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 w
eapons” 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.