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 f
rom 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.