: light, which involves lasers, and
charged particles, which involve electrons or protons. “Particle beam
weapons [are] esoteric weapons systems,” Ruina explained. They come
with a “Buck Rogers death ray image,” noted an early ARPA summary,
because they “work at the speed of light and involve instantaneous kill.”
The Jason scientists wondered if an incoming ICBM could be shot down
by a directed energy beam. The conundrum, according to Ruina, “was
whether you can use a particle beam, earth-based, to form a beam through
the atmosphere and destroy an incoming warhead.” The concept’s
originator was Nick Christofilos; he had first presented the idea during
Project 137, Goldberger recalled. Scientists at Livermore laboratory had
already conducted earlier proof test experiments under the code name
Seesaw. The classified results were shared with the Jason scientists, who
were impressed. Directed energy weapons were well worth researching and
developing, they decided, and ARPA moved forward with Project Seesaw
—its first directed energy weapons program. Goldberger recalled the
program being so highly classified that not even all of the Jasons were
cleared for future work on it.
“Seesaw was a sensitive, limited-access project which deserves mention
in the ARPA history as the most enduring specific project ever supported by
the agency,” an agency review stated. ARPA’s mission was and remains
getting programs up and running, then transferring them over to the military
services or other government agencies for field use. Project Seesaw
remained in development at ARPA for fifteen long years. Then in 1974 it
was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission. Some unclassified
summaries have been released. Over the next fifty-five years, ARPA’s
directed energy weapons programs would develop and grow. The majority
of them remain highly classified.
“Directed energy is the weapon of the future,” said retired four-star
general Paul F. Gorman in a 2014 interview for this book. “But that is a
sensitive area and we can’t get into that.”
 CHAPTER SIX

Psychological Operations

A handsome dark-haired war hero named William H. Godel was

commanding the attention of a crowd of reporters outside Vandenberg Air
Force Base in California. It was June 3, 1959. Godel wore the wire-rimmed
glasses of an intellectual and walked with the slight limp of a Marine
wounded in battle, in his case the hellhole of Guadalcanal. As director of
policy and planning for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Godel had
a few facts to share with the press corps about America’s tiniest space
pioneers, four black mice. Not far away from where Godel was standing at
the podium, a seventy-eight-foot Thor Agena A rocket, carrying the
Discoverer III life-sustaining satellite, pointed upwards at the sky. The four
black mice were inside the rocket’s nosecone. They were about to be shot
into space.
The mice, Godel announced, were “happy and healthy.” They were all
males and were about two months old. These were not “ordinary mice” but
members of the C-57 strain, making them “the best specimens of a special
strain of hardy laboratory animals, selected and trained specifically for their
road trip into space and planned return to earth.” They had been selected, at
random, from a pool of sixty similarly trained mice. Their mouse capsule,
roughly two feet long and two feet wide, was air-conditioned and
soundproof. They had a food supply of unsalted ground peanuts, orange
juice, and oatmeal. Each rodent had a tiny instrument pack on its back
containing mini-transmitters that would record its heartbeat, pulse, and
body temperature and then send that information back to Air Force
veterinarians on the ground.
 Godel cautioned people to be realistic about the fate of the mice. Most
likely they would not return to earth alive, he said. The chances that the
mice astronauts would live through the journey were roughly one in seven
hundred.
“We don’t want to humanize them in any way,” said a colleague of
Godel’s, an Air Force officer. The mice were purposely unnamed because
“it would just make it worse for those people who have tender feelings
about these things.”
So much rested on the success of the mission. The space race was about
creating ICBMs capable of annihilating the other side, but it was also a
psychological race, about humans and science and who was best. Both the
United States and the Soviet Union had succeeded in getting animals into
space, but neither side had been able to launch living beings into space with
enough acceleration to escape the earth’s gravity and achieve orbital
motion, that mysterious balancing point somewhere between gravity’s pull
on the satellite and a satellite’s inherent inertia. The satellite had to reach an
altitude of 150 miles above the earth’s surface while traveling at a speed of
about 17,000 miles per hour. Too slow and the satellite would fall back to
earth; too fast and it would disappear into deep space. The plan was for the
Discoverer III life-sustaining satellite to achieve orbit, circle the earth
seventeen times, then return back to earth with the mice, ideally, alive. The
Navy had been rehearsing “a dramatic rescue effort” to retrieve the capsule
once it landed in the ocean.
In the Cold War space race, each side sought to be the first nation to
achieve specific scientific milestones. Getting mice into orbit was a big one.
The Discoverer program was, as a “satellite technology effort,” a scientific
experiment that would eventually allow humans to travel into space. That
was all true, but there was another side. Discoverer III was a highly
classified spying mission, a cover for America’s first space-based satellite
reconnaissance program, called Corona. The CIA had done the heavy lifting
in Corona’s early years, with the support of the U.S. Air Force. ARPA had
inherited the program from the Air Force in 1958. The mission of Corona
was to photograph the Soviet Union from space so that the United States
could better understand Soviet military hardware on the ground. Corona
would remain one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, and would
stay classified for thirty-six years, until February 1995. Like the U-2 spy
plane, also a highly classified CIA program, this was where technology,
espionage, and the quest for military superiority fused.
It was ARPA’s job to put satellites in space for intelligence-gathering
purposes, and William Godel oversaw these early programs. Satellite
technology gave birth to a whole new world of intelligence-collection
disciplines, including IMINT, or imagery intelligence (like Corona);
SIGINT, signals intelligence; GEOINT, geospatial intelligence; and
MASINT, measurement and signature intelligence. Some of ARPA’s most
successful early satellite programs included SAMOS (signals intelligence),
GEODESY (mapping), NOTUS (communications), TRANSIT
(navigation), and MIDAS (early warning). Most of these programs were
highly classified, while others, like TIROS, the Television-Infrared
Observation Satellite Program, amazed and informed the general public in
remarkable ways.
TIROS was the world’s first true weather satellite. ARPA had inherited
much of the technology from an Army program called JANUS. The TIROS
satellite, a first-generation remote-sensing instrument, was developed by
RCA. It weighed 270 pounds and contained a television system that
transmitted images of the earth’s weather—most notably its cloud cover—
from a 450-mile altitude orbit back to a ground station at Fort Monmouth,
New Jersey. The first launch took place on April 1, 1960; by then the
program had been transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, or NASA. In its seventy-six-day life, TIROS
transmitted 22,952 images back to earth. Every image was revolutionary.
The spiral banded structure of oceanic storms, the vastness of mountain-
wave cloud structures, the unexpected rapid changes in cloud patterns—
none of this had been seen before. Technology offered a view of the planet
previously beyond human comprehension, a new and spectacular
perspective on Mother Earth. Before TIROS it was unknown.
The first set of photographs were pictures of cloud formations along the
St. Lawrence River, over the Baja Peninsula, and across Egypt near the Red
Sea. They were so magnificent that the director of NASA personally
delivered them to President Eisenhower for him to see. The president called
a press conference and shared details of the breathtaking photographs with
the American public. The New York Times ran a four-column page-one
article about TIROS. The very notion that it was now possible to see
photographs of a storm front out at sea, before it hit land, inspired awe, if
not disbelief, in millions of people. The photographs were marvels of
modern science. National Geographic dedicated a large portion of its
August 1960 issue to the seminal images.
To William Godel, satellites provided access to legions of foreign
intelligence. Hired just weeks after ARPA’s creation, Godel held the
second-most-important job after Herb York. His nebulous title, originally
director of foreign developments, then director of policy and planning,
purposely concealed the classified nature of Godel’s work. Godel was in
charge of ARPA’s psychological warfare programs as well as its overseas
research programs, both of which would intensify during the Vietnam War.
When Godel departed the agency under FBI investigation for financial
misconduct in 1964, he left behind the most controversial and most toxic
legacy in the agency’s fifty-seven-year history. Notably, his presence at
ARPA has been largely erased from the official record. “The Pentagon
library has no information about him in our collection,” confirmed Pentagon
librarian Myron “Mike” Hanson in 2013. Declassified files located at the
National Archives and other documents obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act reveal a story of intrigue.
William Godel began his career in espionage. By the time of the
Discoverer III launch of the four black mice, Godel had more than a decade
of experience working with and among spies. He moved back and forth
between military intelligence and civilian intelligence, between the CIA and
the Pentagon, with great self-confidence and aplomb. From his earliest
beginnings as a Marine Corps intelligence officer until he began working
for ARPA in February 1958, Godel had already forged a brilliant record in
the uppermost echelons of the U.S. intelligence community. He was
intensely patriotic, physically brave, and intellectually bold. He joined the
Marine Corps in 1940, at the age of nineteen, and one month after turning
twenty-one he fought at Guadalcanal, the remote jungle-covered island in
the Pacific where Allied forces won their first major offensive against the
Empire of Japan. At Guadalcanal, Godel was shot in the leg and suffered a
near-fatal injury that left him with a leg brace and a limp.
After the war, Godel worked at the Pentagon, in military intelligence.
His boss was Major General Graves B. Erskine, a hard-charging war hero
who had already fought in both world wars. In World War II, the forty-
seven-year-old General Erskine led the Third Marine Division in the battle
for Iwo Jima. In the spring of 1950, Godel was chosen by General Erskine
to accompany him on an elite mission to Southeast Asia, a mission that
would profoundly affect how William Godel saw the world and how he
would do his job at the Pentagon over the next fourteen years.
On its face, the mission to Southeast Asia in July 1950, led by Erskine
and the diplomat John F. Melby, was a joint State Department–Defense
Department diplomatic effort to determine the long-range nature of
American objectives in the region. Its real purpose, classified secret, was to
examine how communist-backed fighters, also called insurgents or
guerrillas, were resisting and undermining French colonial rule in Vietnam.
When the Melby-Erskine team arrived in Vietnam, French military officers
handed General Erskine and his associates five thousand pages of reports to
read. Erskine found the request ridiculous.
The French “haven’t won a war since Napoleon,” he told Godel and the
team. “Why listen to a bunch of second raters when they are losing this
war?” Instead, General Erskine told his team to go out into the field with
South Vietnamese army units of the French Expeditionary Corps and make
military intelligence assessments of their own. For several weeks the
Erskine team accompanied the soldiers on tours of military installations,
including forays into Vietnam’s neighbors Laos and Cambodia. One night
the Erskine group accompanied a South Vietnamese army unit on a
nighttime ambush of a camp of communist insurgents. The French ordered
the South Vietnamese unit to capture the communist soldiers, called Viet
Minh, and bring them back to French Expeditionary Corps headquarters for
interrogation. The French believed that the Viet Minh soldiers had
information that could help them gain a strategic edge.
The ambush was a success but the mission was a failure. In an after-
action report, Godel’s colleague Captain Nick Thorpe explained why. “The
Vietnamese refused to bring back heads with bodies still attached to them,”
Thorpe wrote. To Godel, the ramifications were profound. The French
wanted the soldiers’ minds; the South Vietnamese brought them heads.
French commanders wanted intelligence; South Vietnamese soldiers wanted
revenge.
The way Godel saw it, the French colonialists were trying to fight the
Viet Minh guerrillas according to colonial rules of war. But the South
Vietnamese, who were receiving weapons and training from the French
forces, were actually fighting a different kind of war, based on different
rules. Guerrilla warfare was irrational. It was asymmetrical. It was about
cutting off the enemy’s head to send a message back home. When, in the
spring of 1950, William Godel witnessed guerrilla warfare firsthand in
Vietnam, it shifted his perspective on how the United States would need to
fight future wars. Guerrilla warfare involved psychological warfare. To
Godel, it was a necessary component for a win.

Halfway across the world in Korea, during some of the heaviest fighting of
the Korean War, a most unusual element of ARPA’s psychological warfare
programs found its origins near a hilltop called Outpost Bunker Hill. It was
the fall of 1952 on the western front, and soldiers with the First Marine
Division were freezing and tired in their rat-infested trenches. For months
the Marines had been battling the enemy here for control of area hills. Once
a hilltop was conquered, the Marines would dig in and build bunkers and
trenches with their shovels. Sometimes they could rest.
The Korean War, like so many wars, began as a civil war between the
North and the South. In June 1950 the conflict became international when
the United Nations joined the war to support the South, and the People’s
Republic of China joined the war to support the North. The international
war began as a mobile campaign, with UN forces led by an American,
General Douglas MacArthur. The initial ground assault was supported by
U.S. airpower. But after more than two years of battle, by the fall of 1952
the conflict had devolved into trench warfare, the old-fashioned, grueling
style of warfare that defined World War I and had come to symbolize
stalemate.
“We hated to dig,” recalled A. Robert Abboud, First Marine Division
Company commander at Outpost Bunker Hill. “The Chinese were
wonderful diggers. They had tunnels they could drive trucks through,” said
Abboud. “We couldn’t get to them with our air power because they were
underground all the time.”
Yet these tunnels were a lifeline for the Marines at Outpost Bunker Hill.
And so with their shovels they dug and dug, creating a labyrinth of trenches
and tunnels that provided them with some degree of safety from enemy
attack. “We had lumber, really six-by-sixes… in the trenches,” explained
Abboud, “that we’d set up and then we’d put a roof of lumber on top and
sand bags on top of that.” In this manner, the Marines created firing
positions along a number of the topographical crests. Individual men
maintained guard over their own sliver of the hill. “You had to make sure
that there was integrity, that nobody came in and infiltrated your area,” said
Abboud. The Marines relied on one another.
It was tough and brutal work, keeping enemy infiltrators at bay. The
weather was hellish and cold. It snowed much of the time, and there were
rats running around the trenches. Late at night the youngest soldiers, whom
Abboud called “just kids with bayonets,” got sent out into the darkness,
down the hill and into the rice paddies on patrol. Their job was to poke their
bayonets around on the ground in an effort to locate Chinese land mines.
Other times, more senior officers led dangerous patrols to check the
integrity of the perimeter wire. Abboud himself went so many times he lost
track of the number. Sometimes his deputy went, a young machine gun
officer whose safety Abboud felt particularly responsible for, and whose
name was Allen Macy Dulles. The young soldier’s father, Allen Welsh
Dulles, was the deputy director of the CIA.
It was also personal. Abboud and the younger Dulles had known each
other since they were boys. “I’d known Allen because he’d gone to Exeter
and he was on the debating team,” Abboud recalled. “I was on the debating
[team] at Roxbury Latin,” the venerable Boston day school. The two boys
became friends, sharing a similar passion for antiquity and a desire to study
ancient Greece. Both did; Allen Macy Dulles studied classics at Princeton,
Abboud at Harvard. Now here they were in Korea, together serving as
Marines. Despite his being the son of the deputy director of the CIA, Allen
Dulles sought no special treatment in Korea. He insisted on taking his equal
share of the dangerous night patrols, said Robert Abboud.
While both men came from privilege, Dulles came from extraordinary
privilege. In addition to his father’s powerful position at the CIA, his uncle
John Foster Dulles was about to become U.S. secretary of state. From his
knowledge of classics, Abboud knew that the history of warfare—from
Carthage to the present time—was riddled with stories of princes being
captured by enemy forces only to be used as bargaining chips. These stories
almost always had a tragic end. The thought of the young Allen Macy
Dulles being captured and taken prisoner of war by the Chinese communists
worried Abboud. Sometimes it kept him up at night.
Still, “we took turns going out there to the front lines,” Abboud recalled.
On occasion, Abboud suggested maybe it wasn’t a good idea. “If I said,
‘Allen, I can’t send you out there. Your father is [deputy] head of the CIA.
What happens if you get captured?’ He’d say, ‘I’m a Marine Corps officer
and it’s my turn to go out there. I’m going to go.’”
Which is exactly what Allen Macy Dulles did one fateful night in
November 1952.
“For God’s sake don’t get hurt!” Abboud called after his friend.
Dulles made his way out of the bunker. Abboud watched him climb over
the sandbags and head down the steep slope of the hill, then listened on the
communications system.
“I’m on the radio and I’m listening and my heart’s in my throat,”
Abboud remembered. “God, don’t let anything happen here,” he prayed.
Dulles walked down the slope a good distance until he came to where
the Marines had constructed a simple barbed-wire fence. The enemy had
cut the concertina wire there. He pulled a tool from his pocket and began
making repairs. Suddenly the area was consumed by a loud and deafening
noise. The enemy was launching a mortar attack.
“Lieutenant Dulles has been hit!” cried a voice over the radio.
Robert Abboud summoned four Marines and a stretcher. The team ran
out of the bunker, down the hill, and into the open terrain in search of
Dulles. They discovered him not far from the fence, lying on the ground.
“We found him,” Abboud recalled. The situation was grim. Dulles’s
helmet had been knocked off his head. Blood and shrapnel covered the
ground. He was unconscious. A low pulse. Abboud picked his friend’s
helmet up off the ground.
“There was a lot of his head in the helmet,” Abboud said.
The team lay Dulles on the stretcher and ran back to the bunker with
what was left of him. When a rescue chopper finally arrived, they loaded
Dulles inside. Abboud remembered watching the Sikorsky fly away. News
reached Washington, D.C., fast.
“Marine Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles, son of the deputy director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, has been critically wounded in Korea,” the
Associated Press reported the following day. The helicopter took Dulles to
the hospital ship USS Consolation, anchored off the coast of Korea. There
he remained, unconscious but with signs of life. He was twenty-two years
old.
“He was unconscious for three weeks, maybe a month,” recalled his
sister Joan Dulles Talley at age ninety, in 2014. “Initially there was no
cognition. No response to people or to environmental stimulus. Then,
slowly, he came back. He reemerged. Doctors told us there would be no
hearing in one ear but he could speak, just like someone who was normal.
At first there was hope. Allen seemed normal when we took him home. But
as month after month passed, he was not able to make a life for himself.
Then we realized what had been injured was his mind.”
Dulles had suffered a catastrophic traumatic brain injury. The promising
young scholar, brave Marine, and son of the deputy director of the CIA was,
in the words of his sister, “caught between worlds. It was as if he were
trapped in a faraway place,” Talley continued. “Allen was there, but not
really there. It was so terribly tragic. He was so young. He was someone
who had been so gifted in the mind. Like so many young soldiers he had
everything ahead of him, and then… no more.”
In November 1952 the human brain was uncharted territory. Cognitive
science, the study of the mind and its processes, was still in its dark ages.
Neuroscience, as an interdisciplinary field that now includes biology,
chemistry, genetics, and computer science, did not yet exist. Not for another
three months would James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick announce
that they had determined the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries
genes. Advanced computers that can image the human brain and produce
high-resolution scans had not yet been developed. Lobotomies—a
neurosurgical procedure that removes part of the brain’s frontal lobes—
were still being performed in U.S. hospitals as a means to treat psychiatric
illness. Brain science was as mysterious in 1952 as was the center of the
earth or the surface of the moon. Like a man lost in space, Allen Macy
Dulles had very little hope of ever returning fully to this world.
A few weeks after Allen Macy Dulles was transported back to the
United States, in January 1953, his father, Allen W. Dulles, was chosen by
President Eisenhower to be the director of the CIA. Already Dulles had
decided he would do everything in his power to help his brain-injured son.
Most notably, he hired a top brain specialist named Dr. Harold G. Wolff, a
world-renowned neurologist and director of the New York Hospital–Cornell
Medical Center. In addition to being the world’s authority on migraine
research, Dr. Wolff was a pioneer in the study of general brain behavior,
with a specialty in psychosomatic illness, or mental illness, which in 1953
did not mean all that much. Dr. Wolff, on the surface, was a man of
distinction. Privately he was a dark, shadowy figure, though this would take
decades to be known. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in
1923, Wolff traveled to Europe to study neuropathology, or diseases of the
nervous system, in Austria. Next he traveled farther east, to Leningrad,
where he worked under Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist
known for his discovery of classical conditioning, the idea that human
behavior could be strengthened or weakened though punishment and
reward. (Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1904 and will forever
be remembered for his famous dog.)
When Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles came back from Korea with his
brain injury, CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles contacted Wolff in New York
City, hoping Wolff could help his son get well. Dr. Wolff said he would be
happy to see what he could do. But the following month a national security
crisis gripped the nation, and Allen Dulles was pulled away. On February
23, 1953, a U.S. Marine colonel named Frank S. Schwable appeared on TV
as a prisoner of war of the North Koreans. Schwable, a member of the U.S.
First Marine Air Wing, had been shot down on a combat mission over
North Korea seven months earlier, in July 1952. Now, in a six-thousand-
word statement broadcast on Chinese radio, Colonel Schwable shocked the
world with a startling confession.
Colonel Schwable said that he had been given detailed orders by his
superior officers to participate in “various elements of bacteriological
warfare.” Schwable cited specific “field tests” which he claimed had already
taken place and said that military commanders had discussed with him their
plans for using biological weapons against North Korean civilians in
“regular combat operations.” Schwable named names, described meetings,
and discussed strategy. Everything Schwable said, if true, violated the
Geneva Conventions. General Mark W. Clark, UN Supreme Commander in
Korea, immediately denounced the germ warfare charges, declaring them
fabrications, but at the Pentagon, officials were aware how quickly such a
narrative could spin out of control.
 At the Pentagon, the man tasked with handling the situation was William
Godel, now deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). The
PSB coordinated psychological warfare operations between the Department
of Defense and the CIA. In response to the Colonel Schwable affair, Godel
convened an emergency meeting of the PSB. This was psychological
warfare of the worst order, Godel declared; declassified minutes of the
emergency PSB meeting indicate that its members agreed. The position of
the U.S. government was then, and is now, that it never engaged in
biological warfare in Korea. So how should the United States respond?
Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson suggested an “all out campaign to
smear the Koreans.” He wanted the Pentagon to accuse the communists of
“a new form of war crime, and a new form of refinement in atrocity
techniques; namely mind murder, or menticide.” The CIA thought this was
a bad idea. “Menticide” was too powerful a word, Director Dulles
cautioned, and it conceded too much power to the communists. But time
was critical, and the Pentagon had to respond. The members of the PSB
agreed to a watered-down version of Secretary Wilson’s suggestion. Hours
later, the Department of Defense issued a statement calling Colonel
Schwable’s action the result of the “mind-annihilating methods of these
Communists in extorting whatever words they want.” Defense Department
officials had a very specific name for what the communists were doing to
our soldiers, a word recommended by the CIA. The communists were
“brainwashing” American soldiers, the Pentagon said.
It was a CIA move that was three years in the making. In fact, the word
“brainwashing” had entered the English lexicon in September 1950,
courtesy of the CIA, when an article written by a reporter named Edward
Hunter appeared in a Miami newspaper, the News. “Brain-Washing Tactics
Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,” the headline read.
Although Hunter had been a journalist for decades, he also worked for the
CIA. He’d been hired by the agency on a contract basis to disseminate
brainwashing stories through the mainstream press. “Brain-washing,” wrote
Hunter, was a devious new tool being used by the communists to strip a
man of his humanity and “turn him into a robot or a slave.” The very
concept grabbed Americans by the throat. The notion of government mind-
control programs had been a mainstay of dystopian science-fiction novels
for decades, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We to Aldous Huxley’s
1932 best-seller Brave New World. But that was science fiction. This was
real, Hunter wrote. To be incinerated in a nuclear bomb attack was an ever-
present Cold War threat, but it was also an abstraction, difficult to
conceptualize on an individual scale. In 1950, the idea of being
brainwashed, as if controlled by an evil wizard’s spell—that was somehow
much easier to relate to. Brainwashing terrified people, and they wanted to
know more.
Edward Hunter wrote article after article on the subject, expanding his
stories into a book. The communists, he declared, had developed tactics “to
put a man’s mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is
untrue, what is right for what is wrong.” Brainwashing could turn a man
into an amnesiac who could “not remember wrong from right.” Memories
could be implanted in a brainwashed man whereby he would “come to
believe what did not happen actually had happened, until he ultimately
becomes a robot for the Communist manipulator,” Hunter warned.
In the September 1950 Miami News article, Hunter claimed to have
information proving that the Chinese had created “brainwashing panels” of
experts who used drugs, hypnosis, and other sinister means that could
render a man “a demon [or] a puppet.” The goal of the communists, said
Hunter, was to conquer America by conquering its citizens—one at a time.
In a follow-up book on the subject, Hunter explained the science behind the
“mind atrocities called brainwashing.” Through conditioning, the
communists intended to change human nature. To turn men into ants. “What
the totalitarian state strives for is the insectivization of human beings,”
Hunter declared. “Brain changing is the culmination of this whole evil
process,” he said. “The brain created science and now will be subordinate to
it.” Even Congress invited Hunter to testify before the Committee on Un-
American Activities, in a session discussing “Communist Psychological
Warfare (Brainwashing).” He was presented as an author and a foreign
correspondent, with no mention of his role as a CIA operative.
Psychologists across America echoed Hunter’s thinking, adding to the
growing fear of mind control. In an article for the New York Times
Magazine, the renowned psychologist and former prisoner of the Nazis
Joost A. M. Meerloo agreed that brainwashing was real and possible. “The
totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their
own purposes,” Meerloo wrote.
 With all this focus on brainwashing and its evil power, starting with
Hunter’s first mention of the concept in the fall of 1950, it is surprising how
quickly the story of the brainwashed Marine colonel Frank S. Schwable in
the winter of 1953 went away. At first the situation garnered considerable
press, but then diffused. This was largely due to the behind-the-scenes
efforts of William Godel. Godel had been assigned to act as liaison between
the Pentagon and the government of North Korea in an effort to get
Schwable and thousands of other Korean War POWs released. The
documents at the National Archives are limited in number, and many
remain classified, but what surfaces is the notion that William Godel was
extremely effective at his job. By the late summer of 1953, the majority of
the captured pilots had been returned. Many of them appeared on television
and explained what had been done to them, that they had been tortured into
making false confessions. A solid narrative emerged. The evil communists
had tried to “brainwash” the Americans, with emphasis on the word “tried,”
and failed. Schwable recanted everything he had said and was awarded the
Legion of Merit. The American public welcomed this idea with open arms;
in his constitution and character, the American serviceman was stronger
than and superior to the communist brainwashers.

As for Allen Macy Dulles, he was not getting any better. The brain injury
had damaged his prefrontal cortex, leaving him with permanent short-term
amnesia, also called anterograde amnesia. He had lost the ability to transfer
new information from his short-term memory to his long-term memory. He
knew who he was, but he could not remember things like where he was. Or
what day it was. Or what he had done twenty minutes before.
“He was present, one hundred percent present, in the moment,” his sister
Joan Talley said. “But he could not hang on to anything that was happening
anymore. He could remember everything about his life up to the war, up to
the injury. Then nothing.” His days at Exeter, when he was a teenager, were
his fondest memories, all sharp. He retained much knowledge of the
classics, and of ancient Greek warfare, which he had studied at Princeton.
He could recall training with the Marines, but from the moment of the
injury, it was all darkness. Just a blank page. “You would talk to him, and
ten minutes later he would not remember anything that you had just said,”
Joan Talley recalled. “Poor Allen began to act paranoid.” Conspiratorial
thinking gripped his mind. It was the fault of the Nazis, he claimed. The
fault of the Jews. His father was not his father. His father was a Nazi spy.
“The psychiatrists tried to say it was mental illness. That Allen was
suffering from schizophrenia. That was the new diagnosis back then. Blame
everything on schizophrenia.”
The ambitious Dr. Harold Wolff could not help Allen Macy Dulles, nor
could any of the other doctors hired by his father. He was moved into a
mental institution, called the Chestnut Lodge, in Rockville, Maryland. This
was the infamous locale where the CIA sent officers who experienced
mental breakdowns. How much doctoring went on at the Chestnut Lodge
remains the subject of debate, but the facility offered safety, security, and
privacy. Joan Talley visited her brother regularly, though it pained her to see
him locked up there.
“Allen was suffering from a terrible brain injury,” she said. “Of course
he wasn’t crazy…. Allen had been absolutely brilliant before the brain
injury, before the war. It was as if somewhere down inside he knew that he
was [once] very intelligent but that he wasn’t anymore. It drove him mad.
That his brilliance in life was over. That there would be brilliance no more.”
Allen Macy Dulles was shuffled around from one mental hospital to
another. Eventually he was sent overseas, to a lakeside sanatorium in
Switzerland, where he returned to a prewar life of anonymity. Joan moved
to Zurich, to study psychology. She visited her brother every week.
Dr. Harold Wolff did not disappear. He had become friendly with CIA
director Dulles while treating his amnesiac son. Now Dr. Wolff had a bold
proposal for the CIA. A research project in a similar field. What, really, was
brainwashing other than an attempt to make a man forget things he once
held dear? Wolff believed this was rich territory to mine. The brainwashing
crisis with the Korean War POWs had passed, but there was much to learn
from brainwashing techniques. What if a man really could be transformed
into an ant, a robot, or a slave? What if he could be made to forget things?
This could be a major tool in psychological warfare operations. The CIA
was interested, and so was William Godel.
In late 1953 Dr. Wolff secured a CIA contract to explore brainwashing
techniques, together with Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, his partner at the Cornell
University Medical College in New York City. Their classified report,
which took more than two years to complete, would become the definitive
study on communist brainwashing techniques. From there, the work
expanded. Soon the two doctors had their own CIA-funded program to
carry out experiments in behavior modification and mind control. It was
called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. One of their jobs
was to conduct a study on the soldiers who had become POWs during the
Korean War. This work would later be revisited by the CIA and DARPA
starting in 2005.
At the Pentagon, having so adroitly dealt with the POW brainwashing
scandal, William Godel was elevated to an even more powerful position.
Starting in 1953, he served as deputy director of the Office of Special
Operations, an office inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Godel’s
boss was General Graves B. Erskine. Godel acted as liaison between the
Pentagon and the CIA and NSA. So trusted was William Godel that during
important meetings he would sometimes serve as an alternate for the deputy
secretary of defense. In declassified State Department memos, Godel was
praised as an “expert from DoD on techniques and practices of
psychological warfare.” He worked on many different classified programs
in the years from 1955 to 1957 and left a footprint around the world. As
part of the Joint Intelligence Group, he was in charge of “collecting,
evaluating and disseminating intelligence in support of activities involving
the recovery of U.S. nationals held prisoner in Communist countries around
the globe.” He served as deputy director of the Office of Special
Operations, Department of the Navy, and was in charge of the classified
elements of the Navy’s mission to map Antarctica. In March 1956, a five-
mile-wide ice shelf off the coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, was
named after him, the Godel Iceport. But his true passion was
counterinsurgency.
In 1957 Godel traveled around the country, giving lectures at war
colleges to promote the idea that the United States would sooner or later
have to fight wars in remote places like Vietnam. In many ways, Godel
would say to his military-member audiences, America was already fighting
these wars, just not out in the open. In his lectures he would remark that by
the time of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the U.S. had “been paying
eighty percent of the bill.” Godel believed that America had “to learn to
fight a war that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, doesn’t have the North
German Plain, and doesn’t necessarily involve Americans.”
Godel believed he knew what the future of warfare would look like.
How its fighters would act. They would use irregular warfare tactics, like
the ambushes and beheadings he had witnessed in Vietnam. America’s
future wars would not be fought by men wearing U.S. Army uniforms,
Godel said. They would be fought by local fighters who had been trained by
U.S. forces, with U.S. tactics and know-how, and carrying U.S. weapons.
The way Godel saw it, the Pentagon needed to develop advanced weaponry,
based on technology that was not just nuclear technology, but that could
deal with this coming threat. Godel formulated a theory, something he
proudly called his “bold summation.” Insurgents might have superior
discipline, organization, and motivation, he said. But science and
technology could give “our” side the leading edge.
In February 1958, William Godel was hired on in a key position at the
newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was Godel’s role as
director of the Office of Foreign Developments to handle what would be
ARPA’s covert military operations overseas. For Godel, his experience in
Vietnam back in 1950 left him convinced that if America was going to
defeat the global spread of communism, it needed to wage a new kind of
warfare called counterinsurgency warfare, or COIN. Godel was now in a
position to create and implement the very programs he had been telling war
college audiences across the country needed to be created. Through
inserting a U.S. military presence into foreign lands threatened by
communism—through advanced science and technology—democracy
would prevail and communism would fail. This quest would quickly
become Godel’s obsession.
In 1959 ARPA’s Office of Foreign Developments was renamed the
Policy and Planning Division. Godel retained the position of director. Herb
York moved from chief scientist at ARPA to the director of the Defense
Department of Research and Engineering, or DDR&E, with all ARPA
program managers still reporting to him. Herb York and William Godel
shared a similar view: the United States must aggressively seek out
potential research and development capabilities to assist anticommunist
struggles in foreign countries by using cutting-edge technology, most of
which did not yet exist. In early 1960, York authorized a lengthy trip for
Godel and for York’s new deputy director, John Macauley. The two men
were to travel through Asia and Australia to set up foreign technology–
based operations there. Godel still acted as ARPA liaison to the NSA and
CIA.
Godel traveled to a remote area in South Australia called Woomera.
Here the Defense Department was building the largest overland missile
range outside the Soviet Union. The site was critical to ARPA’s Defender
program. Next he went to Southeast Asia, where he made a general
assessment of the communist insurgency that was continuing to escalate
there, most notably in Vietnam. Upon his return to the United States, Godel
outlined his observations in a memo. In 1960 the South Vietnamese army
had 150,000 men, making them far superior, numerically, to what was
estimated to be an insurgent fighting force of between only three thousand
to five thousand communists, the Viet Minh or Vietcong. And yet the South
was unable to control this insurgency, which was growing at an accelerating
rate. South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s “congenitally trained,
conventionally organized and congenitally equipped military organizations
are incapable of employment in anti-guerrilla operations,” Godel wrote.
For the secretary of defense William Godel prepared lengthy memos on
the unique nature of the insurgency, singling out the growing communist-
backed guerrilla forces in Vietnam and neighboring Laos and the “potential
value of applying scientific talent to the problem.” Godel suggested that
ARPA create “self-sustaining paramilitary organizations at the group level,”
to be sent into Vietnam to conduct psychological warfare operations. Godel
believed that ARPA should begin providing local villagers with weapons to
use, so as to turn them into counterinsurgency fighters for the Pentagon.
“These forces should be provided not with conventional arms and
equipment requiring third-and fourth-level maintenance but with a
capability to be farmers or taxi drivers during the day and anti-guerrilla
forces at night.” William Godel was suggesting that ARPA take on a role
that until now had been the domain of the Special Operations Division of
the CIA and U.S. Army Special Forces teams. Godel believed that ARPA
should create its own army of ARPA-financed fighters who would appear to
be civilians by day, but who would take on the role of paramilitary
operators by night. A new chapter in ARPA history had begun.
Upon returning from Vietnam, Godel roamed the halls of the Pentagon,
intent on garnering support for his counterinsurgency views. He was largely
ignored. “Godel continued to press his views on people throughout the
government, many of them well-placed via his remarkable network of
contacts,” said an ARPA colleague, Lee Huff, but the Eisenhower
administration had little interest in his ideas, and he was vetoed at every
turn. With the arrival of a new president, this would change.

When a new president takes office, he generally changes the guard. And the
arrival of John Fitzgerald Kennedy meant the departure of Herb York.
“When John Kennedy won the 1960 election [I] became what politicians
call lame ducks,” York later observed, adding that he was not sorry to go. “I
didn’t have to spend all my time putting out fires” anymore. York was
proud of the work he had accomplished while at ARPA, the “truly
revolutionary changes” he had overseen at the Pentagon. At the top of the
list was the arsenal of nuclear weapons he had helped build up. “By the end
of the Eisenhower period, we had firm plans and commitments for the
deployment of about 1,075 ICBMs (805 Minutemen plus 270 Atlas and
Titans),” York noted with pride.
He also admitted that these accomplishments presented a paradox. As he
put it, “Our nuclear strategy, and the objective situation underlying it,
created an awful dilemma.” After his years working on ARPA’s Defender
program, he had “concluded that a defense of the population was and very
probably would remain impossible in the nuclear era.”
At noon on January 20, 1960, John F. Kennedy became the thirty-fifth
president of the United States. It would be more than a week before York
would officially leave office. As the “senior holdover in the [Defense]
Department,” York explained, “I became the Secretary of Defense at the
same moment” the president took office. Former Ford Motor Company
president Robert McNamara had been nominated to serve as Kennedy’s
secretary of defense, but it was not known how long the confirmation
hearings would take. In the meantime, someone had to be in charge of the
nation’s nuclear weapons. The practice of the president remaining in
constant contact with the so-called nuclear football, the briefcase containing
the codes and other data enabling a president to order a nuclear launch, was
not yet in effect. In January 1961 it was the job of the secretary of defense
to carry the case, to be responsible for, in York’s words, “getting the nuclear
machine ready to go into action when the president so ordered it.” What this
meant was that for now, Herb York was in charge of America’s entire
nuclear arsenal.
A special red telephone was installed in York’s bedroom, at his home
just outside Washington. It had a large red plastic light on top that would
flash if York was being called. The red phone was connected to one place
only, the War Room located beneath the Pentagon. The day after Kennedy’s
inauguration, York decided to venture over to the War Room to see what
was going on down there.
“When I knocked at the door, a major opened it a crack,” York
recounted.
From behind the crack in the door, the man asked, “What do you want?”
“I’m the acting secretary of defense,” York answered.
“Just a minute,” said the man. He closed the door gently in York’s face.
A few moments later, the man, an Army major, returned and let Herb York
inside, not without some fanfare. York looked around. Here, the Pentagon
was keeping special “watch” on situations around the globe considered
most critical to national security. One place was the Central African
Republic of the Congo, not yet called Zaire, where a rebellion was under
way in the mineral-rich province of Katanga. “The other was Laos,”
recalled York, Vietnam’s turbulent neighbor. The next three presidents
would have their presidencies defined by the Vietnam War. But at that time,
as far as the rest of America was concerned, “nothing special was going on
in either place, as far as our people knew. Vietnam was not yet in our
sights.”
The following week, Robert McNamara was confirmed as the new
secretary of defense. No one bothered to go to York’s house and retrieve the
red telephone. “It remained there until I left Washington, permanently, some
four months later,” said York.
 PART II

THE VIETNAM WAR

 CHAPTER SEVEN

Techniques and Gadgets

The first two U.S. military advisors to die in the Vietnam War were
ambushed. Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand were
sitting with six other Americans in the mess hall of a South Vietnamese
army camp twenty-five miles north of Saigon when the attack came. The
lights were off and the men were watching a Hollywood movie, a film noir
thriller called The Tattered Dress. When it was time to change the reel, a
U.S. Army technician flipped on the lights.
Outside, a group of communist guerrilla fighters had been surveilling the
army post and waiting for the right moment to attack. With the place now
illuminated, they pushed the muzzles of their semiautomatic weapons
through the windows and opened fire. Major Buis and Master Sergeant
Ovnand were killed instantly, as were two South Vietnamese army guards
and an eight-year-old Vietnamese boy. In a defensive move, Major Jack
Hellet turned the lights back off. The communist fighters fled, disappearing
into the jungle from where they had come.
In his first two months in office, President Kennedy spent more time on
Vietnam and neighboring Laos than on any other national security concern.
Counterinsurgency warfare, all but ignored by President Eisenhower, was
now a top priority for the new president. William Godel finally had an ear,
and by winter, the Advanced Projects Research Agency made its bold first
entry into the tactical arena. On the morning of his eighth day in office, the
new president summoned his most senior advisors—the vice president, the
secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the director of the CIA, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the assistant secretary of defense, and
a few others—to the White House. The subject of their meeting was the
“Viet-nam counter-insurgency plan,” the location still so foreign and far
away that it was hyphenated in the official memorandum. Two days after
the meeting, President Kennedy authorized an increase of $41.1 million to
expand and train the South Vietnamese army, roughly $325 million in 2015.
Of far greater significance for ARPA, President Kennedy signed an official
“Counter-insurgency Plan.” This important meeting paved the way for the
creation of two high-level groups to deal with the most classified aspects of
fighting communist insurgents in Vietnam, the Vietnam Task Force and the
Special Group. William Godel was made a member of both groups.
From the earliest days of his presidency, Kennedy worked to distance
himself from a traditional, old school military mindset. President
Eisenhower, age seventy-one when he left office, had been a five-star
general and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe
during World War II. President Kennedy was a dashing young war hero, full
of idealism and enthusiasm, and just forty-three years old. Kennedy sought
a more adaptable, collegial style of policy making when it came to issues of
national security. The Eisenhower doctrine was based on mutual assured
destruction, or MAD. The Kennedy doctrine would become known as
“flexible response.” The new president believed that the U.S. military
needed to be able to fight limited wars, quickly and with flexibility,
anywhere around the world where communism threatened democracy. In
describing his approach, Kennedy said that the nation must be ready “to
deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear or conventional, large or small.”
The new president reduced the number of National Security Council
staff by more than twenty and eliminated the Operations Coordinating
Board and the Planning Board. In their place, he created interagency task
forces. These task forces were almost always chaired by men from his inner
circle, Ivy League intellectuals on the White House staff or in the Pentagon.
Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, was a Harvard
Business School graduate whose deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, was a graduate
of Yale Law School. The president’s brother and attorney general, Robert
Kennedy, was, like the president, a Harvard grad. National security advisor
McGeorge Bundy graduated from Yale, as did deputy national security
advisor Walt Rostow and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs William Bundy (brother of McGeorge
Bundy), who also attended Harvard Law School. The staffs of many
presidential administrations have been top-heavy with Ivy League
graduates, but to many in Washington, it seemed as if President Kennedy
was making a statement. That a man’s intellectual prowess was to be valued
above everything else. War was a thinking man’s game, he seemed to be
saying. Intellect won wars. The most powerful men in Secretary
McNamara’s Pentagon were defense intellectuals, including many former
RAND Corporation employees. As a group, they would become known as
McNamara’s whiz kids.
“Viet-nam” had to be dealt with, the president’s advisors agreed. On
April 12, 1961, in a memo to the president, Walt Rostow suggested “Nine
Proposals for Action” in Vietnam to fight the guerrillas there. “Action
Proposal Number Five,” written by William Godel, suggested “the sending
to Viet-Nam of a research and development and military hardware team
which would explore with General McGarr which of the various techniques
and ‘gadgets’ now available or being explored that might be relevant and
useful in the Viet-nam operation.” General Lionel McGarr was the
commander of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam (MAAG-
V), and the ongoing “Viet-nam operation,” which involved training the
South Vietnamese army in U.S. war-fighting skills. Godel’s action proposal
called for ARPA to augment MAAG-V efforts with a new assemblage of
“techniques and ‘gadgets.’”
President Kennedy liked Godel’s proposal and personally requested
more information. The following week, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Roswell Gilpatric submitted to the president a memorandum that elaborated
on “Action Proposal Number Five.” This particular plan of action,
according to Gilpatric, involved the use of cutting-edge technology to fight
the communist insurgents. He proposed that ARPA establish its own
research and development center in Saigon, a physical location where an
ARPA field unit could develop new weapons specifically tailored to jungle-
fighting needs. There would be other projects too, said Gilpatric—the
“techniques” element of Godel’s proposal. These would involve
sociological research programs and psychological warfare campaigns. The
ARPA facility, set up in buildings adjacent to the MAAG-V center, would
be called the Combat Development and Test Center. It would be run jointly
by ARPA, MAAG-V, and the South Vietnamese armed forces (ARVN). The
ARPA program would be called Project Agile, as in flexible, capable, and
quick-witted. Just like the president and his advisors.
The following month, President Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon B.
Johnson to meet personally with South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh
Diem and garner support for the “techniques and ‘gadgets’” idea.
Photographs of the two men dressed in matching white tuxedo jackets and
posing for cameras at Diem’s Independence Palace in Saigon were reprinted
in newspapers around the world. Johnson, who was six foot four, towered
over the diminutive Diem, whose head barely reached Johnson’s shoulder.
Both men smiled broadly, expressing commitment to their countries’
ongoing partnership. Communism was a scourge, and together the
governments of the United States and South Vietnam intended to eradicate
it from the region.
President Diem, an avowed anticommunist and fluent English speaker,
was Catholic, well educated, and enamored of modernity. These qualities
made him a strong ally of the U.S. government but alienated him from
many of his own people. In the early 1960s, the majority of Vietnamese
were agrarian peasants—Buddhist and Taoist rice farmers who lived at the
subsistence level in rural communities distant from Saigon. By the time
President Diem met with Vice President Johnson to discuss fighting
communist insurgents with techniques and gadgets, Diem had been in
power for six years. Diem ruled with a heavy hand and was notoriously
corrupt, but the Kennedy administration believed it could make the situation
work.
During the meeting, Johnson asked Diem to agree to an official memo of
understanding, to “consider jointly the establishment in [Saigon] of a
facility to develop and test [weapons], using the tools of modern technology
and new techniques, to help [both parties] in their joint campaign against
the Communists.” Diem agreed and the men shook hands, setting Project
Agile in motion and giving ARPA the go-ahead to set up a weapons facility
in Saigon.
“[Diem] is the Winston Churchill of Asia!” Johnson famously declared.
The following month, on June 8, 1961, William Godel traveled to
Vietnam with Project Agile’s first research and development team to set up
ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center (CDTC). Project Agile was
now a “Presidential issue,” which gave Godel authority and momentum to
act. The new R&D center was located in a group of one-story stone
buildings facing the Navy Yard, near the Saigon River. Each building had
heavy shutters on the windows and doors to keep out the intense Saigon
heat. Ceiling fans were permanent fixtures inside all the buildings, as were
potted palms and tiled floors. On the walls hung large maps of Vietnam and
framed posters of the CDTC logo, an amalgamation of a helmet, wings, an
anchor, and a star. Desks and tabletops were adorned with miniature
freestanding U.S. flags, and there were large glass ashtrays on almost every
surface. Some buildings housed ARPA administrators, while others
functioned as laboratories where scientists and engineers worked.
Photographs in the National Archives show “ARPA” stamped in bold
stenciling on metal desks, tables, and folding chairs.
During the trip, Godel met three separate times with President Diem. On
one visit Diem toured the CDTC, and in photographs he appears confident
and pleased as he strolls down the pebble pathways, wearing his signature
Western-style white suit and hat. Accompanying Diem is his ever-present
entourage of military advisors, soldiers dressed in neat khaki uniforms,
aviator sunglasses, and shiny shoes. In Godel’s first field report he notes
President’s Diem insistence that U.S. military involvement in South
Vietnam remain disguised. This, warned Diem, was the only way for the
two countries to continue their successful partnership. The success of
Project Agile rested on discretion and secrecy. Godel agreed, and a large
open-sided workspace—similar to an airplane hangar but without walls—
was constructed adjacent to the CDTC. Here, local Vietnamese laborers
toiled away in plain sight, building components for Project Agile’s various
secret weapons programs.
By August, ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was up and
running with a staff of twenty-five Americans. Colonel William P. Brooks,
U.S. Army, served as chief of the ARPA R&D field unit, while President
Diem’s assistant chief of staff, Colonel Bui Quang Trach, was officially “in
charge,” which was how he signed documents related to the CDTC. ARPA’s
first staffers included military officers, civilian scientists, engineers, and
academics. Some had research and development experience and others had
combat experience. The CDTC was connected by a secure telephone line to
room 2B-261 at the Pentagon, where Project Agile had an office. Agile’s
budget for its first year was relatively modest, just $11.3 million, or one-
tenth of the budget for ARPA’s biggest program, Defender. By the
following year, Project Agile’s budget would double, transforming it into
the third-largest ARPA program, after Defender and Vela.
Upon returning to Washington, D.C., from Saigon, Godel traveled across
the nation’s capital, giving briefings on Project Agile to members of the
departments of State and Defense, and the CIA. On July 6, 1961, he gave a
closed seminar at the Foreign Service Institute. There he discussed the first
four military equipment programs to be discreetly introduced into the
jungles of Vietnam—a boat, an airplane, guns, and dogs. At first glance,
they hardly seem high-tech. Two of the four programs, the boats and the
dogs, were as old as warfare itself. But ARPA’s “swamp boat” was a
uniquely designed paddlewheel boat with a steam engine that burned cane
alcohol; it carried twenty to thirty men. What made it unusual was that it
was engineered to float almost silently and could operate in as little as three
inches of water. In 1961, the night in Vietnam was ruled by the Vietcong
communist insurgents, which meant the boat had to be able to travel quietly
down the Mekong Delta waterways so that U.S. Special Forces working
with South Vietnamese soldiers could infiltrate enemy territory without
being ambushed.
ARPA’s canine program was far more ambitious than using dogs in the
traditional role of sentinels. “One of the most provoking problems [in
Vietnam] is the detection and identification of enemy personnel,” ARPA
chemists A. C. Peters and W. H. Allton Jr. stated in an official report, noting
how Vietcong fighters were generally indistinguishable from local peasants
in South Vietnam. ARPA’s dog program sought to develop a chemical
whose scent could be detected by Army-trained dogs but not by humans. As
part of a tagging and tracking program, the plan was to have Diem’s
soldiers surreptitiously mark large groups of people with this chemical, then
use dogs to track whoever turned up later in a suspicious place, like outside
a military base.
ARPA’s canine program was an enormous undertaking. The chemical
had to work in a hot, wet climate, leave a sufficient “spoor” to enable
tracking by dogs, and be suitable for spraying from an aircraft. The first
chemical ARPA scientists focused their work on what was called squalene,
a combination of shark and fish liver oil. German shepherds were trained in
Fort Benning, Georgia, and then sent to the CDTC in Saigon. But an
administrative oversight set the program back when Army handlers
neglected to account for “temperatures reaching a level greater than 100 F.”
After forty-five minutes of work in the jungles of Vietnam, the ARPA dogs
“seemed to lose interest in any further detection trials.” The German
shepherds’ acute sense of smell could not be sustained in the intense jungle
heat.
The first Project Agile aircraft introduced into the war theater was a
power glider designed for audio stealth—light, highly maneuverable, and
able to fly just above the jungle canopy for extended periods on a single
tank of gasoline. Godel called it “an airborne Volkswagen.” Because it flew
so close to the treetops, guerrilla fighters found it nearly impossible to shoot
down. ARPA’s power glider would pave the way for an entirely new class
of unconventional military aircraft, including drones.
The most significant weapon to emerge from the early days of Project
Agile was the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. In the summer of 1961, Diem’s
small-in-stature army was having difficulty handling the large
semiautomatic weapons carried by U.S. military advisors. In the AR-15
Godel saw promise, “something the short, small Vietnamese can fire
without bowling themselves over,” he explained. Godel worked with
legendary gun designer Eugene M. Stoner to create ten lightweight AR-15
prototypes, each weighing just 6.7 pounds. Vietnamese commanders at the
CDTC expressed enthusiasm for this new weapon, Godel told Secretary
McNamara, preferring it to the M1 Garand and Browning BARs they had
been carrying.
Inside the Pentagon, the military services had been arguing about a
service-wide infantry weapon—since Korea. With Agile’s “Presidential
issue” authority, Godel cut through years of red tape and oversaw the
shipment of one thousand AR-15s to the CDTC without delay. U.S. Special
Forces took the AR-15 into the battle zone for live-action tests. “At a
distance of approximately fifteen meters, [a U.S. soldier] fired the weapon
at two VC [Vietcong] armed with carbines, grenades, and mines,” read an
after-action report from 340 Ranger Company. “One round in the [VC’s]
head took it completely off. Another in the right arm took it completely off,
too. One round hit him in the right side, causing a hole about five inches in
diameter. It can be assumed that any one of the three wounds would have
caused death,” the company commander wrote.
 In 1963 the AR-15 became the standard-issue rifle of the U.S. Army. In
1966 it was adapted for fully automatic fire and redesignated the M16
assault rifle. The weapon is still being used by U.S. soldiers. “The
development of the M-16 would almost certainly not have come about
without the existence of ARPA,” noted an unpublished internal ARPA
review, written in 1974.

The Combat Development and Test Center was up and running with four
weapons programs, but dozens more were in the works. Project Agile
“gadgets” would soon include shotguns, rifle grenades, shortened strip
bullets, and high-powered sound canons. ARPA wanted a proximity fuse
with an extra 75-millisecond delay so bombs dropped from aircraft could be
detonated below the jungle canopy but just above the ground. Big projects
and small projects, ARPA needed them all. Entire fleets of Army vehicles
required retrofitting and redesign to handle rugged jungle trails. ARPA
needed resupply aircraft with short takeoff and landing capability. It had
plans to develop high-flying helicopters and low-flying drones. ARPA
needed scientists to create disposable parachutes for aerial resupply,
chemists to develop antivenom snakebite and leech repellent kits,
technicians to create listening devices and seismic monitoring devices that
looked like rocks but could track guerrilla fighters’ movement down a
jungle trail. ARPA needed teams of computer scientists to design and build
data collection systems and storage systems, and to retrofit existing air,
ground, and ocean systems so all the different military services involved in
this fight against the Vietnamese communists could communicate better.
But there was one weapons program—highly classified—that
commanded more of Godel’s attention than the others. This particular
program was unlike any other in the Project Agile arsenal in that it had the
potential to act as a silver bullet—a single solution to the complex hydra-
headed problem of counterinsurgency. It involved chemistry and crops, and
its target was the jungle. Eventually the weapon would become known to
the world as Agent Orange, and instead of being a silver bullet, Agent
Orange was a hideous toxin. But in 1961, herbicidal warfare was still
considered an acceptable idea and William Godel was in charge of running
the program for ARPA.
 At Fort Detrick, in Maryland, ARPA ran a toxicology branch where it
worked on chemical weapons–related programs with Dr. James W. Brown,
deputy chief of the crops division of the Army Chemical Corps Biological
Laboratories. ARPA had Dr. Brown working on a wide variety of defoliants
with the goal of finding a chemical compound that could perform two
functions at once. ARPA wanted to strip the leaves off trees so as to deny
Vietcong fighters protective cover from the jungle canopy. And they wanted
to starve Vietcong fighters into submission by poisoning their primary food
crop, a jungle root called manioc.
On July 17, 1961, Godel met with the Vietnam Task Force to brief its
members on what was then a highly classified defoliation program, and to
discuss the next steps. “This is a costly operation which would require some
three years for maximum effectiveness,” Godel said. The use of biological
and chemical weapons was prohibited by the Geneva Convention and from
his experience in Korea, Godel knew how easily the international spotlight
could turn its focus on claims of Geneva Convention violations. For this
reason, anyone briefed on the defoliation campaign and all personnel
working at the CDTC were advised to move forward, “subject to political-
psychological restrictions (such as those imposed by Communist claims of
U.S. biological warfare in Korea).” The classified program would be called
“anticrop warfare research,” as destroying enemy food supplies was not
against the rules of war. In the field, operational activities were to be
referred to as “CDTC Task Number 20,” or “Task 20” for short.
While it is interesting to note ARPA’s unity with the Vietnam Task Force
on the question of allowing this controversial decision to proceed, the
record indicates that the meeting was a formality and that Godel had
already gotten the go-ahead. On the same day Godel met with the Vietnam
Task Force, the first batch of crop-killing chemicals—a defoliant called
Dinoxol—arrived at the Combat Development and Test Center in Saigon. A
few days later, spray aircraft were shipped. And a week after that, Dr. James
W. Brown, deputy chief of the crops division at Fort Detrick, arrived at the
CDTC to oversee the first defoliation field tests.
The first mission to spray herbicides on the jungles of Vietnam occurred
on August 10, 1961. The helicopter—an American-made H-34 painted in
the colors of the South Vietnamese army and equipped with an American-
made spray system called a HIDAL (Helicopter Insecticide Dispersal
Apparatus, Liquid)—was flown by a South Vietnamese air force pilot.
President Diem was an enthusiastic advocate of defoliation, and two weeks
later he personally chose the second target. On August 24 a fixed-wing
aircraft sprayed the poisonous herbicide Dinoxol over a stretch of jungle
along Route 13, fifty miles north of Saigon.
The defoliation tests were closely watched at the Pentagon. R&D field
units working out of the CDTC oversaw Vietnamese pilots as they
continued to spray herbicides on manioc groves and mangrove swamps.
Godel and his staff were working on a more ambitious follow-up plan. A
portion of the Mekong Delta believed to contain one of the heaviest
Vietcong populations, designated “Zone D,” was chosen to be the target of a
future multiphase campaign. Phase I set a goal of defoliating 20 percent of
the manioc groves and mangrove swamps over a thirty-day period. This
was to be followed by Phase II, with a goal of defoliating the remaining 80
percent of Zone D, meaning the entire border with North Vietnam.
Together, the two-part operation would take ninety days to complete. After
Phase I and Phase II were completed, Phase III called for the defoliation of
another 31,250 square miles of jungle, which was roughly half of South
Vietnam. Finally, ARPA’s R&D field units would be dispatched to burn
down all the resulting dead trees, turning the natural jungle into man-made
farmland. This way, Godel’s team explained, once the insurgency was
extinguished, it would not be able to reignite. The projected cost for the
Project Agile defoliation campaign was between $75 and $80 million, more
than half a billion dollars in 2015. The only foreseeable problem, wrote the
staff, was that the program’s ambitious scope would require more chemicals
than could realistically be manufactured in the United States.

In 1961, few Americans outside elite government circles knew what was
happening in Vietnam. Inside Washington, the power struggles over how
best to handle the communist insurgency were becoming contentious as the
rift between the White House and the Pentagon widened. Just three months
after taking office, Kennedy experienced the bitter low point of his
presidency when a CIA-sponsored, military-supported paramilitary invasion
of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba failed. More than a hundred men were killed and
twelve hundred were captured. The fiasco damaged the president’s
relationship not only with the CIA but also with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Publicly, President Kennedy assumed full blame. “I’m the responsible
official of the government,” he famously said. But to his closest White
House advisors, he said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had failed him.
“The first advice I’m going to give my successor,” Kennedy told
Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, “is to watch the generals and to avoid
feeling that just because they were military men their opinion[s] on military
matters were worth a damn.” The situation seemed to strengthen his
perception that his group of intellectually minded White House advisors
and civilian Pentagon advisors, the so-called McNamara whiz kids, not only
were more trustworthy but also had better ideas on military matters than did
the military men themselves.
After the Bay of Pigs, in the summer of 1961 President Kennedy created
a new position on his White House staff called military representative of the
president. The post was created specifically for General Maxwell Taylor, a
dashing multilingual World War II hero who had written a book critical of
the Eisenhower administration. According to a memo that outlined General
Taylor’s duties as military representative of the president, he was to “advise
and assist the President with regard to those military matters that reach him
as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.” General Taylor was also to
“give his personal views to assist the President in reaching decisions,” and
he was to have a role in offering “advice and assistance in the field of
intelligence.” It was a position of enormous influence, particularly in light
of the coming war in Vietnam. General Taylor was to advise the president
on all military matters, and yet he was part of the White House staff, not the
Pentagon.
General Taylor was dispatched to Vietnam as head of a delegation that
would become known as the Taylor-Rostow mission. The purpose of the
mission was to investigate what future political and military actions were
necessary there. Accompanying Taylor on this trip was William Godel. The
two men shared similar views on counterinsurgency programs; in fact,
Godel would write major portions of Taylor’s trip report. Godel took
General Taylor to ARPA’s new Combat Development and Test Center and
showed him some of the gadgets and techniques being developed there. In
Taylor’s report to President Kennedy, he praised the CDTC’s work, noting
“the special talents of the U.S. scientific laboratories and industry” on
display.
The Taylor-Rostow mission left Washington on Sunday, October 15,
1961, stopped for a briefing in Honolulu, and arrived in Saigon on October
18. Godel joined the party in Saigon. General Taylor wore civilian clothes
and requested that there be no press briefings, no interviews, no social
functions, and most of all no military formalities. To the president, General
Taylor described the Vietnam situation as “the darkest since the early days
of 1954,” a reference to the year when the French lost Dien Bien Phu.
Taylor warned how dangerous the terrain had become, noting that the
“Vietcong strength had increased from an estimated 10,000 in January 1961
to 17,000 in October; they were clearly on the move in the delta, in the
highlands, and along the plain on the north central coast.” He painted the
picture facing the government of South Vietnam in the bleakest of terms.
President Diem and his generals “were watching with dismay the situation
in neighboring Laos and the negotiations in Geneva, which convinced them
that there would soon be a Communist-dominated government in
Vientiane,” the capital of Laos, Taylor wrote, and proposed that President
Kennedy take “vigorous action” at once.
“If Vietnam goes, it will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to
hold Southeast Asia,” Taylor warned. “What will be lost is not merely a
crucial piece of real estate, but the faith that the U.S. has the will and the
capacity to deal with the Communist offensive in that area.” General
Taylor’s message was clear. The United States needed to expand its covert
military action in Vietnam. In his report to President Kennedy, Taylor
suggested making use of ARPA’s gadgets and techniques, most notably “a
very few ‘secret weapons’ on the immediate horizon” at the CDTC. One
such “secret weapon” was herbicide. As the program moved forward,
however, there was a hitch.
In the fall of 1961, Radio Hanoi in North Vietnam made public ARPA’s
secret defoliation tests. The United States had “used poisonous gas to kill
crops and human[s],” Radio Hanoi declared in a condemnatory broadcast.
The revelatory radio program was then rebroadcast on Radio Moscow and
Radio Peking, but surprisingly, it did not produce the kind of international
uproar that the Vietnam Task Force had cautioned against in the July 17
meeting. But the president’s advisors agreed that a formal decision had to
be made about whether to proceed with ARPA’s defoliation program or to
halt it. The Vietnam Task Force asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to weigh in.
On November 3, they expressed their opposition. Mindful of the Geneva
Protocols, they wrote, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff are of the opinion that in
conducting aerial defoliant operations [against] food growing areas, care
must be taken to assure that the United States does not become the target for
charges of employing chemical or biological warfare.” Echoing earlier
concerns from the Vietnam Task Force, the Joint Chiefs warned that the
world could react with solemn condemnation, and that “international
repercussions against the United States could be most serious.”
Even deputy national security advisor Walt Rostow, just back from the
trip to Vietnam with General Taylor and William Godel, felt compelled to
point out to the president the reality behind spraying defoliants. In a
memorandum with the subject line “Weed Killer,” Rostow told President
Kennedy, “Your decision is required because this is a kind of chemical
warfare.” There was no uncertainty in Walt Rostow’s words.
On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy approved the chemical
defoliation program in Vietnam. The program, said Kennedy, was to be
considerably smaller than the Advanced Research Projects Agency had
originally devised, and it should instead have a budget between $4 million
and $6.5 million. With President Kennedy’s blessing, the genie was out of
the bottle. By war’s end, roughly 19 million gallons of herbicide would be
sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam. A 2012 congressional report determined
that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million and 4.8 million
Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange.
From his ARPA office at the Pentagon, William Godel sent a memo,
marked “Secret,” to Dr. James Brown, the Army scientist at Fort Detrick,
asking Brown to come see him at once. During the meeting, Dr. Brown was
informed that he was now officially the person in charge of defoliation
operations in Vietnam and that he was a representative of the secretary of
defense. “He was advised to be ignorant of all other technical matters,”
notes a declassified memo. “If friendly authorities requested information on
biological anticrop or antipersonnel agents or chemical agents or protective
measures or detection kits, etc., etc. he [Dr. Brown] was to state he knew
nothing about them and suggest that they direct their inquiries to Chief
MAAG [Military Assistance Advisory Group].”
Like much of ARPA’s Project Agile, the defoliation campaign was a
“Presidential issue.” Details about the program, what it involved, and what
it sought to accomplish were matters of national security, and the narrative
around this story needed to be tightly controlled. In the words of Walt
Rostow, the Agent Orange campaign was “a kind of chemical warfare.” But
it was also a “secret weapon,” and had the potential of serving as a magic
bullet against communist insurgents in Vietnam.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

RAND and COIN

At the RAND Corporation in sunny Santa Monica, California, by 1961

war game playing had expanded considerably since the days of John von
Neumann and the lunchtime matches of Kriegspiel. For several years now,
RAND had been simulating counterinsurgency war games played out
between U.S. forces and guerrilla fighters in Vietnam. These
counterinsurgency games were the brainchild of Ed Paxson, an engineer
from the mathematics department, who called the game series Project
Sierra. Unlike the old lunchtime matches, the Sierra games lasted months,
sometimes more than a year, and involved various scenarios, including ones
in which U.S. forces used nuclear weapons against communist insurgents.
One day back in the mid-1950s, while observing one of the Sierra war
games, an analyst named George Tanham made an astute observation. He
mentioned that the entire Sierra series was unrealistic because the RAND
analysts were assuming Vietnamese communist fighters fought like
American soldiers, which they did not.
In the mid-1950s it was generally agreed that Tanham knew more about
counterinsurgency than anyone else at RAND. A Princeton University
graduate and former U.S. Air Force officer, Tanham was a highly decorated
veteran of World War II. After the war he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford in
unconventional warfare and joined RAND in 1955. Tanham’s observations
about the Sierra war games impressed RAND president Frank Collbohm,
who sent Tanham to Paris to study counterinsurgency tactics, and to learn
how and why the French army lost Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Tanham’s study was paid for by the Pentagon and was classified secret.
When a sanitized version appeared in 1961, George Tanham became the
first American author to publish a book about communist revolutionary
warfare.
At the Pentagon, Tanham’s book caught Harold Brown’s eye. Brown,
who had taken over Herb York’s job as director of Defense Department
Research and Engineering (DDR&E), was the man to whom ARPA
directors reported. Like Herb York, Harold Brown had served as chief
scientist at Livermore laboratory before coming to Washington, D.C.
Harold Brown reached out to Tanham and asked him to pay a visit to
ARPA’s Combat Development Test Center in Saigon and write up his
assessment of CDTC progress there. Tanham’s 1961 report remains
classified, but he referred to some of his observations in a report three years
later, since declassified. ARPA’s weapons programs in Vietnam—CDTC’s
“gadgets”—needed to expand, said Tanham. And so did psychological
warfare efforts—CDTC’s “techniques.” But equally important, said
Tanham, was the war’s presentation back home. He suggested that the
conflict be presented to the American people as a “war without guns being
waged by men of good will, half a world away from their native land.”
When Tanham returned from Saigon, he met with the Vietnam Task
Force, the Special Group, and the CIA. The following month Harold Brown
sent a classified letter to Frank Collbohm asking the RAND Corporation to
come on board and work on Project Agile in Vietnam. RAND was needed
to work on “persuasion and motivation” techniques, programs designed to
win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.
In its “persuasion and motivation” campaign, ARPA began pursuing a
less traditional defense science program involving social science research.
Accepted as an offshoot of anthropology, and generally looked down upon
by nuclear physicists like those in the Jason advisory group, social science
concerned itself with societies and the relationships among the people who
live in groups and communities. Harold Brown told Frank Collbohm that
ARPA needed studies performed that could answer questions that were
confounding defense officials at the Pentagon. Who were these people, the
Vietnamese? What made one Vietnamese peasant become a communist and
another remain loyal to President Diem? How did these foreign people live,
work, strategize, organize, and think? The idea was that if only ARPA could
understand what motivated Vietnamese people, the Pentagon might be able
to persuade them to see democracy as a form of government superior to
communism.
It was an enticing proposal for RAND. Social science research was far
afield from the RAND Corporation’s brand of nuclear war analysis and
strategy, and of game theory. But defense contractors need to stay relevant
in order to survive, and Frank Collbohm recognized that with President
Kennedy in office, there was much new business to be had in
counterinsurgency studies and strategy. Here was an opportunity for RAND
to expand its Defense Department contracts beyond what it had become
famous for.
RAND formed two counterinsurgency committees to strategize how best
to handle Harold Brown’s requests. One committee was called the Third
Area Conflict board and was run by Albert Wohlstetter, the man behind
RAND’s legendary “second strike” nuclear strategy, also known as NUTS.
The second committee was run jointly by RAND vice president George H.
Clement, an expert on missiles, satellites, and “weapons systems
philosophy,” and Bob Bucheim, head of the aero-astronautics department.
Proposals were written, and in a matter of months, ARPA and RAND
entered into an initial Project Agile contract for $4 million (roughly $32
million in 2015), to be paid out over a period of four years. With funding
secure, RAND was given its own office inside the Combat Development
Test Center in Saigon, where a secretary answered telephones, typed letters,
and received mail. RAND analysts could reside in a French colonial villa
down the street from the MAAG-V headquarters at 176 Rue Pasteur, or they
could have their own apartments. In early 1962, RAND began sending
academics, analysts, and anthropologists to Saigon. Soon the number of
RAND staff working out of the CDTC would more than double the number
of Pentagon employees there.
The first two RAND analysts to arrive in Saigon, in January 1962, were
Gerald Hickey and John Donnell. Both men were eminently qualified
anthropologists and spoke fluent Vietnamese. Hickey had been a professor
at Yale University, where he specialized in Vietnamese culture. Donnell
taught social sciences at Dartmouth College. Both had spent time working
in Vietnam as government consultants. Before working for RAND, Hickey
was part of the Michigan State University Group, whose members, at the
behest of the State Department, counseled President Diem’s government in
how to be better administrators. Donnell, who also spoke Chinese,
consulted for the State Department on Asian affairs.
Saigon in January 1962 was a beautiful city, resplendent with French
colonial architecture and still called the Paris of the Orient. Its broad
boulevards were lined with leafy trees, and the streets were filled with
bicycles, rickshaws, and cars. Locals relaxed outside in parks or in
European-style cafés. Vendors sold flowers, and President Diem’s police
forces patrolled the streets. But for Hickey and Donnell, there was a not so
subtle indication that things had changed in Saigon since their last visits in
the late fifties. “Signs of conflict had replaced the feeling of peace,” Hickey
later wrote. “Everyone was concerned with security.”
The road from the airport to RAND’s office at the CDTC was crowded
with military vehicles. During dinner their first night in Saigon under the
ARPA contract, Hickey and Donnell sat in a rooftop café at the Caravelle
Hotel listening to mortar explosions in the distance and watching flares light
up the edges of the city. “Both John and I were somewhat astonished how
the advent of the insurgency had changed the atmosphere of Saigon,”
Hickey recalled.
The plan was for the two anthropologists to travel into the central
highlands and study the mountain people who lived there, the Montagnards.
President Diem told his American counterparts that he doubted the loyalty
of the mountain dwellers, and Hickey and Donnell were being sent to assess
the situation. Before leaving for the mountains, they checked in with
ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center, where they were met by a
CIA officer named Gilbert Layton, who told them there had been a change
of plans. The CIA was working on its own project with the Montagnards,
Layton said, and there was not room for both programs. Hickey and
Donnell would have to find another group of people to study.
Hickey and Donnell discussed the situation, consulted with RAND
headquarters back in Santa Monica, and agreed on a different study to
pursue. There was another important program that the Defense Department
and the CIA had been working on with President Diem called the Strategic
Hamlet Program, or “rural pacification.” The plan was for the South
Vietnamese army to move peasants away from the “Vietcong-infested”
countryside and into new villages, or hamlets, where they would allegedly
be safe. The Strategic Hamlet Program offered financial incentives to get
the villagers to move. Using Defense Department funds, Diem’s army
would pay the villagers to build tall, fortress-like walls around their new
jungle settlements.
Building these fences required weeks of intense labor. First, a deep ditch
had to be dug around each new hamlet. Next, concrete posts needed to be
sunk down into the ditch at intervals of roughly ten feet. Finally, villagers
were to venture out into the jungle forests, cut down hundreds of thick
stalks of bamboo, and make spears, which would then be used to build the
fence. The South Vietnamese army would provide the villagers with the
concrete posts and also with large rolls of barbed wire, courtesy of the
Pentagon. The rest of the labor was for the villagers to do.
Defense Department officials saw U.S. investment in the Strategic
Hamlet Program as an effective means of pacification and a way to help
President Diem gain control over the region. The idea was that in exchange
for their safety, the Vietnamese farmers would develop a sense of loyalty
toward President Diem. But there was also a far more ambitious plan in
place whereby ARPA would collect enough information on strategic
hamlets to be able to “monitor” their activity in the future.
After the CIA canceled Hickey and Donnell’s Montagnard project, the
men decided to study the Strategic Hamlet Program. It is unlikely they
knew about ARPA’s future monitoring plans. Hickey and Donnell rented a
Citroën and set off for a village northwest of Saigon called Cu Chi.
In Cu Chi, at a small shop, they came across a group of village farmers
drinking tea. At first they found the villagers to be reticent, but after they
spent a few days talking with them in their own language, tongues loosened
up. As anthropologists, Hickey and Donnell were familiar with local
farming techniques, and they also understood the villagers’ deeply held
beliefs in spirit culture, or animism, the idea that a supernatural power
organizes and animates the material world. After a few more afternoon
visits, the villagers began offering information to Hickey and Donnell about
what had been going on in their village as far as the Strategic Hamlet
Program was concerned.
“Without our asking, the Cu Chi villagers complained about the strategic
hamlet,” Hickey wrote in his report. The program had required villagers to
move away from where they had been living, deep in the jungle, to this new
village they did not consider their own. The mandatory relocation was
having a devastating effect. People were distraught over having been forced
to leave their ancestral homes and their ancestors’ graves. Here, in this new
village, farmers now faced a new challenge as they struggled to plant crops
on unfamiliar land. Villagers were angry with the Diem government
because they had been told that in exchange for digging ditches and
building walls, they would be paid ten piasters a day and given lunch.
President Diem’s forces were supposed to have provided them with
concrete posts and barbed-wire fence. Instead, the villagers said, Diem’s
soldiers had rounded up groups of men, forced them to work, refused to
feed them, and charged them money for building supplies. The forced labor
lasted roughly three months, with only one five-day break for the New Year
festival. The labor program coincided with the most important planting time
of the year, which meant that many farmers had been unable to plant their
own crops. As a result, they would likely end up producing only one-tenth
of their usual annual yield. “One bad crop year can put a Vietnamese farmer
in debt for several years afterwards because [farmers] live on a very narrow
subsistence margin,” Hickey wrote. Subsistence farmers live season to
season, producing just enough food to feed their families, meaning they
rarely have anything left over to spare or save.
In one interview after another, Hickey and Donnell found widespread
dissatisfaction with the Strategic Hamlet Program. Most villagers had never
wanted to leave their original homes in the first place. The “compulsory
regrouping” and “protracted forced-labor” had caused villagers undue
emotional suffering. President Diem promised political and economic
reforms, but nothing had materialized. Even on a practical level, the
program was failing. A group of villagers showed Hickey and Donnell a
deep underground tunnel that had been dug by the Vietcong. It ran directly
under the perimeter defense wall and up into the center of the village.
Vietcong could come and go as they wished, the villagers said. And they
did.
Hickey and Donnell spent three months interviewing villagers in Cu
Chi. The conclusion they drew cast the Strategic Hamlet Program in a very
grim light. In the winter of 1962, strategic hamlets were being erected at a
rate of more than two hundred per month. The Defense Department had set
a goal of establishing between ten thousand and twelve thousand hamlets
across South Vietnam over the next year.
 Hickey and Donnell presented their findings to General Paul Harkins,
the new commander of the recently renamed Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam, or MACV. The anthropologists believed that General
Harkins would be unhappy with the news but that he would take seriously
the villagers’ legitimate concerns. Years later, when the ARPA report was
finally declassified, Hickey recalled the meeting. “I said, in essence, that
strategic hamlets had the potential of bringing security to the rural
population but they would not work if they imposed economic and social
burdens on the population,” he said. If President Diem wanted villager
support, he had to hold up his end of the bargain and pay the workers, as
agreed. “General Harkins replied that everyone wanted protection from the
Viet Cong, so they would welcome the strategic hamlets.” The discussion
was over, General Harkins told Hickey and Donnell, and the
anthropologists left Harkins’s office in Saigon.
Hickey and Donnell were flown to the Pentagon, where they were
scheduled to brief Harold Brown and Walt Rostow, the president’s national
security advisor, on the Strategic Hamlet Program. The Pentagon was a
world away from Saigon and from Cu Chi, and yet the anthropologists
knew firsthand what an impact the Defense Department’s work was having
on the villagers living there. They made their way through security, into the
mezzanine, past the food shops and the gift shops and the employee banks.
They walked up stairs, down corridors, and into Harold Brown’s office in
the E-Ring, not far from the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. Brown’s office was spacious and well decorated, with large leather
chairs and couches, and a view of the Potomac River.
Hickey recalled paraphrasing from their written ARPA report. “In the
present war,” he said, “the Vietnamese peasant is likely to support the side
that has control of the area in which he lives, and he is more favorably
disposed to the side which offers him the possibility of a better life.” Hickey
and Donnell told Brown and Rostow that Diem’s army was simply not
holding up its end of the bargain. As a result, and despite the well-intended
efforts of the Strategic Hamlet Program, local Vietnamese peasants were
more likely to side with the Vietcong.
Then something strange happened. “As we began our first debriefing at
the Pentagon with Harold Brown,” Hickey noted, “[he] swung his heavy
chair around and looked out the window, leaving us to talk to the back of
his chair.” Hickey and Donnell kept talking. Perhaps Brown was simply
contemplating the severity of the situation.
“Farmers were unwilling to express enthusiasm for the program and
appeared to harbor strong doubts that the sacrifices of labor and materials
imposed on them could yield any commensurate satisfaction,” the
anthropologists explained. If something wasn’t done, the entire Strategic
Hamlet Program was at risk of collapse. Hickey and Donnell suggested that
the Pentagon put pressure on Diem’s forces to pay the farmers a small
amount of compensation, immediately.
Harold Brown did not respond. Throughout most of the meeting, he kept
his back turned on the two men, and though now they had finished their
briefing, Brown still didn’t turn around to face them. National security
advisor Walt Rostow, who had been paying attention, looked away. An aide
walked into the room, and Hickey and Donnell were shown the door.
Escorted out of Harold Brown’s office, the two men were led down the
corridor to where they were scheduled to brief Marine Corps lieutenant
general Victor “Brute” Krulak, now serving as special assistant for
counterinsurgency and special activities. Krulak was a hard-charging
militarist. During World War II he had masterminded the invasion of
Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific theater and the last
battle of the war. In the Korean War, Krulak had pioneered the use of
helicopters in battle. Krulak was not happy with what Hickey and Donnell
had to say, and he was demonstrative in his disapproval. He told them that
he wasn’t going to pay a bunch of Vietnamese peasants for their support.
“He pounded his fist on the desk [and said] that ‘we’ were going to make
the peasant do what’s necessary for the strategic hamlets to succeed,”
Hickey recalled.
The anthropologists from RAND were shown the door. Their thirty-page
report, originally prepared for ARPA as an unclassified report, was now
given a classification of secret, which meant it could not be read by anyone
without an appropriate government clearance. Harold Brown told RAND
president Frank Collbohm about his dissatisfaction with what he saw as
Hickey and Donnell’s overly pessimistic analysis of the Strategic Hamlet
Program. The anthropologists’ findings were “too negative,” ARPA officials
complained, and they prepared an official rebuttal to be attached to each
copy distributed around the White House and the Pentagon.
 Determined to repair any damage that Hickey and Donnell might have
done, Collbohm sent a new set of RAND researchers to Saigon with
specific instructions to reevaluate the Strategic Hamlet Program. This
included Fulbright scholar Joe Carrier, who worked in cost analysis at
RAND, and Vic Sturdevant, from systems analysis. With no previous
knowledge of Southeast Asia, and with no local language skills, the two
men studied incidents in strategic hamlets initiated by the Vietcong over a
nine-month period, from December 1962 to September 1963. Their findings
were markedly different from Hickey and Donnell’s. In this new ARPA
report on the Strategic Hamlet Program, Carrier and Sturdevant concluded
that it would likely prove promising in the long run, if only the Defense
Department would take a “more patient approach.”
Another RAND analyst dispatched to Vietnam to write a similarly
themed report was George B. Young, an expert in missile design,
aerodynamics, and nuclear propulsion. Young, who was Chinese American,
became the first RAND employee assigned full-time to the Combat
Development Test Center in Saigon. His analysis of the Strategic Hamlet
Program was enthusiastic. Young said the villagers were committed to
participating. In his ARPA report, called “Notes on Vietnam,” Young wrote
about the fluid “delivery of intelligence” information that was taking place.
Locals in the program had been taught to make written notes on any
Vietcong activity they observed, Young reported. In turn, that information
was taken to village elders, who wrote up reports for the Diem government.
Soon, Young declared, the Vietcong forces would be “ground to a pulp.”
George Tanham returned to the CDTC in Saigon in 1963, now under a
long-term ARPA contract. Much had changed since Tanham’s first trip, at
Harold Brown’s behest, in the summer of 1961. In his “Trip Report:
Vietnam, 1963,” Tanham showed great optimism about how things were
shaping up in Vietnam. An Air Force officer from the Combat Development
and Test Center took Tanham in an airplane ride over the strategic hamlet
regions, just outside Saigon—some of the very same hamlets that Gerald
Hickey and John Donnell had written so pessimistically about in their
report, the one that caused Harold Brown to turn his back on them. Tanham
marveled at the little villages down below. He said he could see the bamboo
huts, the barbed-wire fences, even the distinct perimeter ditches, and that it
all looked wonderful. In Tanham’s estimation, the Defense Department
could look ahead to “successfully concluding the war in two or three years
or even less.” He included in his report an interview with an officer from
the U.S. Air Force who said that the Air Force was “proud of its
contribution to the war in Vietnam” and that it planned to “leave behind
helicopters and airplanes when it left, ideally sometime in 1964.” Things
were looking very positive, Tanham wrote. He quoted a high-ranking
general as telling him, “Given a little luck we can wind this one up in a
year.”
 CHAPTER NINE

Command and Control

In October 1962, a quiet forty-seven-year-old civilian scientist from

Missouri arrived at the Pentagon to begin a new job with the Advanced
Research Projects Agency. His work would change the world. By 2015, 3
billion of the 7 billion people on the planet would regularly use technology
conceived of by him. The man, J. C. R. Licklider, invented the concept of
the Internet, which was originally called the ARPANET.
Licklider did not arrive at the Pentagon with the intent of creating the
Internet. He was hired to research and develop command and control
systems, most of which were related to nuclear weapons at the time. The
idea that a bright red telephone, like the one installed in Herb York’s
bedroom in the first week of the Kennedy presidency, was the only way for
heads of state to communicate the dreaded “go or no-go” decision in a
potential nuclear launch scenario was absurd. In the world of push-button
warfare, fractions of seconds mattered. World leaders could not afford the
extra seconds it would take to dial a 1962 telephone.
The mandate to update the command and control system, which would
become known as C2, came from the president. Within months of taking
office, Kennedy ordered Congress to allocate funds to rapidly modernize
the U.S. military command and control system, specifically to make it
“more flexible, more selective, more deliberate, better protected, and under
ultimate civilian authority at all times.” The directive for “new equipment
and facilities” was sent to the Pentagon, where it was tasked to ARPA.
Harold Brown recruited J. C. R. Licklider for the job.
Licklider was a trained psychologist with a rare specialization in
psychoacoustics, the scientific study of sound perception. Psychoacoustics
concerns itself with questions such as, when a person across a room claps
his hands, how does the brain know where that sound is coming from? It
involves elements of both psychology and physiology, because sound
arrives at the ear as a mechanical sound wave, but it is also a perceptual
event. People hear differently in different situations, and those “conditions
have consequences,” Licklider liked to say. During World War II, while
working at Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, Licklider
conducted experiments with military pilots in all kinds of flight scenarios,
with the goal of developing better communication systems for the military.
Aircraft were not yet pressurized, and at altitudes of 35,000 feet, cockpit
temperatures descended below freezing, which profoundly affected how
pilots heard sound and how they responded through speech. Licklider
conducted hundreds of experiments with B-17 and B-24 bomber pilots,
analyzed data, and published papers on his findings. By war’s end, he was
considered one of the world’s authorities on the human auditory nervous
system.
After the war, Licklider left Harvard for the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT,
where he became interested in how computers could help people
communicate better. Engineers at the Lincoln Laboratory were working on
an IBM-based computer system for the Air Force called the Semi-
Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, which was being built to serve
as the backbone of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD)
air defense system. SAGE was the first computer to integrate radar with
computer technologies, and to perform three key functions simultaneously:
receive, interpret, and respond. The SAGE system received information
from tracking radar; it interpreted data as it came in; and in response, it
pointed America’s defensive missile systems at incoming threats. It was a
gargantuan machine, so large that technicians walked inside it to work on it.
SAGE system operators were among the first computer users in the world
required to multitask. While sitting at a console, they watched display
monitors, typed on keyboards, and flipped switches as new information
constantly flowed into the SAGE system through telephone lines.
Licklider was inspired by the SAGE system. To him, it exemplified how
computers could do more than just collect data and perform calculations.
He imagined a time in the future when man and machine might interact and
problem-solve to an even greater degree. He wrote a paper outlining this
concept, called “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” in which he described a
partnership between humans and “the electronic members of the
partnership,” the computers. Licklider envisioned a day when a computer
would serve as a human’s “assistant.” The machine would “answer
questions, perform simulation modeling, graphically display results, and
extrapolate solutions for new situations from past experience.” Like John
von Neumann, Licklider saw similarities between the computer and the
brain, and he saw a symbiotic relationship between man and machine, one
in which man’s burdens, or “rote work,” could be eased by the machine.
Humans could then devote their time to making important decisions,
Licklider said.
Licklider believed that computers could one day change the world for
the better. He envisioned “home computer consoles,” with people sitting in
front of them, learning just about anything they wanted to. He wrote a book,
Libraries of the Future, in which he described a world where library
resources would be available to remote users through a single database.
This was radical thinking in 1960 yet is almost taken for granted today by
the billions of people who have the library of the Internet at their fingertips
twenty-four hours a day. Computers would make man a better-informed
being, Licklider wrote, and one day, “in not too many years, human brains
and computing machines will be coupled… [and] the resulting partnership
will think as no human brain has ever thought.”
It was exactly this kind of revolutionary thinking that interested the
Advanced Research Projects Agency and why the work of J. C. R. Licklider
caught ARPA’s attention. Computing power needed to be leveraged beyond
its present capabilities in order to advance command and control systems,
and J. C. R. Licklider was the man for the job. ARPA director Jack Ruina
telephoned Licklider and asked him to come to Washington and give a
series of seminars on computers to Defense Department officials. Then he
offered Licklider a job. When Licklider arrived at the Pentagon just a few
months later for his first day of work, the sign on his door read “Advanced
Research Projects Agency, Command and Control Research, J. C. R.
Licklider, Director.” It was a small office, in both physical size and relative
importance. At the time, it was impossible to imagine just how colossal a
program command and control would become. In 1962, it was just an idea.
 When Licklider arrived at the Pentagon in the fall of 1962, the
Department of Defense purchased more computers than any other
organization in the world, and ARPA had just entered the world of
advanced computer research. The agency inherited four computers from the
Air Force, old dinosaurs called Q-32 machines. Each was the size of a small
house. These were the computers that the SAGE program had run on at the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, starting in 1954; there was no way the Pentagon
was going to throw them away. The Q-32s, built by Systems Development
Corporation, a subdivision of RAND, had been incredibly expensive to
construct, each costing $6 million (roughly $50 million in 2015). ARPA had
inherited them, and Licklider was given the job of making sure they got
used.
Fifteen days after Licklider’s arrival at the Pentagon, the most harrowing
of conflicts set the world on a razor’s edge. Photographs taken by a U-2 spy
plane revealed that the Soviets had covertly placed nuclear-armed missiles
in Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of Florida. President Kennedy demanded
that the missiles be removed, but Premier Nikita Khrushchev refused. For
thirteen days, starting on October 16, the United States and the Soviet
Union played a game of nuclear chicken. At the height of the crisis, on
October 24, the United States set up a military blockade off the island and a
standoff in the ocean ensued. By all accounts, this thirteen-day period was
the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, before or since. The
president raised the defense condition to DEFCON 2 for the first and only
time in history. And yet new information from ARPA’s history has recently
come to light that paints an even more dramatic Cuban Missile Crisis than
was previously understood.
“Guess how many nuclear missiles were detonated during the Cuban
Missile Crisis?” asks Paul Kozemchak, special assistant to DARPA director
Arati Prabhakar, during an interview for this book. Kozemchak is a thirty-
year veteran of DARPA, which makes him the longest-serving employee in
its history. “I can tell you that the answer is not ‘none,’” said Kozemchak.
“The answer is ‘several.’” In this case, “several” refers to four.
By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eisenhower’s test ban had
failed, and the United States and the Soviet Union had both returned to
nuclear weapons testing. Twice during the height of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, on October 20 and October 26, 1962, the United States detonated
two nuclear weapons—code-named Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime
—in space. These tests, which sought to advance knowledge in ARPA’s
pursuit of the Christofilos effect, are on the record and are known. What is
not known outside Defense Department circles is that in response, on
October 22 and October 28, 1962, the Soviets also detonated two nuclear
weapons in space, also in pursuit of the Christofilos effect. In recently
declassified film footage of an emergency meeting at the White House,
Secretary of Defense McNamara can be heard discussing one of these two
Soviet nuclear bomb tests with the president and his closest advisors. “The
Soviets fired three eleven-hundred-mile missiles yesterday at Kapustin
Yar,” McNamara tells them, one of which contained a 300-kiloton nuclear
warhead. “They were testing elements of an antimissile system in a nuclear
burst environment.”
It is hard to determine what is more shocking, that this information,
which was made public by Russian scientists in the early 1990s, is not
generally known, or that four nuclear weapons were detonated in space, in a
DEFCON 2 environment, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Firing off
nuclear weapons in the middle of a nuclear standoff is tempting fate. The
BMEWS system, at J-Site in Thule, could easily have misidentified the
Soviet missile launches as a nuclear first strike. “The danger of the situation
simply getting out of control, from developments or accidents or incidents
that neither side—leaders on either side—were even aware of, much less in
control of, could have led to war,” says the former CIA officer Dr.
Raymond Garthoff, an expert in Soviet missile launches.
The information about the Soviet high-altitude nuclear tests remained
classified until after the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet nuclear weapon
detonated on October 28, 1962, over Zhezqazghan in Kazakhstan at an
altitude of ninety-three miles had a consequential effect. According to
Russian scientists, “the nuclear detonation caused an electromagnetic pulse
[EMP] that covered all of Kazakhstan,” including “electrical cables buried
underground.”
The Cuban Missile Crisis made clear that command and control systems
not only needed to be upgraded but also needed to be reimagined. It was J.
C. R. Licklider who first challenged his ARPA colleagues to rethink old
ideas about what computers could do beyond mathematical tasks like
payroll and accounting. Licklider proposed the development of a vast
multiuser system, a “network” of computers that could collect information
across multiple platforms—from radar and satellites to intelligence reports,
communication cables, even weather reports—and to integrate them. What
was needed, said Licklider, was a partnership between man and machine,
and between the military and the rest of the world.
Of his ARPA bosses, Licklider wrote, “I kept trying to convince them of
my philosophy that what the military needs is what the business man needs,
is what the scientist needs.” Six months after arriving at ARPA, he sent out
a memo calling this network the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” At the
time, different computers spoke different programming languages,
something Licklider saw as a hurdle that needed to be immediately
overcome. It was an extreme problem, he wrote, one “discussed by science
fiction writers: How do you get communications started among totally
uncorrelated sapient beings?” Finding the answer would take decades, but it
began at ARPA in 1962.

