by Yasha Levine
A 1970 investigation for Ramparts magazine detailed the effects of these brutal concentration camp–style counterinsurgency methods on a rebellious minority Thai hill tribe known as the Meo. “Conditions in the Meo resettlement villages are harsh, strongly reminiscent of the American Indian reservations of the 19th century. The people lack sufficient rice and water, and corrupt local agents pocket the funds appropriated for the Meo in Bangkok.” The magazine quoted an eye witness report: “Physical hardship and psychological strain have taken a heavy toll on these people. They are gaunt and sickly; many are in a permanent state of semi-withdrawal stimulated by the shortage of opium to feed lifelong habits. Yet the decay of the Meos’ spirit is even more distressing than the deterioration of their bodies. They have lost all semblance of inner strength and independence: they seem to have withered, while assuming the manner of the humbled.”67
An even more disturbing dimension of the AIR’s pacification work in Thailand was that it was supposed to serve as a model for counterinsurgency operations elsewhere in the world—including against black people living in American inner cities, where race riots were breaking out at the time. “The potential applicability of the findings in the United States will also receive special attention. In many of our key domestic programs, especially those directed at disadvantaged sub-cultures, the methodological problems are similar to those described in this proposal,” reads the project’s proposal. “The application of the Thai findings at home constitutes a potentially most significant project contribution.”68
That’s exactly what happened. After the war, researchers, including a young Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve), who had worked on counterinsurgency programs for ARPA in Southeast Asia, returned to the United States and began to apply the pacification ideas they developed in the jungles to the thorny domestic issues of class, race, and economic inequality.69 The effects were just as disastrous at home as they were overseas, giving a modern scientific veneer to public policies that reinforced racism and structural poverty.70
As the AIR proposal had not so subtly hinted, ARPA’s behavioral science programs in Southeast Asia went hand in hand with a bloodier and more traditional counterinsurgency policy: covert programs of murder, terror, and torture that collectively came to be known as the Phoenix Program.
One of the guiding lights of this dark side of counterinsurgency was Edward Lansdale, a former Levi Strauss and Company executive who learned the trade fighting the communist insurgency in the Philippines after World War II.71 Lansdale’s hallmark psychological warfare strategy was using local myths and beliefs to induce primal terror and fear in his targets. A celebrated trick was exploitation of a Filipino belief in the existence of vampires to scare communist guerrillas. “One of Lansdale’s counter-terror psy-war tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood,” explained Douglas Valentine, a journalist who exposed the Phoenix Program. “The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.”72 Lansdale, who would become Godel’s boss, replicated the Philippine strategy in Vietnam: assassinations, death squads, torture, and the obliteration of entire villages.73 It was all meant to “deincentivize” peasants from helping the North Vietnamese rebels. Somewhere between forty thousand and eighty thousand Vietnamese were killed in the Phoenix Program’s targeted assassinations; the CIA estimates the number closer to twenty thousand.
By the late 1960s, the Vietnam War had turned into a meat grinder. In 1967, 11,363 American soldiers lost their lives. A year later, that number climbed to almost 17,000. By 1970, American soldiers no longer wanted to fight. There was chaos on the battlefield and insubordination back at base. There were hundreds of cases of “fragging,” superior officers killed by their own soldiers. Drug use was rampant. Soldiers were wasted—drunk, high on grass and opium. ARPA’s Project Agile was not immune to the transformation but connected to it. Indeed, according to a former head of ARPA, William Godel was personally involved with “Air America” missions to supply the CIA’s covert war in Laos, an operation that, according to credible reports, involved smuggling heroin to finance anticommunist militias.74
As Saigon turned into a military camp full of booze, heroin, prostitution, and cheap thrills, ARPA’s research center became a bizarre nexus of stuffy anthropologists, spies, generals, South Vietnamese officials, and sociopathic commandos passing on their way to terror missions deep inside enemy-controlled territory. An old French colonial villa in the city that housed RAND scientists became a social hub for this weird scene, by day a working command center, by night a dinner-and-cocktail-party venue.75
A strange pseudoscience emerged. Blending free-market economics and rational choice theory, military planners and scientists viewed the Vietnamese as automatons, nothing more than rational individuals who were acting purely in their own self-interest. They had no bigger guiding values or ideals—no patriotism, no loyalty to their communities or traditions or to some bigger political idea. They were interested in nothing other than maximizing positive outcomes for themselves. The trick would be to peel the Vietnamese away from the insurgency through a mix of marketing, consumer-style incentives, and a bit of tough love when nothing else worked. Cash handouts, jobs, small infrastructure improvements, land privatization schemes, anticommunist propaganda, crop destruction, mutilations, murder, assassinations—all these were legitimate variables to throw into the coercion equation.76
Some began to doubt America’s mission in Vietnam and questioned the purpose of ARPA’s scientific approach to counterinsurgency. Anthony Russo, a RAND contractor who worked on ARPA projects and who would later help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers, discovered that when results of ARPA studies contradicted military wishes, his bosses simply suppressed and discarded them.77
“The more I grew to admire Asian culture—especially Vietnamese,” Russo wrote in 1972, “the more I was outraged at the Orwellian horror of the U.S. military machine grinding through Vietnam and destroying everything in its path. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls were turned into prostitutes; streets that had been lined with beautiful trees were denuded to make room for the big military trucks. I was fed up with the horror and disgusted by the petulance and pettiness with which the RAND Corporation conducted its business.”78
He believed that ARPA’s entire Project Agile apparatus was a giant racket used by military planners to give scientific cover to whichever existing war policies they were intent on pursuing. This wasn’t cutting-edge military science, but a boondoggle and a fraud. The only people benefiting from Project Agile were the private military contracting firms hired to do the work.
