The start of that database was Thailand, where ARPA could with relative freedom collect data and test equipment. One of Thailand’s most attractive features as a war laboratory was its jungle, and so it is not surprising that its earliest use was as a proving ground for jungle communication. The project originated with the president’s brother Bobby Kennedy. According to Stark, Bobby Kennedy was chairing a meeting of the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, when he asked in frustration, “We can communicate by radio between the Earth and the Moon. How come we can’t communicate a couple of hundred yards in the jungle?”
The answer was attenuation. As radio waves propagate over wet, dense vegetation, they lose their strength. For soldiers operating in Vietnam’s jungles—whether American advisers or South Vietnamese soldiers—this presented a major problem. The proposed solution was SEACORE, short for Southeast Asia Communications Research, which was designed to address this problem through a series of data collection experiments in Thailand.
At first glance SEACORE seemed to be a project tailor made for ARPA. Here was a fundamental military problem—radio communications in the jungle—with a specific scientific challenge: attenuation caused by tropical growth. But SEACORE was troubled from the start. ARPA essentially adopted a U.S. Army program started in Panama and transported it to Southeast Asia. What started in 1962 as an eighteen-month study with a $2.5 million budget ballooned in cost and dragged out over years. An ARPA consultant hired to review SEACORE concluded in 1964 that the work “had little potential.”
Even with that negative assessment, the work stretched out over seven years and involved moving an entire laboratory to Thailand. ARPA even paid to build a faux village in the Thai jungle to carry out the doomed communications experiments. The best proposal SEACORE could come up with was a half-wave dipole placed on three elephants, which would “maintain a much more efficient antenna capability along the trail.” The idea was novel but not terribly practical for American or Vietnamese forces. The easy fix was simply to put antennas on top of tall trees.
Though the program cited some incremental improvements, like the development of a high-frequency radio that was used in Vietnam and around the world, its largest legacy was a raft of publications and annual reports. “While SEACORE may have had some marginal achievements, e.g., leaving some enhanced Thai military communications research capability, it appears to have neither substantially affected Thai military communications capabilities nor to have made a major contribution to the state of the art of communications in a jungle environment,” the ARPA history concluded.
Smaller projects fared little better. One example was a “sunlight projector” developed by ARPA for psychological operations teams. As the name implied, it was a movie projector that used a mirror—a shaving mirror in this case—to focus sunlight on movie film to project it on a screen. The idea was that this sort of ruggedized equipment could be easily carried into small villages to play government propaganda films. An American psychological operations team actually tested the device in 1965 in a small village. The results were not good: the projector ended up focusing too much sunlight and burned a hole through the film.
Not all of the Thai programs were a failure. The Mekong River surveillance system was a rare bright spot. The project was designed to come up with a comprehensive way for Thai authorities to control the flow of insurgents and smugglers along the Mekong. ARPA provided boats, radar, and training. Another successful project, called the Junk Blue Book, achieved something of a legendary status among boat enthusiasts and military personnel alike. Published in 1962, the original Junk Blue Book cataloged every type of civil watercraft (of which there were many) that traveled along South Vietnam’s waterways. ARPA then followed up with another version, for Thailand. According to Charles Herzfeld, the goal was to see if one could link the construction of junks to the region they were built and in that way help the military determine whether a particular boat was from a hostile area. Herzfeld called it “All the South China Sea Junks,” a play on the compendium All the World’s Fighting Ships, which he described as one of his favorite books from childhood. The Junk Blue Book, which was to be used by the military to help identify potential smugglers or insurgents, also captured a piece of history that is used by boat enthusiasts even today.
That rare success aside, Stark came to realize that much of the military’s—and ARPA’s—problem was that it simply did not understand the societies or culture of Southeast Asia. The agency’s staff were scientists or policy wonks, like himself, with little prior experience in the region or cultural knowledge. As Stark walked down the street in Thailand, Thai children would often call him farang kee nok, or “bird shit foreigner.” Stark would answer with farang kee Tai, or “bird shit Thai.”
In northeast Thailand, Stark was overseeing ARPA’s Rural Security Systems Program, which was applying systems analysis—a method that looks at each part of a large organization or endeavor—to every aspect of counterinsurgency, from policing to economic development. Pentagon-style systems analysis was even taught to the Thais, sometimes with humorous results. American military officers, known for elaborate slide briefings, would explain the Rural Security Systems Program with an infographic comparing different elements of the project to the pillars of a Greek temple, a favorite icon among defense technocrats (it was used, for example, in the Institute for Defense Analyses logo). The Thais attempted to mimic the Americans, but because a Greek temple was an unfamiliar symbol in Thailand, they used a diagram of a chicken to depict the various elements of systems analysis.
