The army conducted its own report in 1963, concluding that the M14 was a better weapon. For the next three years, the army, which was accused by critics of bias, would battle advocates of the AR-15 in the Pentagon and Congress, until it was finally forced to purchase the gun. Even then, the army ordered modifications to the original design, including ball propellant ammunition, which was later blamed for causing the rifle to jam during firefights. The debates went back and forth: soldiers voiced frustration over the jamming and the need to constantly clean the weapon, and AR-15 advocates blamed the army for modifying the design. In the meantime, the original purpose of the ARPA tests—to quickly field a rifle better suited for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam—was delayed as a result of the bureaucratic infighting the weapons had sparked in the Pentagon. As a result, it took six years for the AR-15 to be fielded in large quantities to South Vietnamese soldiers, who would not get the new rifles until 1968, after the Tet Offensive. Godel had wanted the AR-15 to help the Vietnamese soldiers battle an insurgency and instead saw his idea get bogged down over an entirely different question: the fielding of a new weapon for American troops. Eventually, all three U.S. military services adopted the AR-15, designated the M16, and ARPA officials frequently touted it as a success in later years. Godel’s assessment was quite different. “It was a blatant, blithering failure,” he said.
Even if some of AGILE’s technology—the “gimmickry and gadgetry” as the ARPA director Jack Ruina had derided it—had worked, it is not clear they would have been effective in their overall goal of waging counterinsurgency, which was posited on having an effective South Vietnamese government. Diem’s autocratic regime was plagued by nepotism and weighed down by corruption and incompetence, and its legitimacy was marred by brutal crackdowns, particularly against South Vietnam’s Buddhists.
Patience with Diem, and with the counterinsurgency proponents, waned back in Washington. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had made his reputation in operations research, never embraced counterinsurgency, at least not the type forwarded by men like Lansdale, who by 1963 had largely been sidelined, at least from matters relating to Vietnam. And in Saigon, American military leaders were also getting frustrated with ARPA, which they felt was stepping on their turf. ARPA reported not to the commanders in charge of operations in Vietnam but instead to Harold Brown back in the Pentagon. According to an official army history, the military services looked at ARPA as an unwanted competitor, and they “regarded the ARPA field unit with distrust.”
ARPA was now in a position similar to its nascent days in 1958 and 1959. Thanks to William Godel, the agency had successfully carved out a role for itself in an area that had become front and center in American policy. And for the second time in its history, ARPA found itself surrounded by enemies who wanted to dismantle its growing empire, only instead of space it was in Vietnam.
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At 4:30 p.m. local time on November 1, 1963, a panicked President Diem called up the American ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. There was shooting at the presidential palace, and a coup was under way: What was the position of the United States?
“I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you,” Lodge replied. “I have heard the shooting, but am not acquainted with all the facts. Also it is 4:30 a.m. in Washington and the U.S. Government cannot possibly have a view.”
“But you must have some general ideas,” Diem, now frantic, replied.
South Vietnam’s president had reason to question the American ambassador; he had never trusted the Americans, and though he had no way of knowing for sure, he correctly suspected that the United States supported the coup now under way. Rebels in the South Vietnamese military took control of Saigon and were quickly closing in on the palace. ARPA personnel in the city, including Charles Herzfeld, who was visiting from Washington on his first trip to Vietnam, watched the fighting until late in the night from the rooftop bar of downtown Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, occasionally ducking at the sight of machine gun tracers. That evening, Diem and his brother escaped from the surrounded palace through a secret underground tunnel carrying a briefcase stuffed with American dollars and sought refuge in Cholon, a Chinese section of Saigon.
Back in Washington, Diem’s supporters had other problems. Edward Lansdale, the patron saint of Project AGILE, was forced to retire from the air force, having already been pushed out of his role in Southeast Asia counterinsurgency over the past two years (following the CIA’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, Lansdale helped lead Operation Mongoose, the series of failed attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro). News of the coup reached Godel shortly before a meeting that would have a profound effect on his career, and on ARPA.
John Wylie, the Pentagon bureaucrat who oversaw the funds used to finance the agency’s classified Vietnam operations, called William Corson, a marine major assigned to ARPA in charge of distributing the cash. Wylie wanted to meet with Corson and Godel that morning. Strangely, Wylie did not want to talk at the Pentagon, instead insisting on the nearby Twin Bridges Marriott Motor Hotel, a popular meeting point for military officials, thanks to its location just five minutes away from the Pentagon and its nice views of the Potomac River and the Washington Monument. It was not the place, however, where one would normally hold a serious financial meeting about funds used for a classified Vietnam program. Wylie’s request was odd, but Corson chose not to argue with a senior Pentagon official.
Corson was a mysterious figure. Assigned to ARPA as Godel’s special assistant in June 1962, he was also working as a secretary on the Joint Defense Department–CIA Committee on Counterinsurgency. The young marine officer seemed to despise ARPA and all the work it was doing. He believed that the defense scientists he was working with were “vultures,” whose novelties, like crop defoliants and man-hunting devices, were doing little to address the underlying causes of insurgency. In a meeting to discuss proposals for counterinsurgency work, Corson derided all of the ARPA studies on offer, saying they were “doomed to failure.” Regarding a proposal to look at CIA–Special Forces activities, Corson quipped, “This has about as much value to ARPA as engaging a marriage counselor to provide guidance to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton about marriage.”
