The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  The lawmaker then pointed out that the French had been in Vietnam for a decade, with more than half a million men, and yet “they didn’t win.”

  “Yes,” Herzfeld agreed, “but they didn’t do nearly as well the things we are doing.”

  Herzfeld was wrong. In the predawn hours of January 31, 1968, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces carried out a simultaneous wave of attacks, bringing the war out of the jungles and into South Vietnam’s cities. Timed to coincide with the lunar New Year, the Tet Offensive redefined the nature of the conflict. What had been guerrilla warfare was clearly veering toward conventional war, and much of the work that ARPA had been sponsoring seemed almost beside the point. Saigon’s once bustling expatriate nightlife wound down, and ARPA decided to arm its civilian employees.

  In the end, it was Congress that put an end to ARPA’s support for the social sciences. The growing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam led lawmakers to question more of ARPA’s work, particularly AGILE. In 1969, the Democratic senator Mike Mansfield, an ardent critic of the Vietnam War, pushed through what became known as the Mansfield Amendment, which prohibited the Defense Department from funding research that “lacked a direct or apparent relationship to a specific military function.” The amendment struck at the heart of ARPA’s social science funding, ending much of the agency’s work in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. With AGILE drawing to a close, Deitchman went back to the Institute for Defense Analyses.

  Over the next few years, almost all of the governments that ARPA worked with on counterinsurgency collapsed. Only Thailand managed to avoid a total political implosion: a 1973 revolution toppled the military-led government, but the country never fell to a communist insurgency. In 1974, a communist junta took power in Ethiopia. The following year, South Vietnam fell to a conventional invasion by the North, and the country was united under a communist government; sectarian divisions in Lebanon ignited a civil war that would go on for fifteen years. In Iran, the shah’s repression, corruption, and reliance on foreign benefactors fueled a slow-burn implosion. In 1979, the regime finally collapsed. In its disastrous wake, Ruhollah Khomeini, better known in the West as the Ayatollah Khomeini, created one of the most enduring anti-American regimes in the world.

  Vietnam presaged those counterinsurgency disasters. Deitchman recalled during one trip there taking a break from endless military briefings to visit a Taoist temple with John Boles, a brigadier general in charge of the Joint Research and Test Activity at Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. They traveled together through the heat and humidity on a cyclo, a three-wheeled bicycle taxi common in Vietnam. Inside the incense-filled temple, they spotted an elderly fortune-teller. To Deitchman’s amusement, the general declared that he wanted his fortune read. The fortune-teller obliged, relating a series of seemingly prescient statements, like Boles’s recent promotion and an upcoming visit with his family. “As to the reason you are here,” the fortune-teller told the two Americans, “it will be like scissors cutting water.”

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  Deitchman at the time thought the simile was wonderful but wrong. He believed that with science the Pentagon could succeed in Vietnam. If he thought it was ironic to be told by a fortune-teller that the American mission would fail—considering that ARPA had been paying for a variety of magicians, sorcerers, and holy men to spread rumors of a Vietcong defeat—he did not mention it. Years later, however, he acknowledged the fortune-teller’s prescience. “How right he was,” Deitchman wrote, the month before he died. ARPA’s work in Vietnam—like much of what the American government did there—accomplished almost nothing.

  AGILE became about helping American conventional forces fight abroad, the very thing that the original counterinsurgents had wanted to avoid. AGILE—and counterinsurgency in Vietnam more generally—failed in large part because it was supporting a government that was incapable of providing the security the population wanted, and no amount of American forces could change that. ARPA could not change that equation. Technocrats like Deitchman and Herzfeld had deeply believed that science could solve almost any problem related to warfare, even human problems. They were ultimately proved wrong, a lesson that Deitchman took to heart. Herzfeld, however, defended the counterinsurgency work to the end as part of his enduring philosophy about ARPA’s role in coming up with solutions to big problems. “AGILE was an abysmal failure; a glorious failure,” Herzfeld later recounted without a hint of irony. “When we fail, we fail big.”

