by Yasha Levine
Back in the States, he sketched out what this new warfare would look like.
Counterinsurgency theory wasn’t particularly new. Earlier in the twentieth century, the United States had conducted brutal counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines and South America. And the CIA was in the midst of running a brutal covert counterinsurgency campaign in North Vietnam and Laos—headed by Godel’s future boss, Air Force Col. Edward Lansdale—that included targeted raids, death squads, propaganda, and torture.32 What made Godel’s counterinsurgency vision different was its laser beam focus on the use of technology to bolster effectiveness. Sure, counterinsurgency involved terror and intimidation. It involved coercion and propaganda. But what was equally important was training and equipping fighters—no matter if they were US special operations teams or local forces—with the most cutting-edge military tech available: better weapons, better uniforms, better transportation, better intelligence, and a better understanding of what made the locals tick. “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,” writes Jacobsen.33
Godel proselytized this new vision back in the United States, lecturing and speaking about his counterinsurgency theories at military institutions around the country. In the meantime, the newly created ARPA tapped him to run its vaguely named Office of Foreign Developments, from which he would manage the agency’s covert operations. The job was murky, highly secretive, and extremely fluid. Godel would oversee the agency’s highly classified missile and satellite projects one moment, then hatch plans to nuke an area on behalf of the National Security Agency the next. One such plan involved ARPA detonating a nuclear bomb on a small island in the Indian Ocean. The idea was to create a perfectly parabolic crater that could fit a giant antenna the NSA wanted to build to catch faint Soviet radio signals that had scattered into space and bounced back off the moon. “ARPA guaranteed a minimum residual radioactivity and the proper shape of the crater in which the antenna subsequently would be placed,” an NSA official said. “We never pursued this possibility. The nuclear moratorium between the US and the USSR was signed somewhat later and this disappeared.”34
When Godel was not devising plans to blast small tropical islands, he was pursuing his main passion: high-tech counterinsurgency. As Jacobsen recounts in Pentagon’s Brain: “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.”35
Meanwhile, in his work for ARPA he traveled to Southeast Asia to assess the growing Viet Minh insurgency and booked a trip to Australia to talk counterinsurgency and scope out a potential polar satellite launch site.36 All through this time he pushed his main line: the United States needed to establish a counterinsurgency agency to take on the communist threat. In a series of memos to the assistant secretary of defense, Godel argued, “Conventionally trained, conventionally organized and conventionally equipped military organizations are incapable of employment in anti-guerrilla operations.” Despite the overwhelming size superiority of the South Vietnamese army, it had not been able to put down a much smaller armed insurrection, he pointed out. He pushed for letting ARPA set up a counterinsurgency research center in the field—first to scientifically study and understand the needs of local anti-insurgency forces and then to use the findings to set up local paramilitaries. “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,” he wrote.37
Godel’s vision clashed with the dominant US Army thinking at the time, and his proposals did not generate much enthusiasm with President Eisenhower’s people. But they were on their way out, anyway, and he found an eager audience in the incoming administration.
Bugging the Battlefield
John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 1961. Young and dashing, the former Massachusetts senator was progressive on domestic politics and a committed Cold War hawk on foreign policy. His election ushered in a crop of young elite technocrats who truly believed in the power of science and technology to solve the world’s problems. And there were a lot of problems to be solved. It wasn’t just the Soviet Union. Kennedy faced regional insurgencies against American-allied governments all around the world: Cuba, Algiers, Vietnam and Laos, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Lebanon. Many of these conflicts came out of local movements, recruited local fighters, and were supported by local populations. Countering them was not something that a traditional big military operation or a tactical nuclear strike could solve.
Two months after taking office, President Kennedy delivered a message to Congress arguing for the need to expand and modernize America’s military posture to meet this new threat. “The Free World’s security can be endangered not only by a nuclear attack, but also by being slowly nibbled away at the periphery, regardless of our strategic power, by forces of subversion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or non-overt aggression, internal revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerrilla warfare or a series of limited wars,” he said, forcefully arguing for new methods of dealing with insurgencies and local rebellion. “We need a greater ability to deal with guerrilla forces, insurrections, and subversion. Much of our effort to create guerrilla and anti-guerrilla capabilities has in the past been aimed at general war. We must be ready now to deal with any size of force, including small externally supported bands of men; and we must help train local forces to be equally effective.”38
The president wanted a better way of countering communism—and ARPA seemed the perfect vehicle for carrying out his vision.
