The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  Like Licklider, Lawrence was interested in fundamentally transforming how people interacted with machines, which would eventually have far-reaching applications. But the challenge of biocybernetics was weighing the fantastical applications it offered—brain-driven computers and mind-controlled aircraft—with the reality that such work was decades away. For example, according to a 1975 summary, ARPA hoped to achieve a capability to translate an eight-word vocabulary based on EEG signals. “The discipline of biocybernetics is essentially being created by ARPA,” the program summary at the time stated.

  Lawrence’s brain-driven computers and soldiers tapping into the body’s autonomic functions were on the edge, but so was killing bunny rabbits to communicate with submarines or funding an Israeli magician to remotely view Soviet bases. ARPA was a place in the early 1970s that tolerated and even encouraged exploring such outlandish ideas, but unlike some other agencies it required good science.

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  In one final meeting to discuss ARPA’s possible funding of parapsychology, Lawrence sat with Lukasik, the ARPA director, and CIA officials who had been funding the work. At the end, one of the CIA officials turned to Lawrence and said, “They certainly haven’t been wasting our money. Dr. Lawrence, what do you think about all this?”

  At that point, Lawrence’s investigation of psychic phenomena had introduced him to a colorful array of mystics and frauds. “You have been wasting your money,” he exploded in frustration. “Every damn dime of this is nonsense.”

  There was dead silence. Lukasik quickly changed the subject, and as Lawrence recalled, no one ever asked him to look at parapsychology again. Nor did ARPA ever fund a psychic program. “I worked so long, and so hard, and dealt with so many fools and charlatans,” Lawrence later recalled. “There is no question in my mind that all of it is bunk.”

  Geller’s advocates, who believed the magician could help the United States spot Soviet submarines, looked on Lawrence’s role with great disappointment, but Lawrence helped save ARPA from the embarrassment that befell the intelligence community when it was revealed the nation’s spies had spent tens of millions of dollars on psychics. And for those who questioned whether ARPA’s open-ended investigation of parapsychology was a good idea at all, the reality is that the same attitude that allowed Lawrence to meet witches and psychics also enabled him to pursue the brain-driven computer, which in the 1970s sounded like pure fantasy. The intelligence community’s support of psychics continued through 1995, producing claims of successful results but little in the way of evidence that was ever accepted by the scientific community. Biocybernetics, on the other hand, blossomed.

  It was an audacious idea in the early 1970s, when the ability to read brain signals was crude at best. By 2013, however, biocybernetics had spawned an entire industry of brain-computer interface devices used in everything from commercial video games and car sensors to tools that allow “locked in” patients, those with no way to communicate with the external world, to type messages and control external devices. Applications that were once decades away are now being built, and Lawrence’s “made up” vision is becoming a reality. As for parapsychology, Lawrence joked years later that maybe he should not have been so forthright with his criticism, instead playing it out even longer. “At the very least,” he said, “I could have met some more witches.”

  Those days were coming to a close anyway. Over in the Pentagon, Malcolm Currie, ARPA’s overseer, was getting increasingly annoyed. He could not understand why a Pentagon agency would be involved in things that did not have an immediate military application. ARPA’s independence from the Pentagon meant that it did not typically need permission from higher-ups to fund individual projects, but now that autonomy appeared almost foolhardy, at least to Currie. News of the spoon-bending investigation was one of the final straws. Currie decided that ARPA was “wandering off the territory.” It was time, Currie decided, for some changes at the agency.

  ARPA, in the view of a new crop of defense officials, was meant to be a corporate laboratory of the Pentagon—a place that built weapons—not a think tank or a scientist’s playground, let alone a place that tried to address strategic-level problems, as past directors had done. The new ARPA—now to be called DARPA—would build technology that could find enemies and kill them.