Even William Godel, the counterinsurgency star who started the program, got caught up in a petty embezzlement scheme that involved the misappropriation of part of the $18,000 in cash that he had carried to Saigon in 1961 to set up Project Agile.79 It was a bizarre case that involved an almost insignificant sum of money. Some of his colleagues hinted that it was politically motivated, but it didn’t matter. Godel was ultimately convicted of conspiracy to commit embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison.80
Other ARPA contractors had reservations about their work in Vietnam as well, but the mission rolled on. Fraudulent or not, Project Agile turned Southeast Asia, from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam, into a giant laboratory. Every tribe, every jungle path, every captured guerrilla was to be studied and analyzed and monitored and understood. While assassination teams terrorized the rural population of Vietnam, ARPA scientists were there to log and measure program effectiveness. Incentive programs were designed and then monitored, analyzed, tweaked, and monitored again. ARPA didn’t just bug the battlefield; it tried to bug entire societies.
Interviews, polls, population counts, detailed anthropological studies of various tribes, maps, available weapons, migration studies, social networks, agricultural practices, dossiers—all this informat
ion poured out of ARPA’s centers in Vietnam and Thailand. But there was a problem. The agency was drowning in data: typewritten paper reports, punch cards, giant tape reels, index cards, and tons of crude computer printouts. There was so much information coming in that it was effectively useless. What good was all this intel if no one could find what they needed? Something had to be done.
Chapter 2
Command, Control, and Counterinsurgency
What separates military intelligence in the United States from its counter-parts in totalitarian states is not its capabilities, but its intentions. This is a significant distinction, but one which may not wholly reassure many Americans.
—Christopher Pyle, “Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis,” 1973
Early Monday morning, October 1, 1962, a man named J. C. R. Licklider woke up in an apartment along the Potomac River across from the White House. He ate breakfast, said goodbye to his wife and daughters, and drove the short way to the Pentagon to start his new job as director of ARPA’s Behavioral Science and Command and Control Research divisions.
Settling into his modest office, he surveyed the scene. For the past few years, those in defense circles had pushed to upgrade America’s military and intelligence communication systems. As soon as he came into office, President Kennedy had complained about the difficulty of effectively exercising command of US military forces. He found himself blind and deaf at the most crucial moments, unable to get real-time intelligence updates or to communicate timely commands to commanders in the field. Believing that military commanders were using the outdated technology as cover to buck his authority and ignore instructions, he pushed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to investigate solutions. He also harangued Congress about the need to develop “a truly unified, nationwide, indestructible system to insure high-level command, communication and control.”1
Licklider agreed. America’s defense communication systems were indeed pathetically outdated. They simply could not effectively respond to the challenges of the day: dozens of small-scale wars and insurgencies happening in distant places no one knew a damn thing about. All that combined with the ever-present threat of nuclear strikes that could decapitate huge chunks of military command. But what exactly would such a new system look like? What components would it have? What new technologies needed to be invented for it to work? Few people in the Pentagon knew the answers. Licklider was one of the few.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider—a ridiculously long name—was simply called “Lick.” He wore Coke-bottle glasses and three-piece suits and was known for his Coca-Cola addiction. In rarified military circles, Lick had a reputation as a brilliant psychologist and a computer futurist with some far-out ideas about the coming age of the man-machine.
He was born in 1915 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, a Baptist minister and the head of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, was a God-fearing, business-oriented man. Lick made his dad proud. In 1937, he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a triple major in psychology, mathematics, and physics and then moved on to study how animals processed sound, which mostly involved slicing cats’ skulls open and zapping their brains with electricity.2 During World War II, Lick was recruited to work at Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, which was established with lavish funding from the US Air Force to study human speech, hearing, and communication.3 At this lab he met his future wife, Louise Thomas, who worked as a secretary in a military research center. She considered herself a socialist and even brought her copy of Socialist Worker to the office. She’d leave it on the edge of her desk so that the men in the lab could grab it on the way to the bathroom and have something to read while they were on the can.
