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ince its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced

S Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has grown
to become the Defense Department's most secret,
most powerful, and most controversial military
Science research and development agency—“the
Pentagon’s brain.” Created by President Eisenhower
to prevent another Sputnik, and to focus primarily
on defensive programs against nuclear weapons,
the agency—and its imagination and scope—has
expanded enormously with each passing year.
From Agent Orange in Vietnam to insect-sized
drones in use today, from the earliest networked
computers and the Internet to smart rockets and war
zones under twenty-four-hour video surveillance,
DARPA is responsible for innovations that have
changed the course of war, national security, and
strategic planning at the highest levels. Thousands
of scientists and engineers have been engaged
for decades in a technological arms race, using
battlegrounds to test their science. The results
have changed the way we fight, and the world
we know. |
To uncover the secret history of DARPA in
action, New York Times bestselling author Annie
Jacobsen tracked down key players in DARPA’s
Smart Weapons Program, past and present:
neuroscientists building an artificial brain, cell
biologists working on limb regeneration, the Nobel
laureate who invented the laser. From DARPA’s
earliest defensive advances to hundreds of
ongoing programs (including one in which War on
Terror vets with brain injuries are being used in
DARPA experiments—chips are implanted in their
brains to try to restore cognitive function),
ALSO BY ANNIE JACOBSEN
Operation Paperclip
Area 51
 THE
PENTAGON'S
BRAIN
AN UNCENSORED HISTORY OF
DARPA,
AMERICA’S TOP SECRET
MILITARY RESEARCH AGENCY

ANNIE JACOBSEN

BROWN AND COMPANY

LARGE PRINT EDITION

Copyright © 2015 by Anne M. Jacobsen
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of
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to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior
written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author's
rights.
Little, Brown and Company
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Printed in the United States of America
For Kevin
 CONTENTS

Prologue 5

PART |
THE COLD WAR
Chapter One: The Evil Thing 13
Chapter Two: War Games and Computing Machines 39
Chapter Three: Vast Weapons Systems of the Future 65
Chapter Four: Emergency Plans 85
Chapter Five: Sixteen Hundred Seconds Until
Doomsday 110
Chapter Six: Psychological Operations 134

PART Il
THE VIETNAM WAR
Chapter Seven: Techniques and Gadgets 171
Chapter Eight: RAND and COIN 195
Chapter Nine: Command and Control 212
Chapter Ten: Motivation and Morale 234
Chapter Eleven: The Jasons Enter Vietnam 265
Chapter Twelve: The Electronic Fence 289
Chapter Thirteen: The End of Vietnam 313
 CONTENTS

PART Ill
OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR
Chapter Fourteen: Rise of the Machines 347
Chapter Fifteen: Star Wars and Tank Wars 380
Chapter Sixteen: The Gulf War and Operations
Other Than War 395
Chapter Seventeen: Biological Weapons 415
Chapter Eighteen: Transforming Humans
for War 446

PART IV
THE WAR ON TERROR
Chapter Nineteen: Terror Strikes 467
Chapter Twenty: Total Information Awareness 492
Chapter Twenty-One: IED War 518
Chapter Twenty-Iwo: Combat Zones That See 539
Chapter Twenty-Three: Human Terrain 567

PART V
FUTURE WAR
Chapter Twenty-Four: Drone Wars 593
Chapter Twenty-Five: Brain Wars 615
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Pentagon’s Brain 644
Acknowledgments 665
Notes 671
List of Interviews and Written Correspondence 729
Bibliography 733

viii
 THE
PENTAGON'S
BRAIN
The best way to predict the future is
to create it.
—Erich Fromm
 PROLOGUE

he Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency, or DARPA as it is known, is the most
powerful and most productive military sci-
ence agency in the world. It is also one of the most
secretive and, until this book, the least investigated.
Its mission is to create revolutions in military science
and to maintain technological dominance over the
rest of the world.
DARPA was created by Congress in 1958 and has
functioned ever since as the central research and
development organization of the Department of
Defense. With an annual budget of roughly $3 bil-
lion, DARPA is unlike any other military research
agency in the United States. DARPA as an agency
does not conduct scientific research. Its program
managers and directors hire defense contractors,
academics, and other government organizations to
do the work. DARPA then facilitates the transition
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

