“Who can direct”: Licklider, interview with Aspray and Norberg, Charles Babbage Institute.
“I did realize”: Ibid.
“asked to see me about something”: Ruina, interview with William Aspray, Charles Babbage Institute.
“Tell me what has happened”: Ibid.
Licklider ended up spending: Under Licklider, the Behavioral Sciences Office was not involved in Southeast Asia. In 1964, Lee Huff, who had been ARPA’s representative in Thailand, took over and began to fund work in that area. Huff, interview with author. See also Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-52-3.
“There was a kind of a cloak and dagger”: Licklider, interview with Aspray and Norberg, Charles Babbage Institute.
Licklider’s immediate problem: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-49.
By 1960, the Pentagon’s primary concern: “NORAD/CONAD Historical Summary,” Jan.–June 1960, Directorate of Command History, Office of Information Headquarters, NORAD/CONAD, 1.
“great asset”: Licklider, interview with Aspray and Norberg.
“At this extreme, the problem”: Licklider to Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network, memo, Advanced Research Projects Agency, April 25, 1963.
After the heyday: See Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, Figure VII-I.
“Okay, look, before you cancel”: Sproull, interview with Williams/Gerard.
“almost killed the Internet”: Ibid.
“I was in the army”: Sutherland, interview with author.
“There came a moment”: Crocker, interview with author.
“my major failure”: Sutherland, interview with William Aspray, Charles Babbage Institute.
“I became a disciple”: Herzfeld, interview with author.
“How much money”: Taylor, interview with William Aspray, Charles Babbage Institute.
“Over the course of several hundred years”: Baran, interview with O’Neill, Charles Babbage Institute.
“I did nothing”: Ruina, interview with Finkbeiner.
Licklider was able to do: Though it is often presumed in retrospect that the freedom ARPA enjoyed was a given, the agency was only a few years old, and there was little presumption of anything. It was a unique time for the agency, Ruina reminisced. “I had so much freedom; [if] I wanted to build a bridge from Chattanooga to Seattle, I could do it,” he recalled in an interview almost fifty years later. “I look back at my years, and I didn’t appreciate enough the kind of freedom I had to do as many good things that I could have done, and that would have been great for the country, and great for ARPA. I just didn’t realize what special times they were.” Ruina, interview with author.
CHAPTER 8: UP IN FLAMES
“The growing U.S. military involvement”: Karnow, Vietnam, 270.
“I don’t see nothing”: Ibid., 270–71.
“This program has been undertaken”: Memo forwarded by Robert H. Johnson to Walt Rostow, Sept. 20, 1961, containing a Sept. 13, 1961, report, Kennedy Library.
That experiment appeared: George Rathjens and William Godel, research and development app. of the Taylor report, Nov. 3, 1961, Kennedy Library.
eliminate ground cover: Ibid.
That came on November 30, 1961: Major William A. Buckingham Jr., “Operation Ranch Hand: Herbicides in Southeast Asia,” Air University Review, July–Aug. 1983.
“to be ignorant”: C. E. Minarek, Memorandum for the Record, “Subject: Meeting with Mr. William Godel on 4 December 1961,” Defense Technical Information Center.
To avoid detection: Cecil, Herbicidal Warfare, 31.
The security measures were not: Ibid.
The bands on the barrels: Ibid., 32.
“The development and use”: William H. Godel, Deputy Director, Vietnam Combat Development and Test Center, ARPA, Progress Report: Vietnam Combat Development and Test Center, Sept. 13, 1961, Kennedy Library.
Another important distinction: Department of Army pamphlet, Area Handbook for South Vietnam, April 1967.
massive undertaking: Quang Trach, the Vietnamese colonel who headed ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center, and Truong Quang Van, the intelligence chief’s aide, both recalled in their court depositions that Diem was skeptical of the strategic hamlet program at that first meeting with Godel in June 1961; he wanted a study done to see if the village leaders could be persuaded to participate, and that required “gifts,” or more accurately, bribes, which could be used to persuade them to move the peasants.
