Richard Cesaro never attained that level of personal notoriety, but he asserted, even after he retired, that the Moscow Signal remained an open question. “I look at it as still a major, serious, unsettled threat to the security of the United States,” he said, when interviewed about it nearly two decades later. “If you really make the breakthrough, you’ve got something better than any bomb ever built, because when you finally come down the line you’re talking about controlling people’s minds.”
Perhaps, but Pandora resonated for years as the secrecy surrounding the project generated public paranoia and distrust of government research on radiation safety. Project Pandora was often cited as proof that the government knew more about the health effects of electromagnetic radiation than it was letting on. The government did finally inform embassy personnel in the 1970s about the microwave radiation, prompting, not surprisingly, a slew of lawsuits. In the end, the government found that the best method for dealing with the incessant Moscow Signal was to build an aluminum screen to shield the building from microwaves. “The lesson learned is to treat your people as if they have some intelligence,” said Koslov, reflecting on the controversy.
The armed drone program also crashed and burned. In 1972, Lukasik transferred Nite Gazelle to the military services, which discontinued the project, though the QH-50 was used in tests for a number of years. Lukasik called Nite Gazelle a “showy stunt” that failed. The legacy of ARPA’s work on armed drones would not become clear until thirty years later, when, in the weeks following September 11, 2001, the air force took a QH-50 and put a Hellfire missile on it. The test was a failure. “The bird tumbled out of the sky,” recalled Peter Papadakos, the son of the man who designed the QH-50. It did not matter, because at that point the air force and the CIA had a new armed drone, called Predator, based on yet another ARPA project. Afghanistan, and not Vietnam, would ultimately be the testing ground for armed drones.
With seemingly little to show from its Vietnam work, let alone Pandora, ARPA was losing support in the Defense Department. Vietnam began to take over the Pentagon figuratively and literally. ARPA’s offices were moved out of the Pentagon to make way for analysts working on the Vietnam War, and the agency moved into leased office space on Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia. It was a clear demotion for ARPA and distanced the agency even further from the Pentagon’s senior leadership. Herzfeld, the director, was appalled, calling the move the loss of a “great gift” for the Defense Department. “I argued very hard against moving ARPA out and lost, just plain lost,” Herzfeld recalled.
By the fall of 1967, Herzfeld found himself pushed out of ARPA. Domestic opposition to an escalating conventional war was bringing the agency’s projects under even greater scrutiny, and ARPA was facing new challenges to its existence.
CHAPTER 12
Bury It
On July 16, 1969, at 9:32 a.m., Apollo 11 lifted off from Florida on its way to fulfilling President Kennedy’s vision of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The rocket that launched the Apollo mission was the Saturn V, a descendant of the Saturn rocket that ARPA’s first director had fought for over “dying and bleeding bodies,” as William Godel had put it. The rocket that led to man’s first steps on the moon was credited to Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists at NASA. The critical contribution that ARPA made to that mission had been long forgotten. By the time NASA reached the moon, ARPA was stuck in Vietnam.
Earlier that year, when Richard M. Nixon was sworn in as president, troop levels in Vietnam peaked at more than half a million. That same year, the journalist Seymour Hersh published shocking details of a massacre conducted by American troops in My Lai, a village in South Vietnam. My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg: the American public was being flooded with graphic pictures and reporting depicting the scale of civilian suffering and death. The war was reaching new heights of unpopularity, and ARPA was under attack.
Cyrus Vance, when he was the deputy secretary of defense, had even advocated disbanding the agency. Congress also started to wonder why the Pentagon needed ARPA at all. “Would it be desirable to abolish ARPA as such and consolidate this work elsewhere?” asked Representative George Mahon, the Texas lawmaker and frequent ARPA critic, during one contentious hearing.
By the early 1970s, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced a new policy called Vietnamization, which entailed shifting responsibility to the South Vietnamese government. Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser, was in secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese government. The American involvement in Vietnam was coming to an end, and so was ARPA’s work there. The Vietnam War, and ARPA’s involvement in it, had made the agency a punching bag on Capitol Hill. “Congress hated AGILE,” Stephen Lukasik said.
