The Imagineers of War
Page 19
Whether there was a rhyme or reason to ARPA’s work was unclear, but even those within AGILE seemed to recognize that the Middle East office lacked a larger purpose. And yet it was expanding to new regions. Herzfeld spent several years—and many trips—traveling to India to forge a research and development partnership with the country’s military establishment. In 1962, communist China and India went to war over a disputed border region, with much of the fighting taking place in mountainous areas. India had learned a great deal about fighting in high-altitude conditions, and Herzfeld thought the United States could learn from India’s experience. In the end, the White House quashed the nascent partnership over rising tensions in the region, a rare defeat for the rapidly expanding AGILE program.
ARPA’s staff often knew even less about the Middle East than they did about Southeast Asia. Donald Hess, the senior financial administrator for ARPA, recalled being sent to Capitol Hill to discuss the agency’s budget request for funding its Middle East work. “We wanted to open another AGILE base somewhere in the Middle East,” he said, though he could not recall where. “It looked to be small enough that nobody cared.” The lawmakers, however, began to pepper him with questions. Why was ARPA opening the office? Who told ARPA to do this? What was the office going to do? Hess admitted he had no idea, other than some vague notion that the White House wanted it. No one, at least among ARPA’s rank and file, really seemed to understand the overall goal.
Stark, the AGILE program manager, traveled multiple times to Lebanon, but he admitted recalling more details about his food and the hotel than he did about any of the work. At one point, he said, the agency was advising both Israel and Lebanon on how to defend one from the other. “We did a study for the Lebanese on planning to evacuate villages in southern Lebanon in the event of an Israeli invasion. What would be a good way to protect the people?” Stark said. “At the same time, we were working with the Israelis to protect their borders.”
It was not that the two projects were inherently contradictory but simply that ARPA did not seem to have any larger goal other than planting its flag in the region, and that, according to Stark, came to characterize much of what he saw throughout AGILE, from Thailand to Lebanon. It was expansion for the sake of expansion.
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When he first started at ARPA, Stark, like many, had been enamored of William Godel and his intelligence exploits; the two men grew to be friends, and his family sometimes spent Sundays at the Godel house in Virginia. Stark had been enthusiastic about the idea of creating a worldwide counterinsurgency laboratory. At one point he even forwarded a proposal to Godel for expanding AGILE domestically, warning of “an impending insurgency situation in the United States resulting from racial unrest.” This conflict, he said, was similar to the types of insurgencies that AGILE was helping combat around the world. “It is my opinion that the military should start thinking about this situation in its most drastic form,” Stark wrote, citing leaders like Malcolm X. “A contingency planning group in DOD could begin to think about the various forms such an insurgency could take, the requirements for preventative military action, and the abundant problems associated with this potentially large scale conflict.” There is no evidence that ARPA actually followed up on Stark’s suggestion, however.
The closest AGILE ever got to applying its counterinsurgency work at home in the United States was a secret assignment that followed the assassination of President Kennedy. On the Monday after Kennedy was shot, ARPA, as part of Project AGILE, launched a research program focused on presidential protection. The work was given the formal name Star, short for Strategic Threat Analysis and Research, a secret project to help protect the president of the United States. Privately, however, Harold Brown, ARPA’s boss, began calling the work “Operation Barn Door,” because, as Frosch said, “that’s what you [close] after the horses have already escaped.”
With its move into presidential protection, ARPA had now carved out a mission in almost every critical area of national security. Its new work was problematic from the start, however. The newly sworn-in president, Lyndon Johnson, was going to be running for reelection soon, and he was not interested in anything that would make it look as if he were hiding behind bulletproof glass. “We couldn’t possibly let the project be known,” recalled Robert Sproull in an interview years later. “As soon as it became known, it would be killed, and that was complicated because ordinary security isn’t enough. You know the Pentagon leaks like a sieve. So, how are we going to keep it quiet?”