Diem’s brother Nhu: For all the literature that has been dedicated to the strategic hamlet program, there has been remarkably little discussion about what persuaded Diem to embark on a risky large-scale endeavor that had already failed on a small scale. Some accounts of the Vietnam War point to the CIA, although there is little documentation to back up that claim, while others have claimed it was Diem’s brother. “While it was never explicitly stated, there does seem considerable reason to believe that the strategic hamlet scheme was the personal concept of President Diem’s brother, Ngo-Dinh Nhu,” wrote Milton E. Osborne in Strategic Hamlets in South Vietnam: A Survey and a Comparison (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 26. Though the only evidence for his patrimony is a self-serving booklet published by the South Vietnamese government crediting Nhu with the idea.
By the fall: Gravel, Chomsky, and Zinn, Pentagon Papers, 128–59.
“is a condition of the mind and heart”: ARPA, “Research and Development Effort in Support of the Vietnamese Rural Security Program” (Washington: ARPA, 1962), 12. Thomas Thayer Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C.
“machinery for formal government control”: Ibid.
Farmers complained of forced labor: John C. Donnell and Gerald C. Hickey, The Vietnamese “Strategic Hamlets”: A Preliminary Report (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1962).
Gripping a cigarette holder: Hickey, Window on a War, 92.
A marine general slammed his fist: Ibid., 99. Harold Brown wrote that he could not recall Hickey’s briefing, “but he is certainly right that I, along with most others in the government, was naïve about the nature and prospects of the Vietnam War.” Brown, correspondence with author.
In April 1962: Stephen T. Hosmer and S. O. Crane, Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16–20, 1962 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1962).
“That it was the major facet”: Grinter, “Population Control in South Viet Nam, the Strategic Hamlet Study.”
Counterinsurgency experts like: Lansdale admitted he did not realize until 1955 that Nhu was essentially running Diem’s intelligence operations.
The strategic hamlets, run by Nhu: Sheehan, Bright Shining Lie, 265.
Unable to adapt to the jungle: Seymour Deitchman, interview with author. “Dogs were scroungers in Vietnam, never used as pets,” Deitchman said. “And they were considered food.”
The spraying was supposed to be done: Associated Press, “Attempt to Strip Jungles in Viet Nam a Flop So Far,” Tuscaloosa News, March 30, 1962, 16.
Empty barrels: “The vapor from those barrels killed all the vegetation in the city for a mile around the [Research Development Field Unit] compound,” Deitchman recalled. Deitchman, interview with author.
At one point, Colonel Trach: Ibid.
“Well, do you know”: Ibid.
“wanted to stick a finger”: Godel, interview with Huff.
“For the type of conflict”: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Final Report, OSD/ARPA Research and Development Field Unit–Vietnam, Aug. 20, 1962, Defense Technical Information Center.
“that the AR-15 is decidedly superior”: Reed, Van Atta, and Deitchman, DARPA Technical Accomplishments, vol. 1, 14-4.
The army did not want to be told: The lethality debate continued more than four decades later, with soldiers questioning the performance of the weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anthony F. Milavic, “The Last ‘Big Lie’ of Vietnam Kills U.S. Soldiers in Iraq,” American Thinker, Aug. 24, 2004.
“It was a blatant, blithering failure”: Godel, interview with Huff.
“regarded the ARPA field unit”: Cosmas, MACV, 51.
“I do not feel well enough informed”: The phone call between Diem and Lodge is printed in Gravel, Chomsky, and Zinn, Pentagon Papers.
ARPA personnel in the city: Herzfeld, Life at Full Speed, 126–27.
following the CIA’s Bay of Pigs fiasco: Charles Maechling, “Camelot, Robert Kennedy, and Counter-insurgency: A Memoir,” Virginia Quarterly (Summer 1999).
Wylie wanted to meet: Godel/Wylie trial transcript.