The contractors running the Rural Security Systems Program had little experience in Thailand, and the idea of reducing society down to a set of variables that could be manipulated proved quixotic. One former senior ARPA official called it “laughable” and “really bad.” ARPA’s employees also tried their best to parrot the language of systems analysis, though they often did not do much better than the Thai chicken. Stark remembers giving one briefing on Thailand, trying to show how the entire program worked. “I remember taking this big sheet of paper, and in the middle I had village security and I had little circles; it must have been twenty different programs and how they all intermixed and really fit into this whole thing,” he recalled. “[The official] liked it. He said, ‘That all makes sense.’ ”
No, Stark thought to himself, it really did not make any sense. Stark was beginning to think the entire program was garbage, yet ARPA management disagreed: they promoted Stark to a senior management position and sent him to the White House to have his picture taken with President Lyndon Johnson.
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ARPA’s program needed professional help, so Stark in 1967 turned to scientific experts, convening a high-level advisory board that included social scientists. He took the experts to Thailand for a weeklong visit to review ARPA’s programs and make suggestions on improving them. Stark recalled one eminent Yale economist expounding for ten minutes on variations within Thai villages in the size of houses and quality of clothing people wore. Asked what could account for such discrepancies, Bob Kickert, ARPA’s resident anthropologist who specialized in Thailand, rolled his eyes and replied, “Wealth.” (Kickert, one of the few agency employees with actual expertise in the culture of the region, would later quit after drinking himself silly on gin during a year spent in a remote village near the border with Burma.)
It got worse. Stark asked the JASONs, the genius-packed group that advised ARPA, to look at counterinsurgency strategies. The group had been involved in Vietnam, but mostly informally, by suggesting possible technological novelties for the battlefield, many impractical. In 1966, for example, Nicholas Christofilos, the JASON who once suggested a planetary force field, forwarded a proposal to his friend John S. Foster Jr., the director of defense research and engineering, for detecting hidden weapons caches and munitions by suspending a two-hundred- to three-hundred-foot wire between two helicopters flying parallel to each other. The helicopters would fly over an area where suspecte
d Vietcong might be lurking, and weapons caches could be detected by measuring the frequency change of inductance in the wire caused by the presence of ferromagnetic materials. Herzfeld greeted the idea with enthusiasm. “The approach appears feasible and is worth pursuing,” he wrote in a brief note to Foster, who agreed. Foster called it “a unique approach that merits further consideration.”
Christofilos’s idea was forwarded to a program manager at ARPA, who pointed out that, although a novel idea, “the suspension of a wire between helicopters will present an intolerable safety hazard to pilots, besides being most difficult to achieve.” The Christofilos proposal appears to have been tested but, not surprisingly, never used in combat.
The JASONs were mostly physicists, but Stark thought their reputation for brilliance meant they might have some ideas on running a counterinsurgency program in Southeast Asia, so he gathered them for a series of conferences in Cape Cod in the summer of 1967 to discuss the war. They did have ideas, though not particularly good ones. Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist, whimsically suggested ARPA look at the effects of various security tactics, like cutting off the ears of insurgents. The minutes of that meeting, with the “ear cutting” comment, were later leaked to the press, leading to campus demonstrations against the JASONs. Just a couple years later, Gell-Mann won the Nobel Prize for his theory of quarks, confirming that brilliance in physics does not necessarily translate into other fields.
Stark knew the situation on the ground in Vietnam was getting worse by the day, and it was not clear that science, or scientists, were going to help. In fact, it would soon become clear they were making it worse. Counterinsurgency was premised on helping the local government fight communist rebels so that the United States would not have to commit its own troops, but in Vietnam, foreign assistance to an inept and corrupt government was instead fueling the insurgency. As counterinsurgency work grew, the ranks of the Vietcong swelled with new recruits. Yet ARPA’s attention had already moved beyond Southeast Asia.
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On the afternoon of June 3, 1963, Ruhollah Khomeini was driven through the unlit streets to the Fayziya madrassa in the holy city of Qom, Iran. Followed by a procession of students along the way, the popular imam was greeted by an overflowing crowd, but no electricity. In recent months, the government had been ramping up the White Revolution, a secularization campaign that was aimed at undermining the clergy’s power. The authorities had cut off power to the entire city of Qom in anticipation of the imam’s speech; his lectures had become so popular they were traded on cassettes. Khomeini still spoke; his microphone was hooked up to a generator.
The timing was auspicious; it was Ashura, the day when Shiite Muslims mourn Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet. Imam Khomeini had been escalating his rhetoric in recent months against the shah of Iran, whose regime he regarded as a puppet for the West. This speech was a watershed, however. Khomeini had decided to take aim directly at the shah, the monarch who had ruled Iran since a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 overthrew the popular and democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. “You helpless creature,” Khomeini said, addressing the shah directly, “you don’t realize that on the day when a true outburst occurs, not one of these so-called friends of yours will want to know you.”
Khomeini was arrested shortly after his speech, sparking a round of protests and arrests. The shah’s rule, and Khomeini’s popularity, were exposing cracks in Iranian society along religious and class lines, exacerbated by nationalist concerns about foreign meddling. An insurgency in Iran was growing, just as it had in Vietnam, and in other parts of the world, and ARPA saw an opportunity.
