The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  Godel, who was also dispatched to Norway to launch a search from an air base in Bodø, was doubtful of the purported sightings. “The mission was foredoomed to failure,” he wrote. No one there had any way to track the incoming capsule, and the chances of someone on a sparsely populated remote island spotting a single capsule were unlikely. In that part of Norway, people barely had electricity, and they were certainly not spending time outside, looking up at the sky. The capsule, Godel concluded, “was buried out there somewhere in a mountain of snow and ice covered with wind-blown coal dust that had not melted since the days of the Mastodon, and no one was going to find it until the end of the next ice age, if then.” The capsule was never found.

  It took twelve more launches, but on August 18, 1960, film from the launch of Discoverer 14 was recovered by an air force C-119. Within hours, analysts were able to look at the first earth photographs taken from space: grainy images of the Mys Shmidta air base in the Russian Far East. That same week, Gary Powers, the American pilot of a U-2 shot down earlier that year over the Soviet Union while trying to collect imagery, was tried and convicted in Moscow. The era of satellite reconnaissance was launched.

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  While ARPA, as the Pentagon’s space agency, ostensibly had control over the spy satellite program, the management was convoluted. According to an official history of Corona, declassified only in 2012, ARPA was in charge of the funding for the overt elements of Corona, that is, the Discoverer cover story; the CIA was in charge of its real objectives. On paper, at least, Roy Johnson was signing the directives, and there is no indication in official records that the White House regarded ARPA as merely a purse holder.

  The battle over control of rockets was an annoying sideshow for the CIA. The air force and the CIA believed that ARPA, which controlled funding for the launches, was attempting to build its own empire in space and taking advantage of the biomedical cover story for its “man in space” work as a “counterweight to the announced NASA program.” In other words, they believed ARPA was using the funds from Corona, which constituted a large portion of its budget, to justify its continuing role in space. The air force was never happy about having another agency manage any of its satellite programs, but now it also had the CIA on its side, accusing ARPA officials of “interference” with Corona.

  Those conflicts were soon to end. York was now installed in his new Pentagon position over ARPA, and at his recommendation Secretary of Defense McElroy on September 18, 1959, authorized the formal transfer of ARPA’s military space projects back to the services. All of the agency’s space programs, including Transit, which would eventually become the basis for the Global Positioning System, were given back to the military services. For ARPA, and Johnson, control of the military space programs was the heart and soul of the agency and, more important, the primary reason for its existence. As quickly as things had gotten started, the agency that was supposed to lead America into space seemed to be falling apart, and Johnson could do nothing to stop it. After a contentious press conference at the Pentagon to announce the new space plans, George Kistiakowsky, the presidential science adviser, wrote that Johnson was “mad as hell and will now resign as director of ARPA.”

  In November 1959, Johnson announced he was leaving his post to become a “professional artist.” He left disillusioned with the agency, with the White House, and with space policy. The military had lost the manned space exploration mission, and ARPA had lost space completely. ARPA’s remaining work, ballistic missile defense, was nowhere near as glamorous as space travel. Yet Pentagon officials still insisted they would keep ARPA around to pursue advanced research, and Charles Critchfield, a prominent scientist, was handpicked to be Johnson’s successor.

  Critchfield was supposed to come to Washington as a salaried employee of Convair, which would continue to pay him his $40,000-a-year salary, and Critchfield would recuse himself of any contracts involving his company. The government would pay him a symbolic $1 per year, a carryover from the “$1 contracts” used during World War II, when companies worked closely with the government. But the war was long over, and lawmakers were growing increasingly skeptical of such arrangements. After Congress raised concerns about the potential for a conflict of interest, Critchfield pulled out of the job, leaving the agency without any director.

  ARPA was an expedient solution born in the midst of crisis, and as 1959 came to a close, its brief but chaotic life seemed to be almost over. In less than two years, it had taken the mantle of the country’s first space agency and had pushed its agenda for advanced technology aggressively. Yet it had lost more battles than it had won, and it still had neither its own offices nor any permanent employees. That ARPA survived much beyond 1959 could be credited, not completely, but in large part, to Godel, who understood how badly ARPA had bungled relations with the White House and the scientists who held sway there. “We mistreated [the scientists],” Godel admitted in an unpublished interview, “we crushed their nuts.”

  Just prior to his departure, Roy Johnson wrote a memo to McElroy, looking at options for the agency’s future, urging the defense secretary to keep ARPA around as a way to pursue advanced research. The question was what, in the absence of space, should ARPA do? The agency still had work in missile defense, and in a few smaller areas, like propellant chemistry, but nothing that would sustain the interest of top scientists or leaders. Neither space nor science had been of particular interest to Godel. The seasoned intelligence bureaucrat had his sights set not on the moon but on the jungles of Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 5

  Welcome to the Jungle

  In 1950, William Godel stood next to the marine general Graves Erskine looking at a ridgetop in Vietnam, where smoke from an encampment could be seen curling up into the sky. Erskine turned to the French general accompanying them and asked whose forces were on the ridge.

