The Internet and the agency’s Vietnam War work were proposed solutions to critical problems: one was a world-changing success, and the other a catastrophic failure. That muddied history of Vietnam and counterinsurgency might not fit well with DARPA’s creation story, but it is the key to understanding its legacy. It is also the history that is often the most challenging to get many former agency officials to address. DARPA may brag about its willingness to fail, but that does not mean that it is eager to have those failures examined.
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DARPA is now more than fifty-five years old, and much of its history has never been recorded in any systematic way. One effort was made, in 1973, when DARPA approached its fifteenth anniversary. Stephen Lukasik, then the director, commissioned an independent history of the agency to better understand its origins and purpose. The final document was regarded as so sensitive that the authors were only authorized to make six copies, all of which had to be handed over to the government. Although it was supposed to be an unclassified history, the new director was aghast at what he felt was an overly personal account; he stamped the final product as classified and locked it away. It took more than a decade for it to be released.
Agencies, like people, make sense of themselves through stories. And like people, they are selective about the facts that go into their stories, and as time passes, the stories are increasingly suspect and often apocryphal. No other research organization has a history as rich, complex, important, and at times strange as DARPA. Whether it was a mechanical elephant to trudge through the jungles of Vietnam or a jet pack for Special Forces, DARPA’s projects have been ambitious, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Some of these fanciful ideas, like the concept of an invisible aircraft named after a fictional, eight-foot-tall rabbit, actually succeeded, but many more failed.
At some point, the successes, and the failures, began to get smaller, because the problems assigned to the agency grew narrower. The key to DARPA’s success in the past was not just its flexibility but also its focus on solving high-level national security problems. DARPA today runs the risk of irrelevancy, creating marvelous innovations that have, unlike previous years, little impact on either the way the military fights or the way we live our lives. The price of success is failure, and the price of an important success is a significant failure, and the consequences of both should be weighed in assessing any institution’s legacy. Conversely, if the stakes are not high, then neither the successes nor the failures matter, and that is where the agency is in danger of heading today, investing in technological novelties that are unlikely to have a significant impact on national security.
Current DARPA officials may disagree with this pessimistic assessment of the agency’s current role or argue about which failures, and successes, should be highlighted. Yet the research for this book is based on thousands of pages of documents, many recently declassified, held in archives around the country, and hundreds of hours of interviews with former DARPA officials. Most past directors share a very similar sentiment: DARPA continues to produce good solutions to problems, but the problems it is assigned, or assigns itself, are no longer critical to national security. To understand why this narrowing of scope happened, it is important to examine the real history of DARPA. The agency’s origins may begin with the space race, but DARPA’s legacy lies elsewhere.
Godel and his trip to Vietnam were seminal to the agency’s history—both its high and its low points. That trip helped create the modern agency and its greatest and worst legacies. Yet Godel’s story is one that DARPA officials today do not talk about, or even know about. It is a story buried in long-forgotten court records and has been nearly written out of the agency’s history, because it no longer fits the narrative of DARPA as an agency dedicated to technological surprise. Yet it is a story that illustrates the true tensions within DARPA, an agency that enlists science—and scientists—in the service of national security.
PART I
AN AGENCY FOR UNIMAGINED WEAPONS
CHAPTER 1
Scientia Potentia Est
Michiaki Ikeda was a chubby-faced six-year-old when the nuclear age smacked him in the face with a blinding flash of light. Just as he was stepping out of an elevator at Nagasaki Medical University’s hospital, a nuclear weapon code-named Fat Man detonated seven hundred meters away from him. The bomb had the explosive equivalent in force of more than twenty kilotons of TNT and flattened almost everything within a kilometer radius. The concrete hospital building was mostly left standing, but the majority of the people inside were killed. The steel elevator shaft likely saved his life.
When he came to, it was pitch-dark, and the first sensation he recalled was the sound of something burning. Then the smell of smoke reached his nostrils, bringing him to his feet. As he stumbled out into what had been the hospital’s corridor, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he realized he was standing on dirt. The wood floors had been blown away. In the corner, he saw a nurse on the ground surrounded by shattered glass, and her face covered in blood. To Michiaki, it was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood over her head. Yet her eyes were open, and she was staring at him.
“Call the ambulance service,” she ordered, her expression a mix of shock and rage.
He looked around, but all he could see were shards of glass and wood panels blown from the ground. He crawled out a window frame and stepped down into what had been, just a little while before, a tranquil garden with water. Now, as he looked up, he could see some trees were toppled and the ones that still stood were in flames. When his eyes moved from the burning treetops down to the ground, the scene was pure horror. The hospital’s garden was strewn with corpses with hair burned into frizzy clumps. Some had eyeballs hanging down on their cheeks, and faces with their lips and flesh burned away, leaving the teeth and jaw exposed. There were some bodies with stomachs bloated to twice their normal size, and others with internal organs spilling out.