  Yet of all the failings tied to ARPA’s global experiment in counterinsurgency, perhaps the most troubling was the arrogance involved in treating nations as living test beds. It was an arrogance born, in many cases, from smart and well-meaning scientists. It was an arrogance that pervaded the agency in the mid- and late 1960s. Whether it was insurgent warfare or nuclear warfare, ARPA was going to the edge of science and policy, drawing itself into some of the biggest, most controversial, and most secretive projects of the Cold War. And like AGILE, it did not always end well.

  CHAPTER 11

  Monkey Business

  On October 22, 1964, half a mile underground in a salt mine in Mississippi, the United States set off a nuclear device about a third as powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Above where the nuclear device was detonated, someone had placed a Confederate battle flag next to a sign that read, “The South Will Rise Again.”

  It was an unexpectedly apt description for what happened next: shock waves from the nuclear explosion, which scientists had expected to be contained inside the underground cavity, sent tremors through the earth. In the nearby town of Baxterville, chimneys and shelves of the modest homes collapsed, plaster cracked, and residents returned to houses that looked as if they had been ransacked. It was what Charles Bates, chief of ARPA’s Vela Uniform program, described as a “bad roll.”

  The only atomic weapons tests conducted east of the Mississippi in the United States were carried out under the auspices of ARPA’s nuclear detection project. Carrying out a nuclear test, even so close to a populated area, was “easy in those days,” Bates explained in an interview four decades later. ARPA and the Atomic Energy Commission consulted with Senator John Stennis from Mississippi, who sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then Stennis spoke to the governor, who spoke to the sheriff, the local judge, and the local newspaper editor. Soon, everyone was on board, and 150 local residents were evacuated, whether they liked it or not. It was, after all, the Cold War, and the nation believed the American military was involved in a life-or-death battle to avoid nuclear Armageddon. “These were poor people. We put them on government per diem,” Bates said. “Even babies were on per diem for two days. They got to go to Hattiesburg and stayed in a hotel that they couldn’t afford on their own.” Adults got $10 per day, and the babies and children $5.

  The test, called the “Salmon shot,” pushed the walls of the mine out, like a “spoon into Jell-O,” as Charles Herzfeld later told Congress. Unlike Jell-O, however, the walls did not bounce back. Instead, what remained after the explosion was a spherical cavity some hundred feet in diameter filled with melted salt and poisonous gas. It took the government two years of pumping in fresh air to remove the gas and lower the interior temperature to a still scorching three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then, on December 3, 1966, ARPA set off another nuclear explosion in the same salt mine. This test, called Sterling event, involved a much smaller 380-ton nuclear explosive. Both shots were part of Project Dribble, which was designed to see whether the Soviets might be able to hide a nuclear test by conducting it inside an underground cavity, essentially muffling the signal by reducing the amplitude of the seismic waves—a process called decoupling.

  That ARPA could set off a nuclear weapon in a salt mine in Mississippi reflected the ambition, power, and reach the agency had by the mid-1960s, and not just in nuclear test detection. Its missile defense work was also expanding globally: on a tiny sliver of land in the South Pacific, known as Kwajalein Atoll and Roi-Namur, ARPA paid to build radar that looke
d like giant golf balls to track warheads launched over the Pacific. By the mid-1960s, ARPA’s nuclear test detection work, such as that conducted in Mississippi, had produced a variety of technologies, particularly sensors, and agency officials were eager to find ways to expand that work to new areas of national security.

  In 1965, ARPA established the Advanced Sensors Office, specifically to market technology—derived from its work in nuclear test detection—to the CIA and intelligence community. The office’s first director was Sam Koslov, a physicist who came to ARPA after helping the CIA and the air force develop sensor payloads for balloons that would be flown over the Soviet Union to detect nuclear tests. The new office was, as Stephen Lukasik, who later became ARPA director, described it, the agency’s “first attempt to get in bed” with the intelligence community.

