The Imagineers of War
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When President John F. Kennedy came into office in January 1961, he was faced with a deepening crisis in Southeast Asia. Laos was in the midst of a civil war, the Vietcong insurgency in South Vietnam was expanding, and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had pledged support for “wars of national liberation.” A report written by Godel’s colleague and mentor, Edward Lansdale, caught Kennedy’s eye. Lansdale, who had just returned from a trip to Vietnam, concluded that the Vietcong were determined that year to launch a major offensive and take the south. “This is the worst yet,” the president declared after reading how Lansdale described the situation on the ground.
On January 28, 1961, Lansdale, then a brigadier general, was invited to the White House to brief Kennedy and other senior officials on the situation in Vietnam. Lansdale was a hit with the president, who loved the secretive world of spies and derring-do. Just a year earlier, Kennedy had dined with the James Bond author, Ian Fleming, and he even listed Fleming’s book From Russia, with Love as one of his favorites in a 1961 profile in Life magazine. It is no surprise, then, that Lansdale’s description of counterguerrilla warfare persuaded the new president, despite considerable skepticism from some of his key military and diplomatic advisers. The president wanted to send Lansdale back to Vietnam as ambassador, but the State Department objected, and Lansdale instead took over as head of the Office of Special Operations in the Pentagon.
From the Pentagon, Lansdale used his new position to continue supporting the Diem regime, working closely again with Godel. On May 11, 1961, the White House approved “A Program of Action to Prevent Communist Domination of South Vietnam.” Among other measures, it gave presidential approval for ARPA to set up a counterinsurgency combat center. Lansdale that month wrote to Harold Brown, a physicist who succeeded Herbert York as the director of defense research and engineering, asking him to assemble people “to acquire directly, develop and/or test novel and improved weapons, military hardware, for employment in the Indo-Chinese environment.” That team of people, Lansdale wrote, in the highly classified memo, should “immediately initiate planning with the services to dispatch to the field at the earliest possible time a small team capable of rendering initial assistance in this matter to the Viet-Namese armed forces.”
The next month, ARPA Order 245 was signed, allotting $500,000 for the Combat Development and Test Center and to fund the start of Project AGILE, an umbrella name for Godel’s plan to conduct counterinsurgency research in Southeast Asia. AGILE would soon grow to become the third-largest project in ARPA, in terms of money, but it was even more significant measured by the attention it received from the White House. ARPA, an agency founded to take America to space, was now jumping headlong into the counterinsurgency business.
In an interview years later, Godel said there were two aims to the ARPA program: to help local governments, like that of South Vietnam, learn to fight an insurgency; and to help American personnel fight in very limited engagements, without conventional troops. The idea of AGILE was to provide “policy options without massive introduction of U.S. troops,” he explained. The entire goal was “to let others fight or do it ourselves without massive commitment.”
By early 1961, Godel had managed to use the power vacuum at ARPA to carve out a new role for the agency in Vietnam. 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 the specifics. A research and development agency might have looked like an odd place from which to launch counterinsurgency warfare, but Godel saw it as an opportunity. It was a young, well-funded agency that operated below the radar screen and had plenty of experience from its space days of operating with a “black budget,” or secret money.
Then, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy set an ambitious goal for the country that brought the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union to an entirely new level. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” Kennedy announced. For Godel’s colleagues at ARPA, the president’s announcement was bittersweet, particularly because the Saturn rocket that would eventually take the first men to the moon was one of ARPA’s early projects. The space race was still very much front and center in the nation’s Cold War battle with the Soviet Union; it just was not ARPA’s battle anymore. Instead, Godel and a suitcase of cash—essentially a down payment for Project AGILE—were on their way to Vietnam to establish a counterinsurgency center. ARPA would stay in that business for the next ten years, eventually expanding it into a worldwide scientific program.
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On June 8, 1961, Godel arrived in Saigon with cash and presents. He packed an assortment of small gifts for officials and their families he might meet along the way, including rosewood jewelry cases for women and two dozen Parker Jotter mechanical pencils. For Diem, however, Godel brought something special: a spy camera disguised as an elegant gold-plated lighter. It was an ingenious device, featuring a fast shutter camouflaged by a gold leaf, and a wide-angle lens. The hidden camera could be loaded with 16 mm film and was designed to snap people’s pictures surreptitiously while lighting their cigarette. That sort of spy gadget, Godel knew, would delight Diem. He was looking forward to the meeting. He regarded Diem as a good friend with whom he shared many fine evenings of dinner and conversation. Diem, according to an associate, regarded Godel with fear.
When Godel arrived in Saigon with his briefcase of cash, he went immediately to the presidential palace, a grand relic of French colonialism with rooms adorned with porcelain and wood paneling and appointed with overstuffed velvet and silk-embroidered chairs that required constant care to prevent them from sprouting mold in the humidity. As Diem, clad in his usual double-breasted white sharkskin suit, walked into the foreign reception room, he was flanked by two aides: Truong Quang Van, who worked for the intelligence chief, and Bui Quang Trach, a bespectacled military colonel and trusted adviser to Diem.
The gold-plated spy camera Godel brought as a present for Diem was a hit, and everyone admired the elegance of the hidden lens. The gift was just a prelude to the real goal of getting Diem’s approval for ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center, which would test, research, and develop tactics and technologies to help the South Vietnamese military defeat the Vietcong. Godel came equipped with an entire laundry list of ideas: “an airborne Volkswagen,” a power glider that could fly for hours on a single tank of gas; a steam-engine paddleboat that could carry more than two dozen men, navigating through waters as shallow as a few inches, and run on cane alcohol; chemical defoliants to remove jungle cover; and, more exotically, a “hormone plant killer” that would specifically target cassava, the Vietcong’s food source. He also wanted to bring over military dogs that would help hunt Vietcong in the jungles.
President Diem did not necessarily agree with all of the ideas. He laughed at the dog proposal, telling Godel the poor creatures would simply succumb to heat and illness in the jungle and die. But the president agreed to give the dogs a try and claimed to be enthusiastic about Godel’s other plans. He approved the creation of Godel’s proposed Combat Development and Test Center, and assigned ARPA the old French barracks on Ben Bach Dang Street in Saigon. Diem also tapped his associate and trusted aide Colonel Trach as the Vietnamese head of the new center, which would be run jointly with ARPA.
The president might have liked the combat center, but he greeted Godel’s other major proposal at the meeting with more skepticism. Godel wanted to relocate hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants from their villages, which were often and easily infiltrated by the communist guerrillas, and move them into fortified encampments, called strategic hamlets. Those hamlets, in turn, would be fortified with a mix of physical security barriers, such as moats and bamboo-spiked walls, and sensors and alarms, which would be developed by the new combat center. The Vietcong would no longer be able to infiltrate the villages, st
ealing food, killing government loyalists, and abducting new recruits, and the government, in turn, could attack and destroy Vietcong encampments with impunity, without having to worry about enraging peasants caught in the cross fire.
Godel’s proposal for population resettlement was not entirely new. In 1959, Diem had embarked on his own experiment with small-scale population resettlement to separate loyal peasants from Vietcong supporters, called the Agroville program, a plan inspired by the British experience in Malaya. Agroville presumed that if communist insurgents were sneaking into villages, then the best solution was to concentrate the “loyal” villages in a defensible area, allowing the military to root out the insurgents, now deprived of civilian cover.
The Agroville plan collapsed quickly under the weight of corruption and incompetence. Construction of new villages relied on the labor of peasants, who had no motivation to work for free, particularly at the expense of harvesting their own crops. Those who could afford to do so bribed officials to get out of indentured service, and eventually the entire enterprise was abandoned. Diem, fresh from the failure of Agroville, was understandably reluctant to embark on any new resettlement ventures. He did agree that Godel could travel around Vietnam to survey possible sites for the new hamlets and to look at ways to secure villages (Diem accompanied Godel on at least one of the trips, to Pleiku, to study border security). Godel set off with Van, an assistant to Diem’s chief of intelligence, giving gifts and cash to village leaders in exchange for information and support.
By the end of Godel’s trip in June, the Combat Development and Test Center was up and running. The staff was still small: three American military officers, four enlisted men, and twenty-three Vietnamese personnel. ARPA also planned to send two scientists on a temporary tour of duty. Godel returned to the United States on June 28 and immediately went to work promoting both the combat center and strategic hamlets to policy wonks in Washington. Robert Johnson, a State Department official, reported on a talk Godel gave at the Foreign Service Institute in July 1961 surveying the ways that the United States was helping Diem fight the growing insurgency. “Godel has suggested to Diem that a policy of temporary displacement of populations along the lines of the Malayan operation might serve his purpose well, without encountering the difficulties of the Agrovilles,” Johnson noted. “Diem seemed interested.”
It took three months between June and August 1961, and around fifty study trips across Vietnam, to eventually convince Diem of the strategic hamlet program. By early 1962, Diem agreed to massive population resettlements along the Mekong delta and the Central Highlands that eventually became the linchpin of the regime’s counterinsurgency program, with more than twenty-five hundred hamlets established by August 1962. The breathtaking goal was to concentrate about 90 percent of the rural population into the strategic hamlets by September 1963.
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. 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.” At that point, Van was sitting in a jail cell. Godel soon would be, too.
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In Washington, President Kennedy was torn over the Vietnam situation. Though he was heavily influenced by proponents of counterguerrilla warfare, the worsening situation in Vietnam was providing ammunition for those, like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who were pushing to send troops. Unsure of the situation, Kennedy decided to dispatch General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, an adviser, to Vietnam on a mission that would end up being one of the key turning points of early American involvement in Vietnam. The Taylor Mission, as it was called, arrived in Vietnam in mid-October 1961, just days after a critical National Security Council meeting with the president to discuss the military options. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had suggested that forty thousand troops would be enough to “clean up the Viet Cong threat.”