of its successful results to the military for use. It acts

swiftly and with agility, free from standard bureau-
cracy or red tape. DARPA maintains an extraordi-
narily small staff. For six decades now the agency
has employed, on average, 120 program managers
annually, each for roughly five years’ tenure. These
entrepreneurial leaders, the majority of whom are
accomplished scientists themselves, initiate and
oversee hundreds of research projects—involving
tens of thousands of scientists and engineers work-
ing inside national laboratories, military and defense
contractor facilities, and university laboratories—
all across America and overseas.
DARPA program managers maintain an unusual
degree of authority in an otherwise rigid military
chain of command. They can start, continue, or
stop research projects with little outside interven-
tion. Once ready for fielding, the resulting weapons
and weapons-related systems are turned over to the
Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and to intelli-
gence agencies including the CIA, NSA (National
Security Agency), DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency),
NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency),
NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), and others.
DARPA carefully controls its public persona. Sto-
ries about DARPA as America’s cutting-edge science
agency appear regularly in the press, while the bulk
of DARPA’s more consequential and sometimes

6
 PROLOGUE

Orwellian programs go largely unreported. “Tiny

DARPA implants could give humans self-healing
powers,” headlined CBS News in the fall of 2014.
That same week, Business Insider ran the headline
“DARPA’s Incredible Jumping Robot Shows How
the US Military Is Pivoting to Disaster Relief.”
These and other DARPA stories angle toward health
and wellness, when in fact DARPA’s stated mission
is to create weapons systems. This book reveals why.
Many news stories remind readers that DARPA cre-
ated the Internet, Global Positioning Systems (GPS),
and stealth technology. But to describe DARPA this
way is to describe Apple as the computer company
that built the Macintosh 512K. These DARPA mile-
stones are forty-year-old inventions. Why has so
much else about America’s most powerful and most
productive military science agency been shrouded in
mystery? This book shines a light on DARPA’s secret
history.
Until 1972, DARPA was located inside the Penta-
gon. Today the agency maintains headquarters in an
unmarked glass and steel building four miles from
the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia. DARPA’s direc-
tor reports to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
In its fifty-seven years, DARPA has never allowed the
United States to be taken by scientific surprise. Admir-
ers call DARPA the Pentagon’s brain. Critics call it
the heart of the military-industrial complex. Is

7
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

DARPA to be admired or feared? Does DARPA

safeguard democracy, or does it stimulate America’s
seemingly endless call to war?
DARPA makes the future happen. Industry, pub-
lic health, society, and culture all transform because
of technology that DARPA pioneers. DARPA cre-
ates, DARPA dominates, and when sent to the bat-
tlefield, DARPA destroys. “We are faced with huge
uncertainties and shifting threats,” DARPA director
Arati Prabhakar stated in a press release in 2014,
“but we also have unparalleled opportunities to
advance technologies in a way that can provide the
nation with dramatic new capabilities.” But what if
some of these “dramatic new capabilities” are not
such great ideas?
To research this book, I interviewed seventy-one
individuals uniquely affiliated with DARPA, going
back to the earliest days of the agency. The list
includes presidential science advisors, DARPA pro-
gram managers and scientists, members of the eso-
teric and highly secretive Jason scientists, captains,
colonels, a Nobel laureate, and a four-star general.
In interviewing these individuals, I heard stories
about pushing known scientific boundaries in the
name of national security, about weather warfare,
social science experiments, and war games. I heard
about brilliance and hubris, about revolutionary tri-
umphs and shortsighted defeat. One concept stands

8
 PROLOGUE

out. DARPA, by its mandate, pioneers advanced

military science in secret. A revolution is not a revo-
lution unless it comes with an element of surprise.
Once DARPA technology is revealed on the battle-
field, other nations inevitably acquire the science
that DARPA pioneered. For example, in the early
1960s, during the Vietnam War, DARPA began
developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. It
took three decades to arm the first drone, which
then appeared on the battlefield in Afghanistan in
October 2001. By the time the public knew
about drone warfare, U.S. drone technology had
advanced by multiple generations. Shortly thereaf-
ter, numerous enemy nations began engineering
their own drones. By 2014, eighty-seven nations had
military-grade drones.
In interviewing former DARPA scientists for this
book, I learned that at any given time in history,
what DARPA scientists are working on—most
notably in the agency’s classified programs—‘is ten
to twenty years ahead of the technology in the pub-
lic domain. The world becomes the future because
of DARPA. Is it wise to let DARPA determine what
lies ahead?
 PART |