  PART II

  SERVANTS OF WAR

  CHAPTER 14

  Invisible War

  “Oh my God, he’s dead,” Alan Brown thought as he watched the chief test pilot for Lockheed’s Skunk Works division float down to earth. At least the pilot had ejected, but his head was slumped awkwardly to one side, and Brown thought the force of the ejection killed him.

  It had not, but the pilot was in bad shape. He had broken his collarbone and was knocked unconscious, which meant he was in danger of suffocating when he landed in a sandy area of the test range. It was fortunate that a chase helicopter with medics was already in the air, because when they got to the pilot, he was already turning blue, his mouth and nose filled with sand. The helicopter rushed him to Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital. Then things got complicated.

  Neither the aircraft nor the test site where it was being flown existed, at least officially. It was May 4, 1978, and the pilot, Bill Park, was flying a top secret aircraft known by its code name, Have Blue. He had ejected after the experimental aircraft’s undercarriage was damaged, making a safe landing impossible. The flight tests for Have Blue took place at Area 51, sometimes called Groom Lake, a classified site in the Nevada desert that has long resided uncomfortably between lore and secrecy. The secret test area was established in the mid-1950s as a place to test the U-2 aircraft for the CIA away from prying eyes. Kelly Johnson, the head of the secretive Lockheed Skunk Works division that built the U-2, looked at a number of areas across the United States and settled on a barren area of Nevada pocked with dry lake beds. They named it Paradise Ranch; Johnson later called the name a “dirty trick” to help attract people to what was an otherwise inhospitable area. For decades its existence was not acknowledged by the government, even as conspiracy theorists, press, and tourists made pilgrimages to the edge of the restricted zone, well aware that secret work was going on inside.

  That contradiction did not necessarily matter; the Pentagon could live with the public knowing that it was a top secret testing area, as long as no one knew what precisely was being tested. The colorful mix of fact and fiction that linked the area to everything from antigravity research to aliens ended up helping the military shield real technology. From the Pentagon’s perspective, it was better for people to believe it housed little green men than secret spy aircraft. Military officials often contributed to the false aviation rumors, feeding cover stories to the press. Even if the military did not acknowledge it, most people knew that part of southern Nevada, just a couple hours’ drive from Las Vegas, was used for testing secret aircraft. Yet the day of Park’s crash, official secrecy almost turned tragic.

  There was a cover story for an accident. After all, crashes of experimental aircraft were hardly unexpected. But in the chaos that ensued after the crash, and in the rush to get Park to the hospital, the cover story went out the window and was replaced with an impromptu and rather unbelievable fabrication. “He was on a scaffold and he fell off,” blurted out one of the air force security officials who accompanied Park.

  When the hospital staff saw the outline of flight goggles around Park’s face, they grew suspicious. Park’s helmet had been ripped from his face when he was ejected, and his skin was bright red from windburn, except where his goggles had been. Again, the explanation was ludicrous. “Oh, that was his gas mask,” the official said.

  The scaffolding story failed miserably. Hospital workers started asking more questions, and when Park regained consciousness, he only added to the mystery. The injured pilot refused to say what happened, providing staff with just his name and his employer’s name, Lockheed. He gave his address as “General Delivery, Las Vegas.” Someone eventually alerted the med
ia of a suspected aircraft crash. Military officials at Nellis Air Force Base denied any knowledge of a crash.

  The Pentagon a week later finally confirmed that a plane had crashed and that a pilot suffered minor injuries. (In fact, the crash ended Park’s career as a test pilot; he would reveal years later in an interview that his heart had stopped beating by the time paramedics reached him.) The press quickly followed up on news of a secret aircraft crash, even if some of the details were wrong. One press account reported that the pilot was testing a classified aircraft called the “TR-1,” a high-altitude aircraft meant to “perform missions along a country’s border without entering its airspace.” That report was wrong, either an attempt at deliberate misinformation or confusion with another project that was in fact named the TR-1, a version of the U-2 spy plane.