  “Le Viet Minh, Monsieur,” the commander answered, referring to the communist forces fighting the French.

  “Well why don’t you send a battalion up there to route them out?” the American general demanded.

  “Mais non, monsieur: If we sent a battalion up there the Viet Minh would disappear into the jungle,” the French general replied. “This way, we know where they are. N’est-ce pas?”

  General Erskine, who had led the Third Marine Division in its World War II assault on Iwo Jima, was “angered to the point of nausea,” Godel recalled. “He got very drunk that night, something he rarely did.”

  Godel and Erskine were in Vietnam as part of an extended study trip authorized by President Harry Truman, known as the Melby-Erskine mission, that was to look at American economic support for the region. John Melby, the American diplomat who co-headed the mission with Erskine, saw the trip as “a piece of blackmail” the French used to pull America into Vietnam. If the Americans did not assist the French, the communists would win the elections in France and pull out of NATO. The ruse worked well, because Truman later declared that the United States would help the French contain the communists. Four years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would expand that logic beyond Vietnam, arguing that losing one country to the communists would be like a “row of dominos,” where “you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”

  Yet the four-month trip in 1950, spent mostly in Vietnam, foreshadowed how perilous American involvement would later become. The situation on the ground shocked officials on the mission, making them realize just how little the United States understood the region. “There was not one single Officer in that Embassy who spoke a word of Vietnamese,” reported Melby, who wrote a ten-page single-spaced telegram back to Washington. In Melby’s view, the decision to provide economic aid was a “terrible mistake” that would slowly lead to disastrous involvement.

  Godel’s memory of the trip was equally bleak. The mission convinced him that sending Western ground troops—whether French or American—with their modern technology into Vietnam was a
losing proposition. The United States would have to follow a different path if it wanted to avoid getting sucked into the quagmire that had trapped the French in Vietnam. The trip also sparked Godel’s passion for Southeast Asia, where he sensed a growing, but ignored, Cold War threat. While top-level planners in the Pentagon were focusing on Soviet nuclear and conventional forces, Godel recognized that the United States was more likely to face small-scale insurgent wars in regions like Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The United States, he concluded, had to learn to win wars that did not involve using nuclear weapons, or battling Soviet conventional forces in Europe. Even more important, it had to find a way to do it without sending its own troops.

  In the 1950s, Godel remained heavily involved in Southeast Asia, visiting the region frequently, making friends with high-level Thai, Filipino, and Vietnamese officials. So close were Godel’s relations with some of those officials that their children would often spend summers staying at the Godel family home in Virginia, or even longer to attend school in the United States. Godel also worked closely with Edward Lansdale, one of the nation’s most famous counterinsurgency experts, who had extensive experience in Asia.

  Lansdale, a former advertising man turned air force officer, had forged his reputation working for the CIA in the Philippines, where he helped President Ramon Magsaysay fight a growing insurgency. Employing a unique mix of American advertising savvy and CIA tricks, the American spy introduced psychological operations techniques that preyed on local superstitions. In one case, he persuaded Magsaysay’s government to take advantage of peasants’ fears of asuang, or vampires, by ambushing a communist rebel, draining his blood, and putting puncture wounds on his neck, leaving the body to be found by his comrades. Whether such maneuvers really helped quash the insurgency, whose support was already waning, is unclear, but it cemented Lansdale’s reputation as one of the best-known intelligence operatives in history.

  In 1954, Lansdale was assigned to head the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission, and he soon insinuated himself into the inner circle of the newly appointed prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, repeating the psychological warfare techniques he honed in the Philippines. He ordered the printing of an almanac based on soothsayer predictions that foretold communist defeats. He also helped Diem win a 1955 referendum against Bao Dai, the former emperor, by printing Diem’s ballots on red paper, an Asian symbol of joy, while Bao Dai was left with a somber shade of green. Diem took what Lansdale viewed as a subtle but effective tool to sway—or rig—the elections and turned it into a sledgehammer, claiming 98.2 percent of the vote, which reinforced claims of widespread fraud. Lansdale was appalled but did nothing.

  Lansdale and Godel shared a similar intellectual disposition toward dealing with the communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia. The goal, they believed, was to focus on defeating insurgencies by building support for the local government, even a flawed one, led by President Diem, whose brutal tactics and authoritarian bent were alienating much of the population. The two men saw in Diem, whatever his faults, a kindred anticommunist spirit and an inspired leader who just needed some American guidance. Despite mounting evidence of brutal repression and rampant corruption, Lansdale and Godel were convinced that Diem was the best hope for Vietnam. Lansdale so frequently reminded Diem that he was the George Washington of Vietnam and the “father of his country” that at one point Diem snapped at Lansdale to stop calling him “papa.”