THE COLD WAR

 CHAPTER ONE

The Evil Thing

ne day in the winter of 1954, a group of

() insta scientists found themselves enter-
ing into a time when a machine they had
created could trigger the end of the world. It was
March 1, 1954, 4:29 a.m. local time on Bikini Atoll
in the Marshall Islands, a small island chain in the
vast Pacific Ocean, 2,650 miles west of Hawaii.
Some of the scientists in the group had warned of
this moment. Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, both
Manhattan Project scientists, called this machine an
“evil thing,” and they told President Truman it
should never be created. But it was built anyway,
and now it was about to explode.
The machine was a thermonuclear, or hydrogen,
bomb, small enough to be loaded onto a U.S. Air Force

13
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

bomber and dropped on an enemy city like Moscow.

Because the bomb’s existence had been kept secret from
the American public, the test that the scientists were
about to witness had been given a code name. It was
called Castle Bravo.
On one end of Bikini Atoll, ten men, each with a
top secret Q clearance for access to nuclear secrets,
waited inside a concrete bunker, facing an unknown
fate. In a little more than two hours, the most pow-
erful bomb in the history of the world to date was
going to be detonated just nineteen miles away. No
human being had ever before been this close to the
kind of power this bomb was expected to deliver.
With a predicted yield of 6 megatons, Castle Bravo
would deliver twice as much power as all the bombs
dropped on Germany and Japan during World War
II together, including both atomic bombs.
Thanks to recent advancements in defense sci-
ence, by 1954 machines were being miniaturized at
an astonishing rate. Nuclear weapons in particular
were getting smaller and more efficient in ways that
scientists could not have imagined a decade before.
The Castle Bravo bomb would likely explode with
one thousand times the force of the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, and yet it
weighed just a little more than twice as much.
The light had not yet come up on Bikini. An
intense tropical rainfall the night before had left the

14
 THe Evit THInc

fronds on the coconut palms and pandanus trees

soaking wet. Salt-loving sea lavender plants covered
the lowlands, and little penny-sized geckos scam-
pered across wet white sands. The bunker, code-
named Station 70, was an odd sight to behold, squat,
rectangular, with blast-proof doors and three-foot
concrete walls. Everything but the bunker’s entrance
had now been buried under ten feet of sand. A free-
standing concrete-block seawall stood between the
bunker and the lagoon, engineered to help protect
the men against a potentially massive tidal wave. A
three-hundred-foot-tall radio tower built nearby
made it possible for the men in the bunker to com-
municate directly with U.S. defense officials and sci-
entists running this secret operation from aboard
the Task Force Command ship USS Estes, sixty
miles out at sea.
The men inside the bunker were members of the
bomb’s firing party, a team of six engineers, three
Army technicians, and one nuclear scientist. Miles
of waterproof submarine cable connected the racks
of electronic equipment inside the bunker to the
Castle Bravo bomb, which was located on a separate
island, nineteen miles across Bikini’s lagoon.
“In the bunker we felt secure,” recalled Bernard
O'Keefe, one of the nuclear weapons engineers who
had advocated for this test. Like Fermi and Rabi, Bar-
ney O’Keefe had worked on the Manhattan Project.

15
 Tuer PENTAGON’S BRAIN

But unlike those two nuclear physicists, O’Keefe

believed this hydrogen bomb was a good thing. That
it would keep Americans safe. Defense science is, and
likely always will be, a debate.
“At 4:30 a.m. we heard from the scientific direc-
tor,” O’Keefe later remembered. Dr. William Ogle,
Los Alamos scientific director, used a ship-to-shore
radio link to relay messages from the USS Estes. Zero
Hour grew near.
“Start the countdown,” Ogle said.
“The Time is H minus two hours,” O’Keefe
announced. Beside him, another member of the fir-
ing party pushed the red button marked “TWO
HOURS.” The machinery took hold.
Inside the bunker, time marched on, and as it
did, the general tenor shifted from bearable to “ago-
nizing,” O’Keefe recalled. The interior of Station 70
was rough and ugly, with the damp baldness of new
concrete. Pool hall-style reflector lights gave off a
harsh fluorescent glare. There was a laboratory table
covered with tools of the engineering trade: radio
tubes, bits and pieces of wire, a soldering iron. On
one wall hung a blackboard. On it someone had
written a mathematical equation then erased part of
it so it no longer made sense. A clock ticked toward
Zero Hour. For a long stretch no one said a word,
and a heavy and foreboding silence filled the room.
Just sixteen minutes before detonation, someone