  The specialized aviation press quickly forwarded a different theory. Flight International reported that the crashed plane was a “stealth” aircraft project led by Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s famed aircraft designer, who had been developing secret planes for the CIA for years. This aircraft, in fact, was sponsored by the agency now known as DARPA, whose future hinged on the program’s success. At $100 million, it was one of the largest aircraft programs the agency had ever sponsored, and it was a huge risk for an agency that some critics were lobbying to close down. In the late 1970s, around the time of the secret aircraft’s development, a letter was circulating calling for the abolishment of the agency, according to James Tegnelia, the former acting director of DARPA in the 1980s. The military chiefs wanted “to disestablish DARPA, because it wasn’t paying off for the services,” he recalled.

  Designed to give the United States a strategic edge in combating Soviet conventional superiority, the stealth aircraft grew out of research that emerged in the waning days of the Vietnam War and matured in DARPA’s newly formed Tactical Technology Office. Born of Stephen Lukasik’s vision to carve out a strategic role for the agency, the secret aircraft had the potential to save DARPA. If it failed, however, it might put the agency out of business permanently.

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  The stealth aircraft’s journey began in 1974 during a chance meeting in Lukasik’s office with a man obsessed by an invisible rabbit. Charles “Chuck” Myers, the Defense Department’s director for air warfare, had been making the rounds in the Pentagon, pitching anyone who would listen to his idea for a new type of aircraft. Myers was part of a self-described subversive group of military experts known as the fighter mafia, who battled the prevailing air force preference for technologically complex fighters. The fighter mafia had successfully lobbied for the development of a maneuverable, lightweight fighter that eventually became the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

  Now Myers, who had flown combat missions in both World War II and the Korean War, was on a one-man mission to sell his concept for a small, radar-evading aircraft inspired by an invisible rabbit named Harvey. In the 1950 James Stewart movie of the same name, Harvey was a six-foot-tall “pooka,” a mythical creature only the protagonist could see. Myers’s pooka was much like Stewart’s—an invisible plane, or a “stealth aircraft.” By 1974, Myers had pitched Harvey to anyone and everyone who would listen. Like James Stewart’s Harvey, no one believed in an invisible aircraft except Myers. His wife had even made him a model of “Harvey,” which consisted of a stuffed Easter Bunny, to which she added a top hat, a plastic cocktail olive sword, and a band around its hat that read, “Walk Stealthily and Carry a Sharp Stick.”

  Myers was concerned about the escalating threat from ground radar and surface-to-air missiles. Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles had proved deadly to American pilots in Vietnam; even without a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War had demonstrated that Soviet technology was advancing at a fast pace. The United States had put its money into an expensive war, and the Soviet Union in the meantime had put its money into technology, like surface-to-air missiles. The lessons of Vietnam were reinforced in 1973, when Israeli pilots during the Yom Kippur War faced a barrage of these deadly Soviet-supplied missiles. Israel reportedly lost about a third of its combat aircraft. For a growing circle of military experts, the lesson was that even advanced aircraft were becoming increasingly vulnerable to air defense systems. “Signature is the most important feature of a combat system,” Myers wrote, regardless of whether it is an aircraft or an infantry soldier. “When fighting in the jungle if your canteen sloshes and you smell like Burma Shave, survival is unlikely.”

  No one in the Pentagon was interested in Myers’s invisible aircraft until a chance meeting with DARPA officials changed everything. Myers was invited to attend a meeting to review the programs of the Tactical Technology Office, the division formed from the remnants of ARPA’s Vietnam work. Robert Moore, then the deputy head of the office, presented the DARPA projects, which did little to excite Myers. After the meeting, Myers cornered Moore and asked him if DARPA might have funds to pay for a study on the “invisible aircraft.” He handed Moore a copy of a white paper he had written, titled simply “Harvey.”

