The extraordinary freedom given to ARPA in the early 1960s to tackle military problems was supporting fruitful research into computer networking and nuclear test detection, but in Southeast Asia the agency was pursuing something equally ambitious, but with far darker consequences. For the next decade, ARPA’s involvement in the Vietnam War would have profound consequences for the agency. Its ambitious vision of solving insurgency was creating a body of research that would be resurrected decades later in Afghanistan and Iraq, leading to technology that would eventually reshape the very way the United States fights its wars.
CHAPTER 8
Up in Flames
By late 1961, the United States was on a path of escalating involvement in Vietnam, taking ARPA along with it. The Taylor Mission to Southeast Asia in October 1961 had laid the groundwork by calling for more troops and support for South Vietnam’s government. The Kennedy administration was now committed to defeating communism in Southeast Asia, and so the debates in Washington after that point were largely over how best to achieve that goal. It was decided that much of that support would be done in secret.
“The growing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was kept secret, partly because it violated the Geneva agreement,” which placed limits on outside involvement in the country, like the number of foreign military advisers, “and partly to deceive the American public,” wrote Stanley Karnow in his history of the Vietnam War. Karnow, then a journalist in Vietnam, describes in late 1961 seeing from his hotel in Saigon an American aircraft carrier in the harbor loaded with several dozen helicopters strapped to the deck. Yet when he pointed the sight out to the American military spokesman he was having drinks with, the officer told him, “I don’t see nothing.”
ARPA’s presence in Vietnam, under the rubric of Project AGILE, was a vital part of this secret escalation, and its field office was an unprecedented merging of science and technology with counterinsurgency operations. Whether it was manipulating food supplies, experimenting with forest fires, or moving whole villages, ARPA’s Project AGILE was conducting the world’s first large-scale scientific experiments in counterinsurgency. One of the first and most significant of those experiments was chemical defoliation, which was under the personal control of William Godel. ARPA started in the fall of 1961 with experimental spray tests using an adapted UH-1 Huey, called a HIDAL, short for Helicopter, Insecticide Dispersal Apparatus, Liquid, as well as fixed-wing aircraft. At that stage, the focus was still on experimenting with different chemicals on test plots. “This program has been undertaken with due regard to possible adverse psychological effects and at the strong insistence of the Vietnamese Government. Local district and village heads have coordinated the program,” Godel wrote in a secret September 1961 report sent to senior leaders at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House.
That experiment appeared, at least in Godel’s mind, to have been successful, and President Diem himself began requesting chemicals to destroy manioc and rice plants. The initial campaign would require four H-34 helicopters and six C-19 aircraft to spray the defoliant. Time was of the essence; it was late fall and some rice would already be ready for harvest, so the report also recommended using air-delivered napalm bombs on the grain fields. The plan was to start with a thousand-mile section of “zone D,” not to destroy food, but to eliminate ground cover for the Vietcong. The extreme sensitivity of chemical spraying required a policy decision from the highest levels. That came on November 30, 1961, when President Kennedy secretly authorized the use of chemical defoliation in Vietnam.
Five days later, on December 4, 1961, Godel summoned James W. Brown, a scientist from the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to discuss the start of ARPA’s secret defoliation experiment. The location of the experiment was described, in a later memo, merely as a “friendly country.” Godel explained that a crop destruction operation had been approved, and a preselected area would be sprayed with a defoliant, followed by napalm to burn down foliage. Brown would be in charge of initial spray operations and ensuring government authorities in South Vietnam would be ready to move in once the spraying was complete. The sensitivity of the operation was clear: Godel instructed Brown that he was “to be ignorant” if local government authorities asked him for information about the chemical agents or about protective measures. Brown should tell them nothing, a classified account of the meeting noted.