16
 THE Evit THING

finally spoke. One of the Army’s radio technicians

wondered aloud how tonight's steak dinner, stored
in a meat locker at the back of the bunker, was going
to taste after the bomb finally went off.
“H minus fifteen minutes,” said O’Keefe, his
voice sounding out across dozens of loudspeakers
now broadcasting the information to more than ten
thousand scientists, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and
government officials spread out across fourteen sea-
going vessels, forty-six aircraft, and two weather sta-
tions. There was no turning back now. Zero Hour
was just fifteen minutes away.
Out at sea, aboard another vessel, the men on the
USNS Ainsworth heard Barney O’Keefe’s voice “loud
and clear,” recalls Ralph “Jim” Freedman, a twenty-
four-year-old nuclear weapons engineer. Standing
beside Freedman on deck was a group of scien-
tists from Los Alamos. These were the physicists
who had designed and built this bomb. They were
here now to witness the results of their engineered
creation—the machine that Enrico Fermi and
Isidor Rabi had warned President Truman was an
“evil thing.” The sun had not yet risen. Outside, all
around, it was dark.
“All observers having high-density goggles put
them on,” O’Keefe’s voice boomed. Freedman was
feeling anxious and uneasy. He had not slept well
the night before. “I was in the same bunkroom as

Ib
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the Los Alamos scientists, some who were up all

night, drinking Chivas Regal and discussing the
bomb test,” Freedman recalls. “They were discuss-
ing things they were not supposed to be discussing
but did anyway, because who could sleep the night
before the test?” Castle Bravo had been built accord-
ing to the “Teller'Ulam” scheme—named for its
co-designers, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam—
which meant, unlike with the far less powerful
atomic bomb, this hydrogen bomb had been designed
to hold itself together for an extra hundred-millionth
of a second, thereby allowing its hydrogen isotopes to
fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy,
called fusion, producing a potentially infinite amount
of power, or yield. “What this meant,” Freedman
explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million
chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the
earth’s atmosphere, when Castle Bravo exploded, it
could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some sci-
entists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about
the end of the world.”
This was not Freedman’s first atmospheric nuclear
bomb test. By 1954 he had worked on more than a
dozen nuclear tests at the continental atomic test site
located in Nevada, seventy miles north of Las Vegas.
Freedman had witnessed atomic explosions before,
through dark welder’s glasses. He had seen mush-

18
 THE EviL THING

room clouds form. But Castle Bravo was different. It

was going to be colossal. Titanic. A history-making
bomb test. With his goggles in place over his eyes,
Freedman turned to face the bomb. There was less
than two minutes to go when a Los Alamos scientist
standing beside him let out a frustrated cry.
“He'd left his goggles down below deck,” Freed-
man explains. “And there wasn’t enough time for
him to go get them and make it back up.”
Freedman took off his goggles and handed them
to the man. “I was young,” he says, “not so impor-
tant to the test.” Without eye protection, Jim Freed-
man had to turn his back to the bomb. So instead of
watching Castle Bravo explode, Freedman watched
the scientists watch the bomb.
The prerecorded voice of Barney O’Keefe came
over the loudspeaker, counting down the last sec-
onds. Everyone fell silent. “Five. Four. Three. Two.
One.” Zero Hour. A flash of thermonuclear light,
called the Teller light, sprang to life as a flood of
gamma radiation filled the air. The presence of
x-rays made the unseen visible. In the flash of
Teller light, Freedman—who was watching the sci-
entists for their reactions—could see their facial
bones.
“In front of me...they were skeletons,” Freed-
man recalls. Their faces no longer appeared to be