  ARPA’s relationship to the intelligence community had always been fraught. The agency was established to provide technology for the military, not the intelligence community, even though there was natural overlap. In the days of the Corona spy satellite, ARPA had been an unwanted interloper from the CIA’s perspective. Similarly, ARPA’s involvement in nuclear test detection intruded on what the intelligence community believed was its territory. And, of course, there was William Godel and his work in Vietnam, which had also been viewed with suspicion by the CIA. Yet some ARPA officials looked to the intelligence community as a way to expand the agency’s influence: in essence, spies were just an additional customer, or so went the theory.

  In his memoir, Charles Herzfeld mentions almost in passing setting up the innocuous-sounding Advanced Sensors Office, which he describes as dedicated to work on “some special projects.” In congressional testimony, the office’s work was described obliquely as supporting “research in such fields as acoustics, electromagnetics, optics, biology and chemistry that have important applications to new and advanced sensor concepts and hardware.” Individual projects were rarely discussed, and when they were, many details were deleted from the public congressional record.

  The office was the most “sparsely described” of ARPA divisions, and its activities were often hidden even from senior officials, according to the agency’s history. “Its operation, greatly complicated by its relationship to intelligence applications, was questioned, from the beginning,” the history states. The office was, simply put, ARPA’s conduit to the spy world. Wrapped in a blanket of secrecy, it existed for barely seven years, and its tenure was often stormy, with a director who ran roughshod over his bosses. The Advanced Sensors Office was established in 1965 with a modest budget of just under $5 million, and its first program was Project Pandora, a top secret research program into mind control.

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  In 1965, medical workers began showing up at the American embassy in Moscow, drawing blood from the employees inside. The American diplomats were told that doctors were looking for possible exposure to a new type of virus, something not unexpected in a country known for its frigid winters.

  It was all a lie. The Moscow Viral Study, as it was called, was the cover story for the American government’s top secret investigation into the effects of microwave radiation on humans. The Soviets, it turned out, were bombarding the embassy in Moscow with low-level microwaves. The “Moscow Signal,” as officials in Washington called the radiation, was too low to do any obvious harm to the people in the building. At five microwatts per square centimeter, the signal was well below the threshold needed to heat things, as a microwave oven does. Yet it was also a hundred times more powerful than the Soviets’ maximum exposure standards, which were much more stringent than those of the United States. That was cause for alarm.

  The intelligence community was worried that the Soviets knew something about non-ionizing radiation that the United States did not. With research into the effects of low-level radiation still in its infancy, one of the first theories forwarded by the CIA was that the Soviets were trying to influence the behavior or mental state of American diplomats, or even control their minds. The United States wanted to figure out what was going on without tipping off the Soviets that they knew about the irradiation, and so the diplomats working in the embassy—and being exposed daily to the radiation—were kept in the dark. The State Department was responsible for looking at biological changes associated with microwaves, and the newly created Advanced Sensors Office at ARPA, headed by Sam Koslov, was assigned to look at the possible behavioral effects of microwaves.

  The new ARPA office was only up and running for a few months when Koslov took another position in the Pentagon. That left his deputy, Richard Cesaro, in charge. Cesaro was one of ARPA’s earliest employees, hired back in 1958, and also perhaps its most notorious, with a reputation for being creative, aggressive, and obnoxiously rude. No one quite knew what Cesaro was doing, and that was the way he liked it. Some officials, like Robert Frosch, who served as the deputy director of ARPA for several years in the 1960s, thought Cesaro might even be a resident spook. “He did his best to act like one, always leaving the suggestion that he knew things you didn’t know drifting in the air behind him,” he said.

