by Yasha Levine
33. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6.
34. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 304.
35. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6.
36. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-38.
37. Memo, William Godel, Director Policy and Planning Division, ARPA, for Assistant Secretary of Defense, September 15, 1960, quoted in Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support, 351–352.
38. President John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on the Defense Budget, March 28, 1961.
39. William Godel had access to the inner circle of the Kennedy administration. “Godel’s success is not surprising as his assessment of the problem in Southeast Asia closely corresponded to the views of the Kennedy leadership.” Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-39–V-40.
40. “Vietnam ‘Program of Action’ by Kennedy Task Force,” New York Times, July 1, 1971.
41. Eric Pace, “Edward Lansdale Dies at 79; Advisor on Guerrilla Warfare,” New York Times, February 24, 1987.
42. Weinberger, Imagineers of War, chap. 5.
43. Herman S. Wolk, USAF Plans and Policies: R&D for Southeast Asia, 1965–1967 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1969).
44. Project Agile’s budget—which started out at $11.3 million in 1962—grew as the war progressed. By 1964, it was $26 million, or one-tenth of ARPA’s total budget, according to the Richard J. Barber Associates report.
45. ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was more than just a technology research and development center. It took part in active counterinsurgency missions, including going out with the 4400th “Jungle Jim” Squadron, a covert special forces counterinsurgency division. Report on General Taylor’s Mission to South Vietnam (Washington, DC: National Security Council, November 3, 1961), 162.
46. Institute for Defense Analysis, DARPA Technical Accomplishments: An Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects, Vol. I (Washington, DC: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1990).
47. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, II-7.
48. Matt Novak, “How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America,” Gizmodo Paleofuture, September 24, 2015, http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-vietnam-war-brought-high-tech-border-surveillan-1694647526.
49. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
50. Bugging the Battlefield (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1969), motion picture, https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.4524913.
51. John T. Halliday, Flying through Midnight: A Pilot’s Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions over Laos during the Vietnam War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005).
52. Ibid., 17–18.
53. Edwards, Closed World, 4.
54. “These early uses of ground sensors were effective and within a year John Mitchell’s Justice Department was seeding a 65-mile experimental stretch of the border with Vietnam-tested acoustic sensors, buried strain-sensitive cables and infrared detection devices. In 1972, when the test section was fully operational, 128,889 illegal crossers were apprehended and authorities claimed more than 30,000 were netted as a result of the electronic fence. In the fall of 1973 the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service jointly announced plans to expand the fence along the whole 2,000-mile border with the exception of the most inaccessible areas and immediately pledged $1.5 million to start the job. Today electronic sensors are installed at the most active points along the border, but there is some question at the moment whether the whole border will be wired. This situation results largely from the success of the system (although costs have been a factor too). General Leonard F. Chapman Jr., head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, explained in a 1975 interview in Nation’s Business that the sensors work fine but that more than half the alarms go unanswered because the Border Patrol is spread too thin” (Paul Dickerson, The Electronic Battlefield [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976]). An excerpt of the book was read into the Congressional Record. (“Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, United States Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess. [June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975]).
55. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961, edited by Daniel J. Lawler and Erin R. Mahan (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 96, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1961-63v01/d96.
56. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency.
57. Proceedings of the Symposium “The U.S. Army’s Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research,” March 26–28, 1962, edited by William A. Lybrand (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, 1962).
58. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
59. The Richard J. Barber Associates report has a great discussion of Godel’s pioneering use of data and social science for counterinsurgency: “Despite its hardware and ‘hard science’ image, ARPA’s AGILE leadership—very much reflecting Godel’s sensitivity to the ‘people’ aspects of insurgent warfare—began to undertake studies in Thailand intended to focus on the village and rural atmosphere within which insurgent situations seemed to develop.… The MRDC effort, a relatively crude first cut exercise, involved sending a Thai-U.S. team composed of an economist, engineer, forester, anthropologist, and operations analyst to 40 villages in Northeast Thailand. Their report covered physical characteristics, locational and communications data, population and census information, officials and village leadership, villager skills and specialists, migration patterns, and villager responses to perceived ‘threats.’” Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-43–VI-44.
60. The RAND Corporation was originally created by the air force in 1946 as Project RAND “to perform a program of study and research on the broad subject of intercontinental warfare, other than surface, with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” US Army Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research symposium, Special Operations Research Office, American University, Washington, DC, June 1962.