J. C. R. Licklider is sometimes called modern computing’s “Johnny

Appleseed” for planting the first seeds of the digital revolution. What is not
generally known about Licklider is that he ran a second office at the
Pentagon called the Behavioral Sciences Program, an office that would
eventually take on much more Orwellian tasks related to surveillance
programs. This office grew out of a study originally commissioned by Herb
York, titled “Toward a Technology of Human Behavior for Defense Use.”
This study examined how computers, or “man-machine systems,” could
best be used in conflict zones. The results, today, are far-reaching.
In its Behavioral Sciences Program, ARPA wanted to “build a bridge
from psychology into the other social sciences” using computers, according
to an early ARPA report. Because Licklider was trained as a psychologist,
ARPA director Jack Ruina believed he was the right man for this job, too.
One task of the Behavioral Sciences Program was to imagine a future
world where computers could be used by the Defense Department as
teaching tools. This was visionary thinking in 1962, when computers still
took up entire rooms and cost millions of dollars to build and operate.
“Computer assisted teaching systems and computer assisted gaming and
simulation studies are examples of work chosen [for] human performance
research believed to be defense relevant,” read an internal ARPA report.
Training President Diem’s South Vietnamese army was a solid example.
ARPA sought ways in which to teach Vietnamese recruits to be better
soldiers and more efficient administrators so they could defeat communism.
This was arduous, labor-intensive work. Language and culture barriers
added an extra layer of toil. One idea behind the Behavioral Sciences
Program was that computers could one day shoulder the burden of this kind
of work.
The Behavioral Sciences Program initiated a number of projects. These
were programs that had a public face but also had highly classified
components. ARPA secretly opened a second Combat Development Test
Center, this one on the outskirts of Bangkok, five hundred miles to the
northwest of Saigon. Like its Vietnamese counterpart, this new CDTC
would also research and develop techniques and gadgets but with a focus on
longer-term counterinsurgency goals, including Licklider’s plans for
computer-assisted teaching, gaming, and simulation studies. Congress was
not told about the new Combat Development Test Center in Bangkok, nor
was the House Committee on Appropriations, though the Defense
Department was legally required to notify it before constructing new
facilities.
“Thailand was the laboratory for the soft side and Vietnam was the
laboratory for the hard side, or things that go boom,” explained James L.
Woods, an ARPA officer who worked at the CDTC in Thailand.
There was a bigger plan in play, until now unreported. Secretary
McNamara was eager to have ARPA create additional Combat
Development Test Centers around the world, something he considered an
important part of the president’s national security policy of flexible
response. Insurgent groups, also called terrorist organizations, were on the
rise across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
“The U.S. would need to support Limited Wars in these remote areas,” one
Project Agile report declared, adding that “similar representation is being
considered by OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] in other areas of
the world.” ARPA called its worldwide program “Remote Area Conflict”
and hired the defense contractor Battelle Memorial Institute to open and
operate two “Remote Area Conflict Information Centers,” one in
Washington, D.C., and the other in Columbus, Ohio, to keep track of
programs at the Combat Development Test Centers in Saigon and Bangkok
and all future CDTCs, and to write summary reports and produce analyses
of progress made. As early as 1962, ARPA drew up plans for CDTCs in
Beirut and Tehran under this new “Remote Area Conflict” banner. The
declassified CDTC files housed at the National Archives have been
miscataloged and are lost. The only known copies remain with Battelle.
Though the copies are more than fifty years old, Battelle declined to release
them, stating that “unfortunately, it is Battelle policy not to release copies of
Battelle reports.”
In Thailand, the new CDTC flourished. ARPA engineers in Licklider’s
Behavioral Sciences Program office believed that computers could be used
to model social behavior. Data could be collected and algorithms could be
designed to analyze the data and to build models. This led Licklider to
another seminal idea. What if, based on the data collected, you could get the
computer to predict human behavior? If man can predict, he can control.
“Much of the work is theoretical and experimental,” stated T. W. Brundage,
the first director of the CDTC in Bangkok, “and for the time being is mainly
non-hardware oriented.” Brundage was referring to one of the first tests of
Licklider’s theory to be conducted at the new center. It was called
“Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces,” and involved
2,950 Thai soldiers, sailors, and pilots. It was an example of a CDTC
program with a public face but a classified motive. The Thai government
was told that the purpose of the program was “to provide information on the
body size of Thai military personnel,” which could then be used for “design
and sizing of clothing and equipment” of the Thai armed forces in the
future. ARPA technicians took fifty-two sets of measurements from each of
the 2,950 Thai participants, things like eye height, seated height, forearm-
to-hand length, and ankle circumference. But the Thai participants were
also asked a bevy of personal questions—not just where and when they
were born, but who their ancestors were, what their religion was, and what
they thought of the king of Thailand.
The true purpose of the “Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai
Armed Forces,” and dozens of other surveys like it, was “data collection
and data processing.” The information was sent back to the Computer
Branch of the U.S. Army Natick Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts.
“After coding the background information, all of the data were transferred
from the data sheets to punched cards,” reads a declassified report. A digital
profile was then made “on each of the men in the series.” ARPA wanted to
create a prototype showing how it could monitor third world armies for
future use. The information would be saved in computers stored in a secure
military facility. In 1962 Thailand was a relatively stable country, but it was
surrounded by insurgency and unrest on all sides. If Thailand were to
become a battle zone, ARPA would have information on Thai soldiers, each
of whom could be tracked. Information—like who deserted the Thai army
and became an enemy combatant—could be ascertained. Using computer
models, ARPA could create algorithms describing human behavior in
remote areas. Eventually these patterns could lead to predictive computer
modeling, Licklider believed.
There were other individuals working with and for Licklider in his
predictive modeling programs. One was Ithiel de Sola Pool, a left-leaning
revolutionary in the field of social science. Doing contract work for ARPA,
Pool became one of the first social scientists to use computers to create
models for analyzing human behavior. He would become the world’s first
authority on the social impact of mass media. J. C. R. Licklider and Ithiel
de Sola Pool put together a series of proposals for ARPA to consider.
Computer models could be used to answer important questions, the men
said. They proposed that studies be done on “peasant attitudes and
behavior,” “‘stability and disorder’ in several countries,” and “cultural
patterns.”
Pool and Licklider both served on ARPA’s Behavioral Sciences Panel,
and in that capacity they examined Hickey and Donnell’s study of the
Strategic Hamlet Program. “They [Hickey and Donnell] have yielded much
useful information and opened up promising areas for investigation,”
Licklider and Pool wrote, “but with regard to the solution of these
important, complex problems, they have barely scratched the surface.” The
two behavioral scientists recognized that the information Hickey and
Donnell had collected on the villagers could also be used to create computer
models and to predict how these kinds of individuals might act in future
conflicts. “These are important tools,” said Licklider, for they can lead to a
better understanding of the “inexorable flow from conditions to
consequences.” With baseline data in a Defense Department computer
system, the behavior of the villagers could be covertly monitored, analyzed,
and modeled. This was an effective means of command and control.
But as with the history of warfare, the desire to control and the ability to
control are often at odds. Despite inventive government efforts to influence
a population, events occur that are beyond military control. What happened
next in Vietnam had consequences that could not be undone.

May 8, 1963, marked the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, and a group of
religious followers gathered in the village of Hue to celebrate. Protest was
in the air. Buddhists were being repressed by President Diem’s autocratic
Catholic regime. The villagers of Hue had been told not to fly Buddhist
flags, but they did anyway. The mood was festive, and a large crowd of
nearly ten thousand people had assembled near the Hue radio station when
eight armored vehicles and several police cars arrived on the scene in a
show of force. Police ordered revelers to disperse, but they refused. Police
used fire hoses and tear gas, still with no effect. Someone threw a grenade
onto the porch of the radio station, killing nine people, including four
children. Fourteen others were severely injured. A huge protest followed.
The event became a catalyst for people across South Vietnam to express
widespread resentment against President Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh
Nhu, who was head of the secret police. The Buddhists demanded the right
to fly their own flags and to have the same religious freedoms accorded to
members of the Catholic Church. When the government refused, more than
three hundred monks and nuns convened in Saigon for a protest march,
including an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc. The group made its
way silently down one of Saigon’s busiest boulevards to a crossroads,
where everyone stopped and waited. Thich Quang Duc sat down on a
cushion in the middle of the street and assumed the lotus position. A crowd
gathered around him, including New York Times reporter David Halberstam.
Two other monks, each carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline, walked up to
Thich Quang Duc and poured gasoline on him. One of them handed Thich
Quang Duc a single match. He struck the match, touched it to his robe, and
set himself on fire.
David Halberstam described the devastation he felt watching the monk
catch fire and burn to death right in front of him on the Saigon street.
“Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering
and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring,” Halberstam wrote. “In
the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly
quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were
now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask
questions, too bewildered even to think…. As he burned he never moved a
muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to
the wailing people around him.”
During the self-immolation, somehow the monk was able to remain
perfectly still. He did not writhe or scream or show any indication of pain.
Even as he was consumed by fire, Thich Quang Duc sat upright with his
legs folded in the lotus position. His body burned for about ten minutes
until finally the charred remains toppled over backwards.
Journalist Malcolm Brown, the Saigon bureau chief for the Associated
Press, took a photograph of the burning monk, and this image was printed
in newspapers around the world. People everywhere expressed outrage, and
overnight President Diem became an international pariah.
But instead of showing empathy or capitulating to the Buddhists’
wishes, President Diem, together with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu’s
wife, the glamorous Madame Nhu, began to slander the Buddhists. Madame
Nhu went on national TV in pearls and a black dress, fanning herself with a
folding fan, to say that Buddhist leaders had gotten Thich Quang Duc drunk
and set him up for suicide as a political ploy.
“What have the Buddhist leaders done?” asked Madame Nhu on
television. “The only thing they have done, they have barbecued one of
their monks whom they have intoxicated…. Even that barbecuing was
done, not even with self-sufficient means because they used imported
gasoline.” By the end of summer, the crisis was full-blown. The White
House advised President Diem to make peace with the Buddhists
immediately. Diem ignored the request and instead, in August 1963,
declared martial law.
In late October, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot
Lodge Jr., told President Kennedy that a coup d’état was being organized
against President Diem by a group of Diem’s own army generals. In the
now famous “Hillman cable,” the president, the ambassador, and diplomats
Averell Harriman and Roger Hillman agreed not to interfere with the
overthrow of Diem by his own military. In the cable, Ambassador Lodge
gave secret assurances to the South Vietnamese generals that it was fine
with the White House for them to proceed with the coup.
On November 1, 1963, a group of Diem’s generals overthrew the
government of South Vietnam. President Diem and his brother escaped to
the Saigon district of Cholon, where they hid inside a Catholic church. The
following morning, November 2, the brothers were discovered. Diem and
Nhu were thrown into the back of an American-made armored personnel
carrier and driven away. Sometime shortly thereafter, President Diem and
his brother were executed. Their bullet-riddled bodies were photographed,
then buried in an unmarked grave in a plot of land adjacent to Ambassador
Lodge’s house.
When the leader of the Vietnamese communist movement, Ho Chi
Minh, learned of the assassination, even he was surprised. “I can scarcely
believe the Americans would be so stupid,” he said.
Out in the countryside across South Vietnam, the garrison state
constructed by President Diem and the U.S. Department of Defense began
to crumble. The local people, be they paddy rice farmers or committed
Vietcong, began tearing down the fabricated enclaves the Diem regime had
forced them to build as part of the Strategic Hamlet Program. News footage
seen around the world showed farmers smashing the fortifications’ bamboo
walls with sledgehammers, shovels, and sticks, as the strategic hamlets
disappeared. Seizing the opportunity, the communists began sending
thousands of Vietcong fighters to infiltrate the villages of South Vietnam.
They came down from the North by way of a series of footpaths and jungle
trails, which would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Soon it would
be impossible to tell a neutral farmer from a committed communist
insurgent.
Command and control was an illusion in Vietnam. Despite millions of
dollars, hundreds of men, and the use of lethal chemicals as part of a
herbicide warfare campaign, ARPA’s Project Agile—with its cutting-edge
gadgets and counterinsurgency techniques—was having little to no effect
on the growing communist insurgency spreading across South Vietnam.
Perhaps Americans in Saigon might have been able to foresee the fall of
President Ngo Dinh Diem, but it is unlikely that anyone could have
predicted what happened shortly thereafter, halfway around the world in
Texas. Twenty days after the execution of Diem and his brother, while
riding in an open car through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, President John
Kennedy was shot dead by an assassin.
Another president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would inherit the hornet’s
nest that was Vietnam.
 CHAPTER TEN

Motivation and Morale

The anthropologist Gerald Hickey leaned out the side of a low-flying

military aircraft watching the sea snakes swimming below. The weather was
warm, the sea calm, and as the aircraft he shared with a team of ARPA
officials approached Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Siam, the water was
robin’s egg blue. It was the winter of 1964, and Hickey was back in
Vietnam, working for the RAND Corporation on another ARPA contract,
this time studying how U.S. military advisors got along with their
Vietnamese counterparts. The war that did not officially exist marched on.
The ARPA officers were heading out to the island to test weapons and
gear which they would then turn over to their junk fleet commander
counterparts, local Vietnamese fishermen paid by the Pentagon to patrol the
coasts and keep an eye out for Vietcong. Hickey was here to interview
participants on both sides. “En route, the ARPA officers tested the new AR-
15, an early version of the M-16, by shooting at long sea snakes, which
when hit, flew into the air,” Hickey recalled.
Once on the island the group set up a beachfront camp, stringing ARPA-
engineered hammocks between palm trees and setting up ARPA-engineered
tents before heading over to the steep sea cliffs, where they tested the
ruggedness of ARPA-designed military boots. Hickey tagged along,
notebook in hand, taking notes and asking questions, as he always did.
After the day’s work, the men sat around a fire pit eating grilled shark and
giant sea turtle, washing it down with rice and La Rue beer.
After the Phu Quoc Island trip, Hickey headed back to Saigon and then
up to the U.S. military facility at Da Nang, conducting dozens of interviews
along the way. On July 4, 1964, he caught a ride in an H-34 Marine
helicopter and headed into the Ta Rau Valley to a Special Forces camp
located at Nam Dong.
“Known as deep VC territory,” Hickey noted in his journal.
Captain Roger Donlon, commander of the unit at Nam Dong, met
Hickey at the dirt landing pad when his helicopter touched down. Hickey
noted how heavily fortified the camp was, its perimeter ringed with anti-
sniper sandbags, machine gun posts, mortar pits, and concrete bunkers.
Hickey was here at Nam Dong to interview each member of the twelve-man
Special Forces team as well as their Vietnamese counterparts, young men
who were mostly Nung people, an ethnic minority of Chinese descent.
The team at Nam Dong was here in the Ta Rau Valley to protect five
thousand Vietnamese who lived in the surrounding area. In addition to
patrolling the jungle, the Special Forces team organized locals’ efforts to
dig wells and build schools. There was little else to do here, and Hickey
recalled that “the A-team members were happy to have an anthropologist in
town.”
His first day in Nam Dong, Hickey accompanied Captain Donlon out to
one of the villages where there had been reports of chemicals being sprayed
out of aircraft. “Rice crops had been destroyed and villagers were sick,”
Hickey noted. Captain Donlon told the sick villagers that he would send
their complaints up the chain of command. Hickey had no way of knowing
that the organization paying for his report, ARPA, was the same
organization behind the science program that had sprayed the chemicals on
the villagers and their rice crops.
The men drove back to the base in an Army jeep, careful to get to the
camp before nightfall. Once the sun disappeared behind the mountains, the
valley was plunged into darkness, making travel dangerous and difficult.
Back at Nam Dong, Hickey filled out a timesheet, required by RAND to be
submitted each week, and dropped it in the command center’s U.S.
mailbox. He ate dinner with the Nung soldiers, interviewing them in their
native language. The Nung soldiers told Hickey they believed a Vietcong
attack was imminent, and he took the news to Captain Donlon. A team
meeting was organized, and Donlon ordered the Vietnamese strike force to
double its outer perimeter security and also ordered the helicopter landing
zone to be fortified. Donlon gave Hickey an AR-15 and told him to sleep
with it close by his bed.
In the middle of the night, at 2:26 a.m., a massive explosion knocked
Hickey out of bed. More explosions followed, and suddenly the camp was
filled with white phosphorus smoke. With the sound of automatic weapons
fire coming from every direction, Hickey grabbed his eyeglasses and his
AR-15 and started to run. “Suddenly bullets were piercing the bamboo
walls,” he later recalled.
Outside his bunkroom, the mess hall and supply room were on fire.
“Mortar rounds landed everywhere, grenades exploded, and gunfire filled
the air. In a matter of minutes,” Hickey recounted, “the camp had become a
battlefield.” For a moment, he felt all was lost. That he would die here in
Nam Dong. Instead, the anthropologist raised his AR-15 and assumed the
role of a soldier, fighting alongside the Green Berets and the Nung
commandos through the night.
When light dawned and the Vietcong retreated back into the jungle,
Hickey surveyed the carnage. Sixty Nung, two Americans, and one
Australian had been killed. “There were bodies and pieces of bodies
everywhere—on the cluttered parade ground, in the grasses, and on the
[perimeter] wires.” One of the Nung soldiers he had eaten dinner with the
night before was dead, recognizable only by the insignia on his shirt. “The
smoky air was heavy with the odor of death,” Hickey recalled. Overcome
by a wave of nausea, he threw up.
“The July 1964 Nam Dong battle foreshadowed the fury of the struggle
that would become known as the Vietnam War,” wrote Hickey. “As that
war, with its modern technology and armaments and large armies, drew all
of South Vietnam into its vortex and captured the world’s attention, the
battle of Nam Dong faded into obscurity.” Americans still did not know
they were fighting a war in Vietnam. Captain Roger Donlon was awarded
the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first of the Vietnam War, and Gerald
Hickey would continue his work as an anthropologist, writing more than a
dozen reports for ARPA, on subjects including the role of the AR-15 in
battle and the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese.

Back in America, RAND Corporation president Frank Collbohm had set his
focus on securing a lucrative new contract with the Advanced Research
Projects Agency. Collbohm and analyst Guy Pauker flew to Washington,
D.C., to meet with ARPA officials. RAND’s Third Area Conflict Board
believed that the firm’s social scientists could help stop the Vietcong
insurgency by researching and analyzing for the Pentagon the “human
problems” connected to insurgent groups. The broad-themed contract they
sought had enormous potential value and would turn out to be RAND’s
single-biggest contract during twelve years of war in Vietnam. It was called
the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, and it was secured in a single
meeting in Washington, D.C.
In Washington, Collbohm and Pauker met with Seymour Deitchman,
Harold Brown’s new special assistant for counterinsurgency at ARPA.
Before Deitchman took over the counterinsurgency reins, ARPA’s Project
Agile programs had been overseen by William Godel. But the situation with
Godel had taken a bizarre turn. For eighteen months, Godel had received
high praise from the White House and the Pentagon for his
counterinsurgency work, winning the prestigious National Civil Service
League award and being named one of the nation’s ten top government
administrators in 1962. But suddenly and mysteriously, financial
incongruities within Project Agile’s overseas expense accounts were
brought to the attention of Secretary of Defense McNamara, and the FBI
was brought in to investigate. Godel was at the very center of the
investigation. Counterinsurgency was too significant a program to leave in
the hands of a man under suspicion, and Deitchman, an aeronautical and
mechanical engineer working at the Institute for Defense Analyses, or IDA,
was chosen to replace Godel.
Also present during the meeting was the powerful William H. Sullivan,
a career State Department official and the head of President Johnson’s new
Interagency Task Force on Vietnam. In a few months’ time, Sullivan would
become ambassador to Laos. Between Sullivan and Deitchman, the officials
in the room had the power to award a significant counterinsurgency contract
to whomever they saw fit, in this case RAND. Which is exactly what the
record shows happened next.
William Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper and set it in front of
Collbohm and Pauker. On the paper was a list of twenty-five topics that the
Interagency Task Force and the Pentagon wanted researched. Down at the
bottom, near the end, one topic leaped out at Guy Pauker. It read:
 “Who are the Vietcong? What makes them tick?”
Pauker was electrified. “Where did this question come from?” he asked.
“That question came directly from Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara,” Sullivan said, “who keeps asking the question.”
“Frank and I agreed on the spot that RAND would try to answer the
Defense Secretary’s question,” Pauker recalled.
Guy Pauker, born in Romania, was a staunch anticommunist. He had a
Ph.D. from Harvard in Southeast Asian studies, and was an expert on how
Stone Age cultures, such as the Navajo, do or do not adapt to the modern
world. He felt excited by this counterinsurgency challenge. The Vietcong
were like a Stone Age people, Pauker believed, and he welcomed the
opportunity to determine what it was that made them tick. Collbohm and
Pauker returned to RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, where they put
together an outline for the new project and a bid.
Over at the Pentagon, the question “What makes the Viet Cong tick?”
had also been confounding the Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The
original intent” of the RAND program, as Seymour Deitchman later
explained it, was to understand the nature of the Vietcong revolutionary
movement by finding answers “to such questions as, what strata of society
its adherents came from; why they were adherents; how group cohesiveness
was built into their ranks; and how they interacted with the populace.” By
the summer of 1964, the secretary of defense had grown frustrated by the
lack of progress being made in the “techniques” area of Project Agile.
Three years into the conflict and still no one seemed to have a handle on
who these Vietcong insurgents really were. ARPA needed quality
information on the enemy combatant, said Deitchman, and for this, to help
facilitate the new RAND Corporation study, the secretary of defense made a
deal with the CIA.
Joseph Zasloff was the lead social scientist on the original Viet Cong
Motivation and Morale Project, and in 2014 he recalled the premise of the
RAND study. “The CIA had detention centers and prisons in South
Vietnam,” Zasloff said, facilities that were not supposed to exist. It was in
these secret detention centers that the CIA kept captured communist POWs,
from whom various case officers tried to extract information. “We
interviewed these prisoners for our study,” explained Zasloff. “We learned a
lot from them about what had been going on. Some were old and had fought
at Dien Bien Phu. Some were just teenagers. They were all very dedicated.
Had great discipline and commitment. They were indoctrinated into the
communist way of thinking.”
Joe Zasloff and his wife, Tela, arrived in Saigon for the Motivation and
Morale Project in the summer of 1964. Zasloff, an expert on Southeast
Asian studies, had spent the previous year at RAND working on a report for
the U.S. Air Force called The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern
Insurgency. In this report, which he produced from his office in Santa
Monica, Zasloff concluded that the North Vietnamese were responsible for
fueling the insurgency in the South. Through the lens of history this is
hardly news, but in 1964 Zasloff’s findings were considered original. He
was sent to Saigon to lead this new RAND study. Zasloff did not have the
kind of hands-on social science research experience that Gerald Hickey and
John Donnell had, but he had been to Vietnam, in the late 1950s, as a
university professor teaching social science at the Faculty of Law in
downtown Saigon.
Because Zasloff would be working directly with the highest-ranking
members of the MACV, he was given a civilian rank equal to the rank of
general, as well as accommodations fit for a general. The Zasloffs settled
into ARPA’s elegant two-story villa at 176 Rue Pasteur, just down the street
from the Combat Development Test Center. Their front yard had trees and a
grassy lawn. A wide wooden veranda and second-story balconies added to
the French colonial feel, as did the staff of servants who took care of
housekeeping needs. Tela Zasloff had the maids string white lights
throughout the garden, said to be inhabited by ghosts. A ten-foot-tall
concrete wall had been constructed around the villa’s perimeter as an added
security precaution.
The villa’s first-floor interior was grand, laid out like a posh hotel lobby,
with rattan furniture and potted palm trees. The downstairs served as a work
area for the RAND researchers who came and went. At night, the Zasloffs
frequently hosted dinner parties.
One month after the Zasloffs got the place up and running, John
Donnell, the author with Hickey of the unfavorable Strategic Hamlet
Program report, arrived. Donnell was to be Zasloff’s partner on the new
ARPA project, examining communist motivation and morale. The success
of the program relied on getting accurate information from POWs, and
Donnell spoke Vietnamese. Zasloff also hired local academics to act as
interpreters, French-speaking Vietnamese intellectuals who were considered
wealthy by national standards. The Vietnamese interpreters were often
invited to the Zasloffs’ dinner parties and were asked to share their thoughts
and perceptions. The interpreters were candid and open, admitting freely
that they knew almost nothing about Vietnamese peasants who lived in
villages outside Saigon. They were all citizens of the same country, but with
very little in common. Most farmers, the interpreters said, lacked dreams
and aspirations and were generally content. Most had no ambition to do
anything but farm. All the peasants wanted out of this life, the interpreters
said, was to live with their families in peace, in rural villages, without being
harassed or disturbed.
The interpreters set out with Zasloff and Donnell to interview prisoners
of war in the secret CIA prisons across the South. The group interviewed
prisoners inside the notorious Chi Hoa prison in Saigon as well as in many
smaller detention centers out in the provinces. Most of the POW interviews
were done with either Zasloff or Donnell and one Vietnamese interpreter,
who also acted as a stenographer or note taker. There were no uniformed
officials present, which meant the prisoners often loosened up and spoke
freely.
“We interviewed all kinds of prisoners,” Zasloff recalled. “Some from
the North and some from the South.” Most of the northern-born fighters had
made their way to the South along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While their
histories unfolded, the initial assumptions of the interpreters from Saigon
began to change, including the preconception that all a Vietnamese farmer
wanted was to own a small plot of land and be left in peace. As work
progressed, the RAND researchers started to learn more about what was
actually fueling the insurgency. It was a relatively simple answer that was
echoed among the prisoners. What motivated Vietcong fighters, the
prisoners said, was injustice, “grievances the peasants held against the
Saigon government.” The prisoners told Zasloff and Donnell they believed
that through communism, they could have a better life, one that was not
based on corruption. The prisoners expressed “ardent aspirations they had
for education, economic opportunity, equality and justice for themselves
and their descendants,” Zasloff and Donnell wrote.
The POWs also talked of being tortured by the government of South
Vietnam. Some prisoners showed the RAND analysts scars they claimed
were the results of incessant torture by prison guards. They spoke of being
forced to watch summary executions of fellow prisoners, without
explanation or trial. There was no way to verify the veracity of what they
were told, but Zasloff and Donnell felt compelled to report these Geneva
Convention violations to Guy Pauker at RAND. When Pauker forwarded
the information on to the Pentagon in a memo titled “Treatment of POWs,
Defectors and Suspects in South Vietnam,” Seymour Deitchman got
involved.
He asked questions: How did Zasloff and Donnell know that the
prisoners were not lying? Why believe a prisoner in the first place? Instead
of looking into Zasloff and Donnell’s claims, Deitchman later
commissioned a RAND study on how to detect when a Vietcong prisoner
was telling a lie. In “Estimating from Misclassified Data,” RAND analyst S.
James Press used a probability theorem called Bayes’ theorem to refute the
idea that POW interviews could always be trusted. “The motivation for the
work had its genesis in a desire to compensate for incorrect answers that
might be found in prisoner-of-war interviews,” Press wrote. After forty-
eight pages of mathematical calculations that placed Vietcong POWs’
answers in hypothetical categories, Press concluded, “It is clear that if
hostile subjects were aiming at an optimal strategy, they would lie
independently of all the categories.”
The same summer that Zasloff and Donnell presented their concerns to
Seymour Deitchman, something totally unexpected happened at the
Pentagon, a situation that still confounded Joseph Zasloff after more than
fifty years. His earlier RAND monograph, The Role of North Vietnam in the
Southern Insurgency, began making its way around the upper echelons of
the Pentagon. In this report Zasloff had concluded that the North
Vietnamese were responsible for most insurgent activity in the South.
“Much of the strength and sophistication of the insurgent organization in
South Vietnam today is attributable to the fact that North Vietnam plans,
directs, and coordinates the over-all campaign and lends material aid,
spiritual leadership and moral justification to the rebellion,” Zasloff had
written. A copy went to the Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay.
The overall war policy at the time called for “graduated pressure,” a
strategy that Robert McNamara had developed for President Johnson to
avoid making the war in Vietnam official. Only a few months remained
until the November presidential election; Johnson desperately wanted to
maintain what was known at the Pentagon as his “hold until November”
policy. This strategy allowed for so-called tit-for-tat bombing raids, small-
scale U.S. Air Force attacks against communist activity. Up to this point in
the conflict, Hanoi, the capital of the North, had not been targeted.
Reading Zasloff’s The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern
Insurgency, General LeMay decided the paper was the perfect report on
which to base his argument to bomb North Vietnam. Unknown to Zasloff,
his RAND report would now become the centerpiece of LeMay’s new
strategy for the secretary of defense. In this unconventional war, which
America was still not officially fighting, the role of bombing had been
fraught with contention. In the summer of 1964, the U.S. Air Force was
playing a subordinate role to the U.S. Army, which led efforts on the
ground. General LeMay had been arguing that airpower was the way to
quell the insurgency, but his arguments had been falling on deaf ears. As
LeMay geared up to use Zasloff’s RAND study in a new push with
Secretary McNamara, a major incident and turning point in the war
occurred.
In the first week of August 1964, U.S. naval forces clashed with North
Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. It served as a casus belli,
an act or event used to justify war. President Johnson went on national
television, interrupting regular programming across the country to announce
North Vietnamese aggression and request from Congress the authority to
take military action. This was the official beginning of the Vietnam War. In
a matter of days, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving
President Johnson the authority to take whatever actions he saw necessary,
including the use of force. At the Pentagon, Zasloff’s study was now at the
center of a perfect storm. On August 17, 1964, General LeMay sent a
memorandum to General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. “The best chance” for winning the war in Vietnam, LeMay
wrote, was to choose ninety-four targets in North Vietnam already identified
by the Pentagon as “crucial” to the communists and therefore necessary to
destroy. Zasloff’s study, also sent to General Wheeler, was the centerpiece
of LeMay’s argument. At the time, Zasloff had no idea.
In Saigon, Zasloff and Donnell were getting close to the end of their
prisoner of war study, the first of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale
Project reports for ARPA. The men had conducted 145 interviews over five
months, in multiple CIA prisoner facilities. In December 1964, Guy Pauker
flew to Saigon to help compile the information. In the downstairs
mezzanine of the ARPA villa on Rue Pasteur, the three men labored for
weeks to put together Zasloff and Donnell’s final report, which was fifty-
four pages long.
Once it was completed, the RAND analysts briefed General William
Westmoreland, at MACV headquarters just down the street. The Vietcong
insurgents, Zasloff and Donnell said, saw the Americans as invaders and
would do anything they could to make them give up and leave. Ten years
earlier, participants from the same movement had fought to kick the French
out, and had succeeded. Now they were fighting for the same cause. The
insurgency was not an insurgency to the locals, Zasloff and Donnell said. It
was a nationalist struggle on behalf of the people of Vietnam. The
insurgents saw themselves as being “for the poor,” the analysts said, and
they saw the Americans as the villains, specifically “American imperialists
and their lackeys, the GVN [Government of Vietnam].” Zasloff and Donnell
said that in their POW interviews they had learned that very few fighters
understood what communism meant, what it stood for. Hardly any of the
Vietcong had even heard of Karl Marx. It was a fact that the Vietcong had
patrons among the Chinese communists and that the same patrons had been
helping the North Vietnamese, giving them weapons and teaching war-
fighting techniques. But what the local people were after was independence.
South Vietnamese peasants had aspirations, too. They wanted social justice,
economic opportunity. And they wanted their land back—land that had
been taken from them during dubious security operations like the Strategic
Hamlet Program. That was what made the Vietcong tick, Zasloff and
Donnell told General Westmoreland.
Next, the men briefed General Maxwell Taylor, whom Johnson had
made U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. After that, it was back to MACV
headquarters to brief the senior staff, as well as the ARPA officials at the
Combat and Development Test Center. In each facility, to each person or
group of people, they said the same thing. The Vietcong were a formidable
foe. They “could only be defeated at enormous costs,” Zasloff and Donnell
said, “if at all.”
Under the aegis of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, the
Advanced Research Projects Agency sought to determine what made the
Vietcong tick. But the agency did not want to hear that the Vietcong could
not be defeated. Seymour Deitchman took the position that Zasloff and
Donnell had gone off the rails, same as Hickey and Donnell had done with
the Strategic Hamlet Program report a few years before. According to other
RAND officers, Deitchman perceived the POW report as unhelpful. RAND
needed to send researchers into the field whose reports were better aligned
with the conviction of the Pentagon that the Vietcong could and would be
defeated. Frank Collbohm took to the hallways of the RAND headquarters
he was in charge of in Santa Monica. “I am looking for three senior,
imaginative fellows to go over to Vietnam,” he said, and to get a handle on
the chaos in Southeast Asia. He needed to replace Zasloff and was looking
for a quality analyst to take over the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale
Project. Collbohm found what he was looking for in a controversial nuclear
strategist named Leon Gouré.
Leon Gouré, born in Moscow in 1922, was a Sovietologist who loathed
Soviet communism. He was born into a family of Jewish socialist
intellectuals who were part of a faction called the Mensheviks, who came to
be violently persecuted by the Leninists. When Gouré was one year old, the
family went into exile in Berlin, only to flee again a decade later when
Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The Gourés moved to Paris but in
1940 were again forced to flee. Gouré once told the Washington Post that
his family left Paris on the last train out, and that only when he arrived in
America did he finally feel he had a home. Gouré enlisted in the U.S. Army,
became a citizen, and was sent back to Germany to fight the Nazis in the
Battle of the Bulge. As a member of the Counterintelligence Corps,
America’s Army intelligence group, he became fluent in German and
French. He also became a valuable interrogator, learning how to draw
information out of captured prisoners, and to write intelligence reports.
After the war, Gouré earned an undergraduate degree from New York
University and a master’s degree from Columbia. In 1951 he became an
analyst with RAND, and in no time he was working on post–nuclear war
scenarios with the firm’s elite defense intellectuals, including Albert
Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn. Gouré’s particular area of expertise was
post-apocalypse civil defense, and in 1960 he traveled to Moscow on a civil
defense research trip for RAND. In 1961 his findings were published as a
book that caused a national outcry.
Gouré claimed that during his trip to Moscow, he had seen firsthand
evidence indicating that the Soviet Union had built a vast network of
underground bunkers, which would protect the Russian people after a
nuclear first strike against the United States. The Soviet action would
inevitably be followed by a U.S. nuclear response. The concept of mutual
assured destruction was based on the idea that the superpowers would not
attack each other, provided they remained equally vulnerable to a nuclear
strike. Gouré’s frightening premise suggested that the Soviet Politburo
believed they could survive a nuclear war and protect the majority of their
population as well. Like Albert Wohlstetter’s second-strike theory, Gouré’s
findings suggested that since the Soviets believed they could survive, they
might attempt a decapitating first strike.
Gouré’s critics said his work was unreliable. That he hated Soviet
communism with such passion that he was biased to the point of being
blind. In December 1961 an article attacking Gouré’s work appeared in the
New York Times under a headline that read “Soviet Shelters: A Myth or
Fact?” Reporter Harrison E. Salisbury had taken a month-long trip across
the Soviet Union, covering roughly twelve thousand miles. He said that he
“failed to turn up evidence of a single Soviet bomb shelter,” and that the
underground bomb shelters purported to have been built across Moscow
were nothing more sinister than subway tunnels. He singled out “Leon
Gouré, research specialist of the Rand Corporation,” who, Salisbury wrote,
“has presented several studies contending that the Russians have a wide
program for sheltering population and industry from atomic attack.”
Salisbury had interviewed scores of Russians for his article and learned that
Gouré’s reports had been “vigorously challenged by observers on the
scene.” Close scrutiny of the alleged facts, wrote Salisbury, revealed that no
shelters had been constructed. “Diplomats, foreign military attaches and
correspondents who have traveled widely in the Soviet Union report that
there is no visible evidence of a widespread shelter program.” The Gouré
report, Salisbury suggested, served only one master, RAND’s single largest
customer, the U.S. Air Force, in its quest for tens of millions more dollars
from the Pentagon for its ever-growing bomber fleets.
The acrimonious debate over the legitimacy of Gouré’s civil defense
report raged for months and then subsided. Gouré disappeared from the
headlines but continued to write reports for RAND. Now, as 1964 drew to a
close, Frank Collbohm tapped Leon Gouré to replace Joseph Zasloff as the
lead social scientist on the ARPA Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project
in Saigon. Zasloff saw this appointment as a disaster waiting to unfold.
“Still, after fifty years, I get red in the face just thinking of what Leon
Gouré did,” Zasloff said in 2014. Within a matter of weeks Gouré was in
Saigon. And he was ready to take charge.

In Saigon, stability and security were quickly deteriorating as chaos

enveloped the city. On Christmas Eve, 1964, two Vietcong fighters drove a
car packed with two hundred pounds of explosives into the underground
parking garage beneath the Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters, a seven-story
hotel leased by the Defense Department to provide housing for its officers
in Saigon. The bomb demolished three floors of the building, killing two
U.S. servicemen and injuring sixty-three Americans, an Australian Army
officer, and forty-three Vietnamese civilians.
Suddenly faced with the possibility that Saigon could fall to the
Vietcong, Secretary of Defense McNamara pressured President Johnson to
take action. On February 7, 1965, a limited bombing campaign called
Operation Flaming Dart began. Eleven days later, Johnson ordered the Joint
Chiefs of Staff to initiate Rolling Thunder I, the air campaign that General
LeMay had been arguing for. On March 8, the Marines landed in the city of
Da Nang. It was war. Officially now.
Leon Gouré settled into the RAND Saigon villa previously occupied by
the Zasloffs and got to work. His first report for the Viet Cong Motivation
and Morale Project drew conclusions that were diametrically opposed to
what Zasloff and Donnell had found.
“By and large,” wrote Gouré, “Vietnamese farmers hold no strong
political views.” Indeed, it was “the ideological apathy of the peasant” that
allowed most Vietnamese to concentrate on “personal survival,” not
political aspirations, Gouré wrote. The majority of the Vietnamese were
neutral, he said, and unlike people from the West, they did not adhere to the
democratic notion that “they have a real freedom of choice.” Gouré argued
that bombing was the pathway to victory in Vietnam. Bombing weakened
the morale of the Vietcong, he said.
“Gouré gave the Pentagon exactly what the Air Force wanted to hear,
about bombing [Vietnam],” Zasloff said. But to Zasloff, what was
particularly egregious was that Gouré used the transcripts of Zasloff and
Donnell’s prisoner interviews to draw his own conclusions. These
conclusions, said Zasloff, “simply were not there.” Gouré did not interview
any Vietcong prisoners on his own for his original report.
In the winter of 1965, RAND’s Guy Pauker flew to Washington to meet
with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to sell an expanded idea for the Viet Cong
Motivation and Morale Project, now being run by Leon Gouré. The
premise, Pauker said, was to determine how best to “break the backbone of
the VC [Vietcong] hard core.” In this new study, Gouré would interview
Vietcong prisoners himself, and by doing so, he would best be able to
determine the psychological effect that airpower and heavy weapons were
having on the Vietcong. “Judicious exploration” of this concept, Pauker
said, “offered considerable promise” about the way to win this war. The
Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed, and the ARPA project was expanded. With no
previous experience studying Southeast Asia, Leon Gouré, RAND’s leading
Sovietologist and civil defense expert, was put in charge of the expanded
Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project.
The villa at Rue Pasteur was now a regular meeting place for RAND
anthropologists and social scientists working on various ARPA projects
over the course of the long war. This group included Gerald Hickey, now
back in Saigon to work on studies about how Special Forces worked with
Montagnards and how Vietnamese beliefs in “cosmic forces” factored into
the war. In his memoir, Hickey recalled how a rising star at the Pentagon
named Dan Ellsberg regularly came around the RAND villa. Hickey had
met Ellsberg the previous summer and was aware of his reputation as a
brilliant Harvard economist who had written a fascinating paper on how
diplomacy was similar to blackmail. Ellsberg was now working in Vietnam
for the Defense Department, with the mysterious title of “special liaison” to
the Pentagon. One particular evening with Daniel Ellsberg stuck in
Hickey’s mind.
“In November 1965, I was invited to have an informal dinner with Dan
Ellsberg at his Saigon villa next to the heavily guarded villa of General
Westmoreland,” Hickey recalled. “Dan was affable as we talked about
many subjects relating to Vietnam, and then he produced a packet of photos
taken on trips into the countryside with [Lieutenant Colonel] John Paul
Vann. In the photographs he carried an automatic weapon, which he said he
often fired into the thick foliage along the road where the Vietcong might be
hiding. Talking about these trips,” recalled Hickey, “Dan became more
excited by the bravado, the adventure, something I had seen in other such
men (combattant manqué [frustrated fighter], the French called them) who
came to Vietnam for reasons I could never understand.”
Vietnam was a complicated, labyrinthine place to work and to live, with
professionals serving many masters on many projects about whose real
meaning they had no idea. This was the nature of classified defense work,
with individual scientists and soldiers given but a sliver of the truth, just
enough to be able to do the job without always knowing the reason behind
it. Ellsberg’s bravado may not have made much sense to Hickey in 1965. In
the fall of 1972, things would become illuminated when Ellsberg took
actions against the Pentagon that would force him to go underground as, for
a time, the most wanted man in America.

Leon Gouré continued to produce reports for ARPA, almost all of which
promised the Pentagon that Vietcong fighters were rapidly losing
motivation and morale. In “Some Impressions of Viet Cong Vulnerabilities:
An Interim Report,” Gouré and co-author C. A. H. Thomson declared that
Vietcong soldiers had become “discouraged and exhausted,” and that “life
in the Viet Cong has become more dangerous and that the hardships are
greater than in 1964.” These findings, Gouré said, drew upon a record of
450 interviews with Vietcong captives, “a body of evidence yielding more
or less reliable impressions… of the Viet Cong’s current vulnerabilities.”
Furthermore, wrote Gouré, Vietcong cadres had confided in him that they
had lost hope. In recent months, as he put it, Vietcong “soldiers have
spoken more often of their probable death in the next battle, of never seeing
their families again.” There is no mention in these reports that Vietcong
fighters also expressed a willingness to die for their nationalist cause.
Instead, Gouré’s reports served as pithy endorsements for continued U.S.
Air Force bombing campaigns. “Fear of air power,” Gouré promised, would
“bring the VC to their knees.”
 In 1965 Leon Gouré became an advisor to Secretary McNamara. It was
not unusual for him to be picked up at the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur and
helicoptered to an aircraft carrier stationed off the coast of Vietnam, where
he would brief field commanders on the studies that RAND was doing for
ARPA and the Pentagon. When summoned to Washington, Gouré was
treated with equal fanfare. The word among defense intellectuals was that
President Johnson walked around the White House with a copy of Gouré’s
findings in his back pocket.
“When Gouré would return from Vietnam to [RAND headquarters in]
Santa Monica, he would stay long enough to change shirts, then fly off to
Washington to brief McNamara,” recalled Guy Pauker, who had begun to
sour on the truthfulness of Gouré’s findings. For as much as Gouré was
respected by the Pentagon and the White House, he was creating enemies
inside RAND. Gouré’s undoing began in late 1965, when RAND’s work on
the Viet Cong Motivation and Moral Project came under scrutiny by
Congress. During a hearing before the Subcommittee on International
Organizations and Movements, Congressman Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen
demanded to know why the RAND Corporation had been hired to do so
much work on the Vietcong when it seemed that what they were gathering
was “straight military intelligence.” That work “should be done by the
military,” Frelinghuysen said, not “highly-paid consultants like Rand.”
“As a matter of convenience, [we] gave the contract to the Rand
Corporation, as an instrument of the military systems, to perform the
study,” ARPA’s Seymour Deitchman said. ARPA did not want to send its
own people into the field—people like Deitchman—because they were
“heavily occupied with operational problems associated with the war, and
would not have time to spend several months on these detailed questions—
important as they were,” Deitchman explained. A think tank like Rand had
the manpower, the expertise, and the time.
Congressman Frelinghuysen did not agree. Not only was the work
expensive, but also its conclusions were puerile, he said. He quoted from
one of Gouré’s reports, calling the work so banal “it was something a child
could have come up with.”
Frelinghuysen’s accusations caught the attention of Senator J. William
Fulbright, who in turn made himself familiar with Gouré’s reports and was
appalled by what he saw as Gouré’s manipulation of prisoner of war
interviews. “[We have] received reports of recent surveys conducted by the
RAND Corporation and others concerning the attitudes of the Viet Cong
defectors and prisoners,” Fulbright wrote to Secretary McNamara. It
appeared to him that “those in charge of the project may have manipulated
the results in such a way as to affect the results.” Senator Fulbright
demanded that the entire RAND effort be reviewed.
When McNamara assigned an Air Force officer to investigate, the Air
Force found nothing wrong with the RAND work. But the national attention
that Congress had directed at RAND made the corporation look bad.
Despite RAND’s initial support of Leon Gouré, the controversy
surrounding him could no longer be ignored. Gouré needed to be removed.
RAND president Frank Collbohm sent analyst Gus Shubert to Saigon to
take over the ARPA contract. Gouré was relieved of his duties while the
Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project continued on. By 1968, RAND
analysts had conducted more than 2,400 interviews related to Vietcong
fighters, which were typed up into 62,000 pages of text and compiled into
more than fifty ARPA reports.
Leon Gouré was not alone in his downfall. William Godel, the man
responsible for Project Agile to begin with, was arrested by the FBI in
August 1964 on charges that he had siphoned ARPA monies into his own
personal bank account. On December 16, a federal grand jury indicted
Godel and two former Pentagon colleagues for defrauding the U.S.
government and embezzling a total of $57,000 in Defense Department
funds. Godel and his attorney worked hard to clear Godel’s name.
Depositions were taken on his behalf from U.S. ambassador to Vietnam
general Maxwell Taylor and others. A judge granted Godel permission to
travel to Vietnam to take depositions from a Vietnamese general and Thai
prince, but to no avail. At trial, the government produced 150 exhibits and a
large number of eyewitnesses to testify against him. After eight days of
testimony and ten hours of jury deliberation, William Godel was convicted
on two counts of embezzlement and conspiracy to mishandle government
funds. The judge ordered that he serve concurrent five-year prison terms on
both counts.
William Godel, war hero, spy, diplomat, and the architect of many of
ARPA’s most controversial programs in Vietnam, including its
counterinsurgency efforts and the Agent Orange defoliation campaign, was
sent to a low-security federal correctional institution in Allenwood,
Pennsylvania. His personal financial benefit from the embezzlement scheme
was determined to have been $16,922, roughly $135,000 in 2015.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Jasons Enter Vietnam

During the Vietnam War, the RAND Corporation handled soft science
programs for the Advanced Research Projects Agency. For hard science
programs, in fields characterized by the use of quantifiable data and
methodological rigor, ARPA looked to the Jason scientists. The Jasons were
an elite, self-selected club mostly of physicists and mathematicians
interested in solving problems that seemed unsolvable to the rest of the
world. All throughout the 1960s, their only client was ARPA, which meant
that all of their reports—the majority of which were classified secret, top
secret, or secret restricted data (involving nuclear secrets)—wound up on
the desk of the secretary of defense. The Jasons were quintessential defense
scientists, following in the footsteps of John von Neumann, Ernest
Lawrence, and Edward Teller. The core group, including Murph
Goldberger, Murray Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, and William Nierenberg,
had been closely intertwined, academically, since the Manhattan Project
during World War II. In the early 1960s, the Jasons began expanding,
bringing some of their Ph.D. students on board, including a young
geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald.
In the Jason scientists’ first four years they had performed scientific
studies for ARPA covering some of the most esoteric problems facing the
Pentagon, including high-altitude nuclear explosions, electromagnetic pulse
phenomena, and particle beam lasers. Their reports had titles like “The
Eikonal Method in Magnetohydrodynamics” (1961), “Radar Analysis of
Waves by Interferometer Techniques” (1963), and “The Hose Instability
Dispersion Relation” (1964).
 “We were interested in solving defense problems because they were the
most challenging problems to solve,” Murph Goldberger explained in 2013
in an interview for this book, and for the first several years this was
generally the case. Then came Vietnam. “The high goals set by the
originators of the Jason concept were being met when the Vietnam War
intervened,” said Gordon MacDonald, who joined the Jasons in the summer
of 1963. “Murray Gell-Mann called to ask if I’d like to join Jason. I
respected Murray a great deal,” and said yes to joining. The first year as a
Jason, MacDonald recalled, “my contribution was principally related to
[nuclear effects]—what happens to the ionosphere when you set off nuclear
explosions, things of that sort.” But as individual Jasons became interested
in Vietnam, so did the group. The first Jason to be very interested was
Murray Gell-Mann.
Gell-Mann was one of the most respected thinkers in the Jason group,
and one of the most esoteric. In 1969 he would win the Nobel Prize in
physics for his discovery of quarks, a subatomic particle the nature of which
is far beyond the grasp of most people. But Gell-Mann’s areas of interest
were also incredibly plebeian; he liked to think about things common to all
men, including mythology, prehistory, and the evolution of human
language. During the 1961 summer study in Maine, Gell-Mann led a
seminar called “White Tiger.” It addressed the growing counterinsurgency
movement in Vietnam from the standpoint of “tribal warfare.” This was
well before any of the other Jason scientists were thinking about the
Vietnam problem, Goldberger recalled.
Gell-Mann had unsuccessfully tried to get the California Institute of
Technology, where he was a professor, to open a department of behavioral
sciences. To Gell-Mann, guerrilla warfare was a topic well worth
examining. “Because he was intrigued, the Jasons became intrigued,”
Goldberger recalled. “We thought, well, if the Jasons can understand the
sociology behind counterinsurgency, perhaps the Vietnam problem” could
be solved. And so in the summer of 1964, ARPA asked the Jasons to
conduct a formal summer study on Vietnam. William Nierenberg, a former
Manhattan Project scientist, was chosen to lead the study, which was
conducted in La Jolla. This was not the first time the Jasons examined what
Goldberger called “the Vietnam problem,” but it was the first time they
wrote a report about it.
 Murray Gell-Mann invited the revered war correspondent and political
scientist Bernard Fall to come and speak to the Jason scientists that summer
in La Jolla. In 1964 Fall was considered one of the most knowledgeable
experts on Southeast Asia. His book Street Without Joy, published in 1961,
chronicled the brutal eight-year conflict between the French army and the
Vietnamese communists, ending with the staggering defeat of the French at
Dien Bien Phu. “Street Without Joy” was the name given by French troops
to the communist-held stretch of road between the villages of Hue and
Quang Tri.
Fall had personal experience with insurgency and counterinsurgency
groups. A Jew born in Vienna in 1926, he fled with his parents to Paris after
the Nazis annexed Austria. Fall’s father joined the French resistance but
was captured, tortured, and murdered by the Gestapo. Fall’s mother was
deported to Auschwitz, then murdered in the gas chamber there. An orphan
by the age of sixteen, Fall joined the French resistance and learned firsthand
what a resistance movement was about. After France was liberated in 1944
he joined the French army, and after the war he worked as an analyst for the
Nuremberg war crimes tribunals. Fall won a Fulbright scholarship and
moved to America, where he was initially known as a scholar and political
scientist. But wanting to see the guerrilla war in Indochina up close, he
became a war reporter. Still a French citizen in the 1950s, he was allowed to
travel behind enemy lines with French soldiers and reported from the
battlefield. Bernard Fall knew what it was like to be a soldier. Soldiers and
scholars alike admired him. He became a U.S. citizen and was one of the
few Americans ever invited to Hanoi to interview Ho Chi Minh.
Fall believed in and advocated for U.S. development of
counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam. Asymmetrical warfare was a
formidable foe; Fall had seen it in person. At Dien Bien Phu, French forces
had far more sophisticated weaponry, but the communist Viet Minh won the
battle with the crafty use of shovels, a Stone Age tool. The communists
literally dug a trench around French forces and encircled them. Then they
brought in the heavy artillery and bombarded the French soldiers trapped
inside. The battle of Dien Bien Phu marked the climactic end of the French
occupation of Vietnam, and with the signing of the Geneva Accords,
Vietnam was divided at the seventeenth parallel. Control of the North went
to Ho Chi Minh, and control of the South went to Emperor Bao Dai, with
Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister.
Fall believed that unless the Americans wanted to repeat what had
happened to the French in Vietnam, their efforts had to match guerrilla
warfare tactics in ingenuity. After Fall’s briefing, the Jasons wrote a report
titled “Working Paper on Internal Warfare.” It has never been declassified
but is referred to in an unclassified report for the Naval Air Development
Center as involving a “tactical sensor system program.” The information in
this report—the Jasons’ seminal idea of using “tactical sensors” on the
battlefield in a counterinsurgency war—would soon become central to the
war effort. In 1964 this was considered just too long-term an idea and it was
shelved.
Two and a half years after he participated in the Jason summer study in
La Jolla, educating physicists and mathematicians about counterinsurgency
warfare in Vietnam, Bernard Fall was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.
With terrible irony, the place where Fall was killed was the same stretch of
road that had given his book its title, Street Without Joy. Fall’s book would
become one of the most widely read books among U.S. officers during the
Vietnam War. In 2012 General Colin Powell, now retired, told the New York
Times Book Review that Fall’s book was one that deeply influenced his
thinking over the course of his career from a young soldier to chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff to secretary of state. “Street Without Joy, by
Bernard Fall, was a textbook for those of us going to Vietnam in the first
wave of President Kennedy’s advisors,” Powell said.

The Jason scientists were expanding their work and commitment to the
Vietnam War, and in the process, there was growing discord among them
about how to proceed, specifically in the scientific gray area called social
science. Some, like Murray Gell-Mann, saw promise in understanding
human motivation. Others believed that using advanced technology was the
only way to win the war. In Gordon MacDonald’s opinion, ingenuity
needed to be applied across the board, including the use of weather as a
weapon. Climate change is, and always has been, “a driver of wars,” he
believed. Drought, pestilence, flood, and famine push people to the limits of
human survival, often resulting in war for control over what few resources
remain. With war escalating in Vietnam, the Pentagon sought new ways to
use weather as a weapon. As a Jason scientist, MacDonald had a rare front-
row seat at these events. Most of what occurred remains classified; but
some facts have emerged. They come from the story of Gordon
MacDonald, one of the most influential and least remembered defense
science advisors of the twentieth century.
Gordon MacDonald was born in Mexico in 1929. His father, a
Scotsman, was an accountant at a Canadian bank in Mexico City. His
mother, a secretary, worked in the American embassy down the street. His
first passion was rocks, which he embraced as a child with the enthusiasm
of a geologist until his childhood was shattered by illness. In the second
grade, MacDonald contracted a mysterious disease that left him temporarily
paralyzed in both legs and one arm. He had polio, an acute, virulent
infectious disease that was not immediately diagnosable in Mexico in the
1930s. He was transported by railcar to Dallas, where, like so many child
polio sufferers, he was left alone in a hospital, feeling abandoned. This was
“not a pleasant experience,” he confided to a fellow scientist in 1986, in a
rare discussion about his childhood trauma. From tragedy springs
inspiration. While recovering in the Texas hospital, MacDonald developed
two skills that would shape his life: reading everything made available to
him, then discussing and debating the contents with a person of equal or
greater intellect.
“One very positive thing that came out of that [experience] was an
uncle, Dudley Woodward,” who lived not far away from the hospital,
MacDonald recalled. “He made it a practice of virtually every day coming
by to see me.” Dudley Woodward was a man of many interests, an attorney
who also served as chairman of the Board of Regents at the University of
Texas. “He subscribed to the Dallas Morning News for me,” said
MacDonald. “I would read the paper and be ready to discuss world events
with him every morning. We did this every single day.” Gordon MacDonald
was just nine years old.
The young boy returned home to Mexico, but with an acute physical
disability. For seven long years he could not attend school. “There was a
gap in my education,” as he put it. “From second to ninth grade… I had
taken my first years [of schooling] in a Mexican school, a church school,
and then I had no formal education. I did a great deal of reading at home.”
What his uncle Dudley Woodward had taught him in the hospital in Texas
had sharpened his ability to learn without formal teaching. His mother also
helped, through tutoring. Finally he was well enough to attend school again
and “made the leap into high school.” In an understatement he added, “And
I was able to do very well.”
He left home for a military boarding school, San Marcos Baptist
Academy, in rural Mexico, a day and a half away from Mexico City by
train. School “was difficult with the disability.” He explained, “I still
continued to suffer from physical deficiency, [while] trying to maintain
standing with the corps of cadets.” San Marcos was a religious school, but it
also had a football team. “My principal ambition was to overcome my
physical defect, and so in the last year I was there, I played football, became
a member of their starting team, and that I regarded as a very great
achievement.” During summer vacations he worked at the American
Smelting and Refining Company plant in San Luis Potosí, by the sea, where
it was his job to collect ore samples in the field to bring back for study in
the lab. During this time, he refined his interest in rocks to specific minerals
and crystals. To keep current with world events, he listened to shortwave
radio while he worked. In his junior year in high school, he decided to
apply to Harvard University, and was accepted—on a football scholarship.
The year was 1946, and Gordon MacDonald had never been out of
Mexico, except when he was in the hospital in Texas. He took the train up
from San Luis, stopping for a short stay with an aunt in New York City,
never before having visited a city outside Mexico or ridden on a subway.
Finally, he arrived at the Harvard University campus in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. “By a very good fortune I had been placed in Massachusetts
Hall, which is the oldest of the dormitories at Harvard, and my room was
right over the room of Jim Conant, who was president [of Harvard].” Jim
Conant was James Conant, the famous American chemist who had just
returned from working on the Manhattan Project. “I got to know [Conant]
very well later in life,” MacDonald said, but their first meeting was far more
commonplace. “He made a point of letting [me] know I was living over his
office, and to be appropriately quiet during the daytime hours.”
MacDonald chose physics as a course of study but soon decided that
Harvard had “miserable” physics teachers. “I began to see the difference
between memory and understanding when it comes to difficult subjects,” he
said, meaning that to learn facts by rote was one thing, but to understand
concepts on a fundamental level required serious intellectual discipline.
After six months of physics, he decided to shift his concentration to geology
and math. Socially he struggled. Many students had matriculated from
exclusive boarding schools—St. Paul’s, Andover, and Exeter—and coming
from a Bible school in Mexico, he felt outclassed. Playing on the football
team proved almost impossible, but he refused to give up and instead
persevered.
In his second year at Harvard, his interest in weather peaked during a
confrontation with a visiting professor. The venerable Dr. Walter Munk, one
of the world’s greatest oceanographers, was giving a seminar on the
variable rotation of the earth and, as Munk later recalled, “how that was
associated with a seasonal change in the high-altitude jet stream that had
just been discovered.” So, “feeling reasonably secure that no one in the
audience knew anything about this, I was surprised when a student in the
first row interrupted [me] with rude comments about neglect of tides,
variable ocean currents, and such like.” Dr. Munk was not amused and
dismissed the student’s questions as inconsequential. The student was
Gordon MacDonald. “Four years later I gave a much-improved account at
MIT; there he was again sitting in the front row, complaining that I had not
answered his questions of four years ago.”
In 1950 MacDonald graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, the first
ever to do so in the geology department. Despite his physical limitations, he
managed to play football and row crew in intercollegiate scull racing. He
was granted membership in Harvard’s legendary Society of Fellows,
making him one of twenty-four scholars from around the world who were
given complete freedom to do what they wanted to do, all expenses paid,
for three years. He was the youngest fellow on record, and remains so to
date. MacDonald traveled around the country and the world, returning to
Harvard for a master’s degree in 1952 and a Ph.D. in geology and
geophysics in 1954. Some of his fondest memories of that period in his life
were the so-called Monday night sherry dinners hosted by the Society of
Fellows. During them, he enjoyed long discussions with physics giants like
Enrico Fermi, with whom he discussed the earth’s rotation, its core, and its
crust—still rather mysterious concepts in 1959. “And with Adlai Stevenson,
who was a candidate for president, I talked about science policy,” said
MacDonald. “I became aware that there was this much larger world, other
than the world of rocks, minerals, and thermodynamic relationships.”
Suddenly it all “sort of fitted together.” He wanted to learn everything he
could about the geophysical world, but also about how those who inhabited
it used science for their own benefit.
His academic output was phenomenal. MacDonald was able to see, in
ways other scientists before him had not, how elements of the earth were
connected. “Paleontology is not distinct from astronomy,” he said. In an
award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959, he was
praised for his groundbreaking studies. His work, the academy declared,
“brought together very distinct parts of geophysics: meteorology,
oceanography, the interior of the earth, and astronomical observations about
the earth’s rotation.” In 1958 he appeared on Walter Cronkite’s program The
World Tomorrow, in the first-ever public discussion on American television
about how man would soon be able to explore the moon. Then he became a
consultant for the Pentagon, for ARPA, and for NASA. “I was very
enthusiastic,” he said. “I felt we could learn a great deal about the earth by
looking at the moon, and so I was eager to participate.”
As passionate as MacDonald could become about earth sciences, he
could also lose interest in a subject as quickly. By 1960, he said, “I was
becoming more interested in the atmosphere, working on climate
problems.” The University of California, Los Angeles, was developing a
program in atmospheric science, and he accepted a position there as director
of the Atmospheric Research Laboratory. At UCLA he found himself
working on weather and the ionosphere. This led him to become interested
in climate control. In 1962 he was appointed to the National Academy of
Sciences and its Committee on Atmospheric Sciences. In 1963 MacDonald
was elected chairman of the Panel on Weather and Climate Modification,
which was part of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 1963, weather modification was still legal. The job of the panel,
MacDonald wrote, was “to take a deliberate and thoughtful review of the
present status and activities in this field, and of its potential and limitations
for the future.” The public was told that the National Academy of Sciences
was investigating weather modification for “benign purposes only,” in areas
that included making rain by seeding clouds. “There is increasing but
somewhat ambiguous evidence that precipitation from some types of clouds
and storm systems can be modestly increased and redistributed by seeding
techniques,” MacDonald wrote in a 1963 report.
At the same time, in his classified work, Gordon MacDonald was
becoming deeply interested in weather modification. He told the Journal of
the American Statistical Association: “I became increasingly convinced that
scientists should be more actively engaged in questions of environmental
modification, and that [the] federal government should have a more
organized approach to the problem. While research could take place in both
the public and the private sector, the government should take the lead in
large-scale field experiments and monitoring, and in establishing
appropriate legal frameworks for private initiatives.”
At the Pentagon, where the uses of weather weapons were being
explored, MacDonald had an additional job: serving as a scientific
consultant. In the winter of 1965 there was a feeling of “hesitancy” at the
Pentagon about how to proceed in Vietnam, and by late fall, the feeling was
moving toward what he called “complexity.” Secretary of Defense
McNamara and his colleagues “were searching, almost desperately, for a
means to contain the war,” MacDonald told an audience of fellow Jasons in
1984. In December 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of
defense authorized ARPA to research and develop “forest fire as a military
weapon” in Vietnam.
The secret program, called Project EMOTE, was developed by ARPA,
ostensibly to study the use of “environmental modification techniques.” It
was conducted in partnership with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest
Service, under ARPA Order 818. The central premise of the program was to
determine how to destroy large areas of jungle growth by firestorm. Jungles
are inherently damp and nonflammable. In order to modify the jungle’s
natural condition to “support combustion,” ARPA scientists discovered that
the lush jungle canopy had to be destroyed with chemicals before it would
effectively burn to the ground. ARPA already had the arsenal of chemicals
to do this, from its ongoing Project Agile defoliant campaign. The
herbicides, varied in composition, were now being called Agent Orange,
Agent Purple, Agent Pink, and other colors of the rainbow. Project EMOTE
called for millions of gallons of Agent Orange to be sprayed in the forests
as one element of the “weather modification campaign.”
Since the earliest days of recorded history, forest fire has been used as a
weapon, and the authors of the ARPA study quoted from the Bible to make
this point. “The battle was fought in the forest of Ephraim; and the forest
devoured more people that day than the sword,” they wrote, citing 2 Samuel
18. In Vietnam, forests provided cover for the enemy, as they had since time
immemorial. “Forests were a haven and refuge for bandits, insurgents and
rebel bands,” the report stated. Leaders from “Robin Hood [to] Tito to
Castro had learned to conduct successful military operations from forest
lairs.” Chairman Mao boasted that insurgents were like “fish who swim in
the sea of peasants,” but to the ARPA scientists working on weather
modification, the insurgents were more like jungle cats, hiding in the forest
to prey on unsuspecting villagers. “A recent study of VC [Vietcong] bases
showed that 83 percent were located in the dense forest,” the report noted.
Forests had served the enemy throughout history. Now, modern technology
was working to put an end to that.
In late March 1965, the 315th Air Commando Group conducted a
firebombing raid, code-named Operation Sherwood Forest, “against” the
Boi Loi Forest, twenty-five miles west of Saigon. Aircraft loaded with
78,800 gallons of herbicide sprayed Agent Orange over the jungle, after
which B-52 bombers dropped M35 incendiary bombs. But it had rained
earlier in the day and the experiment did not result in “appreciable
destruction of forest cover,” as was hoped. ARPA postponed the next test
until the height of the dry season, ten months later. Operation Hot Tip, on
January 24, 1966, mimicked the earlier raid but with slightly better results,
mostly because there was no rain.
The first full-scale operation occurred a year later, again at the height of
the dry season, and was code-named Operation Pink Rose. This time, U.S.
Air Force crews, flying specially modified UC-123B and UC-123K aircraft,
sprayed defoliants on a first pass, then sprayed a chemical drying agent on a
second pass. Next, the Air Force flew B-52 bombers that dropped cluster
bombs to ignite the chemicals. Targets included “known enemy base areas”
and also village power lines. Short of “killing” the jungle and an unknown
number of its inhabitants, and starting localized fires, no “self-sustaining
firestorm” occurred. There were simply too many environmental factors at
issue, ARPA scientists concluded. Rain and humidity consistently got in the
way.
One year later a secret operation, code-named Operation Inferno, was
launched against the U Minh Forest, the Forest of Darkness. Instead of
using defoliants, the Air Force flew fourteen C-130s low over the jungle
canopy, pouring oil from fifty-five-gallon drums over each target area, four
times. A forward air controller then ignited the fuel by sending white
phosphorus rockets to each target. An intense inferno ignited and burned.
But as soon as the fuel was consumed, the fire died down and went out.
ARPA’s final 170-page report, originally classified secret, is kept in the
Special Collections of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Maryland. The
report indicates that forest flammability depended primarily on two
elements. One was weather, which could not be controlled. The other was
“the amount of dead vegetation on or near the ground surface,” which
scientists determined could be controlled. “Forest flammability can be
greatly increased by killing all shrub vegetation, selecting optimum weather
conditions for burning, and igniting fires in a preselected pattern,” ARPA
scientists wrote. But to kill all shrub vegetation was too big a task even for
ARPA, and the idea of using forest fire as a military weapon was shelved.

As war in Vietnam widened, the Jason scientists were continuously

consulted for hard science ideas about how to defeat the communist
insurgents. In 1965 they were asked to focus on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the
Pentagon’s name for that system of 1,500 miles of roads and pathways that
stretched from North Vietnam, through Laos and Cambodia, and down into
South Vietnam. Some of the roads were wide enough for trucks and oxcarts;
others were meant for bicycles and feet. The Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) determined that each day some two hundred tons of weapons and
supplies made their way down communist supply routes, from the North to
the South, by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail contained storage
depots, supply bunkers, underground command and control facilities, even
hospitals. A top secret report by the National Security Agency, declassified
in 2007, described the trail as “one of the great achievements in military
engineering of the twentieth century.”
Cartographers, geographers, and map designers briefed the Jason
scientists on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and its terrain. The Jasons read the
RAND prisoner of war transcripts, originally compiled by Joe Zasloff and
John Donnell, to learn more about how things worked on the trail. ARPA’s
Seymour Deitchman, still overseeing Project Agile at the Pentagon, sent the
Jason scientists dozens of reports on the trail, classified and unclassified. To
Jason scientist William Nierenberg, the trail seemed almost alive, “an
anastomosed structure,” he wrote, like a human body or a tree, a “network
of interconnected channels,” like blood vessels or branches, which
depended on one another to flow. The Pentagon wanted the Jasons to figure
out how to sever the trail’s arteries.
ARPA doubled the Jasons’ annual budget, from $250,000 to $500,000,
roughly $3.7 million in 2015, and the scientists began working on tactical
technologies they thought might be useful in obstructing movement along
the trail. At least three studies the Jasons performed during this time period
remain classified as of 2015; they are believed to be titled “Working Paper
on Internal Warfare, Vietnam,” “Night Vision for Counterinsurgents,” and
“A Study of Data Related to Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army Logistics
and Manpower.” Because the contents are still classified, it is not known
how they were received by Secretary McNamara. But according to Murph
Goldberger, McNamara felt the ideas the Jasons were proposing would take
too long to implement. “We did our studies based on the assumption of a
relatively long war lasting several years,” he said, and the secretary of
defense wanted more immediate results. So McNamara asked the Jason
scientists to determine if it would be effective to use nuclear weapons to
destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Jasons’ top secret restricted data report “Tactical Nuclear Weapons
in Southeast Asia” remained classified until 2003, when the Nautilus
Institute in Berkeley, California, obtained a copy under the Freedom of
Information Act. “The idea had been discussed at the Pentagon,” said
Seymour Deitchman in 2003, in response to the outrage the report created.
Deitchman recalled that Secretary McNamara believed the Jason scientists
were best equipped to decide if using nuclear weapons was a wise idea.
“Mr. McNamara would have said, ‘There has been some talk about using
tactical nuclear weapons to close the passes into Laos; tell me what you
think of the idea,’” according to Deitchman, who says the Jasons were
asked to determine “whether it made sense to think about using nuclear
weapons to close off the supply routes [along] the Ho Chi Minh trail
through Laos over which the supplies and people moved.”
For a possible nuclear target, the Jasons focused on the Mu Gia Pass, a
steep mountain roadway between Vietnam and Laos. Thousands of
Vietcong, as well as weapons and supplies, moved through this pass, which
the Jasons described as “a roadway carved out of a steep hillside, much like
the road through Independence Pass southeast of Aspen, Colorado.” If
nuclear weapons were to be used against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Jasons
concluded, they should be tactical nuclear weapons, lightweight and
portable like the Davy Crockett nuclear weapon, a mockup of which Herb
York had transported from California to Washington, D.C., in his carry-on
luggage aboard a commercial flight in 1959.
But the Jason scientists calculated that use of nuclear weapons to destroy
the Ho Chi Minh Trail would not be as easy as one might think. Indeed,
“the numbers of TNW [tactical nuclear weapons] required will be very
large over a period of time,” the Jason scientists wrote. “At least one TNW
is required for each target, and the targets are mostly small and fleeting. A
reasonable guess at the order of magnitude of weapons requirements…
would be ten per day or 3000 per year.” The Vietcong were tenacious, the
Jasons said, and it was likely that even if the pass were destroyed in a
nuclear strike, the battle-hardened communist fighters would simply create
a new pass and new supply trails. As an alternative, the Jason scientists
proposed dropping radioactive waste at certain key choke points along the
trail, thereby rendering it impassable. But radioactivity decays, they
explained, and the window of impassability would also pass. In the end, the
Jasons argued against using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam and Laos.
They warned that if the United States were to use them, China and the
Soviet Union would be more likely to provide similar tactical nuclear
weapons from their own arsenals to the Vietcong and to the government of
North Vietnam. “A very serious long-range problem would arise,” the
Jasons warned, namely, “Insurgent groups everywhere in the world would
take note and would try by all means available to acquire TNW [tactical
nuclear weapons] for themselves.”
The study was read by many at the Pentagon. Dropping a few thousand
nuclear bombs was not an option, and the Jasons were told to come up with
another idea to solve the Ho Chi Minh Trail problem. “We put our thinking
caps on,” recalled Murph Goldberger, and got to work. Their next idea
would totally revolutionize the way the U.S. military conducts wars.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

The Electronic Fence

Lieutenant Richard “Rip” Jacobs had a terrible nickname for someone

who flew on combat missions in a war zone. “Rip” made many of the other
fliers and crewmembers in VO-67 Navy squadron think of RIP, “Rest in
peace,” a phrase used after a person is dead.
The real reason Jacobs was called Rip was because of a mishap in high
school, just a few years before, in Georgia. “I stepped on this girl’s dress at
a high school dance and I accidentally tore it,” Rip Jacobs explains. “Then I
kind of got the nickname.”
Now it was February 27, 1968, and Rip Jacobs, age twenty-four, stood
on the tarmac of the Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Base in Thailand,
eighteen miles from the border with Vietnam. Jacobs was preparing for a
highly classified mission he knew very little about, other than that it
involved dropping high-technology sensors mounted on racks beneath an
OP-2E Neptune armed reconnaissance aircraft onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
He was part of Lucky Crew Seven, and today’s assigned target was in
Khammouane Province, in Laos, about fifteen miles southwest of the Ban
Karai Pass. This was deeply held enemy territory. Jacobs had been on
twelve missions like this, but recently things had gotten bad.
Six weeks before, on January 11, 1968, Crew Two was lost. Nine men
KIA. Killed in action. Bodies not recovered. They had left early in the
morning on a sensor-dropping mission. Their aircraft lost radio and radar
contact at 9:57 a.m., and they never returned to base. “It didn’t cross my
mind they wouldn’t come back,” Jacobs remembered in 2013. The men had
left on an ordinary mission that morning, same as they always did. They
even had the Crew Two mascot with them, a black-and-white puppy
everyone called Airman Snoopy Seagrams. “It got somewhat routine. Then
word spread. ‘Crew Two down.’ No parachutes, no beeper. No Jolly
Greens,” meaning search and rescue crews.
On February 17, a similar thing had happened. Crew Five was lost. They
had completed the first target run. During the second run, one of the escort
aircraft reported the OP-2E Neptune’s starboard engine had been hit and
was on fire. During the last radio transmission, one of the Neptune pilots
was heard saying, “We’re beat up pretty bad.” Then nothing after that. Nine
men KIA. Bodies not recovered. No beepers, no parachutes, no Jolly
Greens. The area was filled with Vietcong.
On this morning, February 27, 1968, Crew Seven consisted of nine men
—eight crew and a commander. Navy captain Paul L. Milius would be
flying the aircraft. Navy airmen like Rip Jacobs knew well enough to stay
focused and cheerful, but at times a foreboding crept in. This was mission
number thirteen. Jacobs checked his flight suit. Checked his gear. Checked
the rack of technology that was the centerpiece of the mission.
Each mission was different, depending on the technology. Sometimes
the OP-2E Neptunes had to fly in low and level over the trail, as was the
case when crews were dropping listening devices called acoubuoys. Each
sensor was jettisoned from the aircraft with its own small parachute
attached. Aircraft needed to fly low on these missions because too much
altitude raised the likelihood that the parachute lanyards would get tangled
up in too much air and fail to emplace themselves in the canopy of trees.
But flying low and level made them an easy target for the Vietcong
antiaircraft guns that were so prevalent along the trail.
Other missions involved sensors that had to be dropped from a higher
altitude, around five thousand feet. This was the case with Crew Seven’s
mission today. They would be dropping Air Delivered Seismic Intrusion
Detectors, or ADSIDs. The seismic devices were made by Sandia weapons
laboratory for ARPA and were based on technology developed for an earlier
ARPA program, Vela Hotel, which involved ground sensors for detecting
nuclear tests. The ADSID sensors were approximately two and a half feet
long and five inches in diameter. Each one looked like a miniature missile,
or a large dart, with tail spikes that were released outward once the ADSID
was lodged firmly in the ground. ADSIDs were designed to penetrate the
earth from a high speed and to be deployed from the OP-2E without a
parachute.
Standing on the tarmac preparing for the mission, Rip Jacobs was ready.
He double-checked his parachute. Then he climbed aboard the aircraft.
Crew Seven left the tarmac on time. Roughly an hour into the mission,
Captain Milius reported his position not far from the Ban Karai Pass. Rip
Jacobs was standing near the deck hatch, observing ordnance drops. Ensign
Tom Wells was seated in a well-armored chair, with his face in the Norton
bombsite, calling out coordinates when suddenly the aircraft was engulfed
in flames. “That’s how it happens,” Wells explained in 2013. “You’re flying
fine, then wham, you’re hit.”
An antiaircraft projectile fired by the Vietcong had come up through the
bottom skin of the airplane and exploded in the radar well. “Now
everything was on fire,” Wells recalled. “I grabbed the fire extinguisher next
to the hydraulic panel, but it was on fire. It burned the skin off my hands.”
In a matter of seconds the flight deck area was filled with dense, dark
smoke.
Lieutenant Barney Walsh, the co-pilot, climbed out of his seat and
started to make his way to the back. “We couldn’t control anything” in the
cockpit, he says. “I’m yelling ‘Get out!’ That was the only choice. That was
it.” Someone else hollered, “Hatch open, parachutes ready to go!”
There was blood everywhere. In the chaos, Rip Jacobs tried to ascertain
what was going on. Then he realized Petty Officer John F. Hartzheim, an
avionics technician, had been hit badly.
“He wasn’t wearing his parachute,” Wells says.
“He had taken it off because it was so hot,” Jacobs explains. “He was
bleeding badly. Mortally wounded. I thought about trying to get a parachute
on him. The smoke and flames were so intense. The G-forces. I was
standing in a pool of [Hartzheim’s] blood and I slipped and fell down on the
floor. The plane was going down. In your mind you’re saying, ‘With the last
crew, nobody got out.’”
Someone hollered again. “Parachutes, get ready. Go!”
Rip Jacobs turned to the deck hatch. He jumped out of the burning
airplane and began to fall. He pulled his ripcord. The chute opened. What
happened after that he can’t get his memory to recall. Time passed. Was he
dead? After a while he realized he had landed in a tree.
 “I was alive. Everything hurt. Back. Legs. I looked down and I was
covered in blood.” The way he had landed in the tree canopy, his body was
parallel to the ground. The parachute lanyards had wrapped around him in a
way that made it impossible for him to wriggle free. “Did I remember to hit
my locator button when I was falling through the air?” He asked himself
this question again and again.
He tried to reach the button with his chin. It was out of reach.
“I was pretty sure I’d set off my locator button,” Jacobs recalls. “But
what if I didn’t? What if I hadn’t activated the locator? I’d die up here.
What if no one knows where I am?”
Then a worse thought. He heard sounds. The unmistakable sound of
gunfire. Single shots. One after the next. Getting closer. There were
Vietcong on the ground looking for VO-67 crewmembers who had made it
out of the burning airplane they had just shot down. More gunfire. What if
the Vietcong spotted him up here in this tree?
“I had to be real quiet,” Jacobs recalls. “Every time I tried to move at all,
all the dead stuff around me fell to the ground.” During missions, there
were F-4 Phantom fighter jets that protected the OP-2E Neptunes from any
approaching enemy MiGs. “One [F-4] flew over the top of my head. Did he
see me?” Three, maybe four hours passed. “It felt like eternity.”
Suddenly, Rip Jacobs heard the faint sound of a helicopter. Or was he
imagining things? Then he was certain. He was hearing the unmistakable
sound of helicopter blades. A Jolly Green. He saw it in the distance. A
rescue team. Then a crushing thought. “What if it didn’t see me? What if it
was out searching a wide area?” If he hadn’t hit his locator button, no one
would know he was here in this tree.
And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the helicopter slow down.
Slower. Closer. The Jolly Green was hovering overhead.
Out of the helicopter came a Pararescue crewman. The man was sitting
on a little seat attached to a metal cable. The cable got longer and the man
got closer as he was lowered down to where Rip Jacobs was tangled up in
the tree.
“He reached out to me. I saw his two arms. Then he folded down this
little seat next to his seat. He pulled out a knife and cut me from the shroud
lines.”
Rip Jacobs climbed onto the seat beside the Pararescue crewman. “I
never talked to him. The helicopter was deafening. We were extremely high
up. Adrenaline was pumping through my body. I was covered in blood.”
Jacobs was pulled into the Jolly Green. “There were medical people inside.
They told me I was bleeding badly, but mostly I was covered in
Hartzheim’s blood.”
The Jolly Green made its way back to Nakhon Phanom Air Base. Once
the helicopter touched down, hundreds of people swarmed out onto the
tarmac. It seemed like everyone from the VO-67 Navy squadron was there.
It was overwhelming, Jacobs recalled. “To go from that terrified to that
relieved.” He was taken into a room for a debriefing. Hartzheim had died in
the aircraft. Captain Milius was MIA, missing in action. Everyone else
made it out alive and was rescued by now. “An Air Force officer started
asking me a lot of questions. It took a moment to register that he was asking
about the sensor devices. The devices were laid out in a string, with timing.
He kept asking about the devices. I kept thinking I could care less about
where those things went right now. But he kept talking about the devices. It
was absurd.”
At the time, Rip Jacobs had no idea that the sensor technology program
he was part of was the highest-priority program of the war. He had no idea
that the top secret program had cost well over $1 billion to bring from
conception to fruition. Or that it was the brainchild of the Jason scientists—
an idea they had come up with less than two years before, during a Jason
summer study in Santa Barbara in 1966.
The Jasons called their idea the “Anti-Infiltration Barrier.” The Pentagon
gave it a series of code names as it transitioned from theory to reality. First
it was called Project Practice Nine, then Illinois City, then Dyer Marker,
then Igloo White and Muscle Shoals. After the war was over and parts of
the program were made public, it would become known—and often
ridiculed—as McNamara’s electronic fence.

