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 t
o 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.
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