The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  The conclusion reflected Rand’s long-standing opposition to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Conveniently, it also provided a case for ARPA’s new generation of weaponry. Of course, the idea was still theoretical, because ARPA had not yet developed all these weapons, just the underlying technology. The specific ARPA proposal that followed was something like a cross between the Star Wars Death Star and Terminator’s Skynet. It was a weapon, or actually several weapons, that could collect and integrate data from various radar, crunch the numbers using a computer-driven targeting system, select targets, and then send a drone-packed mother ship over Soviet lines. Once there, it would release its kamikaze drones, called guided submunitions, which would hunt down and destroy Soviet targets.

  In other words, the ARPA concept was not a single weapon but many weapons operating together, or what would later in Pentagon parlance be called a “system of systems.” The eventual name for this program underscored its ultimate purpose: Assault Breaker, a weapon system for defeating the Soviets in the Fulda Gap, without having to rely on a nuclear assault. To the cynically minded, ARPA had just done a classic end run around the defense planning process. It had funded a study of defense intellectuals to tell the Pentagon that it needed a new generation of weapons that could be developed at ARPA, and specifically at its new division, the Tactical Technology Office, whose sensors, drones, and bombs had been developed for Southeast Asia.

  Wohlstetter and his acolytes eventually got what they had wanted out of the ARPA study: a new way of fighting on the European battlefield. By 1982, the army had adopted this strategy, which relied on new technology, much of it out of ARPA. Some of the credit, according to Wikner, goes to Starry, the four-star general in the army who developed the new military doctrine. “ARPA gets 60 to 70 percent credit for the technologies that were used to implement it,” Wikner added.

  AGILE was buried, and from its grave arose the Tactical Technology Office, whose weapons enabled a fundamental shift in warfare. It was Vietnam, not outer space, that would prove formative for the modern agency. Over the next three decades, the projects in that office would give rise to precision weapons, drones, and stealth aircraft—the modern tools of warfare, or what some would later call a “revolution in military affairs.” In a few short years, Lukasik had overhauled ARPA, creating the foundations for weapons that would in the coming decades transform the battlefield. “It all came from counterinsurgency,” Lukasik said.

  The backlash against the Vietnam War drove ARPA’s weapons out of the jungle and onto the modern battlefield. Yet that same antiwar sentiment would have an altogether different effect on ARPA’s seminal work in computers. The growing counterculture in the United States would transform J. C. R. Licklider’s man-machine symbiosis into something far more ambitious and controversial: machines controlled directly by the human brain.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Bunny, the Witch, and the War Room

  On the morning of January 28, 1969, a red and blue flag emblazoned with a yellow star was hoisted over the Stanford Post Office in Palo Alto, California. Students for a Democratic Society used the Vietcong flag to protest the university’s ties to the Pentagon and its ongoing research in Southeast Asia. In particular, the students were concerned about classified military work at the Stanford Research Institute, an offshoot of the university created after World War II. The institute was supposed to take on research that fit with the university’s overall mission, but that work had increasingly evolved into Defense Department contracting. ARPA, one of the Stanford Research Institute’s major funders, particularly for computer science, was also paying its researchers to conduct studies in Southeast Asia.

  Over the course of the year, the protests at Stanford grew, much as they did at campuses across the United States, with some erupting into violence, like the bombing of the University of Wisconsin’s Sterling Hall. The attack, which was directed at the university’s ties to the Pentagon, ended up killing a researcher with no connection to the military-funded work. Stanford never experienced that level of violence, but in April 1969 several hundred students took over the university’s Applied Electronics Laboratory, bringing work there to a temporary halt. That month, Stanford’s board of trustees voted to end the university’s classified research and cut off its historic relationship with the Stanford Research Institute. Just months later, ARPA-funded computer science work there would make history.

  At 10:30 p.m., on October 29, 1969, a one-word message arrived at a computer console at the Stanford Research Institute. “Lo,” read the message. That was the entire content of the first transmission sent across the ARPANET. Charley Kline, a student programmer working for Professor Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California, Los Angeles, sent the message to Bill Duvall, a computer programmer at the Stanford Research Institute, and it was supposed to be “login,” but the system crashed before it could be transmitted in its entirety, sending just the first two letters.

  At that point, the ARPANET consisted of just four sites, or “nodes”: UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPA had funded those four sites to each receive an Interface Message Processor, which broke up data into small chunks, a method known as packet switching. Even with its first brief transmission, the ARPANET already contained most of the underpinning of the modern Internet. It was still basic computer science work, with no direct military mission, and the technical details often befuddled ARPA’s directors. Without true believers, the ARPANET could have easily been killed, either by protesters worried that it was a Pentagon project to conduct nuclear warfare or by lawmakers convinced it was not doing enough for the Pentagon.

  The ARPANET continued through those years largely unscathed, because ARPA officials believed in the vision of man-computer symbiosis that had been laid out by J. C. R. Licklider and worked hard to protect it. Stephen Lukasik, like Charles Herzfeld before him, understood the broader importance of the project and struck a delicate balance of justifying its work to Congress as relevant to the Pentagon while publicly downplaying any potential military role. “ARPA’s computing program continued to lead its charmed life, rather like a person sleepwalking through a battlefield without getting a scratch,” M. Mitchell Waldrop wrote in his history of the ARPANET.