It did not take long, as predicted, for word of the project to leak out. In response to a congressional inquiry about Project Star, Herzfeld, the deputy director, wrote to lawmakers to say that ARPA only provided $15,000 to Aberdeen Proving Ground to hasten development of some armor materials for the presidential limousine. “The Defense Department has, of course, no responsibility with respect to the use of the automobile by the President,” Herzfeld wrote. The letter was at best misleading: it failed to mention that ARPA was helping to design a new armored limousine for the president, not to mention half a dozen other related research projects that would likely have raised eyebrows in Congress.
Putting Star in the AGILE office was a way of conducting the work in secrecy; information about the project was shared on a strict “need to know” basis. Like other parts of AGILE, Project Star consisted of a string of failed or rejected ideas. One proposal, for example, suggested using chemical weapons to protect the president. “There also exists a need for a system which would make an unfriendly crowd become friendly almost instantaneously,” one note in the files stated. “This goes beyond the desire to divert a crowd, as could be done by the prompt and generous use of cash money. The possible use of gasses, sound, lights and other chemical biological or psychological agents to achieve such a change as well as other attributes they might possess for crowd control will require further study.” Though there are a number of references to psychological agents in the Star records, it does not appear that any ideas were actually tested in the lab, let alone on people, at least in the United States.
Another proposal examined under Star was to have a continuous stream of air flowing in front of the president’s speaker stand. It was thought this airflow might slightly deflect bullets or other projectiles, at least enough to protect the president from a direct hit. Simple calculations showed that the airstream would have a minimal effect on anything except tomatoes, and even then the ARPA-funded analysts predicted the thrower would be able to correct his or her aim by the second or third throw.
Other ideas of more technical promise—such as creating a metal screen of rotating rods that would deflect bullets while still allowing visibility of the president—were never pursued, probably for practical reasons. Star also included brainstorming sessions that produced ideas that ranged from the mind-numbingly obvious, like having the president wear body armor, to the exotically far-fetched, like a “mirage producing system” that involved heating the air or gas around the president to change the index of refraction (in other words distorting light, which would make it harder for an assassin to take aim). Some suggested tactics surely failed the proverbial snicker test, such as having the president continuously “move about when in the car” or use armor disguised as a sunshade, which might require “spreading false weather reports” to justify its use.
Despite high ambitions, the only new technology that appeared to result from Star was a comical high-powered squirt gun, which was designed to disable a single person in a crowd and could be carried and used much like a regular gun. The nonlethal weapon would fire a high-power stream of liquid containing capsicum, the active ingredient in tear gas, disabling a potential assassin. The liquid squirt gun, though built, suffered from the practical limitations of such weapons. Getting the water to go out in a relatively concentrated stream beyond twenty feet was difficult (and if someone was indeed an imminent threat to the president, the more likely gun of choice for any Secret Service agent would be a regular servic
e weapon). Though the squirt guns were delivered in 1965, it appears that they were never used and eventually misplaced.
ARPA’s final contributions included its work on the upgraded presidential vehicle, modest improvements to the presidential transport helicopter, some two dozen studies covering various aspects of presidential security, and a never-used squirt gun. Beyond armoring the presidential vehicle, the only substantive Project Star innovation that Harold Brown could recall being implemented was having an airstream directed at flags positioned behind the president. “The rationale was that a waving flag background could confuse a shooter’s aim,” Brown recalled. “How that has worked out in theory or practice I have no idea.”
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Project AGILE’s approach of treating the entire world as a living laboratory had a fundamental problem: real people were living in those laboratories, and some of the agency’s ideas looked at best callous or at worst sinister. ARPA pursued a “people sniffer” that would, as the name suggested, hunt Vietcong fighters by sensing the presence of ammonium from urine. The “Airborne Concealed Personnel Detector” was placed on Huey helicopters and flown over the jungles of Vietnam. ARPA even funded a study to see whether the common green bottle fly, known for its ability to smell from hundreds of yards away, could be used to detect humans. To be fair, ARPA often turned down some of the more gruesome ideas, like a proposal from Hughes Aircraft Company for “nonlethal decay mechanisms,” which involved spreading tainted grain and human parasites that might lower the morale of the Vietcong.