61. In The Imagineers of War, Sharon Weinberger excavated the previously unrecognized fact that William Godel’s ARPA counterinsurgency work in Vietnam played a role in the Strategic Hamlet Initiative. “The Defense Department’s internal study of the war, known as the Pentagon Papers, would later claim Robert Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission, was the one who proposed and persuaded Diem in December 1961 to pursue strategic hamlets,” writes Weinberger. “But by the time Thompson showed up, Godel had already spent months laying the groundwork. Van, the Vietnamese government official who was Godel’s traveling companion on his trips in the summer of 1961, made clear who was responsible. ‘Only one man helped me and my team to instill the idea [of strategic hamlets] to our government,’ Van told American officials investigating Godel in 1964. ‘Mr. Godel, and his team’” (chap. 5).
62. Anders Sweetland, Rallying Potential among the North Vietnamese Armed Forces (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1970).
63. Although many of these ARPA studies had the appearance of scientific objectivity, those that produced results that fit preconceived notions or that provided rationales for existing military doctrine got wider play and attention; those that didn’t were buried or ignored.
64. Remote Area Conflict Research and Engineering Semi-annual Report (Washington, DC: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Project AGILE, July 1–December 31, 1963).
65. H. P. Phillips and D. A. Wilson, Certain Effects of Culture and Social Organization on Intern
al Security in Thailand (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 1964).
66. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2002), 60–61.
67. Banning Garrett, “The Dominoization of Thailand,” Ramparts, November 1970, http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1970nov-00007.
68. Ibid.
69. Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
70. Take Charles Murray, a young researcher who worked on ARPA’s counterinsurgency programs for the American Institutes for Research in Thailand (Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand [Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1998]). His experience among the rebellions of Thai peasants marked his thinking for life. He became convinced that the carrot was much less effective than the stick: social programs—things like building roads and health clinics and providing jobs—designed to “buy” hearts and minds simply didn’t work. But harsh, punitive measures did (Jason DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray,” New York Times, October 9, 1994). He would apply that logic in the United States to the difficult socioeconomic problems faced by black ghettoized communities. Reducing poverty and inner-city crime—these were not problems that could be solved through welfare and social programs. In fact, anything the government did to support and nudge people in the right direction didn’t work; they had the opposite effect: they only encouraged the very behavior they were aimed at curbing. So, Murray advised the opposite: harsher prison terms and punitive zero-tolerance measures to deter crime as well as abolishing all government social programs, including food stamps, welfare, and the Social Security pension system (“Prison Called Best Treatment for Juvenile Offenders,” Associated Press, November 1, 1979, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations /prison-best-treatment-for-juvenile-offenders-associated-press-1-november-1979.png; Charles A. Murray and Louis A. Cox Jr., Juvenile Corrections and the Chronic Delinquent [Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research, March 1979]). Today, Murray is a libertarian political scientist and one of the most influential ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. He is best known for The Bell Curve, a controversial best seller that promoted racial eugenics theories, claiming among other things that whites and Asians are genetically superior in intelligence to blacks and Latinos. But his most lasting achievement was giving intellectual backing to President Bill Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Signed into law in 1996, the bill killed traditional federal welfare in America in order to incentivize people to get a job. The law had a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for single mothers as a way to reduce poverty, the idea being that welfare incentivized them to have children, thereby perpetuating poverty. It was a cruel move and, like much of the research tested in Vietnam, was ineffective at achieving its stated goal. Instead of decreasing joblessness and alleviating poverty, these reforms plunged minority communities into even more suffering and impoverishment (Timothy Casey and Laurie Maldonado, Worst Off—Single Parent Families in the United States [New York: Legal Momentum, December 2012]).
71. Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counter-Terrorism, 1940–1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), chap. 8.
72. Douglas Valentine, “Dirty Wars and Self-indulgence,” Dissident Voice, June 7, 2013, http://web.archive.org/web/20170523152813/http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/06/dirty-wars-as-self-indulgence/.
73. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
74. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (New York: Verso Books, 1997). “He may have been involved to some extent with an organization which I think was called Air America. I’m not sure, but it was a CIA operation in Vietnam,” said former ARPA director Robert Sproull in a 2006 interview (http://web.archive.org/web/20170523134945/http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/DARPA/15-F-0751_DARPA_Director_Robert _Sproull.pdf).
