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.