After the war, Lick left Harvard for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he came into contact with the world’s first networked digital computer surveillance system. It changed the trajectory of his life.
Soviet Nukes
At precisely 7:00 a.m. on August 29, 1949, engineers sitting in a fortified bunker on the isolated steppes of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic threw a switch and detonated the first Soviet nuclear bomb: First Lightning, codename RDS-1.4 The bomb was set up on a wooden tower surrounded by mock buildings and industrial and military machinery trucked there to test the effects of the blast: a T-34 tank, brick buildings, a metal bridge, a small section of a railroad complete with railroad cars, automobiles, trucks, field artillery, an airplane, and over a thousand different live animals—dogs, rats, pigs, sheep, guinea pigs, and rabbits—tied down in trenches, behind walls, and inside vehicles.
It was a fairly small bomb, around the size of the one dropped on Nagasaki. In fact, it was almost a one-to-one replica of Fat Man, as that bomb was known. Before and after photos of the site show heavy damage. Many of the animals died instantly. Those that didn’t were badly burned and died of radiation exposure. Lavrentiy Beria, the notorious NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, a Soviet secret police organization) chief, was there to observe. He cabled Stalin: the test was a success.5
News of the explosion threw America’s military establishment into a panicked frenzy. US nuclear dominance was no more. The Soviet Union now had the capability to launch a nuclear strike against the United States; all it needed was a long-range bomber. This posed a serious problem.
America’s early warning radar system was sparse and full of holes. The process of tracking airplanes was done by hand: uniformed military men sitting in dark rooms filled with cigarette smoke, watching primitive green radar screens, barking out coordinates and jotting them down on glass boards, and then radioing commands to pilots. The system would be useless in the face of a large, targeted nuclear attack by air.
A report of a special body convened by the US Air Force recommended that the early warning radar system be automated: radar information should be digitized, sent over wires, and processed in real time by computers.6 In 1950, this recommendation was more than just ambitious—it was a crackpot idea. MIT professor George Valley, who headed the air force study, asked several computer companies if they would be able to build such a real-time computer system. He was laughed out of the room. The technology for real-time data processing, especially from multiple radar installations that were hundreds of miles away from the central computer, just did not exist. Nothing even came close.
If the air force wanted an automated radar system, it would have to invent a computer powerful enough to handle the job. Luckily, the Pentagon was already a prime mover and shaker in this field.
During World War II, the US military played a leading role in advancing the primitive state of digital computer technology. The reasons for this were many, and all of them central to the war effort. One was cryptography. The navy’s intelligence division, as well as several other predecessor agencies to the National Security Agency, had long used specialized IBM punch card tabulators to perform cryptographic analysis and code breaking. During the war, they were faced with advanced Nazi encryption techniques and needed machines that could work faster and with much more complicated code. Digital computers were the only thing that could get the job done.
Other services were also desperate for machines that could carry out mathematical calculations at high speeds, but for a slightly different reason. During the war, powerful new cannons and field artillery rolled off production lines and headed out to the European and Pacific theaters. All this firepower was useless if it couldn’t be properly aimed. Artillery, big guns that can hit targets a dozen miles away, don’t shoot in a straight trajectory but lob shells at a slight angle so that they descend on far-off targets after tracing a parabolic arc. Each gun has a firing table that specifies the angle at which to fire so shells hit their mark. Firing tables aren’t simple, one-page sheets but thick booklets with hundreds of variables in the equations. The 155-millimeter “Long Tom” field cannon, one of the most popular big guns used during World War II, incorporates five hundred variables in its firing table.7 Air temperature, gunpowder te
mperature, elevation, humidity, wind speed and direction, and even soil type—all are important environmental factors required in the complex calculations.
Not surprisingly, these charts were treacherous to calculate. All the variables in hundreds of permutations had to be plugged in and worked out by hand. Mistakes regularly crept in and calculations restarted from scratch. Just one firing table for one type of gun could take more than a month to complete. And there were surprises: the army discovered that tables calculated to work in Europe didn’t work in Africa because the soil variables were different; though the guns were delivered, they were little more than dead weight until the firing data could be recalculated from scratch.8 Squads of clerks—usually women—worked around the clock using pen, paper, and mechanical adding aids to crunch the numbers. These women were called “computers” before digital computers existed, and they were incredibly important to the war effort.9 Firing tables were of such vital significance that both the navy and the army funded separate efforts to build automated calculators—all in the service of aiming giant killing machines—and helped develop the first digital computers in the process. Most notable among them was the ENIAC, built for the army by a team of mathematicians and engineers at University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The computer was an instant sensation.
“Robot Calculator Knocks Out Figures Like Chain Lightning” declared a newspaper headline in 1948 in an article reporting the unveiling of the ENIAC: