Godel in the early days was running the AGILE office as his own covert operations shop with a handful of longtime loyalists whom he knew from World War II and had personally recruited into the agency. His team included Savadkin, the navy officer who had bought the “Jesus shoes,” and Tom Brundage, a marine colonel, who ran the ARPA program in Saigon. Godel and his team gathered technology from wherever they could find it. For example, he used ARPA funds on a trip to Australia to buy a small, jet-powered drone and gave it to Brundage, in Saigon, making it the first unmanned aircraft deployed in Vietnam.
In July 1961, Godel wrote to Lansdale, updating him on plans for the combat center and providing a laundry list of proposed projects, which included everything from folding bicycles for South Vietnamese soldiers to a “persistent scent identification agent,” which would be sprayed by aircraft on Vietcong fighters so that dogs could track them later. Many items Godel listed were for psychological operations, like a combat recorder that would be used for interrogations and a loudspeaker for broadcasting government messages. The list also included study projects such as one for “Means of Using the Montagnards Against the Viet Cong,” a reference to the indigenous ethnic group that lived in the Central Highlands and was fast becoming the focus of CIA and military interest.
Over that summer, Godel shuttled back and forth between the United States and Vietnam, often personally delivering weapons to government and pro-government forces. He gave arms to Nguyen Lac Hoa, better known as Father Hoa or the “fighting priest,” a Catholic priest and Chinese refugee who had organized a militia to protect his village from communist insurgents. And in October, Godel brought over ten AR-15 rifles to Vietnam to demonstrate the new weapons for Vietnamese soldiers and American military advisers. Godel explained to President Diem that the AR-15 would be a better weapon for jungle warfare, providing Vietnamese soldiers with the confidence to hunt the Vietcong. Diem was impressed. “All I want to know is when will we get them for the Airborne Brigade?” he asked. The new rifle, designed by Eugene Stoner, was lightweight, “something the short, small Vietnamese can fire without bowling themselves over,” a summary description of Godel’s trip recounted. After an initial positive response from the field, ARPA in December 1961 ordered an additional one thousand AR-15 rifles.
By the fall of 1961, the new Combat Development and Test Center was in full swing, and an assortment of arms and technologies were flowing into the country. Some technologies were so secret that they were funded “off budget,” meaning there was no official accounting for them in the ARPA files, Godel later wrote. One, called “Big Ears,” was a battery-operated microphone designed to pick up the sound of engines, as an early warning device. Painted to look like jungle vegetation and hung from trees, the sensors proved a failure; the batteries would die after just a week or two. Mixed results aside, Godel used the small-scale projects to convince President Diem of more ambitious technological undertakings. “If the President were convinced that an electronic surveillance system would contribute to the security of even one of his strategic hamlets, and that it might replace a group of tin cans hanging on the barbed wire enclosure, he could also be persuaded to expand the program to other surveillance technologies,” Godel wrote.
The fall also marked the start of one of Godel’s most ambitious, and controversial, counterinsurgency projects. On the initial list he sent to Lansdale in July, Godel had included a proposal for a chemical plant killer that could specifically target cassava, the Vietcong’s subsistence food supply. The “hormone” killer was still theoretical, but Godel also wanted a chemical defoliant for aerial spraying of broad-leaf vegetation. “ARPA advises the chemical could be developed within several months within the U.S.,” he wrote.
The idea for chemical defoliation was drawn, like many other aspects of Project AGILE, from the British experience in Malaya, where jungle brush provided cover for guerilla attacks on railways and roads. Similarly, in Vietnam, Godel wanted to use defoliation to clear jungle cover used by the Vietcong. In a September 1961 report that Godel sent describing the newly opened Combat Development and Test Center, he noted that ARPA had already done some early experimentation with defoliants, spreading them by aircraft and vehicle, and was awaiting initial results. If it worked as planned, the idea was to expand its use along the border areas with Laos and Cambodia, where vegetation destruction would be used to increase visibility along key roads and major waterways. But whereas chemical defoliation in Malaya was primarily used for eliminating enemy cover, the plans in Vietnam were much more ambitious. Ambushes were a concern, but another consideration was that subsistence crops were being grown or foraged to support the Vietcong fighters. Defoliation could be used to deprive communist insurgents of valuable food sources—potatoes and cassavas. In other words, the goal was to starve out the insurgents.
President Diem placed a high priority on crop destruction, requesting commercially available products, as well as four helicopters and six fixed-wing aircraft. Godel in his fall trip report noted that ARPA had already funded twenty thousand gallons of defoliant and needed another eighty thousand gallons. Given the urgency of destroying the crops by November, Godel recommended adding napalm bombs to the defoliation campaign, which would hasten crop destruction. In noting the sensitivity of targeting food, Godel said this was being done “at the strong insistence of the Vietnamese Government.”
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Jack Ruina, who was brought in as ARPA director in early 1961, watched the growing involvement in Vietnam with equal parts horror and confusion. Ruina was, at least in name, Godel’s boss, but Godel was answering to the White House and senior Pentagon leaders. Even Harold Brown, the Pentagon official who oversaw DARPA in 1961 and would later become secretary of defense, admitted Godel and his work were a bit of a mystery. “A covert ops guy,” was how Brown described him.
Godel and Ruina did not feud so much as simply avoid each other. Ruina, a PhD electrical engineer, wanted ARPA to be a scientific institution and despised everything about Project AGILE and the agency’s involvement in Vietnam. Godel even warned members of his team to avoid the ARPA director at all costs. Warren Stark, who worked on AGILE, went so far as to hide behind a door at one point when Ruina walked into the room. Ruina did not care for the growing war in Vietnam. “Harold Brown sort of foisted it on me,” Ruina recalled of AGILE. “He said, ‘You should do it.’ I never liked it, it was full of gimmickry and gadgetry.”
Yet Ruina’s job as director required him to at least nominally oversee the Vietnam work. He recalled one trip to Vietnam, likely in early to mid-1962, when he had a private meeting with President Diem. At that point, chemical defoliation was well under way, and there was clearly a tension between the goal of eliminating jungle and starving out insurgents. Ruina recalled Diem telling him, “You people did the wrong thing. We asked you to destroy crops.”
Ruina, a scientist, had no idea what Diem was talking about and did not much care. “I wasn’t involved in operations: what the government was doing in operations, it wasn’t my business,” Ruina tried to tell the president. But Diem continued to blast the ARPA director. “The ambushing is not important,” Diem said. “It’s destroying crops.” He proceeded to get out a map of Vietnam showing areas of vegetation that were controlled by the Vietcong.
“How do you know which crops are which?” Ruina asked the Vietnamese leader.
“Oh, I know,” Diem replied.
The truth was, Diem did not know which crops belonged to the Vietcong and which to villagers, but it probably did not matter to him. Defoliation gave the central government control over the food supply, and control was what Diem wanted. Diem was happy to feign interest in American counterinsurgency strategies if it got the United States to support him, but he was determined to rule the country, and fight the war, his way.
For Ruina, the exchange with Diem merely confirmed his concerns about Project AGILE, which were as much political as technical. He did not see a scientific justification for much of what ARP
A did there, and he admitted in an interview more than four decades later that his “political slant” was against involvement in the war. “AGILE made Jack physically ill,” Godel later recalled.
Ruina, a disciple of Herbert York’s, wanted to create a science agency that served national security, while Godel wanted to build a national security agency served by scientists. The battle over those competing visions would characterize the agency’s future.
CHAPTER 6
Ordinary Genius
“He savaged me,” a dejected president John F. Kennedy told a New York Times reporter in a secret meeting, after a disastrous summit in 1961 with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna. The new president had hoped the summit would be a chance to demonstrate his ambitious vision for foreign policy and show his strength as a leader. Instead, with the summit’s coming on the heels of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Soviet premier had openly mocked the young president, threatening war over the divided city of Berlin.
During the 1960 election, Kennedy had campaigned against the Republicans by promising a fresh approach to foreign policy. He brandished the alleged “missile gap” with the Soviet Union—the purported lead that the Soviet Union had over the United States in missiles and nuclear firepower—as a blunt political weapon. While the reality and the extent of that gap were hotly debated in Washington, Kennedy had argued, “Whichever figures are accurate, the point is that we are facing a gap on which we are gambling with our survival.”
Once in office, however, Kennedy quickly realized the situation was far more complex than he had imagined. Whether Kennedy really believed in the missile gap during the campaign, or simply saw it as a politically expedient bumper sticker, is hard to say, but the political landscape shifted quickly once he was in office. Over the next few months, images from the first successful retrievals of film from the Corona satellite—added to the images coming in from U-2 flights—would completely dispel any illusion of a missile gap. A little more than two weeks after Kennedy moved into the White House, his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, thinking he was speaking off the record, inadvertently revealed to the nation that there was no missile gap at all.
Now in the White House, Kennedy perhaps had a better idea what President Eisenhower meant when in his farewell address he warned about the influence of the “military-industrial complex” and admonished the country to beware of becoming “captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Eisenhower’s warning was prescient. The military used tensions with the Soviet Union as the excuse to pressure the new administration to deploy Nike Zeus, the country’s first antiballistic missile system. The plan was to launch a nuclear-tipped long-range missile that would explode close enough to an incoming enemy ICBM to destroy it. It was not a particularly good technology, and radar experts knew there really was no way that Nike Zeus could track an incoming missile well enough to intercept it reliably. But that view was not reaching senior political leaders.
Soon after joining ARPA as director, Jack Ruina got word that Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, wanted a basic briefing on missile defense. ARPA, after all, had been left in charge of missile defense research, even after the space mission was taken away, and suddenly missile defense was a hot political issue. McNamara apparently wanted to learn the basics of missile defense. Ruina warned that such a briefing could take all day, and McNamara said that the ARPA director would get “all the time we need.” Ruina spent the day laying out the technical challenges of a ground-based missile defense system like Nike Zeus. Ruina called the briefing “The Earth Is Round,” because that is literally where it started, explaining that the earth was a globe, which meant ground-based radar could only detect a missile within a few thousand miles, providing precious little time to launch another missile to intercept it.