The electronic fence idea was born in the summer of 1966, shortly after the
Jason scientists completed the study about whether or not the Pentagon
should use nuclear weapons to cut off weapons traffic along the Ho Chi
Minh Trail. The Defense Department was desperately seeking new ways to
win the Vietnam War. The bombing campaigns were failing. ARPA’s
Project Agile was having no effect on the communist insurgency. Weather
warfare wasn’t working. Nuclear weapons were not an option. Soon there
would be 385,000 U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam. And yet
despite these numbers and the efforts of so many involved, Ho Chi Minh’s
men and matériel kept pouring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in a steady,
unrelenting stream.
Secretary McNamara wanted an unassailable solution, and he looked to
the Jason scientists to help figure out a way to sever the trail’s arteries.
Their idea involved creating a series of electronic barriers across major
access routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, so-called “denial fields,”
running through central and eastern Laos, into Vietnam. The Jasons
proposed to bug the battlefield so as to be able to “hear” what was
happening on the trail, then send in strike aircraft to bomb Vietcong troops
and truck convoys on the move.
As ARPA’s head of counterinsurgency, Seymour Deitchman organized
the Jason summer study and then flew out to Santa Barbara to oversee
efforts. Secretary McNamara personally made sure that General Maxwell
Taylor and William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassadors to Vietnam and Laos,
traveled to Santa Barbara to brief the Jasons on the Pentagon’s electronic
barrier idea. The ambassadors’ presence that summer underscored just how
badly the Pentagon needed the concept to work, even if the diplomats
thought privately that the fence was a foolish idea. “Secretary McNamara
asked me if I would go out with General Taylor, to talk to the Jason group
out at Santa Barbara, where they were working on some electronics,”
Ambassador Sullivan later recalled. “Neither Taylor nor I thought very
much of it. My expectations of it were never very high.”
The electronic fence had two faces, one public and one classified. The
program that the public would be told about was a physical fence or barrier
that was being constructed by the Pentagon to disrupt traffic on the Ho Chi
Minh Trail. This fence would be built by Army engineers and guarded by
Army soldiers. “A mechanical barrier built of chain link fencing, barbed
wire, guard towers, and a no-man’s land,” as Jason scientist William
Nierenberg later described it. But the secret fence the Jason scientists were
to design required no soldiers to keep guard. Instead, high-technology
sensors would be covertly implanted along the trail.
Since their creation in 1960, the Jason scientists had been involved in
many of the most classified sensor programs ARPA initiated, including the
Navy’s development of sonobuoys and magnetic detectors, Sandia’s
development of seismic sensors, and the Army’s development of infrared
sensors. Now, during the 1966 summer study, the Jason scientists developed
a plan to fuse, or merge, various sensor technologies and to make them
work together as a system, borrowing anti-submarine warfare tactics used
by the Navy. Except instead of listening for Soviet submarines in a vast
ocean expanse, the anti-infiltration barrier would listen for Vietcong fighters
in a sea of jungle trails.
The prototype for the Santa Barbara summer study was ARPA Study
No. 1, also called Project 137, which had taken place at the National War
College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1958. This
time, in Santa Barbara, the scientists lived in University of California
dormitories looking out over the Pacific Ocean. In the mornings, they
gathered in a university lecture hall for daily briefings. They wrote reports
in the afternoon and gathered together again in the evening for dinner and to
share ideas. They studied history’s great barriers and walls built over the
previous two thousand years, from the walls around Jerusalem, to the Great
Wall of China, to the Nazis’ Siegfried Line. During breaks, Murph
Goldberger recalled playing tennis. The particle physicist Henry Kendall
surfed in the Pacific waves. The nuclear physicist Val Fitch and the
experimental physicist Leon Lederman took long walks around the campus
grounds. It was an interesting idea, this electronic fence. But could it be
done?
The Jasons produced a classified study called Air-Supported Anti-
Infiltration Barrier. In it, they concluded that an electronic fence could in
fact be built across and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The barrier would be
constructed of the most advanced sensors available in the United States,
including audio and seismic sensors, but also thermal, electromagnetic, and
chemical sensors designed to detect fluctuations in body heat, engine heat,
and even scent. Initially, these sensors would be implanted along the trail by
being dropped out of aircraft, like the OP-2E Neptune, flying low over the
trail. Some of the small, camouflaged sensor packages would be carried
down to the ground by small parachutes, while others would be jettisoned
into the earth like spears. The idea was that enemy troops moving down the
trail would trigger these sensors with movement or sound. The sensors
would in turn relay the information to overhead reconnaissance and
surveillance aircraft, which would in turn relay the information to the
“brain” of the program—a room full of computers inside a highly classified
Infiltration Surveillance Center, most likely at a U.S. air base in Thailand.
Computers would play a key role, the Jason scientists imagined. The
machines would analyze and interpret the sensor data. Technicians would
then use the information to pinpoint the exact locations of communist
fighters, trucks, and other transport vehicles, including bicycles and oxen
carts. Military commanders would then dispatch aircraft to drop SADEYE
cluster bombs on jungle fighters moving down the trails. These unguided, or
“dumb,” bombs each carried a payload of 665 one-pound tennis-ball-sized
BLU-26B fragmentation, or “frag,” bombs, each with a delay fuse that
allowed the submunitions to blow up just above the ground, spraying razor-
sharp steel shards in a kill radius of roughly eight hundred feet. Jason
scientist Richard Garwin, a nuclear physicist and ordnance expert who,
years before, helped design the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb, held a
seminar on the SADEYE cluster bomb and other munitions that would be
most effective when accompanying the sensors on the trail. The Jason
scientists determined that the trail should be seeded with button bomblets,
small, “aspirin-size” mini-bombs designed to make a firecracker-like noise
when stepped on, thereby triggering the air-dropped acoustic sensors. Two
anti-truck bombs were also included in the design, coin-sized “Gravel
mines,” and larger land mines called Dragontooth mines, so named because
they looked like giant teeth. These anti-truck bombs were designed to
damage vehicle tires, which would slow convoys down and give strike
aircraft more time to hit their targets. When stepped on they were powerful
enough to remove a person’s foot.
The electronic fence concept was a colossal undertaking with many
moving parts. The Jason scientists were very specific regarding the numbers
of bombs it required: “20 million Gravel mines per month; possibly 25
million button bomblets per month; 10,000 SADEYE-BLU-26B clusters
per month,” the sum total of which made up “by far the major fraction [of
what] has been estimated to be about $800 million per year” in operational
costs alone. “It is difficult to assess the likely effectiveness of an air-
supported barrier of this type,” the Jasons concluded in their written report.
“We are not sure the system will make the [trail] nearly impenetrable, but
we feel it has a good claim of being the foundation of a system that will,
over the years.” Finally, a prescient warning: “We see the possibility of a
long war.”
With the work complete, the summer study came to an end. On
September 1, 1966, Goldberger, Deitchman, and several other Jasons flew
to the Pentagon to brief Secretary McNamara on their final proposal for an
electronic fence. The projected costs had risen to roughly one billion to get
the fence up and running, they said, and it could be constructed in about a
year and a half. McNamara was impressed.
Meanwhile, that same summer, Secretary McNamara had assembled a
second group of scientists on the east coast—made up of Jason scientists
and non-Jason scientists from Harvard and MIT—also working on the
electronic fence idea. This group, called Jason East, conducted its work on
the campus of Dana Hall, a girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The
two study groups were given similar information, classified and
unclassified, and came up with likeminded ideas about what would work
best on this fence project and why. Pleased with both sets of results,
McNamara merged the two studies into one.
A second briefing took place on September 6, 1966, this time at the
Cape Cod summer home of Jason East member Jerrod Zacharias. Secretary
McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, and Director
of Defense Department Research and Engineering John Foster (who, like
his predecessors Herb York and Harold Brown, had served as director of the
Livermore laboratory before working at the Pentagon as the liaison between
ARPA and the secretary of defense) helicoptered in to the meeting on Cape
Cod. Gordon MacDonald represented the Jason group at the secret briefing.
“The occasion was highly informal,” he remembered, in one of the only
known written recollections of the meeting. “Maps were spread out on the
floor, drinks were served, a dog kept crossing the demilitarized zone as top
secret matters were discussed. Even though the subject was the Jason study,
I was the only Jason present.” Seymour Deitchman did most of the talking.
“It was, you know, a typical social occasion,” MacDonald recalled, except
the participants were “just… deciding the next years of the Vietnam War.”
But at the Pentagon, McNamara’s electronic fence idea was belittled by
most of the generals. When McNamara sent the final Jason study to General
Earle Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for review, they rejected the
idea. General Wheeler thought it was too expensive and feared it would pull
valuable resources away from the front lines. “The very substantial funds
required for the barrier system would be obtained from current Service
resources thereby affecting adversely important current programs,” General
Wheeler wrote in his response. Admiral Ulysses Sharp, commander in chief
of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), saw the entire construction effort as
“impractical.” The Joint Chiefs felt that McNamara’s electronic fence idea
would require too much time and treasure, and relied too heavily on
technology, some of which did not yet exist. “It [is] CINCPAC’s opinion
that maintenance of an air supported barrier might result in a dynamic
‘battle of the barrier,’ and that the introduction of new components into the
barrier system would depend not only on R&D and production capability,
but would also depend on the capability to place the companions in the right
place at the right time.” It was simply too complicated—not just to
implement but to create. “CINCPAC concluded that even if the US were to
invest a great deal of time, effort, and resources into a barrier project, it was
doubtful that such a barrier would improve appreciably the US position in
RVN [the Republic of Vietnam].” The commander of Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam, kept his opinion succinct: “It is necessary to point out
that I strongly oppose commitment to create and man a barrier.”
On September 15, 1966, McNamara reviewed the negative opinions
from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander in chief of the Pacific, and
others, and overruled them. The secretary of defense had the authority to
move ahead with the electronic fence with or without the support of his
military commanders, and he did, with the classification of top secret. That
same day McNamara appointed Lieutenant General Alfred D. Starbird head
of Joint Task Force 728. Starbird, an Army officer, was a favorite of the
secretary of defense. He knew how to handle highly classified, highly
sensitive military projects that involved thousands of people and billions of
dollars. Starbird had overseen the nuclear detonations in space, code-named
Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime, during the height of the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Now he was in charge of developing the barrier and
overseeing its deployment in the war theater. He had an impossible deadline
of one year.
General Starbird was a master bureaucrat, soldier, government advisor,
and engineer. Fast and thorough, he was a consummate athlete with a
brilliant mind. He’d competed in Hitler’s Olympics in 1936, in the
pentathlon. After serving in World War II, Starbird had served in Europe as
director of the Army’s Office of the Chief of Engineers. During the
development of the hydrogen bomb, he served as director of Military
Applications for the Atomic Energy Commission, acting as liaison between
the Defense Department and the AEC. He had a photographic memory and
never lost his cool.
Joint Task Force 728, also called the Defense Communications Planning
Group, was in charge of planning, preparing, and executing the electronic
fence. Starbird got to work immediately, acquiring space at the U.S. Naval
Observatory in Washington, D.C., as his headquarters in the United States.
He began outlining projects, designating assignments, and creating
schedules. For his Scientific Advisory Committee, Starbird hired seven of
the fifteen Jason scientists who had worked on the original Santa Barbara
summer study, including Murph Goldberger and Gordon MacDonald. A
skillful diplomat, Starbird pulled together leaders from the four services. He
had an enormous task in front of him, just the kind of operation he was used
to. Technology, munitions, aircraft, ground systems, and “high-speed”
computers. In October, McNamara and Starbird traveled to Vietnam to meet
with field commanders. When McNamara returned, he briefed President
Johnson on the barrier program, officially, for the first time. On January 12,
1967, the classified National Security Action Memorandum No. 358 gave
the top secret electronic fence, then code-named Project Practice Nine, the
“highest national priority” for expenditures and authorization. For reasons
not explained, Walt Rostow signed for the president of the United States.
Starbird had a billion dollars at his disposal and the authority to get the
electronic fence up in one year’s time. The program was the single most
expensive high-technology project of the Vietnam War. It is nothing short of
astonishing that the VO-67 Navy squadron was actually flying combat
missions one year later, in January 1968.

A few months before the sensor-dropping missions began, General Starbird

decided that he needed a liaison in Saigon, someone who could keep an ear
to the ground inside CIA prisons and detention facilities to determine if the
Vietcong had gotten word about what the U.S. military was planning on the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was hard to find a qualified person. Starbird asked
around at ARPA and was referred to RAND’s George Tanham, who in turn
referred Starbird to Leon Gouré. After having been embarrassed during
congressional hearings on the spurious nature of ARPA’s Viet Cong
Motivation and Morale Project, Gouré had been keeping a low profile at
RAND. Now General Starbird wanted Gouré to take the lead on an
important new ARPA study for the Defense Communications Planning
Group, this time related to the highly classified electronic fence project.
With a new contract in place, in August 1967 Gouré returned to Saigon to
conduct interviews with Vietcong prisoners being held in secret CIA
prisons. According to Gouré, the enemy had not heard a thing about
Americans building a high-technology fence.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration

barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8
billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome
of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of
cutting off enemy supplies. Most of the failures were technology-based.
Sensors were temperature sensitive, and in the extreme heat of the jungle,
batteries drained quickly and sensors went dead. The V0-67 aircrews were
often unable to place sensors accurately along the trail. In 1968 there was
no such thing as advanced laser-guided technology. Rip Jacobs and his
fellow Navy airmen relied on an electrical device called a “pickle switch”
to release sensors from the OP-2E Neptunes, hoping they would land where
they were supposed to along the trail. Instead, many sensors landed
hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet away. But far-reaching seeds were
sown.
Gradually, commanders changed their opinions about McNamara’s
electronic fence. In 1969, speaking to members of the Association of the
U.S. Army at a luncheon at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.,
retired four-star general William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S.
military operations in Vietnam, spoke of the power of the electronic fence.
“We are on the threshold of an entirely new battlefield concept,”
Westmoreland told his audience of former soldiers. “I see battlefields on
which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications
and the almost instantaneous application of a lethal firepower.”
In 1985, during a banquet to celebrate the twenty-five-year anniversary
of the Jason program, Gordon MacDonald discussed how profound a
moment in history the development of the barrier concept had been. “The
most important element of the barrier study was its definition of a system
concept,” he said. Tiny sensors covertly placed in a war zone acted like
eyes, ears, and fingertips on the ground, then relayed information back to a
computer system far away, which filtered and analyzed it for a commander
who would in turn decide what tactical action to take next. This was the first
time anyone thought of creating a “system of systems,” MacDonald
observed. It gave birth to the “basic concept of unmanned sensors gathering
tactical intelligence to be used for managing the delivery of munitions.” As
John von Neumann first imagined, and J. C. R. Licklider later discussed,
this was the first truly symbiotic relationship between man and machine and
the battlefield.
The electronic fence had initially been dismissed by a majority of
defense officials, who saw it as newfangled gadgetry. But by the 1980s, the
concept of the fence would be reinterpreted as visionary. And by the 1990s,
the electronic battlefield concept would begin its transformation into the
most revolutionary piece of military technology of the twentieth century,
after the hydrogen bomb.
In a summary of the work performed by VO-67 Navy squadron, whose
crewmembers dropped electronic sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, U.S.
Air Force colonel Warren H. Peterson wrote a top secret cable and a sixty-
four-page report for the commander in chief. “It is worth observing that the
program itself was visionary,” Colonel Peterson said. “From its outset, [the
electronic battlefield concept] combined extremes of the technically
sophisticated with the amazingly primitive. How would an ordinary,
reasonably educated layman, for instance, be likely to react when told of a
system that proposed to detect enemy troops moving along jungle trails, but
using modern electric acoustic detectors, which had to be activated by the
detonations of firecrackers which the troops were expected to step on? Yet it
must be remembered that this report covers only the stone age of what may
be a long era of development.”
Colonel Peterson could have been speaking about ARPA as a whole,
about what it was doing and what it would do. The agency was growing
used to taking old technologies and accelerating them into future ways of
fighting wars. By the twenty-first century the electronic battlefield concept
would be ubiquitous.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The End of Vietnam

The downfall of the Jason scientists during the Vietnam War began with a
rumor and an anonymous phone call to Congress. On February 12, 1968,
Carl Macy, the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
received a tip saying that the committee should look into why the Pentagon
had sent a nuclear weapons expert, Dr. Richard Garwin of Columbia
University, to Vietnam. The battle of Khe Sanh was raging, the tipster said,
and rumor had it that the Pentagon was considering the use of nuclear
weapons against the Vietcong.
“Within a week the rumor had gone around the world and involved the
President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Britain and leaders of
Congress in a discussion over whether or not the United States was
considering using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam,” reported the New
York Times. The White House expressed outrage, calling the accusations
“false,” “irresponsible,” and “unfair to the armed services.” But there was
truth behind the allegation. The tipster was likely alluding to the highly
classified Jason report “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia,” in
which the Jason scientists advised against such use. The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee was not convinced and convened a closed-door
meeting where senators echoed similar concerns. The New York Times
reported that one senator “said he had also picked up rumors that the
Administration was considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in
Vietnam, perhaps in defense of Khesanh if necessary to save the Marine
Corps garrison there.”
The Pentagon issued a statement saying that Dr. Garwin and other
scientists had been sent to Vietnam to oversee “the effectiveness of new
weapons,” ones that “have no relationship whatsoever to atomic or nuclear
systems of any kind.” This was true. Although the statement did not reveal
the classified program itself, the “new weapons” the Pentagon was referring
to were essential to McNamara’s electronic fence.
Jason scientists Richard Garwin, Henry Kendall, and Gordon
MacDonald were in Vietnam to problem-solve issues related to the sensor
technology. The Tet Offensive was under way, and the Vietcong were in the
process of cutting off access to the Marine base at Khe Sanh. There were
fears at the Pentagon that what had happened to the French at Dien Bien
Phu in 1954 could now happen to the Marines at Khe Sanh. The similarities
were striking, including the fact that the Vietnamese general who had led
the communists to victory at Dien Bien Phu, General Vo Nguyen Giap, was
again leading communist fighters in the battle for Khe Sanh.
VO-67 Navy squadron crewmembers were called upon to assist. More
than 250 sensors were dropped in a ring around the Marine outpost at Khe
Sanh in an effort to help identify when and where the Vietcong were closing
in. The target information officer at Khe Sanh, Captain Harry Baig, was
having trouble with the technology, and so Richard Garwin, Henry Kendall,
and Gordon MacDonald were flown to the classified Information
Surveillance Center at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, to help. Unable to solve
the problem from Thailand, MacDonald offered to be helicoptered in to the
dangerous Marine outpost at Khe Sanh.
“It was a scary place,” MacDonald later recalled, “because you knew
you were isolated. There were something on the order of four thousand
Marines and to many [it seemed as if] there was little hope of getting them
out. It was a dreadful situation.” What was remarkable was that MacDonald
offered to be inserted into the middle of the battle in the first place. A polio
survivor and now a presidential advisor, he could easily have chosen to stay
in the safety of neighboring Thailand with Kendall and Garwin.
The nuclear physicist and ordnance expert Richard Garwin later stated
that he was likely the source of the information leak that set off the
downfall of the Jasons. “I had probably told people I was going to Vietnam,
which I shouldn’t have,” Garwin told Finn Aaserud, director of the Niels
Bohr Archive, in 1991. “Colleagues with overheated imaginations and a
sense of mission thought someone should know about this,” he surmised.
 As reporters began digging into Garwin’s backstory, the connection with
the Jason scientists and the Advanced Research Projects Agency emerged.
The classified report on barrier technology did not surface at this time, but
the title of the Jasons’ report, “Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast
Asia,” did. For antiwar protesters, this information—that the Pentagon had
actually considered using nuclear weapons—led to outrage. Many of the
Jason scientists held positions at universities, and they were now targeted
by antiwar protesters for investigation and denunciation.
A powerful antiwar coalition called the Mobilization Committee to End
the War in Vietnam, or “the Mobe,” had been organizing massive
demonstrations across the country. The previous spring, hundreds of
thousands of people had attended an antiwar march in New York City,
walking from Central Park to the United Nations building, where they
burned draft cards. The march, which was led by Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., made news around the world. The Mobe’s March on the Pentagon, in
the fall of 1967, had turned violent when protesters clashed with U.S.
marshals and heavily armed military police assigned to protect the building.
Six hundred and eighty-two people were arrested, including the author
Norman Mailer and two United Press International reporters. Now, after it
was revealed that many university professors were discreetly working on
classified weapons projects as defense scientists, the Mobe’s underground
newspaper, the Student Mobilizer, began an investigation that culminated in
a report called “Counterinsurgency Research on Campus, Exposed.” The
article contained excerpts from the minutes of a Jason summer study,
reportedly stolen from a professor’s unlocked cabinet. It contained
additional excerpts from classified documents written for ARPA’s Combat
Development and Test Center in Bangkok, Thailand, also allegedly stolen.
In March 1968, students at Princeton University learned that the Jasons’
advisory board was the Institute of Defense Analyses, or IDA, the federally
funded think tank that served the Department of Defense—and that IDA
maintained an “ultra secret think-tank” on the Princeton campus, inside Von
Neumann Hall (named in honor of John von Neumann). Further
investigation by student journalists revealed that the windows of this
building were made of bulletproof glass. Student journalists broke the story
in the Daily Princetonian, reporting that inside this Defense Department–
funded building, and using state-of-the-art computers, “mathematicians
worked out problems in advanced cryptology for the National Security
Agency” and did other “war research work.” University records showed
that the computer being used was a 1.5-ton CDC-1604, the “first fully
transistorized supercomputer” in the world. When it arrived at the
university in 1960, the supercomputer had a “staggering 32K of memory.”
The journalists also revealed that at Princeton, IDA was working on “long
range projects with ARPA—The Defense Department’s Advanced Research
Projects Agency… in the field of communication.”
The student journalists discovered, too, that Princeton University
president Robert F. Goheen was also a member of IDA’s twenty-two-man
board of trustees and that numerous current and former Princeton physics
professors, including John Wheeler, Murph Goldberger, Sam Treiman, and
Eugene Wigner, had worked on IDA-ARPA projects related to war and
weapons. As a result of these revelations, the antiwar group Students for a
Democratic Society staged a sit-in, demanding that IDA be kicked off
campus. The faculty voted that Princeton should terminate its association
with IDA, and when university trustees overruled the demand, students
chained the front doors of Von Neumann Hall shut, preventing anyone from
getting in or out for several days. The issue died down until the following
year. When students learned IDA was still operating on campus, protestors
initiated a five-day siege of Von Neumann Hall, spray painting anti-Nixon
graffiti across the front of the building, engaging with police officers, and
chanting, “Kill the computer!”
Still, there was very little public mention of the Jason scientists and their
position as the elite advisory group to the Pentagon, or that all their
consulting fees were paid for by ARPA. But what happened at Princeton
and elsewhere, as links between university professors and the Department
of Defense became known, was just the tip of a very large iceberg that
would take until June 13, 1971, to be fully revealed.

For the Pentagon, the antiwar protests were a command and control
nightmare. For ARPA it meant the acceleration of a “nonlethal weapons”
program to research and develop ways to stop demonstrators through the
use of painful but not deadly force. There was a sense of urgency at hand.
Not only were the protesters gaining support and momentum in their efforts,
but also they were now controlling the narrative of the Vietnam War. “The
whole world is watching!” chanted activists at an antiwar rally outside the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The phrase
spread like wildfire and drew attention to National Guardsmen, in Chicago
and elsewhere, as protesters were threatened with guns and fixed bayonets.
In these antiwar protests, and also in civil rights protests across the nation,
state police, military police, and the National Guard used water cannons,
riot batons, electric prods, horses, and dogs to control and intimidate
crowds.
ARPA’s research into nonlethal weapons was classified and highly
controversial. To keep this research secret, laboratories were set up abroad
under an innocuous program name, Overseas Defense Research. This
research took place at the Combat Development and Test Center (CDTC) in
Bangkok, which had been renamed the Military Research and Development
Center. Progress reports were delivered to ARPA program managers with a
cover letter that stated, “This document contains information affecting the
National Defense of the United States within the means of the Espionage
Laws.” The program was overseen by defense contractor Battelle Memorial
Institute, in Columbus, Ohio, and was considered part of Project Agile’s
Remote Area Conflict program. A rare declassified copy of one such report,
from April 1971, was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“Nonlethal weapons are generally intended to prevent an individual
from engaging in undesirable acts,” wrote E. E. Westbrook and L. W.
Williams, the authors of the report. “Apart from the moral arguments in the
present and future use of nonlethal weapons, public officials find it prudent
to examine nonlethal force using a framework that it was keeping ‘innocent
bystanders’ from being hurt.” At the overseas CDTCs, ARPA chemists
examined a variety of incapacitating agents for future use against protesters,
including dangerous chemical agents with a wide range of effects, from
vomiting to skin injury to temporary paralysis.
Possible irritants for use against demonstrators included “CN (tear gas)
… CS (riot control agent)… CX (blister agent),” also called phosgene oxide
—a potent chemical weapon that causes temporary blindness, lesions on the
lungs, and rapid local tissue death. CS was seen as a viable option: more
than 15 million pounds of CS had already been used in Vietnam to flush
Vietcong out of underground tunnels on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. CX was
also recommended for crowd control. It “produced a corrosive injury to the
skin, including tissue injury,” but because the worst damage was inside the
lungs, the harm would be disguised. Anticholinergics were considered,
chemicals that cause physical collapse. “Probably the most promising of the
anticholinergics (agents which block passage of impulses through
parasympathetic nerves),” wrote the chemists, were compounds that
produced “rapid heart rate, incoordination, blurred vision, delirium,
vomiting, and in cases of higher doses, coma.” Emetic agents, chemicals
that induce vomiting, were also recommended.
A second program involved delivery systems. Mechanisms for delivery
included liquid stream projectors, able to shoot a twelve-inch-diameter
stream of liquid across a distance of up to forty feet, as well as grenades
thrown by hand or discharged from a small rocket. A more powerful option
was the E8-CS man-portable tactical launcher and cartridge, which could be
fired electrically or manually into rioting crowds at a distance of up to 750
feet. “It is nonlethal in the impact area, but its high muzzle velocity creates
a lethal hazard at the muzzle during firing,” the scientists wrote.
Poison darts were discussed as a possible “means for injecting an enemy
[i.e., a protester] with an incapacitating agent.” Also recommended were
tranquilizing darts, historically effective in subduing wild or frightened
animals. The problem, the ARPA chemists cautioned, was that “using these
kinds of darts was not entirely safe as accurate dosage was based on the
weight of the animal.” One advantage was that the “use of a dart allows
selection of an individual target, perhaps the leader of a group or a
particularly destructive person, without injuring others around him.”
Further, the darts “possess a psychological advantage not shared by many
other systems,” noted the scientists. “The victim may wonder what he has
been hit with and whether or not it is essential that he find an antidote.”
This benefit needed to be weighed against another danger, however, which
was that if someone was hit in the head or neck, it could be fatal. “Darts are
not regarded by many as an ‘acceptable’ weapon,” the scientists wrote.
Following the dart discussion was a long treatise on whether or not the use
of the electric cattle prod against human protesters would be defensible.
The 130-page report offered hundreds of additional development ideas
about how to incapacitate demonstrators without killing them, programs
that were currently being researched for battlefield use but had not yet been
deployed in Vietnam. “Photic driving” was a phenomenon whereby the
application of stroboscopic light within a certain frequency range could
cause a person’s brain waves “to become entrained to the same frequency as
the flashing light.” But early studies showed that this kind of flickering light
was effective in only about 30 percent of the population. Laser radiation
was suggested as a potential way of temporarily blinding people, also called
flash blindness. One drawback, the ARPA scientists noted, was that “the
laser must be aimed directly at the eye,” which “diminishes its practicality
in a confrontation situation.” Microwaves could potentially be used to
incapacitate individuals by burning their skin, but the science had not yet
been adequately advanced. “Surface skin burns using microwaves would
not form soon enough to create tactical advantage,” the scientists wrote.
Also, trying to burn someone with a microwave beam would be “ineffective
against a person who is wearing heavy clothing or who is behind an object,”
the scientists wrote.
Another series of tests researched “the use of loud noises to scare people
or to interfere with communications.” But the ARPA scientists cautioned
that sound would have to be “so offensive and repugnant that hearers leave
the scene,” meaning a volume so high that it presented the danger of
permanent hearing loss. “Most subjects experience pain at about 140 db
[decibels], and at about 160 db, the eardrum is torn.”
Tagging was an option, to help police make arrests after a
demonstration. “The marking of people for later apprehension is another
technique which has been tried in some situations,” the scientists wrote,
suggesting specific materials including “invisible markings which were
sensitive to ultraviolet light” and “odor identifying markings, sensed by
dogs or gas chromatographs.”
Crowd control had long been an engineering challenge at the Pentagon.
To be effective, nonlethal weapons need to deliver enough power to
produce a dispersal effect but not enough power to cause serious injury or
harm. Most historical accounts of the use of nonlethal weapons in the
United States cite the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968
as a turning point. The act established the Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration (LEAA), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of
Justice designed to assist state police forces across the nation in upgrading
their riot control hardware and officer-training programs. The act also
provided $12 billion in funding over a period of ten years. Police forces
across America began upgrading their military-style equipment to include
riot control systems, helicopters, grenade launchers, and machine guns. The
LEAA famously gave birth to the special weapons and tactics concept, or
SWAT, with the first units created in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. “These
units,” says an LAPD historian, “provided security for police facilities
during civil unrest.” But what has not been established before this book is
that much of this equipment was researched and developed by ARPA in the
jungles of Vietnam and Thailand during the Vietnam War.

In America, antiwar protests raged on. Not even computers could escape the
hostility between the Pentagon and the antiwar establishment. In early
1970, a Defense Department computer at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, called the ILLIAC IV, came under fire. ILLIAC IV
was the fastest computer on earth at the time. The scientist in charge of the
project for ARPA was Professor Daniel L. Slotnick, a mathematician and
computer architect. A former student of John von Neumann, Slotnick had
worked with von Neumann on MANIAC, at the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, starting in 1952. It was there that Slotnick developed his
first thoughts about centrally controlled parallel computers. A pioneer in his
field, Slotnick was one of the first to develop the concept of parallel
computing, a form of computation in which multiple calculations are
carried out simultaneously by separate computers and solved concurrently.
Slotnick co-authored the first paper on the subject, in 1958. His goal with
ILLIAC IV was to build a machine that could perform a billion instructions
per second. Although it used the same architecture conceived by John von
Neumann, ILLIAC IV was a far cry from MANIAC in terms of computing
power.
ILLIAC IV was fifty feet long, ten feet tall, and eight feet wide. The
machine’s power supply units were so massive they had to be moved with a
specially designed forklift. The supercomputer was made up of a group of
sixty-four processor elements, with a potential for up to 256—a
groundbreaking number of processing units at the time. The machine was
designed to cut down exponentially on the time it took to complete basic
computational science and engineering tasks. Approximately two-thirds of
the computer’s time was designated for work on Department of Defense
weapons programs, including “computational requirements for ballistic
missile defense.” Specifically, the calculations sought to differentiate a
missile from the background noise, the problem that had been plaguing the
Jason scientists since they first began studying the topic in 1960. ILLIAC
IV was also used for climate modeling, and for weather modification
schemes, as part of a still-classified ARPA program called Nile Blue. Not
until July 1972 would the U.S. government renounce the use of climate
modification techniques for hostile purposes. In May 1977 an international
treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile
Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, would be signed, in
Geneva, by forty-eight nations. Until then, weather modification schemes
were pursued.
Slotnick and his team called the ILLIAC IV “the ultimate number
cruncher.” ARPA officials believed that if they had two of these computers,
their capability would cover “all the computational requirements on planet
earth.” The building of ILLIAC IV, most of which was done by graduate
students, was the largest and most lucrative Defense Department contract in
the history of the University of Illinois. By late 1969, the university had
received more than $24 million in funds, roughly $155 million in 2015.
Plans for a fancy new facility to house the machine were in place, with
groundbreaking ceremonies to begin sometime during the following year.
The specifics of the arrangement between Slotnick and ARPA were
classified, but it was not a secret that a supercomputer was being built at the
university.
What it would be used for was obscure until January 5, 1970, when the
Illinois Board of Higher Education met for a budget review and a student
reporter managed to attend. The following day, on January 6, 1970, a
headline in the Daily Illini declared, “Department of Defense to employ UI
[University of Illinois] computer for nuclear weaponry.”
The revelation that the university was working with the Defense
Department on nuclear weapons work had an explosive effect on an already
charged student body. “The University has proven that it is not a neutral
institution,” declared the antiwar group Radical Union, “but is actively
supporting the efforts of the military-industrial complex.” One article after
the next alleged malevolent intentions on the part of Professor Slotnick and
the dean of the Graduate College, Daniel Alpert, in having tried to conceal
from the student body the true nature of the computer. “The horrors ILLIAC
IV may loose on the world through [the] hands of military leaders of this
nation” could not be underestimated, the Daily Illini editorialized. “We fear
the military… will use the computer to develop more ways to kill people
and spend the people’s money.” In another article, a group of concerned
students wrote, “Considering the evil demonstrated by our military in recent
years, we would rather have seen the University resistant to the evil… than
complicit with it.”
Professor Slotnick tried to justify the Pentagon funding by pointing out
that other institutions were unwilling to fund such an important but far-
sighted program as building this supercomputer. “If I could have gotten $30
million from the Red Cross, I would not have messed with the DoD,”
Slotnick said. ARPA took offense, calling Slotnick a “volatile visionary.”
The board tried to throw a blanket over the fire by declaring the “more
important” parts of the computer “non-military.” Despite attempts to
humanize the machine, the debate only grew. A teach-in was organized
against ILLIAC IV. Students wanted the machine gone.
On February 23, 1970, the protests took a violent turn when unknown
persons firebombed the campus armory, causing $2,000 worth of damage.
Then on March 2, five hundred protesters disrupted a job-recruiting session
with General Electric, the defense contractor that helped build ILLIAC IV.
Windows were broken and three people were injured. Officers who tried to
arrest people were pummeled with mud balls. The crowd grew to as many
as three thousand. When antiwar demonstrators broke windows in the
chancellor’s office, state police wearing full riot gear appeared on the scene.
Not until late that night was peace restored. Twenty-one students were
arrested, eight seriously injured. On March 9, the university’s faculty senate
took a vote to oppose ILLIAC IV; it failed. Two days later, the Air Force
recruiting station in Urbana was firebombed, the sixth local arson attack of
the month.
The spring of 1970 was a tempestuous time on college campuses across
America. On April 30, 1970, President Nixon went on national television to
announce the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, yet another expansion of the
Vietnam War. Nixon’s disclosure that 150,000 more soldiers would now be
drafted sparked major protests across the nation. Four days later, on May 4,
four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot dead by the
National Guard.
The following day, the ILLIAC IV protests at the University of Illinois
ratcheted up even further when two thousand demonstrators stoned police
vehicles parked on campus. On the morning of May 6 the National Guard
moved in, and on May 7, ten thousand students and faculty held a peace
rally. When the university refused to fly flags at half-mast for the victims of
the Kent State shootings, students pulled down the American flag that had
been flying on the university fire station flagpole and set it on fire. On May
9, demonstrators staged a sit-in in front of the building that housed the
ILLIAC IV. Protests and arrests continued until May 12.
In June, university officials told ARPA that they could no longer
guarantee the safety of its supercomputer. ARPA began looking for a new
facility to house the ILLIAC IV and in 1971 entered into a new contract
with a federal research facility in California. Each side—the protesters and
the government—believed strongly in the legitimacy of its position.
Students at the University of Illinois and elsewhere across the nation
continued to protest against war; the Department of Defense continued its
weapons research and its war in Vietnam.
The supercomputer was packed up and taken to California. By the
spring of 1972, ILLIAC IV was up and running at NASA’s Institute for
Advanced Computation at the Ames Research Center. This was adjacent to
the U.S. Navy’s west coast facility where highly classified antisubmarine
warfare work was taking place. ILLIAC IV began making calculations for
the Navy’s Project Seaguard, a classified program to track submarines using
acoustics, another ARPA program, with research taking place at ARPA’s
classified Acoustic Research Center, deep underwater in a lake in northern
Idaho.
The submarine research facility was one of ARPA’s best-kept secrets, an
underwater test site located at the south end of a small resort community on
Lake Pend Oreille in Bayview, Idaho. The forty-three-mile-long lake is
1,150 feet deep in places, making it the perfect locale to conduct secret
submarine research. Acoustic sensors placed on the floor of the lake
recorded and processed data which were then fed into ILLIAC IV, allowing
for major Cold War advances in antisubmarine warfare.
The ILLIAC IV controversy coincided with a major turning point in the
history of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Public opposition to the
Vietnam War, coupled with rising inflation, put an unwelcome spotlight on
ARPA when Senator Mike Mansfield, an antiwar Democrat from Montana,
introduced a bill that barred the Defense Department from using funds “to
carry out any research project or study unless the project or study had a
direct relationship to [a] specific military function.” The Mansfield
Amendment, introduced in late 1969 as an amendment to the Military
Authorization Act, focused “the public’s desire for practical outcomes”
against the idea that not only was the Pentagon failing to end the war in
Vietnam, but also its spending was out of control. The amendment put
military research and development under intense scrutiny and had a direct
impact on ARPA. Because most of its work was speculative, looking ten to
twenty-five years into the future, directors of the agency would now have to
present much more detailed information to Congress before their budgets
could be passed.
Then in February 1970 came another devastating blow for ARPA. The
secretary of defense authorized a decision that the entire agency was to be
removed from its coveted office space inside the Pentagon to a lackluster
office building in the Rosslyn district of Arlington, Virginia, two and a half
miles away. Desks, chairs, file cabinets, and furniture were all boxed up and
moved.
The Pentagon was the seat of military might, the locus of power.
Moving even a short distance away was, as one insider put it, “the epitome
of the Agency’s downgrading.” The underlying message being sent to staff
was that the Advanced Research Projects Agency might just fold. Even the
ARPA director at the time, the electrical engineer and telecommunications
expert Eberhardt Rechtin, appeared to have lost confidence in the agency he
was in charge of. Rechtin confided to a colleague, “It wouldn’t surprise me
that all of a sudden [a secretary of defense] would decide to kill ARPA.”
Since its inception in 1958, ARPA had been a place where there was always
more money than ideas. Suddenly, “the dollar situation was so bad, [the
agency] had far more ideas than money,” Rechtin said. Without money,
there was less power, and without power, there was greater tension.
To many on the ARPA staff, it seemed as if Rechtin did not particularly
care whether the agency survived. “The staff just didn’t know what was
going to happen next,” one program manager told a government historian in
1974. “They didn’t know who was boss. They didn’t know who to follow.
They didn’t know whether anyone cared.” The staffer continued: “At least
if you kill something[,] you know. You line it up against the wall, you take
aim, you spend five minutes at the job and you kill it right. But to let it
wither away by not even allowing it to have a Director [who cared] is
almost [worse]. The feeling was: he [Rechtin] doesn’t care anymore… he is
selling us down the river… we’ve become the pawn, and we are moving
away from the center.” An “apocalyptic feeling” overwhelmed the ARPA
staff. “We had terrible feelings that this [was] the end,” said another
unidentified staffer.
As ARPA director, Rechtin believed he knew why the agency had run
into so many difficulties during the Vietnam War. He called it the “chicken-
and-egg problem” in congressional testimony related to the Mansfield
Amendment. When asked by a committee member if it was appropriate to
describe the Advanced Research Projects Agency as a “premilitary research
organization within the Defense Department,” Rechtin said that if the word
“military” were replaced with the word “requirement,” then that assessment
would be correct. Unlike the regular military services, Rechtin said, ARPA
was a “pre-requirement” organization in that it conducted research in
advance of specific needs. “By this I mean that the military services, in
order to do their work, must have a very formal requirement based on
specific needs,” Rechtin said, “and usually upon technologies that are
understood.” ARPA existed to make sure that the military establishment
was not ever again caught off guard by a Sputnik-like technological
surprise. The enemy was always eyeing the future, he said, pursuing
advanced technology in order to take more ground. And ARPA was set up
to provide the Defense Department with its pre-requirement needs.
“There is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem in other words, in
requirements and technology,” Rechtin explained. “The difficulty is that it
is hard to write formal requirements if you do not have the technology with
which to solve them, but you cannot do the technology unless you have the
requirements.” The agency’s dilemma, said Rechtin, was this: if you can’t
do the research before a need arises, by the time the need is there, it’s clear
that the research should already have been done.
Rechtin had defended ARPA’s mission but wasn’t long for the job and
would soon move on to a more powerful position higher up the ladder at the
Department of Defense. In December 1970 he resigned his post at ARPA
and returned to the Pentagon, to take over as principal acting deputy of
Defense Department Research and Engineering (DDR&E), the person to
whom the ARPA director reports. The rest of the agency employees waited
for the other shoe to drop.
Drop it did. On June 13, 1971, the first installment of the Pentagon
Papers appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The classified
documents had been leaked to the newspaper by former Pentagon employee
and RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The papers unveiled a
secret history of the war in Vietnam—three thousand narrative pages of war
secrets accompanied by four thousand pages of classified memos and
supporting documents, organized into forty-seven volumes. Back in 1967,
when he was secretary of defense, Robert McNamara had commissioned
the RAND Corporation to write a classified “encyclopedic history of the
Vietnamese War,” neglecting to tell the president he was undertaking such a
project. The Pentagon Papers covered the U.S. involvement in Vietnam
since the end of World War II. Revealed in the papers were specifics on how
every president from Truman to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
had misled the public about what was really going on in Vietnam. The
classified documents were photocopied by Ellsberg, with the help of RAND
colleague Anthony Russo, the individual who had worked extensively with
Leon Gouré on the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project. Both Ellsberg
and Russo had originally supported the war in Vietnam but later came to
oppose it.
The papers revealed secret bombing campaigns, the role of the United
States in the Diem assassination, the CIA’s involvement with the
Montagnards, and so much more. With respect to ARPA, the papers
revealed the extensive role of the Jason scientists throughout the war—
specifically that they had designed sensors, strike aircraft retrofits, and
cluster bombs for the electronic fence. The scientists had first been brought
into the spotlight back in February 1968 when the scandal broke over the
possible use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Mu Gia Pass. Like so
many controversies during the war, that scandal came and went. But now,
with the revelations of the Pentagon Papers, the Jason scientists were
caught in a much harsher spotlight. In the words of former ARPA director
Jack Ruina, the Jason scientists were now portrayed as “the devil.”
All across the country, and even overseas, the Jason scientists became
targets for antiwar protesters. The words “war criminal” were painted on the
pavement outside Kenneth Watson’s house in Berkeley. Gordon
MacDonald’s Santa Barbara garage was set on fire. Herb York got a death
threat. The Jasons’ summer study office in Colorado was vandalized. In
New York City, a consortium of professors at Columbia demanded that the
scientists resign from Jason or resign from the university. In Paris, Murray
Gell-Mann was booed off a stage. Riot police were called to a physics
symposium in Trieste where Jason scientist Eugene Wigner was speaking as
an honored guest. In New York City, Murph Goldberger was getting ready
to deliver a lecture to the American Physical Society when a huge crowd
interrupted his talk in a very public way. Goldberger had recently led the
first-ever State Department–sanctioned delegation of American scientists to
communist China, but as he began to speak, the demonstrators raised huge
placards reading “War Criminal!” He tried to keep his composure and
continue his talk about China, but the protesters kept interrupting him,
shouting out questions about the Jason scientists and their role as weapons
designers for the Vietnam War.
“Look, I’ll talk about China or I won’t talk about anything,” Goldberger
told the crowd, but his voice was drowned out by boos. He tried a different
tactic and said that he would discuss Jason and Vietnam after his speech if
the protesters were willing to secure a venue where they could have a
conversation somewhere nearby after he was done. The protesters agreed.
As soon as Goldberger finished giving his lecture about China, he walked
over to the East Ballroom of the New York Hilton hotel and politely took
questions from a crowd of what was now more than two hundred people,
including lots of reporters.
“Jason made a terrible mistake,” Goldberger said in a voice described by
the Philadelphia Inquirer as “anguished” and fraught with moral guilt. We
“should have told Mr. McNamara to go to hell and not become involved at
all,” said Goldberger.
No Jason scientist was spared defamation. A group of antiwar protesters
learned the home address of Richard Garwin in upstate New York and
showed up on his front lawn with hate signs. Another time, when Garwin
was on an airplane, a woman sitting in the seat next to him recognized him,
stood up, and declared, “This is Dick Garwin. He is a baby killer!”
An Italian physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Naples,
Bruno Vitale, spearheaded an international anti-Jason movement. Vitale
saw the revelations in the Pentagon Papers about the Jason scientists as a
“perfect occasion to see bare the hypocrisy of the establishment physicists;
their lust for power, prestige; their arrogance against the people.” In a
monograph titled “The War Physicists,” he charged that the scientific world
had become divided into insiders and outsiders. “Jason people are insiders,”
Vitale wrote. “They have access to secret information from many
government offices.” On the opposite side of the coin, “those who engage in
criticism of government policies without the benefit of such inside access
are termed outsiders.” Vitale argued that scientists needed to stand together
in their outrage and not accept what he called phony arguments. “When a
debate arises between insiders and outsiders, invariably the argument is
used that only the insiders know the true facts and that therefore the
outsiders’ positions should not be taken seriously.”
Vitale’s crusade garnered international support, and in December 1972 a
group of European scientists, three of whom were Nobel Prize winners,
wrote a very public letter to the Jason scientists, which was published in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The land mines that formed part of the
electronic fence “have caused terrible wounds among Vietnamese
civilians,” they charged, and asked the Jasons to respond. In the weeks that
followed, in letters to the editor, other scientists demanded that the Jason
researchers “explain how they could justify to their consciences” the work
they had done designing land mines. Famed British physics professor E. H.
S. Burhop wrote: “The scientists became, to some extent, prisoners of the
group they had joined…. At what point should they have quit?” In Science,
a reader wrote in to say that the Jasons “should be tried for war crimes.”
The Jasons did not collectively respond. Looking back in 2013, Goldberger
said of the group he co-founded, “We should never have gotten involved in
Vietnam.”

By 1973, ARPA’s new director, Stephen Lukasik, felt it was time for the
agency to distance itself from the Jason scientists. For years the group had
been at the “intellectual forefront of everything we were trying to do to
prevent technological surprise,” Lukasik later remarked. But he also felt
that the Jason scientists suffered from an intellectual superiority complex.
“The word ‘arrogant’ [was] associated with Jason,” Lukasik acknowledged.
He had worked with the Jasons for a decade, going back to the time when
he was head of ARPA’s Nuclear Test Detection Office, which handled the
Vela program. On more than one occasion, Lukasik felt that the Jasons had
displayed a “pattern of arrogance.” That they were a self-congratulating
group. “They picked their members. And so they had in 1969 the same
members they had in 1959.” Lukasik wanted new blood. The Jasons still
“didn’t have any computer scientists. They didn’t have any materials
scientists. They weren’t bringing in new members.” Lukasik notified the
Jason scientists, through their oversight committee at IDA, that it was time
for them to move on. “I probably was seen as an enemy of the Jasons,”
Lukasik admitted. In the winter of 1973, without any resistance, the Jasons
departed IDA for the Stanford Research Institute, in California. “It was an
agreeable move,” Goldberger recalled. Before leaving IDA, the Jason
scientists had had only one client, the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Now, said Goldberger, the Jasons were free to work “for whomever we
pleased.”
Not all those affiliated with ARPA were feeling liberated. In their new
office building away from the Pentagon, ARPA employees were at a
crossroads. Feeling banished from the center of power and with budgets
slashed, they feared that the future of ARPA was more uncertain than it had
ever been. Who could have imagined this precarious time would give way
to one of the most prosperous, most influential eras in the history of the
Advanced Research Projects Agency?
 PART III

OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR

 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rise of the Machines

During the Korean War, when Allen Macy Dulles left the trench at
Outpost Bunker Hill and headed down to check the fence, he was doing
what soldiers have done for millennia. He was going out on patrol. The
moment when Dulles saw someone had cut the fence, he likely sensed
danger was near. But before he had time to notify anyone of the incursion,
the twenty-two-year-old soldier took enemy shrapnel to the head, suffered a
traumatic brain injury, and was rendered amnesic. Like millions and
millions of soldiers before him, he became a war casualty. The Vietnam
electronic fence, conceived and constructed hastily during the war, created
the opportunity to change all that. Technology could do what humans had
been doing all along: patrol and notify. The fence required no human guard.
It guarded itself. From ARPA’s research and development standpoint, the
concept of the electronic fence was a sea change. It set in motion a
fundamental transformation of the battlefield. This change did not happen
overnight. By 2015 it would be irreversible.
By the winter of 1973, almost no one in America wanted anything more
to do with the Vietnam War. On January 27, the Paris Peace Accords were
signed and U.S. troops began fully withdrawing from Vietnam. On
February 12, hundreds of long-held American prisoners of war began
coming home. And in keeping with the Mansfield Amendment, which
required the Pentagon to research and develop programs only with a
“specific military function,” the word “defense” was added to ARPA’s
name. From now on it would be called the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or DARPA.
 If the agency was going to survive and prosper, it needed to reinvent
itself, beginning with the way it was perceived. Any program associated
with the Vietnam War would be jettisoned. Project Agile became the
scapegoat, the punching bag. In internal agency interviews, three former
ARPA directors, each of whom had overseen Project Agile during the
Vietnam War, spoke of it in the most disparaging terms. “We tried to work
the counter-insurgency business,” lamented Eberhardt Rechtin, “and found
we couldn’t. All the things we tried—radar systems and boats and
whatever”—didn’t work. “Agile was an abysmal failure; a glorious failure,”
said Charles Herzfeld. “When we fail, we fail big.” Even William Godel,
now freed from federal prison for good behavior, spoke candidly about
failure. “We never learned how to fight guerrilla warfare and we never
really learned how to help the other guy,” Godel said in a rare recorded
interview, in July 1975. “We didn’t do it; we left no residue of good will;
and we didn’t even explain it right.” Still, Godel insisted that the problem of
counterinsurgency was real, was multiplying, and was not going to go away
anytime soon. “We did a goddamn lousy job of solving those problems, and
that did happen on my watch,” he said.
But for DARPA, Vietnam was far from a failure; it could not be spoken
of in any one way. The enormous sums of money, the volumes of classified
programs, the thousands of scientists and technicians, academics, analysts,
defense contractors, and businessmen, all of whom worked for months,
years, some more than a decade, to apply their scientific and industrial
acumen to countless programs, some tiny, some grand, some with oversight,
others without—the results of these efforts could by no means be
generalized as success or failure any more than they could be categorized as
good or bad. Granted, the results of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale
Project, with its thousands of hours of interviews of prisoners, peasants, and
village elders—allegedly to determine what made the Vietcong tick—
amounted to zero, that mysterious number one arrives at when everything
gained equals everything lost. The Strategic Hamlet Program, the Rural
Security System Program, the COIN games, the Motivation and Morale
studies: it is easy to discount these as foolhardy, wasteful, colonialist. But
not all the ARPA Vietnam programs could or would be viewed by DARPA
as failures. Among the hardware that was born and developed in those
remote jungle environs, there was much to admire from a Defense
Department point of view.
Testifying before Congress in 1973, director Stephen Lukasik said that
DARPA’s goal was to refocus itself as a neutral, non–military service
organization, emphasizing what he called “high-risk projects of
revolutionary impact.” Only innovative, groundbreaking programs would
be taken on, he said, programs that should be viewed as “pre-mission
assignments” or “pre-requirement” research. The agency needed to apply
itself to its original mandate, which was to keep the nation from being
embarrassed by another Sputnik-like surprise. At DARPA, the emphasis
was on hard science and hardware.
Project Agile was abolished, and in its place came a new office called
Tactical Technology. Inside this office, components of the electronic fence
were salvaged from the ruins of the war. The program, with its obvious
applications in the intelligence world, was highly classified. When asked
about the sensor program in an agency review in 1975, acting director Dr.
Peter Franken told colleagues that even he was not cleared to know about it.
“It was most difficult to understand the program,” Franken told the
interviewer, attributing the inscrutable nature of sensor research to the fact
that “special clearance requirements inhibited even his access to the sensor
program.” In keeping with the mandate to develop advanced technology
and then turn it over to the military for implementation, sensor programs
were now being pursued by all of the services and the majority of the
intelligence agencies. All born of the Vietnam War.
DARPA’s early work, going back to 1958, had fostered at least six
sensor technologies. Seismic sensors, developed for the Vela program,
sense and record how the earth transmits seismic waves. In Vietnam, the
seismic sensors could detect heavy truck and troop movement on the Ho
Chi Minh Trail, but not bicycles or feet. For lighter loads, strain sensors
were now being further developed to monitor stress on soil, notably that
which results from a person on the move. Magnetic sensors detect residual
magnetism from objects carried or worn by a person; infrared sensors detect
intrusion by beam interruption. Electromagnetic sensors generate a radio
frequency that also detects intrusion when interrupted. Acoustic sensors
listen for noise. These were all programs that were now set to take off anew.
In the early 1970s, the Marine Corps took a lead in sensor work. The
success of the seismic sensors placed on the ground during the battle for
Khe Sanh had altered the opinions of military commanders about the use of
sensors on the battlefield. Before Khe Sanh, the majority opposed sensor
technology; after the battle, it was almost unanimously embraced. Before
war’s end, the Marines had their own sensor program, Project STEAM, or
Sensor Technology as Applied to the Marine Corps. STEAM made room
for sensor platoons, called SCAMPs, or Sensor Control and Management
Platoons. Within SCAMP divisions there were now Sensor Employment
Squad Sensors, called SES, and Sensor Employment Teams, called SETs.
The Marines saw enormous potential in sensor technology, not just for
guard and patrol, but for surveillance and intelligence collection. These
programs would develop, and from the fruits of these programs, new
programs would grow.
Two other technologies that would greatly impact the way the United
States would fight future wars also emerged from the wreckage of Vietnam.
Night vision technology expanded into a broad multi-tiered program as
each of the services found great strategic value in being able to see at night
while the enemy remained in the dark. So did stealth technology, a radical
innovation originally developed by the CIA for reconnaissance purposes,
starting in 1957, when the agency first tried to lower the radar cross-section
of the U-2 spy plane. ARPA’s original work in audio stealth began in 1961
with William Godel’s sailplane idea, one of the four original Project Agile
gadgets, along with the AR-15, the riverboat, and the sniffer dogs. During
the course of the Vietnam War, Project Agile’s sailplane had developed
successfully into the Lockheed QT-2 “quiet airplane,” a single-engine
propeller plane that flew just above the jungle canopy and was acoustically
undetectable from the ground. Dedicated to surveillance and packed with
sensor technology, the QT-2 would glide silently over Vietcong territory
with its engine off. In 1968 ARPA turned the program over to the Army,
which made modifications to the aircraft, now called the Lockheed YO-3
Quiet Star. After the war, DARPA sought to expand its stealth program
from acoustically undetectable sailplanes to aircraft that were undetectable
even by the most sophisticated enemy radar. In 1974 DARPA’s Tactical
Technology Office began work on a highly classified program to build
“high-stealth aircraft.” The following year, DARPA issued contracts to
McDonnell Douglas and Northrop, considered by DARPA to be the two
defense contractors most qualified for the stealth job.
 There was a fascinating twist. By the mid-1970s, Lockheed had already
achieved major milestones in stealth technology, having developed the
highly classified A-12 Oxcart spy plane for the CIA. (The A-12 later
became the unclassified SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, flown by the Air
Force.) Knowledge of the CIA’s classified stealth program was so tightly
controlled that even DARPA director George Heilmeier did not have a need
to know about it. In 1974, when management at Lockheed Skunk Works
learned of DARPA’s “high-stealth aircraft” efforts—and that they had not
been invited to participate—they asked the CIA to allow them to discuss the
A-12 Oxcart with Heilmeier. After the discussion, Lockheed was invited to
join the competition and eventually won the DARPA stealth contract.
The first on-paper incarnation of what would become the F-117 stealth
fighter was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled
the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers were not initially
certain it would fly. “We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like
mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” remembers Edward
Lovick, who worked as a lead physicist on the program. After the Hopeless
Diamond went through a number of drafts, the project became a classified
DARPA program code-named Have Blue. Two aircraft were built at the
Lockheed Skunk Works facility in Burbank, California, and test flown at
Area 51 in Nevada in April 1977. Satisfied with the low observability of the
aircraft, the U.S. Air Force took over the program in 1978. Stealth
technology was a massive classified endeavor involving more than ten
thousand military and civilian personnel. The power of this secret weapon
rested in keeping it secret. To do so, the Air Force set up its own top secret
facility to fly the F-117, just north of Area 51 outside Tonopah, Nevada.
The base was nicknamed Area 52.
The 1970s were a formative time at DARPA from a historical
perspective. Away from the Pentagon, DARPA came into its own. Congress
remained averse to ARPA’s former herd of social science programs, which
it criticized in post-Vietnam oversight committees as having been
egregiously wasteful, foolhardy, and without oversight. Any mention of the
phrase “hearts and minds” in the Pentagon made people wince. To avoid the
“red flag” reaction from Congress, ARPA programs that touched on
behavioral sciences were renamed or rebranded.
ARPA’s social science office (which actually existed during the Vietnam
War) was called Human Resources Research Office, or HumRRO. But in
the post-Vietnam era, HumRRO programs focused on improving human
performance from a physiological and psychological standpoint. Two
significant ideas emerged. The first was to research the psychological
mechanisms of pain as related to military injuries on the battlefield. ARPA
scientists sought to understand whether soldiers could suppress pain in
combat, and if so, how. The second major project was a research program
on “self-regulation” of bodily functions previously believed to be
involuntary. The general, forward-thinking question was, how could a
soldier maintain peak performance under the radically challenging
conditions of warfare?
It was a transformative time at DARPA. The agency already had shifted
from the 1950s space and ballistic missile defense agency to the 1960s
agency responsible for some of the most controversial programs of the
Vietnam War. And now, a number of events occurred that eased the
agency’s transition as it began to change course again. Under the direction
of the physicist Stephen Lukasik, in the mid-1970s the agency would take a
new turn—a new “thrust,” as Lukasik grew fond of saying. In this mid-
1970s period of acceleration and innovation, DARPA would plant certain
seeds that would allow it to grow into one of the most powerful and most
respected agencies inside the Department of Defense.

“The key to command and control is, in fact, communication,” said Stephen
Lukasik shortly after he took over the agency. Command and control, or C2,
had now expanded into command, control, and communication, or C3, and
this concept became the new centerpiece of the DARPA mission under
Lukasik. The advancement of command, control, and communication
technology relied heavily on computers. Since 1965 the power of
microchips, then called integrated electronic circuits, had been doubling
every year, a concept that a computer engineer named Gordon E. Moore
picked up on and wrote about in Electronics magazine. In “Cramming More
Components into Integrated Circuits,” Moore predicted that this doubling
trend would continue for the next ten years, a prescient notion that has since
become known as Moore’s law. Doubling is a powerful concept: 10 x 10 =
100; 100 x 100 = 10,000; 10,000 x 10,000 = 100 million. In 2014, Apple
put 2 billion transistors into its iPhone 6.
In 1974, DARPA’s supercomputer, ILLIAC IV, now up and running at
the Ames Research Center in California, was the fastest computer in the
world. Its parallel processing power allowed for the development of
technologies like real-time video processing, noise reduction, image
enhancement, and data compression—all technologies taken for granted in
the twenty-first century but with origins in DARPA science. And Lukasik’s
C3 program also relied heavily on another emerging DARPA technology,
the ARPANET.
It had been more than a decade since J. C. R. Licklider sent out his
eccentric memo proposing the Pentagon create a linked computer network,
which he called the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Licklider left the
Pentagon in 1965 but hired two visionaries to take over the Command and
Control (C2) Research office, since renamed the Information Processing
Techniques Office. Ivan Sutherland, a computer graphics expert who had
worked with Daniel Slotnick on ILLIAC IV, and Robert W. Taylor, an
experimental psychologist, believed that computers would revolutionize the
world and that a network of computers was the key to this revolution.
Through networking, not only would individual computer users have access
to other users’ data, but also they would be able to communicate with one
another in a radical new way. Licklider and Taylor co-wrote an essay in
1968 in which they predicted, “In a few years, men will be able to
communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” By
2009, more electronic text messages would be sent each day than there were
people on the planet.
Sutherland and Taylor began asking DARPA contractors at various
university research laboratories around the country what they thought about
the networked computer idea. The feedback was unanimous in favor of it.
In general, scientists and engineers were frustrated by how little access to
computers they had. This got Sutherland and Taylor thinking. Why not try
linking several of these university computers together so the DARPA
contractors could share resources? To do so would require building a
system of electronic links between different computers, located hundreds of
miles apart. It was a radical undertaking, but Sutherland and Taylor
believed it could be done.
Bob Taylor went to DARPA director Charles Herzfeld to request enough
money to fund a networked connection linking four different university
computers, or nodes. Herzfeld told Taylor he thought it sounded like a good
idea but he was concerned about reliability. If all four computers were
linked together, Herzfeld said, when there was a problem, it meant all four
computers would be down at the same time. Thinking on his feet, Taylor
said he intended to build a concept into the system called network
redundancy. If one connection went down, the messages traveling between
the computers would simply take another path. Herzfeld asked how much
money Taylor thought be needed. Taylor said a million dollars.
Herzfeld asked, “Is it going to be hard to do?”
“Oh, no. We already know how to do it,” Taylor said, when really he
was guessing.
“Great idea,” said Herzfeld. “You’ve got a million dollars more in your
budget right now.” Then he told Taylor to get to work.
Taylor left Herzfeld’s office and headed back to his own. He later
recalled the astonishment he felt when he looked at his watch. “Jesus
Christ,” he thought. “That only took twenty minutes.” Even more
consequential was the idea of network redundancy—making sure no single
computer could take the system down—that emerged from that meeting. It
is why in 2015, no one organization, corporation, or nation can own or
completely control the global system of interconnected computer networks
known as the Internet. To think it came out of that one meeting, on the fly.
The first four university sites chosen were Stanford Research Institute in
northern California; the University of California, Los Angeles; the
University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt
Lake City. In 1969, ARPA contractor Bolt, Beranek and Newman became
the first east coast node. By 1972 there were twenty-four nodes, including
the Pentagon. The person largely responsible for connecting these nodes
was an electrical engineer named Robert Kahn. At the time, Kahn called
what he was working on an “internetwork.” Soon it would be shortened to
Internet.
This network of ARPA nodes was growing, and Kahn wanted to devise
a common language, or protocol, so that all new nodes could communicate
with the existing nodes in the same language. To do this, Kahn teamed up
with another DARPA program manager named Vint Cerf, and together the
men invented the concept of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and
Internet Protocol (IP), which would allow new nodes seamless access to the
ARPANET. Today, TCP/IP remains the core communications protocol of
the Internet. By 1973 there were thirty-six ARPANET nodes connected via
telephone lines, and a thirty-seventh, in Hawaii, connected by a satellite
link. That same year the Norwegian Seismic Array became connected to the
ARPANET, and J. C. R. Licklider’s vision for an “Intergalactic Computer
Network” became an international reality.
In 1975 DARPA transferred its ARPANET system over to the Defense
Communications Agency, and in 1982 standards for sending and receiving
email were put in place. In 1983 the Pentagon split off a military-only
network, called MILNET. Today the ARPANET is often referred to as “the
most successful project ever undertaken by DARPA.”

Between the advances in computer technology, networking power, and the

ARPANET, DARPA was primed for the development of an entirely new
C3-based weapons system. Sometime in 1974, DARPA commissioned
several classified studies on how the Pentagon could best prepare itself for a
Soviet invasion of western Europe. The strategist leading one analysis was
the former RAND mathematician Albert Wohlstetter, author of the nuclear
second-strike doctrine, or NUTS. Wohlstetter, now a professor at the
University of Chicago, sought “to identify and characterize” new military
technologies that would give the president a variety of “alternatives to
massive nuclear destruction.” Wohlstetter assembled a study group, called
the Strategic Alternatives Group, to assist him in his analytic efforts. In
February 1975 the group completed the generically titled “Summary Report
of the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program.”
In the report, Wohlstetter concluded that several Vietnam-era DARPA
projects merited renewed attention. Topping the list was the effectiveness of
laser-guided bombs and missiles. In the last year of the Vietnam War, the
U.S. Air Force sent 10,500 laser-guided bombs into North Vietnam.
Roughly one-half of these bombs, 5,100 in total, achieved a “direct hit,”
with another 4,000 achieving “a circular error probable (CEP) of 25 feet.”
Compared to the success rate of unguided “dumb” bombs of previous wars,
including World War II, Korea, and most of Vietnam, these statistics were
to be interpreted as “spectacularly good,” wrote Wohlstetter. The best
example was the bombing of the Thanh Hoa Bridge, a 540-foot steel span
across the Song Ma River, roughly seventy miles south of Hanoi. The
bridge was an important supply route for the North Vietnamese during the
war, and they kept it defended with garrison-like strength. The bridge was
surrounded by a ring of three hundred antiaircraft systems and eighty-five
surface-to-air missile systems. A wing of Soviet-supplied MiG fighter jets
was stationed nearby. For years in the 1ate 1960s, the Air Force and the
Navy tried to destroy the bridge but could not. By 1968, eleven U.S. aircraft
had been shot down trying to bomb the bridge. Then, in May 1972, after a
four-and-a-half-year bombing halt, fourteen F-4 fighter bombers equipped
with newly developed laser-guided bombs were sent on a mission to bomb
the bridge. With several direct hits, the bridge was destroyed. “It appears
that non-nuclear weapons with near-zero miss may be feasibly and
militarily effective,” Wohlstetter wrote in praise of these new “smart”
weapons.
Also of interest to Wohlstetter were DARPA’s early efforts with mini-
drones, which had played a major role in advancing laser-guided weapons
technology—a fact largely underreported in military history books.
DARPA’s Vietnam drone program had grown out of DDR&E John Foster’s
love of model airplanes and remote control. Two of the mini-drones, called
Praerie and Calere, caught Wohlstetter’s eye. Praerie and Calere were
exceptionally small at the time, each weighing seventy-five pounds,
including a twenty-eight-pound payload that could be a camera, a small
bomb, or an “electronic warfare payload.” Each was powered by a
lawnmower engine and could fly for up to two hours. Praerie carried a TV
camera and used laser target technology. It was the first drone to direct a
cannon-launched guided projectile to a direct hit on a tank, a milestone
achieved at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, during an undated field test. The
Calere drone was equally groundbreaking. It carried forward-looking
infrared, or FLIR, another Vietnam-era invention, which allowed the drone
to “see” at low altitudes in the dark of night.
DARPA also developed another, much larger, “more complicated” drone
that interested Wohlstetter, as revealed in an obscure 1974 internal DARPA
review. Nite Panther and Nite Gazelle were helicopter drones, “equipped
with a real time day-night battlefield reconnaissance capability including
armor plate and self-sealing, extended-range fuel tanks.” The drone
helicopters were deployed into the battlefield, starting in March 1968, in
response to an urgent operational request from the Marine Corps. To create
the Nite Panther drone, DARPA modified a Navy QH-50 DASH
antisubmarine helicopter—originally designed to fire torpedoes at
submerged submarines—and added a remotely controlled television system,
called a “reconnaissance-observation system,” which could transmit real-
time visuals back to a moving jeep, acting as a ground station. The jeep was
loaded with racks of telemetry and television equipment, antennae, and a
power supply. The drone operator sitting in the jeep was able to operate and
monitor the drone helicopter from takeoff to touchdown. Images captured
by the drone, flying over enemy territory, were recorded by the equipment
on the jeep, then relayed back to a shipboard control station, where
commanders could send high-performance strike aircraft to bomb targets
identified by the drone. This was groundbreaking technology during the
war. In 1974 Wohlstetter recognized its future potential. Conceivably, as
computers got smaller and were able to process data faster, a drone could be
sent deep behind enemy lines to photograph targets and send the images to
commanders in real time.
Another significant DARPA technology that allowed these Vietnam-era
systems to converge was a satellite-based navigation technology called
Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. GPS began as a classified military
program, the purpose of which was to direct weapons to precise targets.
DARPA’s pioneering GPS program was called TRANSIT. It began in 1959,
when ARPA contracted with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory to create the first satellite positioning system, using six
satellites, three for positioning and three as spares.
After several failed launches, TRANSIT finally took up residence in
space in June 1963. To deny enemy access to this kind of precise targeting
information, the system was originally designed with an offset feature built
in, called selective availability (SA). If an individual were able to access the
GPS system with a private receiver, the information would be offset by
several hundred feet.
Over the next ten years, the Navy and the Air Force developed their own
satellite-based navigational systems, but each system was incompatible with
the other. In 1973 the Pentagon ordered DARPA to create a single system
shared by all the military services, and a new DARPA program called
NAVSTAR Global Positioning System emerged. It was a herculean effort
filled with technical stumbling blocks and failed rocket launches. Finally,
starting in 1989 a constellation of twenty-four satellites, each fitted with
atomic clocks to keep them in sync, was sent aloft and began orbiting the
earth. The U.S. military now had precise navigational coverage of the entire
world, in all weather conditions, in real time.
During the 1990s, interest in satellite-based global positioning
technology grew, and European companies began developing GPS-like
systems for civilian use. In an effort to keep the United States at the
forefront of the burgeoning new industry, in May 2000 President Clinton
discontinued the selective availability feature on GPS, giving billions of
people access to precise GPS technology, developed by DARPA.

To Albert Wohlstetter, working on the DARPA analysis in the mid-1970s,

the fusion of various Vietnam-era technology systems—sensors, computers,
laser-guided weapons, the ARPANET, drones—offered great promise and
potential in the development of what he called a “system of systems.” The
following year, on the basis of suggestions made in the “Summary Report
of the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program,” DARPA
initiated a new weapons program called Assault Breaker. A series of once
disparate technologies could come together to fulfill Lukasik’s vision to
“command, control, and communicate.” Using technologies that also
included radar tracking and camera confirmation, Assault Breaker would
one day allow commanders to precisely strike targets—even moving targets
—deep behind enemy lines. Imagining a system in which this kind of
weaponry and technology could work together was unprecedented. All of it
had emerged from the Vietnam War.
In the 1970s, the Soviets were notorious for maintaining a network of
spies in and around Washington, D.C., and it did not take long for the
Russians to learn about DARPA’s classified Assault Breaker plans. When
they did, the Soviet military brass began studying the concept and planning
countermeasures. In 1978 an article about Assault Breaker appeared in the
classified Soviet military journal Military Thought. That the Soviets knew
about DARPA’s “system of systems” might have gone unnoticed had it not
been for the sharp eyes of Andrew W. Marshall, a former RAND analyst
and Wohlstetter protégé who now had his own office inside the Pentagon.
Marshall served as director of the Office of Net Assessment, created by the
Nixon White House in 1973 and dedicated to forecasting future wars. At
RAND, Marshall had secured his reputation as a master game theorist, and
at the Pentagon, his wizardry in prognosis and prediction earned him the
nom de guerre Yoda, or the Jedi Master. It also put him in regular contact
with DARPA directors and program managers, as he continued to be for
over forty years.
Part of Andrew Marshall’s job in the 1970s was to monitor what Soviet
generals were writing in their classified journals. In reading Military
Thought, Marshall learned that the Soviets felt so threatened by the
prospects of an Assault Breaker–like system of systems that they were
running exercises to practice countermeasures against one. Soviet fears of
DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept did not stop there but made their way to
the top of the Soviet military chain of command. In 1984 Marshall Nikolai
Ogarkov, chief of the general staff of the armed forces of the Soviet Union,
worried in a classified memo that Assault Breaker gave the Americans the
ability to conduct “automated reconnaissance-and-strike complexes,” a
capability that must be regarded as a “military-technical revolution.”
Marshall renamed the Russian pronouncement a “revolution in military
affairs,” which had since become a celebrated Pentagon maxim. The saying
defines what happens when one country or fighting force creates a
technology or tactic that makes everything else subordinate to it and makes
many of the other side’s earlier weapons systems obsolete.
Just a decade before, in the wake of the Vietnam War and with his
agency’s budget slashed, Stephen Lukasik had appealed to Congress to
allow DARPA to pursue “high-risk projects of revolutionary impact.”
Lukasik told Congress that in the modern world, the country with the most
powerful weapons would not necessarily have the leading edge. He argued
that as the twenty-first century approached, the leading edge would belong
to the country with the best information—with which it could quickly plan,
coordinate, and attack. Eleven years later, his vision proved correct. The
Soviets felt deeply threatened by DARPA’s C3-based revolution in military
affairs.
Technology continued to advance at a radical new pace. In 1977 Harold
Brown became President Carter’s secretary of defense, making Brown the
first nuclear scientist to lead the Department of Defense. Brown believed
that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he
also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity.
“Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,”
remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and
unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing
technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication
networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at
whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff
programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and
drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology
would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were
forming.

In the fall of 1978, Captain (later Colonel) Jack A. Thorpe, a thirty-four-

year-old Air Force officer with a Ph.D. in psychology, was sitting inside a
flight simulator at the Flying Training Division of Williams Air Force Base
in Arizona when he got a radical idea. The flight simulator here at the
Human Resources Laboratory was one of two of the most advanced
simulators in the country—and the most expensive, having cost more than
$25 million to build, roughly $100 million in 2015. The computer-driven
simulator was mounted on a hydraulic motion system that moved like a
carnival ride. The simulator Captain Thorpe was sitting inside was
connected to a second computer, which made the pair state of the art and
one of a kind.
“The other flyer’s aircraft appeared in the corner of my screen like a
small cartoonish icon,” Thorpe remembers. “What this meant in 1978 was
that this flight simulator was the only one in America where two pilots
could engage in flight training research operations together, at the same
time.”
Thorpe was struck with an idea. What if an Air Force pilot could sit
inside a small room like the one he was sitting in now, but instead of
looking at cartoonish icons moving across a computer screen, he saw the
world in front of him in three dimensions? What if it felt like he was
actually inside the airplane, with his wingman flying alongside? Jack
Thorpe had a name for what he imagined. It was a “high-fidelity simulator,”
a virtual world.
Back at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., where he was
stationed, Thorpe put his thoughts down on paper. In “Future Views:
Aircrew Training, 1980–2000,” Thorpe described a flight-training situation
in which a whole squadron of pilots could prepare for combat readiness
together, training on individual but networked flight simulators. Each
airman would be flying a separate aircraft but in the same battle space. In
this virtual reality, pilots would be in visual contact with one another and in
audio contact with a commander, who would work from a remote
information center, imagined as a real place, which Thorpe called a Tactical
Development Center. Thorpe’s Tactical Development Center would have “a
three dimensional, holographic, electronic sand table,” he wrote, “a place
where tacticians and strategists could see what the pilots in their simulators
were doing.” In this computer-generated environment, a commander would
be able to “see” what was happening in the battle space, in real time, thanks
to an overhead satellite source delivering data. In this new virtual world,
pilots would train and their commanders would strategize.
These simulators would allow for “real-time dress rehearsals,” Thorpe
wrote, teaching pilots how to train in groups, with the immediacy of real
battle situations but without the lethal consequences. On the basis of the
outcomes of various simulations, commanders could quickly decide what
course of action each pilot should take. Without having access to any
information about DARPA programs, and certainly not being privy to
newly formulated classified details of the Assault Breaker program, Thorpe
had envisioned almost the same thing that Wohlstetter saw. Only Thorpe’s
high-fidelity simulator was a training tool for war, played in a virtual world,
and Assault Breaker was a billion-dollar weapons system to be developed
and deployed in a real war.
Thorpe was invited to present his thoughts to a group of senior officials.
“They were all command pilots, each with thousands of hours of flight
time,” Thorpe recalls. “Here I am, this clown with no wings, proposing to
take away flight training time from air officers. I did not articulate myself
very well. I got my lunch handed to me.” The senior officials chuckled at
his idea.
Thorpe figured he was missing a key piece of this puzzle he was
designing, but he just did not know what it was yet. “There is nothing like
getting yelled at to make you think harder, to really reflect,” Thorpe says. “I
figured out you can’t take away flight training time. The simulator would be
a better place to practice certain combat skills that can never be practiced
except in battle,” he says. “For example, you could practice with equipment
like jammers, which you would never turn on in peacetime, [which] an
opponent could [potentially] see. As soon as I had the ‘ah-hah’ moment,
that the real value of the simulator was to teach and practice skills you
could not practice until the first day of real combat, that’s when the way to
design the simulator became clear to me.”
Thorpe ran the idea by a few senior officers, but it was just too difficult a
concept for most people to visualize. Then, “by happenstance,” says
Thorpe, “I was offered the services of a graphic artist in the Pentagon, and
he illustrated the key components of the proposed concept.” Thorpe’s paper,
which now included elegant drawings, was reviewed by senior Pentagon
staff. “Everyone said, ‘Hey, that’s cool,’” Thorpe recalls. “But they also
said, ‘The fact is, the technology isn’t there yet.’” Most colleagues who
looked at Thorpe’s drawings said to him, “We don’t even know how to start
building something like that yet.”
One of the greatest stumbling blocks to Thorpe’s vision in 1978 was
how these simulators could possibly be connected to one another. “The idea
of networks connecting distant military installations was not yet imagined,”
says Thorpe. “The ARPANET experiments connecting a small number of
computers between different universities were under way, but the results
were not well known.” Mostly they were still classified. With his vision for
the future seeming more science fiction than science, Thorpe’s paper was
shelved.
Thorpe went back to school, to the Naval War College in Newport,
Rhode Island, and in January 1981 he was assigned to DARPA, on loan
from the Air Force. He was made a program manager in the Systems
Science Division, next door to the Information Processing Technology
Office that was being run by Bob Kahn, the man who, together with Vint
Cerf, had invented the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP). Thorpe recalls what an exciting time it was at DARPA, “the
center of the universe for gadgets.” DARPA was located at 1400 Wilson
Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, and the Systems Science Division had its
own demonstration facility across the street, “a place to try out all the new
gadgets, take them apart, put them back together again, or maybe integrate
one with another system.” Thorpe remembers one such example when one
of the world’s first compact disc players arrived in America, at DARPA, in
1981 or 1982. It had been sent from a small electronics company in Japan.
“There were only a few CDs in the world at the time,” Thorpe recalls, “and
they had music on them. Our director wasn’t interested in listening to
music, but we were interested in thinking about using the technology for
data storage.” The CD player was the size of a suitcase.
In the DARPA building, down the hallway from Thorpe’s office, was the
Cybernetics Technology Office, where DARPA’s artificial intelligence work
was under way. One day Thorpe’s boss, Craig Fields, the former program
director of cybernetics technology, asked Thorpe if he had any bright ideas.
“I pulled out the old high-fidelity simulator drawings,” recalls Thorpe.
“Fields, a brilliant guy, and later the director of DARPA, says, ‘I like that.’
He suggested we go talk to the director, Larry Lynn.” Thorpe explained his
idea to Lynn, who said he liked it, too.
“How much to build this synthetic world?” Thorpe recalls Lynn asking.
“Seventeen million,” Thorpe told him.
“Let’s do it,” Larry Lynn said.
“So we went ahead and started the program,” says Thorpe.
Captain Jack Thorpe’s paper was now a DARPA program called
Simulator Networking, or SIMNET. Broadly speaking, the goal of SIMNET
was to add a new element to command and control (C2), namely training.
C2 would eventually become C2U, “with a ‘U’ for university,” says
Thorpe.
In April 1983, SIMNET was just another DARPA program. Nothing like
it had ever been attempted before, and like other blue-sky science
endeavors at DARPA, SIMNET was given room to succeed or to fail.
“DARPA, unlike most agencies, is allowed to fail some fraction of the
time,” says Joe Mangano, a former DARPA program manager.
“In the early 1980s, most people in the defense community accepted the
notion that building an affordable, large-scale, free-play, force-on-force
worldwide networked war-fighting system was impossible,” retired colonel
Neale Cosby recalled in 2014. Cosby served as a SIMNET principal
investigator for DARPA for five years. But SIMNET would astonish
everybody, not only for its military application but for the multibillion-
dollar industry it would help create. “William Gibson didn’t invent
cyberspace,” Wired magazine reported in 1997, referring to the science
fiction author who coined the term in 1982, “Air Force captain Jack Thorpe
did.” SIMNET was the first realization of cyberspace, and it was the
world’s first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG
—more commonly known as an MMO.
MMOs first became popular in the gaming community in the late 1990s,
and by 2003 they had entered the mainstream. MMOs are now able to
support enormous numbers of game players simultaneously, with each
individual gamer connected to the game by the Internet. One of the most
popular MMOs is World of Warcraft, which sold more than $2.5 billion
worth of subscriptions in its first ten years. Each month, some 10 million
monthly World of Warcraft subscribers explore fantastic virtual landscapes,
fight monsters, and complete quests using an avatar.
MMO users became so great in number that in 2008, the CIA, the NSA,
and DARPA launched a covert data-mining effort, called Project Reynard,
to track World of Warcraft subscribers and discern how they exist and
interact in virtual worlds. To do so, CIA analysts created their own avatars
and entered the virtual world of World of Warcraft. That the CIA was
spying on MMO users was classified and remained unknown until 2013,
when former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden
disclosed top secret documents detailing the program, which also involved
British intelligence agencies. “Although online gaming may seem like an
innocuous form of entertainment, when the basic features and capabilities
are examined, it could potentially become a target-rich communication
network,” reads one top secret report, “WoW [World of Warcraft] may be
providing SIGINT [signals intelligence] targets a way to hide in plain
sight.”
But back in 1983, SIMNET was just getting started. MMOs were far in
the future and still a figment of the imagination. SIMNET was about
training warfighters for battle. And Jack Thorpe had more than a decade of
work ahead of him.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Star Wars and Tank Wars

On the evening of March 23, 1983, a long black limousine pulled up to the
south gate of Ronald Reagan’s White House. In the back sat Edward Teller,
now seventy-five years old. Teller was not exactly sure why he was here.
He had just flown in from California, where he lived, because the aide who
called him three days earlier said President Reagan thought it was important
that he be at the White House on this night.
Walking with a limp and a cane, Teller made his way through the White
House foyer, up the stairs, and into the Blue Room. There he was greeted by
Admiral John Poindexter, the Military Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs. Poindexter suggested Teller have a seat. Thirty-
six chairs had been set up in neat rows. Teller sat down and waited. In
another seat was the Jason scientist and Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes,
the principal inventor of the laser.
At 8:00 p.m., in a nationally televised address, President Reagan
announced to the world his decision to launch a major new research and
development program to intercept Soviet ICBMs in various stages of flight.
The program, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), would require
numerous advanced technology systems, the majority of which were still in
the development stage. DARPA would be the lead agency in charge until
SDI had its own organization.
President Reagan said that the reason for this radical new initiative was
simple. When he first became president, he was shocked to learn that in the
event of a Soviet nuclear strike, his only option as commander in chief was
to launch an all-out nuclear attack against the Soviets in response. Reagan
said he was not willing to live in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon—
mutual assured destruction. The United States needed the capability to
strike down incoming Soviet missiles before they arrived. This bold new
SDI program would allow for that.
For decades, defense scientists like the Jason scientists had been
grappling with this conundrum of ballistic missile defense and had
concluded that there was no way to defend against an onslaught of
incoming ICBMs. Now, Reagan believed that technology had advanced to
the point where this could be done sometime in the not-so-distant future.
The Strategic Defense Initiative involved huge mirrors in space, space-
based surveillance and tracking systems, space-based battle stations, and
more. But the element that got the most attention right away was the x-ray
laser, which scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had
been working on since the 1970s. Very few people outside the Livermore
group understood the science behind an x-ray laser, and even fewer knew
that x-ray lasers were powered by nuclear explosions.
Several days after Reagan’s speech, Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger was leaving the Pentagon to brief Congress on SDI. Walking
alongside him was Undersecretary Richard D. DeLauer, a ballistic missile
expert. Secretary Weinberger was having trouble grasping the science
behind SDI and DeLauer was trying to explain it to him.
“But is it a bomb?” Secretary Weinberger asked.
DeLauer was candid. As the former executive vice president of the
missile company TRW, Inc., and with a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering,
DeLauer understood the science behind the x-ray laser. “You’re going to
have to detonate a nuclear bomb in space,” he told the secretary of defense.
“That’s how you’re going to get the x-ray.”
This put Secretary Weinberger in an untenable position. President
Reagan had assured the public that his new program would not involve
nuclear weapons in space. “It’s not a bomb, is it?” Weinberger asked a
second time.
DeLauer chose his words carefully. He said that the x-ray laser didn’t
have to be called a bomb. It could be described as involving a “nuclear
event.”
In a 1985 interview for the Los Angeles Times, DeLauer relayed this
story verbatim. He said that the secretary of defense “didn’t understand the
technology,” adding, “Most people don’t.”
The laser was invented in the late 1950s by Charles Townes, who in
1964 was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. In the most basic sense a
laser is a device that emits light. But unlike with other light sources, such as
a lightbulb, which emits light that dissipates, in a laser the photons all move
in the same direction in lockstep, exactly parallel to one another, with no
deviation. To many, the laser is something straight out of science fiction. In
a 2014 interview for this book, Charles Townes, then age ninety-eight,
confirmed that he had been inspired to create the laser after reading Alexei
Tolstoi’s 1926 science-fiction novel The Garin Death Ray. “This idea of a
flashing death ray also has a mystique that catches human attention,” said
Townes, “and so we have Jove’s bolts of lightning and the death rays of
science fiction.” A half century after Tolstoi wrote about the Garin death
ray, George Lucas modernized the concept with Luke Skywalker’s light
saber in the science-fiction film Star Wars.
One of the first sets of experiments involving lasers, mirrors, and space
took place in 1969 and has been largely lost to the history books. The
experiment began on July 21 of that year, said Townes, when, for the first
time in history, two men walked on the moon. While on the lunar surface,
“astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin [Buzz] Aldrin set up an array of
small reflectors on the moon and faced them toward the Earth.” Back here
on earth—which is 240,000 miles from the moon—two teams of
astrophysicists, one team working at the University of California’s Lick
Observatory, on Mount Hamilton, and the other at the University of Texas’s
McDonald Observatory, on Mount Locke, took careful notes regarding
where, exactly, the astronauts were when they set down the mirrors. “About
ten days later, the Lick team pointed the telescope at that precise location
and sent a small pulse of power into the tiny piece of hardware they had
added to the telescope,” said Townes. Inside the telescope, a beam of
“extraordinarily pure red light” emerged from a crystal of synthetic ruby,
pierced the sky, and entered the near vacuum of space. A laser beam.
Traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, the laser beam
took less than two seconds to hit the mirrors left behind on the moon by
Armstrong and Aldrin, and then the same amount of time to travel back to
earth, where the Lick team “detected the faint reflection of its beam,”
explained Townes. The experiment delivered volumes of scientific data, but
one set was truly phenomenal. “The interval between launch of the pulse of
light and its return permitted calculation of the distance to the moon within
an inch, a measurement of unprecedented precision,” said Townes. The
laser beam was able to measure what stargazers and astronomers have
wondered since time immemorial: Exactly how far away from earth is the
moon?
While the astrophysicists were using laser technology for peaceful
purposes, the Defense Department was already looking at using lasers as
directed-energy weapons (DEW). In 1968 ARPA had established a
classified laser program called Eighth Card, which remains classified today,
as do many other laser programs, the names of which are also classified.
Directed-energy weapons have many advantages, none so great as speed.
Traveling at the speed of light means a DEW could hit a target on the moon
in less than two seconds.

After hearing Reagan’s historic announcement from a front-row seat in the

White House Blue Room, Edward Teller and Charles Townes had decidedly
different reactions. Teller embraced the idea and would become a leading
scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative and the follow-up program,
called Brilliant Pebbles. Charles Townes did not believe Reagan’s SDI
concept could work.
“For a president who doesn’t know the technology one can see why [it]
might be appealing,” said Townes. “It doesn’t really seem very attractive to
me, or doable. But you can see how from a matter of principle it sounded
good to Reagan. It’s like an imaginary story of what might be done.”
The day after the speech, Senator Edward Kennedy criticized the
president’s initiative, calling it a “reckless ‘Star Wars’ scheme.” The name
stuck. From then on, the president’s program became known around the
world as “Star Wars.” Science fiction and science had crossed paths once
again. For the general population, real-world lasers, death rays, and
directed-energy weapons were scientifically impossible to grasp. Science
fiction was not so hard.
Congress worried that SDI was not technically feasible and that it was
politically irresponsible. That even if the technology were successful, it
could trigger a dangerous new arms race with the Soviets. But after
debating the issue, Congress gave the Reagan White House the go-ahead
for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and over the next ten years, nearly $20
billion was spent. It is often said that the Clinton administration canceled
the SDI program, when in fact it canceled only certain elements of the
Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI never really went away. In 2012 the Fiscal
Times reported that more than $100 billion had been spent on SDI
technologies in the three decades since Reagan first proposed the idea, $80
billion of which had been spent in the past decade.

Space remains a domain where domination has long been sought but where
all-out war has never been fought. For scientists and engineers working on
DARPA’s SIMNET program, the focus would remain on land. There had
been steady progress with the SIMNET program in the year since director
Larry Lynn gave it the go-ahead, including the fact that the Army was now
involved. Which is how, in the spring of 1984, Jack Thorpe, now a major,
found himself maneuvering a sixty-ton M1 Abrams tank up over a muddy
hill deep in the pine-forested back lot of the legendary armor school at Fort
Knox, Kentucky.
“When we started SIMNET, the threat was on Soviet armor warfare,”
says Thorpe, “meaning tanks.” This meant that simulating tank warfare was
SIMNET’s first priority. The desired goal was to create a virtual reality that
felt real. So Thorpe and the DARPA team were at Fort Knox, driving
through the mud, attempting to “capture the sense of tankness,” says
Thorpe. DARPA had big plans for SIMNET, with a goal of building four
SIMNET centers to house a total of 360 simulators, roughly 90 per site. At
the time, Thorpe and the DARPA team were working on the first two
simulators, which would be models of M1 Abrams tanks.
Because there would be no motion in these simulators, the emphasis was
placed on sound. Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of
La Jolla was in charge of working with field units at instrumented training
ranges and collecting data. The defense contractor Perceptronics
Corporation of California was hired to design the fiberglass and plywood
simulators and wire them for sound. “For someone on the outside, the
sound of the hundred-and-five-millimeter tank gun firing at a target
downrange is incredibly loud, but for a person inside the tank the
experience is totally different,” says Thorpe. Because of the overpressure,
there is almost no noise. “It’s incredibly quiet.” What there is inside is
movement, which, Thorpe says, “is a totally different kind of sound.” The
audio specialists with Perceptronics replicated the sound inside the tank by
simulating the loose parts that vibrate when the gun fires. “Coins in the
glove box,” recalls Thorpe, “loose bolts, anything that’s not tied down.”
Back in the laboratory, to convey that rattling sound, audio engineers filled
a metal pie plate with nuts and bolts, then glued the pie plate to the top of a
subwoofer which they hid behind the fiberglass in the tank simulator. Then
Bolt, Beranek and Newman of Boston, which had been a principal
contractor on ARPANET, developed the networking and graphics
technology for the simulators.
The 1986 annual armor conference at Fort Knox was a milestone in
SIMNET history, the first test run of two DARPA SIMNET simulators.
General Frederic “Rick” Brown and another general would test the systems,
and there was a lot resting on what they thought of a simulated war game.
Thorpe recalls the first two simulators as being “about eighty percent
[complete], made of fiberglass and plywood, with one hand control to
control the turret.” The two SIMNET tank simulators had been set up
roughly twenty feet apart. The generals took their seats and the DARPA
team piled inside.
“Neither general had any experience in the virtual world,” says Thorpe.
“Here’s General Brown looking at a screen in front of him with an icon of
the other tank. I say, ‘There in that tank, that is the [opposing] general.’ He
doesn’t get it. So I say, ‘Turn the turret and point it toward the other tank.’
The turret turns. General Brown got a little giddy. He gets it, I think,”
Thorpe recalls. “I tell him to load a sabot [round]. ‘Sir,’ I say, ‘if you trigger
here, you can shoot the general.’”
General Brown fired the virtual weapon. On the screen, General Brown
watched the other general’s tank blow up. “Everything went dark,” Thorpe
recalls, in the virtual world, “the general and his crew were ‘dead.’” From
the other tank, in the other fiberglass and plywood box, Thorpe heard the
other general call out, “‘Reinitialize!’” Inside his simulator, the second
general’s tank came back to life. He swung his turret around, put General
Brown in his sights, and fired at him.
In that “reinitialize” moment, Thorpe says, he became convinced that
both generals were sold on SIMNET. “The behavior in a virtual world is the
same behavior as the behavior in the real world,” Thorpe says.
After its initial trials, and with the endorsements from two U.S. Army
generals, the SIMNET project had considerable momentum, and the
DARPA teams went into production mode. In nine months, DARPA had
constructed a building at Fort Knox the size of a small Costco. Inside there
were roughly seventy tank simulators, each made of fiberglass, and each
with the approximate dimensions of an M1 Abrams tank or a Bradley
fighting vehicle. “The building was designed like a hockey rink,” Thorpe
says. Power and networking cables dropped from the ceiling. “Entire tank
battalions would enter the SIMNET center and begin training together, as if
they were in a real tank battle.” Real-world problems had been built into the
system. “If you left your virtual electricity on overnight, in the morning
your battery would be dead,” Thorpe recalls. “If you didn’t pay attention to
landmarks and disciplined map reading, you got lost in the virtual battle
terrain. It was force on force. One group against another.” Competition
drove the training to a whole new level. “The desire to win forced people to
invent new concepts about how to beat their opponents.”
A second SIMNET center was built at Fort Benning, Georgia, then
another at Fort Rucker, in Alabama, for attack helicopter training. In 1988 a
fourth SIMNET center went up at the U.S. Army garrison in Grafenwoehr,
Germany, also for armor vehicles. In DARPA’s SIMNET, the U.S. Army
saw a whole new way to prepare for war. Then an unexpected new center
was requested by the Department of Defense.
“The high rankers at the Pentagon wanted a simulation center of their
own,” recalls Neale Cosby, who oversaw the engineering on this center. The
facility chosen as the host was DARPA’s longtime partner the Institute for
Defense Analyses, just down the street from DARPA in Alexandria. The
IDA offices were located in a collegiate-looking yellow-brick and glass
building located at 1801 North Beauregard Street. In 1988, Cosby recalls,
much of the ground floor, including the cafeteria, was taken over by
DARPA so an IDA simulation center could be built there for Pentagon
brass. Cosby recalls the production. “We covered all the windows with
camouflage, laid down a virtual tarmac made of foam, set up fiberglass
helicopters, tanks, and aircraft cockpits, then networked everything and
wired it for sound.” Finally, a mysterious feature was added, one that no
other SIMNET center had. For reasons of discretion, Cosby and Thorpe
called the feature a “flying carpet.”
“It was a way for [participants] to put themselves into the virtual world
not as a pilot or a tank driver or a gunner, but anywhere” in flight, says
Cosby. “It was as if you were invisible.” At the time, the details of the
invisible component were classified because the flying carpet feature was a
way for Pentagon officials with high clearances to experience what it would
be like to fly through a virtual battle in a stealth fighter jet. These were the
results of DARPA’s “high-stealth aircraft” program, which began in 1974.
Over a ten-year period, DARPA and the Army spent $300 million
developing simulation technology. In the summer of 1990 the SIMNET
system was transferred over to the U.S. Army. Its first large-scale use was to
simulate a war game exercise undertaken by U.S. Central Command
(CENTCOM), in Tampa, Florida. For years CENTCOM had sponsored a
biennial war game exercise called Operation Internal Look, based on a real-
world contingency plan. The Internal Look war games trained
CENTCOM’s combatant commander and his staff in command, control,
and communications techniques. The exercises involved a pre-scripted war
game scenario in which U.S. forces would quickly deploy to a location to
confront a hypothetical Soviet invasion of a specific territory. In the past,
the war games had taken place in Cold War settings like the Zagros
Mountains in Iran and the Fulda Gap in Germany.
In the summer of 1990 the Cold War climate had changed. The Berlin
Wall had come down eight months before, and CENTCOM commander in
chief General Norman Schwarzkopf decided that for Internal Look 90, U.S.
forces would engage in a SIMNET-based war game against a different foe,
other than the Soviet Union. A scripted narrative was drawn up involving
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his military, the fourth largest in the
world. In this narrative, Iraq, coming off its eight-year war with Iran, would
attack the rich oil fields of Saudi Arabia. In response, U.S. armed forces
would enter the conflict to help American ally Saudi Arabia. Because new
SIMNET technology was involved, realistic data on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and
neighboring Kuwait were incorporated into the war game scenario,
including geography, architecture, and urban populations, this for the first
time in history. In playing the war game, CENTCOM battle staff drove
tanks, flew aircraft, and moved men across computer-generated Middle
Eastern cities and vast desert terrain with the astonishing accuracy and
precision of SIMNET simulation.
“We played Internal Look in late July 1990, setting up a mock
headquarters complete with computers and communications gear at Eglin
Air Force Base,” General Schwarzkopf wrote in his memoir. And then to
everyone’s surprise, on the last day of the simulated war game exercises, on
August 4, 1990, Iraq invaded its small, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait—for real.
It was a bizarre turn of events. Science and science fiction had crossed paths
once again.
Months later, after the Gulf War began and ended, General Schwarzkopf
commented on how strangely similar the real war and the simulated war
game had been.
“As the exercise [i.e., the Gulf War] got under way,” General
Schwarzkopf said, “the movements of Iraq’s real-world ground and air
forces eerily paralleled the imaginary scenario of the game.”
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Gulf War and Operations Other

Than War

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney sat in his office in the E-Ring of the
Pentagon eating Chinese food. It was shortly after 6:00 p.m. on January 16,
1991. On the round table in front of him there were paper cartons of food:
steamed vegetables, egg rolls, and rice. On a television set mounted on the
wall, CNN war correspondents were reporting from Baghdad, Iraq, where it
was the middle of the night. Secretary Cheney listened carefully as he ate
his dinner. He would later say that what struck him as odd, even surreal, as
he watched the news feed was just how ignorant the reporters and everyone
else in Baghdad were regarding the reality that was about to unfold.
Tomahawk land attack missiles, the engines of which were created by
DARPA, and F-117A stealth fighter aircraft, also a DARPA-born program,
were on their way to destroy parts of the city. The Tomahawks could not be
recalled. War was less than an hour away.
Below the office of the secretary of defense, just one floor down, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, sat reviewing
target lists. The missiles and bombs were set to strike and destroy Saddam
Hussein’s military command centers, communication towers, electrical
plants, radar sites, and more. The plan was to “give them the full load the
first night,” Cheney later observed. Any kind of gradual escalation carried
the stench of Vietnam. It was an ambitious strategy. Baghdad had a
sophisticated air defense network and was the second most heavily air-
defended city in the world, after Moscow.
 It was a little after 2:30 a.m. Baghdad time and the moonless sky over
the city was dark as Major Greg “Beast” Feest prepared to drop the first
bomb of the Persian Gulf War. Piloting his F-117A stealth fighter toward
the target, Major Feest was overwhelmed by a wave of apprehension.
“Two thoughts crossed my mind,” Feest later recalled. “First, would I be
able to identify the target? Second, did the Air Force want me to drop this
bomb?” But the doubts were fleeting and lasted only a few seconds. “As I
approached the target area, my adrenaline was up and instinct took over. My
bomb was armed.”
Major Feest’s target was the Information Operations Center at the
Nukayb Airbase, southwest of Baghdad, a key link between Iraq’s radar
network and its air defense headquarters. Destroying this target would allow
other, non-stealth aircraft to enter Iraq undetected. Feest looked down at the
display panel in front of him. “My laser began to fire as I tracked the
target,” he said. “All I had to do was play, what I called, a highly
sophisticated video game, and in 30 minutes I would be back in Saudi
Arabia.”
At precisely 2:51 a.m. local time, the weapons bay doors opened on
Feest’s F-117A and a two-thousand-pound laser-guided GBU-27 dropped
from the fighter aircraft, headed for the target. On the display in front of
him Feest watched what happened next. “I saw the bomb go through the
cross-hairs and penetrate the bunker. The explosion came out of the hole the
bomb had made and blew out the doors of the bunker.” Feest’s bomb hit and
destroyed one-half of the Iraqi air defense center at Nukayb.
“The video game was over,” Feest recalled thinking. Except this was not
a video game. This was war, and Major Feest had just dropped the first
bomb.
Precisely one minute later, a second laser-guided bomb from a second F-
117A took out the remaining half of the building at Nukayb. As Feest
headed back to the base in his stealth aircraft, he was stunned by what he
saw. The sky was filled with a barrage of antiaircraft artillery shooting
blindly at him. “I watched several SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] launch
into the sky and fly through my altitude both in front [of] and behind me,”
as Feest later described it. But not a single missile was guided to hit him.
The F-117A was invisible to radar. DARPA’s stealth technology program
had created a revolution in warfare.
 Ten additional F-117As were on their way to drop bombs on targets in
downtown Baghdad. In the first twenty-four hours of the war, a total of
forty-two stealth fighters, which accounted for only 2.5 percent of the U.S.
airpower used in the campaign, destroyed 31 percent of Iraqi targets. This
was technology in action, and it gave the United States not only a tactical
advantage but a psychological one as well. Stealth was like a silver bullet. It
had allowed U.S. fighter jets to sneak into Iraqi airspace, destroy the
country’s air defense system, and leave without a loss. Still, Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein declared, “The great showdown has begun! The mother of
all battles is under way.”
The U.S. air campaign against Baghdad devastated Saddam Hussein’s
Ba’ath Party military infrastructure. Between the laser-guided bombs, the
infrared night-bombing equipment, and the stealth fighter aircraft, the Iraqi
air force never had a chance to engage. In retaliation, the Iraqis launched
Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but almost immediately, a U.S.
Patriot missile shot down an Iraqi Scud missile, making the Patriot the first
antimissile ballistic missile fired in combat. The Pentagon promoted the
Patriot as having near-perfect performance. But in classified
communications a different story was unfolding. There were twenty-seven
Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia and Israel, and each battery was
shooting nearly ten missiles at each incoming Iraqi Scud. At first the
numbers did not make any sense, certainly not to U.S. Army vice chief of
staff General Gordon R. Sullivan. How could it take ten U.S. Patriot
antimissile missiles to shoot a single Iraqi Scud out of the sky? A classified
investigation revealed that because of poor-quality engineering, the Iraqi
Scuds were breaking apart in their terminal phase, shattering into multiple
pieces as they headed back down to earth. These multiple fragments were
confusing Patriot missiles into thinking that each piece was an additional
warhead. Shoddy workmanship had inadvertently created a poor man’s
version of the highly sophisticated MIRV—multiple independently
targetable reentry vehicle—the deceptive penetration aid originally dreamed
of by the Jason scientists thirty years before.
For the U.S. military, the Gulf War was an opportunity to demonstrate
what its system of systems was capable of. While the stealth fighter aircraft
received most of the attention, as far as high technology was concerned,
there were other DARPA systems flying over Iraq that were equally
revolutionary, just not as visible or as sleek. Drones played a prominent role
in the system of systems, largely unreported. Remotely piloted vehicles,
small and large, collected mapping information that helped steer
Tomahawks to their targets. Some 522 drone sorties were flown, totaling
1,641 hours, many of them based on DARPA technology going back to the
Vietnam War. Equipped with infrared sensors, the drones’ cameras easily
located ground troops and vehicles hidden behind sand berms or covered in
camouflage. The drones relayed back the information, which was then used
to take out the targets. In one instance, a group of Iraqi soldiers stepped out
from a hiding place and waved the white flag of surrender at the eye of a
television camera attached to a drone that was hovering nearby. This
became the first time in history that a group of enemy soldiers was recorded
surrendering to a machine.
Another DARPA technology workhorse was the four-engine Boeing
707-300 lumbering 42,000 feet above the battlefield. This was DARPA’s
JSTARS, or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, a command,
control, and communication center flying overhead in racetrack formation,
managing much of the action going on down below. JSTARS, run jointly by
the Air Force and the Army, involved aircraft equipped with a forty-foot-
long canoe-shaped radar dome mounted under the front of the fuselage.
Inside the dome, a radar antenna the height of a two-story house was able to
send precise target information to Army ground stations below. The radar
could detect, locate, and track vehicles moving deep behind enemy lines,
making JSTARS the first and only airborne platform in operation that could
maintain “real time surveillance over a corps-sized area of the battlefield.”
The system software on board JSTARS was so complex it required almost
600,000 lines of code, roughly three times more than any other C3 system
previously developed by the U.S. military. Sixteen years earlier, DARPA
had begun developing this system of systems concept with Assault Breaker.
Now it was in play in the war theater.
JSTARS was like an all-seeing commander in the sky. It could “see”
some 19,305 square miles of terrain below, and it could detect moving
targets 200 to 250 miles away. It could “see” in darkness and bad weather,
including clouds and sandstorms. Two of these prototype JSTARS were
flown in the Gulf War, providing what DARPA historical literature
describes as a “real-time tactical view of the battlefield never seen before in
the history of warfare.” When, on February 1, a ten-mile-long column of
Iraqi armored tanks headed into Saudi Arabia, JSTARS saw it and sent
coalition aircraft to destroy the column. As bombing continued from the air,
sorties passed the forty thousand mark—ten thousand more missions than
the U.S. Army Air Force flew against Japan in the last fourteen months of
World War II. The Pentagon began releasing mind-numbing statistics on
what its system of systems had destroyed: 1,300 of Iraq’s 4,280 tanks, 1,100
of Iraq’s 3,110 artillery pieces, and 800 of Iraq’s 2,870 armored tanks.
Next came the ground war, which began on Sunday, February 24, at 4:00
a.m. Saudi time. Saddam Hussein delivered a radio broadcast telling his
troops to kill “with all your might.” The decisive battle that ended the Gulf
War two days later would become known as the Battle of 73 Easting, the
last great tank battle of the twentieth century. But unlike so many of
history’s great tank battles, which were named after the cities in which they
were fought, the Battle of 73 Easting was named after a GPS coordinate, or
gridline.
On February 25, eight hundred M1A1 Abrams tanks lined up on Iraq’s
southern border with Saudi Arabia, and the following morning, the initial
attack against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard Tawakalna tank
division began with an assault by the Second Armored Cavalry Division.
Spearheading the attack were three troops: Ghost, Eagle, and Iron. The
Second Armored Cavalry Division had been stationed in Grafenwoehr,
Germany, and had trained on DARPA’s SIMNET simulators before
deploying to the Persian Gulf. The M1 Abrams tanks that Jack Thorpe and
his DARPA team had driven around at Fort Knox had since been outfitted
with a powerful new weapons system: night vision thermal imaging.
On the day of the battle that ended the Gulf War, there had been terrible
weather all morning. After a night of rain, the flat, trackless desert remained
encumbered by thick fog and clouds. Around 3:30 p.m. the sun briefly
emerged, but then a sandstorm kicked in. Between the bad weather and the
thick black smoke moving across the desert from the burning Kuwaiti oil
fields, visibility was reduced to nil. The gunners in the Iraqi Tawakalna tank
division were blind. Not so the Second Armored Cavalry. Equipped with
thermal imaging systems, the M1A1 tanks made it possible for U.S. soldiers
to see in the dark. Night vision was a science DARPA had been advancing
since 1961, when ARPA wrote the first handbook on the subject, the
Handbook of Military Infrared Technology. Infrared vision was developed
in Vietnam to help soldiers see through dense jungle canopies. Now it was
being used in the desert.
“We had thermal imagery,” says Major Douglas Macgregor, who saw
action in the Battle of 73 Easting as commander of Cougar Squadron, and
“the Iraqis did not. Yes, our firepower was extremely accurate, pinpoint
accurate, but we could see what we were firing at and they could not.”
When the Second Armored Cavalry’s Eagle Troop launched its attack
around 4:10 p.m., it caught the Iraqi Republican Guard unawares. In less
than half an hour, Eagle Troop destroyed twenty-eight T-72 Iraqi tanks,
sixteen armored personnel carriers, and thirty-nine trucks, with no losses of
its own. “The battle took twenty-three minutes to win,” retired four-star
general Paul Gorman told Congress. “The U.S. alone enjoyed the advantage
of satellite navigation and imagery, and of thermal-imaging fire control.”
The Iraqi army was overpowered. Iraqi soldiers started to give up and
abandon their posts en masse. During a vast exodus of Iraqi troops from
Kuwait City, JSTARS pinpointed thousands of fleeing vehicles for coalition
attack aircraft to bomb. The stark photographs of destroyed vehicles along
Iraq’s Highway 80 provided a striking visual image of how a system of
systems worked. Between JSTARS, stealth aircraft, GPS satellite
navigation, bomber aircraft, laser-guided bombs, and night vision, the
United States and its technological firepower wrought mega-death. Between
1,500 and 2,000 charred and abandoned vehicles were left littering the road,
including Iraqi tanks, Mercedes-Benz sedans, stolen Kuwaiti fire trucks,
and minivans. There were charred bodies and loose flip-flops, suitcases, and
fruit crates. Some of the victims had been flash-heated to death in crawling
and stretching motions, like the famous bodies from Pompeii. The
international press called the four-lane stretch of highway between Iraq and
Kuwait the “Highway of Death.”
Concerned about the negative narrative unfolding in the press, Colin
Powell met with General Schwarzkopf to discuss the matter.
“The television coverage,” said Powell, is “starting to make us look as if
we engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Schwarzkopf told him.
Powell asked General Schwarzkopf what he wanted to do.
“One more day should do it,” Schwarzkopf said, indicating he was
authorizing one more day of bombing.
Late the following day, on February 27, President George H. W. Bush
declared “suspension of offense combat” in the Persian Gulf and laid out
conditions for a permanent cease-fire with Iraq. The Gulf War had lasted
one month and twelve days.

One week after the cease-fire, back in Washington, D.C., DARPA director
Victor Reis met with General Gordon Sullivan, vice chief of staff of the
Army, for lunch. General Sullivan had formerly served as the deputy
commander of the Armor Center at Fort Knox and was a fan of SIMNET.
To this lunch General Sullivan carried with him a copy of the Stars and
Stripes newspaper. Pointing to a headline, “Ghost Troops Battle at the 73
Easting,” General Sullivan asked Reis if DARPA could put the Battle of 73
Easting in reverse simulation, as a training tool. Reis said he would see
what he could do.
Reis brought the idea to Neale Cosby at the IDA SIMNET Center. “I
told Vic it was a great idea,” Colonel Cosby recalled in 2014. “I said, we
can do it and we should do it.” Reverse simulation of the Battle of 73
Easting, he thought, would be “the ultimate after-action report.” There was
much to learn from technology.
In a matter of days, a team from DARPA, led by Colonel Gary
Bloedorn, flew to Iraq to interview soldiers who had fought in the battle.
Bloedorn and the DARPA team heard varying accounts, read notes and
radio transcripts, and listened to an audiotape made by a soldier in one of
the command vehicles. The team traveled to the GPS gridline at 73 Easting,
where they walked around the battlefield, recorded forensic evidence, and
measured distances between U.S. firing positions and destroyed Iraqi
vehicles. Then they returned to IDA to input data and reconstruct the battle
down to fractions of seconds. The process took six months.
With a draft version complete, the reconstruction team traveled to
Germany, where most of the battle’s participants were stationed. The
DARPA team showed the soldiers the SIMNET version of the battle, took
notes, and made final adjustments for accuracy. Back at IDA the team
worked for another six months, then met with the key leaders of the battle
one last time for a final review. They proved that “capturing live combat”
after the fact could be done, says Cosby. Now it was time to take the show
to Congress.
On May 21, 1992, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee
were shown the DARPA simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Retired
general Paul Gorman led the opening remarks. But before playing the
SIMNET simulation, Gorman pointed to the simulator and introduced the
machine.
“This somewhat daunting graphic apparatus before you is an instrument
of war,” Gorman told the committee members, “a mechanism designed to
enable humans to understand the complexity, the kinetics, the chaos of
battle.” Gorman reminded his audience what General Patton once said,
“that it is men, not machines, who fight and win wars.” But the world had
changed, Gorman said, and now machines were there to help. In the past,
war stories were the only record of battle. Computer simulation had now
changed that.
“I am here to urge [you] that all must recognize that simulation is
fundamental to readiness for war,” Gorman said. With that, he played the
twenty-three-minute simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Congress,
Cosby recalled, was “wowed.” The military services would begin moving
toward computer simulation as a primary training tool for war.
DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept had delivered results in the Gulf War,
and at the Pentagon, renewed excitement was in the air. Ever since the
Vietnam War, the Defense Department had struggled with a public
perception of the military rooted in impotency and distrust. The Gulf War
had changed that. The Pentagon was potent once again. The Gulf War was
over fast, the death toll remarkably low: 390 Americans died, with 458
wounded in action. There were 510 casualties from all allied forces.
President George H. W. Bush even triumphantly declared, “By God, we’ve
licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”
But the optimism would not last long.

It was the early afternoon of October 3, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia, a

lawless, famine-stricken city run by armed militias and warlords. What had
begun as a peacekeeping mission ten months prior had devolved into a
series of quick-action Special Forces operations. On this particular day, a
joint special operations task force named Task Force Ranger, made up of
elite U.S. military personnel including Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and
Delta Force, embarked on a mission to capture two high-level Somali
lieutenants working for the warlord and president-elect General Mohamed
Farrah Aidid. A group of Aidid’s lieutenants were holed up in a two-story
building downtown, not far from the Olympic Hotel.
It was fifteen minutes into the mission and everything was going
according to plan. Ground forces had arrived at the target location and were
loading twenty-four captured Somali militants into convoy trucks when a
series of deadly events began to unfold. A Black Hawk helicopter, call sign
Super 61, was heading toward the target building with a plan in place to
transport U.S. soldiers back to base, when suddenly a group of Somali
militants scrambled onto a nearby rooftop, took aim at the helicopter, and
fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
Norm Hooten, one of the Special Operations team leaders, watched in
horror. The Black Hawk “took a direct hit toward the tail boom and it
started a slow rotation” down, Hooten recalled. “It was a catastrophic
impact.” Super 61 began spinning out of control. It crashed in the street
below, killing both pilots on impact. In a videotape recording of the crash
released by the Defense Department in 2013, a voice can be heard shouting
over the military communications system, “We got a Black Hawk going
down! We got a Black Hawk going down!”
A fifteen-man combat search and rescue team and an MH-6 Little Bird
helicopter raced to the crash site to assist. But hundreds of angry Somalis
were gathering in the surrounding streets, creating barricades made of
burning tires and garbage, inhibiting access. A firefight ensued, trapping the
Americans and pitting them against a violent mob. The situation grew
dramatically worse when a second Black Hawk, call sign Super 64, was
shot down. Another mob of Somalis charged to the second crash site, where
they killed everyone except one of the pilots, Michael Durrant. Ranger and
Delta Force teams took to the streets in an attempt to provide search and
rescue, and cover to their trapped fellow soldiers. A chaotic, deadly battle
ensued, lasting all through the night and into the morning. By the time it
was over, eighteen Americans, one Pakistani, and one Malaysian soldier
were dead and eighty were injured. An unknown number of Somalis,
estimated to be roughly three thousand, had been killed.
 This was asymmetric warfare—a battle between two groups with
radically different levels of military power. The superior military force, the
United States, killed a far greater number of the opposition while its own
losses were played out on television screens around the world. Videotaped
images of mobs of Somalis dragging the semi-naked, bloodied bodies of the
dead American pilots and soldiers through the streets were shocking.
It was a watershed moment and a turning point in modern U.S. military
affairs. The might and morale of the United States military, made evident in
the Gulf War, had been weakened. Every war planner, going back at least
2,500 years, knows better than to fight a battle in a crowded place. “The
worst policy,” wrote Sun Tzu, “is to attack cities.” The battle of Mogadishu
was not part of any plan. There was no rehearsal for what happened. U.S.
forces were drawn into a hellish situation, and the result was more lives lost
than in any other combat situation since Vietnam.
“The Americans were not supermen,” commented Somali clan leader
Colonel Aden. “In these dusty streets, where combat was reduced to rifle
against rifle, they could die as easily as any Somali.” Technologically
advanced weaponry had been disabled by sticks, stones, AK-47s, and a few
rocket-propelled grenades.
After the battle of Mogadishu, DARPA convened a senior working
group (SWG) to analyze what had happened in Somalia and make
recommendations for how the Pentagon could best prepare for future
conflicts of a similar nature—situations called Military Operations Other
Than War, or OOTW. The group, led by General Carl W. Stiner, former
commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, focused on
solutions that would require new technologies to be developed. The group
involved itself in ten study sessions over two months and spent six months
preparing a written report.
The opening lines read like a salvo. “The world is no longer bipolar,” the
Senior Working Group wrote. “The post–Cold War strategic environment is
ill-defined, dynamic and unstable.” During the Cold War, America knew
who the enemy was. Not so anymore. Terrorist organizations, paramilitary
groups, and militia were destined to emerge from multiple chaotic urban
environments around the globe. Third World instability, ideological and
religious extremism, and intentional terrorism and narco-terrorism meant
that the whole world was the new battlefield. In future military operations
other than war, irregular enemy forces would include a “diverse range of
adversaries equipped with an ever increasing array of sophisticated
weapons,” including some that were atomic, chemical, and biological in
design. The United States was not properly prepared to deal with these
emerging new threats, the SWG warned. DARPA needed to refocus its
attention on urban warfare. It needed to research and develop new weapons
systems to deal with this threat, now growing across the Third World.
In one part of the report, the group listed dangerous insufficiencies that
DARPA had to shore up at once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological
weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate underground bunker
detection; limited secure, real-time command and control to lower-echelon
units [i.e., getting the information to soldiers on the ground]; limited ISR
[intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and dissemination;
inadequate mine, booby trap and explosive detection capabilities;
inadequate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating agents]; inadequate
modeling/simulation for training, rehearsal and operations; no voice
recognition or language translation; inadequate ability to deal with sniper
attacks.” The SWG proposed that DARPA accelerate work in all these areas
and also increase efforts in robotics and drones, human tagging and
tracking, and nonlethal weapons systems for crowd control.
DARPA had its work cut out. The agency had been leading military
research and development for decades against a different enemy, one with
an army of tanks and heavy weaponry. The new focus was on urban
warfare. What happened in Mogadishu was a cautionary tale. “Military
operations that were of little consideration a decade ago are now of major
concern,” the study group warned.
The following year, DARPA asked RAND to study OOTW and write an
unclassified report. The RAND report was called “Combat in Hell: A
Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare.” It began with the prescient
words: “Historical advice is consistent. Sun Tzu counseled that ‘the worst
policy is to attack cities.’” Accordingly, avoid urban warfare.
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Biological Weapons

On December 11, 1991, a mysterious forty-one-year-old Soviet scientist

named Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov arrived in Washington, D.C., one of a
thirteen-man Soviet delegation. The group was part of a trilateral mission
that also involved scientists from the United States and Great Britain. The
purpose of this visit was allegedly to allow each delegation to inspect the
other countries’ military facilities that had, decades earlier, been involved in
biological weapons programs. But really there was a lot more than just that
going on. Back in 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty had
made germ weapons illegal, and all three countries had pledged to renounce
biological warfare. But recently American intelligence officers had
discovered that the Soviets had not given up bioweapons work and instead
had created a far more nefarious and frightening program than any military
scientist in the Western world had imagined. This information was first
learned two years earlier, in October 1989, and the Americans and the
British had been puzzling out what to do about it ever since. This trilateral
mission was a piece of that puzzle.
In December 1991 the Soviets did not know that American and British
intelligence officers were aware of their covert bioweapons program, which
was called Biopreparat. Nor did the Soviets realize that American
intelligence officers knew that the mysterious Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov was
deputy director of Biopreparat, meaning he was second in command of a
program that involved roughly forty thousand employees, working in forty
facilities, twelve of which were used solely for offensive biological
weapons work.
 That the Soviet delegation was in the United States at all was a highly
sensitive issue. Secretary of Defense Cheney did not want the details made
public, and to ensure secrecy, his office issued a press blackout around the
mission. The only people outside the Defense Department cleared on the
Soviet scientists’ whereabouts were individuals with the U.S. Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), who
served as escorts.
The group traveled to Dugway Proving Grounds, in Utah, where deadly
pathogens had once been tested in the open air, but whose Cold War–era
buildings had since been abandoned. They traveled to Pine Bluffs Arsenal,
in Arkansas, where the United States had once manufactured biological
weapons on an industrial scale, but where there was now nothing left but
weedy fields and rusting railroad tracks. They went to Fort Detrick, in
Frederick, Maryland, the former locus of U.S. bioweapons research and
development, where USAMRIID now had its headquarters.
Years later Dr. Alibekov would write a memoir, and in it he described
the 1991 trip as one on which he was less interested in what he saw at the
former weapons facilities than in the lifestyle of abundance that so many
Americans seemed to enjoy. He regarded with wonderment “the well-paved
highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary
Americans lived.” Democracy, he concluded, offered more to its citizens
than communism ever did.
The trip to America in 1991 was Dr. Alibekov’s first. He spoke not a
word of English and had met just thirteen Westerners in his lifetime, all
members of this same trilateral mission who had visited the Soviet Union
earlier that same year. During that visit, Dr. Alibekov had acted as one of
the tour guides. The Soviets were producing germ weapons, and it was
Alibekov’s job to make sure that the Western scientists were steered clear of
any sights that might belie the Soviets’ illegal weapons work.
Born in Kazakhstan in 1950, Alibekov had trained as an infectious
disease physician, specializing in microbiology and epidemiology. At the
age of twenty-four, he joined the military faculty at the Tomsk Medical
Institute in Siberia and began working inside what he later described as “a
succession of secret laboratories and installations in some of the most
remote corners of the Soviet Union.” With each job came financial
privilege, which was unusual for a non-Russian. Kazakhs were generally
considered second-class citizens during the Cold War. But Alibekov was a
talented microbiologist and a hard worker, which served him well and paid
off. By the 1990s, “with the combined salary of a senior bureaucrat and
high-ranking military officer,” he wrote, “I earned as much as a Soviet
government minister.”
As the tour of the American facilities was taking place, Russia was in a
state of pandemonium. The Berlin Wall had come down two years earlier,
but the red flag of the Soviet Union still flew over the Kremlin. The
geopolitical landscape between the superpowers was in flux. “It wasn’t so
clear the [Soviet leaders] weren’t going to re-form,” remembers Dr. Craig
Fields, DARPA’s director at the time. “There was a lot of anxiety about the
fact that they might re-form.” The two nations had been moving toward
normalized relations, but for the Pentagon this was a time of great
instability. While the world rejoiced over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
Defense Department had been coping with a myriad of national security
unknowns. Would a unified Germany join NATO? How to handle troop
reductions throughout Europe? What about all the nuclear weapons the
Soviets possessed? The Soviet Union had spent the past five decades
building up its weapons of mass destruction, in a shoulder-to-shoulder arms
race with the United States. Who, now, would control the Soviet arsenals of
WMD? At any given moment the Russians had more than eleven thousand
nuclear warheads aimed at carefully selected targets inside the United
States, as well as an additional fifteen thousand nuclear warheads stored in
facilities across the sprawling Russian countryside, including mobile
systems fitted onto railway cars.
One person uniquely familiar with these kinds of questions, numbers,
and threats was Lisa Bronson, the Pentagon official leading the delegation
of Soviet scientists on their tour. Still in her thirties, Bronson was a lawyer
and a disarmaments expert. As deputy director for multilateral negotiations
with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Bronson had helped conceive
and design the visit by the Soviet team. She had also accompanied the U.S.
and British scientists on their tour around Soviet facilities earlier in the year.
She was one of the thirteen Westerners Dr. Alibekov had met before this
trip. Now, with the facilities visited and the mission coming to a close, Lisa
Bronson took the Russian scientists on a walking tour of the nation’s
capital.
 It was during this part of the trip that a fortuitous exchange of words
between Dr. Alibekov and Lisa Bronson occurred. Alibekov recalled the
conversation in his memoir. “At various stops along the way, she had
challenged us about the Soviet biological weapons program,” he wrote.
“Naturally, we denied we had one. But I admired her persistence.”
Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, just down the road from the White
House, one of Alibekov’s colleagues asked Bronson how much money an
American scientist could earn in a year.
“That depends on your experience,” she answered. “A government
scientist can make between fifty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but
a scientist in the private sector could earn up to two-hundred thousand
dollars a year,” about $350,000 in 2015.
Alibekov was astonished. Throughout the trip he remained impressed by
how much better everything was in America, from public infrastructure to
personal living conditions. He thought of his own life in Moscow. How
hard he worked and how little he had to show for it in comparison. And
most of all how grim the future looked now that the wall was down. “At the
time,” he wrote, “a top-level Russian scientist could make about one
hundred dollars a month.” Emboldened, Alibekov decided to speak up.
Through an interpreter he asked Bronson a question of his own.
“With my experience could I find a job here?” he asked.
Bronson gently told Dr. Alibekov that he would have to learn English
first.
Through the translator, Alibekov thanked his Pentagon host. Then he
made a joke. “Okay,” he said, “if I ever come here, I’ll ask for your help.”
Lisa Bronson just smiled.
“Everyone started to laugh,” Alibekov recalled, “including me.”

Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov returned to Moscow with the Soviet delegation. Just
a few days later, on December 25, 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev
resigned. On New Year’s Eve, the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its
iconic hammer and sickle beneath a gold star, was taken down from the
flagpole at the Kremlin. The tricolored flag of the newly formed Russian
Federation was raised in its place. The Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Two weeks later, Dr. Alibekov handed the director of Biopreparat,
General Yury Kalinin, his resignation papers in Moscow. Then, using an
intermediary, Alibekov reached out to Lisa Bronson to let her know that he
wanted to defect to the United States. This was a military intelligence coup
for the Pentagon. For two years now, all the intelligence on Biopreparat—
including the revelation that it existed in the first place—had come from a
single source, a former senior-level Soviet scientist named Vladimir
Pasechnik, now in British custody. The Pentagon wanted its own high-level
defector. Soon they would have Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov.
As for Vladimir Pasechnik, his defection had come out of the blue. In
October 1989 Pasechnik had been sent to France on an official business trip,
to purchase laboratory equipment. Instead, he called the British embassy
from a phone booth and said he was a Soviet germ warfare scientist who
wanted to defect to England. British Secret Intelligence Service agents
picked him up in a car, flew him to England, and took him to a safe house in
the countryside.
The handler assigned to Pasechnik was a senior biological warfare
specialist on Britain’s defense intelligence staff named Christopher Davis.
Pasechnik stunned Davis with a legion of extraordinary facts. The fifty-one-
year-old Pasechnik had worked under Dr. Alibekov in a Biopreparat facility
in Leningrad called the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations. As a
senior scientist at Ultra-Pure, Pasechnik had made such significant
contributions that he was given the honorary military title of general. At
Biopreparat, scientists weaponized classic pathogens like anthrax,
tularemia, and botulinum toxin, standard operating procedure in a
bioweapons program. But at Ultra-Pure, scientists had been working to
genetically modify pathogens so they were resistant to vaccines and
antibiotics. Pasechnik told Davis that at Ultra-Pure, he had been assigned to
work on a strategic antibiotic-resistant strain of the mother of all pathogens,
bubonic plague.
The Soviets called their laboratory-engineered version of history’s most
prolific killer Super Plague. In the thirteenth century, the bubonic plague
killed off roughly every third man, woman, and child in Europe; but it lost
its potency in the twentieth century, when scientists discovered that the
antibiotic streptomycin was effective against the infectious disease. When
Christopher Davis learned that the Soviets were developing a genetically
modified, antibiotic-resistant strain of plague, he interpreted it to mean one
thing. “You choose plague because you’re going to take out the other
person’s country,” Davis said. “Kill all the people, then move in and take
over the land. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”
For months, Christopher Davis and an MI6 colleague spent long hours
debriefing Pasechnik. The information was then shared with American
intelligence counterparts. In the first month alone, Vladimir Pasechnik
provided the British government with more information about the Soviet
biological weapons program than all the British and American intelligence
agencies combined had been able to piece together without him over a
period of more than twenty-five years. The United States’ vast network of
advanced sensor technology had proved useless in detecting biological
weapons. Bioweapons can be engineered inside laboratories hidden in
buildings or underground. Unlike work on missiles, which require launch
tests from proving grounds that are easily observable from overhead
satellites or aircraft, biological weapons work can continue for decades
undetected. And at Biopreparat it did.
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent by U.S. military and
intelligence agencies on high-tech reconnaissance and surveillance systems,
on the ground, in the air, and in space, collecting SIGINT, MASINT,
OSINT, GEOINT, and other forms of technology-based intelligence, a
single human being had delivered so much that was unknown simply by
opening his mouth. Pasechnik provided HUMINT, human intelligence.
“The fact that Vladimir [Pasechnik] defected was one of the key acts of
the entire ending of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,” says
Davis. “It was the greatest breakthrough we ever had.” Once Davis briefed
his U.S. counterparts on Pasechnik’s information, things moved quickly.
The United States sent the Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist Dr. Joshua
Lederberg to England on a secret mission to interview Pasechnik.
Lederberg came home unnerved. That the Soviets were working on Super
Plague was shocking. But Lederberg also learned that scientists at
Biopreparat had been working to weaponize smallpox, which was
duplicitous. In the late 1970s the international health community, including
doctors from the Soviet Union, had worked together on a worldwide effort
to eradicate the killer virus. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared
smallpox dead. That the Soviets would weaponize smallpox by the ton was
particularly nefarious.
 Lederberg confirmed for the Pentagon that Vladimir Pasechnik was
credible, level-headed, and blessed with an impeccable memory. “He never,
ever stretched things,” says Christopher Davis. Using classified CIA
satellite data, including photographs going back decades, the Pentagon
located, then confirmed, the multiple biological weapons facilities revealed
in Pasechnik’s debriefings. Many of the key photographs were from ARPA
satellites that had been sent aloft in the earliest days of the technology. With
confirmation in place, it was now time to tell President George H. W. Bush
about the Soviets’ prodigious, illegal biological weapons program.
The wall had been down for only a few months, and from the
perspective of the Pentagon, it was a precarious time as far as international
security was concerned. There was a growing worry that President Mikhail
Gorbachev was losing control of the Russian military. With this in mind, in
the winter of 1990, President Bush decided it was best to keep the Soviets’
biological weapons program a secret. To reveal it, Bush decided, would
make Gorbachev appear weak. Gorbachev was being hailed internationally
as a reformer. He needed credibility to keep moving his country out of a
Cold War mentality and into the twentieth century. The world could not
allow Russia to fall into chaos. The revelation of the Soviet bioweapons
program could backfire. It needed to stay hidden, at least for now.
The single greatest unknown at this juncture was how much, if anything,
did President Gorbachev actually know? Vladimir Pasechnik could not say
with authority. The Pentagon needed a second source. Back in the fall of
1989 and the winter of 1990, no such second source existed. Pasechnik had
been reticent at first but gradually became more comfortable with his
British handlers. Then he started to name names, including that of Dr.
Kanatjan Alibekov, deputy director of Biopreparat.
The Pentagon got to work setting in motion the trilateral mission—
which is how Alibekov and twelve colleagues wound up at Fort Detrick in
December 1991. After the U.S. trip, Alibekov had been back in Russia for
just three weeks when he made up his mind to defect to the United States.
Arrangements were made. In the dead of night, Alibekov left Russia with
his wife and children, never to return.
By the time Gorbachev was set to leave office, U.S. intelligence had
confirmed that he had in fact been aware of the Soviet bioweapons program.
Gorbachev had received classified memos regarding operations, including
how to deceive U.S. inspectors during trilateral mission facilities tours. The
CIA also confirmed that Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, had been
made aware of the program—and that he was allowing it to move forward.
On January 20, 1992, British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite and Foreign
Secretary Douglas Hurd met with President Yeltsin in Moscow. Since
Pasechnik’s defection, Ambassador Braithwaite had been trying, to no
avail, to get the Russians to admit that they had a biological weapons
program, which would be the first step toward its safe dissolution. This
time, when the subject was brought up, Yeltsin stunned the British
diplomats by acknowledging that he knew about Biopreparat.
“I know all about the Soviet biological weapons program,” Yeltsin
confessed. “It’s still going ahead.” He also said that the Russian scientists
who ran the program were determined to continue their work. “They are
fanatics, and they will not stop voluntarily,” Yeltsin said. He vowed to put
an end to it. “I’m going to close down the institutes,” he promised, to “retire
the director of the [Biopreparat] program.”
“We were stunned,” Braithwaite recalled in his memoir, “and we could
do no more than thank him.”
Boris Yeltsin had admitted what every other Soviet leader, including
Gorbachev, had been lying about for twenty-three years. With the
information now public, the U.S. Congress got involved. So did the
American press. Countering biological weapons was poised to become a
massive new industry, expanding and proliferating at a phenomenal rate.
DARPA would lead the way.

In America, Dr. Alibekov changed his name to sound more American. He

was Dr. Ken Alibek now. He moved his family into a home in the suburbs
outside Washington, D.C. This was the Soviet scientist who, over decades,
had weaponized the bacterial infection glanders, orchestrated test trials of
Marburg hemorrhagic fever, overseen the creation of the Soviet Union’s
first tularemia bomb, and created a “battle strain” of anthrax, Strain 836,
hailed as “the most virulent and vicious strain of anthrax known to man.”
He was working for the U.S. government now.
Each day Alibek drove along the well-paved highways, past the big
homes and the well-stocked stores, to an office building in Virginia just
twenty minutes outside the nation’s capital, where he now worked. There,
inside a secure room on the second floor, he answered questions asked of
him by individuals from a wide variety of U.S. intelligence agencies,
military agencies, and civilian organizations about Russia’s biological
weapons programs.
Alibek confirmed what Vladimir Pasechnik had told British intelligence
about Soviet advances in biotechnology and the development of Super
Plague. But as deputy director of Biopreparat, Alibek had had access to
many more classified programs than Pasechnik did, including delivery
systems for the germ bombs. This work, Alibek said, took place inside a top
secret unit of Biopreparat called the Biological Group, located inside the
Soviet General Staff Operations Directorate. Here, weapons designers
crafted specially designed missiles that would be used in a biological
warfare attack against the United States. Weaponized pathogens are, for the
most part, fragile microbes. They generally cannot withstand extreme
temperature fluctuations, as happens in flight. The Soviets had solved this
problem, Alibek said, by retrofitting long-range ICBM missiles with mini–
space capsules, like the ones astronauts rode in. The missile was a MIRV, a
multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, meaning each ICBM was
capable of carrying ten warheads over a range of six thousand miles. Its
NATO reporting name was SS-18 Satan.
Alibek also provided chilling details about a Soviet bioweapons
programs called Chimera, whereby genetic material from two or more
different organisms was combined to produce more virulent germs. Alibek
told his handlers they should be very worried about this program, and said
he had direct knowledge of a trial developed in the late 1980s in which a
chimera, or hybrid, strain was created by inserting Venezuelan equine
encephalomyelitis genes into smallpox. One of the ultimate goals of
Chimera, Alibek said, was to create a monster hybrid of smallpox and
Ebola. Alibek warned his handlers that the Soviets had sold secrets about
genetically modified bioweapons to Libya, Iran, Iraq, India, Cuba, and
former Soviet bloc countries in eastern Europe. U.S. officials took notes and
listened. Alibek’s greatest frustration, he would later say, was that these
officials did not seem to comprehend the potentially catastrophic
consequences of the Soviet program.
“They did not care about our genetic work,” Alibek lamented. “When it
came to strategic questions,” his interrogators told him that they were
uninterested in what he had to say. “We are only interested in what you
know,” they said, “not what you think could happen.” The Pentagon was
happy to learn what he knew about the inner workings of Biopreparat.
Alibek’s information was useful, he was told, but his opinions were
unwelcome. Soon, this too would change.
There had been a blind spot at the Pentagon and at DARPA since the
earliest days of the Cold War, an aloof indifference to the opinions of
biologists. Officials at the White House and the Defense Department were
much more interested in what the hard scientists, like the Jason scientists,
had to say. Back in 1968 Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg pointed out this
disadvantage in a science column he wrote regularly for the Washington
Post, accusing the federal government of “blindness to the pace of
biological advance and its accessibility to the most perilous genocidal
experimentation.” Lederberg was referring to biological weapons. Starting
in 1945, with the advent of the atomic bomb, the Pentagon had largely
relied on the advice and counsel of physicists and mathematicians as far as
advanced weaponry was concerned, but rarely biologists.
If World War I had been the chemists’ war and World War II the
physicists’ war, now, given the threats facing the Pentagon, would World
War III be the biologists’ war?
Briefed on Alibek’s revelations about the Soviet bioweapons program,
DARPA was quick to note this blind spot and to take action. “DoD had very
little capability in biology” in the early 1990s, recalls Larry Lynn, DARPA’s
director from 1995 to 1998. Now DARPA recognized just how worrisome it
was that biology, and the life sciences in general, could lead the next
revolution in military affairs, and recognized, too, that the Department of
Defense was behind the curve. The Pentagon needed its own core group of
advisors, American scientists at the leading edge of biology. The Jason
scientists were contacted.
Since leaving the Institute of Defense Analyses in 1973, the Jason
scientists had had several homes. For the first eight years they received their
defense contracts through the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park,
California. SRI was a longtime ARPA contractor and an information
technology pioneer, and had been one of the first four nodes on the
ARPANET. Under the SRI in the 1970s, the Jasons brought several
computer scientists and electrical engineers into their ranks. And because
they no longer served ARPA alone, their client list had expanded. Under the
SRI banner, the Jasons conducted studies and wrote reports for the CIA, the
Navy, NASA, the Department of Energy, the Defense Nuclear Agency, the
National Science Foundation, and others.
In 1981 the Jason scientists moved their headquarters to the east coast
once again, this time under the MITRE Corporation banner. There, Gordon
MacDonald, himself a Jason scientist, served as MITRE’s chief scientist.
Business continued to grow, with the Jasons still conducting most of their
work as summer studies.
In 1986, defense contractor General Dynamics gave the Jason scientists
their own room, back in California again, on its sprawling 120-acre La Jolla
campus, which they still used as of 2014. “It’s a SCIF,” Murph Goldberger
explained in a 2014 interview, referring to a “sensitive compartmented
information facility,” meaning it was built to Defense Department security
specifications and ringed by a barbed-wire perimeter. The room at General
Dynamics was not exactly a college dormitory with a view of the ocean, but
as Goldberger noted, “times have changed.”
After the Berlin Wall came down and the bioweapons threat ratcheted
up, Jason “was told it was wise to bring biologists into the ranks,” said
Goldberger. DARPA director Larry Lynn reached out personally to Joshua
Lederberg. After decades of forewarning, Lederberg was finally brought on
board as a defense scientist. He would now serve as chairman of DARPA’s
science advisors for biology. In 1994, DARPA director Larry Lynn and a
team traveled to Moscow, laying plans for how to use technology to keep
track of what was going on there. The details of this trip remain classified.
Biological weapons were the new national security concern, and in the
fall of 1995, in an effort to have sanctions against his country relieved, Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein disclosed to the United Nations that Iraq had
been producing biological weapons by the ton, including botulinum toxin,
camelpox, and hemorrhagic conjunctivitis. Iraq admitted it had hundreds of
scientists working in at least five separate facilities, a number of which were
located underground, and which had survived destruction in the Gulf War.
In 1996, the CIA provided President Clinton with reports on the biological
weapons programs believed to be in existence inside North Korea, Iran,
Iraq, Libya, and Syria—all still classified in 2015. In 1997, the Jasons were
asked to conduct a summer study on biological weapons threats. The group
had a new scientist in their ranks, the microbiologist Stephen M. Block,
who, several years later, published some of the unclassified findings of this
Jason summer study.
The most significant threat, noted Block, was the accelerated pace at
which discoveries in molecular biology were being made. “Recent advances
in life sciences have changed the nature and scope” of microbiology, he
wrote, revealing “inevitably, a dark side.” The Jason scientists warned just
how dangerous the threat of genetically engineered pathogens had become.
Modern bioscience has made “possible the creation of entirely new WMD,
endowed with unprecedented power to destroy,” Block wrote. “Was [this
alarmist] hype, or largely warranted?” he asked. Block said the Jason
scientists had concluded “the latter.” In Block’s opinion, “it seems likely
that such weapons will eventually come to exist, simply because of the
lamentable ease with which they may be constructed.” They were cheap,
easy to make, and, if you knew what you were looking for and could find
out how to create them, freely available in the public domain.
The ability to genetically engineer pathogens had raised the threat level.
For use as a weapon, the possibilities were limitless. “If you were to mix
Ebola with the communicability of measles to create a pathogen that would
continue to alter itself in such a way to evade treatment,” wrote Block, the
rate of Ebola’s transmission and infectivity would skyrocket. These stealth
viruses, which Alibek called chimeras, were even more menacing from a
psychological perspective, Block said.
“The basic idea behind a stealth virus is to produce a tightly regulated,
cryptic viral infection, using a vector that can enter and spread in human
cells, remaining resident for lengthy periods without detectable harm,”
Block wrote, calling this a “silent viral load.” One example that exists
naturally is herpes simplex, or the common cold sore. The virus lies
dormant until it is one day triggered by what is believed to be an
environmental assault on the body, like sunburn or stress. Similarly, an
unwitting population could be “slowly pre-infected with a stealth virus over
an extended period, possibly years, and then synchronously triggered,”
Block wrote. This wicked concept had enormous potential in the realm of
psychological warfare. As far as using a stealth virus as a weapon, the
Jasons were dually concerned. Stealth viruses carried with them “a utility
beyond that of traditional bioweapons,” they concluded. “For example they
could be disseminated and used to blackmail a population based on their
activation.”
If the notion of a stealth virus, or silent load, sounded improbable, Block
cited a little-known controversy involving the anti-polio vaccination
campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to Block, during
this effort millions of Americans risked contracting the “cryptic human
infection” of monkey virus, without ever being told. “These vaccines,”
writes Block, “were prepared using live African green monkey kidney cells,
and batches of polio vaccine became contaminated by low levels of a
monkey virus, Simian virus 40 (SV40), which eluded the quality control
procedures of the day. As a result, large numbers of people—probably
millions, in fact—were inadvertently exposed to SV40.” Block says that
two possible outcomes of this medical disaster remain debated. One side
says the 98 million people vaccinated dodged a bullet. The other side
believes there is evidence that the vaccine did harm. “A great deal of
speculation occurs about whether [simian virus] may be responsible for
some disease” that manifests much later in the vaccinated person’s life, says
Block, including cancer. The subject remains highly contentious, with
vaccine makers and the National Institutes for Health engaged in
acrimonious debate with scientists who have found the SV40 monkey virus
in cancerous human tumors.
The 1997 Jason report on biological weapons remains classified. Shortly
after it was completed, President Clinton issued two Presidential Decision
Directives, PDD 62 and PDD 63, both of which addressed the biological
weapons threat and both of which also remained classified as of 2015.
Biological warfare defense was now a “very high DARPA priority.” In
1996, DARPA opened a new office called the Unconventional
Countermeasures Program. Congress quickly funded this “high-priority
initiative” with $30 million for its first fiscal year. “DARPA is seeking
partnerships with the research community and the biotechnology and
pharmaceutical industries to develop innovative new treatment, prevention
and diagnostic strategies for biological warfare threats,” read one of the
earliest program overview memos.
Initially, DARPA’s primary focus was on protecting U.S. soldiers. An
internal memo noted, “Troops, ports, airfields, supply depots, etc. are
vulnerable to biological attacks,” and yet, paradoxically, “most likely first
use [of bioweapons] will be against population centers of ours or our
allies.” DARPA had a mission to develop “broad strategies to counter the
threat.” This effort explored four areas: sensing, protection, diagnosis, and
countermeasures. But DARPA as an agency was dedicated to advanced
research and development, and the first three areas, sensing, protection, and
diagnosis, were “only marginally protective.” DARPA wanted its scientists
and researchers to strive for revolutionary goals, to focus on innovative
countermeasures that did not yet exist. Larry Lynn told program managers
that he wanted to create the “Star Wars of biology,” a reference to President
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Lynn challenged DARPA scientists to
push existing biotech boundaries and to come up with a vaccine, gene, or
chemical that could allow the human body to “incapacitate or debilitate” a
biological agent on its own, before the pathogen made its host sick. It was a
brilliant, bold idea. But could it work? Was there time?

The 1994 international nonfiction best-seller The Hot Zone, by Richard

Preston, is about the origins of, and incidents involving, the Ebola virus.
Three years later, in 1997, Preston wrote a fictional account of a
bioterrorism attack in New York City, titled The Cobra Event. Preston’s
genetically engineered biological weapon, a chimera virus called Cobra, is
imaginary, but his information was based on real reporting. He had
interviewed Christopher Davis, the Royal Navy surgeon who had been
Vladimir Pasechnik’s original handler, as well as Ken Alibek and many top
scientists at USAMRIID.
President Clinton read The Cobra Event shortly after it was published
and was alarmed. He asked Secretary of Defense William Cohen to read the
book and have an intelligence analysis of the viability of a real-life Cobra
event written up. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala
also read The Cobra Event and included a plot summary in a journal article
she authored for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The
following year, in 1998, Richard Preston testified before Congress in Senate
hearings on the question “Threats to America: Are We Prepared?”
“Biopreparat was like an egg,” Preston said of the Soviet program. “The
outside part was devoted to peaceful medical research. The hidden inner
part, the yolk, was devoted to the creation and production of sophisticated
bioweapons powders—smallpox, black plague, anthrax, tularemia, the
Marburg virus, and certain brain viruses.” In this public forum, Preston
outlined Russia’s capacity to launch a biological weapons attack on the
United States. Using smallpox as an example, Preston said that as recently
as a few years prior, Soviet-era ICBMs fitted with specially loaded MIRV
warheads stood ready and able to launch. Those warheads, Preston said,
carried “twenty tons of freeze-dried small-pox powder” and “probably… an
equal number of Black Death [plague] warheads.” Before the Berlin Wall
came down, Preston summarized, if the Soviets had decided to launch a
biological weapons attack against the United States, his research indicated
that they “could have easily hit the one-hundred largest cities in the United
States with devastating combined outbreaks of strategic smallpox and Black
Death, an attack that could easily kill as many people as a major nuclear
war.” The Soviet Union no longer existed, but the warheads and their
contents did. The congressional hearings supported the idea that biological
warfare was an apocalyptic nightmare waiting to happen. Something radical
had to be done. The bioweapons defense industry was like a sleeping giant,
now awakened.

Ken Alibek had been in the United States for six years. He spoke English
now, had friends, held lucrative defense contractor jobs, and was primed to
enter the public domain. In February 1998 Alibek made his first television
appearance on the ABC News program Primetime Live. In planning for
World War III, Alibek said, the Russians had prepared “hundreds of tons”
of bioweapons. Now, even with the wall down, Alibek said, the Russians
“continue to do research to develop new biological agents.” In March,
Richard Preston profiled Dr. Alibek for the New Yorker magazine. Copies of
the article were distributed to members of Congress through the
Congressional Record.
Before the Primetime Live airing, Ken Alibek was not a public figure.
He had been moving quietly in U.S. government, military, and intelligence
circles, sharing information with individuals who held national security
clearances similar to his own. Now, his opinions found a much wider
audience. American citizens were interested in what he had to say and so
were the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In May 1998 Alibek testified before a
congressional committee hearing on terrorism and intelligence. He even had
a private meeting at the Pentagon, in the E-Ring, where he briefed General
Joseph W. Ralston, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
second-highest-ranking military officer in the United States. The narrative
of the biological weapons threat was gaining traction in the mainstream
press. In June 1998, President Clinton asked Congress to provide $294
million in funding for anti-bioterrorism programs. In October, Alibek was
featured in the PBS Frontline documentary “Plague War.”
In the six years since his defection, Ken Alibek had been a busy man
professionally. For the first few years of his new life in America, he held
various research and consulting positions at the National Institutes of
Health and the CIA and with private defense contractors. Notably, he
developed a relationship with Dr. Charles Bailey, former chief scientist at
USAMRIID. “I helped to build Alibek’s reputation with the military,” said
Bailey. “A lot of people were impressed with Alibek. I was impressed.”
When Bailey went to work for a defense contractor in Huntsville, Alabama,
he brought Dr. Alibek along. Later, from 1996 to 1998, Alibek served as
program manager at SRS Technologies, an information technology
company based in California. In 1998 he and Bailey both worked as
program managers for Battelle Memorial Institute, the defense contractor
that handled ARPA’s Vietnam-era Project Agile reports. In April 1999,
Alibek became president of a defense contractor called Hadron Advanced
Biosystems, Inc., located in Manassas, Virginia, whose mission was to
“develop innovative solutions for the intelligence community… including
intelligent weapons systems and biological weapons defense.” Dr. Bailey
served as vice president. Hadron became a go-to place for several former
Soviet bioweapons engineers, microbiologists Alibek had formerly worked
with at Biopreparat. Among them was Sergei Popov.
Popov was an expert in synthetic bioweapons and had been a member of
the Biopreparat team that worked on the nefarious Chimera program in the
Soviet Union, recombining genes to make stealth viruses. At Biopreparat,
Popov had helped create a class of bioweapons with “new and unusual
properties, difficult to recognize, difficult to treat,” Popov told the PBS
program Nova in 1998. “Essentially I arranged the research towards more
virulent agents causing more death and more pathological symptoms.” Like
Alibek, Popov had defected to the United States after the Soviet Union
ceased to exist.
At Hadron Advanced Biosystems, Alibek, Popov, and Bailey expressed
their determination to find a cure-all against bioweapons, a broad-spectrum
antidote that could shoot down dangerous pathogens in the body before they
were able to infect a human host. This was similar to what DARPA director
Larry Lynn was seeking when he asked his program managers to create a
“Star Wars of biology” program. On Nova, Popov described what the
doctors were working on as a countermeasure with the ability to “induce so-
called ‘unspecific immunity,’ which would be efficient in protecting people
against quite a big range of different diseases.” Alibek called the concept an
“immune booster.” Other military research scientists called the idea
impossible.
One noteworthy skeptic was Dr. Phillip K. Russell, the former
commanding general of the Army Medical Research and Development
Command. Dr. Russell told the Wall Street Journal that searching for a
booster for the immune system was “complex and fraught with risk. Turn it
on, and it does things that can be detrimental as well as protective.” Dr.
Russell also stated that Dr. Alibek was better at theorizing than at
experimenting, and that the former Soviet bioweapons engineer was “as
much an enigma as a scientist as he is as an individual.”
Alibek stayed focused on his research goals. In 1999 he approached
DARPA. Here was an agency that was willing to take risks. And with a
recent infusion of money from Congress, there were many new contracts to
be had in biological warfare defense. As the chief scientist at defense
contractor Hadron, Dr. Ken Alibek was in a prime position to receive
DARPA contracts.
In the fall of 1999, Hadron Advanced Biosystems was awarded its first
one-year DARPA contract, for $3.3 million, roughly $4.6 million in 2015.
Alibek issued a press statement reading, “We hope this [DARPA] program
is just the beginning of new, innovative research, funded by government
agencies.” Alibek told colleagues that one day he hoped to build a drug
manufacturing plant in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. He also told
colleagues that if terrorists got their hands on biological weapons, all of
America would be at risk.
In October 1999, DARPA invited Dr. Alibek to testify before the House
Committee on Armed Services’ Subcommittee on Research and
Development and Subcommittee on Procurement. In his opening statement,
Alibek told members of Congress in no uncertain terms what they should be
afraid of. “What we need to expect,” Alibek said, is biological weapons in
the hands of “some terrorist organization.”
Which is exactly what may or may not have happened two years later, in
October 2001.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Transforming Humans for War

Retired four-star general Paul F. Gorman recalls first learning about the
“weakling of the battlefield” as a young soldier in the 1950s. This was
before Gorman fought in Vietnam, before he served as special assistant to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Department of Defense detailed him to
the CIA, and before he completed his uniformed service and became
commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command.
“Soldiers get tired and soldiers get fearful,” said Gorman, age eighty-
nine in 2014, in an interview for this book. “Frequently, soldiers just don’t
want to fight. Attention must always be paid to the soldier himself.” Since
its inception in 1958, DARPA’s focus has been on the research and
development of vast weapons systems of the future. Starting in 1990, and
owing to individuals like General Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers,
airmen, and sailors. On transforming humans for war.
General Gorman learned about the weakling of the battlefield while
reading S. L. A. Marshall, the U.S. Army combat historian during World
War II. After interviewing soldiers who participated in the Normandy beach
landings, Marshall concluded, “On the field of battle man is not only a
thinking animal but a beast of burden.” It was fatigue that was responsible
for an overwhelming number of casualties, Marshall learned.
“I didn’t know my strength was gone until I hit the beach,” Sergeant
Bruce Hensley told Marshall. “I was carrying part of a machine gun.
Normally I could run with it… but I found I couldn’t even walk with it….
So I crawled across the sand dragging it with me. I felt ashamed of my own
weakness, but looking around I saw the others crawling and dragging the
weights they normally carried.”
And Staff Sergeant Thomas B. Turner told Marshall, “Under fire we
learned what we had never been told—that fear and fatigue are about the
same in their effect on an advance,” such as storming a beach.
Reading these soldiers’ accounts of exhaustion from the sheer weight of
what they carried into battle planted an idea in Paul Gorman’s brain.
Decades later, in the 1970s, Gorman was at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, in New Mexico, “working on a sensitive program,” when he
got an idea about how to strengthen the weakling of the battlefield. It could
be done, he thought, with a strength-amplifying mechanical suit.
“Los Alamos was developing a suit for people who had to be
encapsulated because they were working in a radioactive environment,”
Gorman recalls. The suits were lead-lined, heavy, and cumbersome. “Much
of the science focused on how to lighten the load.” But Gorman noticed
something else as well. “The [people] inside the suits struggled with
sensory deprivation,” he says, “and when deprived of sensory inputs, a
person cannot function at capacity for very long.” Soldiers need strength
and endurance, which led to Gorman’s pioneering idea for a battle suit of
the future: the “quintessential man-machine interface [for] the soldier who
fights on foot.”
General Gorman retired from the Army in 1985 and began working for
DARPA. In 1990 he wrote a paper describing an “integrated powered
exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a
veritable super-soldier. Gorman’s SuperTroop concept would make the
soldier stronger and give him enhanced command, control, communication,
and intelligence capabilities. This was the origin of the now famous
DARPA exoskeleton.
The exoskeleton Gorman proposed offered protection against chemical,
biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a
.50 caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual and haptic [touch] sensors,”
Gorman explains, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound
suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from head to fingertips. Its interior
would be climate controlled, and each soldier would have his own
physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When
a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he
would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading
his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the twenty-
first-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and
communicate. “The exoskeleton would require a very powerful computer,”
Gorman surmised. Since the technology did not yet exist, he proposed that
the SuperTroop concept be fielded first through SIMNET simulators. A
program called the Soldier System Model and Simulation was born, and
work on the DARPA exoskeleton began.
DARPA had spent the previous three decades focusing on advancing
weapons platforms. Now the agency would research and develop
technologies for the dismounted soldier. The biological weapons threat
caused DARPA to bring biologists into its ranks, and with the life sciences
at the fore, DARPA began to look inside the human body, toward a
scientific capability that could transform soldiers from the inside out.
Throughout the 1990s, the exponential progress of three technologies
made this possible: biotechnology, information technology, and
nanotechnology. In 1999 DARPA created the Defense Sciences Office
(DSO) and made Michael Goldblatt its director. With twenty-eight program
managers under his control, Goldblatt would be overseeing the single
largest number of program managers at DARPA, an agency that in 1999 had
140 program managers in total.
Michael Goldblatt came to DARPA with a radical vision. He believed
that through advanced technology, in twenty or fifty years’ time, human
beings could be the “first species to control evolution.” In an interview for
this book in 2014, Goldblatt described the climate at DARPA when he
arrived. “Biology was an area where the Defense Department was
underserved. War was shifting. The pattern of warfare was shifting. So was
the thinking.” The turn of the century “was a radical time to be at DARPA,”
Goldblatt says, and in this time of momentous change he saw great
opportunity. “Suddenly, there were zoologists in the office.” As director of
DSO at DARPA, Goldblatt believed that defense sciences could
demonstrate that “the next frontier was inside of our own selves.” In this
way, at DARPA, Goldblatt became a pioneer in military-based
transhumanism—the notion that man can and will alter the human condition
fundamentally by augmenting humans with machines and other means.
When Goldblatt arrived at DARPA in 1999, the Biological Warfare
Defense Program was two and a half years old. “The threat was growing far
faster than the solutions were coming in. It was a hard problem,” Goldblatt
recalls. “[President] Clinton gave lots of money to the countermeasures
program for unconventional pathogens,” he says. “There was lots of money
for biology programs at DARPA.” Goldblatt saw the creation of the super-
soldier as imperative to twenty-first-century warfare. “Soldiers having no
physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and
operational dominance in the future,” Goldblatt told his program managers
just a few weeks after arriving at DARPA.