Shortly after the speech, advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department drew up a plan of action for a huge program of covert military, economic, and psychological warfare initiatives to deal with what Kennedy saw as the biggest problem: the growing insurrection in Vietnam and Laos. The plan included William Godel’s personal obsession: Project Agile, a high-tech counterinsurgency research and development program.39 At a National Security Council meeting on April 29, 1961, President Kennedy signed his name to it: “Assist the G.V.N. [Government of Vietnam] to establish a Combat Development and Test Center in South Vietnam to develop, with the help of modern technology, new techniques for use against the Viet Cong forces.”40
With those few short lines, ARPA’s Project Agile was born. Agile was embedded in a much larger military and diplomatic program initiated by President Kennedy and aimed at shoring up the government of South Vietnam against a growing rebel offensive. The program would very quickly escalate into a full-blown and, ultimately, disastrous military campaign. But for ARPA, it was a new lease on life. It made the agency relevant again and put it at the center of the action.
Godel operated Agile with a free hand and reported to Edward Lansdale, a retired air force officer who ran the CIA’s covert counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.41 Because of a need for secrecy—the United States was not officially involved militarily in Vietnam—a thick fog hung over the project. “Reporting directly to Lansdale, he conducted work so secret that even the heads of ARPA, let alone the rank and file employees, were unaware of specifics,” writes Sharon Weinberger in The Imagineers of War, her history of ARPA.42
The initial focus of activity was ARPA’s top-secret Combat Development and Test Center, the cluster of buildings on the bank of the Saigon River that Godel helped set up in the summer of 1961. The program started with a single location and a relatively straightforward mission: to develop weapons and adapt counterinsurgency battlefield gadgets for use in the dense and sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia.43 But as US military presence i
ncreased in Vietnam and finally morphed into a full-on, grinding war, the project grew in scope and ambition.44 It opened several other large research and development complexes in Thailand as well as smaller outposts in Lebanon and Panama. The agency did not just develop and test weapons technology but also formulated strategy, trained indigenous forces, and took part in counterinsurgency raids and psychological operations missions.45 More and more, it took on a role that would have felt right at home in the CIA. It also went global, aiming its sights on quelling insurgencies and left-wing or socialist political movements wherever they were—including back home in the United States.
The agency tested light combat arms for the South Vietnamese military, which led to the adoption of the AR-15 and M-16 as standard-issue rifles. It helped develop a light surveillance aircraft that glided silently above the jungle canopy. It formulated field rations and food suited to the hot, wet climate. It bankrolled the creation of sophisticated electronic surveillance systems and funded elaborate efforts to collect all manner of conflict-related intelligence. It worked on improving military communication technology to make it function in dense forest. It developed portable radar installations that could be floated up on a balloon, a technology that was quickly deployed commercially back in the United States to monitor the borders for illegal crossings.46 It also designed vehicles that could better traverse the boggy landscape, a prototype “mechanical elephant” similar to the four-legged robots that DARPA and Google developed a half-century later.47
ARPA frequently pushed way past the boundaries of what was considered technologically possible and pioneered electronic surveillance systems that were decades ahead of their time. It played a big role in some of the most ambitious initiatives. That included Project Igloo White, a multi-billion-dollar computerized surveillance barrier.48 Operated out of a secret air force base in Thailand, Igloo White involved depositing thousands of radio-controlled seismic sensors, microphones, and heat and urine detectors in the jungle. These eavesdropping devices, shaped like sticks or plants and usually dropped from airplanes, transmitted signals to a centralized computer control center to alert technicians of any movement in the bush.49 If anything moved, an air strike was called in and the area was blanketed with bombs and napalm. Igloo White was like a giant wireless alarm system that spanned hundreds of miles of jungle. As the US Air Force explained: “We are, in effect, bugging the battlefield.”50
John T. Halliday, a retired air force pilot, described the Igloo White operation center in Thailand in his memoir. “Remember those huge electronic boards from the movie Dr. Strangelove that showed Russian bombers headed for the U.S. and ours headed at them?” he wrote. “Well, Task Force Alpha is a lot like that except with real-time displays in full color, three stories tall—it’s the whole goddamned Ho Chi Minh Trail in full, living color.”51
Halliday was part of a team that flew nighttime bombing raids over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, targeting supply convoys on the basis of intel provided by this electronic fence. He and his unit were amazed by the futuristic nature of it all:
Step out of the jungle and inside the building, you step back into America—but an America fifteen years from now… maybe 1984. It’s beautiful… gleaming tile floors… glass walls everywhere. They have a full cafeteria where you can get anything you want. They even have real milk, not that powdered crap we get at the mess hall. And air-conditioning? The whole damned place is air-conditioned. There’s even a bowling alley and a movie theater. I and a whole bunch of civilians who look like IBM guys running around in three-piece suits all wearing glasses… it’s “Geek Central.” We never see them over on our part of the base, so I guess they have everything they need in there.