He fled the burning hospital grounds and instinctively started walking toward the city, thinking he would find help. Instead, he found more horror. The main boulevards of Nagasaki were cluttered with debris of blown-out buildings. The living were walking, their arms dripping with scorched flesh outstretched in front of them to avoid the pain of having burned skin touch their bodies. Dazed, they walked down the street, calling for water and looking for help that was not there.
Three days earlier, the United States had dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy, which used highly enriched uranium, on Hiroshima, instantly killing some seventy thousand people. Many more would die later from burns and radiation sickness. Nagasaki had not been the primary target of Fat Boy, a plutonium implosion bomb. A B-29 Superfortress, Bockscar, was planning to drop Fat Boy on the city of Kokura, but cloud cover forced the pilot to divert to Nagasaki, a secondary target. Nagasaki’s natural geography of mountains and valleys protected part of the population, preventing many of the immediate deaths that took place in Hiroshima, but the city center was devastated.
Along with a bomb, a second airplane flying over Nagasaki dropped canisters containing scientific instrumentation. The canisters also contained copies of a personal letter several Manhattan Project scientists addressed to a prominent Japanese scientist. “You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material,” the letter, written by the nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, read. “Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working 24 hours a day, will be exploded on your homeland.”
In Japan, the bomb had now decimated two cities. Six-year-old Michiaki was fortunate: miraculously uninjured, he was found by a nurse and taken to a bomb shelter in the mountains, where he was eventually reunited with his family. Michiaki did not know anything about what had happened that day. He only knew that this was not like the other bombings the city endured during the war, a routine so common t
hat residents often ignored the sirens warning of enemy aircraft. “I had no clue what a nuclear or atomic bomb was—that something like that existed,” he recalled. “I just thought it was many, many big bombs that had fallen.”
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The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was the third atomic device ever detonated. The first atomic explosion, called the Trinity Test, was conducted in secrecy on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Americans learned about this new weapon after Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 of that year. The New York Times announced the nuclear age to the world with the headline “First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’ ” In Japan, however, what little news was reported about Hiroshima was only that incendiary bombs were used.
Speaking the day the bomb on Hiroshima was dropped, President Harry Truman revealed not just the existence of this terrifying new weapon but a massive project conducted in secrecy to build it. Across the country, over two and a half years, as many as 125,000 people had been involved in this secret project, Truman announced. Many workers did not even know exactly what they were working on, only that it was an important war project. “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history,” he said, “and won.”
Truman was right: Less than a week after Nagasaki was bombed, the Japanese emperor announced the country’s unconditional surrender, telling the nation in a broadcast speech that despite great sacrifice “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” More directly, he acknowledged the devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying “the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
A few weeks after the Japanese surrender, Herbert F. York, a young physicist who had been one of the thousands of workers on the secret project Truman had referred to, brought his father to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium had been enriched for the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The work inside the plant itself was still secret, but its existence no longer was. Standing at the top of a hill, York pointed down proudly to the facility hidden in the valley below, where he had labored in secret for two years of the war. “We have made war obsolete,” he triumphantly told his father. It did not take York long to realize he was completely wrong.
In Japan, the power of the atomic bomb left people feeling helpless. In America, for that brief moment, it made people feel invincible. The idea that this same powerful weapon could soon threaten the United States had not yet sunk in. It would soon. The United States might have beaten the rest of the world in building an atomic bomb, but the Germans during the war had achieved something that the Americans, British, and Soviets had not: a guided ballistic missile. The V-2, a liquid-propelled rocket developed by Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists, could travel more than two hundred miles, with an engine thrust eighteen times greater than anything the Allies had achieved. The Nazis used it to terrorize England during the war.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of World War II, and it also marked the beginning of a new war for scientific talent and engineering. The atomic bomb had proved that knowledge was power, and whatever nation had the most knowledge would have an edge in the next war. The Soviet Union might have been allies with the United States in its victory over Germany, but the two countries’ interests diverged even before Japan surrendered. In Germany, the Soviets and the Americans were already engaged in a race to capture knowledge.
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Standing in Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof in 1949, twenty-eight-year-old William Godel paused to admire the grand arches and curved glass above the train terminal. Outside, most of the city was still many feet deep in rubble—the aftermath of bombing during the war. It was not just the station’s neo-Renaissance design Godel was admiring but also the fact that it had survived the war with only superficial damage. The strategic bombing of Germany had been highly effective at causing civilian casualties but not at stopping the industrial war machine.