  Godel was equally taken with South Vietnam’s president. After one meeting with Diem, arranged by Lansdale, Godel, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations, pledged his support in a letter to South Vietnam’s president. “Please be assured that I shall continue to have a great interest in the affairs of your country and am always ready to be of such assistance as may be within my power,” he wrote to Diem in 1956.

  Two years after writing that letter, Godel was swept up into ARPA, and it seemed at first that his job at the new agency would be focused on technology and space, not Southeast Asia. But by 1959, the agency was left without a director or a clear mission. As a place holder, Herbert York, who now oversaw ARPA from the Pentagon, installed Austin W. Betts, a hardworking, if scientifically uninspired, army general who had been working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the director of guided missiles. York told the general, “You’re going to be director of ARPA.” Betts saluted and said, “Yes, sir!”

  York was very specific about what he wanted Betts to do: almost nothing. York referred to Betts as a “custodian,” and the new director got the feeling that the agency was not meant to be around long. “During my one year, I don’t believe that we did anything that would have laid big foundations for big future programs,” he recalled of his brief time at ARPA. “Herb York made it very clear that he wanted me to play a kind of steady-as-you-go role and not pick up any controversy on any major programs.” Godel was an exception for that time period, Betts later recalled, saying his “ideas were a little wild but he was a very bright guy.” Godel’s wild ideas were about to change the course of ARPA.

  —

  In early 1960, as ARPA was drifting into irrelevance, one of William Godel’s former colleagues from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations was brainstorming with fellow military officers about a new era of warfare. In the late 1950s, Samuel Vaughan Wilson, an army officer, had worked together with Godel and regarded him as a man of great drive and energy, if sometimes too ready to put himself, and others, in peril for covert missions. Both men were inspired by Edward Lansdale’s vision of counterguerrilla warfare, which required different weapons, techniques, and training. Most important, it required keeping American soldiers out of those conflicts, focusing on making sure local forces could do the job on their own.

  The United States was finding itself involved in low-level conflicts around the world—in Vietnam, Cuba, and Lebanon—often advising local governments on how to fight. Wilson, then a lieutenant colonel and director of instruction at the U.S. Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, wanted a name for what military advisers were doing in places like Southeast Asia, where they were working with local government forces battling guerrilla movements. “We were trying to figure out what title to give our work. What would be the brand name, so everyone would know it,” recalled Wilson, who later went on to become a lieutenant general.

  Wilson and his colleagues at Fort Bragg spent one furtive evening brainstorming, trying to come up with a name. “Counterguerrilla warfare” was the term that had been used up to that point, but Wilson did not feel the term captured what he had in mind. Nor did “counter-resistance,” because American forces had often worked with “the resistance,” particularly during World War II. The communists had already appropriated the term counterrevolutionary. Finally, at 2:00 a.m., Wilson approached the blackboard and scribbled, “Counterinsurgency.” One of the men in the room declared, “That’s it, let’s go home.”

  That same year, Godel pitched York on a counterinsurgency mission in Southeast Asia. York, whose office now presided over ARPA, agreed to allow Godel to travel across the region to explore cooperative research and development programs for the erstwhile space agency. So with York’s blessing, Godel set off to study what he believed would be the future battlefields of the Cold War. Between October and December 1960, he traveled across Asia, looking at everything from military footwear in Thailand to a weather research center in the Philippines. Behind those seemingly modest issues was a larger question: Why were the communists gaining a foothold in the region, and what could the United States do to counter them?

  The resulting classified report concluded that the United States was woefully unprepared for coming conflicts in the region. Sophisticated American weaponry given to friendly regimes required American mechanics, which meant in many cases the donated equipment was left unused. The United States, Godel wrote, also had precious little idea how to compete with communist ideological influence in the region and needed to come up with research “that co
uld assist in improving the over-all military capability in the insurrectionary, terrorist and guerilla operations in which we are engaged.”

  Looking at the recently concluded Korean War, and the brewing conflicts in other parts of Asia, Godel pointed out that the United States was planning military options—conventional and nuclear—for a war in Europe, and yet it was woefully unprepared for the conflict already taking place in Asia. The United States, he concluded, had “devoted inadequate attention to winning the kind of war in which we are engaged. In this war the situation is such that the Free World sustains the very real risk of total defeat and possesses little capability for even token victory.”

  Godel returned from his trip with a recommendation to establish an ARPA facility in Asia that would be used to experiment with techniques and technologies to fight against guerrillas in the jungles of Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. His plan was much bigger than anything anyone had ever envisioned for ARPA: he wanted to develop the indigenous capabilities of the military forces in Southeast Asia in order to prevent the introduction of American conventional forces. York, who was happy to have ARPA work in an area that did not involve the space race, signed off on it.