19
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

human faces. Just “jawbones and eye sockets. Rows

of teeth. Skulls.”
Out at sea and in the distance, the world’s largest-
ever nuclear fireball—nearly four-and-a-half miles
in diameter and nine miles tall—lit up the sky. So
intense was that fireball that Navy personnel man-
ning a weather station 155 miles to the east watched,
awestruck, as the dark sky remained alight for sixty
agonizing seconds. Next, the mushroom cloud
started to form. Freedman’s eyes remained on
the Los Alamos scientists, his own perspective now
returned to normal in the absence of the Teller light.
“I was watching their faces,” he recalls, “to see their
reaction. Most had their mouths open, with the eye-
balls darting back and forth. I remember the eyes.
The eyeballs kept moving. There was fear and ter-
ror, I think. The mushroom cloud just kept getting
bigger.” The scientists knew something was wrong.
One scientist held two fingers up in front of his
eye, trade craft among nuclear weapons engineers to
roughly measure the rate of expansion of a mush-
room cloud. What was predicted to be a 6-megaton
explosion had gone out of control. Castle Bravo was
a 15-megaton explosion. No one had any idea the
explosion could be this big.
“The mushroom cloud should have been fifteen
[or] twenty miles wide at this point. Instead it was
forty,” Freedman explains. “As the cloud kept grow-

20
 THE Evit THING

ing behind me, I could see in the faces that [some]

of the scientists thought the atmosphere was catch-
ing on fire. The look said, ‘This is the end of the
world.”
Time passed. Freedman stared at the horrified
scientists. Then, finally, the rapid expansion of the
mushroom cloud began to slow. To Freedman’s eye,
the scientists’ expression of intense terror and despair
suddenly lifted and was gone. “The look on their
faces went from fear to satisfaction,” Freedman
recalls. “The world didn’t end and they were trium-
phant. Self-satisfied with what they had accom-
plished. With what they had done.”
Within sixty seconds, the top of the mushroom
cloud reached fifty thousand feet, roughly twice as
high as commercial airplanes flew back then. Its cap
would eventually grow to an astounding seventy
miles across. The cloud’s colossal stem was sucking
millions of tons of pulverized coral up from the
ocean and into the atmosphere, where it would be
dispersed into the jet stream as radioactive dust. The
remains would leave a footprint of fallout on every
corner of the earth.
An unexpected ninety-degree shift in wind direc-
tion meant that weather forecasters had been wrong
about which way the wind would blow. Intense fall-
out was now heading in an easterly direction, where
it would pass over several of the Task Force vessels

His
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and the inhabited atolls of Rongelap and Rongerik.

And it was headed directly for Station 70, on Enyu
Island.
Back inside the bunker, the firing party was silent.
They could not feel or see the fireball. They'd missed
the Teller light. All the ten men had to go by, to
gauge what might be going on outside, was the vio-
lent electronic chatter on the equipment racks.
“The explosion had to have been a big one to
cause that much electrical commotion,” O’Keefe
later recalled. O’Keefe had also calculated that it
would take another forty-five seconds for the shock
wave to travel the nineteen miles from ground zero
across the lagoon and hit the bunker head-on. And
so when, after only ten seconds, the bunker began to
shudder and sway, O’Keefe knew instantly some-
thing unexpected had happened.
“The whole building was moving,’ O'Keefe
recalled, “not shaking or shuddering as it would from
the shock wave that had not arrived yet, but with a
slow, perceptible, rolling motion, like a ship’s roll.”
O'Keefe felt nauseated. He wanted to throw up.
“I was completely unable to get it through my head
that the building was moving,” he said, trying to
push away the sickening feeling that the bunker
might be sinking into the sea. “The walls are three
feet thick,” he told himself. “It’s anchored like a rock
on this island.” But things were most definitely mov-