  Cesaro was no intelligence operative, but he would surely have enjoyed the idea that senior ARPA officials thought he was. In the early days of ARPA, Cesaro had been an ardent space enthusiast, promoting the agency’s role in rocket programs. In the late 1950s, he worked with Godel when ARPA was in charge of the Corona spy satellite program. When ARPA lost its space work, Cesaro kept his ties to the intelligence world and eventually found a new home at ARPA with the Advanced Sensors Office. He was described in one official government history as “a master at maneuvers in government decision-making processes, a technical gadfly, and an aggressive proponent for using advanced technology.” Colleagues at ARPA also remembered Cesaro, who stood just over five feet tall and wore elevator shoes, as an unrepentant bully known for belittling colleagues to their faces. He reveled in his access to classified projects, and by 1965, with Godel gone, Cesaro was the senior-most ARPA official with connections to the spy community. As director of the Advanced Sensors Office, he enjoyed the prestige and independence that came with running highly classified programs, often on behalf of the intelligence community. He traveled around the world, working on secret projects that even his bosses at ARPA often could not ask him about. The Advanced Sensors Office quickly followed the tradition of spooks, according to Lukasik, which dictated, “Tell your nominal boss as little as possible about what you are doing.”

  In the past, the intelligence community had treated ARPA as either an unwanted interloper or, during better times, a convenient cover for classified projects. ARPA in its early years was often used as a “cutout,” meaning an intermediary for classified funds, a legacy of Godel’s intelligence world connections. On the books, the program would belong to ARPA, but in reality it was a facade, and even the director might have only basic knowledge of what the project involved. “We were used as a cutout for some very important classified things. The cutouts were generally there if it went wrong. It was all a guise of ARPA being very intimately involved where in reality we weren’t,” said Kent Kresa, a former senior ARPA official. “There was no money for ARPA. There wasn’t anything. We would have to show up so it looked like we were involved.”

  One example of a cutout, though former ARPA officials have never confirmed it, was the National Security Agency’s top secret spying facility in Australia, known as Pine Gap. In the early 1960s, Godel had gone to Australia to negotiate what Lee Huff described simply as a facility “to use for some of the space work.” Soon, American engineers started showing up to survey land in a valley located in central Australia, and within a few years giant golf-ball-looking radomes popped up along with security fences and more than a dozen buildings. The only public information released either by the Australian or by the American government about the facility was that it would be operated by ARPA.

  In fact, ARPA had almost nothing to do with Pine Gap’s eventual operation, short of the occasional officia
l’s visiting to give the ARPA imprimatur. The facility was a ground station for signals intelligence satellites operated by the NSA. “When I visited a foreign country not to be named, I was there as an announced ‘company man,’ ” recalled Lukasik, the former ARPA director, who even forty years later declined to specify it was Pine Gap, or in Australia. “I was the cover for their station, the owner of what the sign at the gate called ARPA Joint XXX Space Defense facility.”

  Yet the Moscow Signal investigation was a rare opportunity for ARPA to work directly with the intelligence community. In October 1965, Cesaro addressed a secret memo to ARPA’s director, Charles Herzfeld, explaining the justification for this new research effort. The White House had charged the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon to investigate the microwave assault in secret. The State Department was the lead on the program, code-named TUMS, and ARPA’s responsibility, Cesaro explained, “is to initiate a selective portion of the overall program concerned with one of the potential threats, that of radiation effects on man.” Thus was born ARPA Program Plan 562, better known by its code name, Project Pandora, an exploration of the behavioral effects of microwaves and one of the more bizarre episodes in the history of Cold War science.

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  With the passage of time, the government’s concerns about microwave-induced mind control might sound like something born of the worst sort of Cold War paranoia—the sort of thing easily parodied as a tin-foil-hat conspiracy—but set in the landscape of the 1960s, it seemed a plausible concern. The discovery of the Moscow Signal came amid a flurry of American and Soviet research reports on the possible biological effects of low-level microwave radiation. Anecdotal reports of fatigue and confusion fueled theories that microwaves could be used as a weapon for behavior modification, or even mind control. One theory that officials floated was the Soviet Union might be using microwaves to influence the behavior of embassy workers, perhaps to induce clerks to make mistakes on encrypted messages, allowing Soviet cryptographers to crack American codes. In fact, ARPA-sponsored translations of Russian-language research at the time indicated that the neurological effects of microwaves fascinated the Soviets, which American officials took as possible evidence that the Moscow Signal was some sort of weapon.