75. T. Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
76. Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
77. Barbara Myers, “The Other Conspirator: The Secret Origins of the CIA’s Torture Program and the Forgotten Man Who Tried to Expose It,” TomDispatch, May 31, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176004/tomgram %253A_barbara_myers,_the_unknown_whistleblower/.
78. Anthony Russo, “Inside the RAND Corporation and Out: My Story” (photocopy), Ramparts, April 1972, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20 Materials/White%20Assassination%20Clippings%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Study%20Groups/Misc-SG-045.pdf.
79. Jerry Kline, “Never Talked to Wylie of Money, Godel Says” (photocopy), Washington Star, May 1, 1965, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations /jerry-klein-never-talked-to-wylie-of-money-godel-says-the-washington-star-1-may-1965.pdf; Peter S. Diggins, “Godel Tells of Taking $18,000 to Asia and Starting Anti-Guerrilla Center” (photocopy), Washington Post, May 15, 1965, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/peter-s.diggins-godel-tells-of-taking-18-000-to-asia-and-starting-anti-guerrilla-center-the-washington-post-15-may-1965.pdf.
80. Weinberger, Imagineers of War, chap. 8, “Shortly before 10: 00 p.m., the foreman sent a message to the judge…”
Chapter 2
1. President John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on the Defense Budget, March 28, 1961.
2. A huge problem with radio communication was the deafening engine noise of the aircraft, which made effective communication next to impossible. Lick worked on techniques to counter the noise. Robert M. Fano, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider: 1915–1990 (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1998).
3. M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001).
4. Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
5. An amazing Soviet documentary of the test was put together for the personal viewing of Joseph Stalin. It was declassified in the mid-1990s. “Опыт на полигоне № 2. Испытание РДС-1, 1949” (“Experiment on test site No. 2. Testing of RDS-1”) (documentary). Most of the information on the details of the nuclear test comes from a three-volume collection of declassified Soviet documents, Atomic Project of the USSR: Documents and Materials (Moscow: Fizmatlit, 1998–2009), http://elib.biblioatom.ru/sections/0201/.
6. “Lincoln Laboratory Origins,” Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, https://www.ll.mit.edu/about/History/origins.html.
7. Scott McCartney, ENIAC: The Triumph and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer (New York: Walker, 1999), 53.
8. Ibid., 54.
9. Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999).
10. “Robot Calculator Knocks Out Figures Like Chain Lightning,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1946.
11. Martin H. Weik, “The ENIAC Story,” Ordnance: The Journal of the Army Ordnance Association, January–February 1961; McCartney, ENIAC, 108.
12. Chief of Research and Development, Department of the Army, Human Factors Research and Development (paper presented at the Sixteenth Annual Army Human Factors Research and Development Conference, US Army Defense Center and Fort Bliss, TX, October 1970), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext /u2/880537.pdf.
13. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 30–32; Benj Edwards, “The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame),” The Atlantic, January 24, 2013.
14. In Your Defense (motion picture) (SAGE Programming Agency, US Air Force, 1950).
15. Family interviews and other
personal details about Norbert Wiener are informed by the great biography by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
16. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, chap. 1.
17. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1950).
18. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
19. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
20. For example, cybernetics theory formed the base of Noam Chomsky’s work. He rose to fame by redefining the study of linguistics, and helped spark the “cognitive revolution” by positing that human language was produced by what was essentially a specialized language computer module in the human brain—like a sound card plugged into a mother board. He theorized that language could be boiled down to logical expressions, which was the foundation of computer language. His linguistic work at MIT in the 1950s was funded by the army, navy, and air force in large part because the military wanted to develop computer technology that could process human language on the fly in order to analyze intelligence intercepts, to process press reports, and to understand human commands. Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016) and David Golumbia’s The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) explore this topic in great detail.
21. Edwards, The Closed World, 114. Historian Paul Edwards describes this as a closed world—“a dome of global technological oversight… within which every event was interpreted as part of a titanic struggle between the superpowers” (1). It was a world that broadened the concept of air defense to include all elements of life, a vast computerized system of surveillance and control built by the private sector and deployed and backed up by military power to protect the world from communism.