22
 THE Evi_ THING

ing outside. Objects on the surfaces and walls began

to rattle, slide, and crash to the floor. O’Keefe looked
at the clock. He knew how long it was supposed to
take for the shock wave to travel from ground zero
to the bunker. “It was impossible for the shock wave
to have reached Enyu Island yet,” he recalled think-
ing. “But the bunker was moving. The motion was
unmistakable as it built up.”
Lights flickered. The walls appeared to bulge.
Then there was a loud and frightening crash, like a
thunderclap, as the giant steel door beat like a drum-
head. A “slow, sickening whoosh” sounded through
the bunker “as the air found its way out after the
shock wave had passed.” One of the men was thrown
to the ground, and O’Keefe watched him stagger as
he struggled to his knees. Sparks were flying. There
was the sputter of electronic batteries. A vapor cloud
began to fill the room. Then the worst possible ele-
ment in this catastrophic mix appeared.
“Water!” someone yelled. “There’s water coming
in!”
O’Keefe’s legs went rubbery. It was too early for a
tidal wave, he told himself, and began to think that
perhaps the whole ocean had erupted around them.
That soon he and his colleagues would be jettisoned to
the bottom of the lagoon, their concrete bunker a
watery tomb. The scientist in charge, Dr. John
Clark, dispatched one of the Army technicians to

BS
 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

investigate. The technician walked to the single

round porthole built into the blast-proof steel doors
and looked outside. Station 70 was not underwater. It
was still anchored to the land. The water in the bun-
ker was coming from burst water pipes. O’Keefe vol-
unteered to take a Geiger counter and venture
outside. Several others followed along, Geiger coun-
ters in hand.
The situation outside looked far worse than any-
one had anticipated. Palm trees were on fire. Dead
birds littered the land. There was no visible life, and
they sensed that there might not be life anywhere.
The sun was blotted out behind the nuclear mush-
room cloud. “The air was filled with a whitish chaff”
O'Keefe recalled. “I stuck out my hand, which was
soon covered with a substance like talcum powder.”
When O’Keefe turned on his Geiger counter to
check for radiation, the needle spiked. Someone else
shouted out a dangerous radiation level. If a human
were exposed to this level of radiation for twenty-
five minutes, he would be dead.
The men ran back into the bunker. But inside,
behind three-foot concrete walls, there were also
life-threatening radiation levels. The group retreated
to a region far back in the bunker, behind a second
concrete-block wall where the urinals were. Jack
Clark called for an emergency evacuation but was
told it was too dangerous to send a helicopter pilot

24
 THE Evit THING

to Enyu Island just yet. Station 70 had been designed

with a ten thousand factor of radiation shielding.
Whatever was going on inside the bunker, outside it was
ten thousand times worse. The firing party would
have to wait it out. Eventually the deadly radiation
levels would subside, they were told.
Eighty miles to the east another calamity was
unfolding. A Japanese fishing trawler, called the
Lucky Dragon Number Five, had been caught
unawares roughly fifteen miles outside the desig-
nated U.S. military restricted zone. After the Castle
Bravo bomb exploded, many of the Japanese fisher-
men on the trawler ran out on deck to behold what
appeared to be some kind of mystical apparition, the
sun rising in the west. Awestruck, they stood staring
at the nuclear fireball as it grew, until a chalky mate-
rial started falling from the sky. This was pulverized
coral, made highly radioactive by the thermonuclear
blast. By the time the fishermen returned to Japan, all
of them were suffering from radiation poisoning. Six
months later, the Lucky Dragon’s chief radio operator,
Aikichi Kuboyama, died.
Castle Bravo was a weapon of unprecedented
destruction. It was 250 percent more powerful than
the force calculated by the scientists who had engi-
neered it. In time Castle Bravo would become known
as the worst radiological disaster in history. Radioac-
tive contamination became so consequential and

25
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

widespread that two days after the explosion, the

Navy evacuated Rongelap, Rongerik, Ailinginae,
and Utirik atolls, which lay between seventy-five and
three hundred miles to the east of ground zero.
Many of the islanders living there were powdered in
radioactive dust.
In the days that followed, the world’s 2.7 billion
inhabitants remained ignorant of what had hap-
pened in the Marshall Islands. The Atomic Energy
Commission ordered a news blackout on the afteref-
fects of the bomb, including that no mention be
made of the extensive fallout or the evacuation of
the four atolls. Castle Bravo was only the first explo-
sion in a series of U.S. hydrogen bomb tests, a series
that had been obliquely announced to the public as
“weapons tests.” All other information was classi-
fied. This was 1954, before the invention of commu-
nications satellites. It was still possible to move ten
thousand men and a fleet of warships and airplanes
unobserved to an obscure corner of the earth to con-
duct a secret hydrogen bomb test.
Americans back home remained in the dark. On
March 10, a full nine days after the United States
had exploded what would turn out to be a 15-mega-
ton hydrogen bomb, causing deadly fallout to circle
the earth, President Dwight Eisenhower took to a
podium in the White House press room. In his
weekly presidential news conference to the nation,
26
 THE Evi THING

he had this to say: “I have only one announcement.