On January 7, 1962, three C-123 aircraft touched down at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base just as the sun was setting over Saigon. The C-123, a rugged, twin-engine short-haul transport aircraft, was popular for covert missions because of its ability to take off and land from primitive airstrips. The White House had initially weighed stripping the planes of military markings and flying them under the guise of civilian aircraft. That idea was rejected, but the mission was nonetheless classified. To avoid detection, the aircraft were parked under guard on a ramp normally used by President Diem’s counterinsurgency squadron, an elite unit led by Nguyen Cao Ky, a flamboyant military commander known for his penchant for purple scarves and close links with American covert operations.
The crews had been briefed on the secret mission and had signed statements promising not to reveal where they were going or what they would be doing. Designated simply Tactical Air Force Transport Squadron, Provisional 1, the aircraft would later be known by their project code name, Operation Ranch Hand. The security measures were not unwarranted: one morning the American crews found that someone had sabotaged the planes and slashed the throat of a Vietnamese guard. Within a week of arriving in Vietnam, the aircraft began flying missions over Bien Hoa–Vung Tau highway, also known as Route 15. Flying just over the treetops, the aircraft, outfitted with spraying rigs, released their chemicals in a steady stream over the forest below. Inside the aircraft, the barrels were marked with colored bands to denote the type of chemical compound they contained. The bands on the barrels of those first aircraft were purple, denoting “Agent Purple,” a fifty-fifty mixture of two herbicides: dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and trichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Other agents included Pink, Green, Blue, White, and what would eventually be the most widely used defoliant in Vietnam, Agent Orange.
In many respects, Godel was running AGILE as a one-man show, bypassing even ARPA’s director, Jack Ruina, who was happy to ignore the whole mess. Godel reported to senior Pentagon and White House officials through the Special Group for Counterinsurgency and treated AGILE as his personal domain. Godel had, in fact, a very clear idea of what he was trying to achieve. He explained his rationale for the various projects as a “weapons system” approach, meaning each weapon or technology was selected not as an end unto itself but for a specific purpose: to enable the South Vietnamese to fight on their own. “The development and use of patrol dogs and defoliants, for example, is designed to bring Vietnamese troops out of their Beau Geste forts into active pursuit of the enemy,” Godel wrote.
All of Godel’s AGILE projects were tied together. Chemical defoliation would cut off food sources and eliminate ground cover for the Vietcong in the jungle. The South Vietnamese military would be provided, courtesy of ARPA, a host of new technologies—such as new lightweight guns—to fight the Vietcong in the jungles. Finally, the linchpin of the strategy was the strategic hamlet program, which would resettle farmers and their families to areas that could be secured, cutting off opportunities for the Vietcong to terrorize, recruit, and resupply. Or so went the plan.
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The idea of population resettlement in Southeast Asia traces its tragic roots to the British-ruled Malaya, which faced a communist insurgency in the 1940s. Robert Thompson, permanent secretary of defense of Malaya, drew up a wide-ranging counterinsurgency plan, which involved a complex set of psychological operations, such as flying “loud mouth” aircraft that ordered insurgents to give themselves up, chemical defoliation to eliminate cover for rebels, and fortified villages, a small-scale version of what Godel and other officials ended up proposing in Vietnam.
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Just as Edward Lansdale brought his lessons from the Philippines to Vietnam, counterinsurgency experts like Thompson offered lessons from Malaya. And like the Philippines, Malaya offered a seductive case study, because it was regarded as a successful defeat of insurgency. There were key differences between the two regions, however. In Malaya, the communists were ethnic Chinese, a distinct group from the Malay, so when the population was resettled, it was relatively easy to keep the Chinese out of the new villages. In Vietnam, however, there was no easy way of distinguishing the Vietcong from peasants loyal to the government. Another important distinction was size: the communist insurgents in Malaya probably consisted of fewer than ten thousand fighters, while the Vietcong by 1962 would number at least eighty thousand.