Yet of all ARPA’s experiments, defoliation proved the most troubling. While the air force’s operational responsibility for chemical defoliation overshadowed ARPA’s role (and ARPA happily let its paternity be forgotten), the agency’s involvement with Agent Orange and the other “rainbow herbicides” extended well into the war, with the agency’s studying its effects extensively in Vietnam and Thailand, at times with Herzfeld’s encouragement. An ARPA document that includes a “Follow-Up to Dr. Herzfeld’s Trip Report” from November 1965 notes a request for an update to a study on “Human effects of crop destruction and the potential use of crop destruction,” which is described “as a large scale countermeasure” to the Vietcong. A handwritten report labeled “Dr. Herzfeld’s Trip Actions” assigned the herbicide study to Stark as a “high priority.”
Stark, however, was beginning to have serious doubts about the entire approach to counterinsurgency “laboratories,” whether in the Middle East, Asia, or the United States. After his friend and mentor Godel was fired and imprisoned, he began to feel ARPA’s programs were becoming unmoored. Stark’s disillusionment with the science of counterinsurgency had been deepening for some time. His trip reports over the years grew longer, and more dismal, noting the constant renaming of failed projects, like strategic hamlets, which had become the “new rural life hamlets.” In 1967, he finally quit in disgust. “During my five years at ARPA, I spent $100 million of the taxpayers’ hard earned money,” Stark later wrote. “I’d like to have it all back.”
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Whatever the concerns of personnel like Stark, ARPA’s experiments were about to have a fundamental impact on the way the American military was conducting the war in Vietnam. Back in 1964, Godel had laid out a proposal to stop the flow of Vietcong fighters and arms into South Vietnam by “sealing” the border using “novel” technologies, a nearly monumental task given the country’s combination of mountainous and jungle terrain. Part of the goal was to cut off the Vietcong’s resupply route, known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which wound its way from North to South Vietnam, snaking at times into Laos and Cambodia.
The idea of experimenting with some sort of virtual barrier using modern technology—because a physical barrier would be impossible across that geographic expanse—had been around since the early 1960s. Maxwell Taylor had proposed the idea to Edward Lansdale and William Godel during the 1962 study trip. Lansdale had no interest in the project, so ARPA under Godel pursued it. The resulting proposal called for deforesting 80 to 90 percent of a crucial 180-mile portion of South Vietnam’s border with Laos that formed a part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A handwritten list of proposed technologies was indeed novel, if in some cases horrifying. The barrier would require 100,000 “throw-away” shotguns, 250,000 rocket pistols, one million tetrahedrons (ground-based spikes, also known as caltrops), two million mines disguised as rocks, twenty thousand bomblets loaded with chemical defoliants, and an unidentified amount of “insect attractants” (as opposed to insect repellant). Perhaps most disturbingly, the proposal suggested twenty-five thousand “biological weapons systems,” without specifying what those weapons might be or how they would be used.
The border-sealing proposal was initially rejected at the time as too expensive. Seymour Deitchman, a Pentagon engineer and counterinsurgency adviser to Harold Brown, argued that pursuing the proposal “in South Vietnam requires, I believe, a major strategic decision to pursue the war in this manner, because extension of border security would have to be accompanied by a significantly larger combat operation in the border area than is now contemplated.”
Elements of the proposal did move forward, nevertheless. In March 1965, for example, ARPA conducted what could be considered the agency’s most ambitious experiment in its Southeast Asian laboratory. The experiment was carried out as a secret mission conducted by the 315th Air Commando Group, targeting part of the Boi Loi Forest, which the Vietcong had been using as cover. A classified history of Strategic Air Command called the raid “one of the most unusual uses made of B-52s in South Vietnam.” That was because the purpose of the raid was not simply to bomb the Vietcong but rather to spark an out-of-control forest fire using a combination of defoliants and incendiary bombs that would eliminate ground cover for insurgents.