It is very inconsequential. Sometime during the
coming week I shall probably go on the air to dis-
cuss the general contents of the tax program.”
But in Japan the Lucky Dragon fishing trawler
had returned to port, and news of the radiation-
poisoned fishermen was making international head-
lines. The Atomic Energy Commission issued a terse
statement saying that some individuals had been
“unexpectedly” subjected to “some radiation [dur
ing a] routine atomic test in the Marshall Islands.”
On March 17, at the weekly news conference from
the White House, reporter Merriman Smith asked
the president to shed light on this mysterious, all-
powerful weapon.
“Mr. President,” said Smith. “The Joint Congres-
sional Atomic Energy Commissioner said last night
that we now have a hydrogen bomb and can deliver
it anywhere in the world. I wonder if you could dis-
cuss that?”
“No, I wouldn’t want to discuss that,” the presi-
dent said. And he did not.
It was the Cold War, and secrecy reigned.

Behind the scenes, what President Eisenhower was

just now learning about the Castle Bravo bomb was
horrifying beyond most people’s comprehension. The
president's scientific advisors showed him a top secret

27,
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

map of the fallout pattern made by the Castle Bravo

bomb across the Marshall Islands. The scientists then
superimposed that same fallout pattern onto a map of
the east coast of the United States. If ground zero had
been Washington, D.C., instead of Bikini Atoll, every
resident of the greater Washington-Baltimore area
would now be dead. Without a Station 70-style bun-
ker for protection, the entire population living there
would have been killed by 5,000 roentgens of radia-
tion exposure in mere minutes. Even in Philadelphia,
150 miles away, the majority of inhabitants would
have been exposed to radiation levels that would have
killed them within the hour. In New York City, 225
miles north, half of the population would have died
by nightfall. All the way to the Canadian border,
inhabitants would have been exposed to 100 roent-
gens or more, their suffering similar to what the fish-
erman on the Lucky Dragon had endured.
But President Eisenhower had no intention of
relaying this information to the public. Instead, he
said there was nothing to discuss. The physical fall-
out map would remain classified for decades, but
even the president could not control the escalating
international outrage over the Castle Bravo bomb.
Soon he would be forced to address the issue.

The secret decision to engineer the thermonuclear,

or hydrogen, bomb began five years earlier when, on

28
 Tue Evirt THInc

August 29, 1949, the Soviets exploded their first

atomic bomb. Suddenly, the United States lost the
nuclear monopoly it had maintained since World
War II. The question of how to respond took on
great urgency. Should America reply with powerful
counterforce? Or was restraint the more suitable
reply?
One month after the Soviet atomic bomb test, the
General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission—an elite group of
nuclear scientists —convened, in secret, to identify
whether or not the United States should pursue a
crash program to build the hydrogen bomb. The
chairman of this committee was J. Robert Oppen-
heimer, the former scientific director of the Manhat-
tan Project and a man known as the father of the
atomic bomb. In “unanimous opposition,” the scien-
tists agreed that the United States should not move
forward with the hydrogen bomb, and they stated so
in no uncertain terms. The reasons were uncompli-
cated, they said. “It is clear that the use of this
weapon would bring about the destruction of innu-
merable human lives,” they wrote. “Its use would
involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civil-
ians.” Tens of thousands of people had been killed in
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a
hydrogen bomb would kill millions in a single strike.
The hydrogen bomb was a weapon with a builtin

22
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

“policy of exterminating civilian populations,” the

GAC members warned.
Two committee members, the physicists Enrico
Fermi and Isidor Rabi, felt compelled to add a letter, or
“annex,” for then President Truman to read. “It is clear
that such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical
ground,” they wrote. “The fact that no limits exist to
the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very exis-
tence and the knowledge of its construction a danger
to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing
considered in any light.” While there was unanimity
among the scientists on the General Advisory
Committee—the official advisory committee on all
matters related to nuclear weapons—the GAC mem-
bers were not the only nuclear scientists with power
and persuasion in Washington, D.C.
As in any serious scientific race, there was fierce
competition going on behind the scenes. There
existed another group of nuclear scientists who were
deeply committed to engineering a hydrogen bomb.
Leading this team were the Hungarian-born Edward
Teller and his mentor, the American-born Ernest O.
Lawrence, both former members of the Manhattan
Project. Neither Teller nor Lawrence had been
elected to the General Advisory Committee, nor did
they take part in the unanimous decision to advise
President Truman against building the hydrogen
bomb.