  Not all of ARPA’s computer science work was so fortunate. At the University of Illinois, the ARPA-funded Illiac IV computer became the subject of outrage for students who believed it would be used to help the war in Vietnam. Illiac IV was focused on demonstrating a massively parallel processing computer, not performing calculations related to military operations in Southeast Asia, but its public image became enmeshed in the war. In May 1970, students organized a “Smash Illiac” protest day on the campus quad, with speakers from the Black Panther Party and the Chicago 15. A poster advertising the protest featured a cartoon image of the Illiac IV with a screen showing “kill die factor.” Concerned about the ability to protect the expensive supercomputer, ARPA ended up moving it to a NASA facility in California.

  Meanwhile, Congress was chipping away at ARPA. The Mansfield Amendment of 1969 had ended much of the Defense Department’s basic research, cutting off ARPA’s social science work and forcing the Behavioral Sciences Office to refocus its work (to avoid controversy, Lukasik later renamed it the Human Resources Research Office, causing many people to mistake it for a personnel office). The new congressional legislation also affected the hard sciences, forcing ARPA to hand off its interdisciplinary materials laboratories, which had provided long-term funding for universities and had been a fundamental part of ARPA’s basic research portfolio, to the National Science Foundation. Everything ARPA did now had to have a military justification.

  Congress was on the lookout for any programs that did not seem appropriate for ARPA to pursue. “What exotic studies are being made under the behavioral sciences?” a lawmaker asked Lukasik in one hearing. “Are we still studying the mating of bugs and the behavio
r of monkeys?”

  “Nothing like that is going on in the program,” Lukasik answered gravely.

  Lukasik found himself literally patrolling DARPA’s halls for potential problems. One day, he was walking by the office of Al Blue, who headed the Information Processing Techniques Office, and dropped in to say hello. On Blue’s desk was a computer science report by MIT. Lukasik felt his throat seize up when he spotted the title, “Computer Assisted Choreography.” He could almost imagine the next congressional hearing, where lawmakers would grill him about why ARPA was researching dance. “Al, I understand what this is about. This is a good idea, but, Jesus Christ, don’t give me any more reports called Computer Assisted Choreography,” Lukasik said. “Change the name [to] Man-Machine Coordination; it’s just as good.”

  Whether it was congressional attacks or student protests, ARPA could not escape the Vietnam War and the rising counterculture enveloping the country. Yet it also was about to be influenced by those events in unexpected ways. Whether it was Timothy Leary’s lectures on the benefits of psychedelic drugs or newfound interest in Eastern mysticism, even the Pentagon was not impervious to the cultural anarchy of the late 1960s. Unconstrained by conventional wisdom but bound by a belief in rigorous science, ARPA was about to create a new field of research, transforming J. C. R. Licklider’s notion of man-computer symbiosis into technology that would allow people to control computers with nothing more than their thoughts. Its origins would weave together the Stanford Research Institute, the ARPANET, and a growing fascination with the powers of the human mind.

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  The Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s harbored a dark secret that would have shocked even the student protesters outraged by its military research. Among its many classified research projects was a contract supported by the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, a division headed by Sidney Gottlieb, perhaps the most notorious scientist ever to work for the spy agency. The secret program was testing different forms of parapsychology, such as whether humans had the ability to use their minds to visualize or even influence remote objects. Believing the work was showing promise, Gottlieb one day invited ARPA’s director, Stephen Lukasik, over to his CIA office to discuss it.

  The CIA’s Office of Technical Service was housed in a low-slung office building on the grounds of the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, across from the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom. The buildings were the old headquarters of the CIA, before it moved to Langley, Virginia, but in the early 1970s the facility continued to house a few CIA activities. Gottlieb, a chemist by training, was both an unconventional thinker and an unwavering patriot who believed his work served the good of the nation. Born with a clubfoot that kept him out of military service, and afflicted with a stutter that he channeled into the study of speech pathology, Gottlieb was known for his iron determination. “Friends and enemies alike say Mr. Gottlieb was a kind of genius, striving to explore the frontiers of the human mind for his country,” read a New York Times obituary of Gottlieb, “while searching for religious and spiritual meaning in his life.” In the end, however, Gottlieb would be remembered most for what looked like a willful contempt of common decency.

  As the head of the Office of Technical Service, Gottlieb led a wing of the CIA whose failed innovations to assassinate the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, included poison pens and exploding seashells. He also worked on one of the agency’s most notorious projects, the use of LSD as a mind control drug. Under Gottlieb’s supervision, LSD beginning in the 1960s was tested on unwitting human guinea pigs including, among other unfortunate victims, the mentally ill, prostitutes, and even one unsuspecting army scientist who committed suicide. When the program was first exposed in 1975 by the Rockefeller Commission, and then detailed by the congressional Church Committee, Gottlieb’s public legacy as some sort of mad scientist was all but assured.