In December 1963, Rand issued a secret report commissioned by ARPA titled “Support Capabilities for Limited War in Iran,” which looked at the potential of either a direct Soviet invasion of Iran or Soviet support for a local insurgency. It concluded that the United States should focus on improving Iran’s own defense capabilities. The next year, ARPA formally opened its first Middle East office, called the ARPA Research and Development Field Office, Middle East. Based in Beirut, Lebanon, it was, in theory, supposed to work with local governments to help strengthen their research and development capabilities. The key focus for the new office was not actually Beirut—that was just a convenient place to run the program—but Iran.
“Iran has been the primary focus of project operations,” wrote a Pentagon official in a classified memo explaining ARPA’s Middle East office. This focus, the letter goes on to state, was due to several factors, including the Iranian leadership’s “receptivity” to the types of projects that ARPA was proposing. Just as Thailand was to be the “soft side” to test counterinsurgency techniques for Vietnam, Iran was the new counterinsurgency proving ground for the Middle East. It had all the right conditions: a friendly government, a military in the midst of modernization, and a low-level insurgency. The Pentagon official cited “Iran’s attractiveness as a laboratory to study aspects of remote area conflicts.”
Iran was the next frontier: an American ally facing challenges of legitimacy, internal unrest, and looming concerns about Soviet interference. In fact, expanding to the Middle East, according to secret memos, had been a goal of AGILE almost from the start of the program.
One of ARPA’s largest projects in Iran was working with the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, which was heavily involved in counterinsurgency. In 1942, H. Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., chief of the New Jersey State Police, was sent to Iran to help to remake the gendarmerie “in the mold of the New Jersey State Police.” Schwarzkopf, whose son would lead American forces in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, was credited with remaking the gendarmerie into an effective counterinsurgency force that put down tribal rebellions in Kurdistan and Iranian Azerbaijan.
Just as ARPA had tried to help the South Vietnamese military use sensors to detect the movements of the Vietcong, it attempted to apply some of this same methodology and technology to Iran. In Iran, though, the infiltration of the country’s borders had little to do with arms smuggling and more to do with the market for illegal drugs. “The biggest challenge was opium smuggling,” Herzfeld recalled. “I spent a fair amount of time on that.”
For several years, ARPA paid to teach the Iranian forces to use counter-infiltration technology, like seismic intrusion detectors, break wires, and heat sensors. While focused primarily on the gendarmerie, ARPA also held demonstrations for other Iranian security agencies, including the notorious SAVAK, the shah’s secret police. Herzfeld recounted that one popular method for drug smuggling at the time was to use water trucks: the front of the truck would be carrying water, and a back partition would contain opium. ARPA demonstrated how, by using infrared sensors, it was possible to spot temperature differences in the trucks that indicated if they were carrying opium. Eventually, however, ARPA was told by the Iranian government to stop its work on detecting heroin smuggling because it had “gotten too close to the top level traffickers,” Herzfeld recounted in his memoir. “That ended that.”
The problem with the ARPA counter-smuggling program, like almost all of the agency’s work in Iran, was that it presumed the Iranian government wanted to solve the same problems the United States wanted to solve. But the Iranian government was rife with corruption and dysfunction; members of the shah’s family were believed to be involved in the opium trade, and the shah himself lifted the ban on opium cultivation in 1969. Declassified reports from the AGILE files note that as with other elements of ARPA’s work in Iran the gendarmerie rarely if ever followed through with what was suggested. Nonetheless, ARPA persevered for several years, trying to teach the gendarmerie how to use technology for aerial and ground surveillance, as well as along coastal areas. One ARPA report described the surveillance work as “trivial and floundering” and claimed the Iranians were not actually providing any support.
In Lebanon, ARPA funded the American University of Beirut under a project called Factors in Regional Change. Supported by ARPA, the university conducted studies on everything f
rom a confessional census of Lebanon, an extremely sensitive topic in a country that apportioned power based on religion, to students’ political attitudes. The university looked at ARPA’s money as supporting basic research, not tied to any specific military goal.
Herzfeld, however, believed the Middle East office provided valuable intelligence for the military. “They gave us lots of insight about what was going on in the various then small insurgencies in the Arab countries,” he said of the Lebanon office. In Beirut, for example, ARPA at one point planned to fund the university to conduct what Herzfeld described as “an enormous project” to analyze the written records of Muslim families in the region. “Absolutely everything is written down. It goes back at least a thousand years,” he said. “We thought we’d mine that.” The goal was to see if the family records might provide hints to potential conflict and insurgencies. “Can you detect, or get a guess early on, who is likely to go fight against whom,” Herzfeld said. “I guess one way you look at it: What might have been the sources of future insurgencies. Which families?”
ARPA’s achievements in the Middle East never matched its ambitions. In theory, the Beirut office covered all of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa, but ARPA only managed to actually run programs in Iran, Lebanon, and Ethiopia. Official reports back to Washington would often cite successes that sounded odd for an “advanced projects” agency. “We have recently completed development of a field ration so that Ethiopian military forces now no longer must live off the land,” one report enthused.
The Imagineers of War Page 18