The day before Thanksgiving, Ruina, along with several other government scientists, was invited to the White House to brief President Kennedy on missile defense. The meeting included just Ruina; Harold Brown, the director of defense research and engineering; and Jerry Wiesner, the president’s science adviser. All three scientists were critical of Nike Zeus, a doomed system. McNamara was not invited. The meeting went on for several hours, with Kennedy’s posing detailed questions to the scientists about the project. Finally, the president’s brother Bobby interrupted to say they needed to leave for Hyannis, Massachusetts, the Kennedy family compound. “The helicopter’s waiting for you,” he told the president. “If you don’t get in, we won’t get to Hyannis Port in time for Thanksgiving.”
The president turned to the scientists and said, “Well, can you guys come up to Hyannis after Thanksgiving so we can continue this discussion?” Who could say no to the president?
The men flew up the day after Thanksgiving to Hyannis, where Kennedy was busy with meetings with various advisers on nuclear security, which included discussion of a nationwide program for fallout shelters. This time McNamara was invited, but Kennedy had already made his decision on Nike Zeus. “I don’t think we should go ahead with it, Mac, do you?” Kennedy said to McNamara.
The defense secretary replied, “No, let’s not go ahead with it.”
And that, Ruina recalled, was the end of Nike Zeus. Now it was up to ARPA to come up with something better. The scientists at ARPA had free rein to apply their intellect to even the most far-fetched sorts of solutions. They wasted no time, delving into antigravity, science-fiction-inspired death beams, and a space net named after a beloved Walt Disney character. ARPA, the agency that almost disappeared two years earlier, was suddenly in the middle of the Kennedy administration’s nuclear debates.
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Jack Ruina liked to joke that were it not for a chance meeting at a urinal, he might have spent a quiet life in academia. Instead, the Polish-born scientist ended up as the director of an agency engulfed in debates ranging from chemical defoliation to nuclear Armageddon. An engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was relieving himself in the men’s room, when another professor joined him at the next urinal. The professor told Ruina about a group at the University of Illinois that was doing work on radar tracking, Ruina’s specialty, and said that he should talk to them.
Ruina did and was eventually invited to work at Illinois, where he met Chalmers Sherwin, a physicist who would soon become the air force’s chief scientist. Sherwin put in Ruina’s name for a senior Pentagon job: assistant secretary of the air force. When he arrived in Washington for his new job, Ruina was picked up in a limousine and greeted by his new assistant, a lieutenant colonel. He was taken to his large Pentagon office and introduced to his two secretaries. For Ruina, who was conscripted into the army and never rose beyond corporal, the experience was a shock. The highest-ranking officer he had ever met while serving in the army was a major, and he was a dentist. Now Ruina was suddenly elevated from academic to Pentagon official.
Soon, Ruina moved to a new position, working under Herbert York, who was now the director of defense research and engineering. Ruina was responsible for overseeing ARPA, and he understood what was wrong with the agency. “ARPA is not strong now because it is not supported by Dr. York,” Ruina told the agency’s senior management. That shocked no one. York did not support his old agency, because it had been a competitor for his space empire. His solution was to make Ruina, who had become a good friend, the head of ARPA.
On January 20, 1961, the same day John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president, Ruina became the third director of ARPA. Suddenly the thirty-seven-year-old electrical engineer found himself the head of a military technology agency with a broad mandate and little oversight. He inherited an agency that was involved in everything from crop defoliation to weather control. It was a strange mix, and nothing was stranger to Ruina than Project AGILE, the Vietnam counterinsurgency work run by William Godel, the deputy director. AGILE was also high profile, having White House support, so Ruina could not cancel it. He chose instead to ignore it.
Despite ARPA’
s growing work in Southeast Asia, the majority of the agency’s budget went to projects left over from its early role as a space agency: the antiballistic missile defense program, called Project Defender, and a broad nuclear test detection research program, which went by the name Vela. A few other minor research projects remained, like propellant chemistry, but none of the others were terribly important from the perspective of scientists or the military. The ARPA of 1961 was barely three years old and had no particular reputation, or even mission: it was simply a collection of science and technology programs no one else coveted. Kennedy changed that, giving the scientists at ARPA what was arguably the world’s most important problem: nuclear warfare. Ruina mused that just one more cup of coffee before heading to the men’s room and “my whole life would have been different.” So, too, might be the world, because the programs ARPA started under his watch would change the course of arms control.
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In terms of dollars, the single largest program at ARPA in 1961 was Defender, the research effort aimed at developing technology to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles. ARPA had been saddled with missile defense research when it was founded, and Roy Johnson had mostly ignored it while he was director. By 1961, with the advent of ICBMs, missile defense was becoming a higher priority for the president and the Pentagon. Ruina disliked the technical inelegance of a human problem like counterinsurgency, but he immediately took an interest in ARPA’s work in ballistic missile defense and nuclear test detection. “The only two programs that bordered on major policy issues for the nation, were the [ballistic missile defense] research program and the Vela research program,” Ruina said, omitting any mention of ARPA’s Vietnam work, which in his view was not real science. “The other research programs were not ones that the secretary of defense or the president were concerned about.”
The Imagineers of War Page 10