How did Michael Goldblatt, a biologist and venture capitalist from the
Midwest, end up running what would be one of the most consequential
defense sciences programs of the early twenty-first century?
“In the mid-1990s I had not heard of DARPA,” Goldblatt insists. But as
chief science officer and vice president of research, development, and
nutrition at McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food restaurant chain,
Goldblatt had his finger on the pulse of food-related national health scares.
When, in 1993, four children died and 623 people fell seriously ill after
eating E. coli–infected hamburgers sold at Jack in the Box restaurants,
Goldblatt became hyper-aware. All of a sudden, a previously unknown
bacterium, O157:H7, “was on everybody’s radar,” says Goldblatt. Every
person in the fast food business “was on pathogen alert.”
Goldblatt, the venture capitalist, got an idea. “In an effort to identify
ways to enhance food safety and eliminate unwanted pathogens, a guy I was
working with, Alvin Chow, and I came up with a technology for self-
sterilizing packages—packages that sterilized products in the field.”
McDonald’s decided not to use the technology that Goldblatt and Chow had
developed, so the two men sought out a different buyer. “We thought this
technology would be useful to the government,” Goldblatt says. “We did
some research and found this group called DARPA. I called them. No
response. I wrote to them. No response. I called again. I said, ‘This is
Michael Goldblatt from McDonald’s. I’d like to speak with Larry Lynn,’”
the director of DARPA. “After a short while, he called me back. He thought
I was with McDonnell Aircraft. I said, ‘No, McDonald’s hamburgers.’
There was riotous laughter,” Goldblatt recalls. “I told Larry about the self-
sterilizing packages. How they could be used in field hospitals or on the
battlefield. Larry was blown away. He said, ‘We want you to come to
DARPA.’ And I did.”
At DARPA, Goldblatt realized that almost anything that could be
imagined could at least be tried. In the Defense Sciences Office, programs
were initiated to develop technologies that would make soldiers, also called
warfighters, stronger, smarter, more capable, and would give them more
endurance than other humans. One program, called Persistence in Combat,
addressed three areas that slowed soldiers down on the battlefield: pain,
wounds, and excessive bleeding.
Goldblatt hired a biotechnology firm to develop a pain vaccine. “It
works with the body’s inflammatory response that is responsible for pain,”
Goldblatt explained in 2014. The way the vaccine would work is that, if a
soldier got shot, he would experience “ten to thirty seconds of agony then
no pain for thirty days. The vaccine would reduce the pain triggered by
inflammation and swelling,” allowing the warfighter to keep fighting so
long as bleeding could be stopped. To develop new ways to try to stop
bleeding, Goldblatt initiated another program that involved injecting
millions of microscopic magnets into a person, which could later be brought
together into a single area to stop bleeding with the wave of a wand. The
scientist in charge of that program, Dr. Harry T. Whelan, worked on several
“rapid healing” programs under the banner “DARPA Soldier Self Care.”
Another idea regarding ways to allow wounded soldiers to survive blood
loss and avoid going into shock involved figuring out a way to get a human
to go into a kind of hibernation, or suspended animation, until help arrived.
Achieving this goal would give a soldier precious hours, or even days, to
survive while awaiting evacuation or triage. Bears hibernate. Why can’t
man? DARPA DSO scientists asked these and other questions, including,
could a chemical compound like hydrogen sulfide produce a hibernation-
like state in a man?
Sleep was another field of intense research at DSO. In the Continually
Assisted Performance program, scientists worked on ways to create a “24/7
soldier,” one who required little or no sleep for up to seven days. If this
could be achieved, the enemy’s need for sleep would put them at an
extreme disadvantage. Goldblatt’s program managers hired marine
biologists studying certain sea animals to look for clues. Whales and
dolphins don’t sleep; as mammals, they would drown if they did. Unlike
humans, they are somehow able to control the lobes of their left and right
brains so that while one lobe sleeps, the opposite lobe stays awake,
allowing the animal to swim. While some DARPA scientists ruminated over
the question of how humans might one day control the lobes of their own
brains, other scientists experimented with drugs like Modafinil, a powerful
medication used to counter sleep apnea and narcolepsy, to keep warfighters
awake.
To address strength and endurance issues, Goldblatt initiated a program
called the Mechanically Dominant Soldier. What if soldiers could have ten
times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What if they could leap
seven feet and be able to cool down their own body temperature? What if
the military benchmark of eighty pull-ups a day could be raised to three
hundred pull-ups a day? “We want every war fighter to look like Lance
Armstrong as far as metabolic profile,” program manager Joe Bielitzki told
Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau a decade before Armstrong resigned
from athletics in disgrace.
Under the DSO banner, in a program called the Brain-Machine
Interface, DARPA scientists studied how brain implants could enhance
cognitive ability. The program’s first goal was to create “a wireless brain
modem for a freely moving rat,” said DARPA’s Dr. Eric Eisenstadt in 1999.
The scientists would implant a chip in the rat’s brain to see if they could
remotely control the animal’s movements. “The objective of this effort,”
Eisenstadt explained, “is to use remote teleoperation via direct
interconnections with the brain.” DARPA’s bigger vision for its Brain-
Machine Interface program was to allow future “soldiers [to] communicate
by thought alone.”
Dr. Eisenstadt asked his program managers to “picture a time when
humans see in the UV [ultraviolet] and IR [infrared] portions of the
electromagnetic spectrum, or hear speech on the noisy flight deck of an
aircraft carrier.” What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the
world at DARPA was future science. “Imagine a time when the human
brain has its own wireless modem so that instead of acting on thoughts,
warfighters have thoughts that act,” Eisenstadt suggested. Fifteen years
later, the Brain-Machine Interface program would astound. But turn-of-the-
millennium critics cried foul, and a spotlight was turned on DARPA’s super-
soldier pursuits. Critics said that the quest to enhance human performance
on the battlefield would lead scientists down a morally dangerous path.
Michael Goldblatt disagreed.
“How is an exoskeleton or a brain implant different from a pacemaker or
a cochlear implant or a prosthetic?” Goldblatt asked in a 2014 interview.
For Goldblatt, the scientific exploration into transhumanism is personal. His
daughter Gina was born with cerebral palsy, a group of permanent physical
disorders related to movement that get worse over time, never better.
Goldblatt believes that the physically impaired or weak have every right to
compete with their fellows, and if science allows them a way and a means
to do so, that science should be pursued. “When we learned Gina had
cerebral palsy,” said Goldblatt, “I called the smartest person I knew. He said
to me, ‘It’s permanent. Now accept that.’” Goldblatt could still recall the
long, dark silence that followed that statement until finally the smart person
on the other end of the phone said to him, “Now ask yourself, what are you
going to do about it?”
For Goldblatt, the answer was clear. He would provide his daughter with
every opportunity to compete with other children, through performance
enhancements like a motorized wheelchair and the best computers
available, with everything in her bedroom remotely controlled. This vision
carried over to DARPA, where, as director of DSO, Goldblatt would
oversee performance enhancements for the warfighter on a national scale,
spending over $100 million on programs to reengineer the twenty-first-
century soldier fighting on foot.
Asked about that morally dangerous path, Goldblatt rephrases his
question, “How is having a cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear any
different than having a chip in your brain that could help control your
thoughts?” When questioned about unintended consequences, like
controlling humans for nefarious ends, Goldblatt insists, “There are
unintended consequences for everything.”

It was June 2001 and the new president, George W. Bush, had been in office
for six months. The biological weapons threat continued to interest the
public and was regularly featured in the news. And war games, including
the computer-based SIMNET, had become an integral part of national
security strategizing. But in some arenas, old school role-playing prevailed.
In the third week of June, a group of fifteen former senior officials and two
journalists assembled at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., to
carry out a script-based, asymmetrical attack simulation called Dark Winter.
In the fictional game scenario, the nation has been pummeled into chaos
after terrorists attack Oklahoma with a biological weapon containing
smallpox. The Dark Winter exercise involved three National Security
Council meetings taking place over a period of two weeks. In the war game,
the National Security Council members were role-played by former
officials. The onetime U.S. senator and chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, Sam Nunn, played Dark Winter’s fictional president;
the former special counselor to the president and White House
communications director, David Gergen, played the national security
advisor; a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, General John. H.
Tilelli, played the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the former director
of the CIA, James Woolsey, played Dark Winter’s fictional CIA, director;
and the sitting governor of Oklahoma, Frank Keating, played the fictional
governor of Oklahoma. Dark Winter’s war game plot revolved around how
the players would respond to a hypothetical biological weapons attack.
First, the game players were “briefed” on background events. “Last
month Russian authorities, with support from the FBI, arrested Yusuuf
Abdul Aziiz, a known operative in Al-Qaida and a close personal friend and
suspected senior lieutenant of Usama bin Laden,” read the Dark Winter
script. “Yusuuf was caught in a sting operation that had been developing
during the last year. He was attempting to acquire 50 kilograms of
plutonium and was also attempting to arrange the purchase of several
biological pathogens that had been weaponized by the Soviet Union.”
The war game scenario also involved Iraq. Dark Winter game players
were told that two days earlier, “Iraqi forces in the South of Iraq moved into
offensive positions along the Kuwaiti border,” just as they had done in real
life in 1990, which set the Gulf War in motion. Also on background, the
war gamers learned about domestic conditions: “US Economy is in good
shape. Polls show a slim majority of Americans oppose a major deployment
of US troops to the Persian Gulf. Most Americans agree that Saddam’s Iraqi
regime represents a real threat to stability in the region and to American
interests.” It is worth noting that in real life, the first two fictional statement
were based in fact, but the third one, that most Americans saw Saddam’s
Iraq as a threat, was not a fact. What was factual was that the man who had
been secretary of defense during the Gulf War, Dick Cheney, was now the
vice president of the United States, and he saw Saddam’s Iraq as a threat.
As for Dark Winter, the game began when the fictional governor of
Oklahoma informed the National Security Council that his state has been
attacked with a smallpox weapon.
Over the course of the fourteen days, for the game players, the scenario
went from bad to worse to calamitous. Entire states shut down, chaos
reigned, massive traffic jams ensued, civil liberties were suspended, many
banks and post offices closed. As vaccines ran out, “angry citizens
denounce[d] the government’s failure to stop the smallpox epidemic.”
Civilians started shooting policemen. The National Guard started shooting
civilians. Finally, a fictional “prominent Iraqi defector claim[ed] that Iraq
arranged the bioweapons attack on the US through intermediaries,” most
likely Yusuuf Abdul Aziiz, the fictional deputy of the real Osama bin
Laden.
In the Dark Winter war game, 3 million Americans died of smallpox. As
a result, a fictional CNN-Gallup poll revealed that 48 percent of Americans
wanted the president to consider using nuclear weapons in response. The
game ended there.
One month later, on July 23, 2001, former chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn—the man who played Dark
Winter’s fictional president—told Congress during a House hearing on
combating biological terrorism that the real emergency revealed in the war
game was just how unprepared America was to handle an actual biological
weapons attack.
“I was honored to play the part of the President in the exercise Dark
Winter,” Nunn told Congress. “You often don’t know what you don’t know
until you’ve been tested,” he said. “And it’s a lucky thing for the United
States that, as the emergency broadcast network used to say, ‘this is just a
test, this is not a real emergency.’ But Mr. Chairman, our lack of
preparation is a real emergency.”
No one said, “But Dark Winter was only a game.”
Lines were being blurred. Games were influencing reality. Man was
merging with machine. What else would the technological advances of the
twenty-first century bring?
In August 2001, scientists from Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory—renamed in honor of its founder, Ernest O. Lawrence
—traveled to the West Desert Test Center at Dugway Proving Ground in
Utah. There, inside the Special Programs Division, the scientists tested a
new sensor system designed to detect killer pathogens such as anthrax and
botulinum toxin. The name of the program was the Biological Aerosol
Sentry and Information Systems, or BASIS. It was hailed as a plan for
“guarding the air we breathe.” In truth, all BASIS could do was “detect to
treat.” Unlike chemical weapons, the presence of which could now be
identified before release through an advanced technology called acoustic
detection, biological weapons could be detected only after the fact. Even
worse, the sensor systems were notorious for giving false alarms; the filter
system was flawed. In open literature, Livermore acknowledged that false
alarms were a serious concern but did not admit that their own problem was
widespread. “Any technology that reports a terrorist incident where none
exists may induce the very panic and social disruption it is intended to
thwart. Therefore, the rate of false-positive alarms must be zero or very
nearly so.”
By the summer of 2001, Vice President Cheney was becoming
increasingly concerned about a possible biological weapons attack directed
at the White House. Plans were put in place to install Livermore’s BASIS
system throughout the White House and its grounds.
In the summer of 2001, DARPA’s biological weapons defense initiative
was one of the fastest-growing programs in the defense sciences world. A
decade earlier, before the defection of the Soviet scientists, the threat was
not even known to exist. Now the industry was a several-hundred-million-
dollar-a-year field.
Programs were largely speculative: as of yet, in a conundrum that ran
parallel to ARPA’s first quandary, ballistic missile defense, there was no
way to defend against a biological weapons attack. Only if there were a
terrorist attack involving the release of a deadly pathogen on American soil
could biological weapons defense truly be put to the test. Defensive
programs and countermeasure programs would then skyrocket. Which is
exactly what happened next.
 PART IV

THE WAR ON TERROR

 CHAPTER NINETEEN

Terror Strikes

Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, twenty-four-year-old David

A. Bray was in Atlanta, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for
a briefing with the Laboratory Response Network for Bioterrorism. Bray
was the information technology chief for the Bioterrorism Preparedness and
Response Program at CDC, a program established by President Clinton
under his U.S. policy on counterterrorism. It was Bray’s job to make sure
people got good information when and as they needed it. There was so
much information out there, filtering out the important information was key.
A man cannot drink from a fire hose. The meeting on September 11 was
supposed to start at 9:00 a.m.
“When I signed up for work in bioterrorism I thought to myself, what
kind of world requires my job?” asks Bray. That spring, he says, “we had
received a memo that said, ‘Be on alert for Al Qaeda activity June through
August 2001.’ It specifically ended in August.”
It was September now, and Bray and his team were getting ready for the
Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response team briefing when an airplane hit
the North Tower of the World Trade Center. “We got the news. Details were
sketchy.” At 9:03, he recalls, “when the second airplane hit, we definitely
knew it was a terrorism event.”
Many of the CDC employees were dispatched elsewhere. “A large group
started piling computers into cars and were sent to an undisclosed off-site
bunker,” says Bray, explaining, “We were concerned that a second event
would involve bioterrorism.”
David Bray has always been a remarkably focused person. His area of
expertise is informatics, the science of how information is gathered, stored,
and retrieved. The son of a minister and a teacher, Bray started winning
national science prizes in middle school. By age fifteen, he had his first job
with the federal government, with the Department of Energy at its
Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia.
“I was trying to understand the universe, and the lab was looking for
new energy sources,” Bray says of his youth, when he had to get a special
permit to work for the Department of Energy so as to comply with federal
laws regarding child labor. By the time Bray was sixteen, he had been
written up in the Washington Post for inventing a prizewinning computer
program that predicted how best to clean up an oil spill. At age seventeen
Bray was working for the Department of Defense. Before he had turned
twenty-one, he had added jobs with the National Institutes of Health and the
Department of Agriculture to his résumé. In between jobs he attended
college, studying science, biology, and journalism. One summer he worked
in South Africa as a health reporter for the Cape Argus News. What
interested Bray most was information. How people get information and
what they do with the information they have.
As a reporter covering the AIDS crisis in South Africa, Bray observed
how informed people were still willing to ignore dangers right in front of
them. In 1997 more than one out of six people in South Africa had the
AIDS virus, and the epidemic was spreading out of control. Bray went
around the countryside talking to South African students about the risks
they faced, and how easily they could protect themselves with
prophylactics. “They knew that they should wear protection,” Bray says,
“but I asked them if they would wear protection, and they said they would
not.” This was hardly shocking. Bray said many Americans had the same
attitude: “It’s not going to happen to me.” He began thinking about how to
get people to follow the best course of action, certainly as far as public
health goes, based on the information they have. At the Centers for Disease
Control, he found a place where he could focus on this idea.
The terrorist attacks on the morning of September 11 created what Bray
calls a “hyper-turbulent environment.” In this kind of fear-fueled setting,
“knowledge is the most strategically significant resource of an
organization,” says Bray. Not more knowledge but better knowledge. Good,
clear, factual information. Data about what is going on. Immediately after
9/11, says Bray, “we began reaching out to fifty states. We worked from the
idea that the second event would be a biological event. We wanted to have
information channels [open] with all fifty states” in the event that a
bioterrorism attack were to occur.
DARPA had been sponsoring a surveillance program called Bio-ALIRT,
for Bio-Event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition Technology, an
information-based technology program designed to enable computers to
quickly recognize a bioweapons attack. To get a computer to “recognize” a
bioweapons attack from the data was an extraordinary enterprise, and the
program wasn’t capable enough by 9/11.
Originally designed to protect troops on foreign soil, the program had
recently expanded with plans for a national surveillance program of U.S.
civilians, using an individual’s medical records. The ramifications for
collecting medical information on Americans for purposes of national
security, but without their knowledge or consent, were profound. The Bio-
ALIRT program fell under an emerging new industry called
“biosurveillance,” a contentious concept that has largely avoided public
scrutiny. DARPA’s military partner in this effort was the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research. Its civilian partners were the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Laboratory, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
University, and the Stanford University Medical Informatics group.
DARPA’s defense contractor partners were General Dynamics Advanced
Information Systems and the IBM Corporation.
The science behind Bio-ALIRT was intended to determine whether or
not “automated detection algorithms” could identify an outbreak in either a
bioweapons attack or a naturally occurring epidemic, like bird flu. Never
mind the people—the doctors, nurses, and clinicians—reporting from the
field. The idea behind Bio-ALIRT was to take human “bias” out of the
equation and allow computers to do the job faster. As part of Bio-ALIRT,
supercomputers would scan vast databases of medical records, in real time,
as doctors entered data. Simultaneously, and also as part of Bio-ALIRT,
supercomputers would scan sales at pharmacies of both prescription and
nonprescription drugs, in real time. A privately held company called
Surveillance Data, Inc., was hired to provide “de-identified” outpatient data,
meaning that Surveillance Data, Inc., would “scrub” the medical
information of personal details, such as names, social security numbers, and
home addresses. It is unclear how much medical history was considered
personal and how much the Bio-ALIRT supercomputers needed to
differentiate between chronic medical conditions and new symptoms.
There were many flaws in the system, privacy issues among them, but
one flaw rendered the program all but worthless. Bio-ALIRT’s automated
detection algorithms—the software that told the supercomputers what to
look for—were based on data from the World Health Organization’s
International Classification of Diseases, ninth revision, known as ICD-9.
But the biological weapons that were the most deadly—the chimera viruses
and the recombinant pathogens like the ones the Soviet defectors Ken
Alibek, Vladimir Pasechnik, Sergei Popov, and others had been working on
at Biopreparat—were neither listed in nor identifiable by ICD-9. If Bio-
ALIRT programs had been further along than in their earliest stages, the
CDC could potentially have benefited from the system. But on 9/11, the
biosurveillance industry was still in its infancy, and the Laboratory
Response Network for Bioterrorism, which Bray led as information chief,
had to rely on humans in all fifty states for receiving information. Bray and
his team had an overwhelming amount of work cut out for themselves in
this hyper-turbulent environment. Bray welcomed the challenge.
“It was a very long day,” recalls Bray, who was personally doing the
work that one day a computer might do.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, when the first airplane hit the North
Tower of the World Trade Center, at 8:46 a.m., Vice President Dick Cheney
was sitting in his office in the West Wing of the White House. He
immediately focused his attention on the television screen. “It was a clear
day, there were no weather problems, and then we saw the second airplane
hit,” Cheney recalled in his memoir. “At that moment, you knew this was a
deliberate act. This was a terrorist act.”
Vice President Cheney called President Bush, who was in Sarasota,
Florida, visiting an elementary school. Vice President Cheney was on the
phone with a presidential aide in Florida when his door burst open and a
Secret Service agent rushed in. “He grabbed me and propelled me out of my
office, and into the underground shelter in the White House,” Cheney told
CNN’s John King. Later that same night, the Secret Service transferred the
vice president to a more secure underground location outside the capital. En
route from the White House in a helicopter, Cheney asked to view the
damage to the Pentagon, which had been struck by a third plane at 9:37 a.m.
“As we lifted off and headed up the Potomac, you could look out and see
the Pentagon, see that black hole where it’d been hit,” Cheney recalled. For
the first time in the Pentagon’s history, the very symbol of American
military power stood broken and exposed with a huge gash in one of its five
sides.
Cheney was helicoptered to an “undisclosed location,” which was Site
R, the underground bunker facility inside the Raven Rock Mountain
Complex seventy-five miles from the White House, near Camp David. The
location was disclosed in 2004 by journalist James Bamford. This was the
Cold War–era underground command center that had caused President
Eisenhower so much grief back in 1956, during the heated post–Castle
Bravo debate over civil defense. Site R was originally designed to be the
place where the president would be taken in the event of a nuclear attack.
Eisenhower had struggled with the concept throughout his presidency,
mindful that it was designed to provide safety for the president and his close
advisors during a time when the very population the president was sworn to
protect would be most vulnerable, exposed, and unaware.
At Raven Rock, Vice President Cheney began laying plans for war.

Also on the morning of September 11, 2001, shortly before 9:40 a.m.,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sitting in his office on the third
floor of the Pentagon listening to a prescheduled briefing by the CIA.
Rumsfeld took notes on a small, round wooden table once used by General
William Tecumseh Sherman, famous for his scorched earth and total war
policies, and for saying, “War is hell.” Earlier that same morning, terrorists
had hijacked four airplanes and had, by now, flown two of them into the
North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Outside
the door of the office of the secretary of defense, a Pentagon police officer
named Aubrey Davis was standing guard.
“There was an incredibly loud ‘boom,’” Davis later told British
journalist Andrew Cockburn. Terrorists had just crashed an American
Airlines commercial jet into the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld emerged
from his office and asked Davis what was going on. Davis, relaying
information that was coming over his portable radio, told the secretary of
defense that he was getting reports that an airplane had hit the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld listened, then hurried down the corridor. Davis followed after
him. The smell of smoke filled the air. People were running down the
hallways, yelling and screaming. “They’re bombing the building, they’re
bombing the building!” someone hollered. After several minutes of
walking, Rumsfeld, Davis, and others who had joined the group arrived at
what looked like a wall of fire.
“There were flames, and bits of metal all around,” Davis recalled. A
woman was lying on the ground right in front of him, her legs horribly
burned. “The Secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal,” Davis
remembered. “I was telling him that he shouldn’t be interfering with a
crime scene when he looked at the inscription on it and [it read], ‘American
Airlines.’” Amid the chaos and smoke, there were shouts and cries for help.
Someone passed by with an injured person laid out on a gurney. Secretary
Rumsfeld helped push the gurney outside.
By 10:00 a.m. Rumsfeld was back inside the Pentagon. After calling the
president from his office in the E-Ring, he was moved to a secure location
elsewhere in the building, likely underground. From there, Rumsfeld spoke
with Vice President Cheney, who was still in the bunker beneath the White
House. At 12:05 p.m. Rumsfeld received a call from CIA director George
Tenet, who reported that the National Security Agency had just intercepted
a call between one of Osama bin Laden’s deputies and a person in the
former Soviet Republic of Georgia discussing the “good news,” a clear
reference to the terrorist strikes. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were
responsible for the attacks, the CIA director told the secretary of defense.
A little after 2:00 p.m. Rumsfeld gathered a core group of military
advisors and Pentagon staff and began discussing what steps he wanted
taken next. The people in the room included General Richard Myers, acting
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld’s
undersecretary for intelligence; Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman;
and a Pentagon lawyer. Cambone and Clarke took notes with pen and paper.
During the meeting, Rumsfeld discussed the possibility of going after
Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a response to that morning’s terrorist attack.
The notes of the undersecretary for intelligence, later reviewed by the 9/11
Commission, revealed that Rumsfeld asked for “Best info fast… judge
whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time—not
only UBL [Usama bin Laden].” Rumsfeld asked the lawyer in the room to
discuss with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz “connection with
UBL [Usama bin Laden]” and Iraq.

Two days later, on September 13, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national
security advisor Condoleezza Rice gathered for dinner at Holly Lodge,
Camp David, which is located just a few miles from the Site R underground
command center. The topic discussed, according to matching accounts in
three of the four advisors’ memoirs, was how America would respond to the
9/11 attacks.
“We all knew the outcome would be a declaration of war against the
Taliban,” Rice wrote. “But the discussion was useful in teasing out the
questions the President would need to address.”
“We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Cheney wrote in
his memoir. “We were not simply going to go after individual cells of
terrorists responsible for 9/11. We were going to bring down their networks
and go after the organizations, nations, and people who lent them support.”
“I argued that our strategy should be to put them on the defensive,”
wrote Rumsfeld. “The emphasis on a global campaign was important, I
believed.” Preemption was the new way forward. Thwarting the enemy
before he made his next move.
On September 16, CIA director George Tenet sent out a memo to CIA
staff. In the “Subject” line he wrote, “We’re at war.” Tenet told his CIA
staff that in order to successfully “wage a worldwide war against al-Qa’ida
and other terrorist organizations… [t]here must be absolute and full sharing
of information, ideas, and capabilities.” For George Tenet, information was
the way to win this war.
At the CDC in Atlanta, David Bray and his colleagues continued to
work around the clock, keeping channels open between the CDC and health
professionals in all fifty states. Each day that passed without receiving
health-related information that might suggest a bioterrorism event was
under way meant another day of relief. “On October first we were told to
stand down,” Bray recalls. On October 3, he flew to CIA headquarters in
Langley, Virginia. There, inside the George H. W. Bush Center for
Intelligence, Bray gave the Interagency Intelligence Committee on
Terrorism a briefing about what the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network
would do in the event of a bioterrorism attack. It was a seminal moment for
Bray, only twenty-four years old and with considerable responsibility, and
there was something he learned at CIA headquarters that still amazed him
fourteen years later.
“The agency didn’t know we existed,” says Bray. He was the chief
technology officer for the CDC team that would handle a biological
weapons event were it to happen, and yet, according to Bray, no one in the
audience at CIA headquarters seemed to know anything about it. For Bray,
it was a revelatory moment.
“We were created by public law, Presidential Decision Directive Thirty-
nine,” Bray explains. “But they [the CIA] did not have that information.” If
knowledge is the most strategically significant resource of an organization,
as David Bray believes and as George Tenet stated in his “We’re at war”
memo, the U.S. bioterrorism defense community had a very long way to go.
For Bray, bridging the gap between having good information and
effectively disseminating good information would become a professional
crusade. He would continue this work over the next decade as an
information specialist for DARPA in Afghanistan, for James Clapper in the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and as
the chief information officer for the Federal Communications Commission,
starting in 2013. The lessons learned in the hyper-turbulent environment
would shape his career.

The day after David Bray briefed an auditorium full of intelligence officials
at CIA headquarters in Langley, he traveled back to the CDC’s Atlanta
offices, where he learned about a serious new development. Bray was told
that a sixty-three-year-old Florida man had been hospitalized in Boca Raton
with inhalation anthrax.
“You’re joking,” Bray remembers saying. The man was Bob Stevens,
and he was a photo editor with American Media, Inc., the publisher of the
National Enquirer. Twenty-four hours later, Bob Stevens was dead.
 Things very quickly went from bad to worse. The FBI was now
involved. On October 12, an NBC employee in New York City tested
positive for anthrax. On October 15, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle
told reporters that anthrax had been found in his Senate office. The Hart
Senate Office Building was evacuated and put under quarantine. Hundreds
of people lined up for anthrax tests. The Capitol itself was swept clear of
vehicles and nonessential visitors. A bunker mentality took hold. “A war of
nerves is being fought in Washington,” a senior White House official told
the New York Times, “and I fear we’re not doing as well as we might be.”
Over the next few days, more individuals tested positive for anthrax
poisoning after letters containing the substance were mailed to ABC, CBS,
and the U.S. State Department. People were beginning to die. When the
1,271,030-square-foot Hart Building needed to be decontaminated, DARPA
was asked to provide science advisors to help with the enormous
undertaking. A team of DARPA scientists reviewed decontamination
technologies and delivered “quick turn-around testing on three separate
candidates to determine efficacy.” The test that proved most effective
happened to be the “chlorine dioxide approach.” This approach was based
on technology that DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office director, Michael
Goldblatt, together with scientist Alvin Chow, had created for self-
sterilizing packages in the wake of the E. coli Jack in the Box scandal.
“We’d created it in a solid-state form to be triggered by light or humidity,”
Goldblatt explains. “My interpretation was a human scale; [DARPA’s]
solution was a huge scale.” For this, says Goldblatt, he feels “a little bit of
pride.”

Three days after Senator Daschle told reporters that anthrax had been found
in his office, Vice President Cheney paid a visit to ground zero, his first visit
to the World Trade Center site since the 9/11 attacks. It was a little after
1:00 p.m. on October 18, 2001, when Cheney boarded Air Force Two and
headed to New York City. He had been airborne for just a short time when
his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, received a telephone call.
“There had been an initial positive test result indicating a botulinum
toxin attack on the White House,” Cheney revealed in his memoir. “If the
result was confirmed, it could mean the president and I, members of the
White House staff, and probably scores of others who had simply been in
the vicinity had been exposed to one of the most lethal substances known to
man.” Botulinum toxin was a deadly neurotoxin for which there was no
reliable antidote or cure. It kills by attacking the central nervous system and
causing death by paralysis.
The positive hits had come from the BASIS sensor system that had been
installed throughout the White House complex shortly after the Dark Winter
bioterrorism attack war game. Livermore and Los Alamos had promoted the
BASIS system as being able to deliver “a virtually zero rate of false-
positive detection.” Cheney also knew that “a single gram of botulinum
toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, can kill a million people.” He needed
to call the president but decided to have Scooter Libby get a second set of
test results first.
In the interim, the vice president stuck to his schedule. He met with
Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki for a briefing on New
York City affairs. He toured ground zero. He shook hands with recovery
workers who were sorting through rubble at the crash site. When he
returned to his hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria later that afternoon, he
discovered Libby waiting for him there, with very bad news. “He told me
there had been two positive hits for botulinum toxin on one of the White
House sensors,” wrote Cheney. More tests were being run and results would
be available at noon the following day. It was time to call the president.
Cheney was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the annual
Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner that evening in the Waldorf
Astoria ballroom. Wearing white tie and tails, he sat down in front of a
secure video screen in his hotel room and called President Bush, who was
attending a summit in Shanghai. Accompanying the president were Colin
Powell and Condoleezza Rice. All three had been in the White House
complex; all three could have been exposed to botulinum toxin.
“Mr. President,” Vice President Cheney said, “the White House
biological detectors have registered the presence of botulinum toxin, and
there is no reliable antidote. We and many others may well have been
exposed,” Cheney recalled telling the president.
President Bush turned to Condoleezza Rice, who was standing beside
him in Shanghai. In her memoir, Rice recalls hearing the president say, “Go
call Hadley and find out what the hell is going on.” Stephen Hadley was the
president’s deputy national security advisor. Hadley told Rice that lab mice
were now being tested.
“Let’s put it this way,” said Hadley, who could also have been exposed.
“If the mice are feet down tomorrow, we are fine. If they’re feet up, we’re
toast.”
In New York City, Vice President Cheney headed downstairs. During his
speech, he talked about the bravery, generosity, and grace shown to him by
average Americans digging through the rubble at ground zero that day. “I
promised to deliver justice to the people responsible,” Cheney said. He
talked about the dilemma that America would now face with this new
enemy, the terrorist. “We are dealing here with evil people who dwell in the
shadows, planning unimaginable violence and destruction,” he said. The
banquet hall at the Waldorf Astoria erupted into resounding applause.
The following day, the results of the BASIS sensor system were
returned. The $50 million system had delivered a false positive. There had
been no biological weapons attack. No terror strike on the White House. If
knowledge is the most strategically significant resource in a hyper-turbulent
environment, scientists at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national
laboratories had failed. Still, in his 2003 State of the Union address,
President Bush announced he was “deploying the nation’s first early
warning network of sensors to detect biological attack.” BASIS sensors
would now be set up in more than thirty cities around the country, at an
initial cost of roughly $30 million, with another $1 million per city, per
year, estimated in maintenance costs. Between 2003 and 2008, newspapers
reported more than fifty false alarms from BASIS sensors in public spaces.
The full details of BASIS, including its locations, operational costs, and
precise number of false positives, as well as emergency response efforts, if
any, to those false positives, remain classified.
But in Shanghai, in October 2001, Condoleezza Rice happily received
the good news.
“Feet down, not up,” she told President Bush. “The President smiled,”
she wrote in her memoirs. “I’m sure the Chinese thought it was some kind
of coded message.”
The president, vice president, secretary of state, national security
advisor, and others had dodged a bullet. A photo editor, two postal workers,
a female hospital employee, and a ninety-four-year-old woman from
Connecticut were dead from anthrax. As of 2014, the mystery of who killed
them has yet to be definitively solved.

At the end of October, ABC News reported that the anthrax mailed to
Senator Daschle’s office could be tied to the Iraqi bioweapons program
through an additive called bentonite. The White House denied the link. A
few nights later, ABC News reported that the ringleader of the 9/11
hijackers, Mohammed Atta, “had met at least once with a senior Iraqi
intelligence agent in Prague.” The report kicked off a firestorm of related
news articles, including some that confirmed the story of the Iraq link, some
that discredited the story, and some that blamed the CIA for engaging in a
disinformation campaign.
Congress asked DARPA director Anthony Tether to brief the House
Armed Services Committee on efforts currently being undertaken by
DARPA with regard to its Biological Warfare Defense Program. Tony
Tether had been DARPA director for only three months when the airplanes
hit the buildings, but he had decades of experience in the Department of
Defense and the CIA. Tether had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from
Stanford University, and a long career at the Pentagon and in the
intelligence world. Since 1978 he had been working in both intelligence and
defense, serving as the director of the national intelligence office in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1978 to 1982, and from 1982 to
1986 as the director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, the agency’s
liaison to the CIA. The specifics of his job remain classified, but as an
indication of his significance, at the end of his tenure in 1986, Director of
Central Intelligence Bill Casey honored him with the National Intelligence
Medal, while his superior at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger, presented him with the Department of Defense Civilian
Meritorious Service Medal.
In information submitted to Congress, Tether categorized biological
weapons defense according to what DARPA considered to be the five stages
of a biological weapons attack, in chronological order. “Prior to a BW
attack” involved the development of vaccines. “During an attack” focused
on cutting-edge sensor and biosurveillance technologies. “In the minutes
and hours after an attack” included developing immediate ways to protect
people. “In the hours and days after an attack” involved more efficient ways
to get information out to first responders and better management of medical
systems. “In the days and perhaps years after an attack” focused on
decontamination technology, Tether said.
In February 2002, just four months after the first U.S. murder by
anthrax, Congress approved a $358 million budget for biological warfare
defense for the next year, nearly three times what it had been the year
before the 9/11 terror attacks. That same month, George Mason University
announced it would be building a Center for Biodefense “to address issues
related to biological terrorism and the proliferation of biological weapons.”
A press release stated, “Kenneth Alibek, former first deputy chief of the
civilian branch of the Soviet Union’s Offensive Biological Weapons
Program, and Charles Bailey, former commander for Research at the U.S.
Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” would serve as
executive administrators of the center. “Alibek was now in charge of finding
solutions to problems he helped create,” says Michael Goldblatt, who
oversaw some of Alibek’s work for DARPA.
In May, DARPA awarded Alibek’s company an additional $2 million to
create “prototype biodefense products,” the silver bullet DARPA was still
looking for. Alibek spoke to reporters about the exciting prospects that lay
ahead. The goal was to create a product that could “enhance the body’s
innate immune response against a wide variety of biological weapons
threats,” Alibek said. “Our research continues to yield promising results,
and we are pleased that DARPA has awarded us additional funding to
develop advanced protection against biological threat agents.” Ken Alibek
also used the opportunity to talk about future business prospects for his new
corporate ventures. “At the appropriate time, our Company intends to
explore potential opportunities to license its developing technology to, or
seek a joint venture with, a partner to complete the necessary clinical trials,
regulatory approvals, and the development, manufacturing, and marketing
of any future products that might arise from this work.” Some months later,
another company run by Alibek began selling pills on the Internet with
labels that read “Dr. Ken Alibek’s Immune System Support Formula.” The
pills claimed to help the body’s innate immune system defend against a
wide variety of harmful pathogens. They could be purchased for $60 a
bottle at a website called DrAlibek.com.
In government, it is a generally accepted rule that someone has to take the
blame when government fails. For DARPA, whose job it was to safeguard
the nation from technical surprise, there was no clear mission failure on
9/11, at least not in the public eye. The weapons used by the terrorists were
fixed-blade utility knives, invented during the Great Depression. The flint
knife, prehistory’s utility blade, is roughly 1.4 million years old. Al Qaeda
used American technology against America, hijacking four fully fueled
aircraft and successfully piloting three of them, as missiles, to their targets.
It is believed that Al Qaeda spent less than $500,000 planning and
executing the attacks.
The public’s perception, generally, was that the intelligence community
was to blame for 9/11, a surprise attack that rivaled Pearl Harbor in its death
toll and future consequence. Most fingers were pointed at the CIA and the
FBI. Because the National Security Agency maintained a lower public
profile at the time, it was not held accountable to the same degree. History
has made clear, however, that errors by the NSA were indelible. On
September 10, 2001, it intercepted from terrorists, already being monitored
by the NSA, two messages in Arabic.
“The match is about to begin,” read one message.
“Tomorrow is zero hour,” read the other message.
The sentences were not translated until September 12. “In fact these
phrases [might] have not been translated with such a quick turnaround had
the horrific events not happened,” in-house DARPA literature notes.
DARPA is responsible for much of the technology behind advanced
information collection as well as real-time translation capabilities. In the
wake of 9/11, DARPA rapidly began to advance these technologies, and
others related to them, so its partner, NSA, could do its job better.
Despite all the advanced technology at the disposal of the U.S.
government, the national security establishment did not see the September
11, 2001, terrorist attack coming. Nor was its arsenal of advanced
technology able to stop the attack once it began. As a consequence, the
American military establishment would begin a hyper-militarization not
seen since the explosion of the 15-megaton Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb on
Bikini Atoll in 1954.
 CHAPTER TWENTY

Total Information Awareness

The nuclear physicist John Poindexter is rarely noted for his prowess in
nuclear physics. Instead he is almost always referred to as the retired Navy
admiral and former national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan
during the Iran-Contra affair who was convicted on five felony counts of
lying to Congress, destroying official documents, and obstructing
congressional investigations.
The day after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Poindexter was pulling his car
out of the quiet suburban subdivision where he lived outside Washington,
D.C., when he was struck with an idea for DARPA. He had worked for the
agency before, as a defense contractor in the late 1990s. By then
Poindexter’s Iran-Contra notoriety had died down, and he was able to return
to public service. A U.S. court of appeals had reversed all five of
Poindexter’s felony convictions on the grounds that his testimony had been
given under a grant of immunity.
In the decade after the scandal, Poindexter put his focus into computer
technology. Because he had retained his full Navy pension after Iran-
Contra, he did not have to look for a job. Fascinated by computers,
Poindexter began teaching himself computer programming languages, and
soon he could write code. In 1995, through a defense contractor called
Syntek, Poindexter began working on a DARPA project called Genoa. The
goal of Genoa was to develop a complex computer system—an intelligent
machine—designed to reach across multiple classified government
computer databases in order to predict the next man-made cataclysmic
event, such as a terrorist attack. Poindexter, a seafaring man, especially
liked Genoa’s name. A genoa is a boat’s jib, or foresail, typically raised on a
sailboat to increase speed.
Poindexter’s boss on the project, the person in charge of all “next-
generation” information-processing ideas at DARPA in the late 1990s, was
a man named Brian Sharkey. After a little more than a year working on the
project, Syntek’s contract ended. Poindexter and Sharkey had gotten along
well during phase one of Genoa and kept each other’s contact information.
The way Poindexter tells the story, on the morning after the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, he was struck with the idea that the time had come to revitalize the
Genoa program. He pulled his car to the side of the road and began
scrolling through contacts on his cell phone until he found Brian Sharkey’s
number.
“That’s funny,” Poindexter recalls Sharkey saying to him. “I was just
thinking about calling you.”
Both men agreed that it was time to accelerate the Genoa program.
Sharkey had left DARPA to serve as senior vice president and chief
technology officer for the California-based defense contracting giant
Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC. With so many
surveillance-related defense contracts on its roster, SAIC was often jokingly
referred to as NSA West. Another one of SAIC’s prime clients was
DARPA. Brian Sharkey knew the current DARPA director, Tony Tether,
quite well.
“We need to talk to Tony,” Poindexter told Sharkey.

In Washington, Tony Tether was well regarded as a top innovator. Someone

who saw the future and made it happen. When he was serving as director of
DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, back in the 1980s, he advocated
maximizing technology for surveillance capabilities. Now, two decades
later, these kinds of technologies had advanced exponentially. In this post-
9/11 environment, Tether’s enthusiasm for, and experience in, surveillance
collection would prove invaluable in his role as DARPA director.
Brian Sharkey and Tony Tether knew each other from SAIC. In the
1990s, after leaving government service for defense contracting, Tether had
served as vice president of SAIC in its advanced technology sector. Now
Sharkey was a senior vice president at SAIC. During the September 12
phone call between Sharkey and Poindexter, the men agreed that Sharkey
would set up a meeting with Tether to discuss Genoa.
Since 1995, DARPA had spent roughly $42 million advancing the
Genoa concept under the Information Systems Office. The program was
part of a concept DARPA now called Total Information Awareness (TIA).
But the existing Genoa program was nowhere near having the
“intelligence” necessary to recognize another 9/11-style plot. Poindexter
and Sharkey aimed to change that.
The following month, on October 15, 2001, Sharkey and Tether met at a
seafood restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, Gaffney’s Oyster and Ale House,
to discuss Total Information Awareness. Tether embraced the idea, so much
so that he asked Brain Sharkey to leave his job at SAIC and return to
DARPA to lead the new effort. But Sharkey did not want to leave his job at
SAIC. The corporation was one of the largest employee-owned companies
in America, and Sharkey had accumulated considerable stock options. If he
were to return to government service, he would have to let go of profit
participation. John Poindexter was the man who should serve as the director
of the Total Information Awareness program, Sharkey said. SAIC could act
as DARPA’s prime contractor.
A few days later, Sharkey and Poindexter went sailing on Poindexter’s
yacht, Bluebird, to discuss next steps. Poindexter later recalled feeling
excited. He had big ideas. He believed he knew exactly how extensive this
program had to be to succeed. Poindexter knew what the subtitle of the
program should be. In his pitch to Tether, his opening slide would read “A
Manhattan Project on Countering Terrorism.” Artificially intelligent
computers were the twenty-first century’s atomic bomb.
Tether had Poindexter come to his office at DARPA and present the slide
show. Poindexter’s background was in submarines, and there was an
analogy here, he told Tether. Submarines emit sound signals as they move
through the sea. The 9/11 hijackers had emitted electronic signals as they
moved through the United States. But even if the NSA had been listening,
its system of systems was not intelligent enough to handle the load in real
time. The hijackers had rented apartments, bought airplane tickets,
purchased box cutters, received emails and wire transfers. All of this could
have been looked at as it was happening, Poindexter said. Terrorists give
out signals. Genoa could find them. It would take enormous sums of time
and treasure, but it was worth it. The 9/11 attacks were but the opening
salvo, the White House had said. The time was right because the climate
was right. People were terrified.
Tony Tether agreed. If John Poindexter was willing to run the
Information Awareness Office, DARPA would fund it. In January 2002 the
Information Awareness Office was given the green light to proceed, with a
colossal initial start-up budget of $145 million and another $183.3 million
earmarked for the following year. John Poindexter was now officially
DARPA’s Total Information Awareness czar.

“In our view, information technology is a weapon,” says Bob Popp, the
former deputy director of the Information Awareness Office, John
Poindexter’s number two. Popp is a computer scientist with a Ph.D. in
electrical engineering, a prolific author and patent holder. He rides a
motorcycle and is an active participant in and lifetime member of HOG, or
Harley Owners Group. His areas of expertise include anti-submarine
warfare and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). When he
was a younger man, Popp welded Trident nuclear submarines for General
Dynamics.
Before 9/11, “information technology was a huge unexploited weapon
for analysts,” Popp says. “They were using it in a very limited capacity.
There were a lot of bad guys out there. No shortage of data. Analysts were
inundated with problems and inundated with data. The basic hypothesis of
TIA was to create a system where analysts could be effective. Where they
were no longer overwhelmed.”
It was Bob Popp’s job as John Poindexter’s deputy to oversee the setting
up of multiple programs under the TIA umbrella. The Evidence Extraction
and Link Discovery program (EELD) was a big office with a large support
staff. Its function was to suction up as much electronic information about
people as possible—not just terror suspects but the general American
public. The electronic information to be gathered was to include individual
people’s phone records, computer searches, credit card receipts, parking
receipts, books checked out of the library, films rented, and more, from
every military and civilian database in the United States, with the hope of
determining who were the terrorists lurking among ordinary Americans.
The primary job of the EELD office was to create a computer system so
“intelligent” it would be able to review megadata on 285 million people a
day, in real time, and identify individuals who might be plotting the next
terror event.
In 2002, DARPA senior program manager Ted Senator explained how
EELD would work. The plan, Senator said, was to develop “techniques that
allow us to find relevant information—about links between people,
organizations, places, and things—from the masses of available data,
putting it together by connecting these bits of information into patterns that
can be evaluated and analyzed, and learning what patterns discriminate
between legitimate and suspicious behavior.” It was not an easy task. Using
the needle-in-the-haystack metaphor, Senator explains just how hard it was.
“Our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of
needle pieces. This is much harder,” he points out, “than simply finding
needles in a haystack: we have to search through many stacks, not just one;
we do not have a contrast between shiny, hard needles and dull, fragile hay;
we have many ways of putting the pieces together into individual needles
and the needles into groups of needles; and we cannot tell if a needle or
group is dangerous until it is at least partially assembled.” So, he says, “in
principle at least, we must track all the needle pieces all of the time and
consider all possible combinations.”
Because terrorists do not generally act as lone wolves, a second program
would be key to TIA’s success, namely, the Scalable Social Network
Analysis. The SSNA would monitor telephone calls, conference calls, and
ATM withdrawals, but it also sought to develop a far more invasive
surveillance technology, one that could “capture human activities in
surveillance environments.” The Activity Recognition and Monitoring
program, or ARM, was modeled after England’s CCTV camera.
Surveillance cameras would be set up across the nation, and through the
ARM program, they would capture images of people as they went about
their daily lives, then save these images to massive data storage banks for
computers to examine. Using state-of-the-art facial recognition software,
ARM would seek to identify who was behaving outside the computer’s pre-
programmed threshold for “ordinary.” The parameters for “ordinary”
remain classified.
Facial recognition software expert Jonathan Phillips was brought on
board to advance an existing DARPA program called Human Identification
at a Distance. Computer systems armed with algorithms for the faces of up
to a million known terrorists could scan newly acquired surveillance video,
captured through the ARM program, with the goal of locating a terrorist
among the crowd.
TIA was a many-tentacled program. The problem of language barriers
had also long been a thorn in the military’s side. DARPA needed to develop
computer-based translation programs in what it called “the war languages,”
Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Dari, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian
dialects. Charles Wayne was brought on board to run two programs, TIDES
and EARS, to develop computer programs that could convert foreign
languages to English-language text. There would be a war games effort
inside TIA, too, called War Gaming the Asymmetric Environment, and led
by Larry Willis. In this office, terrorism experts would create fictional terror
networks, made up of individual characters, like avatars, who would begin
plotting fake terror attacks. The point was to see if TIA’s myriad of
surveillance programs, working in concert, could identify the avatar-
terrorists as they plotted and planned. To further this effort, a group inside
the group was formed, called the Red Team, headed by former DARPA
director Stephen Lukasik. Red teaming is a role-playing exercise in which a
problem is examined from an adversary’s or enemy’s perspective.
Finally there was Genoa II, the centerpiece of the program, the software
that would run the system of information systems. Its director, Thomas P.
Armour, described Genoa II as a “collaboration between two
collaborations.” One group of collaborators were the intelligence analysts,
whose goal was “sensemaking,” Armour said. These collaborators had the
tricky job of collaborating among themselves, across multiple
organizations, including the CIA, NSA, DIA, and others. It was the job of
the sensemakers to construct models or blueprints of how terrorists might
act. This group would then collaborate with “policymakers and operators at
the most senior level,” who would evaluate the intelligence analysts’ work
and develop options for a U.S. response to any given situation. Genoa II,
Armour told his team, “is all about creating the technology to make these
collaborations possible, efficient, and effective.”
To Armour, there was hardware, meaning the machinery, software,
meaning the computer programs, and wetware, meaning the human brain.
Armour saw the wetware as the weakest link. The challenge was that
intelligence agencies historically preferred to keep high-target terrorist
information to themselves. “The ‘wetware’ whose limitations I mentioned
is the human cognitive systems,” Armour told defense contractors who
were bidding on the job. “Its limitations and biases are well documented,
and they pervade the entire system, from perception through cognition,
learning, memory, and decision,” Armour told his team. In this system of
systems, which was based on collaborative efforts between humans and
their machines, Armour believed that the humans represented the point
where the system was most vulnerable. “These systems,” said Armour,
referring to human brains, “are the product of evolution, optimized by
evolution for a world which no longer exists; it is not surprising then that,
however capable our cognitive apparatus is, it too often fails when
challenged by tasks completely alien to its biological roots.”
Unlike so many of the new technologists working on TIA, Tom Armour
was a Cold Warrior. He was also a former spy. After flying combat missions
during Vietnam as a U.S. Air Force navigator on the AC-119K gunship, he
began a long career with the CIA, starting in 1975. Armour was an expert
on Soviet nuclear weapons systems, missile technology, and strategic
command and control. At the CIA, under the Directorate of Intelligence, he
served as chief of computing and methodological support, bringing the
agency into the twenty-first century with computers for intelligence
analysis.
But when the Berlin Wall came down, Armour saw new threats cropping
up everywhere. “People then were talking giddily about a ‘peace
dividend,’” he told a group of DARPA technologists at a conference in
2002, but reminded the audience that his former boss at the CIA, James
Woolsey, knew better. “Woolsey pointedly said that while the ‘big bad bear’
was gone, the woods were still filled with lots of poisonous snakes,”
Armour said. The terrorists had since emerged as the new snakes, “what we
now call the asymmetric threat.” Armour believed that the job of the
twenty-first-century intelligence analyst was to find the snakes, using
computers.
Humans were frail. As technical collectors, they could be manipulated
either by assets trying to give them bad information or by their own biases
and mental blocks. This weakness “has long been called ‘deception and
denial’ in intelligence circles,” Armour said. Genoa II’s predecessor, Genoa,
was about making the machines smarter. Each machine had been overseen
by what was called a “Lone Ranger,” a single intelligence analyst. With
Genoa II, Armour wanted to get “smarter results.” He wanted “cognitive
amplification.” Smarter machines and smarter humans.
Armour created what he called “bumper sticker phrases” that captured
Genoa II’s automation goals, phrases that read like words George Orwell
could have written in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four because
they sounded like doublethink. “Read everything without reading
everything,” Armour told Genoa II analysts. “There is too much that must
be read to actually read.” Armour also said that TIA analysts would need to
“begin the trip to computers as servants, to partners, to mentors,” meaning
that analysts needed first to view their computers as assistants and
eventually view them as advisors. Ultimately, Genoa II’s computers would
know more than a human could know.
As John von Neumann had predicted on his deathbed in “The Computer
and the Brain,” the “artificial automaton” would one day be able to think.
TIA was a system of information systems that could read everything
without reading everything. It was a system of systems that could observe
and then connect everything the human eye could not see.

On January 14, 2002, the Information Awareness Office opened its doors,
temporarily, on the fourth floor of the DARPA office building at 3710 North
Fairfax Drive in Arlington, while John Poindexter worked to secure an
independent facility where TIA analysts could settle permanently. One of
the first people Poindexter would visit was Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. Over lunch in Rumsfeld’s office in the Pentagon, the two men
discussed TIA. It was agreed that DARPA would build the system, then
help its customers get the system up and running. The customers were the
CIA, FBI, and NSA, but also the service agencies. Tether felt that the best
place to house the new Total Information Awareness system was at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, a division of the Army’s Intelligence and Security
Command, INSCOM.
Tony Tether set up a meeting with INSCOM’s commanding officer,
Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. At Fort Belvoir, Alexander ran his
operations out of a facility known as the Information Dominance Center,
with an unusual interior design that deviated significantly from traditional
military decor. The Information Dominance Center had been designed by
Academy Award–winning Hollywood set designer Bran Ferren to simulate
the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, from the Star Trek television and film
series. There were ovoid-shaped chairs, computer stations inside highly
polished chrome panels, even doors that slid open with a whooshing sound.
Alexander would sit in the leather captain’s chair, positioned in the center of
the command post, where he could face the Information Dominance
Center’s twenty-four-foot television monitor. General Alexander loved the
science-fiction genre. INSCOM staff even wondered if the general fancied
himself a real-life Captain Kirk.
An arrangement was made between DARPA and INSCOM whereby
General Alexander gave John Poindexter and his team an area to work out
of inside the Information Dominance Center. “The initial TIA experiment
was done at INSCOM, worldwide command,” says Bob Popp. “The plan
was to have attachments, or nodes, across the world. Multiple agencies
would work on multiple problems.” Poindexter began inviting other
agencies to work alongside TIA as collaborators. One by one they joined,
including the CIA, NSA, and FBI.
Poindexter believed that another attack was already well along in its
planning phase. It could happen at any time. Many other senior officials
were motivated by the same fear.
“We felt as if we were really battling terrorism,” says Popp. “The
network grew. We set up another node in Germany.” The future of TIA
seemed bright. Then suddenly, as Bob Popp recalls, “we had our own battle,
with Congress.”

In August 2002, John Poindexter unveiled TIA at the DARPATech

conference in Anaheim, California. This technology conference marked the
beginning of the program’s public end. In November 2002, a New York
Times headline read “Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek
at Personal Data of Americans.” Reporter John Markoff wrote that the
Department of Defense had initiated a massive computer-based domestic
surveillance program, “a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal
information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe—including
the United States… without a search warrant.” Markoff named DARPA as
the agency in charge, and reported that the computer system was called
Total Information Awareness. The logo of the Information Awareness
Office became the focus of much ire. It featured the Eye of Providence icon
—the same as the one on the back of the dollar bill—casting a searchlight
over a globe. DARPA’s Latin motto, Scientia Est Potentia, or “Knowledge
Is Power,” fueled its own comparisons to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four.
Several days later, columnist William Safire wrote about TIA, focusing
on the fact that John Poindexter, of the Iran-Contra affair scandal, was its
director. The Pentagon had given a “disgraced admiral… a $200 million
budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans,” Safire
wrote, listing the myriad of electronic transactions a person makes in any
day, week, or year: “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every
magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web
site you visit and e-mail you send or receive.” If DARPA got its way, the
TIA program would be able to monitor them all. “This is not some far-out
Orwellian scenario,” Safire wrote. “It is what will happen to your personal
freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented
power he seeks.”
When Safire’s column ran, TIA’s existence had been a matter of public
knowledge for seven months but no one had paid much attention to it. In the
thirty days after Safire’s column appeared, there were 285 stories about
TIA, the majority of which were overwhelmingly negative. Many of the
articles focused on the $200 million figure cited by Safire. In a press
conference on November 20, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition,
Logistics and Technology Edward “Pete” Aldridge stated that the budget for
the TIA system was $10 million through the 2003 fiscal year. This was
highly inaccurate. According to records from the Defense Technical
Information Center comptroller’s office, the actual budget for the
Information Awareness Office through fiscal year 2003 was $586.4 million.
The true numbers had been concealed inside other DARPA Research,
Development, Test and Evaluation budgeting. Although the numbers
controversy wouldn’t be revealed for months, the privacy concerns took
center stage.
 Americans wanted answers. Lawmakers sent a list of questions for
DARPA. John Poindexter was sent to Capitol Hill, where he was expected
to clarify details about TIA to roughly fifty members of Congress and their
staff. Bob Popp went too. “Me, Poindexter, Tony [Tether], and our Hill
liaison went to the Hill to brief the House and Senate,” Popp recalled in
2014. Their meeting with the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence “went well,” Popp says. “Questions, answers, fine.” Then they
moved on to the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
At the Senate, Poindexter began his testimony with a background of his
own personal history, starting with his early education at a military
academy. After roughly fifteen minutes, a Senate staffer shouted out, “Hey,
when are you going to start talking about the reason you’re here?”
“Poindexter said, ‘If you’ll just give me a chance—’” Popp recalls.
At which point, Poindexter was interrupted by another staffer.
“What’s all this invasion of privacy!” someone else yelled.
Popp says, “John Poindexter was polite, but stern.”
“Get to the data mining!” the staffer yelled, which infuriated Poindexter.
The staffer shouted, “We want answers now!”
Which is when John Poindexter lost his composure. “Will you sit
down!” he shouted back, far too loudly. Then, “I’m not going to let you
drive the agenda!”
Poindexter gave the rest of his presentation, but word of what had
happened was already making its way back to the Pentagon. It was the
beginning of the end of TIA. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was
brought into the loop. What was DARPA to do? Rumsfeld issued an order.
John Poindexter was not to speak to anyone. No interviews with anyone
from Congress. No interviews with the press.
Poindexter’s second fall from grace happened quickly. With him went
the program, at least as far as the public was told. A multitude of newspaper
articles generated a further wave of public outcry, including over the fact
that the Pentagon had allocated a quarter of a billion dollars for TIA
through 2005. Poindexter was portrayed as a villain and DARPA was cast
as a surveillance machine.
A reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld about TIA. “I don’t know much
about it,” Rumsfeld answered. Poindexter “explained to me what he was
doing at DARPA,” he said, “but it was a casual conversation. I haven’t been
briefed on it; I’m not knowledgeable about it. Anyone who is concerned
ought not be.” When asked about Poindexter the man, Rumsfeld said he
didn’t “remember him much.” Rumsfeld told the reporter that, as was often
the case with the American public, there was far too much “hype and
alarm.” Of the surveillance program Rumsfeld said, “Anyone with any
concern ought to be able to sleep well tonight.” TIA was a research
program, he clarified, not an intelligence-gathering operation.
In the wake of the scandal, the Total Information Awareness program
was briefly renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness program, but the
public controversy did not die down. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld made it clear that John Poindexter would resign or be fired.
Ultimately, Poindexter offered his resignation to Tony Tether and told
reporters he was leaving DARPA and looking forward to spending more
time sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. Secretary Rumsfeld then went back to
making plans to invade Iraq.
Months later, in the fall of 2003, Congress eliminated funding for the
Total Information Awareness program, saying it was “concerned about the
activities of the Information Awareness Office.” The House and Senate
jointly directed “that the Office be terminated immediately.”
But “the [TIA] programs did not end,” Bob Popp explained in 2014.
Instead, many of the clandestine electronic surveillance programs were
classified and transferred to NSA, DHS, CIA, and the military services.
Program names were changed. Certain members of Congress were cleared
to know about some of them, but not all of them. Major elements of
DARPA’s Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) and Genoa II
programs, including the physical nodes that already existed at INSCOM and
in Germany, were folded into a classified NSA system called PRISM—a
massive covert electronic surveillance and data-mining program that would
create an international uproar in 2013 after NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden leaked thousands of pages of classified documents to the press.
Some DARPA programs with public faces were transferred to the
Department of Homeland Security, including the Computer Assisted
Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), Activity Recognition and
Monitoring (ARM), and Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID).
These programs, managed by the Office of Biometric Identity Management
and the TSA, oversaw identity recognition software systems at airports and
borders, and in public transportation systems and other public spaces.
For use abroad, other TIA programs were transferred to the Army for its
Biometrically Enabled Intelligence programs, meant ultimately to collect
biometrics on foreign individuals using eye scans, fingerprint scans, and
facial scans. And the CIA initiated a program called Anonymous Entity
Resolution, based on TIA’s Scalable Social Network Analysis (SSNA),
examining links between individuals through electronic systems like ATM
withdrawals and hotel reservations.
For use in future war zones, DARPA recycled some of the most invasive
TIA surveillance and data-mining technologies into a program designed for
video collection, pattern analysis, and targeting acquisition for use in
military operations in urban terrain. This program was called Combat Zones
That See.

Any future invasion strategy needed a “new strategic context,” according to

Secretary Rumsfeld. Future wars would be fought according to DARPA’s
system of systems concept—advanced weapons platforms linked by a
network of advanced computer systems. In 2003 this could not exactly be
sold to the American people as “Assault Breaker Warfare,” which would
require a paragraph of explanation and sounded dull. Rumsfeld had been
thinking about articulating a new strategic context for the Department of
Defense ever since he took office, and shortly after the 9/11 attacks he
tasked the job of choosing a name to retired vice admiral Arthur Cebrowski,
director of the Office of Force Transformation.
The Office of Force Transformation was an in-house Pentagon think
tank personally created by Rumsfeld in the wake of 9/11. The mandate of
this new office was “to challenge the status quo with new concepts for
American defense to ensure an overwhelming and continuing competitive
advantage.” The name that the Office of Force Transformation came up
with for this new way of waging war was “network-centric warfare.” It was
a phrase DARPA had been using for years, based on its Assault Breaker
concept back in 1974. Soon the whole world would start hearing about
network-centric warfare. When Secretary Rumsfeld presented the
Pentagon’s “Transformation Planning Guidance” to the president in the
winter of 2003, he summed up the way forward as “drawing upon
unparalleled Command, Control, Communications, Computers,
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities.” So
much had changed since the days of command and control.
Arthur Cebrowski was a decorated Navy pilot who had flown 154
combat missions during the Vietnam War. He had also served in Operation
Desert Storm, commanding a carrier air wing, a helicopter carrier, and an
aircraft carrier. He retired from the Navy in August 2001. Regarding this
naming issue, in internal documents sent to Rumsfeld in 2003 Cebrowski
simplified why the concept of network-centric warfare would work. It
offered a “New Theory of War based on information age principles and
phenomena,” Cebrowski wrote. And network-centric warfare offered a
“new relationship between operations abroad and homeland security,”
meaning the lines between homeland security and fighting foreign wars
would become intentionally blurred. Finally, Cebrowski wrote, network-
centric warfare would provide a “new concept/sense of security in the
American citizen.” Cebrowski was an avowed American patriot, and he
believed that everyone else should be too. Network-centric warfare “had
great moral seductiveness,” Cebrowski said.
With the doctrine of network-centric warfare in place, on March 19,
2003, the United States and its allies launched Operation Iraqi Freedom and
invaded Iraq. After the U.S. military completed its so-called “major combat
operations” in just twenty-one days of “shock and awe,” Cebrowski told
PBS how pleased he was. “The speed of that advance was absolutely
unheard of,” he said. He attributed this “very high-speed warfare” to
“network-centric warfare.” He espoused the idea that a war that relied on
advanced technology was a morally superior war. America did not have to
resort to “wholesale slaughter” anymore, Cebrowski said. We did not have
to “kill a very large number of them,” meaning Iraqis, or “maim an even
larger number,” because advanced technology now allowed the Defense
Department to target specific individuals. This, said Cebrowski, was a good
and moral thing.
“There’s a temptation to say that to develop that sense in the minds of an
enemy that they are in fact defeated, you have to kill a very large number of
them, maim an even larger number, destroy a lot of infrastructure and key
elements of their civilization, and then they will feel defeated. I think that’s
wrong,” Cebrowski said. “I think we are confronted now with a new
problem, in a way the kind of problem we always wanted to have, where
you can achieve your initial military ends without the wholesale slaughter.
Because, remember,” he said, “this always cuts two ways. You have a moral
obligation not just to limit your own casualties and casualties of
nonparticipants but also those of the enemy itself. So we’re moving in the
more moral direction, which is appropriate…. We need to come to grips
with this reality.”
History would reveal that Arthur Cebrowski spoke too soon. All the
technology in the world could not win the war against terrorists in Iraq or
Afghanistan. Local populations did not see network-centric warfare and
targeted killing by drones, in their neighborhoods, as morally superior. And
a new wave of terrorist organizations would emerge, form, and terrorize.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

IED War

On May 26, 2003, Private First Class Jeremiah D. Smith, a twenty-five-

year-old soldier from Missouri, was driving in an Army vehicle outside
Baghdad when the convoy he was traveling in came upon a canvas bag
lying in the road. It was Memorial Day, which meant that back in the
United States this was a day to remember the millions of American soldiers
who died while serving in the armed forces. Private Smith had been a proud
member of the U.S. Army for a little over a year.
Three and a half weeks earlier, on May 1, 2003, President George W.
Bush had stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced
that major combat operations in Iraq were over. “In the battle of Iraq, the
United States and our allies have prevailed,” he declared. The invasion,
which began on March 21, had been swift. Baghdad fell on April 9.
Standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier in a dark suit and a red tie (he’d
more memorably arrived on board wearing a flight suit), the president
exuded confidence. A banner behind him, designed by the White House art
department, read “Mission Accomplished.” At one point during his speech,
the president gave the thumbs-up.
Now it was Memorial Day, and Private Smith was heading into
dangerous territory. His convoy was escorting heavy equipment out of
Baghdad, traveling west. Smith was a gunner and was sitting on the
passenger side of the Humvee. As the vehicle approached the canvas bag
lying in the road, not far from the Baghdad International Airport, the driver
had no way of knowing it contained an improvised explosive device, or
IED, and he simply drove over it. As the vehicle passed over the bag, the
device exploded, killing Private Smith. In his death, Smith became the first
American to be killed by an IED in the Iraq war.
The blast could be heard for miles. Twenty-two-year-old Specialist
Jeremy Ridgley was one of the first people to come upon the inferno. “I was
a gunner in the Eighteenth Military Police Brigade,” recalled Ridgley in a
2014 interview. “We were driving about five hundred yards behind, in a
totally separate convoy. The explosion was extremely loud. We’d been
informed that people were dropping things off overpasses, so every time we
went under one, we sped up and came out in a different lane. Someone
threw something at our vehicle, then I heard the explosion. I swung my gun
around. It all happened so fast.” The explosion Ridgley heard was the IED
detonating as Private Smith’s vehicle drove over it.
Ahead of him, Ridgley saw the burning Humvee in the road. Two
bloodied soldiers emerged from the thick black smoke and staggered toward
his vehicle, dazed. “One of the guys was trying to push something up his
arm,” recalls Ridgley, “like he was trying to fix his sleeve. When he got
closer I saw it was skin. Skin was just falling off of his arm.” A second
bloodied soldier followed behind. “He asked me if he had something on his
face,” Ridgley recalls. “Most of his face was missing. It was horrible. He
was horribly, horribly burned.”
Ridgley’s team leader, Sergeant Phillip Whitehouse, ran toward the
burning vehicle. Whitehouse discovered Private First Class Jeremiah Smith
unconscious, trapped inside. “He pulled Smith out. That’s when the vehicle
started to cook off,” Ridgley remembers. “All the ammo inside started to
catch on fire. There were massive explosions going off all around. I caught
some shrapnel. A little burn near my sleeve. I was sitting on the gun
platform thinking, I need to call in a report.”
Ridgley called for a Medevac and remembers looking around. “There
were these Iraqi kids playing soccer in a field,” Ridgley recalls, “and I told
the Medevac the helicopter could land there. Everything seemed like slow
motion.” Ridgley had never seen mortally wounded people before, and he
was having trouble focusing. “The Medevac arrived and the soldiers were
loaded onboard. From the time I called it in until the time the helicopter
took off was about twenty minutes,” recalls Ridgley. “But it sure seemed
like it lasted all day,” he says. “Time stood still.” Later, Jeremy Ridgley
learned that Private First Class Jeremiah Smith had died.
 On May 28, the Department of Defense identified Private Smith as
having been killed in Iraq while supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. The
Pentagon attributed Smith’s death to “unexploded ordnance,” as if what had
killed him had been old or forgotten munitions left lying in the road. Two
weeks later, in an article in the New York Times titled “After the War,” a
Defense Department official conceded that the unexploded ordnance that
killed Smith might have been left there deliberately.

An IED is made up of five components: the explosive, a container, a fuse, a

switch, and a power source, usually a battery. It does not require any kind of
advanced technology. With certain skills, an IED is relatively easy to make.
The primary component of the IED is the explosive material, and after the
invasion, Iraq was overflowing with explosives.
“There’s more ammunition in Iraq than any place I’ve ever been in my
life, and it’s not securable,” General John Abizaid, commander of the U.S.
Central Command (CENTCOM), told the Senate Appropriations
Committee in September 2003. “I wish I could tell you we had it all under
control, but we don’t.”
The month after Private Smith was killed by an IED, the casualty toll
from IED attacks began to climb. In June there were twenty-two incidents.
By August the number of soldiers killed by IEDs in Iraq was greater than
the number of fatalities by direct fire, including from guns and rocket-
propelled grenades. By late 2003, monthly IED fatalities were double that
of deaths by other weapons. In a press conference, General Abizaid stated
that American troops were now fighting “a classical guerrilla-style
campaign” in Iraq. This kind of language had not been used by the Defense
Department since the Vietnam War.
“A new phenomenon [was] at work on the battlefield,” says retired
Australian brigadier general Andrew Smith, who also has a Ph.D. in
political studies. “IEDs caught coalition forces off guard. ‘Surprise’ is not a
word you want to hear on the battlefield.” Smith was one of the first NATO
officers to lead a counter-IED working group for Combined Joint Task
Force 7, in Baghdad. Later, in 2009, Brigadier General Smith oversaw the
work of 350 NATO officials at CENTCOM, all dealing with countering
IEDs. “The sheer volume of unsecured weapons in Iraq was staggering,”
Smith says, “a whole lot of explosives left over from Saddam.” In 2003,
there were an estimated 1 million tons of unsecured explosives secreted
around the country in civilian hands. These were former stockpiles once
controlled by Saddam Hussein’s security forces, individuals who quickly
abandoned their guard posts after the invasion. A videotape shot by a U.S.
Army helicopter crew in 2003 shows the kind of explosive material that
was up for grabs across Iraq. In the footage, an old aircraft hangar is visible,
stripped of its roof and its siding. From the overhead perspective, row after
row of unguarded bombs can be seen. One of the men in the helicopter
says, “It looks like there’s hundreds of warheads or bombs” in there.
The IEDs kept getting more destructive. Three months after Private First
Class Jeremiah Smith was killed, a truck bomb was driven into the United
Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty-two people, including the
UN special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The Pentagon added a
new IED classification to the growing roster. This was called the VBIED, or
vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, soon to be joined by the
PBIED, a person-borne improvised explosive device, or suicide bomber.
When Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for the IEDs, the resounding
psychological effects were profound. Before the invasion, there had been no
Al Qaeda in Iraq.
DARPA’s long-term goals were now subordinated to this immediate
need inundating the Pentagon. Initial counter-IED efforts involved Counter
Radio-Controlled Electronic Warfare (CREW) systems, or jamming
devices, that were installed on the dashboards of Army vehicles and cost
roughly $80,000 each. The triggering mechanism on most IEDs consisted
of simple wireless electronics, including components found in cell phones,
cordless telephones, wireless doorbells, and key fobs. Early jammers were
designed to interrupt the radio signals insurgents relied on to detonate their
IEDs. First dozens, then hundreds of classified jamming systems made their
way to coalition forces in Iraq, with code names like Jukebox, Warlock,
Chameleon, and Duke. At the same time, DARPA worked on a next
generation of jammers, developing technology that could one day locate
IEDs by sensing chemical vapors from the relative safety of a fast-moving
vehicle. The program, called Recognize IED and Report, or RIEDAR,
would work from a distance of up to two miles away. The ideal device
would be able to search 2,700 square meters per second, could be small and
portable, and able to alert within one second of detection. But these were
future plans, and the Pentagon needed ways to counter the IED threat now.
By February 2004, IED attacks had escalated to one hundred per week. The
five hundred jammers already in Iraq were doing only a little good. In June,
General Abizaid sent a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld and Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers, sounding an alarm. The Pentagon
needed what Abizaid called a “Manhattan-like project” to address the IED
problem.

In Washington, Congress put DARPA in the hot seat when, in the spring of
2004, in a research study report for Congress, the concept of network-
centric warfare was taken to task. Congress asked whether the Department
of Defense had “given adequate attention to possible unintended outcomes
resulting from over-reliance on high technology,” with the clear suggestion
being that it had not. The unintended consequence that had Congress most
concerned was the IED, presently killing so many American soldiers in
Iraq. In its report, Congress wondered if, while the Pentagon had been
pursuing “networked communications technology,” the terrorists were
gaining the upper hand by using “asymmetric countermeasures.” Congress
listed five other areas of concern: “(1) suicide bombings; (2) hostile forces
intermingling with civilians used as shields; (3) irregular fighters and close-
range snipers that swarm to attack, and then disperse quickly; (4) use of
bombs to spread ‘dirty’ radioactive material; or (5) chemical or biological
weapons.”
To the press, Arthur Cebrowski claimed that he had been misunderstood.
The so-called godfather of network-centric warfare complained that
Congress was misinterpreting his words. “Warfare is all about human
behavior,” said Cebrowski, which contradicted hundreds of pages of
documents and memos he had sent to Secretary Rumsfeld. “It’s a common
error to think that transformation has a technology focus. It’s one of many
elements,” Cebrowski said. Even the Defense Department’s own Defense
Acquisition University, a training and certification establishment for
military personnel and defense contractors, was confused by the paradox
and sent a reporter from its magazine Defense AT&L to Cebrowski’s office
to clarify. How could the father of network-centric warfare be talking about
human behavior, the reporter asked. “Network-centric warfare is first of all
about human behavior, as opposed to information technology,” Cebrowski
said. “Recall that while ‘a network’ is a noun, ‘to network’ is a verb, and
what we are focusing on is human behavior in the networked environment.”
It seemed as if Cebrowski was stretching to make sense, or at least
resorting to semantics to avoid embarrassing the secretary of defense.
Nowhere in Secretary Rumsfeld’s thirty-nine-page monograph for the
president, a summation of Cebrowski’s vision titled “Transformation
Planning Guidance,” was human behavior mentioned or even alluded to.
While Cebrowski did television interviews addressing congressional
concerns, the Office of Force Transformation added four new slides to its
“Transforming Defense” PowerPoint presentation. One of the two new
slides now addressed “Social Intelligence as a key to winning the peace,”
and the other addressed “Social Domain Cultural Awareness” as a way to
give warfighters a “cognitive advantage.”
On PBS NewsHour, Cebrowski defended network-centric warfare and
again reminded the audience that the United States had, he believed,
achieved operational dominance in Iraq, completing major combat
operations in just twenty-one days. “That speed of advance was absolutely
unheard of,” Cebrowski said. But now, “we’re reminded that warfare is
more than combat, and combat’s more than shooting.” It was about “how do
people behave?” To win the war in Iraq, Cebrowski said, the military
needed to recognize that “warfare is all about human behavior.” And that
was what network-centric warfare was about: “the behavior of humans in
the networked environment… how do people behave when they become
networked?”
If Cebrowski could not convincingly speak of human behavior, he found
a partner in someone who could. Retired major general Robert H. Scales
was a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and recipient of the Silver
Star. As the country sought a solution to the nightmare unfolding in Iraq,
Scales proposed what he called a “culture-centric” solution. “War is a
thinking man’s game,” Scales wrote in Proceedings magazine, the monthly
magazine of the United States Naval Institute. “Wars are won as much by
creating alliances, leveraging nonmilitary advantages, reading intentions,
building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks
that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and
their motivation.” As if reaching back in time to the roundtable discussions
held by JFK’s Special Group and Robert McNamara’s Pentagon, Scales was
talking about motivation and morale.
In 2004, amid the ever-growing IED crisis, Scales proposed to
Cebrowski that the Pentagon needed a social science program to get inside
how the enemy thought. The United States needed to know what made the
enemy tick. Cebrowski agreed. “Knowledge of one’s enemy and his culture
and society may be more important than knowledge of his order of battle,”
Cebrowski wrote in Military Review, a bi-monthly Army journal. The
Office of Force Transformation now publicly endorsed “social intelligence”
as a new warfighting concept, the idea that in-depth knowledge of local
customs in Iraq and elsewhere would allow the Pentagon to better
determine who was friend and who was foe in a given war theater. “Combat
troops are becoming intelligence operatives to support stabilization and
counterinsurgency operations in Iraq,” Cebrowski’s office told Defense
News in April 2004. It was hearts and minds all over again, reemerging in
Iraq.

With chaos unfolding across Iraq, all the agencies and military services
attached to the Pentagon were scrambling to find solutions. At DARPA, the
former deputy director of the Total Information Awareness program, Bob
Popp, got an idea. “I was the deputy director of an office that no longer
existed,” said Popp in a 2014 interview. The Information Awareness Office
had been shut down, and Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness
program was no more, at least as far as the public was concerned. “Some of
the TIA programs had been canceled, some were transitioned to the
intelligence community,” says Popp with an insider’s knowledge available
to few, most notably because, he says, “the transitioning aspects were part
of my job.” Popp was now serving as special assistant to DARPA director
Tony Tether. “Tony and I met once a month,” recalls Popp. “He said, ‘Put
together another program,’ and I did.”
Working with DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, Popp examined
data on what he felt was the most important element of TIA, namely,
“information on the bad guys.” After thinking through a number of ideas,
Popp focused on one. “I started thinking, why do certain areas harbor bad
guys?” He sought counsel within his community of Defense Department
experts, including strategists, economists, engineers, and field commanders.
Popp was surprised by the variety of answers he received, and how
incongruous the opinions were. “They were not all right and they were not
all wrong,” Popp recalls. But as far as harboring bad guys was concerned,
Popp wanted to know who was harboring them, and why. He wanted to
know what social scientists thought of the growing insurgencies in Iraq and
Afghanistan. “I looked around DARPA and realized there was not a single
social scientist to be found,” Popp says, so he began talking to “old-timers”
about his idea of bringing social scientists on board. “Most of them were
cautious. They said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. You should listen to the
commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq.’” Then someone suggested to Bob
Popp that he talk to an anthropologist named Montgomery McFate.
When Bob Popp first spoke with McFate in 2004, she was thirty-eight
years old and worked as a fellow at the Office of Naval Research. Before
that, McFate worked for RAND, where she wrote an analysis of
totalitarianism in North Korean society. A profile in the San Francisco
Examiner describes her as “a punk rock wild child of dyed-in-the-wool
hippies… close-cropped hair and a voice buttery… a double-doc Ivy
Leaguer with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a
nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed.” If her
personal background seemed to separate her from the conservative
organizations she worked for, her ideas made her part of the defense
establishment.
McFate says that in addition to being approached by DARPA’s Bob
Popp for help in social science work, she also received a call from a science
advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hriar S. Cabayan, who was calling from
the war theater. “We’re having a really hard time out here,” McFate
remembers Cabayan saying. “We have no idea how this society works….
Could you help us?”
In 2004 the insurgency in Iraq was growing at an alarming rate.
Criticism of the Pentagon was reaching new heights, most notably as stories
of dubious WMD intelligence gained traction in Congress and around the
world. For the Department of Defense, it was a tall order to locate
anthropologists willing to work for the Pentagon. Academic studies showed
that politically, the vast majority were left-leaning, with twenty registered
Democrats to every one registered Republican. Not only was McFate rare
for an anthropologist, but also she was enthusiastic about the war effort.
Like many Americans, she had been propelled into action by 9/11. In 2004,
Montgomery McFate decided to make it her “evangelical mission” to get
the Pentagon to understand the culture it was dealing with in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
In November 2004, DARPA co-sponsored a conference on
counterinsurgency, or COIN, with the Office of Naval Research. For the
first time since the Vietnam War, DARPA sought the advice of behavioral
scientists to try to put an end to what General Abizaid called a “guerrilla-
style” war. The DARPA conference, called the Adversary Cultural
Knowledge and National Security Conference, was organized by
Montgomery McFate and took place at the Sheraton Hotel in Crystal City,
Virginia. The key speaker was retired major general Robert Scales. From
the podium, the decorated Vietnam War veteran told his audience what he
believed was the key element in the current conflict: winning hearts and
minds. Scales was famous for his role in the battle of Dong Ap Bia, known
as the Battle of Hamburger Hill because the casualty rate was so high,
roughly 70 percent, that it made the soldiers who were there think of it as a
meat grinder.
An entire generation of Vietnam War officers like himself had retired or
were in the process of retiring, Scales told his audience. He and his
colleagues were men who had engaged in battle before the age of “network-
centric warfare.” Vietnam-era officers had been replaced by technology
enthusiasts, Scales said, many of whom “went so far as to claim that
technology would remove the fog of war entirely from the battlefield.”
These were the same individuals who said that one day soon, ground forces
would be unnecessary. That the Air Force, the Navy, and perhaps a future
space force would be fighting wars from above, seated in command centers
far away from the battlefield. Scales said it was time to reject this idea.
Guerrilla warfare was back, he warned. Just like in Vietnam. Technology
did not win against insurgents, Scales said. People did.
“The nature of war is changing,” Scales wrote that same fall in
Proceedings magazine. “Fanatics and fundamentalists in the Middle East
have adapted and adopted a method of war that seeks to offset U.S.
technical superiority with a countervailing method that uses guile,
subterfuge and terror mixed with patience and a willingness to die.” Scales
warned that this new kind of warfare would allow the weaker force, the
insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, to take on the stronger force, the United
States, and win. Since the Israeli War of Independence, Scales wrote,
“Islamic armies are 0 and 7 when fighting Western style and 5 and 0 when
fighting unconventionally against Israel, the United States, and the Soviet
Union.”
The Pentagon moved forward with DARPA’s idea to bring
anthropologists into the Iraq war, and McFate garnered exclusive
permission to interview Marines coming home from Iraq. In July 2005 she
authored a paper in Joint Force Quarterly, a magazine funded by the
Department of Defense, titled “The Military Utility of Understanding
Adversary Culture.” In it she stated clearly her opinion about what had gone
wrong in Iraq. “When the U.S. cut off the hydra’s Ba’thist head, power
reverted to its most basic and stable form—the tribe,” wrote McFate. “Once
the Sunni Ba’thists lost their prestigious jobs, were humiliated in the
conflict, and got frozen out through de-Ba’thification, the tribal network
became the backbone of the insurgency.” As an anthropologist, McFate
believed that “the tribal insurgency is a direct result of our
misunderstanding the Iraqi culture.”
Soldiers in the field had information, McFate said, but it was the wrong
information. “Soldiers and Marines were unable to establish one-to-one
relationships with Iraqis, which are key to both intelligence collection and
winning hearts and minds.” McFate issued a stern warning to her Pentagon
colleagues: “Failure to understand culture would endanger troops and
civilians at a tactical level. Although it may not seem like a priority when
bullets are flying, cultural ignorance can kill.”
McFate was hired to perform a data analysis of eighty-eight tribes and
sub-tribes from a particular province in Iraq, and the behavioral science
program she was proposing began to have legs. At DARPA, Bob Popp was
enthusiastic. “It was not a panacea,” he says, “but we needed nation
rebuilding. The social science community had tremendous insights into
[the] serious problems going on [there], and a sector of DoD was ready to
make serious investments into social sciences,” he says of DARPA’s efforts.
Arthur Cebrowski died of cancer the following year. The Office of Force
Transformation did not last long without him and within a year after his
death closed down, but the social intelligence programs forged ahead.
Montgomery McFate found a new advocate in General David Petraeus,
commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command, Iraq, who
shared her vision about the importance of winning hearts and minds.
Petraeus began talking about “stability operations” and using the phrase
“culture-centric warfare” when talking to the press. He said that
understanding people was likely to become more important in future battles
than “shock and awe and network-centric warfare.”
The DARPA program originally conceived broadly by Bob Popp to
bring social scientists and anthropologists into the war effort was fielded to
the U.S. Army. Montgomery McFate became the lead social scientist in
charge of this new program, now called the Human Terrain System. But
what did that mean? The program’s stated mission was to “counter the
threat of the improvised explosive device,” which seemed strangely at odds
with a hearts and minds campaign. Historically, the battle for hearts and
minds focused on people who were not yet committed to the enemy’s
ideology. The Army’s mission statement made the Human Terrain System
sound as if its social scientists were going to be persuading terrorists not to
strap on the suicide vest or bury the roadside bomb after all. The first year’s
budget was $31 million, and by 2014, the Pentagon would spend half a
billion dollars on the program. Unlike in ARPA’s Motivation and Morale
program during the Vietnam War, the social scientists who were part of the
Human Terrain System program during the war on terror would deploy into
the war zone for tours of six to nine months, embedded with combat
brigades and dressed in full battle gear. Many would carry guns. So many
elements of the program were incongruous, it was easy to wonder what the
intent actually was.
“I do not want to get anybody killed,” McFate told the New Yorker. “I
see there could be misuse. But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these
mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.” Major
General Robert Scales, the keynote speaker at the DARPA
counterinsurgency conference organized by McFate, wrote papers and
testified before Congress in support of this new hearts and minds effort in
Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Armed Forces Journal Scales wrote,
“Understanding and empathy will be important weapons of war.” Then he
made a bold declaration. “World War I was a chemists’ war,” Scales said.
“World War II was a physicists’ war,” and the war on terror was “the social
scientists’ war.”
The program quickly gathered momentum. The Human Terrain System
was a countermeasure against IEDs, and counterinsurgency was back in
U.S. Army nomenclature. In December 2006 the Army released its first
counterinsurgency manual in more than twenty years, Counterinsurgency,
Field Manual, No. 3-24. Lieutenant General David Petraeus oversaw the
manual’s publication. Montgomery McFate wrote one of the chapters.
“What is Counterinsurgency?” the manual asks its readers. “If you have not
studied counterinsurgency theory, here it is in a nutshell: Counterinsurgency
is a competition with the insurgent for the right to win the hearts, minds,
and acquiescence of the population.” As it had done in Vietnam, the COIN
manual stressed nation-building and cultural understanding as key tactics in
winning a guerrilla war.
It was as if the Vietnam War had produced amnesia instead of
experience. On its official website, the U.S. Army erroneously identified the
new Human Terrain System program as being “the first time that social
science research, analysis, and advising has been done systematically, on a
large scale, and at the operational level” in a war.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Combat Zones That See

For the Pentagon, trying to fight a war in an urban center was like fighting
blind. From the chaotic marketplace to the maze of streets, there was no
way of knowing who the enemy was. DARPA believed that superior
technology could give soldiers not just sight but omnipotence. Their new
effort was to create “Combat Zones That See.”
In the second year of the Iraq war, DARPA launched its Urban
Operations Program, the largest and most expensive of the twenty-first
century, as of 2014. “No technological challenges are more immediate, or
more important for the future, than those posed by urban warfare,”
DARPA’s deputy director, Dr. Robert Leheny, told a group of defense
contractors, scientists, and engineers in 2005. “What we are seeing today
[in Iraq] is the future of warfare.” While the short-term priority remained
the IED, the long-term solution required a larger vision. It was less about
locating the bombs than about finding the bomb makers, Tony Tether told
Congress in 2005. With Vietnam came the birth of the electronic fence, with
a goal of sensing and hearing what was happening on the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. With Iraq came the birth of the electronic battle space, with eyes and
ears everywhere—on the ground, in the air, behind doorways and walls.
DARPA needed to bolster its research and development programs to
produce wide-scale surveillance technology for urban combat zones—total
surveillance of an area wherever and whenever it was needed. This was the
plan for Combat Zones That See.
“We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the
activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their
equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to
spot snipers, suicide bombers, or IEDs,” Tether told the Senate Armed
Services Committee. “We need to watch a great variety of things, activities,
and people over a wide area and have great resolution available when we
need it.” Through information technology the United States could gain the
upper hand against the terrorists in Iraq and places like it. “And this is not
just a matter of more and better sensors,” he explained, “but just as
important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the
data.” Director Tether requested half a billion dollars to fund the first phase
of development.
The timing was right. Congress had eliminated funding for DARPA’s
Total Information Awareness programs in the fall of 2003, citing privacy
concerns. But Iraq was a “foreign battle space.” Civil liberties were not at
issue in a war zone. “Closely related to this [network of sensors] are
tagging, tracking, and locating (TT&L) systems that help us watch and
track a particular person or object of interest,” said Tether. “These systems
will also help us detect the clandestine production or possession of weapons
of mass destruction in overseas urban areas.”
DARPA partnered with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA), a dual combat support and intelligence agency that had been
drawing and analyzing military maps since 1939. With the invention of the
satellite, NGA became the lead agency responsible for collecting
“geospatial intelligence,” or GEOINT, interpreting that intelligence, and
distributing its findings to other agencies. The NGA remains one of the
lesser-known intelligence agencies. The majority of its operations are born
classified.
In Iraq, DARPA and the NGA worked together to create high-resolution
three-dimensional maps of most major cities and suspected terrorist
hideouts. The mapping efforts became part of a system of systems, folded
into a DARPA program called Heterogeneous Urban Reconnaissance,
Surveillance and Target Acquisition, or HURT. Entire foreign civilian
populations and their living spaces would be surveyed, observed, and
scrutinized by the U.S. military and American allies so that individual
people—insurgents—could be targeted, then captured or killed. In urban
warfare situations, DARPA knew, terrorists tried to blend in among
heterogeneous crowds, much as the Vietcong had done with trees on the
trail. DARPA’S HURT program was technology designed to deprive
terrorists of people cover.
To implement the terrain-based elements of the HURT program,
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of defense contractors were dispatched to
Iraq, capturing digital imagery along at least five thousand miles of streets
using techniques similar to those used for Google Maps. Many details of the
program remain classified, including which cities were targeted and in what
order, but from Tether’s own testimony Congress learned that thousands of
tiny surveillance cameras and other microsensing devices had been
discreetly mounted on infrastructure, designed to work like England’s
CCTV system. Tether described these surveillance cameras to Congress as
“a network of nonintrusive microsensors.” Unclassified documents from the
NGA described these sensors as including low-resolution video sensors
placed close to the ground to monitor foot traffic; medium-resolution video
sensors placed high on telephone poles to watch motor vehicle and
pedestrian streams, and high-resolution video sensors placed at an
opportune height to capture “skeletal features and anthropometric [body
measurement] cues.” The resulting three-dimensional maps laid the
groundwork for the first of many Combat Zones That See. DARPA program
managers joked that their goal was “to track everything that moves.”
One of the drones in the HURT program was the Wasp, a tiny unmanned
aerial vehicle with a fourteen-inch wingspan and weighing only 430 grams,
or less than a pound. Providing real-time overhead surveillance to soldiers
on the ground, a fleet of Wasps took to the airspace over Iraqi cities and
supply routes. The Wasp was one of the smartest drones in the drone fleet in
2005. Powered by batteries, it flew low and carried an exceptional payload
of technology packed inside, including a color video camera, altimeter,
GPS, and autopilot. The Wasps worked together in the system of systems,
bird-sized drones flying in pairs and in threes.
“The [HURT] system can get reconnaissance imagery that high-altitude
systems can not,” says Dr. Michael A. Pagels, a HURT program manager
who oversaw field operations in Iraq. “It can see around and sometimes into
buildings.” Because of the Wasp’s micro size, some could enter into
buildings undetected, through open windows and doorways, then fly around
inside. The drones’ capabilities were tailored for specific urban combat
needs. If two of the Wasps were taking surveillance photos of the same
area, their advanced software was able to merge the best of both images in a
“paintbrush-like effect,” updating the images captured in near real time,
then sending them to small computers carried by soldiers on the ground. At
a soldier’s behest, the HURT system could pause, rewind, and play back the
Wasp’s surveillance video. This was a key feature if a soldier was hunting a
terror cell planting an IED and needed to know what an area looked like
three minutes, or three hours, before. The HURT system even had several
self-governing features. It knew when one of its drones was low on fuel and
could coordinate refueling times to ensure that surveillance was maintained
by other drones in the system. The Wasp was also designed to recognize
when it was running low on battery power. It could transmit its status to an
operator. “HURT is designed to be agnostic,” Pagels says, meaning that if
one part of the system goes down, the other parts of the system quickly
adapt to compensate for the loss. Mindful of what DARPA called the
“chaotic fog of war and the mind-numbing complexity of the urban
environment,” the system’s creators aimed to achieve “Persistent Area
Dominance.” HURT was part of that domination. With HURT, humans and
machines would work together to maintain situational awareness in
dangerous urban environments.
Giant unmanned blimps were also involved in surveillance, in DARPA’s
Tactical Aerostat program, also called the “unblinking eye.” Originally
designed for U.S. border patrol surveillance, these forty-five-foot-long
airships were tethered to mobile launching platforms by reinforced fiber-
optic cable. The moored balloons were then raised to heights of between
one thousand and three thousand feet. They were designed to be compact
and portable, able to go up and down before insurgents could shoot them
out of the sky. Fiber optics allowed for secure communication between the
classified surveillance systems carried inside the blimps and the operators
on the ground. The blimps were helpful for keeping watch over increasingly
dangerous roads, like Main Supply Route Tampa, a fifteen-mile stretch of
road out of Baghdad, and Route Irish, the deadly road to the Baghdad
International Airport.
Unclassified DARPA literature reveals that sometimes the system of
systems worked. Other times, elements failed. Sandstorms made visibility
difficult, and when that happened, terrorists could sneak in and plant their
IEDs under cover of weather. When the sandstorm cleared, it was often
impossible to distinguish windblown trash from newly planted bombs.
Several of the blimps and drones also either were shot down or crashed on
their own.
But DARPA’s defense contractors and scientists back home persevered.
The system of systems being built by DARPA was long term, and had
ambitious, well-funded goals. The ultimate objective for Combat Zones
That See was to be able to track millions of people and cars as they moved
through urban centers, not just in Iraq but in other urban areas that
potentially posed a threat. Cars would be tracked by their license plates.
Human faces would be tracked through facial recognition software. The
supercomputers at the heart of the system would process all this
information, using “intelligent computer algorithms [to] determine what is
normal and what is not,” just as the Total Information Awareness office
proposed. Combat Zones That See was similar to TIA’s needle-in-a-
haystack hunt. It was bigger, bolder, and far more invasive. But would it
work?
In Combat Zones That See, DARPA’s goal was for artificially intelligent
computers to process what it called “forensic information.” Computers
could provide answers to questions like “Where did that vehicle come
from? How did it get here?” In this manner, the computers could discover
“links between places, subjects and times of activities.” Then, with
predictive modeling capabilities in place, the artificially intelligent
computers would eventually be able to “alert operators to potential force
protection risks and hostile situations.” In other words, the computers
would be able to detect non-normal situations, and to notify the humans in
the system of systems as to which hostile individuals might be planning an
IED or other terrorist attack.