At ARPA, Corson was designated a “Class A” agent. In the spy business, Class A agents were used to finance operations that required cash for special purposes, such as paying informants. In this case, Corson was responsible for disbursing cash related to ARPA’s classified activities in Southeast Asia. The marine major later claimed he had little knowledge of what he was supposed to do, other than function as a “paymaster.”
Over the next year, Corson would issue a series of cash advances to Godel, as well as Wylie, receiving receipts that might contain descriptions as vague as for “ARPA directed activities.” Later, when returning from Vietnam or other countries, Godel would file a full expense report, and the cash receipts would be destroyed, a way of acknowledging that the advance had been canceled. The system seemed to work well enough until early November 1963, when McNamara suddenly demanded a full accounting of the cash accounts. As auditors started to comb through the Class A records, they found a shortfall in the funds. Wylie, as the man ultimately responsible for ARPA’s cash, knew there was going to be trouble. It was the sort of thing that could send people to jail.
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It was raining that Friday morning when Wylie picked up Corson in his Pontiac from the Pentagon’s river entrance and drove him over to the Marriott. The two men sat in awkward silence in the hotel’s breakfast area until Godel showed up a half hour later in the official ARPA sedan. Godel’s arrival did not improve the mood; he was preoccupied with the coup in Vietnam, and Wylie was in a panic over the cash accounts. As Godel and Wylie began to discuss the state of the accounts, Corson claimed ignorance. “You can be around people that are in the intelligence business,” Corson recalled, “you know they are speaking English, you know the meaning of every word, but the conversation was extre
mely elliptical.”
There were problems reconciling the cash accounts, and Godel was getting increasingly frustrated with Wylie, who was in charge of the money. “If you are in trouble, you should go to your boss right now and tell him,” Godel finally snapped at Wylie, “and if you are in deep trouble, serious trouble, then you ought to get a lawyer, a good one right away.”
With little resolved, Wylie departed alone, and Corson and Godel drove back together to the Pentagon. On the ride back, Godel asked Corson how much he owed to the Class A account, meaning how much he was indebted based on the cash advance he had received for his most recent Southeast Asia travels. Corson told him he had an outstanding balance of about $3,000. After lunch, Godel went with Corson to David Mann Jewelers, a private store in the lobby of the Pentagon that sold everything from watchbands to engagement rings. Godel, who knew the owner, cashed a personal check for $2,000. The remaining $1,000 he took from the safe in his office and settled his account with Corson. Thinking the matter was closed, Godel returned to following the grim situation in Vietnam.
Back in Saigon, Diem and his brother had sought refuge in a French church in Cholon. Believing a deal had been worked out to allow them passage out of the country, the two brothers got into an armored personnel carrier sent by the coup’s leaders. The two brothers were shot and stabbed repeatedly as the vehicle headed back to military headquarters; pictures of their mutilated corpses eventually made their way into the news. When word of their gruesome deaths got back to the White House on November 2, President Kennedy “rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face.” The White House might have green-lighted the coup, but by all accounts Kennedy’s shock over the brothers’ deaths was genuine.
For Godel, who believed deeply in Diem, the death was a devastating personal blow. Then, within days, on November 5, 1963, an order came down from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: Class A agents were to turn in all of their cash and liquidate the accounts. A surprise audit followed. When auditors showed up at Wylie’s office, he first asked them to come back later, and when they refused, he offered up a $4,000 personal check and withdrew a $100 bill from his wallet to make up for missing cash. What started as an audit ballooned into a criminal investigation. Agents turned their attention to Godel, who was used to spending cash on covert operations with few or no questions asked. In the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations, Godel’s penchant for spending money on covert operations without proper approvals had gotten him reprimanded, but nothing serious. Now he was at the center of an FBI investigation.
Godel gave a series of contradictory answers to investigators from the FBI and the inspector general, some of which he later attributed to confusion over his multiple trips to Vietnam, and some to their confusion over how the accounts were handled. He was also hesitant, he recalled at trial, to discuss with auditors what was really going on with Project AGILE. He was trying, he later explained, to dissuade the auditors from thinking the work was “in some way covert intelligence operations, highly technically defined, and which I did not want associated with this program.”
On November 22, 1963, another event changed the course of Project AGILE. While traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy, whose enthusiasm for covert warfare had enabled AGILE’s broad mandate in Vietnam, was assassinated. The Friday night Kennedy was killed, three of ARPA’s senior officials—Robert Sproull, the director, and his two deputies, Robert Frosch and Charles Herzfeld—had a somber dinner together. The nation was mourning its president, and Frosch recalled that the evening consisted of the three normally loquacious men eating in silence, with each occasionally interjecting the repeated statement “The president’s been shot.” Not present at that dinner was William Godel, who within months would be fired from his position at ARPA and indicted on criminal charges of fraud.