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Lukasik, who had been serving as the deputy director, was appointed director in 1970, just as relations between the White House and the Pentagon were about to go nuclear. In June 1971, The New York Times began publishing excerpts culled from a top secret Pentagon study that revealed the missteps and deceptions that had allowed the Vietnam War to escalate. United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, better known as the Pentagon Papers, had been commissioned several years earlier by the then defense secretary, Robert McNamara, to review the history of the conflict. It did not take long before a Pentagon military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg was identified as the leaker.
Relations between the White House and the Pentagon were strained even before the leak. Nixon was suspicious of the Defense Department’s civilian leadership, and Henry Kissinger did not want to share power with the Pentagon. Together, the two men made a habit of bypassing the Office of the Secretary of Defense, going straight to military commanders. The explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers cemented Nixon’s distrust.
In 1972, Nixon slashed the number of personnel from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a move meant to reduce the power of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. To protect its bureaucracy, the Pentagon began designating offices as field agencies to immunize them from reductions. On March 23 of that year, ARPA officially became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which meant that ARPA would hence be DARPA. On its own, the new name had no significance for the agency’s direction, but it was a symbolic defeat. Lukasik despised the name change, insisting that the acronym remain “ARPA,” which it did, until the end of his directorship. “This was not a minor point of civil disobedience,” Lukasik said. “I said freely that DARPA sounded like a dog food.”
The renaming of the agency was the culmination of several years of decline. In September 1967, Lukasik, then the deputy director, had been summoned along with the agency’s acting director to the Pentagon, where John S. Foster Jr. informed them that ARPA’s missile defense work—the agency’s second-largest program—was being transferred to the army. By the early 1970s, there was talk of taking away ARPA’s nuclear test detection work. It stayed, but it was growing smaller every year as arms control faded into the background of national policy. The agency’s budget was also declining, from around $300 million in the mid-1960s to just over $200 million by the early 1970s.
The agency Lukasik took over in the early 1970s was very different from the one that had existed just a decade prior. In ARPA’s turbulent, and still quite brief, existence, it had transformed itself from a space agency into an agency that specialized in nuclear test detection, missile defense, and, somewhat incongruently, counterinsurgency. Missile defense was gone, arms control had taken a backseat to deterrence, and counterinsurgency was ending, too. Now, as Lukasik described the situation, “the flow of ‘Presidential assignments’ had dried up and we had to figure out what to do absent guidance from the highest levels of government.”
Pushed out of the Pentagon and Vietnam, ARPA was in search of a mission, and there was no clear road map. One of the earliest justifications for the agency had been to “avoid technological surprise,” meaning that its mission was to pr
event another Sputnik, or an unexpected technological advance. That phrase actually did little to guide the research agency, in Lukasik’s view, because it could encompass anything. “It did not serve as a useful planning concept,” Lukasik said. “There is too much technology, too many possible wars.”
Lukasik’s predecessor, Eberhardt Rechtin, had focused on quietly getting rid of projects that were subject to congressional scrutiny, like a $1 million “mechanical elephant.” Operated by a man sitting inside the machine using hydroelectric controls, the four-legged “Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine” was designed to navigate the jungles of Vietnam, hauling equipment for soldiers. Rechtin called it a “damned fool” project bound to land ARPA in hot water.