Assigned to ARPA as Godel’s: Ibid.
“vultures”: Corson, Betrayal, 249.
“This has about as much value”: “Memorandum for General Wienecke: Subject: Analysis of RAC Proposed Tasks by AGILE Program Managers,” May 22, 1964, Project Agile, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
In the spy business, Class A agents: Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). After World War II, for example, Class A agents were used to give cash to German scientists brought to the United States to keep them out of Soviet hands.
McNamara suddenly demanded: Godel/Wylie trial transcript.
“You can be around people”: Ibid.
“If you are in trouble”: Ibid.
Believing a deal: Karnow, Vietnam, 325–26.
“rushed from the room”: Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, 301.
In the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations: Samuel Vaughan Wilson, interview with author.
“in some way covert intelligence operations”: Godel/Wylie trial transcript.
“The president’s been shot”: Frosch, interview with author.
It was late on a Friday evening: All direct references to the Godel trial are taken from the Godel/Wylie trial transcript. John Loftis, another senior Pentagon official originally charged in the case, successfully petitioned to be tried separately and was cleared.
“This is an important case”: Ibid.
None of them had a change of clothes: Ibid.
“distant thunder that precedes”: “South Viet Nam: Forecast: Showers & a Showdown,” Time, May 21, 1965.
“to support what we called”: Godel/Wylie trial transcript.
“I never met”: Ibid.
“Bill Godel wouldn’t bother”: The Landon Chronicles, an oral history of Dorothea Mortenson Landon and Kenneth Perry Landon, recorded by their son, Kenneth Perry Landon Jr. (1976–1989). Margaret and Kenneth P. Landon Papers, Wheaton College Archives.
Wylie appeared nearly comatose: Warren Stark, interview with author. Pretrial records also detail Wylie’s efforts to claim mental illness. Godel/Wylie trial records.
“It was a couple guys”: Cacheris, interview with author.
Over the course of the Vietnam War: See Veterans and Agent Orange: Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994).
Agent Orange became synonymous: The best technical assessment of the herbicide program is in Jeanne Mager Stellman et al., “The Extent and Patterns of Usage of Agent Orange and Other Herbicides in Vietnam,” Nature, April 17, 2003, 681–87. The authors reconstruct the use of herbicides based on National Archives records. They concede the exact amount used is difficult to pin down, because in some cases only procurement amounts are recorded, which is not necessarily the same as what was actually sprayed.
Of all the things Godel: Today, ARPA jokes about its failures, like the mechanical elephant that would trudge through the jungles of Vietnam, but Agent Orange is never mentioned in any official materials. In an otherwise detailed account of the early years of the agency, the only reference to chemical defoliation is a brief note that chemicals were used to “clear roads and border areas and possibly disrupt Viet Cong food sources, culminating in a limited operational test which ‘yielded generally inconclusive results.’ ” Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-42.
Godel left ARPA: Godel even believed that the AR-15, later hailed as AGILE’s greatest success, was, in fact, a failure for counterinsurgency. The debate over the U.S. Army’s adoption of the AR-15 merely sidetracked plans to give the weapon to South Vietnamese troops, to help them fight in the jungles. Turning the AR-15 into a weapon for American forces defeated the entire point. “I neither know, nor give a damn, what the U.S. Army needs,” Godel said. Godel, interview with Huff.
“None”: Ibid.
“stuff happens”: Herzfeld, interview with author.
CHAPTER 9: A WORLDWIDE LABORATORY
“simulating the behavior”: U.S. House, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1966. Part 5: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, 565
Herzfeld was born: National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, Volume 80 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), 162. It also appears that Charles Herzfeld’s grandfather Karl Herzfeld converted and was alleged to be a “leading anti-Semite in the faculty of medicine.” Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Arthur Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 307.
“I was no Mozart”: Herzfeld, A Life at Full Speed, 93.
“towering intellect”: Herzfeld, interview with author.