  Lukasik had a more charitable view of Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues. He viewed them as having ARPA’s penchant for creativity and freethinking but without the checks that public oversight provides. “They are, and I’ll say this in the most positive way, truly wonderful people,” he recounted. “They didn’t so much care about the laws, but in terms of creative people who are just told they don’t have to worry about anything, and just create. They were good people.”

  The day Lukasik went to visit Gottlieb, the CIA scientist was in fine form. He had taken over the Foggy Bottom office that once belonged to the CIA director Allen Dulles. It was an unusually long office, perhaps fifteen feet wide and twice as long. There was a curtain across the length of one of the long walls, and Gottlieb told Lukasik, “Steve, let me show you what outsiders don’t see.” Gottlieb rather dramatically yanked back the curtain revealing a wall-size map of the world flecked with dots. Gottlieb said, “These are the 146 locations of our acoustic taps.”

  Lukasik knew that Gottlieb was just showboating, but he indulged him, waiting for the main point. What Gottlieb really wanted to discuss was bunny rabbits and nuclear Armageddon. In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in a cat-and-mouse game with nuclear submarines. Submarines equipped with nuclear missiles were difficult to spot when prowling the deep seas, making them a potent weapon in the nuclear balance of power with the Soviet Union. The submarine’s chief vulnerability was its need to communicate. In the early 1970s, there was no good way to communicate with submarines deep underwater to let them know, for example, that they needed to launch their missiles because nuclear Armageddon was under way. The solution usually involved coming to the surface, which would make them vulnerable to detection and attack.

  That was where Gottlieb’s new pet project came into play. In 1970, the best-selling book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain described the Soviet Union’s and other Eastern bloc countries’ enthusiasm for psychic phenomena of all sorts. “Major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness ESP was said to come from the Soviet Military and the Soviet Secret Police,” the book’s co-authors asserted. The book detailed dozens of investigations into psychic phenomena conducted behind the Iron Curtain, ranging from Kirlian photography, which sought to capture the “aura” of living things, to telepathic projection of emotions. The idea that the Soviets were investing money in parapsychology quickly became a self-reinforcing justification for the Americans to do the same.

  According to Psychic Discoveries, one theory of parapsychology the Soviets were testing involved a projected emotional link between a newborn and its mother, which allowed the mother to “sense” her offspring’s death even over long distances. Because actually killing a newborn human child was not really an option, they resorted to experimenting with baby rabbits and their mothers. The experiment was as ghastly as it sounded: a baby rabbit would be killed out of sight and sound of its mother, while scientists in a separate lab room observed the mother for a reaction.

  The Soviets claimed it worked and it could be used for communicating with submarines, even if they never quite laid out the protocol for how this would be done. Presumably, a mother rabbit would be kept aboard the submarine, with a submariner assigned to monitor it for signs of distress. The idea was not that an overly excited mother rabbit would prompt a nuclear exchange, but such a signal could be used, as Lukasik put it, as a “bell ringer for Soviet boomers.” It would be a message for them to come above water and get a more detailed message, such as an order to launch their nuclear missiles. The very absurdity of the scenario did not dissuade Gottlieb. The CIA had begun funding experiments at the Stanford Research Institute to conduct a “quiet, low-profile classified investigation” into parapsychology. Gottlieb was interested in having ARPA look at the work and possibly support it with its own funds. “I thought this was a lot of bullshit,” Lukasik admitted.

  Though they sounded dubious, the purported Soviet experiments claimed applications in antisubmarine warfare, an area that ARPA was pursuing at the time. Perhaps more important, the late 1960s and early 1970s had sparked wide
spread interest in parapsychology, even among some members of Congress, who were pressuring agencies, like ARPA, to support it. Lukasik figured that at the least the agency could make a good faith effort to see if there was anything worth funding. He turned to Austin Kibler, an air force colonel in charge of the Behavioral Sciences Office. “Follow this stuff,” Lukasik told him. “Show me anything that works. I don’t care what.”

  The reaction back at ARPA was not enthusiastic. “Everyone pretty much felt that it was just a big pile of crap,” said Robert Young, who later took over as head of the Behavioral Sciences Office, “but we had been given the responsibility from those on high to deal with it. And we did.” The scientist selected to lead the parapsychology investigation was ARPA’s resident expert in counterculture, George Lawrence. The thirty-nine-year-old scientist cut a distinctive figure at ARPA. He favored bell-bottoms and wide-collared shirts over suits and pencil holders and brought his son to skateboard in the hallways of the Pentagon. Pictures from his work trips usually included him lying half-naked by a swimming pool, or holding a pitcher of beer, rather than examining pieces of missile guidance systems.

  ARPA in popular culture may be portrayed as the lair of proverbial mad scientists, but the truth was that, socially speaking, even in the 1960s and 1970s the agency was almost as straitlaced as any other part of the Pentagon. It was home to intellectual freethinkers, but they were largely drawn from the hard science faculties of universities, the defense industry, and the military, not exactly the hotbeds of 1960s counterculture that were dropping acid and embracing mysticism.