The bombing raid was an experiment in using forest fire as a weapon, an extension of ARPA’s defoliation work. It also demonstrated how a small-scale effort to clear vegetation and prevent ambushes had ballooned into a wide-scale program with a life of its own. ARPA had enlisted the Department of Agriculture to help with the ambitious effort. A few months prior, American military aircraft had sprayed the area with defoliants to dry out the vegetation. The idea was that once it was dry, it would be possible to spark a fire. But Mother Nature was not cooperating. On March 3, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, sent fifteen B-52s loaded with incendiary bombs out to the forest, but a sudden rainstorm forced them to return. Another raid a week later was carried out successfully, though it failed to spark the anticipated forest fire. The operation, code-named Sherwood Forest, was a failure.
The agency did not give up, however. The next year, ARPA sponsored Hot Tip I and II, which involved sending some seventeen B-52 bombers from Guam to drop 172 tons of incendiary cluster bombs on another forest. This time, ARPA claimed the mission was an “outstanding operational success,” meaning that the aircraft had dropped the bombs on target. But it was a “qualified technical success,” meaning that no forest fire was ignited. In other words, Hot Tip, like Sherwood Forest, failed. A third attempt, in 1967, code-named Pink Rose, would also fail; rain following the bombing squelched any flames. “The country doesn’t burn well,” deadpanned Craig Chandler, a Forest Service employee who worked on the ARPA project.
Creating man-made forest fires evoked memories of some of the least popular aspects of World War II, like the Dresden firebombing, and it had little to do with the sorts of hearts-and-minds pacification campaign that was supposed to be part of counterinsurgency. After three failed attempts, the forest fire as a weapon project was discarded. “This was clearly one of those ideas that should have been given the very quietest funeral,” an ARPA official told Science magazine, when the project came to light five years later. The forest fire efforts were emblematic of much of what was wrong with Project AGILE by mid-1965. Quick-reaction projects were giving way to operations, like Sherwood Forest, to support American, rather than Vietnamese, forces. It was not working.
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Despite those setbacks, the proposal to seal South Vietnam’s border was picked up by Seymour Deitchman, who had advised against pursuing the idea when Godel had forwarded it just a few years prior. In 1966, Deitchman was working with the JASONs, the ARPA-funded advisory group, looking for ways to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The JASONs devised a wholly unique and arguably improved border system—a virtual barrier made up of thousands of air-dropped ground sensors linked to a computer system that would cue strike aircraft to a suspected infiltration. (Prior to the JASON proposal, ideas for a virtual barrier had either relied on mines and other antipersonnel weapons or presumed that someone on the ground would have to manually relay information about an incursion.) Unlike Godel’s proposal, which had floundered, the JASON proposal went all the way up to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who approved the electronic barrier project. It was not to be an ARPA project, however. McNamara instead assigned it to a secret Pentagon organization obtusely named the Defense Communications Planning Group. The electronic barrier became part of a larger highly secret project initially code-named Practice Nine, and later Dye Marker and Igloo White. “ARPA was cut out of the loop,” explained Stephen Lukasik, who became director a few years later.
ARPA was relegated to a bit player, providing some of the sensors used by the air force, but had no real role in the overall design of the project. James Tegnelia, who worked on the barrier for the army in Vietnam, said that ARPA’s contributions were highly classified and mostly involved providing hardware for the barrier. “A lot of what we called ‘dirty tricks,’ all classified programs, were done by ARPA,” said Tegnelia, who later served as an acting director of ARPA in the 1980s. “Silent pistols and chemical darts that would poison you, those kinds of things, strange stuff.”