In the winter of 2005, the Washington Post reported that an IED attack
occurred inside Iraq every forty-eight minutes. The primary countermeasure
was still the electronic jamming device, designed to thwart IED activation
by remote control. But these jammers were doing only a little good. In Iraq,
coalition forces were up against an electromagnetic environment that was
totally unpredictable and impossible to control. Iraq had an estimated 27
million people using unregulated cell phones, cordless phones, walkie-
talkies, and satellite phones, and DARPA jammers were failing to keep up.
Jammers were even getting jammed: Al Qaeda bomb makers developed a
rudimentary radio-controlled jamming signal decoder that the Americans
called the “spider.” The U.S. military appeared to be losing control. Despite
DARPA’s lofty goals of Persistent Area Dominance through battle space
surveillance, in reality the Combat Zones That See concept was collecting
lots of information but providing little dominance.
DARPA had dozens of potential solutions in various stages of
development. The Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, at Los Alamos National
Laboratories, was now ready to deploy. As part of the animal sentinel
program, going back to 1999, scientists had been making great progress
training honeybees to locate bombs. Bees have sensing capabilities that
outperform the dog’s nose by a trillion parts per second. Using Pavlovian
techniques, scientists cooled down groups of bees in a refrigerator, then
strapped them into tiny boxes using masking tape, leaving their heads, and
most of their antennae, poking out the top. Using a sugar water reward
system, the scientists trained the bees to use their tongues to “sniff out”
explosives, resulting in a reaction the scientists call a “purr.” After training,
when the scientists exposed the bees to a six-second burst of explosives,
some had learned to “purr.”
DARPA officials traveled to Los Alamos to observe the tests, filming the
event for later review. The bees, transported in little boxes, were tested with
various explosives, including TNT and C4. As a proof-of-concept test, a
van configured like a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or
VBIED, was packed with explosives. Remarkably, the bees were able to
sniff out the explosive material inside, their tiny tongues “purring” when
they came in proximity. The DARPA team was excited by the science and
the prospects. But when the Army learned that DARPA planned to send
bees to Iraq as a countermeasure to the IED threat, they rejected the idea.
The reality of depending on insect performance in a war zone was
implausible, the Army said, so the Los Alamos bees never traveled to Iraq.
On the urban battlefield the casualty rate continued to escalate. An even
more deadly IED emerged, called the explosively formed penetrator, or
EFP. Crafted from a cylindrical firing tube and packed with explosives, the
unique EFP had a front end that was sealed by a concave liner, usually a
copper disk. When the EFP fired, the intense heat of the blast turned the
copper disk into an armor-piercing molten slug, propelling itself forward on
a straight path at 2,000 meters per second, more than double the speed of a
.50 caliber bullet. The EFP was designed with an infrared trigger, which
meant it was largely jammer proof. As for other IEDs, terrorists had created
new measures to defeat U.S. jamming countermeasures. They were now
engineering IEDs to be “victim activated,” triggered by a human foot or
vehicle tire. By 2006, roughly two thousand jammers had been installed on
the dashboards of coalition force vehicles in Iraq. None of these could
defeat the dreaded “victim activated” pressure plate.
DARPA enhanced its body armor efforts through a program called
Hardwire HD Armor. Scientists and engineers developed an entirely new
class of body armor made of a hybrid metallic-composite material that
weighed less than steel armor but could defend better against armor-
piercing rounds. The manufacturing company Hardwire LLC specialized in
building blast-resistant bunkers before it started designing bulletproof vests.
But the IEDs kept coming, increasing in lethality and terror. Armor protects
the chest but leaves limbs, sexual organs, and the brain exposed. All across
Iraq, from Mosul to Najaf, IEDs continued to rip apart soldiers’ bodies,
tearing away their limbs, shredding their penises and testicles, gravely
injuring their brains. The improvised explosive device—a low-technology
bomb constructed for as little as $25—was now responsible for 63 percent
of all coalition force deaths.
By 2006, the Pentagon had spent more than $1 billion on “defeat-the-
IED” technology. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
recommended the creation of a permanent program, and on February 14,
2006, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization
(JIEDDO) was established to deal with the ever-increasing IED threat. With
a first-year budget of $3.6 billion, JIEDDO was described as its own mini–
Manhattan Project. Hundreds more electronic warfare specialists were sent
to the war theater in Iraq. To the explosive ordnance disposal technicians,
called EOD techs, working to defuse bombs in the war theater, there was
something that DARPA was working on that could not get there fast
enough: its force of next-generation robots.

Master Chief Petty Officer Craig Marsh was a Master Explosive Ordnance
Disposal (EOD) technician, assigned to the first ever Combined Joint
Counter-IED Task Force, otherwise known as CJTF Troy. EOD techs are
part of the Special Operations community and frequently operate alongside
Navy Seals, Green Berets, and other Special Warfare units on classified
missions. In 2006, Marsh deployed to Iraq to help establish CJTF Troy as
the Operations (J3) senior noncommissioned officer. Marsh was trained to
respond to and dispose of bombs planted underwater and aboveground,
including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. When he was a
younger sailor, he served on the classified Mark 6 Marine Mammal System
program, swimming with highly trained bottlenose dolphins to detect and
mark the location of underwater intruders and explosives.
In Iraq, the daily work of EOD techs was among the most crucial, most
deadly, and most nerve-racking of jobs. IEDs were ubiquitous. Defusing
these homemade bombs, and collecting intelligence about the bombs and
the bomb makers, made for an extraordinarily stressful workload. In
Hollywood, the efforts of EOD technicians would be made famous by the
Academy Award–winning film The Hurt Locker. In Iraq, the work was
overwhelming, and many of the younger technicians were largely
unprepared for what they were up against. “We were dealing with thousands
and thousands of IEDs,” Craig Marsh recalls. “Ninety-five percent of the
guys had never seen an IED before.”
At forty-two years old, Marsh had nearly twenty years of experience in
the EOD community defusing bombs. In Baghdad, it was his job to oversee
the work of eighty EOD teams spread across Iraq, each composed of two or
three technicians, and he was to coordinate the fragmentary orders
(FRAGOs) from the Multi-National Corps-Iraq three-star generals across
the entire Joint Task Force Troy.
At Task Force Troy, Marsh lived on the fourth floor of the Al Faw
Palace, or Water Place, formerly inhabited by Saddam Hussein and his
entourage. The palace had roughly sixty-two rooms and twenty-nine
bathrooms. It was loaded with garish gold chandeliers and expensive
marble tile. The Al Faw was surrounded by artificial ponds filled with large,
hungry carp, notorious for attacking and devouring ducks that landed on its
shimmering surface. The Americans set up a headquarters here and
renamed the place Camp Victory, Iraq. Combined Joint Task Force Troy
lived inside.
 Over time, Camp Victory would grow larger and come to be encircled in
twenty-seven miles of concrete wall, making it the largest of a total of 505
bases operated by the United States in Iraq. Even Saddam Hussein and his
cousin Ali Hassan al Majeed, known as “Chemical Ali,” lived at Camp
Victory during the war. The two men were imprisoned in a top secret
building on an island in the center of one of the ponds. Accessible only by a
drawbridge, the prison was code-named Building 114. In the mornings,
Marsh would pass by the island on his morning jog.
Task Force Troy was the first operational counter-IED task force in U.S.
military history, and the unit was only a few months old when Marsh
arrived. “In 2006, everyone was still running around with their hair on fire,”
he recalls. “We were still trying to determine who the good guys were and
who the bad guys were.” There were thousands of bombs to defuse. Too
many to count. “All eighty teams would be out in the field, working
eighteen, twenty hours a day. Some guys would clear ten locations, then
come back, then get sent back to the same hole” after another IED had been
planted in it. “There were snipers to deal with. The cost was tremendous,”
Marsh says. Death was commonplace. “It was painful and frustrating.
Within the first couple of months, one of the sailors I was working with was
blown up and killed.”
Another part of Craig Marsh’s job was to coordinate the work between
the teams that were trying to locate bomb makers and the lab technicians
examining evidence. At every location, before and after an IED blast, there
was forensic evidence to collect, a potential means of identifying and
capturing members of local terrorist cells. Task Force Troy worked in
concert with a forensic counter-IED team called the Combined Explosive
Exploitation Cell, or “sexy” (CEXC) for short. CEXC had an electronics
shop and laboratory at Camp Victory where technicians worked around the
clock examining evidence. This was home to some of the most
technologically advanced forensic equipment in the world, including high-
powered microscopes, reflective ultraviolet imaging system fingerprint
scopes, and x-ray photographing machines.
Task Force Troy had access to some sensor technology, but it did not do
much good in the field. “Sensors are great for identifying anomalies at the
bottom of the ocean,” says Marsh. “Technology can be very good for
gathering intelligence. But when it comes to assessing technology, nothing
comes close to an experienced human. The ‘ah-hah’ moments almost
always came from a guy in the lab at CEXC.”
Human intelligence, HUMINT, offered Task Force Troy some of the
best leads in trying to identify who might be building and planting the
IEDs. Task Force Troy teams would go out in the field and talk to locals,
taking paper-and-pen notes. “We’d follow up on these leads,” relates Marsh,
only to discover “we were now dealing with death squads.” For Iraqis,
working with Americans carried a high price. “These guys would kill entire
families just for talking to us. It was brutal. We’d find vans stuffed with
bodies. Villagers who talked to us would wind up dead, blindfolded, left by
the side of the road.” Corpses went unidentified and lay rotting in the streets
because extended family members were afraid to claim the bodies, fearing
reprisal. As the violence swelled, trust disappeared.
The psychological toll grew heavy. Marsh remembers being back at
Camp Victory one night, longing for some kind of a break, when he and a
colleague were watching a training video illustrating how a DARPA robot
could allow first sighting of visible wires and other components of a
partially buried IED. Marsh recalls what he saw. “The robot’s working the
road. Then the robot blows up. The dust clears. Along comes another robot
and it starts working on a second IED in the road.” EOD teams had used
DARPA robots before, “but there were not enough of them to go around,”
says Marsh. “The few robots [we had] were taking a beating due to IED
blasts. DARPA was the momentum behind pushing the much-needed
volume of robots into the hands of those of us who really needed them.”
When Marsh learned more robots were coming to Task Force Troy, “that
was a ‘thank God’ moment,” he recalls.
The workhorse of all the counter-IED robots was DARPA’s Talon robot,
first developed for DARPA by Foster-Miller, Inc., in 1993. The robot was
originally conceived as a counter-mine robot, designed to work in shallow
ocean waters, called the surf zone. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war,
Talon robots were used to remove unexploded munitions. On 9/11, Talon
robots were used on-site at the World Trade Center, searching through the
rubble for survivors. And Talon robots were the first robots used in the war
on terror. They accompanied Special Forces during action against the
Taliban and Al Qaeda on a classified mission in Afghanistan in 2002.
“Talon robots have been in continuous active military duty ever since,”
DARPA literature reports.
Now, a fleet of combat-ready, man-portable Talon robots was finally
ready for battle in Iraq. It was 2006. This generation of Talon was small and
squat, weighing just one hundred pounds. It had a robotic arm and was
mounted on a four-wheeled platform that rolled along on two tank treads.
The robot was operated from a portable control unit through a two-way
radio or a fiber-optic link.
The EOD techs gave the Talons high praise—and human names.
“Sorry for the late report on Gordon the robot,” reads one EOD operator
report. “While I was in direct control of Gordon, 8 deep buried IED’s were
disposed of, 7 houses were cleared of possible HBIEDs [house-borne
improvised explosive devices], 13 Unexploded Ordinances (UXO) found in
houses that were to be placed as IEDs, 18 landmines. Approximately 300
lbs of HME [homemade explosive] was disposed of.”
Several days after that report, Gordon the robot was launched out the
back of an EOD truck and was searching an intersection for a deeply buried
IED when a bomb detonated approximately ten feet from where Gordon
was working. “Still functioning, he continued to search the area,” the EOD
tech reported. “On the opposite side of the road, another IED was detonated
and had turned him upside down. Everything was still working until a fire
fight started. Gordon took 7 rounds to the underside and was done for the
day.” The EOD technician took Gordon back to the robot shop for repair.
He was fixed, returned to the team, and sent back out into the field.
Not long after, Gordon was searching a gate near a house, looking for
possible booby traps, when an IED detonated right next to where he was
working. “Gordon was mangled beyond repair. Now his replacement,
‘Flash,’ is here to finish his job,” wrote the tech. The beauty of robots, says
Craig Marsh, is simple to understand. “Some leaders say you can’t take the
man out of the mine field. But the bottom line is, robots save lives. EOD
technicians will choose to work smarter instead of harder when at all
possible.” The Talon robots cost between $60,000 and $180,000 per unit,
depending on what sensor technology the robot is fitted with.
The longer-term goal of Task Force Troy was to turn the bomb detection
and defusing technology over to the Iraqis themselves. “We were trying to
establish a partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Police, but we got a lot of
pushback,” Marsh recalls. “We’d say, here’s how DNA works. Here’s how
fingerprinting works. And they’d look at us like we were talking about
magic.” In Marsh’s experience, the way the Iraqi police force worked in
2006 was based on a man’s word. “They’d ask someone, a suspect, ‘Did
you build this IED?’ And if he said ‘no,’ that worked for them. Proof to
them was an eyewitness. Judges would ask, ‘Are there any eyewitnesses to
back this up?’ If the answer was no, and [the suspect] said he didn’t do it,
he would be let go. The system was based on deceptions. On a lot of
untruths.”
Task Force Troy worked with CEXC to build what it called “targeting
packages,” files of evidence that could be used by Iraqi police before a
judge. “It made things complicated and frustrating. Trying to assist the Iraqi
judicial system—we were not supposed to say ‘train’—and to prosecute the
war.”
There was a major turning point in cooperative science on February 22,
2006. Early that morning, sixty-five miles north of Baghdad, in the city of
Samarra, a massive IED blast tore apart the Golden Dome of the Askariya
Shrine, one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines. “This is like 9/11 in the United
States,” declared Abdel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents, a
Shiite Muslim.
When Craig Marsh learned about the bombing, he walked across the Al
Faw Palace compound to update his commander, Colonel Kevin Lutz, on
the other side of Camp Victory. The two men discussed next steps. “There
was so much evidence to collect at the Golden Dome,” says Marsh. “We
wanted to get eyes on the incident site and at least do our best to preserve
the evidence for collection without damaging an already sensitive
relationship with Iraqi leadership. CEXC guys were well equipped to
handle that.” The Iraqi government in Baghdad was not. But now they saw
how they could “benefit from the science,” says Marsh. For the first time
since Task Force Troy had been set up, the government of Baghdad, which
was led by Shiite Muslims, agreed to allow CEXC to investigate something
that had nothing to do with coalition force deaths. A team of Task Force
Troy CEXC technicians descended on the rubble of the Golden Mosque.
In working with forensic science to identify the terrorists who blew up
the Golden Dome, Iraqi leaders in Baghdad warmed to science in general,
says Marsh. Then advances in science took a bizarre and tragic turn. Marsh
learned that Iraqi security forces were relying on a device to detect bombs
that had no science behind it at all. Word was the device, called the ADE
651, “was a totally bogus piece of equipment,” he says. It was a small
handheld black box with a swiveling antenna attached to the top. The Iraqi
Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives
had purchased more than 1,500 of the devices from a private company in
England called ATSC.
Craig Marsh took the problem to senior officers, who invited top Iraqi
officials to Task Force Troy for a technology demonstration. “We had the
Iraqis come to the laboratory and we had DoD guys demonstrate” that it did
not work, Marsh recounts. The ADE 651 “did not detect explosives of any
kind. We took it apart. We had it x-rayed. It had no electronic components
inside.” There was also no power source. The Iraqis insisted the device
worked on “nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR.” Despite overwhelming
evidence coming from the CEXC lab at Task Force Troy that the device had
no scientific value whatsoever, Iraqi officials stood behind the ADE 651
bomb detector, which cost $60,000 per device. Soon, almost every Iraqi
guard at every major checkpoint across the country was using the worthless
device in place of any kind of physical inspection. It was dangerous and
frustrating. “Insurgents were able to get dump truck bombs past
checkpoints” into Baghdad, Marsh says. “Coalition checkpoints did not use
this device because we had actual explosive detection systems at our
disposal.” The ADE 651 “was nothing more than a magic wand.”
“Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,”
Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the General Directorate for
Combating Explosives, told the New York Times. “I know more about this
issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone
in the world.”
Years later, the maker of the phony device, ATSC president Jim
McCormick, was arrested in England and convicted for fraud after a
whistleblower revealed that McCormick knew he was selling bogus
equipment. In 2011, Major General al-Jabiri was arrested for taking
millions of dollars in bribes from McCormick. As of 2014 he had not been
tried, and the bogus devices were still being used in Iraq.

The same month that terrorists in Iraq blew up Shia Islam’s revered shrine,
attacks against coalition forces numbered more than two an hour, or fifty a
day. By 2007 that figure had doubled to one hundred attacks a day, or three
thousand a month. An estimated $15 billion had been spent by that point on
counter-IED efforts—on jammers, robots, surveillance systems, and more.
The situation was only getting worse. DARPA’s Combat Zones That See
program was having little effect on the war effort, despite a classified
number of dollars being spent on a program that collected video images of
Iraqi citizens walking around cities and driving in cars and housed them in
classified data storage facilities for access at a later date. America was
rapidly losing control of the war, and in response, in January 2007, an
additional thirty thousand troops were deployed to Iraq in what would
become known as “the surge.”
To support the tens of thousands of new soldiers heading into battle,
Tony Tether appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to
discuss several new technology programs DARPA was sending into the war
zone. The Boomerang was DARPA’s response to sniper threats, Tether said.
It was an acoustic sensor system made up of seven small microphones that
attached to a military vehicle, listened for shooter information, and notified
soldiers precisely where the fire was coming from, all in less than a second.
The Boomerang system was able to detect shock waves from a sniper’s
incoming bullets, as well as the muzzle blast, then relay that information to
soldiers. For example, when a shot was detected, Boomerang might call out,
“Shot. Two o’clock. 400 meters.” Tether told Congress that DARPA had
fielded sixty Boomerang units to the Army, Marine Corps, and Special
Forces, and was now working on a more advanced Boomerang-based
technology called CROSSHAIRS (Counter Rocket-Propelled Grenade and
Shooter System with Highly Accurate Immediate Responses).
CROSSHAIRS was a vehicle-mounted system that fused radar and
signal-processing technologies to quickly detect much larger projectiles
coming at coalition vehicles, including rocket-propelled grenades, antitank
guided missiles, and even direct mortar fire. A sensor system inside the
CROSSHAIRS would be able to identify where the shot came from and
relay that information to all other vehicles in a convoy. The terrorists would
be able to get one shot off, then Boomerang and CROSSHAIRS would
allow coalition shooters to respond by targeting and killing the enemy
shooter—in under one second.
 To help snipers with accuracy, immediacy, and portability, DARPA was
also fielding the smallest, lightest-weight sniper rifle in the history of
warfare, the DARPA XM-3.
Tether also told Congress about DARPA’s new Radar Scope, a tiny, 1.5-
pound handheld unit that allowed U.S. forces to “sense” through
nonmetallic walls, including concrete, and determine if a human was hiding
inside a building or behind a wall. In the winter of 2007, DARPA fielded
fifty Radar Scopes to the Army, Marines, and Special Forces for evaluation
in the war theater. Tether hinted at bigger plans for this same technology,
including ways to sense human activity underground, up to fifty feet deep.
Broad intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance efforts fused with
massive data collection and data-mining operations would continue to be
DARPA’s priority in urban area operations, Tether told Congress. “By 2025,
nearly 60 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas,” Tether
said, “so we should assume that U.S. forces will continue to be deployed to
urban areas for combat and post-conflict stabilization.” Tether listed
numerous unclassified programs, each with a suitable acronym. DARPA’s
WATCH-IT (Wide Area All Terrain Change Indication Technologies)
program analyzed data collected from foliage-penetrating radar. DARPA’s
LADAR (Laser Detection and Ranging) program sensors obtained
“exquisitely detailed, 3-D imagery through foliage to identify targets in
response to these cues.” DARPA’s ASSIST (Advanced Soldier Sensor
Information System and Technology) program allowed soldiers to collect
details about specific Iraqi neighborhoods and then upload that information
into a database for other soldiers to use.
DARPA’s HURT (Heterogeneous Urban Reconnaissance, Surveillance
and Target Acquisition) program was flying more than fifty drones in
support of coalition infantry brigades. HURT was able to reconnoiter over
hundreds of miles of roadways, support convoys, and EOD tech teams.
HURT provided persistent perimeter surveillance at forward operating
bases and was playing a role in stopping an ever-increasing number of
suicide bombers who were targeting U.S. military bases. In 2007 the HURT
program would discreetly change its name to HART (Heterogeneous
Airborne Reconnaissance Team) after unnamed sources suggested that the
acronym was in poor taste.
To merge its growing number of surveillance and data-collection
technologies, DARPA engineered a multimedia reporting system called
TIGR (Tactical Ground Reporting) to be used by soldiers on the ground in
Iraq. Congress was told that TIGR’s web-based multimedia platform
“allows small units, like patrols, to easily collect and quickly share ‘cop-on-
the-beat’ information about operations, neighborhoods, people and civil
affairs.” It was like a three-dimensional Wikipedia for soldiers in combat
zones. U.S. soldiers told MIT Technology Review that TIGR allowed them
to “see locations of key buildings, like mosques,” and to access data on
“past attacks, geo-tagged photos of houses… and photos of suspected
insurgents and neighborhood leaders.” In testimony the following year, the
Armed Services Committee was told that TIGR was “so successful in
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was [being] requested by brigades going to
Afghanistan.” Which, in the fall of 2008, was where tens of thousands of
additional coalition forces would soon be headed.
After five years of relative stability in Afghanistan, the country was
again spiraling into violence and chaos. Critics cried foul, declaring that the
Bush administration had lost control of an insurgency force it had already
defeated and pacified in 2002. That in diverting the great majority of
American military resources, as well as intelligence and reconstruction
resources, from Afghanistan into Iraq, the White House and the Pentagon
had created a dual insurgency nightmare. Afghanistan and Iraq were being
called quagmires in the press. These wars were unwinnable, critics said.
This was Vietnam all over again. And, as had been the case for fifty years,
DARPA was heading straight into the war zone.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Human Terrain

At 9:20 p.m. on the night of June 13, 2008, two truck bombs, or vehicle-
borne IEDs (VBIEDs), pulled up to the gates of the Sarposa prison in
Kandahar, Afghanistan, and exploded in massive fireballs, knocking down
large sections of the mud brick walls. Taliban militants on motorcycles
quickly swarmed into the area in a coordinated attack, firing rocket-
propelled grenades and assault rifles at prison guards, killing fifteen of
them. It was a scene of carnage and mayhem. By the time coalition forces
arrived, roughly an hour later, not one of the 1,200 incarcerated prisoners
remained. In the morning, Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid
Karzai and the head of the provincial council in Kandahar, declared that
“all” of the Sarposa prisoners had escaped, including as many as four
hundred hard-core Taliban.
The prison break was dangerous for the citizens of Kandahar and
embarrassing for NATO-led coalition forces, officially called the
International Security Assistance Force. The Taliban issued a press release
claiming responsibility and stating that the freed prisoners were happy to be
back living in their Kandahar homes. Coalition force soldiers conducted
door-to-door searches looking for Taliban escapees, but there was almost no
way to determine who had been in the prison. Fifteen prison guards were
dead, and those still alive were not cooperating.
As a result of the security failure, the Pentagon redoubled efforts
regarding its biometrics program in Afghanistan. Thousands of Handheld
Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) units were shipped to
coalition forces with instructions on how to collect eye scans, fingerprints,
facial images, and DNA swabs from every Afghan male between the ages
of fifteen and sixty-four that coalition soldiers and Afghan security forces
came into contact with. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had given birth to
a new form of U.S. intelligence exploitation called bio-intelligence, or
BIOINT. This concept found its genesis in DARPA’s Information
Awareness Office. The mission of BIOINT, bulleted out in a DARPA
program memo from 2002, was to “produce a proto-type system to [gather]
biometric signatures of humans.” The biometrics system had been fielded to
the Army, with the first hardware units appearing in Fallujah, Iraq, in
December 2004.
The U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, was an advocate
of collecting biometrics in counterinsurgency operations. “This data is
virtually irrefutable and generally is very helpful in identifying who was
responsible for a particular device [i.e., an IED] in a particular attack,
enabling subsequent targeting,” Petraeus said. “Based on our experience in
Iraq, I pushed this hard here in Afghanistan, too, and the Afghan authorities
have recognized the value and embraced the systems.” Over the next three
years, coalition forces would collect biometrics on more than 1.5 million
Afghan men, roughly one out of every six males in the country. In Iraq the
figure was even higher—reportedly 2.2 million male Iraqis, or one in four,
had biometric scans performed on them.
The month after the Sarposa prison break, in July 2008, Democratic
presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama took his first official trip to
the region, spending two days in Iraq and two days in Afghanistan. Senator
Obama called the situation in Afghanistan “precarious and urgent,” and said
that if elected president, he would make Afghanistan the new “central front
in the war against terrorism.” Two days later the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, appeared on PBS NewsHour to
discuss the growing violence in Afghanistan and the need for a ten-
thousand-to twenty-thousand-troop surge there.
Summer became fall, and now it was November 2008. It had been four
years since DARPA had sponsored its first social science and
counterinsurgency conference since the Vietnam War, the Adversary
Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference organized by
Montgomery McFate. The results of the conference had borne fruit in what
was now the Army’s Human Terrain System program, and at least twenty-
six teams of social scientists and anthropologists had been sent to Iraq and
Afghanistan. On November 4, one of those Human Terrain Teams was a
three-person unit stationed at Combat Outpost Hutal, Afghanistan, fifty
miles west of Kandahar. On this day back home, Americans were voting for
a new president, and here in the war theater, anthropologist Paula Loyd,
security contractor Don Ayala, and former combat Marine Clint Cooper
were heading out on regular patrol.
The area around Kandahar was particularly dangerous and hostile to
coalition forces. Kandahar had long been the spiritual center of the Taliban,
and now, after the prison break five months earlier, an unusual number of
hard-core Taliban were living among the people, making the situation even
more precarious. On patrol that November morning, Paula Loyd, Don
Ayala, and Clint Cooper were accompanied by three local interpreters and
one platoon of U.S. Army infantry soldiers with C Company, 2-2 Infantry
Battalion. Paula Loyd was a dedicated anthropologist, a Wellesley College
graduate, thirty-six years old and engaged to be married. Petite and striking,
with long blond hair hanging out the back of her combat helmet, Loyd had
served in the U.S. Army for four years after college, including a post as a
vehicle mechanic in the DMZ in South Korea. She was hardworking,
curious, and respected by her peers; one former colleague said, “An
indefinable spirit defined her.” Nearing the central market in the village of
Chehel Gazi, the Human Terrain Team spread out. Paula Loyd stopped in a
dirt alleyway and started handing out candy and pens to local children
walking to school. The alleyway was about twenty-five feet wide and lined
on either side by tall mud brick walls. Running down the center of the
alleyway was a shallow creek, its sloping banks lined with tall leafy trees.
As adults passed by, through an interpreter Loyd asked questions about the
local price of cooking fuel, a key indicator as to whether or not the Taliban
had hijacked supply lines. As Loyd interviewed people, she took notes in
her notebook, information that was to be uploaded into a military database
at the end of each day.
A young bearded man walked up to Loyd, shooing the local children
away. The man carried a container, like a jug. Loyd asked her interpreter to
translate.
“What’s in your jug?” Loyd asked the man.
He told her it was fuel. Gasoline for his water pump at home.
 “How much does petrol cost in Maiwand?” Loyd asked.
He told her it was very expensive. She asked about his job. He said he
worked for a school.
“Would you like some candy?” she asked.
“I don’t like candy,” the man said. His name was Abdul Salam. He wore
blue sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a blue-striped vest. Abdul Salam
asked Loyd’s interpreter if she smoked. The conversation continued for a
while, then tapered off. Then Abdul Salam wandered away. After a while he
came back. The interpreter noticed he was playing with a plastic lighter,
turning it over in one hand. In the other hand he held the jug of fuel.
In a flash, Abdul Salam raised the jug and poured gasoline over Paula
Loyd. He struck the lighter and set her on fire. Some witnesses described
hearing a whoosh sound. Others described seeing Paula Loyd being
consumed by an inferno of flames. The heat was so intense and powerful
that no one near her could immediately help without catching fire as well.
Loyd’s interpreter later recalled seeing her burning as his mind raced for a
way to put the fire out. She called out his name. Nearby, a twenty-six-year-
old platoon leader named Matthew Pathak shouted out that soldiers should
get her into the creek. He filled his helmet with water and threw it on Loyd.
People tossed dirt and sand on her, trying to get the fire out. Finally, soldiers
dragged her across the alleyway and into the creek. The flames were not
out. Loyd had third-degree burns on 60 percent of her body. She was still
conscious.
“I’m cold,” she said. “I’m cold.” It was one of the last things she said.
When Abdul Salam set Paula Loyd on fire, people started screaming.
Human Terrain Team member Don Ayala was standing roughly 150 feet
down the alleyway. He drew his pistol and raced toward the commotion. As
Ayala ran toward Loyd, Abdul Salam was running away from the crime
scene, toward Ayala. Soldiers pursuing Salam screamed, “Stop that man!
Shoot him!” Ayala tackled Salam and, with the help of two soldiers, put
him in flex cuffs.
Don Ayala was not a social scientist or an anthropologist; he was a
security contractor, or bodyguard. Ayala had previously guarded Afghan
president Hamid Karzai and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. His job
was to keep Paula Loyd from getting killed. Witnesses watched him work
to immobilize Abdul Salam, who resisted detention, while soldiers and
interpreters about 150 feet away tried to help the critically injured Loyd,
whose clothes had melted into her skin and who was in terrible pain.
Specialist Justin Skotnicki, one of the U.S. Army infantry soldiers who had
witnessed the attack, went over to Ayala and told him what had happened to
Paula Loyd, that Abdul Salam had thrown gasoline on her and set her on
fire. Ayala called out for an interpreter.
“Don had the interpreter inform [Abdul Salam] that Don thought the
man was the devil,” Skotnicki later recalled. Then Don Ayala pulled his
9mm pistol from his belt, pressed it against Abdul Salam’s temple, and shot
him in the head, killing him.
Paula Loyd was transported to Brooke Army Medical Center in San
Antonio, Texas. She was in the burn unit there for two months until she
died of her injuries on January 7, 2009. The Taliban claimed credit for her
death.
Earlier that spring, in May, Don Ayala was tried for murder in a
Louisiana courtroom. He pled guilty to manslaughter. U.S. District Senior
Judge Claude Hilton showed leniency and gave Ayala probation and a
$12,500 fine instead of jail time. “The acts that were done in front of this
defendant would provide provocation for anyone” who was present, Judge
Hilton said. “This occurred in a hostile area, maybe not in the middle of a
battlefield, but certainly in the middle of a war.”
The entire situation was grotesque. An anthropologist handing out candy
to children was set on fire by an emissary of the Taliban and died a horrible
death. The security contractor hired to protect the anthropologist was unable
to do so and instead took justice into his own hands. But none of this was
exactly as it seemed. Why was Ayala on the Human Terrain Team in the
first place? He had no qualifications in anthropology or social science. Why
weren’t the U.S. Army infantry soldiers considered capable of protecting
her? According to Montgomery McFate, all Human Terrain Team members
“advise brigades on economic development, political systems, tribal
structures, etc.; provide training to brigades as requested; and conduct
research on topics of interest to the brigade staff,” but Ayala was not
qualified in any of those areas, except for the “etc.” part.
Court documents revealed that Don Ayala was paid $425 a day, each day
he worked in Afghanistan, and that in Iraq he had been paid $800 a day,
which meant he earned more in two days than any of the soldiers in C
Company made in a month. What service could Don Ayala perform that the
C Company soldiers were unable to do? Over the next five years the Human
Terrain System would cost taxpayers $600 million. What actual purpose did
it serve? The answer would ultimately lead back to DARPA.
But first there was subterfuge and misinformation, starting with the wide
gap between how McFate and other social scientists presented the program
to the public—knowingly or not—and how the program was actually
positioned in the Defense Department hierarchy.
To the public, the Human Terrain System was sold as a culture-centric
program, a hearts and minds campaign. But in U.S. Army literature, the
Human Terrain System was in place “to help mitigate IEDs,” and the
program was funded by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat
Organization (JIEDDO), with members like Paula Loyd working alongside
EOD technicians, DARPA jammers, and Talon robots. In press releases, the
Army was oblique. “Combat commanders [do] not have a good
understanding of the cultural and social implications of military operations
in urban environments,” said one. Anthropologists and social scientists
were going into the battle zone “to provide social science support to
military commanders.” The important word was “support.” It would take
until this book for a fuller picture to emerge of what was being supported.
The Human Terrain System program was controversial from the start.
The American Anthropological Association, which was founded in 1902,
and whose credo for anthropologists was “first do no harm,” denounced the
program as “a disaster waiting to unfold.” Its executive board condemned
the Human Terrain System as “a problematic application of anthropological
expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds,” and in a letter to Congress
called the program “dangerous and reckless” and “a waste of the taxpayers’
money.” In an article for Anthropology Today, Roberto González, associate
professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, called the program
“mercenary anthropology.” Catherine Lutz, chair of the anthropology
department at Brown University, charged that the Defense Department was
promoting a dangerous and false idea “that anthropologists’ ‘help’ will
create a more humane approach on the part of the U.S. military towards the
Iraqi people.” Lutz believed the notion of helping people to be “a very
seductive idea,” but she encouraged anthropologists to step back and ask,
“Help what? Help whom, to do what?”
 Hugh Gusterson, professor of anthropology at George Mason University,
accused the Army of trying to convince anthropologists that “Americans
have a mission to spread democracy” and that “Americans have only the
well-being of other people in mind.” Gusterson saw that as manipulative
and believed that once a person convinced himself or herself of that, “you
start to think of it [war] as some kind of cultural miscommunication. And
you start to ask naive, misshapen questions [like],‘If we only understood
their culture, how could we make them like us? Why do they hate us so
much?’” Gusterson believed the answer was simple. “They hate us because
we are occupying their country, not because they don’t understand our hand
signals and because occasionally we mistreat their women,” Gusterson said.
“So if you ask the wrong questions you get the wrong answers and more
people on both sides will die.”
“I think the idea that there can be a kinder, gentler counterinsurgency
war is a myth,” said González. “I think it’s a hope that many people have.
It’s a kind of dream that they [anthropologists] can somehow do things
differently. I do think it’s a myth, though, and I think we have lots of
historical evidence to back that up.”
With the debate escalating, the Pentagon cultivated two succinct
narratives regarding the Human Terrain System, as exemplified in
educational courses taught at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military
Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the U.S. Army War College in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode
Island. One narrative was that Human Terrain Teams helped make way for
“the moral prosecution of warfare.” That time and again, the teams enabled
soldiers to narrowly avert disaster. That putting anthropologists on the
battlefield made soldiers better able to engage in so-called “honorable
warfare.” The experiences of Major Philip Carlson and his unit in the
wrongful arrest of an Iraqi village elder, as taught by the Army, illustrate
this point of view.
“My very first time out in an HTT [Human Terrain Team] in Iraq, we
had a company airmobile to the countryside because of the IED threat on
the road,” said Carlson. The Human Terrain Team was attached to a patrol
fire squadron in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment and was carrying
out “random interviews and know and search operations.” Carlson was
having problems with his local interpreters, whom he described as “young,
gung-ho Shi’ites who were motivated to capture terrorists.” In one
particular house, Major Carlson recalled, coalition forces discovered an
older man in possession of a rifle scope and a closetful of books. The
interpreters insisted that the books were “jihadist in nature and the [rifle]
scope was for a sophisticated sniper rifle,” said Carlson. The man, Mr.
Alawi, was arrested and “paraded through the village back to the patrol
base.” There, a Human Terrain Team’s cultural expert, Dr. Ammar,
questioned Alawi further and decided he was not a radical but a “kindly old
school teacher.” His books, said Carlson, were textbooks from a school. The
scope was from an air rifle that he used to shoot birds.
According to Major Carlson, if the Human Terrain Team had not been
present, the coalition forces would not have understood how important it
was to restore Alawi’s honor. They simply would have released him and let
him return to his house on his own. This would have been a grave mistake,
said Dr. Ammar, who instructed the soldiers on the specifics of honor
restoration. In the Army-sanctioned story, Major Carlson did not elaborate
on what the specifics of honor restoration entail, nor did he explain what
happened to the gung-ho Shi’ite interpreters who presented their U.S. Army
employers with false information. According to Carlson, “the news [of the
honor restoration] spread like wildfire.” Instead of having created a foe in
Mr. Alawi, they had created a friend. The son of the village elder showed
Major Carlson where an IED was buried and where eighty mortar tubes
were hidden. “That is the power of understanding and operating
appropriately within a culture,” said Major Carlson.
A second Pentagon narrative, conveyed by the Navy, held that work
done by the Human Terrain Teams sometimes seemed futile but had
positive outcomes later on. This narrative is exemplified by the writings of
Human Terrain Team advisor Norman Nigh. In “An Operator’s Guide to
Human Terrain Teams,” written for the U.S. Naval War College’s Center on
Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups, Nigh asks, when considering
counterinsurgency doctrine and COIN application, “Can doctrine be applied
despite an unwilling population?” To answer the question, he tells the story
of an Afghan village elder called Haji Malma.
Norman Nigh was a member of a Human Terrain Team attached to a
group of coalition forces from Canada, assigned to the village of Nakhonay,
Afghanistan, located about ten miles southwest of Kandahar, in the Taliban
heartland, not far from where Paula Loyd was set on fire. Most of the
soldiers on Nigh’s combat patrol despised Haji Malma, “a stoic village
elder, known Taliban judge, and suspected architect of countless Canadian
deaths.” For several years, NATO forces had been trying to build a case
against Haji Malma and other Taliban leaders like him, but could not.
Malma reveled in the fact that there was nothing the coalition forces could
do to him, Nigh says. “Like most sophisticated Taliban leaders in
Afghanistan,” Nigh explains, “Malma was taking advantage of [America’s]
COIN war. On the surface, he appeared to be a benign village elder,
interested only in the well-being of the people of Nakhonay,” when in fact
he was a “key Pakistani-educated Al-Qaida supporter who controlled one of
the most dangerous and strategically important areas in Kandahar.”
Haji Malma regularly sought development funds from aid organizations
and NATO troops, and regularly received financial support. The same went
for the rest of the duplicitous elders running Nakhonay village affairs. The
Human Terrain Team found that the situation was infuriating soldiers, who
were “unable to realize justice for the friends they’ve lost.” This, says Nigh,
was dangerous for the broader effort in Afghanistan, since “these
heightened emotions often blur an operator’s ability to understand the
population and wage an effective COIN war.”
The Human Terrain Team suggested that coalition forces, in this case
Task Force Kandahar, “pull back and take a long-horizon perspective.”
Nigh and his colleagues determined that Afghanistan was “a country that
lacks a rule of law,” ranking 176 out of 178 on the State Department’s
Corruption Perception Index. “Corruption and kickbacks of public
procurement act as a necessary evil to mitigate risk, leverage against
liabilities, and promote cooperation.” The Human Terrain Team also
conducted a comprehensive ethnographic study on the topic of corruption,
interviewing the majority of villagers and asking them what they thought.
“Virtually the entire village agreed that the Western term ‘bribery’ was
nothing more than tarrun, an Afghan word for contract or agreement,” Nigh
explained.
Right around this same time, Task Force Kandahar was preparing for
what was called a “clearing operation” in the area—the removal of Taliban
leaders and the installation of more coalition-friendly men. But in the
opinion of the Human Terrain Team, “many previous clearing operations
had resulted in little to no change.” They suggested a different strategy,
something Nigh referred to as the “oil spot plan… to divide and conquer the
population.” The oil spot COIN strategy worked analogously to the way
cheesecloth works, writes Nigh, with each drop of oil representing a
stability initiative, or a municipal service, or an offer of agricultural
development assistance. “Drops of oil, one at a time and over time,
eventually cover the entire cloth,” according to Nigh, “each oil spot
[representing] a visible manifestation of the desired end state for the entire
war.” The oil spot concept was a strategy endorsed by Dr. Karl Slaikeu, the
psychologist and conflict resolution specialist who replaced Paula Loyd.
The oil spot strategy was put into effect in Nakhonay, and in his Naval War
College narrative Nigh writes, “The strategy appears to be working.” The
international press did not agree. In an October 2010 issue of Military
World Magazine, published in England, Nakhonay would be described as “a
town now infamous as a killing zone.”
The mainstream press largely disparaged the program as the deaths of
Human Terrain Team members made headline news. Michael Bhatia, an
anthropologist with degrees from Brown University and Oxford University,
and who was working on a Ph.D. dissertation on the mujahedeen of
Afghanistan, was killed in May 2008 while traveling through Khost,
Afghanistan. His unit was en route to help negotiate a peace process
between two warring tribes when his vehicle drove over an IED buried in
the road. Witnesses say the explosion was loud, horrific, and all-consuming.
Bhatia and two Army soldiers were instantly killed. As an Associated Press
article about his death put it, “Michael Bhatia was on the frontlines of a
Pentagon experiment.” The following month, in Iraq, Human Terrain Team
member Nicole Suveges, a political scientist from Johns Hopkins
University, was also killed by an IED, planted by terrorists inside a district
council building in Sadr City. Killed alongside Suveges were eleven other
people, military and civilian, including U.S. soldiers, Iraqi government
officials, and U.S. Embassy personnel. Her team was trying to identify ways
that ordinary Iraqi citizens could learn how to assist a transitioning
government achieve their political aims, according to the Pentagon.
The Human Terrain System continued to grow. In 2010 it was reported
that team members earned $200,000 a year. Ever vilified by the press,
Human Terrain Team members were likened to de facto intelligence agents
because the judgments they provided to coalition forces about who was
friend and who was foe often amounted to who would live and who would
die. Comparisons were made to the CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix and
CORDS programs, whereby the CIA enlisted local Vietnamese leaders to
help choose targets for assassination. The truth about the Human Terrain
System was hidden in plain sight. It was, truly, about human terrain. In the
same way that cartographers map terrain, the U.S. Army was mapping
people. The program supported DARPA’s technology-driven concept of
creating Combat Zones That See.
Each day, after going out on patrol, Human Terrain System members fed
information into a mega-database, called Map-HT, or Mapping Human
Terrain. Map-HT uses a suite of computer tools to record data gathered by
Army intelligence officers, Human Terrain Team members, and coalition
forces, including HUMINT and BIOINT. All the information is uploaded
into a massive database. Some of the information is sent to the Human
Terrain System Reach-Back Research Center at Fort Leavenworth. The
more sensitive information “is stored in a classified facility at the National
Ground Intelligence Center, outside Charlottesville, Virginia,” says former
Army lieutenant colonel Troy Techau, who served as director of the
Biometrics Program of U.S. Central Command J2X in post-invasion Iraq.
When retired vice admiral Arthur Cebrowski told PBS News-Hour that
network-centric warfare was about “the behavior of humans in the
networked environment,” he was speaking factually. To fight the war on
terror, the Pentagon would collect, synthesize, and analyze information on
as many humans as possible, and maintain that information in classified and
unclassified networked databases.
“People use human networks to organize the control of resources and
geography,” explains Tristan Reed, an analyst with the private intelligence
firm Stratfor Intelligence. “No person alone can control anything of
significance. Presidents, drug lords, and CEOs rely on people to execute
their strategies and are constrained by the capabilities and interests of the
people who work for them.”
Afghanistan was a nation controlled by warlords. Iraq was a nation
controlled by religious militia groups. The Pentagon needed to understand
who was controlling what, and how. Mapping the terrain of individual
humans was a means of connecting the networks’ data points. In 2012,
coalition forces withdrew from Iraq, and with them the Human Terrain
Teams. In Afghanistan, thirty-one teams continued to map the human
terrain. Army intelligence took over parts of the program from JIEDDO and
retooled it for “Phase Zero pre-conflict,” or the phase before the next war.
“Whether it’s counterinsurgency, or whether it’s Phase Zero pre-conflict,
there are critical questions to ask before you decide on a course of action or
if you decide to take any action,” says U.S. Army colonel Sharon Hamilton,
who directs the program. “If we raise the level of understanding [among the
U.S. military], we establish a context baseline of beliefs, values, dreams and
aspirations, needs, requirements, security—if we can do all that in Phase
Zero, we might not be talking about being somewhere else for 10 years.” As
of 2014, there are MAP-HT teams operating all over the globe, from Africa
to Mexico.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, by 2011 the Army had intrusively mapped the
human terrain of at least 3.7 million foreigners, many of whom were enemy
combatants in war zones. Apart from the effectiveness of any of that work
—and as of 2015 the Islamic State controlled much of Iraq, while
Afghanistan was spiraling into further chaos—there exists an important
question for Americans to consider. In the summer of 2013, whistleblower
Edward Snowden released classified information that showed the National
Security Agency had a clandestine data-mining surveillance program in
place, called PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect information on
millions of American citizens. Both of these programs had origins in
DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program. In the wake of the
Snowden leak, the NSA admitted, after first denying, that it does collect
information on millions of Americans but stated that none of the
information is synthesized or analyzed without a warrant. But the data are
all stored in classified NSA facilities, available for NSA reach-back. Is the
NSA mapping the human terrain in America in this same way?
Several data-mining surveillance programs described in the fiscal year
2015 budget estimate for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
raise privacy concerns. For its biomedical technology program, an element
of “bio-warfare defense,” DARPA requested from Congress $112 million to
develop a technology “to allow medical practitioners the capability to
visualize and comprehend the complex relationships across patient data in
the electronic medical records system.” Specifically, the technologies being
developed ostensibly would allow practitioners “to assimilate and analyze
large amounts of data and provide tools to make better-informed decisions
for patient care.” It is not clear under what authority patient data would be
shared with the federal government, and DARPA declined to answer
questions for this book.
The Nexus 7 program, whose 2015 budget was classified, monitors
social media networks. Specifically, Nexus 7 “applies forecasting, data
extraction and analysis methodologies to develop tools, techniques and
frameworks for [examining] social networks.” The classified program was
used operationally in Afghanistan by a unit called DARPA Forward Cell
and won the Defense Department Joint Meritorious Unit Award. From 2007
to 2011, dozens of DARPA personnel traveled “far behind enemy lines… to
ensure the latest research and technological advances inform their efforts,”
according to DARPA literature associated with the award. The unit
emplaced High-Altitude LIDAR Operations Experiment (HALOE) sensors
into the battle space as well as Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar
(VADER) pods. How Nexus 7 is used in the United States is classified, and
DARPA declined to answer general questions.
For the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program,
DARPA requested from Congress $28 million to develop computer
algorithms to allow machines to scour a vast array of text-based messages
from “free-text or semi-structured reports, messages, documents or
databases,” so as to pull “actionable intelligence” out of ambiguously
worded messages. “A key DEFT emphasis is to determine the implied and
hidden meaning in text through probabilistic inference, anomaly detection
and disfluency analysis.” The only way to determine if a person’s message
or part of a message was anomalous or irregular would be to have a much
larger database of that user’s messages to compare it to. How DEFT is used
in the United States is classified, and DARPA declined to answer general
questions. These are just three out of nearly three hundred DARPA
programs that were in development for fiscal year 2015, with a requested
budget of $2.91 billion, not counting classified budgets.
It is impossible for American citizens to know about and to comprehend
more than a fraction of the advanced science and technology programs that
DARPA is developing for the government. And at the same time, it is
becoming more possible for the federal government to monitor what
American citizens are doing and saying, where they are going, what they
are buying, who they are communicating with, what they are reading, what
they are writing, and how healthy they are.
All this raises an important question. Is the world transforming into a
war zone and America into a police state, and is it DARPA that is making
them so?
 PART V

FUTURE WAR
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Drone Wars

In May 2013, President Barack Obama gave a long-anticipated speech at

the National Defense University, at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., in
which he said it was time to bring the war on terror to a close. “This war,
like all wars, must end,” he said, and quoted the 1795 warning by James
Madison, who stated, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare.” It was President Obama’s first war speech of his second
term.
In the context of the history of the modern American war machine—the
advanced science and technology of which is spearheaded by DARPA—
there was significance in the president’s words and symmetry in the locale.
It was here at Fort McNair that, fifty-five years earlier, twenty-two defense
scientists gathered to produce ARPA Study No. 1, the first of thousands of
secret and unclassified DARPA studies outlining which weapons would best
serve the United States in coming wars.
“America is at a crossroads,” President Obama said. “We must define
the nature and scope of this struggle”—meaning the war on terror—“or else
it will define us.” Much of the rest of the president’s speech focused on the
use of armed drones. He mentioned drone strikes on fourteen separate
occasions in his roughly fifteen-minute talk. The summary point reported
across news outlets was that President Obama was curtailing the use of
drones.
He was doing no such thing, nor, really, did the president say he was. He
merely said, “I’ve insisted on strong oversight of all lethal action,” meaning
that White House and CIA lawyers would continue to be in the loop before
individual terrorists were targeted for assassination by unmanned systems,
including American citizens living overseas. As commander in chief, the
president had twice endorsed significant Department of Defense reports,
“Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2011–2036” and “Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2013–2038,” which called for the
amplification, not the curtailment, of the Pentagon’s pursuit of robotic
warfare. These two reports, roughly three hundred pages in total, made
clear that Pentagon drones were positioned to lead the way forward over the
next twenty-five years of war.
DARPA’s vast weapon systems of the future will involve an entire army
of drones. They will include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned
ground systems (UGS), unmanned surface vehicles (USV), unmanned
maritime systems (UMS), and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), weapons
that reach from the depths of the ocean into outer space. At present and in
the future, the Pentagon’s drones will fly, swim, crawl, walk, run, and
swarm as they conduct missions around the globe. Some of these drones
will be cyborgs, or what DARPA calls “biohybrids,” which are part animal
and part machine. And the technology, which has been building for
decades, is closer than the average citizen might think.

In the very heart of Washington, D.C., across the street from the White
House, sits a public park called Lafayette Square, so named to honor the
Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. The park has a storied
history. It briefly housed a graveyard and for a while a racetrack. Slaves
were sold here. During the War of 1812, the seven-acre park served as a
soldiers’ encampment. In the modern era it has become home to war
protests. It was here, during an antiwar rally in the fall of 2007, that Bernard
Crane, a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney, saw one of the strangest
things he had ever seen in his life.
“My daughter had asked me to take her to the demonstration, so I did,”
Crane explains. “I certainly wouldn’t have been there on my own. I was
half-paying attention to what was going on onstage and half-looking around
when I saw three incredibly large dragonflies overhead,” says Crane. “They
moved in unison, as if they were in lockstep. My first thought was, ‘Are
those dragonflies mechanical? Or are they alive?’”
 Nearby, someone shouted, “Oh my God, look at those!” Many people
looked up. Vanessa Alarcon, a college student from New York, recalled her
reaction. “I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like
dragonflies or little helicopters.” But she felt certain about one thing.
“Those are not insects,” Alarcon said.
Likewise, Bernard Crane surmised that the creatures were not hatched of
this world. “All three moved together,” says Crane. “They would move to
the left together, then they would move to the right together.” It was bizarre.
“I had just returned from a two-week vacation at a lake house in Maine,”
Crane says. “I’d spent a lot of time lying on my back watching dragonflies.
I’d become familiar with how they move. How they hover. How they
generally fly alone. Dragonflies are not like carpenter ants. They don’t do
the same thing as the next dragonfly over, certainly not at the same time.”
At the protest in Lafayette Square, Bernard Crane scrutinized the flying
objects. Around him, protesters led by the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan
waved signs that read “End the War!” Onstage, the Libyan-born surgeon
and president of the Muslim American Society, Dr. Esam Omeish, railed
against the U.S. government and insisted that President Bush be impeached.
“We must prosecute those who are responsible!” Omeish shouted. “Let us
cleanse our State Department, our Congress, and our Pentagon of those who
have driven us into this colossal mistake!”
The war in Iraq was at a boiling point in 2007. Despite the recent U.S.
troop surge there, violence, mayhem, and death had reached astonishing
new levels. One month earlier, in a single day of carnage, terrorists
detonated multiple truck bombs in public places, killing 500 people and
wounding 1,500 others—the worst coordinated attacks of the war by a
factor of three. From the podium in Lafayette Square, Omeish blamed this
kind of horror—the “blood of the Middle East people”—on the Bush
administration. “Impeach Bush today!” he shouted again and again.
Dr. Esam Omeish was a controversial figure. He served on the board of
directors of the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, the Virginia mosque where
two of the 9/11 hijackers prayed before the terrorist attacks. Omeish
reportedly played a role in hiring the mosque’s imam during that dark time,
a radical cleric named Anwar Al-Awlaki. By 2007, Al-Awlaki, a U.S.
citizen, had fled to Yemen, where he was revealed to be a member of the Al
Qaeda leadership. From Yemen, Al-Awlaki encouraged Muslims around the
world to commit terrorist attacks against the United States. (Some would,
including Major Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people and injured at least
thirty more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.) Al-Awlaki
also served as imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque, from January 2001 to
April 2002. Not for another four years would Anwar Al-Awlaki become the
first U.S. citizen officially assassinated by the U.S. government, in a drone
strike on a desert highway in Yemen. Dr. Esam Omeish had been an
associate of Anwar Al-Awlaki, through Dar Al-Hijrah, but association is not
a crime. Were the dragonflies in Lafayette Park insect-inspired drones sent
to spy on the doctor and the antiwar crowd? Or were they just unusually
large dragonflies?
The month after the Lafayette Square rally, the Washington Post
reported a handful of similar sightings of insect-shaped spy drones flying
overhead at political events in Washington and New York. “Some suspect
the insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools,” wrote Post reporter
Rick Weiss. “Others think they are, well, dragonflies—an ancient order of
insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living
creature can look.” No federal agency would admit to having deployed
insect-sized spy drones. “But a number of U.S. government and private
entities acknowledge they are trying,” wrote Weiss.
By the time of the 2007 antiwar protest, DARPA had been actively
developing insect-inspired drones, called micro air vehicles (MAVs), for at
least fourteen years. The first DARPA micro air vehicles feasibility study
was conducted in 1993, by the RAND Corporation. “Insect-size flying and
crawling systems could help give the United States a significant military
advantage in the coming years,” the RAND authors wrote. Shortly
thereafter, DARPA began soliciting scientists and awarding grants under its
Tactical Technology Office.
DARPA’s original insect-drone prototype, called Black Widow, was built
by AeroVironment, a defense contractor in Simi Valley, California. The six-
inch mini-drone weighed 40 grams and had wings fashioned from plastic
model airplane propellers, cut and sanded for better lift. For years, scientists
with AeroVironment struggled to get Black Widow to fly with a payload,
and by March 1999, with help from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, DARPA
finally had its first-generation micro air vehicle able to fly reconnaissance
missions. Powered by two lithium batteries, this 56-gram variant of Black
Widow carried a black-and-white micro video camera, had excellent
maneuverability, and could even hover, or loiter, for up to twenty-two
minutes before returning to its base. Black Widow “cannot be heard above
ambient noise at 100 feet,” reported scientists in the field, “and unless
you’re specifically looking for [it] you can’t see it.” Even birds were fooled.
“It looks more like a bird than an airplane,” the scientists wrote. “We have
seen sparrows and seagulls flocking around the MAV several times.”
DARPA was enthusiastic; remember, this was March 1999. “The Black
Widow MAV program has been quite successful in proving that a 6-inch
aircraft is not only feasible, but that it can perform useful missions that
were previously deemed impossible,” read an after-action report. Then
came the more important idea. A RAND analyst named Benjamin Lambeth
concluded that mini-drones like the Black Widow had enormous potential,
not just in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, but ultimately as a
means of assassination. Mini-drones disguised as insects, Lambeth wrote,
could one day be outfitted with “micro-explosive bombs… able to kill
moving targets with just grams of explosive.”
DARPA expanded its micro air vehicle program to include at least three
research efforts, or “thrusts,” each of which relies on the animal kingdom
for inspiration and ideas. The results of these programs are called
biosystems, biomimetics, and biohybrids. Biosystems involves the use of
living, breathing insects or animals trained for military use. During the
Vietnam War, German shepherds were trained to track Vietcong fighters
tagged with chemicals. During the Iraq war, scientists at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico trained bees to locate buried IEDs.
These are two examples of biosystemic programs.
Biomimetics research is a field closely related to bionics. In DARPA’s
biomimetics programs, scientists build mechanical systems to imitate
creatures from the natural world. DARPA designed biomimetic drones, like
the Black Widow MAV, including ones that appear to be hummingbirds,
bats, beetles, and flies. If DARPA has dragonfly drones, they would fall
under the rubric of biomimetics. Biomimetic drones have been used by the
intelligence community since at least 1972, when the CIA built a prototype
dragonfly drone it called “insectothopter.” A miniature engine powered the
drone’s wings to move up and down. Insectothopter ran on a thimbleful of
gas.
 Biohybrids tread on entirely new ground. DARPA’s micro air vehicle
programs are built on decades of aviation technology, aerospace
engineering, computer science, and nanotechnology, which is the science of
making things small. Then at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new field
called nanobiology, or nanobiotechnology, came into being. Once relegated
to the pages of science fiction, this burgeoning new discipline allows
scientists to “couple” biological systems with machines. In 1999 DARPA
awarded grants for biohybrid programs. The stated goal was to create
cyborgs—part living creatures, part machines.
DARPA’s biohybrid programs remain shrouded in mystery. Biohybrid
military applications are largely classified, but a few prototype programs
have been unveiled. As nanobiotechnology advanced in the early years of
the twenty-first century, tiny machines could realistically be wired into
animals’ brains, bodies, and wings. Starting in 2002, DARPA began
periodically releasing incremental information into the public domain.
That year, news of an early prototype emerged from a DARPA-funded
laboratory at the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center
in Brooklyn, led by researcher Sanjiv Talwar. Scientists implanted
electrodes in the medial forebrain bundle of a rat’s brain, a region that
senses reward. Wires the size of a human hair connected the electrodes to a
microprocessor sewn onto the rat’s back, like a backpack. From a laptop
500 meters—a third of a mile—away, Talwar and his team of scientists sent
electronic pulses to the rat’s medial forebrain. After using Pavlovian
techniques to train the rat to respond to stimuli, DARPA scientists were able
to control the rat, steering it left, right, and forward through a maze via
brain stimulation.
Animal rights activists cried foul. “The animal is no longer functioning
as an animal,” lamented Gary Francione, an animal welfare expert at
Rutgers University School of Law. But for the majority of Americans, lab
rats are synonymous with scientific experimentation. The idea being it’s
okay to experiment on rats, to control their brains, in the spirit of progress.
The rat was not generally perceived as a cyborg per se. It was just a lab rat
hooked up to a machine.
Over the next five years, DARPA’s biohybrid programs advanced at an
astonishing pace. Microprocessor technology was doubling in capacity
every eighteen months. By June 29, 2007, when Apple rereleased its first-
generation iPhone, Americans could now carry in their pockets more
technology than NASA had when it sent astronauts to the moon.
One of the first insect cyborgs was unveiled in 2009. Inside a DARPA-
funded laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor
Michel Maharbiz and his colleagues coupled a green June beetle with a
machine. The scientists implanted electrodes into the brain and wings of a
2-centimeter-long beetle and sewed a radio receiver onto its back. By
remotely delivering electrical pulses to the beetle’s brain, they were able to
start and stop the beating of the beetle’s wings, thereby steering and
controlling the insect in flight.
In 2014, DARPA scientists working at North Carolina State University
again broke new ground, this time with the Manduca sexta moth, or goliath
worm, an insect with a metamorphic life cycle that lasts forty days. During
the late pupa stage, DARPA scientist Dr. Alper Bozkurt and his team
surgically inserted an electrode in the dorsal thorax of the moth, between its
neck and abdomen. “The tissue develops around the implanted electrodes
and secures their attachment to the insect’s body over the course of a few
days,” explains team member Alexander Verderber. “The electrodes emerge
as a part of the insect’s body in the final adult stage as a moth.” By “taking
advantage of the rebuilding of the insect’s entire tissue system during
metamorphic development,” says Verderber, the scientists were able to
create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine. “One use of the
biohybrid would be for use in applications such as search and rescue
operations,” Bozkurt says. DARPA scientists working on such cyborg
programs invariably describe the programs as designed to help society.
Certainly, subjects like free will, ethics, and the consequences of
manufacturing cyborgs are worthy of and ripe for discussion. Another
question: What are DARPA’s plans for augmenting humans with machines?
By 2014, DARPA had handed over many of its micro air vehicle
programs to the military services. An unclassified in-house 2013 U.S. Air
Force Research Laboratory animated video revealed the burgeoning new
role that biosystemic, biomimetic, and biohybrid micro air vehicles would
play in future weapons systems. The video begins with hundreds of mini-
drones, shaped like living creatures, being dropped from a much larger
drone. The MAVs rain down onto an urban center below. At ground level, a
man parks a van in front of a cement-block safe house. Across the street, a
pigeon sits on an electrical wire.
“The small size of MAVs allows them to be hidden in plain sight,” says
the video’s narrator. A close-up of the “pigeon” reveals that the bird is a
surveillance drone, its head a high-resolution video camera. “Once in
place,” the narrator explains, “an MAV can enter a low-power, extended
surveillance mode for missions lasting days or weeks. This may require the
MAV to harvest energy from environmental sources such as sunlight or
wind, or from manmade sources such as power lines and vibrating
machinery.”
The pigeon drone transmits information to an Air Force technician
sitting at a desk in an information operations center at a remote location.
Using biometrics, the technician confirms that the man driving the van is a
terror suspect.
The man exits the van and walks down an alleyway. The pigeon takes
flight, now joined by a beetle-shaped drone. The pigeon falls away and the
beetle MAV follows the suspect through a maze of alleyways. “MAVs will
use micro-sensors and microprocessor technology to navigate and track
targets through complicated terrain such as urban areas,” says the narrator.
As the terror suspect enters an apartment building, the beetle drone follows
along. “Small in size, agile flight will enable MAVs to covertly enter
locations inaccessible by traditional means of aerial surveillance,” the
narrator says, but “MAVs will use new forms of navigation, such as a
vision-based technique called ‘optic flow.’ This remains robust when
traditional techniques such as GPS are unavailable.” The drone can navigate
and see on its own.
In the video, once inside the building, the beetle drone hovers near an
apartment, loitering above the doorway, out of sight. When the door opens,
a man steps out into the hallway and looks around before exiting the
apartment. He closes the door behind him, but not before the beetle drone is
able to slip surreptitiously inside. Now, a swarm of additional flying insect
drones join in the mission. “Multiple MAVs, each equipped with small
sensors, will work together to survey a large area,” the narrator explains.
“While some MAVs may be used purely for visual reconnaissance, others
may be used for targeting or tagging of sensitive locations.” Inside the
apartment, a terrorist with a high-powered sniper rifle is seen setting up a
kill shot. As the enemy sniper prepares to fire his weapon out an open
window, one of the beetle-sized micro air vehicles flies toward him and
hovers near the back of his head.
“Individual MAVs may perform direct attack missions,” says the
narrator, “can be equipped with incapacitating chemicals, combustible
payloads, or even explosives for precision targeting capabilities.” As the
beetle hovers near the sniper’s head, its payload explodes. The sniper falls
over, dead. The animated video ends.

In addition to missions that involve targeted kills, DARPA’s vast weapon

systems of the future will involve an army of drones on intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The MAVs are but one
element. DARPA has scores of programs for biologically inspired robotic
systems that fly. While micro air vehicles will fly slow and low, DARPA’s
hypersonic stealth drones will fly high and fast. The armed Falcon HTV-2,
launched from a rocket, will travel at Mach 20 (13,000 miles per hour), or
twenty-two times faster than a commercial jet. According to DARPA
documents, “at HTV-2 speeds, flight time between New York City and Los
Angeles would be less than 12 minutes.” The Mach 20 drone will be able to
strike any target, anywhere in the world, in less than an hour. As the
Defense Department grows increasingly reliant on satellite technology,
DARPA must provide the Pentagon with “quick, affordable and routine
access to space,” says DARPA. The XS-1 experimental space drone,
announced in the fall of 2013, is DARPA’s seminal hypersonic low-earth-
orbit drone, designed to be able to fly faster on consecutive around-the-
world missions than any other drone in U.S. history. Specifics about the
weapons systems on board the XS-1 are classified.
The oceans are vast, and DARPA’s plans for unmanned underwater
vehicles (UUVs) are equally immense. One program is Hydra, an undersea
system that includes a fleet of baby submersibles combined with a mother
ship. The baby UUVs are being designed to deploy from the mother ship
into shallow coastal waters and harbors, and then return. Integrated into this
underwater system will also be airborne drones, with encapsulated UAVs
able to eject from the Hydra mother ship, surface, launch, become airborne,
and fly reconnaissance or combat missions. In this way, Hydra will serve as
a submarine, a transport aircraft, and a communications center in one. In
another undersea DARPA program, called Upward Falling Payloads,
unmanned sensor systems are placed on the deep-ocean floor, where they lie
undetected for years at a time, gathering intelligence. “These deep-sea
nodes could be remotely activated when needed and recalled to the
surface,” according to DARPA; hence “they fall upward.”
Ground robotic systems are advancing with equal pace. There is Atlas, a
high-mobility humanoid robot, strong and coordinated enough to navigate
rough outdoor terrain, climb stairs, and manipulate environments with its
hands. Atlas’s head, made up of sensors, includes stereo cameras and a laser
range finder. Similarly anthropomorphic is the six-foot-two Valkyrie robot,
built by NASA for the DARPA robotics challenge. It opens windows and
wears clothes. NASA hopes to send Valkyrie to Mars as a humanoid avatar
and one day assemble structures there.
Accompanying the humanoid robots are Unmanned Ground System
robots, many of which resemble animals. The AlphaDog robot, which is
about the size of a small rhinoceros, is able to traverse rugged terrain with
the ease of a four-legged animal while carrying 400 pounds of military
equipment. It can recognize its squad leader’s commands and right itself
after falling over. The MIT cheetah robot, presently the fastest legged robot
in history, can run twenty-eight miles per hour and jump over obstacles in
its path. Cheetah runs on a quiet electric motor, giving it stealth like a cat.
Other land-based robots roll over terrain on continuous track treads. There
is the Talon SWORD (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance
Detection System) robot, one of the fastest in the fleet, and a next-
generation incarnation of the bomb disposal robots fielded to EOD
technicians in Iraq. The Talon SWORD carries an M249 Squad Automatic
Weapon and a 6mm rocket launcher, each of which can be remotely
controlled from half a mile away. Its more powerful cousin, the MAARS
(Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System), is designed to conduct
reconnaissance and surveillance missions, and then to kill human targets
from almost two miles away. In addition to firing machine guns and grenade
launchers from their robotic arms, the MAARS robots are equipped with
motion detectors, acoustic sensors, siren and speaker systems, nonlethal
laser dazzlers, less-than-lethal grenades, and encryption technology to make
the robotic killer “extremely safe and tamper proof,” according to
unclassified DARPA documents.
 DARPA’s LANdroids (Local Area Network droids) program is one of
the smallest of the tread-borne robotic ground systems. LANdroids are
“small, inexpensive, smart robotic radio network relay nodes” that work in
a fleet, or swarm, says DARPA. These hand-size robots are dropped by
dismounted soldiers as they deploy into urban combat zones, capable of
leveraging their stealth and mobility “to coordinate and move
autonomously” on their own. If one of the LANdroids is destroyed in battle,
the others rearrange themselves accordingly. The LANdroids program aims
to develop “intelligent autonomous radio drones,” a concept that is critical
to understanding where the Pentagon’s army of robots is headed over the
next twenty-five years.
“The program seeks to demonstrate the capabilities of self-configuration,
self-optimization, self-healing, tethering, and power management,”
according to DARPA. In this sense, DARPA’s LANdroids program is a
prototype for future robotic systems that aim toward autonomy, or self-
governance. Autonomy lies at the heart of the Pentagon’s newest revolution
in military affairs. To be clear about what “autonomy” is, the concept is
spelled out by the Pentagon, using a drone as an example: “When an
aircraft is under remote control, it is not autonomous. And when it is
autonomous, it is not under remote control.” It governs itself.
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James A. Winnefeld made
this explicit in the Pentagon’s drone warfare report: “The autonomous
systems are self-directed toward a goal in that they do not require outside
control, but rather are governed by laws and strategies that direct their
behavior.” The nontechnical term for an autonomous drone is a hunter-killer
robot, a robotic system “intelligent” enough to be shown a photograph of a
person and told to return when the target has been killed.
This is science, not science fiction. It is also Pentagon policy.
Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, “Autonomy in Weapon
Systems,” released in 2012, mandates that “autonomous and semi-
autonomous weapon systems shall be designed.” And like all advanced
scientific endeavors, the technology must evolve, from vision to reality. It is
DARPA’s job to lead the way. “DoD envisions unmanned systems
seamlessly operating with manned systems while gradually reducing the
degree of human control and decision making… with an ultimate goal of
full autonomy.”
 According to the Defense Department’s 2011 “Unmanned Systems
Integrated Roadmap,” the progression from semiautonomy to full autonomy
over the next twenty-five years would be a fourfold process. To begin with,
unmanned systems would be “human operated,” or entirely controlled by
man, as they are today. The second step involves “human delegated”
systems, with drones learning how to “perform many functions
independently of human control.” The third level involves “human
supervised” systems, in which the machines perform tasks independently
after being given “top-level permissions or directions by a human.” Finally,
the robotic systems would become “fully autonomous,” whereby “the
system receives goals from humans and translates them into tasks to be
performed without human interaction.” A note accompanies the level-four
goal: “A human could still enter the loop in an emergency or change the
goals, although in practice there may be significant time delays before
human intervention occurs.” Time is everything. It still takes only 1,600
seconds for a nuclear weapon to travel halfway around the earth.
The world has reached an epoch-defining moment the magnitude of
which has not been seen since the decision to engineer the thermonuclear
bomb. If we give machines autonomy, the potential for unintended
consequences is unparalleled. Some civilian-sector robotics experts say the
technology for self-governing machines is simply not there, and won’t be
for decades. That autonomous machines require true artificial intelligence,
and AI capabilities are not yet anywhere near the threshold of self-
governance. But at least one very powerful individual at the Pentagon
disagrees. “Dramatic progress in supporting technologies suggests that
unprecedented, perhaps unimagined degrees of autonomy can be introduced
into current and future military systems,” Ashton B. Carter, then
undersecretary of defense, wrote in 2010 in a letter tasking defense
scientists to study the technology. “This could presage dramatic changes in
military capability and force composition comparable to the introduction of
‘Net-Centricity.’” In February 2015, Ashton Carter took office as President
Obama’s secretary of defense.
So what is the status of artificial intelligence? Are hunter-killer robots
right around the bend? In order to discern DARPA’s AI capabilities, I
traveled to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It was
here, starting in 1943, that U.S. defense scientists engineered the world’s
first atomic bomb. And it is here, in the spring of 2014, that DARPA
scientists were working to create an artificial brain.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Brain Wars

The Los Alamos National Laboratory sits at the top of a mountain range in
the high desert of northern New Mexico. It is a long, steep drive to get there
from the capital city of Santa Fe, through the Tesuque Indian Reservation,
over the Rio Grande, and into the Santa Fe National Forest. I am headed to
the laboratory of Dr. Garrett T. Kenyon, whose program falls under the
rubric of synthetic cognition, an attempt to build an artificial brain.
Roboticists define artificial brains as man-made machines designed to be as
intelligent, self-aware, and creative as humans. No such machine yet exists,
but DARPA scientists like Dr. Kenyon believe that, given the rapid
advances in DARPA technologies, one day soon they will. There are two
technologies that play key roles in advancing artificial intelligence, and they
are computing, which involves machines, and neuroscience, which involves
the human brain.
During the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the 2.5 million
Americans who served, more than 300,000 returned home with brain
injuries. DARPA calls these individuals brain-wounded warriors. One of the
most severe forms of brain injury sustained by brain-wounded warriors is
traumatic brain injury, or TBI, which occurs when an object, such as a
bullet or piece of mortar or shrapnel from an IED, pierces the skull and
enters the brain tissue. To address TBI, as well as other brain injuries
sustained in modern warfare, DARPA has publicly stated that it has a
multitude of science and technology programs in place. The agency’s long-
term goals in brain science research, it says, revolve around trying to restore
the minds and memories of brain-wounded warriors. Through the Office of
the Secretary of Defense (OSD), I submitted multiple written requests to
interview one or more brain-wounded warriors who are currently
participating in DARPA’s brain research programs. OSD and DARPA
repeatedly declined.
Traumatic brain injury is as old as war. U.S. soldiers have sustained
traumatic brain injuries in each and every one of America’s wars since the
Revolution. When I learned that Allen Macy Dulles, the brain-wounded
warrior from the Korean War, was, at age eighty-four, living just down the
road from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I arranged to visit him—
before heading to Dr. Kenyon’s laboratory and its artificial brain.
Allen Macy Dulles, the only son of the former CIA director Allen Welsh
Dulles, lives off the old Santa Fe Trail, down a small side road, inside a
large brown adobe brick home. When I visit him in the spring of 2014, he
has been living with a severe form of traumatic brain injury for almost
sixty-two years. Allen Macy Dulles stopped being able to record new
memories back in November 1952, when he was twenty-two years old. He
was the young soldier I wrote about earlier in this book, the Marine Corps
officer who went out on patrol on the western front in Korea, near a hilltop
called Outpost Bunker Hill, and got hit by enemy mortar fire. He has been
alive all this time and has been well taken care of by his older sister and
guardian, Joan Dulles Talley.
When I arrive, he looks like any elderly gentleman might look, sitting in
a chair in his kitchen, waiting for his lunch. There are flowers on the table
and there is artwork on the walls. Physically Allen Macy Dulles is healthy,
with a big smile and a neatly combed mustache. “He looks just like our
father,” Joan Dulles Talley says. I come in and sit down across from him,
take out my digital tape recorder, and begin our interview. Allen speaks
clearly and eloquently. Remarkably, he can discuss the Egyptian pharaohs
and the ancient Greeks with the ease of the classics scholar he once was,
because he studied and learned these subjects before his brain was injured.
His neural network allows him to access this information, as memory, and
yet he cannot recall what he had for dinner last night or for breakfast this
morning. When I leave, he will have no memory of my having been here,
his sister Joan explains.
Joan Talley, a Jungian analyst by training, age ninety in 2014, is tall,
gentle, fiercely knowledgeable, and has Katharine Hepburn’s voice. Her
first husband worked as a spy during World War II and later served as the
U.S. ambassador to Iran. After their divorce, Joan Talley moved to
Switzerland, where she trained as a psychotherapist specializing in the
psychology of the unconscious, and regularly visited her brother Allen at
the mental institution where he lived for a while, on Lake Geneva. After
their father died, Joan Talley brought her brother back to America and has
been his guardian ever since.
The injury in Korea left Allen Macy Dulles mostly deaf in his left ear.
To compensate for this deficiency he uses a machine, a 1990s-era listening
aid that includes a handheld transmitter, and a microphone attached to the
transmitter by long wires. In his left ear he wears an earpiece. To speak with
him, I pick up the microphone and talk into it. To Allen, this is high
technology and does not make much sense. It did not exist in the world he
is capable of remembering, the world before November 1952.
“What are your plans for the day?” I ask.
“Nothing in particular,” he says, “although I do like going to
secondhand stores.”
“What do you buy?”
“Anything that happens to do with books or scientific devices,” Allen
says. He delivers a short lecture on scientific devices. But he is talking
about science from before 1952.
“Will you remember this conversation in an hour?” I ask.
“Probably not,” he says. “As you know, my [short-term] memory is
practically nonexistent.”
I ask Allen to share a memory with me from before his brain injury,
something from high school.
“I remember a good class on constitutional interpretation,” he says.
“Why did you decide to join the Marines?” I ask.
“Well, you see,” he says with conviction, “I was seventeen years old, I
had the opportunity to enlist. The war in Europe had ended. I knew there
were going to be more wars. There is no shortage of wars.”
Allen discusses war. Greek warfare. The wars in Europe. The war with
Nazi Germany. The war in Korea against the Chinese. He can talk about all
the wars leading up to 1952, and then his knowledge of war, and of the
science and technology that have resulted from wars, abruptly ends for him.
He has lived through every event and invention discussed in this book—the
Castle Bravo bomb, the ICBM, the ARPANET, the Internet, the Vietnam
War, the Gulf War, GPS, stealth technology, robots and computers, 9/11, the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—but he has no memory or knowledge of any
of it having happened. Allen Macy Dulles is a living anachronism. He
belongs to a world that no longer exists. For him, time stands still. It
stopped in 1952, before science and technology transformed and shaped the
modern world in which we live.
Carl Sagan once stated, “It is suicidal to create a society dependent on
science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about the
science and technology.” But I imagine if Carl Sagan had met Allen Macy
Dulles, he would have given the man a pass. As for the rest of us, Sagan’s
message applies.