There were, by the late 1960s, quite a few “damned fool” projects, or at least projects that were not going to change the course of the war and risked making the agency a target of ridicule. ARPA, for example, was paying for an army project to develop a jet belt, a wearable device that would allow soldiers to fly around the battlefield. Developed by the Bell Aerosystems Company, the jet belt had been under development for several years and finally went into flight tests in the late 1960s. The innovative but unwieldy contraption required the pilot to wear something akin to a fiberglass corset, to which the engine and the flight control system would be attached. The jet belt, the company claimed, would “open the door to a new type of counter-guerilla operations.” The as-yet-undeveloped mini-rocket system would allow soldiers to fire weapons while flying over the battlefield, according to Bell. The problem with the jet belt, however, was limitations in the technology, as well as the concept of operations. Even though the company had moved from a pressurized hydrogen peroxide rocket (which allowed just seconds of flight) to a mini turbojet that ran on kerosene, the system could still only carry enough fuel to allow the soldier to travel for a few minutes—not enough to really be useful in battle. ARPA eventually stopped funding for it, and the jet belt never reached Vietnam, though a modified version of the engine ended up being used later in air force cruise missiles.
Other Vietnam technology projects were more successful but also died with the end of the war. ARPA, for example, funded a silent helicopter for the CIA based on the Hughes OH-6A light helicopter. Two silent helicopters were eventually built and used to tap phone lines in North Vietnam. The aircraft were retired after the war, however. “The agency got rid of it because they thought they had no more use for it,” James Glerum, a CIA official at the time they were fielded, later told Air & Space Magazine.
A similar fate befell ARPA’s silent aircraft, called the QT-2, which was designed for “covert air operations.” The silent aircraft was based on the Schweizer SGS 2-32 sailplane, converted into a powered aircraft using a car engine. The idea was that such a plane, which would have removable wings, could be easily transported where needed, assembled, and then flown on reconnaissance missions with a two-man crew. The concept, widely regarded as innovative, did lead to the eventual deployment in 1970 of the YO-3 “Quiet Star” aircraft, but the planes were mothballed after the Vietnam War. Counterinsurgency, in all its multitude of incarnations—technological and analytical—was losing currency.
When Lukasik was formally appointed director, he recognized that something needed to be done with the agency, which was in turmoil. Lukasik had inherited a few career personnel, like Richard Cesaro, who felt as if they answered to no one, even the director. In 1971, on Lukasik’s first official day as director, he fired Cesaro, for “general dishonesty.” Getting rid of Cesaro was just the first step: the real problem was Vietnam, and the Project AGILE field offices. The AGILE name was radioactive on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers associated it with the disastrous war in Vietnam. “AGILE, counterinsurgency, was an embarrassment,” Lukasik said.
ARPA in the 1970s was still a young agency. It had been around long enough to have a reputation but not a legacy. For ARPA to survive, Lukasik needed to find new areas to pursue and redefine the agency’s role in research and defense strategy. First, he had to kill AGILE.
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In Washington, the key to killing something controversial is to never admit you actually killed it. To do that, you first change the name. Perhaps a year later you change the name again, to confuse those who might be tracking it. Then you kill it. By that point, most people will have forgotten about it. Faced with an impending congressional showdown over AGILE, Lukasik sat down with his deputy Don Cotter, a longtime government scientist known for his frank advice. “Look, the Nixon Doctrine says we have got to strengthen our allies so that they can take care of themselves,” Cotter told Lukasik.
Cotter suggested renaming AGILE to sound like something that would fit under the Nixon Doctrine. Lukasik agreed and coined a new term for AGILE, the wonderfully bland-sounding “Overseas Defense Research.” The move was, he later admitted, an effort just to “bury it someplace” deep inside ARPA’s bureaucracy. The program would no longer have anything to do with battling guerrillas. “We shifted from little guys with insurgency problems to bigger guys facing the Soviet Union,” Lukasik said, and in the process performed some alchemy. “I’ve now moved counterinsurgency from shit to gold.”
On the day after Christmas 1972, Lukasik sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Laird titled “Taking Stock,” which laid out the agency’s work over the previous four years and his views for the future. The agency’s work abroad was couched carefully in the language of the Nixon Doctrine and Vietnamization. ARPA was no longer helping governments fight insurgency; it was bringing Western technocracy to their defense bureaucracies, teaching them how to buy weapons. This was not entirely new, of course. One of the earliest ARPA projects in the Middle East was an effort to bring Secretary of Defense McNamara’s passion for cost analysis to Iran. The U.S. Army in 1964 had helped the Iranian military establish a professional research and evaluation group to train a cadre of military officers to evaluate weapons based on cost and performance. It sounded simple, but it was something new to the Iranians, and “the organization foundered.” ARPA was asked to step in and help.