“I thought it was a declaration”: Ibid.
Though he would not formally: Ibid. This view is also supported by the Huff and Sharp history.
“The only thing worth doing”: Ibid.
“I think one could do”: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-21.
But interest in missile defense: Ibid., VII-19. The history notes, “By the end of 1966 the drive for a comprehensive test ban had essentially ceased to exist as a matter of national priority.”
Almost from the start: In a 1988 interview, when asked about his travels to look at networking, he recalled going to MIT a couple times, and also looking at military computers at Strategic Air Command, but it was clear the specifics of the program were beyond his daily purview. In his memoir, Herzfeld devotes fewer than two pages to computer networking, an area in which he was deeply influential but that did not occupy much of his time.
“I’ve been thinking about”: Herzfeld, interview with author.
“more of a doer”: Ibid.
“The question was, if you dig a tunnel”: Ibid.
“We did experiments”: Ibid. Though Herzfeld did not expand on why Vietnam’s trees were sick, it might have been the result of two years of chemical defoliation, initiated by ARPA.
“We were expected to solve”: Herzfeld, interview with author.
“I was involved in this”: Ibid.
“I’m thinking of opening an office”: Stark, interview with author.
“To be honest with you”: Ibid.
The Pentagon’s spending: Circular 515-6, Department of Defense Research and Development Activities in U.S. Southern Command, July 13, 1965, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
“Thailand was basically a laboratory”: Stark, interview with author.
He paid for an hour: Stark, Many Faces, Many Places, 100.
Despite the admitted lack of knowledge: R. H. Wienecke to Director, Program Management, memo, “Subject: Counterinsurgency Information Analysis Center,” June 2, 1964, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
The “people and politics” branch: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Project AGILE, Semiannual Report, 1 July–31 Dec. 1963, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
“With a proper approach”: U.S. House, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1966. Part 5: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, 137.
“The need for ecological”: Stark to Director, Remote Area Conflict, memo, Feb. 18, 1963, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
“We can communicate”: This quotation is repeated in many forms, in memoirs, in interviews w
ith the author, and in the ARPA history. This specific version is from Stark’s memoir, Many Faces, Many Places, 123.
“had little potential”: Huff and Stark, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-40.
“maintain a much more efficient”: Robert A. Kulinyi, “Program Review of the Southeast Asia Communications Research Project,” in J. R. Wait et al., Workshop on Radio Systems in Forested and/or Vegetated Environments (Fort Huachuca, Az: Army Communications Command, 1974), 20.
“While SEACORE may have had”: Huff and Stark, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-41.
ARPA provided boats: Stark and Deitchman, interviews with author.
“All the South China Sea Junks”: Herzfeld, A Life at Full Speed, 137.
As Stark walked down the street: Stark, Many Faces, Many Places, 122.
ARPA’s Rural Security Systems Program: Huff and Sharp, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VIII-47.
The Thais attempted to mimic: Ibid.
“laughable”: Ibid., VIII-48.
“I remember taking”: Stark, interview with author.
Stark was beginning to think: Ibid.
Asked what could account: Stark, Many Faces, Many Places, 110.
two-hundred- to three-hundred-foot wire: Christofilos to Foster, Aug. 29, 1966, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park. The letterhead indicated that Christofilos was writing on behalf of the JASON group, managed by the Institute for Defense Analyses.
“The approach appears feasible”: Herzfeld to Foster, memo, Nov. 23, 1966, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
“a unique approach”: Foster to Christofilos, Nov. 22, 1966, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
“the suspension of a wire”: Lieutenant Colonel Thomas F. Doeppner, memo, Nov. 8, 1966, Project AGILE, RG 330, National Archives, College Park.
The Christofilos proposal: Although the ARPA files do not say if the idea was pursued, in a later interview John Foster refers to an ARPA project that detected oxide using “a new frequency, a harmonic.” Foster, interview with Williams/Gerard.
The Imagineers of War Page 47