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In the next year, conventional military involvement in Vietnam, which Godel had fought so hard to prevent, continued to escalate rapidly. From his federal prison cell in Pennsylvania, Godel watched in horror at the mounting death toll. His tools for counterinsurgency, like defoliation, were warped into weapons of a conventional war, something that was never supposed to happen. Over the course of the Vietnam War, more than ten million gallons of Agent Orange, the most widely used defoliation compound, would be sprayed on Vietnam, exposing tens of thousands of American military personnel and countless more Vietnamese to cancer-causing chemicals. Agent Orange became synonymous with the entire chemical defoliation program and, for many people, symbolic of the flawed war effort. Of all the things Godel brought to Vietnam, chemical defoliation left the deepest and most tragic legacy.
Godel left ARPA believing all his efforts had ended in failure: he had not succeeded in stopping the insurgency from escalating into war, and he had not stopped the introduction of conventional troops to Vietnam. “The goal of AGILE,” according to Godel, was “winning that war, at that time, in those circumstances, and have a legacy at the end—a model of workable answers for the ‘next time.’ ” That did not happen, and when Kennedy died, the idea of counterinsurgency as a way of preventing foreign entanglements died with him. AGILE was created by Godel, enabled by Kennedy, and supported by Diem. Now Kennedy and Diem were dead, and Godel was in prison. Yet rather than ending, AGILE, like the Vietnam War, just got bigger. “We ended up trying to win the war with technology,” Godel said. Asked ten years later in an interview commissioned by ARPA to list any true successes from AGILE, Godel gave a one-word answer: “None.”
Despite the failure of AGILE, Godel had instilled in many of his disciples, including Charles Herzfeld, the desire to apply the tools of science to warfare. Even with Godel gone, Herzfeld, who was about to become director of the agency, embraced the former intelligence operator’s legacy and continued to expand AGILE. As for the conviction of his onetime mentor, the only thing Herzfeld would say on the subject was “stuff happens.” Herzfeld’s vision for ARPA, and AGILE, was more expansive than any previous director’s. For Herzfeld, the world was a giant laboratory.
CHAPTER 9
A Worldwide Laboratory
At a press conference on July 28, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced that American military forces in Vietnam would rise to a staggering 125,000 men. Monthly draft calls were at 35,000 that year. “This is a different kind of war,” Johnson said. “There are no marching armies or solemn declarations. Some citizens of South Vietnam, at times with understandable grievances, have joined in the attack on their own government. But we must not let this mask the central fact that this is really war. It is guided by North Vietnam, and it is spurred by Communist China. Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism. There are great stakes in the balance.”
Those stakes, in the view of the administration, were also increasingly global. The Cuban Revolution that in 1959 overthrew Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power was soon followed by a decade of third world insurgencies. From Southeast Asia and Latin America to the Middle East and Africa, a motley collection of insurgents fought powerful central governments, often quite successfully. Whether it was under the banner of social justice, Marxism, communism, or simply national liberation, insurgencies battling American-backed regimes were regarded by officials in Washington as a disease to be rooted out.
For ARPA, this also meant expanding its mandate beyond Vietnam. Project AGILE was no longer limited to guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia. At hearings ARPA officials began to describe the agency’s mission in terms of creating a global laboratory for counterinsurgent warfare. Reading from an ARPA program description during a hearing in 1965, Texas Representative George Mahon noted that ARPA was working on “simulating the behavior of nations and individuals in the laboratory conditions and in comparing the two.”
“Is there any practical way to simulate the behavior of a nation in a laboratory?” Mahon, in apparent disbelief, asked ARPA’s director, Robert Sproull.
“I believe so,” Sproull answered confidently.
Sproull privately expressed doubts, but that year Charles Herzfeld was elevated to director, and he embraced this global vision. War and science were critical parts of Herzfeld’s upbringing, and he was a steadfast believer in the latter’s ability to influence the former.
Herzfeld was born to a prominent Austrian family of Jewish heritage that had converted earlier that century to Catholicism amid rising anti-Semitism in Vienna. In 1938, when Herzfeld was a teenager, Austria was annexed by Germany, and the family fled to Budapest, taking a circuitous route common to escaping refugees, before finally arriving in the United States, where Herzfeld’s uncle, a prominent physicist, was already settled. Once there, Herzfeld followed in his uncle’s footsteps, pursuing a career in science. Although accepted to Harvard for graduate school, in 1945, he chose the University of Chicago, where Manhattan Project veterans like Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi were heading. After graduate school, however, Herzfeld discovered that he was more interested in managing scientific research than conducting it. “I was no Mozart, but perhaps I was a fair Toscanini,” he wrote.
In May 1961, Herzfeld was working in the government’s scientific bureaucracy when he got a call from Jack Ruina inviting him to visit ARPA to discuss taking over the agency’s missile defense work. Over the course of two days, Herzfeld was briefed on the breadth of the agency’s research, ranging from ballistic missile defense to counterinsurgency. Herzfeld liked the idea of applying technical solutions to complex, big problems, and he was charmed by William Godel’s “towering intellect.” Yet he was still undecided about taking the job until, in the middle of a business trip to Europe, he got word that Soviet-controlled East Germany was putting up a wall to divide Berlin. “I thought it was a declaration of war,” he said.
When he returned to the United States, Herzfeld called Ruina and told him he would take the job at ARPA. Ambitious and brilliant but prone to arrogance, Herzfeld was put in charge of Defender, ARPA’s missile defense program, which was half of the agency’s budget. He quickly rose to assistant director, overseeing the agency’s work in counterinsurgency, missile defense, and computer science. Though he would not formally become director until 1965, he was effectively already running large parts of the agency a year earlier. With his deep Austrian accent and elite scientific pedigree, Herzfeld carried himself with the confidence of a senior statesman. He embodied ARPA at its height: when it succeeded, as it did with the ARPANET, it succeeded big and helped change the world. But when it failed, it failed big, and that changed the world, too, and not always for the better. “The only thing worth doing in an ARPA way is big problems,” he said. “Precisely because little problems you can give to the bureaucracy.”
Whatever area he worked in, Herzfeld thought big. In missile defense, he argued for deploying a system, optimistically arguing the technology was ready. “I think one could do reasonably well with $10 billion, maybe $12 or $14 billion, if you stretch it over a period of five years, it isn’t all that much money really,” he said. But interest in missile defense was already waning by the time Herzfeld took over ARPA, and with no new test ban treaty on the horizon so, too, was ARPA’s nuclear test detection work.
Almost from the start, however, Herzfeld gravitated to AGILE, explaining that it appealed to his personal history. “I’ve been thinking about various forms of warfare for most of my life. I don’t enjoy it, but it’s what I wound up doing,” he recalled in an interview years later. “I found it was a really important problem. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh I don’t want to get my hands dirty.’ The next question is, who would you rather do it, if you don’t? Who does it?” Some ARPA directors, like Jack Ruina, did not like the messiness of AGILE. “I learned to love it,” Herzfeld said.
In Vietnam, Herzfeld saw a place where A
RPA could apply its scientific expertise to the problems of counterinsurgency. He threw himself into Project AGILE, sometimes dreaming up ideas of his own and then traveling to Vietnam to test them. “I enjoyed that sort of fieldwork,” he recalled of his trips visiting the agency’s counterinsurgency work abroad. “I’m more of a doer than a thinker, and the bottom line is I think a lot about things I do. I got a charge out of doing things that changed the environment. It was exciting, it was fun.”
For Herzfeld, Vietnam was a place where scientific ideas could be tested. At one point, he teamed up with Robert Frosch, the head of Project Vela, to put the agency’s experience in nuclear test detection to work in guerrilla warfare. ARPA had experience detecting things underground, like nuclear explosions. Vietnam did not have nuclear weapons, but the insurgents had their own form of underground warfare: an extensive network of tunnels that the Vietcong used for resupply, communications, and even living. Detecting those underground tunnels had proved almost impossible. Herzfeld “cooked up the idea” of detecting the tunnels by looking for sick trees.
“The question was, if you dig a tunnel near a tree, does it get sick, and if it does, does that show?” Herzfeld said of his idea. “We did experiments in the United States, mostly in Virginia. We checked the trees by taking infrared pictures of them. Sure enough, if you dig a tunnel through the tree’s root system, the tree gets unhappy and it shows up on infrared; it looks different than healthy trees. Great triumph we thought.” Then ARPA took the infrared tunnel detector system to Vietnam to test, as Herzfeld put it, “the ground truth” of the idea. “We took pictures of trees in South Vietnam with infrared,” he said. “It turns out that one-third of all the trees in Vietnam are sick. Okay, great idea, but not feasible.”
Herzfeld was interested in history and politics, but most of all he was interested in using science to change the world. In the process, he expanded AGILE from a counterinsurgency effort designed to help indigenous forces into a global program to support American conventional forces and even to protect the president of the United States. “We were expected to solve the problems we were assigned, not just work on them,” Herzfeld later said of his philosophy. Under Herzfeld, AGILE would grow to be the most ambitious global counterinsurgency research program ever conducted, and at times the strangest, turning entire countries into test beds. “I was involved in this really going big scale,” he recounted. “Boy, it was different, and not all the results were happy.”
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Warren Stark’s road to administering a global counterinsurgency laboratory began at a Washington cocktail party. A Harvard Business School graduate, Stark was one of the legions of young men and women inspired by the 1960 election of the youthful John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address—“ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”—was a literal call to action, or at least to Washington. Stark was not exactly sure what he could do for his country, but he had an Ivy League pedigree and some experience in business and had served as an enlisted soldier in World War II, so he decided to move to the capital and find out.
His Harvard connections would serve him well. Stark worked the Washington cocktail scene and soon landed what sounded like a plum job: the American ambassador to Costa Rica offered him a position at the embassy with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Excited, Stark phoned his wife in Florida and told her to sell the house, sell the furniture, sell everything; they were about to move to Costa Rica, a country he knew almost nothing about. There was just one hitch. He first had to get a top secret security clearance, a process that could take many months.
In early 1963, still waiting for his clearance and working Washington’s social scene, Stark got a party invitation from Larry Savadkin, an old family friend. Savadkin’s record was impressive: In World War II, he had suffered head injuries during the German bombing of the destroyer USS Mayrant. In search of something safer, Savadkin transferred to the submarine USS Tang, which was sunk by one of its own torpedoes on a secret mission in the Formosa Strait, hunting Japanese convoys. One of a handful of survivors, he spent a brutal year in Japan as a prisoner of war. Savadkin in the early 1960s was working on counterinsurgency with William Godel at ARPA. He introduced Stark to Godel, and the former marine took an immediate liking to the bright young Harvard MBA. When Stark told Godel about his plans to go to Costa Rica, Godel countered with a different proposal. “I’m thinking of opening an office in Latin America,” Godel told Stark. “Would you do some consulting for me?”
“To be honest with you, I don’t know anything about Latin America,” Stark told Godel. “I’ve never been there, other than the Caribbean.” Stark also did not know anything about ARPA, but with his security clearance still in limbo he agreed to consult for Godel. His first assignment was to write a political report on Latin America. He rushed out and bought a book on Latin America by Lincoln Gordon, the American ambassador to Brazil. “I plagiarized a lot of stuff,” he admitted later. “I ended up doing some research. I wrote him a report, and Godel liked it very much. He asked me if I would like to join his group in ARPA, which I did not know very much about. I told him I really wasn’t all that interested. He kept asking me and asking me. I was attending meetings, and he was sort of embarrassing me.”
Stark finally made Godel his own offer: “Look, whoever gets me my clearance first, that’s where I’ll go.” For Godel, that was apparently easy. In a week, Stark received his top secret clearance. Stark had no idea how Godel did it, but he finally had a government job.