ARPA did not have much better luck than the army. The agency tried to teach mid-level Iranian military officers how to test and evaluate weapons through a failed effort called the Combat Research and Evaluation Center, or CREC. By 1969, the height of the center’s activities, the best example ARPA could come up with in a report was an evaluation of “field bakery equipment” to determine whether troops could make their own bread in the field. The same report expressed “serious doubts about the validity of the program,” which had been around for five years. “Iran’s military leaders neither assign CREC qualified and motivated officers nor give it real work to do, especially because they themselves are not technically oriented enough to recognize the potential value of CREC,” the report griped. The center was “disappointing,” an official later acknowledged, and ARPA soon ended support for it. The only activity that met with any interest from the shah was an “anthropometric survey,” which was being used to help design military uniforms. That work pleased the shah, who was himself known for donning extremely elaborate uniforms.
In 1970, ARPA proposed a new approach in Iran, which it called “high level systems analysis,” advising senior ministry officials on how to buy military weapons. The idea was to teach the staff the basics of systems analysis, which meant, for example, not just comparing the cost of an American missile with that of a British one but calculating the actual “kill per engagement” to come up with a total cost comparison. The bottom line was how much did killing the enemy cost you? If it takes three British missiles to destroy a tank, as opposed to one American missile, then even if the British missile was half the price, it ended up being more expensive. The shah liked the idea of professional bean counters, or at least well enough to approve the ARPA project.
ARPA recruited Joseph Large, a Rand analyst, to run the program, but Large quickly saw its futility. “The reason is simple,” Large wrote to Alex Tachmindji, the deputy direc
tor of ARPA. “His Imperial Majesty makes many of the little decisions and all of the big ones.” Large also expressed concerns about ARPA’s plans to send a second analyst who had a reputation as bright and hardworking but also “pompous.” The new analyst was Anthony Cordesman, a young man frequently described as a sidekick of “Blowtorch Bob” Komer, the head of the pacification campaign in Vietnam. Komer was known, as his New York Times obituary put it, for his “near-religious faith in the power of facts and statistics.” Cordesman, who would go on to become one of Washington’s most influential national security analysts, was Komer’s disciple. He was also, like Komer, divisive. “The trouble was that Tony Cordesman was a pain in the ass and he got everybody mad,” Lukasik said.
When Cordesman arrived in Iran in 1972, he was put to work with the vice-minister of war, Hassan Toufanian, who was ostensibly in charge of Iran’s weapons procurements. Yet the only person really in charge of weapons buying was the shah. “Toufanian was the top clerk, if you will, bringing things to the shah,” said Henry Precht, a diplomat in the American embassy in Tehran at the time. “The shah made all the decisions.”
Not only did the shah make all the decisions, but also the decisions he made were often influenced by corruption. Who cared about the comparative costs of tank killing when the deciding factor was a bribe paid to the shah’s middleman? Cordesman wanted to study Iran’s plans to buy hovercraft, but the shah’s nephew was in charge of the purchase and thus it “would not be politic,” Colonel Harold Kinne, an ARPA official, wrote. Toufanian told Kinne he simply did not have officers to spare for Cordesman and Large and in any case the Iranians “did their own analysis in their heads.”
For the next few months, ARPA and embassy officials sparred over whether to keep the systems analysis work going. Some thought the ARPA men were doing good work, even if they were not teaching the Iranians much about systems analysis. The assignment helped “mask the analysis work now being done by Cordesman and Large,” one official wrote. What other analysis was being masked is unknown, and even fifty years later Cordesman declined to discuss any details of his work for ARPA, claiming that he believed it to still be classified.
The Imagineers of War Page 24