It was against the backdrop of growing calls for conventional troops that Taylor and his group of some half a dozen advisers landed in Saigon. Among those on the trip were Lansdale, the counterinsurgency adviser, and George Rathjens, another ARPA official. Godel, who was already in Vietnam, joined the mission once they arrived. The mood was relaxed—even convivial. Taylor dressed in civilian clothing, and Godel and Lansdale played daily games of doubles tennis against Taylor and Rostow. Over the course of the several-weeks-long mission, Godel tried to impress upon Taylor the importance of developing technologies and tactics specific to guerrilla warfare. Godel showed them the combat center’s early work: the military dogs, the sensors, and something called a Q truck, which was an armored truck disguised to look like a commercial vehicle. At one point, Godel accompanied Taylor and Rostow on a flight over Vietnam’s waterways, to show them how South Vietnamese river craft were being attacked by the Vietcong while en route to Saigon. Godel explained how ARPA was using Q trucks and Q boats as bait to draw out the Vietcong.
The Q truck was named after Q boats, the decoys that were first used by the British and the Germans in World War I to entrap military vessels. A Q boat was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” disguised to look like a vulnerable merchant vessel but in fact heavily armed, and would attack unsuspecting military ships lured into the trap. Similarly, the armored Q truck would, on the outside, look like South Vietnamese ammunition supply trucks frequently targeted by the Vietcong. On his first trip to set up the ARPA Combat Development and Test Center, Godel had brought cash to build the fake supply truck using armored materials salvaged from old French military vehicles and then welding them onto the inside of a two-and-a-half-ton Japanese commercial truck, the type of supply vehicle commonly used by the South Vietnamese military. The Q truck would not simply entrap a few Vietcong fighters; it would also be used to collect data to learn about the nature and frequency of the attacks. The group liked these novelties, Godel later recounted, but “in all truth General Taylor also thought it was somewhat Mickey Mouse, and that regular forces, regularly equipped, and operating in regular formations with heavy weapons could better do the job.”
Taylor liked the technology, but Godel’s attempts to sell the general on counterinsurgency fell flat. The trip “was almost superfluous,” he later wrote, because those on it already thought they had the answers. Taylor, who made his reputation in World War II, “was at best quizzical about partisan warfare, even when he was reminded that the French and British underground had done good work for his 82nd Airborne Division in France and Germany,” Godel wrote. “He was also convinced that the 82nd Airborne could solve the problems of Vietnam with one hand tied behind his back.” When Godel tried to impress on Taylor the difficulty of using conventional forces against an army of guerrillas who could launch surprise attacks and then melt back into the jungle, the general was unimpressed. “Nothing that a good double or triple envelopment could not solve, Bill, despite what you say,” replied Taylor, who saw conventional troops as the only answer.
Taylor was even less willing to listen to Lansdale, the president’s counterinsurgency guru. His only interest, Lansdale recalled, was getting “American genius to work and have an electronic line” that would separate North and South Vietnam, while also cutting off supply routes through Laos and Cambodia. When Lansdale returned from the Vietnam trip, he met with Kennedy to report on his findings, but by that point the president had already decided he wanted something different. “Just stay behind,” Kennedy told Lansdale. “I’ve got something I want you to do.” That something was Cuba: the president put Lansdale in charge of Operation Mongoose, a secret project aimed at removing Fidel Castro and th
e communists from power. That left Godel as the point man for Vietnam counterinsurgency work. Kennedy approved Godel’s plan, Project AGILE, going so far as to personally approve some of the equipment, including a new lightweight rifle for Vietnamese troops.
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In the summer and fall of 1961, Godel’s home near Lake Barcroft, a man-made reservoir in Fairfax County, Virginia, sometimes resembled a real-life incarnation of a James Bond Q lab. Godel brought some of the more benign counterinsurgency gadgets home for a commonsense evaluation. One time, for example, Larry Savadkin, a navy officer assigned to work with Godel, bought sporting pontoons, essentially water shoes, from Abercrombie & Fitch, hoping they might be useful in Vietnam, and Godel let his daughters try them out on the lake. The pontoons would in theory allow a soldier to glide down Vietnam’s water canals. Godel’s daughters called them “walking on water shoes” or “Jesus shoes.” But even in Lake Barcroft, thousands of miles away from Vietnam, it was easy to see they would not work. Every time the girls tried to step forward in the water, they would slip back two steps. “They were not maneuverable,” recalled Kathleen Godel-Gengenbach, Godel’s oldest daughter.
Many other ARPA novelties could not be brought to Godel’s home. ARPA was developing mines disguised as rocks, portable flamethrowers, and thermobaric weapons, which were designed to create intense high-heat explosions to clear jungle foliage. Godel was, quite simply, experimenting with technology and weapons to see what would be effective in the jungle. His most basic premise, which he frequently argued with government officials, was that providing advanced technology, like jet aircraft and helicopters, to developing countries was nearly useless. The jets were difficult for developing countries to service and of limited utility in guerrilla warfare, and helicopters ended up being used to ferry around VIPs, rather than carry troops to combat. What were needed, in most cases, were simple weapons appropriate for jungle warfare.