At ARPA’s headquarters in the Pentagon, Stark found himself in the middle of Project AGILE’s rapid expansion. After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Pentagon decided that insurgency was a global problem and required a global program. The Pentagon’s spending on counterinsurgency operations had grown from $10 million to $160 million between 1960 and 1966, and much of that funding went to ARPA. Even though some of the work that ARPA was sponsoring was unclassified, the very existence of the ARPA field offices was so sensitive that in public records of congressional hearings, the names of the countries that ARPA was involved in, other than Vietnam and Thailand, were blacked out.
The agency had opened up a small field office in Panama, whose jungles could be used to test equipment heading to Vietnam, but the best place to test counterinsurgency technology was Thailand, an American ally that was also facing a rising communist insurgency and that had environmental conditions roughly similar to Vietnam’s. The insurgency in Thailand was focused in the northeast, where communists were able to exploit ethnic and economic divisions. For the United States, the insurgency there offered an ideal proving ground for tactics and technology: Thailand shared features of Vietnam’s geography, including dense jungle and a network of waterways that proved effective for both commerce and warfare. The ARPA office in Thailand would eventually grow to hundreds of employees, making it a central hub of the agency’s global counterinsurgency network. “Thailand was basically a laboratory to conduct research on projects that would end up being used in Vietnam,” explained Stark, who was put in charge of much of the AGILE research in the region.
Stark arrived at ARPA eager and enthusiastic but with, by his own admission, no knowledge about Southeast Asia, which was clearly going to be the focus of his work. He would travel frequently around Thailand, sometimes in the ARPA-owned Caribou aircraft, which could take off from little more than a small clearing, and sometimes by helicopter, catching glimpses of Thai life in the provinces. The conditions in remote Thai villages, such as the lack of electricity and plumbing, shocked him. During one of his first visits to Thailand, Stark went with another ARPA official to a local hostess bar, where a Thai woman’s company could be bought by the hour. He paid for an hour, not out of romantic interest, but so that he could have someone who would tell him something about Thai culture, about which he knew nothing.
Despite the admitted lack of knowledge that senior officials, like Stark, had about the region, AGILE had an underl
ying philosophy that was breathtaking in scope: the agency ultimately envisioned creating a global database of people, politics, and places that could then be applied as a model anywhere in the world where the United States needed to battle insurgency. The “people and politics” branch of this model was embodied in a project called the Remote Area Conflict Information Center, or RACIC, whose objective was “to establish an information system encompassing a broad area of military and sociological information from which state-of-the-art surveys, interdisciplinary analyses and studies, and specific technical information requirements can be derived.”
The “places,” or physical environments, or “bio-ecological classification of military environment,” would be studied under a program called “Duty,” which would create a database of geographic and environmental information of regions where the United States might have to conduct counterinsurgency campaigns. “With a proper approach to the collection of environmental data from a limited number of selected areas in the world, it may be possible to arrive at generalizations which will have predictive value,” Robert Sproull, the director of ARPA, explained to Congress in 1965. “We have underway a contract, which suggests that the conditions of jungle, meteorological conditions, hydrology, and so on, can be classified into approximately 12 general categories. If on further investigation this proves to be the case, we should be able to extract from our experience in Vietnam, as an illustration, a judgment as to the applicability of certain types of equipment and material to similar jungle areas elsewhere.”
Duty, of course, was heavily influenced by ARPA’s involvement in Agent Orange and chemical defoliation. “The need for ecological and physiological studies of vegetation is clear if we are to determine the ‘why’ with respect to the effects of herbicides and then convert this information into predictive procedures,” Stark wrote in one memo, explaining the need to collect and classify environmental data. In other words, ARPA was coming up with models of places and people. Need to defoliate jungles in Latin America? ARPA could determine what sort of herbicide would work best for the local vegetation. Fighting guerrillas in the mountains? ARPA would know what equipment would be the most effective at high altitudes. Need to create a “hearts and minds” campaign for a region infiltrated by pro-Castro communists? There again, ARPA could draw on its database of social movements.
The Imagineers of War Page 17