DARPA leads the nation in advancing science and technology. DARPA

makes the future happen. Starting in 2013, DARPA teamed up with the
White House on the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing
Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative and declared this decade to be the
decade of the brain. The White House calls the BRAIN initiative “a bold
new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind
and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like
Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy and traumatic brain injury.”
These are important goals. But DARPA’s stated goal is advancing weapons
technology, not curing mental illness. What is DARPA’s primary goal in
researching the brain?
To help brain-wounded warriors, DARPA has several programs of note.
In Restoring Active Memory (RAM), scientists have developed and are
testing implantable wireless “neuroprosthetics” as a possible means of
overcoming amnesia. As part of the RAM program, soldiers allow the tiny
machines, or chips, to be implanted in their brain. The Reorganization and
Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery (REPAIR) program seeks to
understand how the brain makes computations and organizes them. This too
requires the surgical implantation of a brain chip, as does the Restorative
Encoding Memory Integration Neural Device (REMIND). Despite multiple
appeals through the Office of the Secretary of Defense, DARPA declined to
grant me an interview with any of these brain-wounded warriors. DARPA
would also not answer specific questions about RAM, REPAIR, or
REMIND.
According to the Pentagon, “mental disorders are the leading cause of
hospital bed days and the second leading cause of medical encounters for
active duty servicemembers.” To address this problem, DARPA has
developed brain implants for the treatment of war-related mental, or
neuropsychological, illnesses. The Systems-Based Neurotechnology for
Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program seeks to treat post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) by surgically implanting multiple electrodes in
various regions of the brain as well as a microchip between the brain and
skull of the brain-wounded warfighter. The chips wirelessly transmit data
back to an information operations center, which has the capacity to send
electrical impulses remotely to different regions of the warfighter’s brain to
relieve symptoms like anxiety and delayed reaction time—a kind of twenty-
first-century electroshock therapy on the go. In technical terms, DARPA
states that its goals are a way to “incorporate near real-time recording,
analysis and stimulation in next-generation devices inspired by current
Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS).” The Office of the Secretary of Defense and
DARPA declined to grant access to any SUBNETS test subjects or to
answer specific questions about the program.
If the past teaches us about the present, it is clear that DARPA’s stated
goals regarding its brain programs are not DARPA’s only goals. DARPA is
not primarily in the business of helping soldiers heal; that is the job of the
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. DARPA’s job is to “create and prevent
strategic surprise.” DARPA prepares vast weapons systems of the future. So
what are the classified brain programs really for? What is the reason behind
the reason?
DARPA’s limb prosthetics program might offer a number of clues. In
2005, with IEDs dominating the war news, DARPA initiated a program
called Revolutionizing Prosthetics. Over the next two years the program
was split in two parts. DEKA Research and Development Corporation, in
New Hampshire, was given a DARPA contract to make a robotic prosthetic
arm. Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory was given a
DARPA contract to create a “thought-controlled” robotic arm. These were
highly ambitious goals.
Of Johns Hopkins’s amazing progress, MIT Technology Review reported
in 2007, “They have demonstrated for the first time that neural activity
recorded from a monkey’s brain can control fingers on a robotic hand,
making it play several notes on a piano.” But this was not entirely accurate,
according to Jonathan Kuniholm, a former engineer officer with the First
Battalion, Twenty-third Marines. Kuniholm lost his right arm to an IED
buried along the Euphrates River in Haditha, Iraq. The homemade bomb
was disguised as a discarded olive oil can. After recuperating, Kuniholm
signed on with DARPA and Revolutionizing Prosthetics. “The Intrinsic
hand was physically capable of all the individual movements necessary to
play the piano,” Kuniholm wrote in IEEE Spectrum, the trade magazine for
the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of
technology, “but it could not be controlled by a person in real time. There
was no muscle twitch or electrical signal being decoded by signal-
processing algorithms in real time. The hand was preprogrammed, like a
player piano.” In some regards, Revolutionizing Prosthetics did more for
DARPA’s image than it did for warfighters who had lost limbs in war.
Major news organizations wrote stories about the DEKA arm, hailing it
as revolutionary, spectacular, and astounding. In 2009, Dean Kamen,
DEKA’s founder, recalled on 60 Minutes what it was like when DARPA
officials came to him proposing to build a robotic arm. “They said, ‘We
want these kids to have something put back on them that will essentially
allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a grape off the table, know the
difference without looking at it.’” Kamen welcomed the challenge, and he
and his team of forty engineers spent a year working on the problem;
DARPA spent $100 million.
But when the cameras go off, the arms usually go back to the DARPA
laboratories, where they generally sit on shelves. “Most of us strap back on
our Captain Hook arms,” said one participant, who lost an arm in Iraq and
who has appeared on national television modeling the DEKA arm but asked
not to be identified by name. This individual has become frustrated with
DARPA, whose motives he sees as something other than getting better
prosthetics to war veterans, though he does not claim to know what
DARPA’s ulterior motives might be. The DEKA arm, which costs up to
$650,000 to engineer, has yet to find a partner to mass-produce its system.
In November 2014 the FDA approved marketing the device, which
reportedly can respond to multiple simultaneous commands from a wearer’s
brain. In a press statement, DARPA said it was happy “to repay some of the
debt we owe to our Service members,” but acknowledges there is no
timeline on when the DEKA arm will become available to amputees.
America’s wounded warriors continue to wear what amputees have worn
since World War I, the so-called Captain Hook arm, which is officially
called the Dorrance hook, invented by D. W. Dorrance in 1912.
It is likely that DARPA’s primary goal in advancing prosthetics is to give
robots, not men, better arms and hands. Robotics expert Noel Sharkey, who
serves as a United Nations advisor and chairman of the International
Committee for Robot Arms Control, explains: “You hear DARPA talk about
a robot they are designing, being able to turn a valve inside a Fukushima-
type power plant. Yes, that is an example of robots keeping humans safe.
But that robotic hand will also soon be able to turn a valve onboard, say, a
ship.” A ship that a robot has been sent to take over in a military operation.
The technologies DARPA is pursuing in its brain and prosthetics
programs have dual use in DARPA’s efforts to engineer hunter-killer robots.
Coupled with the quest for artificial intelligence, all this might explain why
DARPA is so focused on looking inside people’s brains.

High on the top of a forested plateau in the Jemez Mountains, the Los
Alamos National Laboratory is a storied place with a rich and complex
history of nuclear weapons research. The Los Alamos National Laboratory
is also one of the largest producers of defense science in the nation, with a
mission statement that reads, “Delivering science and technology to protect
our nation and promote world stability.” Although the list of DARPA
contracts here at Los Alamos is not public knowledge, it is voluminous.
Most of the contracts are classified. These are not the programs that
DARPA’s public affairs officers are quick to promote in the press. The
classified programs are not like the ones people read about in mainstream
magazines and newspapers, about bullets that bend, prosthetics that can
pick up a grape, cars that can drive themselves, technology you can
swallow, and robots that can fall down and get back up again. Here, in the
classified laboratories at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and in other
classified national laboratories and research facilities like this one, is where
some of DARPA’s highest-risk, highest-payoff programs evolve. The
consequential weapons systems of the future are born black, as in classified,
and, like the hydrogen bomb, McNamara’s electronic fence, Assault
Breaker, and stealth technology, are unveiled to the public only after they
have created a revolution in military affairs.
Within the thirty-six-square-mile Los Alamos campus, there are 1,280
buildings, eleven of which are nuclear facilities. Even the cooks who work
in some of the kitchens have top secret Q clearances. There are sixty-three
miles of gas lines inside the laboratory campus, thirty-four miles of
electrical lines, and a power plant. There are roughly ten thousand
employees and contract workers at the lab, and according to the historian at
the Los Alamos Historical Society, roughly half of them have Ph.D.s. One
scientist who has a DARPA contract and is at liberty to discuss some of his
work on the artificial brain is Dr. Garrett T. Kenyon.
Outside Dr. Kenyon’s office at Los Alamos there is an armored truck
with a machine gun mounted on top. It is parked in the red zone, by the
front entrance. Inside the building, Dr. Kenyon and his team work on
artificial intelligence, man’s quest to create a sentient machine. Dr. Kenyon
is part of the synthetic cognition group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
He and his team are simulating the primate visual system, using a
supercomputer to power the operation. Specifically, the team is trying to
create a precise computer model of the human eye, including all of its
neural networks, to understand the relationship between visual cognition
and the brain. This is not necessarily an impossible task, but it does require
one of the fastest computers in the world to model such a complex neural
network as that of the human eye. Neuroscientists currently believe that
there are 100 billion neurons inside a human brain and that every sensory
message the brain receives involves an exponential number of neural
connections between these networks.
To do their work, Dr. Kenyon and his team use a part of the IBM
Roadrunner supercomputer, or what is left of it. When Roadrunner was built
in 2008 it was the fastest computer in the world, able to perform 1 million
billion calculations per second, setting the world’s record for petaflops per
second data-processing speeds. That is a far cry from the World War II–era
ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School, which
completed five thousand operations per second. But science builds. Visions
become reality. Thus the ENIAC inspired John von Neumann to build
MANIAC, which inspired Daniel Slotnick to build the ILLIAC IV, which
led to the IBM Roadrunner. In 2014, the world’s fastest supercomputer,
located at China’s National University of Defense Technology and called
Tianhe-2, could reportedly perform some 30 quadrillion calculations per
second, or 33.86 petaflops.
As for the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, between its unveiling in
2008 and my visit in 2014, it has become obsolete. The machine cost $100
million to build but has since become too power-inefficient to continue to
run. The machine cannot be recycled, though, because it holds many of the
nation’s nuclear secrets. Computers never entirely lose the information they
record. Because of this, and since the Los Alamos National Laboratory
requires a bigger, faster, more efficient computer, Roadrunner is being
destroyed. Some of what is left of it is being used by Dr. Kenyon’s team in
their quest for artificial intelligence. The banks of computers they use fit
into a room about the size of a basketball court.
Dr. Kenyon takes me to look at the supercomputer. It is located inside
the brick and glass building that houses his laboratory, beyond the armored
truck, down a long corridor and behind a single locked door. Dr. Kenyon
and I peer in through a small window at the Roadrunner supercomputer.
The lights are low. The banks of processors are alight with tiny red and
white blinking lights. There are racks of machines in rows. There are
bundles of cables on the floor. Kenyon points inside. “It’s a giant abacus,”
he says. “The real power is in the human brain.” Kenyon taps his forehead.
“So small, so infinite.”
We walk through another part of the building. While we wait for an
elevator, Dr. Kenyon unfolds a dinner-size napkin and holds it up in the air
in front of his forehead. “This is about the size of your brain, spread out,”
he says. “The part that matters. The cerebral cortex.” The 100 billion
neurons there are also known as the brain’s gray matter. “And the human
brain does things beyond anyone’s comprehension. Evolution created the
smartest machine in this world.”
Dr. Kenyon explains the concept behind the DARPA-funded project he
is working on, in layman’s terms. “Today, my twelve-year-old daughter
reprogrammed my smart phone so it has facial recognition software,” he
says. “But seventy to eighty percent of the time it doesn’t recognize me.”
He holds up his phone to his face. “The smart phone can’t always see it’s
me. I can see it’s me. There’s the double chin, like it or not. So why can’t
my phone recognize me all the time? Why can’t it perform a function that
my dog can, the minute I walk in the door? For all the things the smart
phone can do, it can’t do the simplest things that biological systems can.
Recognize someone all the time.”
Kenyon notes that if a person’s teenaged child recognized him only 70
to 80 percent of the time, there would be something seriously wrong with
the child’s brain. “Sentient beings recognize through sight,” he explains.
“My phone, on the other hand, is just comparing a set of stored features
with a set of features extracted from the input coming from its camera. It’s
not ‘seeing’ anything. My phone is not resolving the pixels into a rich
scene, with all the interrelationships implicit therein. My phone is just
finding a few key points and constructing a high-dimensional feature vector
that it can compare to a stored feature vector.”
At present, true recognition—as in cognition, or acquiring knowledge
and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses—is done
only by sentient beings. “We think that by working hard to understand how
biological systems solve this problem, how the primate visual system
recognizes things, we can understand something fundamental about how
brains solve the problems they do, like recognition. Until then, computers
are blind,” Kenyon says. “They can’t see.”
Which raises at least one technical problem regarding artificial
intelligence and autonomous hunter-killer drones. “I think robot assassins
are a very bad idea for a number of reasons,” Garrett Kenyon asserts.
“Moral and political issues aside, the technical hurdles to overcome cannot
be understated,” he says. “It’s misleading to think just because my smart
phone can ‘identify’ me seventy percent of the time that it has thirty percent
to go.” We are talking about orders of magnitude. “The chances that my
daughter might not recognize me, or misidentify me from a short distance,
or because I am wearing a hat,” he says, “are about one in 0.0001. And we
still do not understand how neural systems work.”
Dr. Kenyon is excited by his research. He is convinced that
neuroscientists of today are like alchemists of the Middle Ages trying to
understand chemistry. That all the exciting discoveries lie ahead. “Think of
how much chemists in the Dark Ages did not understand about chemistry
compared to what we know now. We neuroscientists are trapped in a bubble
of ignorance. We still don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the human
brain. We have theories; we just don’t know for sure. We can’t build an
electrical circuit, digital or analogue or other, that mimics the biological
system. We can’t emulate the behavior. One day in the future, we think we
can.”
Dr. Kenyon says that one of the most powerful facts about DARPA as an
organization is that it includes theoretical scientists and engineers in its
ranks. The quest for artificial intelligence, he says, is similar to getting
humans to Mars. Once you have confidence you can do it, “then getting to
Mars is an engineering problem,” he says. In his laboratory, metaphorically,
“we just don’t know where Mars is yet.” But Dr. Kenyon and his team are
determined. “I don’t think it’s that far away,” he says of artificial
intelligence. “The question is, who will be the Columbus here?”

Columbus was an explorer looking for a new land. DARPA is looking for
ways to use science to fight future wars.
Interviews with DARPA scientists of today give a sense that in the
twenty-first century, programs that once existed in the realm of science
fiction are rapidly becoming the science of the here and now. If Dr. Garrett
Kenyon’s Los Alamos laboratory represents the future of the mind, the
laboratory of Dr. Susan V. Bryant and Dr. David M. Gardiner at the
University of California, Irvine, represents the future of the human body.
Dr. Bryant and Dr. Gardiner are a husband-and-wife team of regeneration
biologists. Dr. Bryant also served as the dean of the School of Biological
Sciences and the vice chancellor for research at U.C. Irvine. Dr. Gardiner is
a professor of developmental and cell biology and maintains the laboratory
where he does research as a regenerative engineer.
This laboratory looks like many university science labs. It is filled with
high-powered microscopes, dissection equipment, and graduate students
wearing goggles and gloves. The work Dr. Gardiner and Dr. Bryant do here
is the result of a four-year contract with DARPA and an extended five-year
contract with the Army. Their work involves limb regeneration. Gardiner
and Bryant believe that one day soon, humans will also be able to
regenerate their own body parts.
Dr. David Gardiner, who is in his sixties, examines a set of lab trays on
the countertop. Crawling around inside the trays are multi-limbed aquatic
salamanders called axolotls. The creatures look both prehistoric and
futuristic, with large, bug-like eyes. Some are pink; others are unpigmented,
a naturally occurring mutation that makes them look transparent; you can
see the bones and blood vessels inside. This species of salamander, a
urodele amphibian, is able to regenerate lost body parts as an adult.
“Regeneration is really coming alive now,” Dr. Gardiner says. “Sue and
I have been studying the science for years. DARPA was the first time
anyone ever asked us to regenerate anything. They did this with the mouse
digit,” he says, referring to the tip of a mouse finger, which they and another
team of scientists had been able to get to grow back, thereby setting a
scientific milestone. “DARPA said, ‘Great. Can you scale it up?’ As in pigs.
As in humans. They asked, ‘Is this possible?’ We said yes. They asked, ‘Do
you know how to do it?’ We said no. They said, ‘Well, then, we’ll fund
you.’” Gardiner believes that therein lies the genius of DARPA. “DARPA
funds questions,” he says.
Dr. Gardiner searches through the trays of salamanders and locates the
one he is looking for. This axolotl has an extra limb coming out the right
side of its body. A second right front limb. “If we look at this extra limb on
the salamander, we understand we [humans] have all the info to make an
arm.”
To explain the concept of limb regeneration, Dr. Gardiner first provides
a brief summary of mutagenesis, the process by which an organism’s
genetic information is changed, resulting in a mutation. “Mutations occur in
nature, as the result of exposure to a mutagen,” he says. “Natural mutations
can be beneficial or harmful to an organism, and this drives evolution.
Mutations can also be performed as experiments, in laboratories. DNA can
be modified artificially, by chemical and biological agents, resulting in
mutations.” One consequential example of harmful mutagenesis that we
discuss occurred as a result of ARPA’s Project Agile defoliation campaign.
People who were exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War suffer a
higher rate of children born with mutations. This includes Vietnamese
people who were sprayed with the herbicides and also a vigorously debated
number of American servicemen who were involved in the spraying.
“Mutations tell us about signals,” Gardiner explains. “Cells talk to each
other using signals. Every cell has an identity. All cells have information.
There are no dumb cells. Cells talk to each other to stimulate growth. They
talk to each other to make new patterns.” Pointing to the see-through axolotl
with the extra limb, Gardiner says, “People look at this salamander and say,
‘Salamanders are special. We [humans] will never regenerate like a
salamander.’” Dr. Gardiner and Dr. Bryant do not agree. “We say, ‘Oh,
really? How do you know?’ The most compelling evidence is you have an
arm.”
There is no regeneration gene, says Gardiner. It happens at a cellular
level. “People regenerate. Look how we started ab initio. As a single cell.
Once upon a time, each one of us was a one-cell embryo that divided. Every
human being on this planet regenerated his or her own cells, in the womb.”
Dr. Bryant uses differentiation to simplify things. “The difference
between salamanders and humans,” she says, “is that when salamanders’
limbs are amputated, they grow new ones. When humans’ limbs are
amputated, they produce scar tissue. We humans respond to injury by
making scar tissue. Why?” she asks.
“At the heart of limb regeneration is evolution,” Dr. Gardiner adds.
What his wife is pointing out, he says, is that “at the heart of genetics is
diversity.”
“Some people make mega-scars,” says Dr. Bryant. “The scars can be
bigger than the wound. If you cut the scar tissue off, it grows back. There is
the same evidence at the other end of the scarring spectrum. Some people
produce scars that can go away.”
Dr. Gardiner suggests looking at cancer research as an analogy. “Cancer
equals our bodies interacting with the environment,” he says. “Cancer
shows us we have remarkable regenerative ability. The pathways that drive
cancer are the same pathways that cause regeneration. In the early days, no
one had any idea about cancer. There was one cancer. Then along came the
idea of ‘cancer-causing’ carcinogens. Well, we have found salamanders are
very resistant to cancer. Inject a carcinogen into a salamander and it
regulates the growth and turns it into an extra limb.”
“Where is this leading?” I ask.
“We are driving our biology toward immortality,” Dr. Gardiner says. “Or
at least toward the fountain of youth.”
In April 2014, scientists in the United States and Mexico announced
they had successfully grown a complex organ, a human uterus, from tissue
cells, in a lab. And in England, that same month, at a North London
hospital, scientists announced they had grown noses, ears, blood vessels,
and windpipes in a laboratory as they attempt to make body parts using
stem cells. Scientists at Maastricht University, in Holland, have produced
laboratory-grown beef burgers, grown in vitro from cattle stem cells, which
food tasters say taste “close to meat.”
“Can science go too far?” I ask Dr. Gardiner and Dr. Bryant.
“The same biotechnology will allow scientists to clone humans,” says
Dr. Gardiner.
“Do you think the Defense Department will begin human cloning
research?” I ask.
“Ultimately, it needs to be a policy decision,” Gardiner says.
In 2005 the United Nations voted to adopt the Declaration on Human
Cloning, prohibiting “all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are
incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” But in
the United States there is currently no federal policy banning the practice.
The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 (H.R. 2560) did not pass. So
the Defense Department could be cloning now. And while neither Dr.
Bryant nor Dr. Gardiner has the answer to that question, we agree that what
is possible in science is almost always tried by scientists.
“These are discussions that need to be had,” Dr. Gardiner says.
In the twenty-first-century world of science, almost anything can be
done. But should it be done? Who decides? How do we know what is wise
and what is unwise?
“An informed public is necessary,” Dr. Bryant says. “The public must
stay informed.”
But for the public to stay informed, the public has to be informed. Dr.
Bryant and Dr. Gardiner’s program was never classified. They worked for
DARPA for four years, then both parties amiably moved on. What DARPA
is doing with the limb regeneration science, DARPA gets to decide. If
DARPA is working on a cloning program, that program is classified, and
the public will be informed only in the future, if at all.
If human cloning is possible, and therefore inevitable, should American
scientists be the first to achieve this milestone, with Pentagon funding and
military application in mind? If artificial intelligence is possible, is it
therefore inevitable?
 Another way to ask, from a DARPA frame of mind: Were Russia or
China or South Korea or India or Iran to present the world with the first
human clone, or the first artificially intelligent machine, would that be
considered a Sputnik-like surprise?
DARPA has always sought the technological and military edge, leaving
observers to debate the line between militarily useful scientific progress and
pushing science too far. What is right and what is wrong?
“Look at Stephen Hawking,” says Dr. Bryant.
Hawking, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, is considered one of
the smartest people on the planet. In 1963 he contracted motor neuron
disease and was given two years to live. He is still alive in 2015. Although
Hawking is paralyzed, he has had a remarkably full life in the more than
fifty years since, working, writing books, and communicating through a
speech-generating device. Hawking is a proponent of cloning. “The fuss
about cloning is rather silly,” he says. “I can’t see any essential distinction
between cloning and producing brothers and sisters in the time-honored
way.” But Hawking believes that the quest for artificial intelligence is a
dangerous idea. That it could be man’s “worst mistake in history,” and
perhaps his last. In 2014 Hawking and a group of colleagues warned against
the risks posed by artificially intelligent machines. “One can imagine such
technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers,
out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even
understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls
it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
Stephen Hawking is far from alone in his warnings against artificial
intelligence. The physicist and artificial intelligence expert Steve
Omohundro believes that “these [autonomous] systems are likely to behave
in anti-social and harmful ways unless they are very carefully designed.” In
Geneva in 2013, the United Nations held its first-ever convention on lethal
autonomous weapons systems, or hunter-killer drones. Over four days, the
117-member coalition debated whether or not these kinds of robotic
systems should be internationally outlawed. Testifying in front of the
United Nations, Noel Sharkey, a world-renowned expert on robotics and
artificial intelligence, said, “Weapons systems should not be allowed to
autonomously select their own human targets and engage them with lethal
force.” To coincide with the UN convention, Human Rights Watch and the
Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic released a report
called “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots.”
“Fully autonomous weapons threaten to violate the foundational rights
to life,” the authors wrote, because robotic killing machines “undermine the
underlying principles of human dignity.” Stephen Goose, Arms Division
director at Human Rights Watch, said, “Giving machines the power to
decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far.”
In an interview for this book, Noel Sharkey relayed a list of potential
robot errors he believes are far too serious to ignore, including “human-
machine interaction failures, software coding errors, malfunctions,
communication degradation, enemy cyber-attacks,” and more. “I believe
there is a line that must not be crossed,” Sharkey says. “Robots should not
be given the authority to kill humans.”
Can the push to create hunter-killer robots be stopped? Steve
Omohundro believes that “an autonomous weapons arms race is already
taking place,” because “military and economic pressures are driving the
rapid development of autonomous systems.” Stephen Hawking, Noel
Sharkey, and Steve Omohundro are three among a growing population who
believe that humanity is standing on a precipice. DARPA’s goal is to create
and prevent strategic surprise. But what if the ultimate endgame is
humanity’s loss? What if, in trying to stave off foreign military competitors,
DARPA creates an unexpected competitor that becomes its own worst
enemy? A mechanical rival born of powerful science with intelligence that
quickly becomes superior to our own. An opponent that cannot be stopped,
like a runaway train. What if the twenty-first century becomes the last time
in history when humans have no real competition but other humans?
In a world ruled by science and technology, it is not necessarily the
fittest but rather the smartest that survive. DARPA program managers like
to say that DARPA science is “science fact, not science fiction.” What
happens when these two concepts fuse?
 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Pentagon’s Brain

In April 2014 I interviewed Charles H. Townes, the Nobel Prize–winning

inventor of the laser. When we spoke, Professor Townes was just about to
turn ninety-nine years old. Lucid and articulate, Townes was still keeping
office hours at the University of California, Berkeley, still writing papers,
and still granting reporters’ requests. I felt delighted to be interviewing him.
Two things we discussed remain indelible. Charles Townes told me that
once, long ago, he was sharing his idea for the laser with John von
Neumann and that von Neumann told him his idea wouldn’t work.
“What did you think about that?” I asked Townes.
“If you’re going to do anything new,” he said, “you have to disregard
criticism. Most people are against new ideas. They think, ‘If I didn’t think
of it, it won’t work.’ Inevitably, people doubt you. You persevere anyway.
That’s what you do.” And that was exactly what Charles Townes did. The
laser is considered one of the most significant scientific inventions of the
modern world.
The second profound thing Charles Townes said to me, and I mentioned
it earlier in this book, was that he was personally inspired to invent the laser
after reading the science-fiction novel The Garin Death Ray, written by
Alexei Tolstoi in 1926. It is remarkable to think how powerful a force
science fiction can be. That fantastic, seemingly impossible ideas can
inspire people like Charles Townes to invent things that totally transform
the real world.
This notion that science fiction can profoundly impact reality remains
especially interesting to me because in researching and reporting this book,
I learned that during the war on terror, the Pentagon began seeking ideas
from science-fiction writers, most notably a civilian organization called the
SIGMA group. Its founder, Dr. Arlan Andrews, says that the core idea
behind forming the group was to save the world from terrorism, and to this
end the SIGMA group started offering “futurism consulting” to the
Pentagon and the White House. The group’s motto is “Science Fiction in
the National Interest.”
Those responsible for safeguarding the nation “need to think of crazy
ideas,” says Dr. Andrews, and the SIGMA group helps the Pentagon in this
effort, he says. “Many of us [in SIGMA] have earned Ph.D.’s in high tech
fields, and some presently hold Federal and defense industry positions.”
Andrews worked as a White House science officer under President George
H. W. Bush, and before that at the nation’s nuclear weapons production
facility, Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico. Of SIGMA
members he says, “Each [of us] is an accomplished science fiction author
who has postulated new technologies, new problems and new societies,
explaining the possible science and speculating about the effects on the
human race.”
One of the SIGMA group members is Lieutenant Colonel Peter
Garretson, a transformation strategist at the Pentagon. In the spring of 2014
Garretson arranged for me to come to the Pentagon with two colleagues,
Chris Carter and Gale Anne Hurd. Chris Carter created The X-Files, one of
the most popular science-fiction television dramas of all time. The X-Files
character the Cigarette Smoking Man is a quintessential villain who lives at
the center of government conspiracies. Gale Anne Hurd co-wrote The
Terminator, a science-fiction classic about a cyborg assassin sent back
across time to save the world from a malevolent artificially intelligent
machine called Skynet. In The Terminator, Skynet becomes smarter than the
defense scientists who created it and initiates a nuclear war to achieve
machine supremacy and rid the earth of humankind.
Carter and Hurd have joined me on a reporting trip to the Pentagon not
to offer any kind of futurism consulting but to listen, discuss, and observe.
It’s a warm spring day in 2014 when we arrive at the Pentagon. The five-
sided, five-floored, 6.5-million-square-foot structure looms like a colossus.
We pass through security and check in. Security protocols require that we
are escorted everywhere we go, including the bathroom. We head into the
Pentagon courtyard for lunch, with its lawn, tall trees, and wooden picnic
tables. Garretson’s colleague Lieutenant Colonel Julian Chesnutt, with the
Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Clandestine Service, tells us a story
about the building at the center of the Pentagon courtyard, which is now a
food court but used to be a hot dog stand. Chesnutt explains that during the
height of the Cold War, when satellite technology first came into being,
Soviet analysts monitoring the Pentagon became convinced that the
building was the entrance to an underground facility, like a nuclear missile
silo. The analysts could find no other explanation as to why thousands of
people entered and exited this tiny building, all day, every day. Apparently
the Soviets never figured it out, and the hot dog stand remained a target
throughout the Cold War—along with the rest of the Pentagon. It’s a great
anecdote and makes one wonder what really is underneath the Pentagon,
which is rumored to have multiple stories belowground.
During lunch, seated at a long picnic table, we engage in a thought-
provoking conversation with a group of Pentagon “future thinkers” about
science fact and science fiction. These defense intellectuals, many of whom
have Ph.D.s, come from various military services and range in age from
their late twenties to early sixties. Some spent time in the war theater in
Iraq, others in Afghanistan. The enthusiasm among these futurologists is
palpable, their ideas are provocative, and their commitment to national
security is unambiguous. These are among the brains at the Pentagon that
make the future happen.
After lunch we are taken to the E-Ring, home to the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the secretary of defense. The maze-like corridors buzz with fluorescent
lighting as we pass through scores of security doors and travel up and down
multiple flights of stairs. Finally, we arrive in the hallway outside the office
of the secretary of defense. Hanging on the corridor walls are large life-
sized oil portraits of the nation’s former defense secretaries. I see the five
past secretaries of defense portrayed in this book. Neil McElroy asked
Congress to approve the creation of DARPA, which he promised would
steward America’s vast weapons systems of the future, and it has. Robert
McNamara believed that intellect and systems analysis could win wars, and
peopled the upper echelons of the Pentagon with whiz kids to accomplish
this goal. Harold Brown, hydrogen bomb weapons engineer, became the
first physicist secretary of defense and gave America its offset strategy—the
ability of commanders to fight wars from a continent’s distance away. Dick
Cheney demonstrated to the world that overwhelming force could
accomplish certain goals. Donald Rumsfeld introduced the world to
network-centric warfare.
As we walk the corridors looking at artwork and photographs of
weapons systems adorning the Pentagon’s walls, our group expands, as
does the conversation about science fact and science fiction. One officer
says he has a poster of the Cigarette Smoking Man hanging on his office
wall. Another says that for an office social event, his defense group made
baseball caps with Skynet written across the front. Science fiction is a
powerful force. Because of the fictional work of Carter and Hurd, many
sound-minded people take seriously at least two significant science-fiction
concepts: that (as in The Terminator) artificially intelligent machines could
potentially outsmart their human creators and start a nuclear war, and that
(as in The X-Files) there are forces inside the government that keep certain
truths secret. As a reporter, I have learned that these concepts also exist in
the real world. Artificially intelligent hunter-killer robots present
unparalleled potential dangers, and the U.S. government keeps dark secrets
in the name of national security. I’ve also found that some of the most
powerful Pentagon secrets and strategies are hidden in plain sight.
The day after the Pentagon reporting trip, I went to see Michael
Goldblatt, the man who pioneered many of DARPA’s super-soldier
programs. Goldblatt, a scientist and venture capitalist, ran DARPA’s
Defense Sciences Office from 1999 until 2004, and oversaw program
efforts to create warfighters who are a mentally and physically superior
breed. Goldblatt asked me to come to his home for our interview, and as a
car took me from my hotel room in Pentagon City out to where Goldblatt
lives in the suburbs, the trip took on the feel of an X-Files episode.
Traveling through the woodsy environs of McLean, Virginia, down Dolley
Madison Boulevard (Dolley’s husband, James Madison, called war the
dreaded enemy of liberty), we passed by the entrance to CIA headquarters,
Langley, and turned in to a nearby residential neighborhood.
Inside his home, Michael Goldblatt and I discussed transhumanism,
DARPA’s efforts to augment, or increase, the performance of warfighters
with machines, pharmaceuticals, and other means. Under Goldblatt’s
tenure, unclassified programs included Persistence in Combat,
Mechanically Dominant Soldier, and Continually Assisted Performance.
These programs focused on augmenting the physical body of warfighters,
but today I am most interested in the DARPA programs that focus on
augmenting the human brain. Not just the brains of brain-wounded warriors
but those of healthy soldiers as well. DARPA calls this area of research
Augmented Cognition, or AugCog. The concept of AugCog sits at the
scientific frontier of human-machine interface, or what the Pentagon calls
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In DARPA’s robo-rat and Manduca sexta
moth programs, scientists created animal-machine biohybrids that are
steerable by remote control. Through Augmented Cognition programs,
DARPA is creating human-machine biohybrids, or what we might call
cyborgs.
DARPA has been researching brain-computer interfaces (BCI) since the
1970s, but it took twenty-first-century advances in nanobiotechnology for
BCI to really break new ground. DARPA’s Aug-Cog efforts gained
momentum during Goldblatt’s tenure. By 2004, DARPA’s stated goal was to
develop “orders of magnitude increases in available, net-thinking power
resulting from linked human-machine dyads.” In 2007, in a solicitation for
new programs, DARPA stated, “Human brain activity must be integrated
with technology.” Several unclassified programs came about as a result,
including Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) and
Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA). Both programs use “non-
invasive technology” to accelerate human capacity to detect targets. The
CT2WS program was designed for soldiers looking for targets on the
battlefield and for intelligence operatives conducting surveillance
operations in hostile environments. The NIA was designed for imagery
analysts looking for targets in satellite photographs. The program
participants wear a “wirelesss EEG [electroencephalography] acquisition
cap,” also called a headset, which jolts their brains with electrical pulses to
increase cognitive functioning. DARPA scientists have found that by using
this “non-invasive, brain-computer interface,” they are able to accelerate
human cognition exponentially, to make soldiers and spies think faster and
more accurately. The problem, according to DARPA program managers, is
that “these devices are often cumbersome to apply and unappealing to the
user, given the wetness or residue that remains on the user’s scalp and hair
following removal of the headset.” A brain implant would be far more
effective.
After Goldblatt left the agency, in scientific journals DARPA researchers
identified a series of “groundbreaking advances” in “Man/Machine
Systems.” In 2014 DARPA program managers stated that “the future of
brain-computer interface technologies” depended on merging all the
technologies of DARPA’s brain programs, the noninvasive and the invasive
ones, specifically citing RAM, REPAIR, REMIND, and SUBNETS. Was
DARPA conducting what were, in essence, intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance missions inside the human brain? Was this the long-sought
information that would provide DARPA scientists with the key to artificial
intelligence? “With respect to the President’s BRAIN initiative,” write
DARPA program managers, “novel BCI [brain-computer interface]
technologies are needed that not only extend what information can be
extracted from the brain, but also who is able to conduct and participate in
those studies.”
For decades scientists have been trying to create artificially intelligent
machines, without success. AI scientists keep hitting the same wall. To date,
computers can only obey commands, following rules set forth by software
algorithms. I wondered if the transhumanism programs that Michael
Goldblatt pioneered at DARPA would allow the agency to tear down this
wall. Were DARPA’s brain-computer interface programs the missing link?
Goldblatt chuckled. He’d left DARPA a decade ago, he said. He could
discuss only unclassified programs. But he pointed me in a revelatory
direction. This came up when we were discussing the Jason scientists and a
report they published in 2008. In this report, titled “Human Performance,”
in a section called “Brain Computer Interface,” the Jasons addressed
noninvasive interfaces including DARPA’s CT2WS and NIA programs.
Using “electromagnetic signals to detect the combined activity of many
millions of neurons and synapses” (in other words, the EEG cap) was
effective in augmenting cognition, the Jasons noted, but the information
gleaned was “noisy and degraded.” The more invasive programs would
produce far more specific results, they observed, particularly programs in
which “a micro-electrode array [is] implanted into the cortex with
connections to a ‘feedthrough’ pedestal on the skull.” The Jason scientists
wrote that these chip-in-the-brain programs would indeed substantially
improve “the desired outcome,” which could allow “predictable, high
quality brain-control to become a reality.”
So there it was, hidden in plain sight. If DARPA could master “high
quality brain-control,” the possibilities for man-machine systems and brain-
computer interface would open wide. The wall would come down. The
applications in hunter-killer drone warfare would potentially be unbridled.
The brain chip was the missing link.
But even the Jasons felt it was important to issue, along with this idea, a
stern warning. “An adversary might use invasive interfaces in military
applications,” they wrote. “An extreme example would be remote guidance
or control of a human being.” And for this reason, the Jason scientists
cautioned the Pentagon not to pursue this area, at least not without a serious
ethics debate. “The brain machine interface excites the imagination in its
potential (good and evil) application to modify human performance,” but it
also raises questions regarding “potential for abuses in carrying out such
research,” the Jasons wrote. In summary, the Jason scientists said that
creating human cyborgs able to be brain-controlled was not something they
would recommend.
This warning echoed an earlier Jason warning, back during the Vietnam
War, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked the Jasons to
consider using nuclear weapons against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Jasons
studied the issue and concluded it was not something they could
recommend. Using nuclear weapons in Vietnam would encourage the
Vietcong to acquire nuclear weapons from their Soviet and Chinese
benefactors and to use them, the Jasons warned. This would in turn
encourage terrorists in the future to use nuclear weapons.
In their 2008 study on augmented cognition and human performance, the
Jason scientists also said they believed that the concept of brain control
would ultimately fail because too many people in the military would have
an ethical problem with it. “Such ethical considerations will appropriately
limit the types of activities and applications in human performance
modification that will be considered in the U.S. military,” they wrote.
But in our discussion of the Jason scientists’ impact on DARPA,
Goldblatt shook his head, indicating I was wrong.
“The Jason scientists are hardly relevant anymore,” Goldblatt said.
During his time at DARPA, and as of 2014, the “scientific advisory group
with the most influence on DARPA,” he said, “is the DSB,” the Defense
Science Board. The DSB has offices inside the Pentagon. And where the
DSB finds problems, it is DARPA’s job to find solutions, Goldblatt
explained. The DSB had recently studied man-machine systems, and it saw
an entirely different set of problems related to human-robot interactions.
In 2012, in between the two Pentagon roadmaps on drone warfare,
“Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2011–2036” and “Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2013–2038,” the DSB delivered to the
secretary of defense a 125-page report titled “The Role of Autonomy in
DoD Systems.” The report unambiguously calls for the Pentagon to rapidly
accelerate its development of artificially intelligent weapons systems. “The
Task Force has concluded that, while currently fielded unmanned systems
are making positive contributions across DoD operations, autonomy
technology is being underutilized as a result of material obstacles within the
Department that are inhibiting the broad acceptance of autonomy,” wrote
DSB chairman Paul Kaminski in a letter accompanying the report.
The primary obstacle, said the DSB, was trust—much as the Jason
scientists had predicted in their report. Many individuals in the military
mistrusted the idea that coupling man and machine in an effort to create
autonomous weapons systems was a good idea. The DSB found that
resistance came from all echelons of the command structure, from field
commanders to drone operators. “For commanders and operators in
particular, these challenges can collectively be characterized as a lack of
trust that the autonomous functions of a given system will operate as
intended in all situations,” wrote the DSB. The overall problem was getting
“commanders to trust that autonomous systems will not behave in a manner
other than what is intended on the battlefield.”
Maybe the commanders had watched too many X-Files episodes or seen
any of the Terminator films one too many times. Or maybe they read
Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, which discusses “the probability
and consequences of failure in autonomous and semi-automatic weapons
systems that could lead to unintended engagements.” Or maybe
commanders and operators want to remain men (and women), not become
cyborg man-machines. But unlike the Jason scientists, the Defense Science
Board advised the Pentagon to accelerate its efforts to change this attitude
—to persuade commanders, operators, and warfighters to accept, and to
trust, human-robot interaction.
 “An area of HRI [human-robot interaction] that has received significant
attention is robot ethics,” wrote the DSB. This effort, which involved
internal debates on robot ethics, was supposed to foster trust between
military personnel and robotic systems, the DSB noted. Instead it backfired.
“While theoretically interesting, this debate on functional morality has had
unfortunate consequences. It increased distrust in unmanned systems
because it implies that robots will not act with bounded rationality.” The
DSB advised that this attitude of distrust needed to change.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that DARPA has a program on how to
manipulate trust. During the war on terror, the agency began working with
the CIA’s own DARPA-like division, the Intelligence Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or IARPA, on what it calls Narrative Networks (N2), to
“develop techniques to quantify the effect of narrative on human
cognition.” One scientist leading this effort, Dr. Paul Zak, insists that what
DARPA and the CIA are doing with trust is a good thing. “We would all
benefit if the government focused more on trusting people,” Zak told me in
the fall of 2014, when I visited his laboratory at Claremont Graduate
University in California. When I asked Zak if the DARPA research he was
involved in was more likely being used to manipulate trust, Zak said he had
no reason to believe that was correct.
Paul Zak is a leader in the field of neuroeconomics and morality, a field
that studies the neurochemical roots of making economic decisions based
on trust. Zak has a Ph.D. in economics and postdoctoral training, in
neuroimaging, from Harvard. In 2004 he made what he describes as a
groundbreaking and life-changing discovery. “I discovered the brain’s
moral molecule,” Zak says, “the chemical in the brain, called oxytocin, that
allows man to make moral decisions [and that] morality is tied to trust.” In
no time, says Zak, “all kinds of people from DARPA were asking me, ‘How
do we get some of this?’” Zak also fielded interest from the CIA. For
DARPA’s Narrative Networks program, Zak has been developing a method
to measure how people’s brains and bodies respond when oxytocin, i.e.,
“The brain’s moral molecule,” is released naturally.
Researchers at the University of Bonn, not affiliated with DARPA, have
taken a different approach with their studies of oxytocin. In December
2014, these researchers published a study on how the chemical can be used
to “erase fear.” Lead researcher Monika Eckstein told Scientific American
that her goal in the study was to administer oxytocin into the noses of sixty-
two men, in hopes that their fear would dissipate. “And for the most part it
did,” she said. A time might not be too far off when we live in a world in
which fear can be erased.

Why is the Defense Science Board so focused on pushing robotic warfare

on the Pentagon? Why force military personnel to learn to “trust” robots
and to rely on autonomous robots in future warfare? Why is the erasure of
fear a federal investment? The answer to it all, to every question in this
book, lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex.
Unlike the Jason scientists, the majority of whom were part-time defense
scientists and full-time university professors, the majority of DSB members
are defense contractors. DSB chairman Paul Kaminski, who also served on
President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2009 to 2013, is a
director of General Dynamics, chairman of the board of the RAND
Corporation, chairman of the board of HRL (the former Hughes Research
Labs), chairman of the board of Exostar, chairman and CEO of
Technovation, Inc., trustee and advisor to the Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics Lab, and trustee and advisor to MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory—all
companies and corporations that build robotic weapons systems for DARPA
and for the Pentagon. Kaminski, who also serves as a paid consultant to the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, is but one example. Kaminski’s fellow
DSB members, a total of roughly fifty persons, serve on the boards of
defense contracting giants including Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics,
Northrop Grumman, Bechtel, Aerospace Corporation, Texas Instruments,
IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National
Laboratories, and others.
One might look at DARPA’s history and say that part of its role—even
its entire role—is to maintain a U.S. advantage in military technology, in
perpetuity. Former DARPA director Eberhardt Rechtin clearly stated this
conundrum of advanced technology warfare when he told Congress, back in
1970, that it was necessary to accept the “chicken-and-egg problem” that
DARPA will always face. That the agency must forever conduct “pre-
requirement research,” because by the time a technological need arises on
the battlefield, it becomes apparent, too late, that the research should
already have been done. DARPA’s contractors are vital parts of a system
that allows the Pentagon to stay ahead of its needs, and to steer revolutions
in military affairs. To dominate in future battles, never to be caught off
guard.
One might also look at DARPA’s history, and its future, and say that it’s
possible at some point that the technology may itself outstrip DARPA as it
is unleashed into the world. This is a grave concern of many esteemed
scientists and engineers.
A question to ask might be, how close to the line can we get and still
control what we create?
Another question might be, how much of the race for this technological
upper hand is now based in the reality that corporations are very much
invested in keeping DARPA’s “chicken-and-egg” conundrum alive?
This is what President Eisenhower warned Americans to fear when he
spoke of the perils of the military-industrial complex in his farewell speech
in January 1961. “We have been compelled to create a permanent
armaments industry of vast proportions,” the president said.
In the years since, the armaments industry has only grown bigger by the
decade. If DARPA is the Pentagon’s brain, defense contractors are its
beating heart. President Eisenhower said that the only way Americans could
keep defense contractors in check was through knowledge. “Only an alert
and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and
goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Anything less, and civilians cede control of their own destiny.
The programs written about in this book are all unclassified. DARPA’s
highest-risk, highest-payoff programs remain secret until they are unveiled
on the battlefield. Given how far along DARPA is in its quest for hunter-
killer robots, and for a way to couple man with machine, perhaps the most
urgent question of all might be whether civilians already have.
Can military technology be stopped? Should it be? DARPA’s original
autonomous robot designs were developed as part of DARPA’s Smart
Weapons Program decades ago, in 1983. The program was called “Killer
Robots” and its motto offered prescient words: “The battlefield is no place
for human beings.”
This book begins with scientists testing a weapon that at least some of
them believed was an “evil thing.” In creating the hydrogen bomb,
scientists engineered a weapon against which there is no defense. With
regard to the thousands of hydrogen bombs in existence today, the mighty
U.S. military relies on wishful optimism—hope that the civilization-
destroyer is never unleashed.
This book ends with scientists inside the Pentagon working to create
autonomous weapons systems, and with scientists outside the Pentagon
working to spread the idea that these weapons systems are inherently evil
things, that artificially intelligent hunter-killer robots can and will outsmart
their human creators, and against which there will be no defense.
There is a perilous distinction to call attention to: when the hydrogen
bomb was being engineered, the military-industrial complex—led by
defense contractors, academics, and industrialists—was just beginning to
exert considerable control over the Pentagon. Today that control is
omnipotent.
Another difference between the creation of the hydrogen bomb in the
early 1950s and the accelerating development of hunter-killer robots today
is that the decision to engineer the hydrogen bomb was made in secret and
the decision to accelerate hunter-killer robots, while not widely known, is
not secret. In that sense, destiny is being decided right now.
The 15-megaton Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb, exploded in the Marshall Islands in 1954, was
the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States. If unleashed on the eastern seaboard
today it would kill roughly 20 million people. With this weapon, authorized to proceed in secret,
came the certainty of the military-industrial complex and the birth of DARPA. (U.S. Department of
Energy)
An elite group of weapons engineers rode out the Castle Bravo thermonuclear explosion from inside
this bunker, code-named Station 70, just nineteen miles from ground zero. (The National Archives at
Riverside)
In the 1950s, John von Neumann—mathematician, physicist, game theorist, and inventor—was the
superstar defense scientist. No one could compete with his brain. (U.S. Department of Energy)
Rivalry spawns supremacy, and in the early 1950s, a second national nuclear weapons laboratory was
created to foster competition with Los Alamos. Ernest O. Lawrence (left) and Edward Teller (center)
cofounded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Herb York (right) served as first director. In
1958, York became scientific director of the brand new Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA),
later renamed DARPA. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
In his farewell address to the nation in January, 1961, President Eisenhower warned the American
people about the “total influence” of the military-industrial complex. The warning was a decade too
late. (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library)
Edward Teller and Herb York—shown here with Livermore colleague Luis Alvarez—envisioned a
10,000-megaton nuclear weapon designed to decimate and depopulate much of the Soviet Union.
(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Harold Brown was twenty-four years old when he was put in charge of thermo-nuclear bomb work at
Livermore. He followed Herb York to the Pentagon and oversaw ARPA weapons programs during
the Vietnam War. In 1977, Harold Brown became the first scientist to be secretary of defense. (U.S.
Department of Defense)
Physicist and presidential science advisor Marvin “Murph” Goldberger cofounded the Jason advisory
group in 1959, paid for solely by ARPA until the end of the Vietnam War. The Jasons, still at work
today, are considered the most influential and secretive defense scientists in America. Photographed
here in his home, age 90 in 2013, Goldberger examines a photo of himself and President Johnson.
(Author’s collection)
Senator John F. Kennedy visiting Senator Lyndon B. Johnson at the LBJ ranch in Texas. Each man,
as President, would personally authorize some of the most controversial ARPA weapons programs of
the Vietnam War. (Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, photo by Frank Muto)
In 1961 Kennedy sent Johnson to Vietnam to encourage South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem
to sign off on ARPA’s weapons lab in Saigon. In this photograph are (roughly front to back) Ngo
Dinh Diem, Lady Bird Johnson, Madame Nhu, Lyndon Johnson, Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Jean Kennedy
Smith, Stephen Smith, and Ngo Dinh Nhu, the head of the secret police. In 1963, Diem and Nhu
were murdered in a White House–approved coup d’état. (Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library,
photo by Republic of Vietnam)
 President Diem’s small-in-stature army had difficulty handling large, semi-automatic weapons
carried by U.S. military advisors in Vietnam. ARPA’s William Godel cut through red tape and sent
1,000 AR-15 rifles to Saigon. In 1966 the weapon was adapted for fully automatic fire and re-
designated the M16 assault rifle. “One measure of the weapon’s success is that it is still in use across
the world,” says DARPA. (NARA, photo by Dennis Kurpius)
The use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange was an ARPA-devised scheme. “Your decision is
required because this is a kind of chemical warfare,” advisor Walt Rostow told President Kennedy,
who signed off on the program in 1961. In 2012 Congress determined that between 2.1 million and
4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange with the number of U.S. veterans
remaining the subject of debate. (NARA, photo by Bryan K. Grigsby)
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara explains the situation in Vietnam, during a Pentagon press
conference in February 1965. Many of today’s advanced technology weapons systems were
developed by ARPA during the Vietnam War. (U.S. Department of Defense)
In 1965, the Jason scientists studied the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam to close off
supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (U.S. Army)
 The Jason scientists were the brains behind McNamara’s electronic fence, a system of advanced
sensors designed to detect Viet Cong trail traffic. Initially ridiculed and later embraced, DARPA
advanced the concept into Combat Zones That See. In this photo, an Air Delivered Seismic Intrusion
Detector (ADSID) sensor is about to be dropped on the trail, near Khe Sanh. (U.S. Air Force)
No amount of technology could stop Vietnam War protesters from gaining control of the war
narrative. (Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, photo by Frank Wolfe)
 As the seventeenth secretary of defense Richard “Dick” B. Cheney oversaw the Gulf War in Iraq,
which put decades of DARPA’s advanced weapons technology on display. (Office of the Secretary of
Defense)
Students train in an M1 Abrams tank SIMNET simulator, the brainchild of DARPA’s Jack Thorpe.
(U.S. Department of Defense)
A staff sergeant armed with an M16A2 assault rifle maintains security over an F-117 stealth fighter,
during refueling. (U.S. Department of Defense)
The superiority of U.S. weapons technology used in the Gulf War is made evident along Iraq’s
Highway 80, or “Highway of Death.” (U.S. Department of Defense, Tech Sgt. Joe Coleman)
A U.S. Marine helicopter flies over a residential area in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1992. The following
year, the Battle of Mogadishu caused DARPA to rethink what future weapons systems would be
needed for urban combat. (U.S. Department of Defense, Tech Sgt. Perry Heimer)
An early 1990s model of what the Pentagon thought an urban combat scenario might look like, seen
here at the Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training center. But combat zones like
Mogadishu, Fallujah, and Kabul look nothing like this. (U.S. Department of Defense, Visual
Information Center)
Retired Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, known for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, served as
director of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, starting in 2001. Allegedly shut down, many
electronic surveillance programs were transferred to NSA. (NARA)
 President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the western face of the
Pentagon, the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by R. D. Ward)
 U.S. and coalition flags fly outside Saddam Hussein’s former Al Faw Palace, taken over by U.S.
military and renamed Camp Victory, Iraq. Master Sergeant Craig Marsh lived here and oversaw the
efforts of bomb disposal (EOD) technicians and DARPA robots. (U.S. Department of Defense, photo
by Staff Sgt. Caleb Barrieau)
DARPA’s Talon robot approaches a deadly improvised explosive device (IED) in Rajah, Iraq. (U.S.
Army, photo by Specialist Jeffrey Sandstrum)
A micro air vehicle (MAV) prepares for its first combat mission in Iraq, in 2005. Many of DARPA’s
advanced MAV’s are now small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. (U.S. Department of Defense,
photo by Sgt. Doug Roles)
The seven-ounce Wasp drone, part of DARPA’s Combat Zones That See, gathers real-time video and
works in a swarm. (U.S. Department of Defense)
 Vice President Cheney, his wife, and their daughter are greeted by General David Petraeus in
Baghdad, in 2008. Petraeus wrote the first U.S. Army counter-insurgency manual since Vietnam and
supported the DARPA-born Human Terrain System program which focused on winning “the hearts,
minds, and acquiescence of the population.” (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Master Sgt.
Jeffrey Allen)
The Predator drone inside a hangar at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, in 2009. (Author’s collection)
The charred alley in Chehel Gazi, Afghanistan, where Human Terrain Team member Paula Loyd was
set on fire by an emissary of the Taliban. (USA Criminal Investigation Command)
DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar and Marine Corps Commandant General James F. Amos pose with
DARPA’s LS3 land robot, designed to carry heavy equipment over rugged terrain, in 2014. (U.S.
Marine Corps, photo by Sgt. Mallory S. VanderSchans)
An armored truck with an assault rifle mounted on top keeps guard outside the Los Alamos National
Laboratory where Dr. Garrett Kenyon and his team work on artificial intelligence for DARPA.
(Author’s collection)
 When the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer was built for Los Alamos, in 2008, it was the fastest
computer in the world, able to perform 1 million billion calculations per second. By 2013, advances
in chip technology rendered it obsolete. In 2014, part of what remains of Roadrunner is used to
power DARPA’s artificial intelligence project. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
The DARPA Modular Prosthetic Limb. The work advances robotics but is it helping warfighters who
lost limbs? (U.S. Department of Defense, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory)
DARPA’s Atlas robot is a high-mobility humanoid robot built by Boston Dynamics. Its “articulated
sensor head” has stereo cameras and a laser range finder. (Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency)
Allen Macy Dulles and his sister, Joan Dulles Talley. A brain injury during the Korean War, in 1952,
made it impossible for Dulles to record new memories. DARPA’s brain prosthetics program alleges to
help brain-wounded warriors like Dulles, but program details remain highly classified. (Author’s
collection)
The Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or MAARS robot kills human targets from almost
two miles away. MAARS robots have motion detectors, acoustic sensors, siren and speaker systems,
non-lethal laser dazzlers, less-than-lethal grenades, and encryption technology to make the robotic
killer “extremely safe and tamper proof,” says DARPA. (U.S. Army)
DARPA Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, bears no identifying signs and maintains a “force
protection environment,” for security purposes. (Author’s collection)
The Pentagon. (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Senior Airman Perry Aston)
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Pentagon’s Brain begins in 1954 with defense scientists who worked
on the hydrogen bomb and ends in 2015 with defense scientists who work
on robots, cyborgs, and biohybrids. In researching a book about extreme
science, one very human nonscientific story stands out. Richard “Rip”
Jacobs shared it with me during an interview. Jacobs was a member of the
VO-67 Navy squadron whose job it was to lay down military sensors on the
Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. I write about the experiences of
Jacobs and his fellow airmen from Crew Seven earlier in this book; they
were shot down over enemy territory on February 27, 1968. Two were
killed, the rest of them—somewhat miraculously—survived.
Forty-two years later, in 2010, sixty-six-year-old Rip Jacobs had just
finished playing golf and was walking back to his car, parked in the Lake
Hefner Golf Club parking lot in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, when he
spotted a bumper sticker on a nearby car. In an instant, billions of neurons
fired in his brain as memory flooded back. The bumper sticker contained the
logo of the Jolly Green Giants, the helicopter search and rescue squadrons
from the Vietnam War.
Rip Jacobs stared at the image. As his neurons sparked he remembered
being tangled up in a tree in the jungle canopy over the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
forty-two years earlier. After parachuting out of a crashing aircraft, Jacobs
had landed in the trees with his parachute’s lanyards wrapped around him in
a way that made it impossible for him to wriggle free. Everything hurt. He
was covered in blood. Immobile, and with his senses heightened, he
remembered hearing the dreaded sounds of small arms fire on the ground as
Vietcong searched for him. In his memory, Rip Jacobs recalled the internal
panic he felt decades before over whether or not he’d set off his locator
button. If he had, there was a chance that a Jolly Green helicopter might be
able to locate and rescue him. If he hadn’t, surely he’d die. And then he
remembered hearing the whap-whap-whap of the Jolly Green helicopter
blades and knowing that his fellow Americans were coming to rescue him.
Forty-two years had passed, but as Rip Jacobs stood there in the golf club
parking lot, he could almost see the little seat come out of the helicopter,
see the two arms that reached out for him back on February 27, 1968. Then
the memory was gone.
“I found a pen and paper and I left a note on the windshield of the car,”
Rip Jacobs recalls. “In the note I said something like, ‘if you know anything
about the Jolly Green Giants in Vietnam, please call me.’ I signed my
name.”
That night the phone rang.
The person on the telephone line introduced himself as Chief Master
Sergeant Clarence Robert Boles Jr. “He said he was eighty-six years old,”
Jacobs remembers. “He said I’d left a note on his car.”
Rip Jacobs asked Clarence Boles if he knew anything about the Jolly
Greens in Vietnam. Boles said, “I was with one of the Jolly Greens working
out of Nakhon Phanom, Thailand.” Then Boles said something astounding.
“In fact,” Bole said, “I recognize your name. I was the guy that rescued you
out of that tree.”
How could that be?
Clarence Boles drove over to Rip Jacobs’s house. The local television
news channel came too. The reporters filmed a segment on the amazing,
chance reunion of the two former Vietnam veterans, after forty-two years.
Back during the Vietnam War, when Rip Jacobs was in the rescue
helicopter, after Boles had cut his parachute lanyards with his knife, Jacobs
never said a word. He was in shock. But Clarence Boles kept a list of the
names of every person his Jolly Green team rescued that day and all the
other days. And for decades, Boles had been telling the story of the person
he’d rescued from the tree. Boles never imagined he’d meet the man he
rescued again and he didn’t particularly feel the need to search him out. It
was a story from the past, a moment in a war. The incident in the golf club
parking lot was an astonishing coincidence that brought the two men
together again. And to think that they were living in nearby towns in
Oklahoma, just a few dozen miles away from each other.
How could that be? It’s hard to explain some things. Not every answer is
found in science. Some of the most mysterious and powerful puzzles are
simply about being human.
Researching and reporting this book required the assistance of many
individuals who generously shared their wisdom and experiences with me. I
wish to thank all the scientists, engineers, government officials, defense
contractors, academics, soldiers, sailors, and warfighters who spoke to me
on the record and all those who spoke on background and asked not to be
named. I thank Joan Dulles Talley, Murph Goldberger, and Michael
Goldblatt for allowing me to interview them in their homes. Thank you
Garrett Kenyon, Paul Zak, Sue Bryant, and David Gardiner for inviting me
into their laboratories. I thank Peter Garretson for arranging for Gale Anne
Hurd, Chris Carter, Dori Carter, and me to come to the Pentagon. Thanks to
David A. Bray for inviting the four of us to join his group for Chinese food.
Thank you Fred Hareland for taking me to China Lake, Damon Northrop
for showing me around SpaceX, and Robert Lowell for the visit to JPL.
Thank you Dr. Steve Bein for your generosity with the introductions. I
thank Finn Aaserud for compiling the Jason scientists’ oral histories in the
1980s; this book benefited greatly as a result. And thank you Richard Van
Atta for taking the time to speak with me and for stewarding so much of the
historical record on DARPA over the past several decades.
At the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park,
MD, I would like to thank Richard Peuser, David Fort, and Eric Van
Slander. At the National Archives at Riverside, thank you Matthew Law
and Aaron Prah. Thank you Aaron Graves, Major Eric D. Badger, and Sue
Gough in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; Thomas D. Kunkle and
Kevin Neil Roark, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Karen Laney, National
Nuclear Security Administration; Byron Ristvet, Defense Threat Reduction
Agency; Christopher Banks, LBJ Library; Eric J. Butterbaugh, DARPA
Public Affairs; Robert Hoback, U.S. Secret Service; Chris Grey, USA
Criminal Investigation Command (CID), Quantico, VA; Pamela Patterson,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
I am most grateful to the team. Thank you John Parsley, Jim
Hornfischer, Steve Younger, Tiffany Ward, Nicole Dewey, Liz Garriga,
Malin von Euler-Hogan, Morgan Moroney, Heather Fain, Michael Noon,
Amanda Heller, and Allison Warner. Thank you Alice and Tom Soininen,
Kathleen and Geoffrey Silver, Rio and Frank Morse, Marion Wroldsen,
Keith Rogers, and John Zagata. And my fellow writers from group: Kirston
Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, and
Annette Murphy.
The only thing that makes me happier than finishing a book is the daily
joy I get from Kevin, Finley, and Jett. You guys are my best friends.
ALSO BY ANNIE JACOBSEN

Operation Paperclip
Area 51
 NOTES

Abbreviations Used in Notes

ARCHIVES

CIA Central Intelligence Agency Library, digital collection

DSOH U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, digital collection

Geisel Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, CA

JFK John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, MA

LANL Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, Los Alamos, NM

LOC Library of Congress, Washington, DC

NACP National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, MD

NAR National Archives and Records Administration at Riverside, CA

UCSB American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

VO67A VO-67 Association, Navy Observation Squadron Sixty-Seven, digital collection

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES & AFFILIATES

ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DNA Defense Nuclear Agency

GAO General Accounting Office

IDA Institute for Defense Analyses
Prologue

1 DARPA as an agency: Inspector general’s report, “Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency Ethics Program Met Federal Government
Standards,” January 24, 2013; “Breakthrough Technologies for
National Security,” DARPA 2015.
2 “We are faced”: DARPA press release,“President’s Budget Request for
DARPA Aims to Fund Promising Ideas, Help Regain Prior Levels,”
March 5, 2014.
3 eighty-seven nations: Interview with Noel Sharkey, August 2013.
Chapter One The Evil Thing

1 “an evil thing”: “Minority report,” General Advisory Committee, U.S.

Atomic Energy Commission, October 30, 1949, LANL.
2 facing an unknown fate: Eyewitness information is from interviews
with Alfred O’Donnell, 2009–2013; interviews with Jim Freedman,
2009–2011. See also O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages; Ogle, Daily Diary,
1954, LANL; DNA, Castle Series 1954, LANL.
3 miniaturized: Principles of the hydrogen bomb were demonstrated two
years earlier with Ivy Mike, which was the size of a small factory and
weighed eighty-two tons.
4 buried under ten feet of sand: Holmes and Narver photographs, W-
102–5, RG 326, Atomic Energy Commission, NAR.
5 scientists running this secret operation: Ogle, Daily Diary, 1954, 95-
99, LANL.
6 “In the bunker”: Quotes are from O’Keefe, 166, 173–175.
7 Out at sea: Quotes are from interview with Jim Freedman; See also
Castle Series 1954, 123.
8 largest-ever nuclear fireball: Memorandum to Dr. John von Neumann
from Lt. Col. N. M. Lulejian, February 23, 1955, LANL; In time, the
Soviets’ Tsar Bomba would be larger.
9 weather station: Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, IV-285.
10 No one had any idea: Joint Task Force Seven, Operation Castle, 46–
61.
11 wind direction: “The Effects of Castle Detonations Upon the Weather,”
Task Force Weather Central, Special Report, October 1954, 3–7,
LANL; Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, IV-289–290.
12 “The explosion”: Quotes are from O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages, 178.
13 scientist in charge: John C. Clark, “We Were Trapped by Radioactive
Fallout,” Saturday Evening Post, July 20, 1957.
14 mystical apparition: Lapp, 28.
15 unprecedented destruction: Castle Series 1954, 182–185. It would take
 Atomic Energy Commission historians thirty-four years to
acknowledge that technical success was a veil and “just behind it were
the frightening problems—some that threatened human existence
itself.”
16 news blackout: Memorandum from Brigadier General K. E. Fields to
Alvin Graves, March 4, 1954, LANL.
17 “very inconsequential”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The President’s
News Conference,” March 10, 1954, UCSB.
18 “routine atomic test”: Memorandum from Brigadier General K. E.
Fields, director of Military Application, USAEC to CJTF 7, March 15,
1954, LANL; Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, IV-298.
19 fallout pattern: RG 326 Atomic Energy Commission, “Distance From
GZ, Statute Miles, Off-site dose rate contours in r/hr at H+1 hour,”
Document 410526, figures 148–150, NAR.
20 roentgens: Hewlett and Holl, 182.
21 “exterminating civilian populations”: Memorandum, General Advisory
Committee, October 25, 1949, LANL. Secrecy elements are discussed
in York, Advisors, 51.
22 fierce competition: “Race for the Superbomb,” American Experience,
PBS, January 1999.
23 “We must know more”: Quotes are from York, Advisors, 60-65.
24 “taking profit out of war”: Ernest Lawrence, transcript, Bohemian
Club Speech, February 8, 1951, York Papers, Geisel.
25 “horse laughs”: York, Advisors, 134.
26 Castle series: Ogle, Daily Diary, 1954, LANL. A total of 22.5
megatons would be detonated.
27 “weapons obsolete”: Minutes, Forty-first Meeting of the General
Advisory Committee (GAC), U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July
12–15, 1954, 12–24, LANL; Fehner and Gosling, 116.
28 only surviving record: Ibid.
29 “quantitative advantage”: York, Making Weapons, 77.
Chapter Two War Games and Computing Machines

1 U.S. Air Force brawn: Abella, photographs, (unpaginated).

2 game pieces scattered: Leonard, 339.
3 “credibility”: York, Making Weapons, 89.
4 remarkable child prodigy: S. Bochner, John Von Neumann, 1903–
1957, National Academy of Sciences, 442–450.
5 “unsolved problem”: P. R. Halmos, “The Legend of John Von
Neumann,” Mathematical Association of America, Vol. 80, No. 4,
April 1973, 386.
6 “He was pleasant”: York, Making Weapons, 89.
7 “I think”: Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 63.
8 “all-out atomic war”: Whitman, 52.
9 maximum kill rate: “Citation to Accompany the Award of the Medal of
Merit to Dr. John von Neumann,” October 1946, Von Neumann
Papers, LOC.
10 “a mentally superhuman race”: Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 45.
11 Prisoner’s Dilemma: Poundstone, 8-9, 103-106.
12 something unexpected: Abella, 55–56; Poundstone, 121-123.
13 “How can you persuade”: McCullough, 758.
14 Goldstine explained: Information on Goldstine comes from Jon
Edwards, “A History of Early Computing at Princeton,” Princeton
Alumni Weekly, August 27, 2012.
15 von Neumann declared: Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 73.
16 “Our universe”: George Dyson, “‘An Artificially Created Universe’:
The Electronic Computer Project at IAS,” Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton (Spring 2012), 8-9.
17 secured funding: Maynard, “Daybreak of the Digital Age,” Princeton
Alumni Weekly, April 4, 2012.
18 he erred: Jon Edwards, “A History of Early Computing at Princeton,”
Princeton Alumni Weekly, August 27, 2012, 4.
19 Wohlstetter’s famous theory: Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of
 Terror,” 1-12.
20 Debris: Descriptions of shock wave and blast effects are described in
Garrison, 23-29.
21 Georg Rickhey: Information on Rickhey comes from Bundesarchiv
Ludwigsburg and RG 330 JIOA Foreign Scientist Case Files, NACP.
See also Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, 252.
22 a hospital, chapel, barbershop: Interview with Dr. Leonard Kreisler,
March 2012. Kreisler was the post doctor at Raven Rock.
23 “land of the blind”: Keeney, 19.
24 the senators had questions: For testimony from the hearings, see U.S.
Senate Committee, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil
Defense of the Committee on Armed Services, 119–21.
25 speck of plutonium: Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, podcast.
26 “Johnny was”: York, Making Weapons, 96-97.
27 He theorizes: John von Neumann, “The Computer and the Brain,” 60,
74.
Chapter Three Vast Weapons Systems of the Future

1 “successful satellite”: Details of this incident are from Brzezinski, 164-

165.
2 “portrays a United States”: Cited in “Missile and Satellite Hearings.”
CQ Almanac 1958, 14th ed., 11-669-11-671. Washington, DC:
Congressional Quarterly, 1959. The actual title was “Deterrence &
Survival in the Nuclear Age,” York Papers, Geisel.
3 national hysteria: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 20.
4 presidential research committee: Gaither had to withdraw because of
illness in September 1957.
5 “The issue”: For this account, see York, Making Weapons, 98.
6 Russians were not preparing: Interview with Hervey Stockman,
August 2009; Jacobsen, Area 51, 86–89.
7 in error: Allen Dulles, “Memorandum from the Director of Central
Intelligence to the Executive Secretary of the National Security
Council,” December 24, 1957, CIA. According to Dulles, the CIA’s
information was “far more detailed than that contained in the Gaither
report itself.”
8 “Soap operas sell”: Hafner and Lyon, 14.
9 He proposed: McElroy wanted to create the agency without
authorization from Congress. He first ran the idea by his general
counsel, who informed him that he did not have the authority to create
such an agency. As per the National Security Act of 1947, McElroy
would have to notify the chairman of the Armed Services Committee
and present him with a proposal.
10 “vast weapons systems”: House Subcommittee on Department of
Defense Appropriations, The Ballistic Missile Program, Hearings,
85th Cong., 1st sess., November 20–21, 1957, 7.
11 “the new dimension”: Quotes and information in this section are from
The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958–1974, Richard J.
Barber Associates, December 1975 (hereafter Barber), II-1-22, located
 in York Papers, Geisel.
12 their service’s domain: Aviation Week, February 3, 1958.
13 State of the Union: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the
Congress on the State of the Union,” January 9, 1958, UCSB.
14 unpublished history: Barber, II-10–25.
15 grandfather made caskets: General Biographical History, Notes, Series
1: biographical materials, York Papers, Geisel.
16 “From the earliest times”: York, Making Weapons, 7.
17 “I made my way with difficulty”: General Biographical History, Notes,
Series 1: biographical materials, York Papers, Geisel.
18 von Braun’s 113 German colleagues: Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip,
16–17, 88, 95–96.
19 “not acceptable”: Barber, II-25.
20 good for national security: Kistiakowsky, 198.
21 York explained: York, Making Weapons, 117.
22 “Traitorous!”: Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, 318.
23 “I formally proposed”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to Nikita
Khrushchev, Chairman, Council of Ministers, U.S.S.R., on the
Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapons Tests, May 16, 1959, UCSB.
24 “If we stop testing”: “Lawrence in the Cold War, Ernest Lawrence and
the Cyclotron,” American Institute of Physics, History Center Exhibit,
digital collection.
25 about to get to work: Barber, IV-27. Vela started small, officially in
ARPA’s second year. The scientific limitations in nuclear detection
were not entirely clear at the 1958 Geneva Conference of Experts. It
was after Project Argus that scientists first determined how difficult it
was to detect nuclear explosions in space.
26 Vela Sierra monitored: Information about Vela follow-on programs can
be found in Van Atta et al, DARPA Technical Accomplishments,
Volume 3, II-2, III-4; Barber, IV-28–30.
Chapter Four Emergency Plans

1 York’s desk: Details from this section are from Herb York, Diaries
Series, appointment books, date books, and wall calendars, York
Papers, Geisel.
2 Keeney made public: Keeney, 22–33.
3 on account of a theory: Barber, II-27.
4 the “Christofilos effect”: Advanced Research Projects Division,
Identification of Certain Current Defense Problems and Possible
Means of Solution, IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, August 1958 (hereafter
IDA-ARPA Study No. 1); interview with Charles Townes, March
2014.
5 Project Floral: DNA, Operation Argus 1958, 3, 53.
6 code name, Project 137: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1; Wheeler oral history
interview, 61–63.
7 “defense problems”: Finkbeiner, 29.
8 “its own special clearance”: Quotes are from interviews with Marvin
“Murph” Goldberger, June–August, 2013. See also Goldberger oral
history interview.
9 “ingenuity, practicality and motivation”: Finkbeiner, 28.
10 Astrodome-like shield: Barber, VI-II. For quotes from York, see
Making Weapons, 129–30.
11 unusual backstory: Melissinos, Nicholas C. Christofilos: His
Contributions to Physics, 1–15.
12 “responsible people”: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, 19.
13 “The group has”: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, 19.
14 Brazilian Anomaly: Operation Argus 1958, 19.
15 so many moving parts: Ibid., 22-26.
16 missile trajectory: Ibid., 48; list of shipboard tests and remarks, 56.
17 “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”: Ibid., 34.
18 watched fireworks: Childs, 525.
19 “The President has asked”: Ibid., 521.
20 detection facilities: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 58.
21 Wissmer examined Lawrence: Childs, 526.
22 had Harold Brown participate: Supplement 5 to “Extended
Chronology of Significant Events Leading Up to Disarmament,” Joint
Secretariat, Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 21, 1961, (unpaginated), York
Papers, Geisel.
23 “I could never”: Childs, 527.
24 Christofilos effect did occur: Argus 1958, 65–68; Interview with Doug
Beason, June 2014; “Report to the Commission to Assess the Threat to
the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack,” 161.
25 The telegram marked: Edward Teller, telegram to General Starbird,
“Thoughts in Connection to the Test Moratorium,” August 29, 1958,
LANL.
Chapter Five Sixteen Hundred Seconds Until Doomsday

1 “Our job”: Interview with Gene McManus, October 2013.

2 “coldest thirteen miles”: Berry, “The Coldest 13 Miles on Wheels,”
Popular Mechanics, February 1968.
3 twenty-four-hour operational mode: Richard Witkin, “U.S. Radar
Scans Communist Areas: Missile Warning System at Thule Is Put in
Operation on a 24-Hour Basis,” New York Times, October 2, 1960.
4 sitting in the NORAD War Room: John G. Hubbell,“‘You Are Under
Attack!’ The Strange Incident of October 5,” Reader’s Digest, April
1961.
5 coming in from the BMEWS J-Site: Interview with Gene McManus,
who arrived at J-Site three months later. The story was legendary at
BMEWS. The technicians involved were McManus’s colleagues.
A NORAD spokesman described the conversation for the Reader’s
Digest magazine six months after the crisis.
6 the story broke: “Moon Stirs Scare of Missile Attack,” Associated
Press, December 7, 1961.
7 closer to $900 million: This information comes from ODR&E Report,
“Assessment of Ballistic Missile Defense Program” PPD 61–33, 1961
(fifty-four pages, unpaginated), York Papers, Geisel.
8 Twenty-six minutes and forty seconds: Ibid.
9 “The nuclear-armed ICBM”: Ibid.
10 “high confidence”: Ibid., Appendix 1.
11 “I started Jason”: Quotes are from interview with Murph Goldberger,
June 2013. He passed away the following year, in November 2014.
12 had been entwined: Brueckner oral history interview, 4; Lukasik oral
history interview, 27.
13 a little business”: Brueckner oral history interview, 7.
14 most significant inventions: Interview with Charles Townes, March
2014.
15 IDA served: Interview with Richard Van Atta, May 2014; Barber, I-8.
16 most respected colleagues: Interview with Murph Goldberger, July
2013.
17 “tremendously bright squad”: Kistiakowsky, 200–202.
18 contribute significantly: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2014.
See also Finkbeiner.
19 official entity: Draft, DoD Directive, Subjects: Department of Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, No. 5129.33, December 30,
1959, York Papers, Geisel.
20 Mildred Goldberger said: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June,
2014; see also Goldberger oral history interview.
21 “confuse satellite detection”: Drell oral history interview, 14.
22 “imaginative thinking”: Barber, V-24.
23 PENAIDS proof tests: Van Atta et al, DARPA Technical
Accomplishments, Volume 2, IV-4–5; Hansen, Swords of Armageddon,
Volume 7, 491.
24 “Pen X”: Ruina oral history interview.
25 deceptive MIRVs: H. F. York, “Multiple Warhead Missiles,” Scientific
American 229, no. 5 (1973): 71.
26 Ruina and Townes reached an agreement: Ruina oral history interview.
27 “instantaneous kill”: Barber, IX-31.
28 “whether you can use a particle beam”: Finkbeiner, 53.
29 Project Seesaw: Barber, IV-23, IX-32; for Christofilos, see York,
Making Weapons, 129–30.
30 “Seesaw was a sensitive”: Barber, IX-31. See also Jason Division,
IDA, Project Seesaw (U).
31 “Directed energy”: Interview with General Paul F. Gorman (retired),
October 2014.
Chapter Six Psychological Operations

1 Thor Agena A: Ruffner, Corona: America’s First Satellite Program,

16.
2 “the best specimens”: Space and Missile Systems Organization, Air
Force Systems Command, “Biomedical Space Specimens, Fact
Sheet,” June 3, 1959, Appendix C.
3 “We don’t want to humanize”: Bill Willks, “Satellite Carrying Mice
Fails,” Washington Post, June 4, 1959.
4 “dramatic rescue effort”: Ruffner, Corona: America’s First Satellite
Program, 16.
5 classified spying mission: Ibid., x.
6 TIROS: Barber, III-15.
7 22,952 images: Conway, 29.
8 photographs of a storm front: John W. Finney, “U.S. Will Share Tiros I
Pictures,” New York Times, April 5, 1960.
9 “no information”: Email correspondence with Mike Hanson,
September 17, 2013.
10 story of intrigue: Files are from RG 330, Office of the Secretary of
Defense, ARPA, Project Agile, NACP; RG 330, Records of Robert S.
McNamara, 1961–1968, Defense Programs and Operations, NACP.
11 forged a brilliant record: Barber, V-37.
12 a limp: Interview with Kay Godel, September 2013. The limp was not
always obvious.
13 “since Napoleon”: Spector, 111.
14 “The Vietnamese refused”: Ibid., 112.
15 “We hated to dig”: Quotes throughout this discussion are from Abboud
oral history interview, 15–16; see also Bernard C. Nalty, Stalemate:
U.S. Marines from Bunker Hill to the Hook, 4.
16 Chinese land mines: Abboud oral history interview, 15.
17 both men came from privilege: All quotes in this section are from
interviews and email correspondence with Joan Dulles Talley, March
 2014–May 2015.
18 shadowy figure: Correspondence between Allen W. Dulles and Dr.
Harold G. Wolff, New York Hospital, CIA; “Biographical Note,”
Harold Wolff, M.D. (1898–1962), Papers, Cornell University
Archives, digital collection.
19 spin out of control: Memorandum, Gordon Gray to Allen Dulles,
October 29, 1951, CIA.
20 Godel convened: As per National Security Council directives NSC
10/2, NSC 10/5, NSC 59/1, Papers of Gordon Gray, Harry S. Truman
Library and Museum, digital collection.
21 “mind-annihilating methods”: See “Forced Confessions,”
Memorandum for the Record, National Security Council Staff, May 8,
1953, and “Brainwashing During the Korean War,” Psychological
Strategy Board (PSB) Central Files Series, PSB 702.5 (no date),
Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, digital collection.
22 “brainwashing”: This account is drawn from Marks, 133.
23 “insectivization of human beings”: Edward Hunter, “Brain-Washing
Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,” Miami News,
September 1950.
24 Congress invited Hunter: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee
on Un-American Activities, “Communist Psychological Warfare
(Brainwashing),” March 13, 1958.
25 Joost A. M. Meerloo: Tim Weiner, “Remembering Brainwashing,”
New York Times, July 6, 2008.
26 Schwable recanted: “Marines Award Schwable the Legion of Merit,”
New York Times, July 8, 1954.
27 mental breakdowns: Officers such as Frank Olson, a biological
weapons expert who committed suicide, or was killed, when he
suffered a breakdown after being covertly dosed with LSD by his CIA
bosses.
28 Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology: Marks, chap. 9.
29 even more powerful position: Official Register of the United States
Civil Service Commission, 1955, 108.
30 Godel was praised: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961–1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
31 “collecting, evaluating and disseminating intelligence”: Document
210, Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH; IAC-
D-104/4 23, April 1957, CIA.
32 Godel would say: Barber, V-36.
33 “bold summation”: Ibid., V-37.
34 outlined his observations: W. H. Godel, director, Policy and Planning
Division, ARPA, Memo for assistant secretary of defense, Subject:
Vietnam, September 15, 1960, RG 330, Project Agile, NACP.
35 “applying scientific talent”: Barber, V-39.
36 “anti-guerrilla forces at night”: Spector, 111–114.
37 ARPA-financed fighters: In May 1960 three U.S. Army Special Forces
Teams of ten men each arrived in Vietnam to work with President
Diem. With them were thirteen U.S. Army intelligence specialists and
three psychological warfare specialists. They trained Vietnamese
soldiers for roughly two months; Spector, 353.
38 “Godel continued”: Barber, V-2, V-4.
39 departure of Herb York: For quotes, see York, Making Weapons, 194,
203.
Chapter Seven Techniques and Gadgets

1 pushed the muzzles: Karnow, 10.