The strategic hamlet program was a massive undertaking by any measure; it involved transplanting South Vietnam’s rural population to newly constructed villages. It required a government capable of explaining the policy and then providing the infrastructure and security needed to build and secure the hamlets. The presumption on the American side was that the villagers wanted to be protected from the Vietcong, so they would willingly, and even happily, move to areas that were protected, but the reality on the ground was far more complex. The creation of the strategic hamlets began in Binh Duong province, where the South Vietnamese government launched the program in March 1962 under the name Operation Sunrise. Few peasants were willing to move voluntarily to fortified encampments far from their farmlands. The South Vietnamese government pushed forward anyway, with Diem’s brother Nhu, a man far removed from the reality of peasant life, heading the process. By the fall, the government in Saigon claimed that 3,225 strategic hamlets had been built “and that over 33 percent of the nation’s total population was already living in completed hamlets.”
Yet ARPA from the start understood that those numbers belied a more complex reality on the ground. The “strategic hamlet,” according to a 1962 ARPA report on rural security, “is a condition of the mind and heart, not an impenetrable fortress.” It was another way of saying that there was no clear blueprint for what a hamlet would look like, because little in the way of resources was provided by South Vietnam’s government for these new encampments. The specifics were unclear, but the goal was not. The same ARPA report described the hamlets bluntly as “machinery for formal government control” over the population. The “effective” strategic hamlet “is one in which every citizen and his activities are generally known and strangers and unusual activities are easily observed,” the report stated.
While the South Vietnamese government was claiming great success, those working with Project AGILE were dubious. Reports of forced labor, disgruntled farmers, and empty villages were filtering back to Washington through the Combat Development and Test Center in Saigon. In 1962, Gerald Hickey, a Vietnamese-speaking anthropologist newly hired by the Rand Corporation to work on ARPA’s Project AGILE, began visiting some of the strategic hamlets around South Vietnam, including in Cu Chi. What he saw was not encouraging. Farmers complained of forced labor to help fortify the hamlets, which took them away from their fields. Agriculture output was dropping precipitously in some areas, and for those already struggling to eke out a living, the uncompensated labor was devastating. As for the elaborate fortifications, which included bamboo spikes and warning devices, the Vietcong, at least around Cu Chi, simply dug tunnels to infiltrate the hamlets.
When Hickey attended a “theatrical” ceremony for the official completion of the Cu Chi hamlet, the scene was markedly different. The hamlet had been hastily cleaned up, and the villagers had been told to stay inside. Diem’s brother Nhu arrived at what seemed in almost every respect to be a Potemkin village. Gripping a cigarette holder, Nhu presided over a ceremony bereft of the residents who were not trusted enough to attend. Hickey’s report to ARPA on the strategic hamlet program, which was resoundingly negative, was not greeted with enthusiasm in Washington, either from civilian or from military leaders. Harold Brown, one of many Pentagon officials Hickey briefed, literally turned his back on Hickey and a colleague during their briefing, swiveling his chair away from them. A marine general slammed his fist on the desk and told the Rand consultants that the peasants would be forced to help the program.
In April 1962, as the strategic hamlet program was collapsing in Vietnam, ARPA hired the Rand Corporation to hold a seminar in Washington, D.C., gathering the world’s top experts in counterinsurgency, drawing on military officers with experience in Malaya, the Philippines, Kenya, and Algeria. Those experts included names that would become synonymous with counterinsurgency, like Edward Lansdale and David Galula, a French officer. They spent four days discussing their experiences quashing insurgencies using a variety of techniques, including forced resettlement. They were upbeat. In Algeria, women liked the “varied social life” in the new settlements, Galula declared. Other attendees praised what they described as successful resettlements in Malaya and Kenya. The counterinsurgents in Washington, D.C., seemed oblivious to what was going on in Vietnam.
Officials back in Washington might not have wanted to hear it, but the strategic hamlets in Vietnam, the very linchpin of counterinsurgency, started coming apart at the seams almost as soon as they were created. “That it was the major facet of the Regime’s counterinsurgency efforts from 1961 on is undeniable,” Lawrence Grinter wrote in an unpublished analysis of strategic hamlets buried in the archives of an ARPA contractor. “That it failed miserably is beyond question.”