“Hey, you,” an American woman snapped. “Come put this baggage aboard and I’ll give you a cigarette.”
“Jawohl, gnädige Frau,” Godel answered, picking up her bag. As he carried it to the train, he walked with a slight limp—a war injury, something not uncommon to see in a German man his age in Frankfurt; Germany was flooded with crippled veterans. The train station was also filled with Americans, mostly military service members and their families stationed in Germany. The Americans who walked through the station were smartly dressed, whether in military uniform or civilian clothing. The Germans, on the other hand, shambled about the train station in threadbare suits. Germany was still under Allied occupation. The Americans controlled Frankfurt, and many still harbored a deep resentment of the Germans. Sometimes the Americans would tell him a compartment was for “Americans only.”
Godel was accustomed to being given orders by Americans in the train station, and the woman’s request to carry her bag was a relief; it meant that he was passing for what he was meant to pass for: Hermann Buhl, a former member of Germany’s Wehrmacht, and not an American covert operative.
The young American was posing as a German veteran so he could slip across Soviet-occupied areas in Germany and Austria, and even into the Soviet Union, recruiting Russian and German scientists, engineers, and military officers to work for the United States. His German was fluent, but not native, good enough to pass with the Americans and Russians, and even Germans, in many cases. German veterans could quickly figure out he was not really ex-Wehrmacht, but that did not so much matter; they had other things to worry about in the late 1940s. “It was a high-risk undertaking, replete with forged documents, black-market funds, bribery, loose women, and all manner of illegalities and immoralities,” he later wrote. He was also on his own when it came to the Russians. “Don’t get caught,” one army general told him, “because I cannot help you worth a damn over there.”
Godel’s work was under the larger rubric of Operation Paperclip, the military intelligence program that was scooping up German scientists and engineers to bring to the United States. The project, so named for the paper clip attached to each scientist’s dossier, had already garnered the biggest bounty: von Braun and his team of rocket scientists. At the end of the war, von Braun had actively sought out the American military, knowing that he and his team would likely fare better with the United States than with the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1945, the Soviets dispatched specialized military intelligence teams to Germany to gather anything that could be found in the way of military technology, including missiles, radar, and nuclear research. The Soviets took Peenemünde, where von Braun and his rocket team had been based, but they had already fled, taking much of their design work with them. “This is absolutely intolerable,” Joseph Stalin said. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde; but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable?”
The Soviets eventually took whatever they could, sending hundreds of German personnel back to the Soviet Union, not to mention trainloads of equipment. The Soviets’ hunt for technical expertise was broad, but it also lacked focus. As von Braun put it, “The Americans looked for brains, the Russians for hands.”
In Germany before the war, von Braun had been part of a visionary group that dreamed of building rockets for space travel but agreed to work for the military, and eventually the Nazis, on weapons. In going with the Americans, he hoped again to work on space travel. Instead, von Braun and more than a hundred other rocket scientists were taken to the United States, initially to Fort Bliss, Texas, and relegated to showing the Americans how to build and operate the V-2. Unsure of what to do with the Germans, and unwilling to give
them money to design new rockets, let alone fulfill von Braun’s ambitions of space travel, the Americans allowed his team to languish in the South.
The Soviets did not suffer from indecision, however. Using captured German know-how, the Soviets moved forward swiftly with designing rockets that could travel even greater distances than the V-2. “Do you realize the tremendous strategic importance of machines of this sort?” Stalin told a senior Russian rocket scientist after the war. “It could be an effective straightjacket for that noisy shopkeeper, Harry Truman. We must go ahead with it, comrades.” In the Soviet Union, the goal was clear. “What we really need,” said Pavel Zhigarev, the commander in chief of the Soviet air forces, “are long-range, reliable rockets that are capable of hitting the American continent.”
As the Soviets moved forward with their ballistic missile program, William Godel, disguised as Hermann Buhl, was on a parallel mission: trying to collect intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. He was growing increasingly convinced that the American military was pursuing weapons based on its own bureaucratic interests and not based on what intelligence was telling it was needed.
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William Hermann Godel was born as Hermann Adolph Herbert Buhl Jr. on June 29, 1921, in Denver, Colorado, to Hermann Buhl Sr. and Lumena Buhl, German immigrants. Hermann Buhl Sr. died of pneumonia in 1931, and Lumena soon married another German immigrant, named William Frederick Godel, who ran his own insurance business and prior to World War II served as the German consul in Denver. The next year, Lumena’s new husband legally adopted his stepson and, at the suggestion of the judge, officially changed the boy’s name to William H. Godel. Relations between the two were icy at best. At one point, the younger Godel built a shack in the backyard to avoid living in the same house as his adoptive father.
The Imagineers of War Page 2