2 Kennedy spent more time: Barber, V-39.
3 “Viet-nam counter-insurgency plan”: “Summary Record of a Meeting,
the White House,” Washington, D.C., January 28, 1961, DSOH.
4 “to deter all wars”: “Special Message to Congress on Urgent National
Needs,” May 25, 1961, National Security Files, JFK.
5 “techniques and ‘gadgets’”: Document 27, Foreign Relations, 1961–
1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
6 develop new weapons: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961–1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
7 garner support: Document 59, Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, Volume
I, Vietnam, DSOH.
8 Johnson asked Diem: Document 56, Foreign Relations, 1961–1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
9 gave Godel authority: Barber, V-35.
10 Each building had: ARPA Field Unit, Vietnam, Monthly Report,
CDTC, photographs (n.d.), RG 330, Project Agile, NACP.
11 entourage of military advisors: Ibid., photograph (n.d.).
12 laborers toiled away: Ibid., photographs (n.d.).
13 giving briefings: Viet-Nam Working Group Files, Lot 66, D 193,
Minutes of Task Force Meetings, National Security Files, JFK.
14 canine program: “The Use of a Marking Agent for Identification by
Dogs,” March 11, 1966, RG 330, Project Agile, NACP; see also ARPA
Field Unit, ARPA Order 262-67, July 7, 1961.
15 Godel called it: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, Volume
I, Vietnam, DSOH.
16 AR-15 prototypes: Barber, V-44.
17 “would have caused death”: Ezell, 187.
18 “development of the M-16”: Barber, V-44.
19 “maximum effectiveness”: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961–
 1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
20 “subject to political-psychological restrictions”: Letter from Brigadier
General Edward G. Lansdale, assist. SECDEF to Dir/Defense
Research & Engineering, subject: Combat Development Test Center,
Vietnam, May 16, 1961. National Security Files, JFK.
21 first batch: Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand, 11, 208n.
22 first mission to spray herbicides: Brown, Vegetational Spray Tests in
South Vietnam, 17, 23, 45.
23 more ambitious follow-up plan: Ibid., 68.
24 roughly half of South Vietnam: Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand,
15.
25 “The first advice”: Bradlee, 22.
26 General Maxwell Taylor: As Army chief of staff, Taylor believed the
Eisenhower doctrine of massive retaliation put too much emphasis on
nuclear weapons and not enough emphasis on the Army. Under
Eisenhower, the Army was reduced by 500,000 men, while the Air
Force gained 30,000. See also McMaster, Dereliction, 8-17.
27 According to a memo: Historical Division Joint Secretariat, Joint
Chiefs of Staff, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1960–1968, ix, 74.
28 Godel took General Taylor: Document 169, Foreign Relations, 1961–
1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
29 Taylor-Rostow mission: Telegram from the President’s Military
Representative (Taylor) to the Department of State, Saigon, October
25, 1961, DSOH.
30 General Taylor described: Quotes are from “Vietnam Report on
Taylor-Rostow Mission to South Vietnam,” November 3, 1961,
RDT&E Annex, National Security Files, JFK.
31 Radio Hanoi: “PsyWar Efforts and Compensation Machinery in
Support of Herbicide Operations,” Subject: Chemical Defoliation and
Crop Destruction in South Viet-Nam, Washington, April 18, 1963,
National Security Files, JFK.
32 “Joint Chiefs of Staff”: Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand, 16;
 McMaster, Dereliction, 114.
33 “Weed Killer”: Memorandum from Rostow to President, November
21, 1961, National Security Files, JFK.
34 Kennedy approved: National Security Action Memorandum 115,
Subject: Defoliant Operations in Viet-nam, November 30, 1961,
National Security Files, JFK.
35 2012 congressional report: Martin, “Vietnamese Victims of Agent
Orange and U.S.-Vietnam Relations,” 2, 15.
36 “He was advised”: RG 330, Project Agile ARPA Field Unit, Vietnam,
Memorandum for record, “Meeting with Mr. William Godel,”
December 4 and December 12, 1961, NACP; Brown, Anticrop Warfare
Research, Task-01, 135.
Chapter Eight RAND and COIN

1 lunchtime matches: Jardini, chap. 2. Jardini’s book is available only on

Amazon Kindle, hence no page numbers.
2 Project Sierra: Weiner, 4-9.
3 Tanham’s observations: Elliott, 27. Mai Elliott’s book is the definitive
work on RAND during the Vietnam War era. She worked on ARPA
programs, in Saigon, during the war.
4 Tanham’s 1961 report: Elliott, 17–18; George K. Tanham, “Trip
Report: Vietnam, January 1963,” RAND Corporation, March 22,
1963.
5 Rand was needed: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 25.
6 generally looked down: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013.
7 “weapons systems philosophy”: George H. Clement, “Weapons
Systems Philosophy,” RAND Corporation, 1956.
8 first two RAND analysts: J. Donnell and G. Hickey, Memo RM-3208-
ARPA, August 1962, ARPA Combat Development & Test Center,
Vietnam, Monthly Report (n.d.), RG 330, Project Agile, NACP.
9 “Signs of conflict”: Hickey, Window, 19, 90–91.
10 change of plans: Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam
(U), 114; Hickey, Window, 91.
11 effective means of pacification: Memorandum from the director of the
CIA to Secretary of Defense McNamara on the Strategic Hamlet
Program, July 13, 1962, CIA.
12 “monitor”: Ehlschlaeger, “Understanding Megacities with the
Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence Paradigm,” xii.
13 Cu Chu villagers: Hickey, Window, 93.
14 “I said, in essence”: Ibid., 99.
15 Hickey recalled paraphrasing: Ibid., 99.
16 ARPA officials complained: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 342.
17 “more patient approach”: Elliott, 33.
18 “ground to a pulp”: Ibid., 38.
19 Tanham showed great optimism: Tanham, War Without Guns, 25-29.
20 “Given a little luck”: Elliott, 31.
Chapter Nine Command and Control

1 command and control: “Special Message to Congress on the Defense

Budget,” March 28, 1961, JFK speeches, JFK.
2 Brown recruited J. C. R. Licklider: Ruina oral history interview.
3 world’s authorities: Hafner and Lyon, 28.
4 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment: Interview with Jay Forrester,
October 2013.
5 “Man-Computer Symbiosis:” J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer
Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics,
volume HFE-1, March 1960, 4–11.
6 “in not too many years”: Ibid., 4-5.
7 The agency inherited: Barber, V-4.
8 “Guess how many nuclear missiles”: Interview with Paul Kozemchak,
April 2014.
9 “The Soviets fired three”: Peter Kuran, Nukes in Space: The Rainbow
Bombs, DVD (2000).
10 could easily have misidentified: Interview with Gene McManus,
October 2014.
11 “could have led to war”: Kuran, Nukes in Space.
12 detonated… over Zhezqazghan: EIS [Electric Infrastructure Security]
Council, “Report: USSR Nuclear EMP Upper Atmosphere Kazakhstan
Test,” 184, 1.
13 Licklider wrote: “Memorandum For: Members and Affiliates of the
Intergalactic Computer Network, From: J. C. R. Licklider,” April 23,
1963; discussed in Barber, V-50–53.
14 related to surveillance programs: Barber, VI-53.
15 used in conflict zones: Smithsonian Institution Archives, “Toward a
Technology of Human Behavior for Defense Use (1962),” Record Unit
179, York Papers, Geisel.
16 “build a bridge”: Cited in Barber, V-54.
17 “Computer assisted teaching”: Ibid.
18 legally required: U.S. General Accounting Office, Activities of the
Research and Development Center: Thailand, 13.
19 “Thailand was the laboratory”: Woods oral history interview.
20 “The U.S. would need”: ARPA, Project Agile: Remote Area Research
and Engineering, Semiannual Report, 1 July–31 December 1963, 2.
21 miscataloged: Interview with archivist Eric Van Slander at National
Archives, College Park, February 2014.
22 “policy not to release”: Email correspondence with Charles E. Arp,
Battelle Enterprise content manager, January 21, 2014.
23 “theoretical and experimental”: Brundage, “Military Research and
Development Center, Quarterly Report,” October 1, 1963–December
31, 1963.
24 “Anthropometric Survey”: Information is drawn from Robert White,
“Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces.”
25 They proposed that studies: Joseph Hanlon, “Project Cambridge Plans
Changed After Protests,” Computer World, October 22, 1969.
26 “barely scratched the surface”: Salemink, 222.
27 “important tools”: J. C. R. Licklider, New Scientist, February 25, 1971,
423.
28 monitored, analyzed, and modeled: The Utilization of ARPA-Supported
Research for International Security Planning, 6, 13–15, 33–42.
29 Someone threw a grenade: U.S. Department of State Central Files,
cable, POL 25, S Viet, May 9, 1963, DSOH.
30 “Flames were coming”: Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, 128.
31 “What have the Buddhist”: Madame Nhu’s response is viewable on
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_PWM9gWR5E.
32 “I can scarcely believe”: Cited in Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken:
The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
Chapter Ten Motivation and Morale

1 with a team of ARPA officials: See Hickey, “The Military Advisor and
His Foreign Counterpart.”
2 “En route”: Quotes are from Hickey, Window, 111.
3 “villagers were sick”: Ibid., 124.
4 a massive explosion: Donlon, Outpost of Freedom, 139; Hickey,
Window, 127.
5 Outside his bunkroom: The account of the ambush is drawn from
Hickey, Window, 130; Hickey, “Military Advisor,” iii.
6 “The July 1964”: Hickey, Window, 147.
7 Collbohm and Pauker: Deitchman oral history interview, 71–72;
Elliott, 48–49.
8 Deitchman: Trained as an engineer, Deitchman had been working at
IDA when he was asked to take a two-year leave to work at the
Pentagon, reporting directly to Harold Brown.
9 “Who are the Vietcong?”: Information is from interviews with Joseph
Zasloff, August–October 2014; Zasloff died in December 2014. Seel
also Zasloff, The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency;
Donnell, Pauker, and Zasloff, Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in
1964: A Preliminary Report; Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia: A
History of the Vietnam War Era, Chapter Two.
10 “The original intent”: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 235.
11 deal with the CIA: Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South
Vietnam, 23.
12 inhabited by ghosts: Tela Zasloff, Saigon Dreaming, 164.
13 Most farmers: Elliott, 59.
14 What motivated Vietcong fighters: Interview with Joseph Zasloff,
October 2014.
15 Pauker forwarded: Pauker, “Treatment of POWs, Defectors, and
Suspects in South Vietnam,” 13.
16 “The motivation”: Press, “Estimating from Misclassified Data,” iii, 26.
17 identified by the Pentagon: McMaster, Dereliction, 143.
18 briefed General William Westmoreland: Interview with Joseph Zasloff,
October 2014.
19 The insurgency: Quotes in this paragraph and the next are from
Donnell, Pauker, and Zasloff, Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in
1964: A Preliminary Report.
20 other RAND officers: Interview with Joseph Zasloff, October 2014.
21 “I am looking for”: Elliott, 88.
22 elite defense intellectuals: Louis Menand, “Fat Man: Herman Kahn
and the Nuclear Age,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005.
23 article attacking Gouré’s work: Harrison E. Salisbury, “Soviet Shelters:
A Myth or Fact?” New York Times, December 24, 1961.
24 “I get red”: Interview with Joseph Zasloff, October 2014.
25 Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters: Karnow, 408–409.
26 “By and large”: Gouré, “Southeast Asia Trip Report, Part I: The
Impact of Air Power in South Vietnam.”
27 “Gouré gave the Pentagon”: Interview with Joseph Zasloff, October
2014.
28 “break the backbone”: Elliott, 90; Gouré, JCS Briefing on Viet Cong
Motivation and Morale, 7.
29 “Dan Ellsberg”: Hickey, Window, 179.
30 reports for ARPA: Gouré, “Some Findings of the Vietcong Motivation
and Morale Study: June–December 1965,” 3.
31 copy of Gouré’s findings: Malcolm Gladwell, “Viewpoint: Could One
Man Have Shortened the Vietnam War?” BBC News Magazine, July 8,
2013.
32 Frelinghuysen said: Quotes are from Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes,
235–39.
33 Fulbright wrote: Jardini (unpaginated).
34 62,000 pages: Phillips, User’s Guide to the Rand Interviews in
Vietnam, iii.
35 indicted Godel: Walter B. Douglas, “Accused Former Aides Cite
Witnesses in Asia,” Washington Post, January 9, 1965.
36 Godel was convicted: Peter S. Diggins, “Godel, Wylie Get 5 Years for
Funds Conspiracy,” Washington Post, June 19, 1965.
37 prison terms: “5-Year Term for Godel Is Upheld,” Washington Post,
May 21, 1966.
38 correctional institution in Allenwood: Interview with Kay Godel,
September 2013.
39 personal financial benefit: “Embezzler Godel Sued to Repay Double,”
Washington Post, November 5, 1966.
Chapter Eleven The Jasons Enter Vietnam

1 secret, top secret, or secret restricted data: Interview with Murph

Goldberger, June 2014.
2 closely intertwined: By example, William Nierenberg earned a Ph.D.
under I. I. Rabi at Columbia. Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi were
both on the faculty at the University of Chicago when Fermi took on
Murph Goldberger and one other theoretical physicist as Ph.D.
students. See also Finkbeiner.
3 “The high goals set”: MacDonald, “Jason—The Early Years,” informal
presentation at the meeting of the Jason Advisory Board held at
DARPA, Arlington, VA, December 12, 1986, York Papers, Geisel;
MacDonald oral history interview.
4 Gell-Mann: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013; Ruina oral
history interview.
5 unsuccessfully tried: Johnson, 229.
6 “Jasons became intrigued”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013; Johnson, 256.
7 “the Vietnam problem”: William Nierenberg, “DCPG: The Genesis of
a Concept,” Journal of Defense Research, ser. B, Tactical Warfare
(Fall 1969); declassified unpublished manuscript, November 18, 1971,
York Papers, Geisel.
8 never been declassified: Harris, Acoustical Techniques/Designs
Investigated During the Southeast Asia Conflict: 1966–1972, 3.
9 Powell said: “Colin L. Powell: By the Book,” New York Times Book
Review, July 1, 2012, 8.
10 “One very positive thing”: MacDonald oral history interview, 3.
11 “He made a point”: Fleming, 5.
12 “miserable”: MacDonald oral history interview, 13.
13 venerable Dr. Walter Munk: Von Storch and Hasselman, 226.
14 “And with Adlai Stevenson”: Quotes are from MacDonald oral history
interview, 6, 10, 11.
15 The World Tomorrow: MacDonald oral history interview, 28.
16 elected chairman: Weather and Climate Modification Problems and
Prospects, vol. 2, Research and Development, National Research
Council, January 1, 1966.
17 “a deliberate and thoughtful review”: Cited in Munk et al, “Gordon
James Fraser MacDonald, July 30, 1929–May 14, 2002,” 230.
18 “I became increasingly convinced”: Ibid., 231.
19 “searching, almost desperately”: MacDonald, “Jason and DCPG—Ten
Lessons,” 6.
20 Project EMOTE: Quotes are from Mutch et al., Operation Pink Rose;
Chandler and Bentley, Forest Fire as a Military Weapon, Final Report.
21 “appreciable destruction”: J. M. Breit, “Neutralization of Viet Cong
Safe Havens,” 13.
22 inferno: Mutch et al., Operation Pink Rose, iii, 116; Joseph Trevithick
“Firestorm: Forest Fires as a Weapon in Vietnam,” Armchair General
Magazine, June 13, 2012.
23 forest flammability: Mutch et al., Operation Pink Rose, 103–112.
24 top secret report: Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness, 94–95. By war’s end,
the NSA estimated “as many as one million soldiers and political
cadre” had traveled the trail during the Vietnam War.
25 sent the Jason scientists: Deitchman, “An Insider’s Account: Seymour
Deitchman,” Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability,
February 25, 2003. Deitchman’s email interview conducted with Peter
Hayes is available online at nautilus.org.
26 “anastomosed structure”: Nierenberg, “DCPG—The Genesis of a
Concept,” declassified unpublished manuscript, November 18, 1971,
York Papers, Geisel.
27 obstructing movement along the trail: Lewis oral history interview.
28 studies the Jasons performed: Interview with Murph Goldberger; see
also Federation of American Scientists, list of Jason studies, digital
archive.
29 “We did our studies”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2014,
quoting/paraphrasing Jason Division, IDA, Air-Supported Anti-
 Infiltration Barrier, ii, as well as his interviews with Finkbeiner and
Aaserud.
30 “think about using nuclear weapons”: Deitchman, “An Insider’s
Account: Seymour Deitchman,” Nautilus Institute for Security and
Sustainability, February 25, 2003.
31 “the numbers”: Jason Division, IDA, Tactical Nuclear Weapons in
Southeast Asia, 27.
Chapter Twelve The Electronic Fence

1 “I stepped on”: Interviews and email correspondence with Richard

“Rip” Jacobs, June–August 2013. Information is from interviews with
VO-67 crew members and the VO-67 Association digital archive and
website.
2 Nine men KIA: VO-67 Crew 2 Memorial Pictures, VO-67 Crew 2
Summary-KIA, VO67A. Personnel in this incident: Denis Anderson,
Delbert A. Olson, Richard Mancini, Arthur C. Buck, Michael Roberts,
Gale Siow, Phillip Stevens, Donald Thoresen, Kenneth Widon.
3 Crew Five was lost: VO-67 Crew 5 Memorial Pictures, VO-67 Crew 5
Summary-KIA, VO-67A. Personnel in this incident: Glenn Miller
Hayden, Chester Coons, Frank Dawson, Paul Donato, Clayborn
Ashby, James Kravitz, James Martin, Curtis Thurman, James Wonn.
4 acoubuoys: For a technical discussion, see Office of the Secretary,
Joint Staff, MACV, Military History Branch. Command History,
United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam: 1967. Volume 3,
1105–1106; for a narrative discussion, see Rego 11–17, with
photographs.
5 “how it happens”: Interview with Tom Wells, June 2013.
6 “We couldn’t control”: Interview with Barney Walsh, June 2013.
7 Captain Milius: Milius was first listed MIA, but his status was later
changed to PKIA (Presumed Killed in Action); the USS Milius is
named in his honor.
8 McNamara… looked: Ruina oral history interview, 28; Pentagon
Papers (Gravel), vol. 4, chap. 1, sec. 3, subsection 1.C. The idea had
first been proposed by Harvard Law School professor Roger Fisher.
9 “Secretary McNamara asked me”: Sullivan oral history interview, 53;
Rego, 1.
10 high-technology sensors: Sensors are small, self-powered machines
designed to measure physical qualities by mimicking biological senses
including sight, hearing, smell, and touch. ARPA became an early
 pioneer in modern sensor technology when, in 1958, before NASA
was created, it was put in charge of all U.S. space programs. The first
American satellite, Explorer I, carried a sensor into space, a tiny
Geiger counter that confirmed the presence of the Van Allen radiation
belts.
11 classified sensor programs: MacDonald, “Jason and DCPG—Ten
Lessons,” 10, York Papers, Geisel.
12 listen for Vietcong: Gatlin, Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report, 32;
Mahnken, 112.
13 the campus grounds: Interview with Goldberger; Fitch oral history
interview. In defense of the Jasons’ role in creating the barrier,
Goldberger said the intention was to “kill fewer people” than the Air
Force was killing with its two-thousand-pound bombs.
14 SADEYE cluster bombs: The bombs are discussed in Jason Division,
IDA, Air-Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier, 3–4.
15 held a seminar: Richard Garwin oral history interview.
16 “aspirin-size” mini-bombs: Jason Division, IDA, Air-Supported Anti-
Infiltration Barrier, 30.
17 “20 million Gravel mines”: Ibid., 5.
18 “It is difficult to assess”: Ibid., 6, 9, and 13.
19 roughly one billion: In September 1966, the official figure the Jasons
gave McNamara was $860 million. By the time the fence was
operational, costs had reached $1.8 billion.
20 McNamara was impressed: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013.
21 “The occasion”: MacDonald, “Jason and the DCPG-Ten Lessons,” 10.
22 belittled by most of the generals: All quotes from Office of the
Secretary, Joint Staff, MACV, Military History Branch, Command
History, United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam: 1967,
Volume 3, 1072–1075.
23 with or without the support: Ibid., 1073.
24 General Starbird: Details are from Foster, “Alfred Dodd Starbird,
1912–1983,” 317–321; interview with Edward Starbird, the general’s
 son.
25 Joint Task Force 728: Office of the Secretary, Joint Staff, MACV,
Military History Branch. Command History, United States Military
Assistance Command Vietnam: 1967. Volume 3, 1072-1075.
26 “highest national priority”: Document 233, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1964–1968, Volume IV, Vietnam, 1966, DSOH.
27 “We are on the threshold”: Cited in Vernon Pizer, “Coming—The
Electronic Battlefield,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, February 14,
1971.
28 “system of systems”: MacDonald, “Jason and the DCPG—Ten
Lessons,” 8.
29 electronic battlefield concept: Half a century later, the results of the
electronic fence are ubiquitous—not just on the battlefield but across
America, in the civil sector. The legacy of the electronic fence is
everywhere: home, phone, computer, car, airport, doctor’s office,
shopping mall.
30 “From its outset”: Gatlin, Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report, 38.
Chapter Thirteen The End of Vietnam

1 received a tip: Quotes are from Finney, “Anonymous Call Set Off
Rumors of Nuclear Arms for Vietnam,” New York Times, February 12
and 13, 1968.
2 “It was a scary place”: MacDonald, “Jason and the DCPG—Ten
Lessons,” 8–12.
3 “I had probably”: Garwin oral history interview.
4 also allegedly stolen: James N. Hill, “The Committee on Ethics: Past,
Present, and Future,” 11–19. In Handbook on Ethical Issues in
Anthropology, edited by Joan Cassell and Sue-Ellen Jacobs, a special
publication of the American Anthropological Association number 23,
available online at aaanet.org.
5 “staggering 32K of memory”: Maynard, 257n.
6 journalists also revealed: Princeton Alumni Weekly, September 25,
1959, 12.
7 students chained… shut: Maynard, 193; “Vote of Princeton Faculty
Could Lead to End of University Ties to IDA,” Harvard Crimson,
March 7, 1968.
8 rare declassified copy: Quotes are from ARPA, Overseas Defense
Research: A Brief Survey of Non-Lethal Weapons (U) (page numbers
are illegible).
9 nonlethal weapons: Steve Metz, “Non-Lethal Weapons: A Progress
Report,” Joint Force Quarterly (Spring–Summer 2001): 18–22; Ando
Arike, “The Soft-Kill Solution: New Frontiers in Pain Compliance,”
Harper’s, March 2010.
10 famously gave birth to: LAPD, “History of S.W.A.T.,” Los Angeles
Police Foundation, digital archive.
11 came under fire: Barber, VIII-63–VIII-67; Van Atta, Richard H.,
Sidney Reed, and Seymour Deitchman, DARPA Technical
Accomplishments, Volume 1. 18-1–18-11; Hord, 4–8.
12 developed his first thoughts: Hord, 245, 327.
13 a billion instructions per second: “A Description of the ILLIAC IV,”
Interim Report, IBM Advanced Computing Systems, May 1, 1967.
The machine never actually achieved a billion operations per second,
but it was at the time the largest assemblage of computer hardware
ever amassed in a single machine.
14 designed to cut down: New to the mix was the concept of building a
large-scale SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) machine. This
would change the way data were stored in the computer’s memory and
how data flowed through the machine. University of Illinois Alumni
Magazine 1 (2012): 30–35.
15 “ballistic missile defense”: Roland and Shiman, 12; Hord, 9.
16 still-classified ARPA program: Author’s FOIA requests were rejected
by the departments of Commerce, Energy, and Defense.
17 “all the computational requirements”: Cited in Muraoka, Yoichi.
“Illiac IV.” Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing, Springer US, 2011,
914–917.
18 Defense Department contract: Barber, VIII-63.
19 headline in the Daily Illini: Patrick D. Kennedy, “Reactions Against
the Vietnam War and Military-Related Targets on Campus: The
University of Illinois as a Case Study, 1965–1972,” Illinois Historical
Journal 84, 109.
20 “The horrors ILLIAC IV”: All quotes are from the Daily Illini,
January 6, 1970.
21 “If I could have gotten”: Barber, VIII-63.
22 firebombed the campus armory: Kennedy, “Reactions Against the
Vietnam War,” Illinois Historical Journal 84, 110.
23 guarantee the safety: O’Neill, 31; Barber, VIII-62. According to
ARPA, it was the agency that pulled ILLIAC IV, not the university.
24 classified program to track submarines: “US Looks for Bigger Warlike
Computers,” New Scientist, April 21, 1977, 140. By 1977, the ILLIAC
IV was outdated. DARPA sought to build a new machine, one that
could produce 10 billion instructions per second (BIPS).
25 Acoustic sensors: “U.S. Looks for Bigger, Warlike Computers.” New
 Scientist, April 21, 1977, 140.
26 “practical outcomes”: Roland and Shiman, 29.
27 “the epitome”: Barber, IX-2.
28 “It wouldn’t surprise me”: Ibid., IX-19.
29 “The staff just didn’t know”: Ibid., VIII-79.
30 “chicken-and-egg problem”: Ibid., VIII-74–77.
31 “the devil”: Finkbeiner, 102.
32 “I’ll talk about China”: Interview with Murph Goldberger; Finkbeiner,
104.
33 “Jason made a terrible mistake”: Joel Shurkin, “The Secret War over
Bombing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1973.
34 No Jason scientist: Interview with Charles Schwartz; file on “Jason
controversy,” York Papers, Geisel.
35 “This is Dick Garwin”: Finkbeiner, 104.
36 “perfect occasion”: Bruno Vitale, “The War Physicists,” 3, 12.
37 European scientists: “Jason: survey by E. H. S. Burhop and replies,
1973,” Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, 1921–1979, Niels Bohr Library
and Archives, digital archive.
38 “tried for war crimes”: Ibid.
39 “We should”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013.
40 “intellectual forefront”: Lukasik oral history interview, 27, 32–33.
41 “an agreeable move”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013.
Chapter Fourteen Rise of the Machines

1 in keeping with the Mansfield Act: Barber, IX-23. Staff supervision

would remain under the control of DDR&E.
2 three former ARPA directors: Barber, VIII-43, VIII-50.
3 “high-risk projects”: Barber, IX-7
4 “It was most difficult”: Barber, IX-37. Lukasik would become a senior
vice president of RAND for national security programs.
5 altered the opinions: Commanders Digest, September 20, 1973, 2.
6 radar cross-section: Interviews with Edward Lovick, 2009–2015;
Jacobsen, Area 51, 97.
7 acoustically undetectable: Reed et al., DARPA Technical
Accomplishments. Volume 1. 16-1–16-4.
8 “high-stealth aircraft”: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 152.
9 asked the CIA: Interviews with Ed Lovick, 2009–2015. After
Heilmeier was briefed by Lockheed, the Skunk Works division was
given a $1 contract by DARPA to “study” stealth, which essentially
amounted to Lockheed handing over reports already done for CIA. I
write about this in Area 51, having interviewed a number of program
participants. The subject is discussed in DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging
the Gap but because Project Oxcart had not been declassified by CIA
when the monograph was written, most of the narrative refers to the
SR-71.
10 “We designed flat, faceted panels”: Interviews with Ed Lovick, 2009;
Jacobsen, Area 51, 340.
11 Two significant ideas: RG 330, ARPA, Memo from George H.
Lawrence to Deputy Director of Procurement, Defense Supply
Service, Contract DAHC15-70-C-0144, NACP.
12 Doubling is a powerful concept: Garreau, 49.
13 “In a few years”: J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, “The
Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology
(April 1968), 22.
14 text messages: K. Fisch, S. McLeod, and B. Brenman, “Did You
Know, 3.0,” Research and Design (2008): 2.
15 “Is it going to be”: Taylor oral history interview.
16 “the most successful project”: DARPA, A History of the Arpanet: The
First Decade, I-2–5.
17 “to identify and characterize”: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 11. For a
detailed discussion of Assault Breaker, see Van Atta et al.,
Transformation and Transition, Volume 1, Chapter Four.
18 Wohlstetter concluded: See Paolucci, “Summary Report of the Long
Range Research and Development Planning Program.”
19 “a circular error probable”: Cited in Watts, “Precision Strike: An
Evolution,” 3, footnote 6.
20 best example was the bombing: Lavalle, 7.
21 “It appears”: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 13.
22 love of model airplanes: Van Atta et al., Transformation and
Transition, Volume 1, 40.
23 Praerie and Calere: Ibid., 40–41.
24 forward-looking infrared: Interview with John Gargus, September
2011.
25 “more complicated” drone: Cited in Barber, VIII-53.
26 Nite Panther and Nite Gazelle: Gyrodyne Helicopter Historical
Foundation, “Nite Panther: U.S. Navy’s QH-50 Drone Anti-Submarine
Helicopter (DASH) System,” (n.d.).
27 TRANSIT: Reed et al., DARPA Technical Accomplishments, Volume 1,
3-1–9.
28 planning countermeasures: Watts, “Precision Strike: An Evolution,”
12.
29 a master game theorist: Jardini (unpaginated). Andrew Marshall served
eight consecutive U.S. presidents, thirteen secretaries of defense, and
fourteen DARPA directors. After forty-two years of military
forecasting, Marshall retired in January 2015 at the age of ninety-two.
He was the longest-serving director inside the Office of Secretary of
Defense in Pentagon history.
30 Soviets felt so threatened: Watts, “Precision Strike: An Evolution,” 5,
7, 11–13.
31 “military-technical revolution”: Marshal N. V. Ogarkov, “The Defense
of Socialism: Experience of History and the Present Day,” Red Star,
May 9, 1984, trans. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily
Report, May 9, 1984.
32 “technology leadership”: Interview with Richard Van Atta, May 2014.
33 being pursued, in the black: Barber, VIII-36, IX-7, IX-32–40; Reed et
al., DARPA Technical Accomplishments, Volume 1, S-1–9.
34 got a radical idea: Interviews and email correspondence with Jack
Thorpe, May 2014–March 2015. The idea, says Thorpe, developed
over time while he was working at the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research in Washington D.C.
35 hydraulic motion system: Michael L. Cyrus, “Motion Systems Role in
Flight Simulators for Flying Training,” Williams Air Force Base, AZ,
August 1978.
36 “The other flyer’s aircraft”: Quotes are from interview with Jack
Thorpe, May–October 2014; See also Thorpe, “Trends in Modeling,
Simulation, & Gaming.”
37 “a place where”: Interview with Jack Thorpe, clarifying his original
paper.
38 reviewed by senior Pentagon staff: Cosby, Simnet: An Insider’s
Perspective, 3.
39 TCP/IP: Roland and Shiman, 117.
40 C2U: Thorpe clarifies that C2U was a term that originated with
DARPA’s Command Post of the Future program.
41 “allowed to fail”: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 68.
42 “networked war-fighting system was impossible”: Interview with
Neale Cosby, March 2014.
43 “William Gibson didn’t”: Fred Hapgood,“Simnet,” Wired Magazine,
Vol. 5, no. 4, April 1997; Deborah Solomon, “Back From the Future
Questions for William Gibson,” New York Times Magazine, August 19,
2007.
44 Project Reynard: Interview with Justin Elliott; Justin Elliott and Mark
Mazzetti, “World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games,”
New York Times, December 9, 2013.
Chapter Fifteen Star Wars and Tank Wars

1 He had just flown in: Teller, 531.

2 Poindexter suggested: Broad, 164.
3 lead agency: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 67. The program
would not be called SDI until later. DARPA’s research and
development efforts focused on directed energy systems and were later
continued by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization.
4 “But is it a bomb?”: Robert Scheer, “X-Ray Weapon,” Los Angeles
Times, June 4, 1986.
5 a laser is: Interview with Charles Townes, March 2014; Townes, 4–6;
Beason, 15.
6 had been inspired to create the laser: Interview with Charles Townes;
Townes, 6. Charles Townes died in January 2015.
7 “array of small reflectors”: Quotes are from interview with Charles
Townes; Townes, 3.
8 “like an imaginary story”: Hey, 95–96.
9 Fiscal Times: Merrill Goozner, “$100b and Counting: Missiles That
Work… Sometimes,” The Fiscal Times, March 24, 2012; Mark
Thompson, “Why Obama Will Continue Star Wars,” Time Magazine,
November 16, 2008.
10 “capture the sense of tankness”: Interviews with Jack Thorpe, May–
October, 2014.
11 “The high rankers”: Quotes are from interviews with Neale Cosby,
May–October 2014.
12 DARPA and the Army spent: Cosby, 4.
13 The Internal Look war games: Interview with General Paul Gorman
(retired), October 2014.
14 “We played Internal Look”: Schwartzkopf, 10.
Chapter Sixteen Gulf War and Operations Other Than War

1 what struck him: Atkinson, Crusade, 25.

2 stealth fighter aircraft: For a comprehensive story of the DARPA
stealth program, see Van Atta et al., Transformation and Transition,
Volume 2, I-1–9.
3 “give them the full load”: Atkinson, Crusade, 31.
4 “Two thoughts”: Crickmore, 63.
5 “sophisticated video game”: Ibid. Feest also discusses how war is like
playing a video game in Richard Benke, “Right on Target,” AP,
January 14, 1996.
6 “video game was over”: Crickmore, 63.
7 tactical advantage: Defense Department New Briefing, January 17,
1991, C-SPAN.org; Robert F. Dorr, 312. Numbers vary slightly,
according to different sources.
8 Iraqi Scuds: Major General Jay Garner, “Army Stands by Patriot’s
Persian Gulf Performance,” Defense News 7, no. 26 (1-4): 3;
Atkinson, Crusade, 182; “Intelligence Successes and Failures in
Operations Desert Shield/Storm,” Report of the Oversight and
Investigations Subcommittee, Committee on Armed Services, U.S.
House of Representatives, August 1993.
9 surrendering to a machine: Ted Shelsby, “Iraqi soldiers surrender to
AAI’s drones.” Baltimore Sun, March 2, 1991.
10 JSTARS: U.S. Air Force, Fact Sheet, E-8C, Joint Stars (2005).
11 600,000 lines of code: Mahnken, 130.
12 “real-time tactical view”: JOINT STARS, Transitions to the Air Force,
Selected Technology Transition, 68.
13 ten thousand more missions: According to a Defense Department
timeline of the Gulf War, www.defense.gov.
14 mind-numbing statistics: USA Today World, 1991 Gulf War
chronology, September 3, 1996.
15 terrible weather: McMaster, “Battle of 73 Easting,” 10–11.
16 wrote the first handbook: Wolfe, 3.
17 “We had thermal imagery”: Interview with Douglas Macgregor, April
2014.
18 Eagle Troop: Interview with General Paul Gorman (retired) October
2014. The controversy continues over how long this battle actually
lasted.
19 “slaughter for slaughter’s sake”: Powell, 505. All quotes in this section
are from Powell’s book.
20 “a great idea”: Interview with Neal Cosby, May 2014.
21 Bloedorn and the DARPA team: Thorpe, “Trends in Modeling,
Simulation, & Gaming,” 12.
22 “capturing”: Interview with Neal Cosby, May 2014.
23 “an instrument of war”: This account is from Gorman and McMaster,
“The Future of the Armed Services: Training for the 21st Century,”
Statement before Senate Armed Services Committee, May 21, 1992.
24 Task Force Ranger: Stewart, The United States Army in Somalia,
1992–1994, 10–11.
25 “a direct hit”: Norm Hooten, interview with Lara Logan, CBS News,
60 Minutes, October 6, 2013.
26 written report: Quotes are from Report of the Senior Working Group
on Military Operations Other Than War (OOTW). Around this time,
DARPA’s name was briefly changed back to ARPA, then restored to
DARPA.
27 “Historical advice”: Glenn, Combat in Hell, 1.
Chapter Seventeen Biological Weapons

1 thirteen-man Soviet delegation: Alibek, 226. The other twelve

members were scientists, Soviet army officers, diplomats, and spies.
2 regarded with wonderment: Alibek, 194; email correspondence with
Ken Alibek, December 2013. Alibek now lives in Kazakhstan.
3 Alibekov’s job: Alibek, 194.
4 he later described: Ibid., 9.
5 “It wasn’t so clear”: “DARPA: The Post-Soviet Years 1989–Present
2008,” video available on YouTube at DARPAtv.
6 great instability: Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Proliferation and
Threat Response,” November 1992, 35.
7 At any given time: Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 330. As per Hoffman,
there were 6,623 land-based and 2,760 sea-based nuclear warheads
aimed at carefully selected targets inside the United States, and an
additional 1,500 nuclear-armed cruise missiles and 822 nuclear-armed
aircraft ready to fly.
8 helped conceive and design: Biography of Lisa Bronson, Missouri
State University, Faculty DSS-73.
9 “At various stops”: This account is from Alibek, 239–40.
10 reached out to Lisa Bronson: Alibek 242, also discussed with Michael
Goldblatt, April 2014.
11 Vladimir Pasechnik’s defection: Mangold and Goldberg, Plague Wars,
91–105.
12 Ultra-Pure: Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 327–328.
13 streptomycin: Poland and Dennis, WHO/CDS/CSR/EDC Plague
Manual, 55.
14 “You choose plague”: Hoffmann, The Dead Hand, 334.
15 “one of the key acts”: Ibid., 332.
16 declared smallpox dead: World Health Magazine, May 1980 (cover).
17 Lederberg confirmed: James M. Hughes and D. Peter Drotman, “In
Memoriam: Joshua Lederberg (1925–2008),” Emerging Infectious
 Diseases 14, no. 6 (June 2008): 981–983.
18 to get the Russians to admit: Braithwaite, 141–143. As the British
ambassador to the Soviet Union, Braithwaite was stationed in Moscow
from September 1988 to May 1992.
19 Yeltsin confessed: Braithwaite, 142–43.
20 Congress got involved: In the spring of 1992, in an interview with
Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yeltsin acknowledged that the Soviet Union,
and subsequently Russia, had been operating a biological weapons
program. He blamed the arms race. In June, while visiting Washington,
D.C., Yeltsin told the U.S. Congress, “We are firmly resolved not to lie
any more,” and promised U.S. lawmakers that Russia’s illegal
bioweapons programs would end.
21 “the most virulent and vicious”: David Willman, “Selling the Threat of
Bioterrorism,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2007.
22 Alibek confirmed: Alibek, 5.
23 provided chilling details: Testimony before the Joint Economic
Committee, U.S. Congress, May 20, 1998; Alibek, 40.
24 “They did not care”: Alibek, 257.
25 “blindness to the pace”: Cited in William J. Broad, “Joshua Lederberg,
82, a Nobel Winner, Dies,” New York Times, February 5, 2008.
26 “very little capability in biology”: Interview with Larry Lynn;
“DARPA: The Post-Soviet Years 1989–Present 2008,” video available
on YouTube at DARPAtv.
27 “a SCIF”: Quotes are from interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013.
28 Lederberg: Nancy Stomach, “DARPA Explores Some Promising
Avenues,” 25.
29 unclassified findings: This section is sourced from Block, Living
Nightmares, 39–75.
30 cancerous human tumors: Kevin Newman, “Cancer Experts Puzzled
by Monkey Virus,” ABC News, March 12, 1994. The subject, “The
SV-40 Virus: Has Tainted Polio Vaccine Caused an Increase in
Cancer?” was discussed and debated before Congress on September
 10, 2003.
31 Shortly after: Block, Living Nightmares, 41.
32 Biological warfare defense: Quotes in this section come from DARPA
Biological Warfare Defense Program, Program Overview no. 884,
briefing slides (unpaginated).
33 “Star Wars of biology”: Ibid.
34 Preston testified: Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology,
Terrorism and Government Information and the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence on Chemical and Biological Weapons,
“Threats to America: Are We Prepared?” April 22, 1998.
35 “hundreds of tons”: Tim Weiner, “Soviet Defector Warns of Biological
Weapons,” New York Times, February 25, 1998.
36 distributed to members of Congress: Congressional Record, March 12,
1998.
37 sharing information: Richard Preston, “The Bioweaponeers,” New
Yorker, March 9, 1998, 52–53.
38 private meeting at the Pentagon: David Willman, “Selling the Threat
of Bioterrorism,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2007.
39 Alibek became president: Executive profile, Bloomberg Business
Week, October 14, 2013. See also Miller, Engelberg, and Broad, 302–
4.
40 Popov: Quotes are from Nova, 1998. Transcripts online at pbs.org.
41 “enigma”: Marilyn Chase, “To Fight Bioterror, Doctors Look for Ways
to Spur Immune System,” Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2002.
42 biological warfare defense: Prepared remarks of Larry Lynn, director,
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, before the Acquisition
and Technology Subcommittee, U.S. Senate Armed Services
Committee, March 11, 1997.
43 “We hope”: “Hadron Subsidiary Awarded $3.3 Million Biodefense
Contract by DARPA,” PRNewswire, May 2, 2000. In just a few years’
time, Alibek’s federal grant and contract money would total $28
million.
44 Ukraine: David Willman, “Selling the Threat of Bioterrorism,” Los
 Angeles Times, July 1, 2007.
45 “terrorist organization”: Testimony of Ken Alibek, U.S. House of
Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on
Research and Development and Subcommittee on Procurement,
October 20, 1999, 15.
Chapter Eighteen Transforming Humans for War

1 “weakling of the battlefield”: Quotes are from interview with General

Paul Gorman (retired), October 2014.
2 “On the field of battle”: Colonel S. L. A. Marshall, The Soldier’s Load
and the Mobility of a Nation (Washington, DC, 1950), 7–10.
3 Gorman wrote: Gorman, SuperTroop, VIII-7.
4 radical vision: Interview with Michael Goldblatt, April 2014. This
belief is common among transhumanists.
5 with the wave of a wand: Garreau, 28.
6 “rapid healing”: Harry T. Whelan et al., “DARPA Soldier Self Care:
Rapid Healing of Laser Eye Injuries with Light Emitting Diode
Technology,” September 1, 2004.
7 like hydrogen sulfide: Jason, MITRE, Human Performance, 22–24.
8 to control the lobes: Garreau, 28.
9 Mechanically Dominant Soldier: Tether, Statement to Congress, March
19, 2003.
10 look like Lance Armstrong: Garreau, 32.
11 “a wireless brain modem”: All quotes are from Statement of Dr. Eric
Eisenstadt, Defense Sciences Office, Brain Machine Interface,
DARPATech ’99 conference.
12 the answer was clear: Author’s tour of Gina Goldblatt’s high
technology bedroom, April 2014.
13 the Dark Winter script: Quotes are from Dark Winter, Bioterrorism
Exercise, Andrews Air Force Base, June 22–23, 2001; U.S. House of
Representatives, Hearing on Combating Terrorism, “Federal Response
to a Biological Weapons Attack,” July 2001.
14 Nunn told Congress: Nunn, statement to Congress, July 23, 2001.
15 all BASIS could do: Interview with Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, October
2013.
16 “Any technology”: Vin LoPresti, “Guarding the Air We Breathe,” Los
Alamos National Laboratory Research Quarterly (Spring 2003), 5.
Chapter Nineteen Terror Strikes

1 asks Bray: Quotes are from interview with David Bray, July 2014. Per
Presidential Decision Directive 39, the Bioterrorism Preparedness and
Response Program was a joint effort between the CDC, the FBI, and
the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
2 supercomputers would scan: David Siegrist and J. Pavlin, “Bio-ALIRT
Biosurveillance Detection Algorithm Evaluation,” Centers For Disease
Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, September 24,
2004/53, 152–158. Carlos Castillo-Chavez, “Infections Disease
Informatics and Biosurveillance,” Springer, October 2010, 6–7.
3 “It was a clear day”: Cheney, 339.
4 “He grabbed me”: Cheney interview with John King, CNN, September
11, 2002.
5 laying plans for war: Cheney, 341.
6 sitting in his office: Rumsfeld, 335; Larry King Live, December 5,
2001.
7 Davis later told: This account is from Cockburn, 1–3.
8 Secretary Rumsfeld helped: Armed Forces Press Service, September 8,
2006, photographs.
9 “Best info fast”: 9/11 Commission Report, 559; Joel Roberts, “Plans
for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11,” CBS News, September 4, 2002.
10 “We all knew”: Rice, 83.
11 “We were embarking”: Cheney, 332.
12 Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 356–57.
13 Tenet sent out a memo: Memorandum from George J. Tenet, The
Director of Central Intelligence, “Subject: We’re at War,” September
16, 2001, CIA.
14 “On October first”: Quotes are from interview with David Bray, July
2014.
15 “A war of nerves”: R. W. Apple, “A Nation Challenged: News
Analysis; City of Power, City of Fears,” New York Times, October 17,
 2001.
16 DARPA was asked: Interview with Michael Goldblatt, April 2014.
17 “a little bit of pride”: Ibid.
18 “There had been”: Quotes are from Cheney, 341.
19 “a virtually zero rate”: Vin LoPresti, “Guarding the Air We Breathe,”
Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Quarterly (Spring 2003), 5,
Science and Technology Review, October, 2003; Arkin, 288n.
20 “Go call Hadley”: Rice, 101.
21 In New York City: Cheney, 340–42.
22 “Feet down”: Rice, 101.
23 additive called bentonite: ABC News, World News Tonight, October
26, 2001.
24 “Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague”: ABC News, This Week, October
28, 2001.
25 disinformation campaign: William Safire, “Mr. Atta Goes to Prague,”
New York Times, May 9, 2002.
26 indication of his significance: Anthony Tether, biography, AllGov.com.
27 five stages: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 19, 2003.
28 nearly three times: FY 2003 budget estimates, determined in February
2002.
29 “Kenneth Alibek”: “George Mason University Unveils Center for
Biodefense: Scientists Kenneth Alibek, Charles Bailey to Direct,”
press release, George Mason University, February 14, 2002.
30 “prototype biodefense products”: PRNewswire, Analex Corporation,
May 1, 2002.
31 $60: “National Security Notes,” March 31, 2006, GlobalSecurity.org.
32 Al Qaeda spent: 9/11 Commission Report, 169. The plotters spent
between $400,000 and $500,000.
33 “The match is about to begin”: John Diamond and Kathy Kiely,
“Tomorrow Is Zero Hour,” USA Today, June 19, 2002.
Chapter Twenty Total Information Awareness

1 nuclear physicist John Poindexter: Dr. John Poindexter, DARPA

biography.
2 struck with an idea: Harris, 144.
3 Poindexter began teaching himself: Ibid., 83.
4 revitalize the Genoa program: Interview with Bob Popp, June 2014.
5 “That’s funny”: Quotes are from Harris, 144.
6 roughly $42 million: Ibid., 145.
7 existing Genoa program: Presentation by Brian Sharkey, Deputy
Director of ISO, Total Information Awareness, DARPATech 99
conference, transcript and briefing slides.
8 let go of profit participation: Harris, 147.
9 opening slide: Ibid., 150.
10 system of systems: Popp and Yen, 409; Dr. Robert Popp, DARPA’s
Initiative on Countering Terrorism, TIA, Terrorism Information
Awareness, Overview of TIA and IAO Programs, briefing slides.
11 Tether agreed: Interview with Bob Popp, June 2014; Harris, 150.
12 $145 million: Congressional Research Services, “Controversy About
Level of Funding,” memo on funding for Total Information Awareness
programs from Amy Belasco, consultant on the defense budget,
Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division, January 21, 2003
(hereafter Belasco memo).
13 “In our view”: Quotes are from interview with Bob Popp, June 2014.
14 multiple programs under the TIA umbrella: Information in this section
is drawn from “Total Information Awareness Program (TIA). System
Description Document (SDD).” Version 1.1, July 19, 2002.
15 EELD office: DARPA, Information Awareness Office, IAO Mission,
briefing slides.
16 “techniques that allow us”: Quotes are from statements of Ted Senator,
DARPATech 2002 conference, Anaheim, California.
17 “capture human activities”: Ibid.
18 Human Identification: Jonathan Phillips’s explanation of face
recognition for SPIE Defense Security and Sensing Symposium can be
viewed on YouTube.
19 “the war languages”: DARPA, IAO Mission briefing slides.
20 Red teaming: International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and
Security, Madrid, March 8–11, 2005.
21 “collaborations”: Quotes are from statements by Tom Armour,
DARPATech 2000 conference, Dallas, Texas.
22 find the snakes: Armour added, “The intelligence analyst will need to
consult vast amounts of information, from both classified and open
sources, to piece together enough evidence to understand their
activities.” Armour, DARPATech 2000 conference, Dallas, Texas.
23 “artificial automaton”: Von Neumann, “The Computer and the Brain,”
74.
24 lunch in Rumsfeld’s office: Harris, 185.
25 at Fort Belvoir: Dr. Robert Popp, DARPA’s Initiative on Countering
Terrorism, TIA, Terrorism Information Awareness, Overview of TIA
and IAO Programs, briefing slides.
26 a whooshing sound: Glenn Greenwald, “Inside the Mind of NSA Chief
Gen. Keith Alexander,” Guardian, September 15, 2013.
27 “initial TIA experiment”: Quotes are from interview with Bob Popp;
see also Harris, 187.
28 “a vast electronic dragnet”: John Markoff, “Pentagon Plans a
Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans,”
New York Times, November 9, 2002.
29 Safire wrote: William Safire, “You Are a Suspect,” New York Times,
November 14, 2002.
30 285 stories: Robert L. Popp and John Yen, 409.
31 true numbers: Belasco memo; DefenseNet transfers from Project ST-
28 in FY2002 to Project ST-11 in 2003.
32 No interviews: Interview with Bob Popp, June 2014.
33 “I don’t know much about it”: U.S. Department of Defense, news
transcript, “Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability en Route to Chile,”
 November 18, 2002.
34 offered his resignation: John M. Poindexter to Anthony Tether,
director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, August 12,
2003.
35 “terminated immediately”: Congressional Record, September 24, 2003
(House), H8500-H8550 Joint Explanatory Statement, Terrorism
Information Awareness (TIA).
36 Anonymous Entity Resolution: Ericson and Haggerty, 180; Steve
Mollman, “Betting on Private Data Search,” Wired, March 5, 2003.
37 Combat Zones That See: DARPA Solicitation number SN03-13, Pre-
Solicitation Notice: Combat Zones That See (CTS), March 25, 2003.
38 “to challenge the status quo”: Defense Industry Daily, August 1, 2008.
39 came up with: Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John H.
Garstka, “Network Centric Warfare: Its Origins and Future,”
Proceedings, 124–139. Cebrowski says he first heard the phrase at the
U.S. Naval Institute Seminar and 123rd Annual Meeting, Annapolis,
April 23, 1997.
40 the whole world: Remarks by Bill Mularie, director, Information
Systems Office, DARPATech ’99 conference, briefing slides.
41 (C4ISR): Rumsfeld, 10.
42 internal documents: U.S. Department of Defense, Report on Network
Centric Warfare, 2001; Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (retired),
speech to Network Centric Warfare 2003 conference, January 2003.
43 “great moral seductiveness”: Cited in James Blaker, “Arthur K.
Cebrowski: A Retrospective,” Naval War College Review, Spring
2006, Vol. 59, no. 2, 135.
44 “The speed”: Quotes are from “Transforming Warfare: An Interview
with Adm. Arthur Cebrowski,” Nova, PBS, May 5, 2004.
Chapter Twenty-One IED War

1 “Mission Accomplished”: Remarks by the President from the USS

Abraham Lincoln, White House Press Office, May 2003.
2 “I was a gunner”: Quotes are from interview with Jeremy Ridgley,
May 25, 2014; Ridgley photographs.
3 “unexploded ordnance”: “Pfc. Jeremiah D. Smith, 25, OIF, 05/26/03,”
Defense Department press release no. 376-03, May 28, 2003.
4 Defense Department official: David Rhode, “After the War:
Resistance; Deadly Attacks on G.I.’s Rise; Generals Hope Troop
Buildup Will Stop the Skirmishes,” New York Times, June 10, 2003.
5 “There’s more ammunition”: Abizaid, testimony before Congress,
September 25, 2003.
6 greater than the number: Smith, 10.
7 soldiers killed by IEDs: Ibid.; John Diamond, “Small Weapons Prove
the Real Threat in Iraq,” USA Today, September 29, 2003.
8 “classical guerrilla-style campaign”: Cited in Rick Atkinson, “Left of
Boom: ‘The IED Problem is getting out of control. We’ve got to stop
the bleeding,’” Washington Post, September 30, 2007.
9 “A new phenomenon”: Quotes are from interview with Brigadier
General Andrew Smith (retired), June 2014.
10 CREW: Glenn Zorpette, “Countering IEDs,” IEEE Spectrum, August
29, 2008.
11 study report: Clay Wilson, “Network Centric Warfare: Background and
Oversight Issues for Congress,” June 2, 2004.
12 “Warfare is all about”: U.S. Department of Defense, Report on
Network Centric Warfare, 2001; Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski
(retired), speech to Network Centric Warfare 2003 conference, January
2003.
13 “Network-centric warfare”: “Transformation for Survival: Interview
with Arthur K. Cebrowski, Director, Office of Force Transformation,”
Defense AT&L, March–April 2004.
14 added four new slides: Office of Force Transformation, “Key Barriers
to Transformation,” PowerPoint, 2002; “Meeting the Challenges of the
New Competitive Landscape PowerPoint, 2004. See also Donald
Rumsfeld, Secretary’s Forward, “Transformation Planning Guidance,”
U.S. Department of Defense, April 2003.
15 “That speed of advance”: “Battle Plan Under Fire,” PBS NewsHour,
May 4, 2004.
16 “culture-centric” solution: Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., U.S.
Army (retired), “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings, October
2004.
17 “Knowledge of one’s enemy”: McFate, “Anthropology and
Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,”
Military Review, March–April 2005, 24–38.
18 “Combat troops”: Meghan Scully,“‘Social Intel’ New Tool for U.S.
Military,” Defense News, April 26, 2004.
19 bringing social scientists on board: Email correspondence with
Montgomery McFate; interview with Bob Popp, June 2014.
20 “punk rock wild child”: Matthew B. Standard, “Montgomery McFate’s
Mission: Can One Anthropologist Possibly Steer the Course in Iraq?”
San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 2007.
21 received a call: Email correspondence with Montgomery McFate.
22 majority were left-leaning: Scott Jaschik, “Social Scientists Lean to
the Left, Study Says,” Insidehighered.com, December 21, 2005.
23 “evangelical mission”: George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can
social scientists redefine the ‘war on terror’?” New Yorker, December
18, 2006.
24 An entire generation: Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr., The
Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003).
25 “The nature of war”: Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., U.S. Army
(retired), “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings, October 2004, 32–
36.
26 “When the U.S.”: McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding
 Adversary Culture,” Joint Force Quarterly, issue 38, July 2005, 44-48.
27 “Soldiers and Marines”: Ibid.
28 “stability operations”: Dehghanpisheh and Thomas, “Scions of the
Surge,” Newsweek, March 24, 2008.
29 “I do not want”: George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can social
scientists redefine the ‘war on terror’?” New Yorker, December 18,
2006.
30 “Understanding and empathy”: Robert Scales, “Clausewitz and World
War IV,” Armed Forces Journal, July 1, 2006.
31 McFate wrote one of the chapters: Email correspondence with
Montgomery McFate.
32 “What is Counterinsurgency?”: Counterinsurgency, Field Manual No.
3-24.
33 “the first time”: http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil.
Chapter Twenty-Two Combat Zones That See

1 “Combat Zones That See”: DARPA Solicitation number SN03-13,

Pre-Solicitation Notice: Combat Zones That See (CTS), March 25,
2003.
2 “No technological challenges”: Robert Leheny, “DARPA’s Urban
Operations Program,” presentation at DARPATech 2005, August 2005,
with photographs.
3 “We need a network”: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 10, 2005,
11.
4 Congress had eliminated funding: U.S. Congress, H8500–H8550, Joint
Explanatory Statement, Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA),
Congressional Record, September 24, 2003.
5 “detect the clandestine production”: Tether, Statement to Congress,
March 10, 2005, 11.
6 “a network of nonintrusive microsensors”: Leheny, “DARPA’s Urban
Operations Program,” 38.
7 unclassified documents: Ehlschlaeger, “Understanding Megacities with
the Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence Paradigm,” 50–53.
8 the HURT program: DARPA Information Exploitation Office (IXO)
HURT Program Office, aerial vehicle platform documents; See also
James Richardson, “Preparing Warfighters for the Urban Stage,”
located in DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 166–67.
9 “The [HURT] system”: Pagels quoted in Clarence A. Robinson, Jr.,
“Air Vehicles Deliver Warrior Data,” Signal Magazine, July 2007.
10 terrorists could sneak in: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 169;
Glenn Zorpette, “Countering IEDs,” IEEE Spectrum, August 29, 2008.
11 DARPA’s goal: This information comes from Tether, Statement to
Congress, 2003; “Combat Zones That See (CTS) Solicitation Number
BAA03-15, March 25, 2003. See also Stephen Graham, “Surveillance,
Urbanization, and the U.S. ‘Revolution in Military Affairs,’” in David
Lyon, ed., Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, 250–
 54.
12 every forty-eight minutes: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘You can’t
armor your way out of this problem;’” Washington Post, October 2,
2007.
13 the “spider”: Noah Shachtman, “The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible
War,” Wired, June 14, 2011.
14 EFP: The first EFPs appeared on May 15, 2004, in Bara. DIA linked
them to Hezbollah forces from 1997.
15 2,000 meters per second: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘You can’t
armor your way out of this problem;’” Washington Post, October 2,
2007.
16 Hardwire HD: “Hardwire Receives DARPA Funding for Novel Armor
Solutions,” Business Wire, August 21, 2006.
17 rip apart soldiers’ bodies: Tony Perry, “IED Wounds from Afghanistan
‘Unbelievable’ Trauma Docs Say,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2011.
18 JIEDDO: Interview with Brigadier General Andrew Smith (retired),
June 2014.
19 “We were dealing with”: Quotes are from interviews with Craig
Marsh, June 2014–March 2015.
20 Building 114: Interviews with Craig Marsh; Andrew E. Kramer,
“Leaving Camp Victory in Iraq, the Very Name a Question Mark,”
New York Times, November 10, 2011.
21 Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell: “CEXC: Introducing a New
Concept in the Art of War,” Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 2007.
22 “Talon robots”: Quotes in this section are from DARPA, Distribution
Statement A, “Unmanned Robots Systems: SBIR Technology
Underpins Life-Saving Military Robots,” DARPA, Distribution
Statement A, 2010, 1-7.
23 “Gordon the robot”: Ibid., 6–8; DARPA, “Unmanned Robotic
Systems: Small Business Innovation Research,” Featured Technology,
December 2010, 6.
24 Talon robots: Sargeant Lorie Jewell, “Armed Robots to March into
Battle,” Army News Service, December 6, 2004.
25 “Whether it’s magic or scientific”: Rod Nordland, “Iraq Swears by a
Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless,” New York Times, November 3,
2009.
26 whistleblower revealed: Adam Higginbotham, “In Iraq, the Bomb-
Detecting Device That Didn’t Work, Except to Make Money,”
Bloomberg Businessweek, July 11, 2013.
27 more than two an hour: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘If you don’t
go after the network, you’re never going to stop these guys. Never,’”
Washington Post, October 3, 2007.
28 $15 billion: Glenn Zorpette, “Countering IEDs,” IEEE Spectrum,
August 29, 2008.
29 Tether appeared: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 21, 2007.
30 “Shot. Two o’clock”: Raytheon news release, BBN Technologies,
Products and Services, Boomerang III.
31 CROSSHAIRS: DARPA, news release, “DARPA’s CROSSHAIRS
Counter Shooter System,” October 5, 2010.
32 DARPA fielded fifty Radar Scopes: Quotes are from Tether, Statement
to Congress, March 21, 2007; Donna Miles, “New Device Will Sense
Through Concrete Walls,” Armed Forces Press Service, January 3,
2006.
33 HART: DARPA Heterogeneous Airborne Reconnaissance Team
(HART), Case no. 11414, briefing slides. Dr. Michael A. Pagels,
August 2008.
34 TIGR (Tactical Ground Reporting): Amy Walker, “TIGR allows
Soldiers to ‘be there’ before they arrive,” U.S. Army News, October 13,
2009.
35 Congress was told: Leheny, Statement to Congress, May 20, 2009.
36 soldiers told: David Talbot, “A Technology Surges,” MIT Technology
Review, February 2008.
Chapter Twenty-Three Human Terrain

1 not one of the 1,200: Declan Walsh, “Afghan Militants Attack

Kandahar Prison and Free Inmates,” Guardian, June 13, 2008;
Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Free 1,200 Inmates in Attack on Afghan
Prison,” New York Times, June 14, 2008.
2 “proto-type system”: DARPA, IAO Mission, briefing slides.
3 “Based on our experience in Iraq”: Thom Shankar, “To Check
Militants, U.S. Has System That Never Forgets,” New York Times, July
13, 2011.
4 On patrol: USA v. Don Michael Ayala (U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division), Document 33, May
6, 2009, and Document 5, November 24, 2008.
5 “An indefinable spirit”: U.S. Army, “In Memory of… Paula Loyd,”
Human Terrain System, September 2011.
6 center of the alleyway: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, photographs.
7 A young bearded man: Gezari, 3–18.
8 He wore: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, photographs.
9 drew his pistol: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, Document 5, 4.
10 previously guarded: Ibid., Document 5, 3.
11 “the man was the devil”: Ibid., Document 33, 2.
12 leniency: Matthew Barakat, “Contractor Gets Probation for Killing
Prisoner,” Associated Press, May 8, 2009.
13 “advise brigades”: In Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic, Udris
Films, 2010.
14 earned more: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, Document 33, 1.
15 “military commanders”: U.S. Army press release, digital archive,
http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil.
16 “dangerous and reckless”: AAA [American Anthropological
Association] Executive Board, Statement on the Human Terrain
System Project, October 31, 2007.
17 “mercenary anthropology”: Roberto J. González, “Towards mercenary
 anthropology? The new US Army counterinsurgency manual FM 3–24
and the military-anthropology complex,” Anthropology Today, Volume
23, Issue 3, June 2007, 14–19.
18 Catherine Lutz: Quotes are from Human Terrain: War Becomes
Academic, Udris Films, 2010.
19 Hugh Gusterson: Ibid.
20 Roberto González: Ibid.
21 “My very first time”: Carlson quotes are from Dan G. Cox, “Human
Terrain Systems and the Moral Prosecution of Warfare,” 27–29.
22 “Can doctrine be applied”: This account is drawn from Nigh, “An
Operator’s Guide to Human Terrain Teams,” 20–23.
23 “clearing operation”: ISAF, TAAC South, “Impacts, Contributions,”
2007; U.S. Army, “Human Terrain Team Handbook,” December 11,
2008.
24 replaced Paula Loyd: Korva Coleman, “Social Scientists Deployed to
the Battlefield,” NPR, September 1, 2009.
25 “infamous as a killing zone”: Jonathan Montpetit,“Canadian Soldiers
Resume Mentoring Afghan National Army After Turbulent Spring.”
Military World, October 28, 2010.
26 “Michael Bhatia was”: “One Man’s Odyssey from Campus to
Combat,” Associated Press, March 8, 2009.
27 $200,000 a year: Jason Motlagh, “Should Anthropologists Help
Contain the Taliban?” Time, July 1, 2010.
28 “People use human networks”: Tristan Reed, “Intelligence and Human
Networks,” Stratfor Global Intelligence Security Weekly, January 10,
2013.
29 “Phase Zero pre-conflict”: Jim Hodges, “Cover Story: U.S. Army’s
Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts,” Defense
News, March 22, 2012.
30 biomedical technology program: Department of Defense, Fiscal Year
2015, Budget Estimates, Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, 1:51.
31 “applies forecasting”: Ibid., 1:130.
32 “far behind enemy lines”: “DARPA Receives Joint Meritorious Unit
Award,” U.S. Department of Defense, press release. December 17,
2012.
33 Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text: Department of Defense, Fiscal
Year 2015 Budget Estimates, Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, 1:88.
Chapter Twenty-Four Drone Wars

1 “This war”: Quotes are from “Remarks by the President at the National
Defense University, Fort McNair,” White House, Office of the Press
Secretary, May 23, 2013.
2 Department of Defense reports: U.S. Department of Defense, “The
Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2013–2038,” 2014, 8:13,
26.
3 “My daughter”: Quotes are from interview with Bernard Crane,
September 2014.
4 “Those are not insects”: Quotes are from Rick Weiss, “Dragonfly or
Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs,” Washington Post,
October 9, 2007.
5 insisted that President Bush be impeached: C-SPAN, “Stop the War
Rally,” September 15, 2007.
6 multiple truck bombs: Damien Cave and James Glanz, “Toll in Iraq
Bombings Is Raised to More Than 500,” New York Times, August 22,
2007.
7 reportedly played a role: “A Carpet for Radicals at the White House,”
Investigative Project on Terrorism, October 12, 2012.
8 served as imam: “Al-Qaida cleric death: mixed emotions at Virginia
mosque where he preached,” Associated Press, September 11, 2011.
9 “Insect-size”: Grasmeyer and Keennon, “Development of the Black
Widow Micro Air Vehicle,” American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, 2001, 1.
10 “We have seen sparrows”: Ibid., 8.
11 “micro-explosive bombs”: Lambeth, “Technology Trends in Air
Warfare,” 141.
12 trained bees to locate: “Sandia, University of Montana Researchers
Try Training Bees to Find Buried Landmines,” Sandia National
Laboratories, press release, April 27, 1999. In the late 1990s, the Mine
Bee Program met with great success when DARPA researchers at
 Sandia National Laboratories worked with entomologists at the
University of Montana to train honeybees to detect buried land mines.
13 Insectothopter: Author tour of the CIA museum, Langley, VA,
September 2010.
14 Animal rights: Duncan Graham-Rowe, “Robo-Rat Controlled by Brain
Electrodes,” New Scientist, May 1, 2002.
15 “The tissue develops”: A. Verderber, M. McKnight, and A. Bozkurt,
“Early Metamorphic Insertion Technology for Insect Flight Behavior
Monitoring,” Journal of Visualized Experiments, July 12, 2014, 89.
16 animated video: online at “Armed with Science,” the DoD’s official
science blog.
17 DARPA’s hypersonic stealth drones: DARPA News, “Hypersonics—
The New Stealth: DARPA investments in extreme hypersonics
continue,” July 6, 2012; “Darpa refocuses Hypersonics Research on
Tactical Missions,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, July 8, 2013.
18 Falcon HTV-2: Animated performance videos of Falcon HTV-2 at
Lockheedmartin.com.
19 hypersonic low-earth-orbit drones: Toshio Suzuki, “DARPA Wants
Hypersonic Space Drone with Daily Launches,” Stars and Stripes,
February 4, 2014.
20 Hydra: John Keller, “DARPA Considers Unmanned Submersible
Mothership Designed to Deploy UAVs and UUVs,” Military
Aerospace Electronics, July 23, 2013.
21 Unmanned Ground System robots: Demonstration videos on DARPA’s
YouTube channel, DARPAtv.
22 LANdroids: USC Information Sciences Institute, Polymorphic
Robotics Laboratory, “LANdroids,” n.d.
23 what “autonomy” is: U.S. Department of Defense, “Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2013–2038,” 15.
24 “The autonomous systems”: U.S. Department of Defense, “Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011–2036,” 43.
25 “autonomous and semi-autonomous”: Department of Defense
Directive 3000.09, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems,” sec. 4, Policy, 2,
 November 21, 2012.
26 fourfold process: U.S. Department of Defense, “Unmanned Systems
Integrated Roadmap FY2011–2036,” table 3, 46.
27 “unimagined degrees of autonomy”: Ashton Carter’s letter, dated
(stamped) March 29, 2010, is attached to the end of Department of
Defense, Defense Science Board, “Task Force Report: The Role of
Autonomy in DoD Systems,” Appendix C, Task Force Terms of
Reference.
Chapter Twenty-Five Brain Wars

1 artificial brains: ArtificialBrains.com tracks scientific and

technological progress toward the goal of building sentient machines.
The website is maintained by James Pearn in Munich, Germany.
2 our interview: All quotes in this section are from my interview with
Allen Macy Dulles, March 2014.
3 brought her brother: Interviews with Joan Dulles Talley, March 2014–
May 2015.
4 The White House calls: White House Briefing Room, “BRAIN
Initiative Challenges Researchers to Unlock Mysteries of Human
Mind,” April 2, 2013. Of note: partnering with DARPA on many of its
brain programs is IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or the CIA’s DARPA.
5 Brain programs: Information on DARPA brain-computer interface
programs from Robbin A. Miranda et al., “DARPA-Funded Efforts in
the Development of Novel Brain–Computer Interface Technologies,”
1-17. The authors are: Robbin A. Miranda, William D. Casebeer, Amy
M. Hein, Jack W. Judy, Eric P. Krotkov, Tracy L. Laabs, Justin E.
Manzof, Kent G. Pankratz, Gill A. Pratt, Justin C. Sanchez, Douglas J.
Weber, Tracey L. Wheeler, and Geoffrey S. F. Ling.
6 According to the Pentagon: Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center,
“Summary of Mental Disorder Hospitalizations, Active and Reserve
Components, U.S. Armed Forces, 2000–2012,” Medical Surveillance
Monthly Report 20, no. 7 (July 2013): 4–11.
7 SUBNETS: “SUBNETS Aims for Systems-Based Neurotechnology
and Understanding for the Treatment of Neuropsychological
Illnesses,” Department of Defense, press release, October 25, 2013.
8 chips wirelessly transmit: George Dvorsky, “Electroconvulsive
Therapy Can Erase Unwanted Memories,” iO9, December 23, 2013.
9 “incorporate near real-time”: “SUBNETS,” DARPA News, October
25, 2013.
10 “notes on a piano”: Emily Singer, “Playing Piano with a Robotic
Hand,” MIT Technology Review, July 25, 2007.
11 “The Intrinsic hand”: Jonathan Kuniholm, “Open Arms,” IEEE
Spectrum, March 1, 2009.
12 Dean Kamen: Kamen interview with Scott Pelley, CBS News, 60
Minutes, April 10, 2009.
13 yet to find a partner: Rhodi Lee, “FDA Approves DEKA Arm
System,” Tech Times, May 10, 2014.
14 “debt we owe”: “From Idea to Market in Eight Years: DARPA-Funded
DEKA Arm System Earns FDA Approval,” DARPA News, May 9,
2014.
15 “turn a valve”: Interview with Noel Sharkey, September 2014.
16 Even the cooks: Interview with LANL cooks, March 2014.
17 Kenyon and his team: Kenyon’s DARPA contract is administered
through the University of Michigan as part of the New Mexico
Consortium (NMC). Kenyon says, “The NMC is sort of an incubator
for LANL. It’s a place where scientists like myself can work with a
team of students and pursue risky ideas that would be hard to pull off
within the confines of LANL itself.”
18 simulating the primate visual system: Quotes are from interviews with
Garrett Kenyon, March–November 2014.
19 world’s record: “Science at the Petascale,” IBM Roadrunner
supercomputer, press release, October 27, 2009.
20 Tianhe-2: Lance Ulanoff, “China Has the Fastest Supercomputer in the
World—Again,” Mashable.com, June 23, 2014.
21 points inside: Kenyon noted that the computer room contains a number
of different machines.
22 “Regeneration is really coming alive”: Quotes are from interviews
with David Gardiner and Sue Bryant, June 2013–October 2014.
23 children born with mutations: Ngo Vinh Long, “Vietnamese
Perspectives,” in Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, ed. by Stanley
Kutler (New York: Scribner’s, 1996).
24 a human uterus: Stephanie Smith, “Creating Body Parts in a Lab;
 ‘Things Are Happening Now,’” CNN, April 10, 2014.
25 make body parts: “Ears, Noses Grown from Stem Cells in Lab
Dishes,” Associated Press, April 8, 2014.
26 laboratory-grown beef burgers: Maria Cheng, “First Reaction: Lab-
Made Burger Short on Flavor.” Phys.org, August 5, 2013.
27 “One can imagine”: S. Hawking et al., “Stephen Hawking:
‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—
But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?’” The Independent, May 1,
2014.
28 “these [autonomous] systems”: Interview with Steve Omohundro, May
2015; See also “Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human
Good,” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence,
November 21, 2014, 303–15.
29 “human-machine interaction failures”: Interview with Noel Sharkey,
September 2014.
Chapter Twenty-Six The Pentagon’s Brain

1 sharing his idea: Interview with Charles Townes, April 2014.

2 SIGMA group: Interview with Doug Beason, who is a member.
Beason, a physicist and the former chief scientist, U.S. Air Force
Space Command, is the author of fourteen science-fiction books, eight
with collaborator Kevin J. Anderson; Email correspondence with
Arlan Andrews.
3 “Those responsible”: Jenna Lang, “Sci-fi writers take US security back
to the future,” Guardian, June 5, 2009.
4 brain-computer interfaces: R. A. Miranda et al., “DARPA-Funded
Efforts in the Development of Novel Brain-Computer Interface
Technologies,” Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2014). The term
was coined by Jacques J. Vidal, in 1971.
5 DARPA’s stated goal: M. L. Cummings, “Views, Provocations:
Technology Impedances to Augmented Cognition,” Ergonomics in
Design (Spring 2010): 25.
6 “Human brain activity”: DARPA, Cognitive Technology Threat
Warning System (CT2WS) Solicitation no. BAA07-25, April 11,
2007.
7 DARPA scientists: R. A. Miranda et al., “DARPA-Funded Efforts in
the Development of Novel Brain-Computer Interface Technologies,”
Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2014).
8 “groundbreaking advances”: Ibid., 3, 5.
9 DARPA program managers: Ibid., 10-13. The four DARPA program
managers are William D. Casebeer, Justic C. Sanchez, Douglas J.
Weber, Geoffrey S. F. Ling.
10 augmenting cognition: Quotes are from Jason, MITRE Corporation,
“Human Performance,” 70, 72.
11 “The Jason scientists”: Quotes are from interview with Michael
Goldblatt, April 2014.
12 “For commanders”: Quotes are from Defense Science Board, “The
 Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” 2012, 2, 19, 46, 48. “Among the
key challenges moving forward,” according to the DSB, “is advancing
tests and evaluation capabilities to improve trust for increasing
autonomy in unmanned systems.”
13 “probability and consequences of failure”: Department of Defense
Directive no. 3000.09, November 21, 2012.
14 “the effect of narrative”: Miranda et al., 9.
15 “We would all benefit”: Interview with Paul Zak, October 2014.
16 “erase fear”: Bret Stetka, “Can Fear Be Erased?” Scientific American,
December 4, 2014.
17 DSB chairman Paul Kaminski: Information according to his White
House biography. Kaminski had a twenty-year career as an officer in
the Air Force. He served as director of Low Observable Technology
and was responsible for developing and fielding the Pentagon’s stealth
programs. Later, as under secretary of defense for acquisition and
technology, he had responsibility for an annual budget that exceeded
$100 billion. See also “Dr. Paul G. Kaminski, Former Under Secretary
of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, 2011 Ronald Reagan
Award Winner,” Missile Defense Agency, digital archive.
18 DSB members: Email correspondence with Major Eric D. Badger,
public affairs officer for the DSB Executive Director; Department of
Defense press release, January 5, 2010; DSB, Appendix D—Task
Force Membership, 109, Appendix E—Task Force Briefings, 110.
Also participating in the DSB report advising the Pentagon on the role
of autonomous weapons systems were briefers from the defense
corporations Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General
Dynamics, General Atomics, SAIC, and QinetiQ.
19 “chicken-and-egg”: Barber, VIII-76.
20 military-industrial complex: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Radio
and Television Address to the American People,” January 17, 1961,
UCSB.
21 “The battlefield is no place”: Cited in Van Atta et al., Transformation
and Transition, Volume 2, V-19.
 LIST OF INTERVIEWS AND WRITTEN CORRESPONDENCE

Dr. Ken Alibek: Virologist, former deputy director Biopreparat, USSR

Dr. Jorge Barraza: Social psychologist, Claremont Graduate University
Colonel Doug Beason, Ph.D. (retired): Physicist, former chief scientist U.S.
Air Force Space Command
Chris Berka: Co-founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc.
Major David Blair: Technologist, MQ-1B instructor pilot, AC-130 gunship
pilot
Dr. David A. Bray: Information technologist, chief information officer,
FCC; former information chief for Bioterrorism Preparedness and
Response, Centers for Disease Control
Rebecca Bronson: FBI records administrator
Dr. Susan V. Bryant: Regeneration biologist, former dean of the School of
Biological Sciences and vice chancellor for research, UC Irvine
Colonel Julian Chesnutt (retired): Former program officer, Defense
Clandestine Service, DIA
Colonel L. Neale Cosby (retired): Former SIMNET principal investigator,
DARPA
Bernard Crane: Lawyer, Washington, DC
Dr. Tanja Dominko: Biotechnoengineer, stem cell biologist, Worcester
Polytechnic Institute
Allen Macy Dulles: Student of history, Korean War veteran, son of Allen
Welsh Dulles
Dr. Jay W. Forrester: Computer pioneer, founder of system dynamics
Ralph “Jim” Freedman: Former nuclear weapons engineer, EG&G
Dr. David Gardiner: Regeneration biologist, professor of developmental and
cell biology, UC Irvine
Colonel John Gargus (retired): Former special operations officer, U.S. Air
Force
Lieutenant Colonel Peter A. Garretson: Transformational strategist, U.S.
Air Force
Dr. Marvin Goldberger: Former Manhattan Project physicist, founder and
chairman of the Jason scientists, science advisor to President Johnson
Dr. Michael Goldblatt: Former director, Defense Sciences Office, DARPA
Dr. Kay Godel-Gengenbach: Academic, daughter of William Godel
General Paul F. Gorman (retired): Former commander in chief, U.S.
Southern Command (US SOUTHCOM), special assistant to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff
Richard “Rip” Jacobs: Former engineer, VO-67 Navy squadron
Dr. Garrett T. Kenyon: Neurophysicist, Synthetic Cognition Group, Los
Alamos National Laboratory
Paul Kozemchak: Special assistant to director, DARPA
Edward Lovick Jr.: Physicist, former Lockheed Skunk Works stealth
technologist
Sherre Lovick: Engineer, former Lockheed Skunk Works stealth
technologist
Robert A. Lowell: Radiation scientist, satellite technologist
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Ph.D. (retired): Former squadron operations
officer, Battle of 73 Easting
Master Chief Petty Officer Craig Marsh (retired): Former master explosive
ordnance disposal technician, Combined Joint Counter-IED Task Force
Troy, Iraq
Montgomery McFate, J. D., Ph.D.: Cultural anthropologist, former senior
social scientist, Human Terrain System, U.S. Army
Cullen McInerney: Former military contractor, former U.S. Secret Service
Eugene McManus: Former technician at BMEWS J-Site, Thule, Greenland
Timothy Moynihan: Pastor, former soldier and operations officer, U.S.
Army
Dr. Walter Munk: Oceanographer, former Jason scientist
Captain C. N. “Lefty” Nordhill: Former aircraft commander, VO-67 Navy
 squadron
Alfred O’Donnell: Former nuclear weapons engineer, EG&G
Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Ph.D.: Neurologist, Harvard Medical School,
director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Non-invasive Brain
Stimulation
Dr. Robert Popp: Former deputy director, Information Awareness Office,
DARPA
Dr. Leonard Reiffel: Nuclear physicist
Robert E. Reynolds: Former air crewman, VO-67 Navy squadron
Michael E. Rich: Assistant U.S. attorney, Department of Justice
Jeremy Ridgley: Former soldier, Eighteenth Military Police Brigade, U.S.
Army
Rob Rubio: Business director, Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc.
Colonel Jack W. Rust: Commander, U.S. Navy, NRO
Dr. Charles Schwartz: Physicist, former Jason scientist
Dr. Noel Sharkey: Emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics
at the University of Sheffield, England, chairman of the International
Committee for Robot Arms Control
Brigadier General Andrew Smith (Australian Army, retired): Former
director, Combined Planning Group, Headquarters, U.S. CENTCOM
Colonel Edward Starbird (retired): Son of General Alfred Starbird
David J. Steffy: Former air crewman, VO-67 Navy Squadron
Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman (retired): U-2 pilot, CIA and U.S. Air
Force
Clifford Stoll: Astrophysicist
Robert Surrette: Former senior acquisition executive, CIA
Joan Dulles Talley: Jungian analyst, daughter of Allen Welsh Dulles
Lieutenant Colonel Troy E. Techau (retired): Former biometrics
technologist, Identity Dominance Operations, U.S. CENTCOM
Elizabeth Terris: Neuroeconomics researcher, Claremont Graduate
University
Kip S. Thorne: Theoretical physicist
Colonel Jack Thorpe, Ph.D. (retired): Creator and founder of SIMNET
Dr. Charles H. Townes: Inventor of the laser, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1964
Andrew Tudor: Nanofabrication and nanoscale researcher, physical
intelligence, UCLA
Dr. Richard H. Van Atta: Senior research analyst, IDA
Eric Van Slander: Archivist, National Archives
Jim Wagner: Former co-pilot, VO-67 Navy Squadron
Captain Barney Walsh (retired): Former co-pilot, VO-67 Navy squadron
Tom Wells: Former engineer, VO-67 Navy squadron
Dr. James M. Wilson: Virologist, former special assistant to the director for
weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Army Medical Research and
Materiel Command
Dr. Paul J. Zak: Scientist, neuroeconomist, Claremont Graduate University
Dr. Joseph J. Zasloff: Social scientist, former RAND analyst for the Viet
Cong Motivation and Morale Project
Dr. Alan Zelicoff: Epidemiologist, former senior scientist in the Center for
National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratories
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 About the Author

 
Annie Jacobsen is a journalist and the author of the New York Times best-
sellers Area 51 and Operation Paperclip. A graduate of Princeton
University, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.
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 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue

PART I
THE COLD WAR
Chapter One: The Evil Thing
Chapter Two: War Games and Computing Machines
Chapter Three: Vast Weapons Systems of the Future
Chapter Four: Emergency Plans
Chapter Five: Sixteen Hundred Seconds Until Doomsday
Chapter Six: Psychological Operations

PART II
THE VIETNAM WAR
Chapter Seven: Techniques and Gadgets
Chapter Eight: RAND and COIN
Chapter Nine: Command and Control
Chapter Ten: Motivation and Morale
Chapter Eleven: The Jasons Enter Vietnam
Chapter Twelve: The Electronic Fence
Chapter Thirteen: The End of Vietnam

PART III
OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR
Chapter Fourteen: Rise of the Machines
Chapter Fifteen: Star Wars and Tank Wars
Chapter Sixteen: The Gulf War and Operations Other Than War
Chapter Seventeen: Biological Weapons
Chapter Eighteen: Transforming Humans for War

PART IV
THE WAR ON TERROR
Chapter Nineteen: Terror Strikes
Chapter Twenty: Total Information Awareness
Chapter Twenty-One: IED War
Chapter Twenty-Two: Combat Zones That See
Chapter Twenty-Three: Human Terrain

PART V
FUTURE WAR
Chapter Twenty-Four: Drone Wars
Chapter Twenty-Five: Brain Wars
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Pentagon’s Brain

Photos
Acknowledgments
Also by Annie Jacobsen
Notes
List of Interviews and Written Correspondence
Bibliography
About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
 Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Anne M. Jacobsen

Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover art by Mclek/Shutterstock
Author photograph by Hilary Jones
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group

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ISBN 978-0-316-37165-0
E3