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By the fall of 1963, Project AGILE was collapsing on all fronts as the insurgency in South Vietnam grew in size and scope amid mounting general opposition to Diem’s regime. Counterinsurgency experts like Edward Lansdale, who supported Diem, were oblivious to the key role of Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother. If the kindly Diem was the public face of the South Vietnamese government, Nhu was the éminence grise, working behind the scenes as the president’s closest confidant and strongman. Nhu, a French-educated self-styled intellectual, was an enigma for Western advisers mostly because he avoided meeting them. An opium addict with pretensions of being a philosopher, Nhu wielded de facto power over the regime’s paramilitary forces.
The strategic hamlets, run by Nhu, were in shambles, and the Mekong delta was now dotted with empty villages filled with roofless huts and broken-down barbed wire, like abandoned prisons whose inmates had long ago escaped. Many of Godel’s other ideas, like his plans to introduce military dogs to South Vietnamese forces, were also failing. The patrol dogs had been one of the first projects Godel introduced under Project AGILE, in the hopes they would help South Vietnamese soldiers fight more effectively in Vietnam’s dense tropical foliage. Unable to adapt to the jungle, Godel’s dogs had largely grown sick and died or were eaten. Diem had warned him that would happen. Then there was chemical defoliation. The spraying was supposed to be done in secret, but it was quickly exposed and proved a boon for North Vietnamese and Soviet propaganda that accused Americans of poisoning crops, which was true.
Even some American officials were wary of the defoliation. Seymour Deitchman, a Pentagon engineer, noticed the dead trees and brown plants in the ARPA compound in Saigon. Empty barrels containing Agent Orange had been stored amid the low-slung colonial buildings on the compound, and the vapors had managed to kill off vegetation in and around the ARPA offices. At one point, Colonel Trach, the Vietnamese head of the Combat Development and Test Center, started selling the barrels, only to get in trouble, not because the barrels were dangerous, but because he failed to give a cut of the profits to his higher-ups. Deitchman was concerned; no one appeared to have given much thought to the health consequences of using the chemicals. “Well, do you know what effect that is going to have on the people caught up by it?” Deitchman asked Godel in one meeting at the Pentagon. The response, Deitchman recalled, was a four-letter curse and an angry dismissal. “ARPA was going to win the war,” Godel told Deitchman. “That was its role.”
Some of Godel’s pr
ojects also ran into unexpected political problems. The AR-15s that Godel brought to Vietnam were supposed to demonstrate their utility for South Vietnamese troops as a lightweight, low-recoil weapon that would be better suited for the jungle than either the World War II–era M1 Garand or the M14 rifle, the standard-issue U.S. Army rifle at the time. A limited number of AR-15s were fielded to American Special Forces and Vietnamese soldiers in 1962. Godel admitted later that he also “wanted to stick a finger in the Army’s eye,” because its leaders had resisted any use of the new rifle.
The experiment looked like a grand success, based on the initial ARPA field report. “The suitability of the AR-15 as the basic shoulder weapon for the Vietnamese has been established,” according to a field test report from August 1962. “For the type of conflict now occurring in Vietnam,” American military advisers found the AR-15 to be “superior in virtually all respects” compared with other weapons tested. In response, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam then requested twenty thousand AR-15s. Similarly, the Pentagon’s Systems Analysis Group, using the ARPA results, published its own study, which concluded “that the AR-15 is decidedly superior in many of the factors considered. In none of them is the M14 superior. The report, therefore, concludes that in combat the AR-15 is the superior weapon.” Yet when advocates of the AR-15 back in Washington used the positive reports to try to persuade the Pentagon to buy the new rifle for American soldiers, it ignited a political firestorm among the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. The army did not want to be told what weapon to buy, and its leadership believed that the AR-15 was not as lethal as the M14.
The Imagineers of War Page 15