  Moore was intrigued but unconvinced. He was getting regular briefings from intelligence officials, who were warning that the Soviets had developed incredibly sophisticated air defense systems. The primary concern was the Fulda Gap scenario, where American pilots were trained to evade Soviet radar with what Moore described as “drastic operational techniques and countermeasures,” a somewhat understated way of describing how pilots would have to fly just one hundred to two hundred feet off the ground—the equivalent of buzzing Yankee Stadium—and then “pop up and roll over.” Not only was this a complex technique; it also required half a dozen support aircraft to relay target information and jam the enemy radar.

  Though Moore was not crazy about the Harvey metaphor, he understood the potential of a “stealthy” aircraft. DARPA had been quietly working on its own stealth experiments with remotely piloted vehicles, or drones. DARPA’s Vietnam War–era drone work had not led to any operational weapons, but it had sparked interest in developing lower-cost mini-drones. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the air force conducts advanced aircraft research, two engineers, Allen Atkins and Ken Perko, had begun work with DARPA funding on a mini-drone that was launched inside a capsule of a surface-to-air missile and could travel seven hundred miles downrange. Once it reached its destination, the drone would emerge from the capsule like a butterfly from a cocoon, extend its wings, and then fly around the Fulda Gap looking for targets. When it spotted a Soviet tank or surface-to-air missile, it would relay the information to an F-4 combat aircraft, which could then fly over and destroy the target.

  The mini-drone was not invisible to radar, but it was small enough that it would be harder to detect and harder to hit, particularly for a surface-to-air missile. Yet even a small pilotless aircraft shows up on radar, and the latest Soviet radar-guided anti-aircraft weapons could take it down. Perko and Atkins proposed to DARPA another mini-drone, one specifically designed to reduce what is known as radar cross section, or how visible something is to radar. DARPA agreed to fund the project, which used small drones made by McDonnell Douglas.

  McDonnell Douglas ended up building half a dozen of these radar-evading drones, called the Mark V, and testing them at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida against a host of Soviet weapons, part of a secret arsenal of equipment that the American military had acquired through black market channels. Just as DARPA had hoped, radar could not lock on and track the little drones. By today’s standards, the mini-drone’s radar signature was large, but it performed better than anyone had expected. It flew undetected past every air defense system, except the Soviet ZSU-23-4 Shilka, an advanced radar-guided anti-aircraft weapon. Even then, it was only spotted when flying directly overhead. By the fall of 1974, Perko and Atkins knew they were onto something. The drone was stealthier than they had predicted. The equations everyone had been using to predict an aircraft’s radar cross section were not based on the “real world,” Atkins said. In the real world, there are
insects, clouds, and birds.

  Moore told Myers a bit about the DARPA work, but Myers was unimpressed by the concept of mini-drones. Both men seemed to agree that at least exploring the idea of a stealth aircraft made sense. Myers wanted $2 million for his Harvey study, a sum that Moore told him DARPA did not have. Moore was intrigued by Myers’s idea, however, so he asked Perko, who by then had been recruited into DARPA, to survey the military aircraft companies to see which ones might have experience with reducing radar cross section. While Perko was on his fishing expedition, a memorandum landed on Moore’s desk from Malcolm Currie, the director of defense research and engineering. The Pentagon’s chief technologist had some money available, but was lacking in new ideas. Moore realized that Harvey, a stealth fighter that could survive close air support against Warsaw Pact forces in the Fulda Gap, might fit the bill. Instead of Harvey, Moore changed its name to the “the high stealth aircraft,” and DARPA requested proposals from five companies: Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, Fairchild, and Grumman. Then the stealth aircraft almost died.

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  In 1975, as the idea of designing stealth aircraft was being discussed in DARPA, Lee Huff, a former DARPA employee, sat down with William Godel, the agency’s onetime deputy director. Huff had been hired to write a history of the agency and interviewed his onetime mentor and boss, who, after serving time in prison, made a career in private business. Reflecting on his time at DARPA, Godel said that program managers were a “dime a dozen,” but true innovators were rare. Asked what DARPA should be working on at the present time, Godel suggested an “unmanned non-detectable bomber.”