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It was late on a Friday evening at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, when the jury finished deliberating. The case against William Godel, the former deputy head of ARPA, went to trial in May 1965, as American troops began pouring into South Vietnam, the very thing that ARPA’s counterinsurgency work was supposed to forestall. Godel’s original justification for AGILE, which was to equip indigenous forces to keep American troops out of the conflict, was gone. That goal had been overtaken by events much larger than ARPA or Godel. The counterinsurgency campaign was now a conventional war.
The criminal trial was supposed to be a straightforward case of government embezzlement, but the deliberations had dragged on for almost an entire week, and the jurors were getting anxious. Initially deadlocked, they were admonished by the judge. “This is an important case,” he told them earlier that afternoon, urging them to try to reach a verdict. “The trial has been expensive in time and effort and money to both the defense and the prosecution.”
The jurors had already been at the courthouse for three weeks, listening to testimony. Earlier in the day, a power main had broken, and the lights started to flicker. If they could not reach a decision that evening, they would have to spend the night in a hotel near the courthouse. None of them had a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. Everyone wanted to go home.
As the jury deliberated in Virginia, tens of thousands of students gathered on the other side of the country, in Berkeley, California, for a Vietnam Day “teach-in” featuring activists like Norman Mailer, whose speech, “Hot Damn, Vietnam,” blasted the war and the Johnson administration. (“Things were getting too quiet in Vietnam. If there was one thing hotter than Harlem in the summer, it was air raids on rice paddies and napalm on red gooks.”) The conflict in Southeast Asia was only just starting to attract national attention at the time of the trial. The week before the jury deliberations, the Vietcong had ended what had been an over two-month pause in the ground war, attacking, as Time magazine wrote on May 21, like “distant thunder that precedes a monsoonal line squall.” The aerial bombardment of North Vietnam, in the meantime, was also ramping up with Operation Rolling Thunder, “the hard, hot application of U.S. air power.”
The judge repeatedly tried to keep the testimony away from Vietnam. This was a fraud case, he insisted, not a trial of American involvement in Southeast Asia. But because Godel was accused of embezzling money intended for secret work in Vietnam, it was hard to separate the two issues. The government alleged that Godel, and his co-defendant John Wylie, had taken a series of large cash advances and then conspired to file fraudulent expense reports against those advances, pocketing the money. It sounded like a simple allegation, but as the jurors listened to the testimony, it became both more complex and more confusing. The jury was told about a series of financial transactions—almost all cash—that had taken place over two years, and trying to untangle the accounting was almost impossible. ARPA had essentially used a system designed for paying covert operatives or, as Godel described it at trial, “to support what we called special operations, that is to say intelligence or otherwise special activities for which a Congressional record of expenditures was not for various reasons desired.” The trial dragged out over several weeks, as jurors listened to stories about spy cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, meetings with the Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the creation of a mass resettlement policy.
Godel’s friends found the fraud charges preposterous. He had five daughters, a wife, and a successful career; the idea that Godel would sacrifice everything for a few thousand dollars was not believable to them. “I never met a finer man,” said Roy Johnson, the first director of ARPA, who came to Godel’s defense at the trial. Even associates who were not quite as gracious in their assessment found the charges unbelievable. “Bill Godel wouldn’t bother with anything so small as that!” Kenneth Landon, a former colleague, declared. “Now if you were telling me that he had absconded with half a million dollars, I would be impressed that that might be possible because Bill Godel always thought big.”
Those who knew John Wylie, the fifty-eight-year-old Pentagon
financial bureaucrat on trial with Godel, offered a less charitable view. Wylie had a fondness for luxury boats and expensive cars. In the months leading up to the trial, he suddenly claimed mental illness, entering a hospital for a month of treatment before being declared fit to stand trial. During the trial, Wylie appeared nearly comatose, staring down at his feet, though observers noticed that once outside the courtroom, he appeared just fine. Wylie never testified.
The case against Wylie was clear. When the Pentagon auditors investigated in 1963, they found he had taken cash from the ARPA accounts to pay for a yacht. In Godel’s case, however, there was little evidence to suggest he took the money for personal expenses. Rather, the question was whether Godel spent the money the way he claimed he did. Meaning it came down to whether the jury believed that the types of cash transactions he was describing, such as $2,000 for an armored “Q truck,” were credible. The prosecutor, Plato Cacheris, who would later rise to fame as a defense lawyer for spies like the former FBI agent Robert Hanssen and the CIA officer Aldrich Ames, insisted the trial was never about Vietnam, just money. “It was a couple guys trying to make a few bucks,” Cacheris later recalled.
Shortly before 10:00 p.m., the foreman sent a message to the judge. The twelve members of the jury, three women, all housewives, and nine men, managers and clerks of local small businesses, had finally reached a decision. Wylie was found guilty of embezzlement and fraud. Godel was acquitted of embezzlement but found guilty of making false statements and conspiring with Wylie. For Godel’s family and friends, it made no sense that the jury would clear him of stealing money and yet find him guilty of working with Wylie, a man Godel could barely tolerate. Both men were sentenced to five years in prison.
The Imagineers of War Page 16