Then there’s this main control room that looks like the one we saw on TV during the Apollo moon shots, or maybe something out of a James Bond movie. There’s computer terminals everywhere. But the main feature is this huge, three-story-tall Lucite… or maybe it’s plastic, I don’t know… full-color depiction of the whole Ho Chi Minh Trail with a real-time depiction of trucks coming down the trail. It’s wild, man.52
Igloo White ran for five years with a total cost of somewhere near $5 billion—roughly $30 billion today. Though widely praised at the time, the project was ultimately judged an operational failure. “The guerrillas had simply learned to confuse the American sensors with tape-recorded truck noises, bags of urine, and other decoys, provoking the release of countless tons of bombs onto empty jungle corridors which they then traversed at their leisure,” according to historian Paul N. Edwards.53 Despite the failure, Igloo White’s “electronic fence” technology was deployed a few years later along America’s border with Mexico.54
Project Agile was a huge hit with the South Vietnamese government. President Diem made several visits to the ARPA research center in Saigon and personally met with Godel and the rest of the ARPA team there.55 The president had one main condition: American involvement must remain secret. Godel was of the same mind. Back home, to justify the need for a new counterinsurgency approach, he frequently trotted out what President Diem told him: “The one way we lose is if the Americans come in here.”
Know Your Enemy
To William Godel, high-tech counterinsurgency was about more than just developing modern killing methods. It was also about surveilling, studying, and understanding the people and cultures where the insurrection was taking place. It was all part of his vision for the future of warfare: to use American advanced science to defeat the superior discipline, motivation, and support of local insurgents. The idea was to understand what made them resist and fight, and what it would take to change their minds.56 The ultimate aim was to find a way to predict local insurgencies and stop them before they had time to mature. The problem in Southeast Asia was that Americans were operating in environments and cultures they did not understand. So how to ensure the military was making the right decisions?
In the early 1960s, defense and foreign policy circles were awash in seminars, meetings, reports, and courses trying to establish proper counterinsurgency policy and doctrine. At one influential multiagency seminar organized by the US Army and attended by Godel’s ARPA colleagues, a military researcher described the difficulty of fighting counterinsurgencies in a very direct manner: “The problem is… that we must operate in a strange cultural environment and influence persons with different cultural values, customs, mores, beliefs, and attitudes.” He concluded with a stark statement: “The same bullet will kill with just about the same effectiveness whether used against a target in the United States, Africa, or Asia. However, the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency weapon is dependent upon the specific target.”57
The Pentagon started throwing money at social and behavioral scientists, hiring them to make sure America’s “counterinsurgency weapon” always hit its target, regardless of the culture in which it was being fired. Under William Godel, ARPA became one of the main pipelines for these programs, helping to weaponize anthropology, psychology, and sociology and putting them in the service of American counterinsurgency. ARPA doled out millions to studies of Vietnamese peasants, captured North Vietnamese fighters, and rebellious hill tribes of northern Thailand. Swarms of ARPA contractors—anthropologists, political scientists, linguists, and sociologists—passed through poor villages, putting people under a microscope, measuring, gathering data, interviewing, studying, assessing, and reporting.58 The idea was to understand the enemy, to know their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks, and their relationships to power.59
The RAND Corporation, under an ARPA contract, did most of this work. Based out of a building overlooking the wide, tan beaches of Santa Monica, RAND was a powerful military and intelligence contractor that had been created by the US Air Force several decades earlier as a private-public research agency.60 In the 1950s, RAND was central to formulating America’s belligerent nuclear policy. In the 1960s, it added a big counterinsurgency division and became a de facto privatized extension of ARPA’s Project Ag
ile. ARPA placed the orders; RAND hired the people and got the job done.
In one major effort, RAND scientists studied the effectiveness of the Strategic Hamlet initiative, a pacification effort that had been developed and pushed by Godel and Project Agile and that involved the forced resettlement of South Vietnamese peasants from their traditional villages into new areas that were walled off and made “safe” from rebel infiltration.61 In another study commissioned by ARPA, RAND contractors were tasked with answering questions that nagged the Americans: Why were North Vietnamese fighters not defecting to our side? What was it about their cause? Weren’t the communists supposed to be brutal to their own people? Don’t they want to live like we do in America? Why was their morale so high? And what could be done to undermine their confidence?62 They conducted twenty-four hundred interviews of North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors and generated tens of thousands of pages of intelligence in pursuit of this goal.63
At the same time, ARPA funded multiple projects aimed at studying local populations to pinpoint the social and cultural factors that could be used to predict why and when tribes would go insurgent. One initiative, contracted with RAND, sent a team of political scientists and anthropologists from UCLA and UC Berkeley to Thailand to map out “the religious systems, value systems, group dynamics, civil-military relationships” of Thai hill tribes, focusing in particular on predictive behavior.64 “The objective of this task is to determine the most likely sources of social conflict in Northeast Thailand, concentrating on those local problems and attitudes which could be exploited by the Communists,” reads the report.65 Another study in Thailand, carried out for ARPA by the CIA-connected American Institutes for Research (AIR), aimed at gauging the effectiveness of applied counterinsurgency techniques against rebellious hill tribes—practices such as assassinating tribal leaders, forcibly relocating villages, and using artificially induced famine to pacify rebellious populations.66