30
 THE Evit THING

Teller and Lawrence had extraordinary power

and influence in Washington, at the Pentagon and
the Atomic Energy Commission. Mindful that the
GAC had plans to stymie their efforts for a hydro-
gen bomb, Edward Teller met personally with the
chairman of the congressional committee on nuclear
energy. “We must know more about principles of
thermonuclear devices to make a decision about
[the] military implications,” said Teller, who felt that
Oppenheimer was foolishly being guided by moral
arguments in a fight against an atheistic communist
enemy. Senator Brien McMahon, the powerful
chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy,
agreed. The view of the Oppenheimer group “just
makes me sick,” McMahon told Teller.
Ernest Lawrence met with David E. Lilienthal,
the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
“If we don’t get this super [i.e., the hydrogen bomb]
first,’ Lawrence warned, “we are sunk, the U.S.
would surrender without a struggle.” Lawrence con-
sidered the atomic bomb “one of mankind’s greatest
blessings,” and felt that the hydrogen bomb was “a
technical means of taking profit out of war.” He met
with Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy
Committee. Lawrence took umbrage at the idea of
anyone’s bringing moral principles into the mix.
Their conversation inspired Strauss to appeal directly
to the president. “A government.of atheists is not

a1
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon

on ‘moral’ grounds,” Strauss wrote. The “super”
must be built. “If we let the Russians get the super
first, catastrophe becomes all but certain,” Brien
McMahon told the president and his national secu-
rity advisors. “It’s either we make it or we wait until
the Russians drop one on us without warning,” said
National Security Committee member Admiral Sid-
ney Souers.
In January 1950 President Truman authorized a
crash program to build the hydrogen bomb. The Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy decided that a second
national nuclear weapons laboratory was needed now,
in order to foster competition with Los Alamos. This
idea—that rivalry fosters excellence and is imperative
for supremacy—would become a hallmark of U.S.
defense science in the decades ahead. Lawrence was put
in charge of the new lab, with Teller acting as his spe-
cial scientific advisor. The lab, a branch of the Univer-
sity of California Radiation Laboratory, was located
in Livermore, California, about forty miles southeast
of the university's Berkeley campus.
Livermore, which opened in the spring of 1952,
began with 123 employees. Three of them, all gradu-
ate students at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory,
were Edward Teller protégés. Their names were
Herb York, Harold Brown, and John Foster. Herb
York, age thirty, was Livermore’s first scientific direc-

32
 THE Evit THING

tor. Harold Brown, age twenty-four, was put in

charge of its A Division, for hydrogen bomb work.
John Foster, age twenty-nine, headed up the B Divi-
sion, which worked on smaller and more efficient
atomic weapons. In retrospect, it seems that York,
Brown, and Foster were all remarkably inexperienced
young men to be put in charge of developing the
most powerful nuclear weapons in the world. Each
scientist would play a major role in the history of
DARPA and leave footprints on U.S. national secu-
rity that are ineradicable and absolute.
Nuclear weapons work at Livermore went slowly
at first. For all the ambition and big ideas, Liver-
more’s first nuclear weapons tests, detonated at the
Nevada Test Site in 1953, were duds. One exploded
with such a low yield— equivalent to just two hun-
dred tons of TN—T thar the steel tower on which it
detonated was left standing in the desert, merely
bent and crumpled. A photograph of the misshapen
tower was published in newspapers around the
country, accompanied by jokes about Livermore’s
impotence.
“Los Alamos scientists filled the air with horse
laughs,” scientific director Herb York later recalled.
And so, despite the Livermore team’s desire to shep-
herd the world’s first deliverable hydrogen bomb into
existence, scientists at Los Alamos were instead given
scientific authority over the Castle Bravo bomb.

33
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Edward Teller had designed the bomb before Liver-

more existed, which is why he is considered the
father of the hydrogen bomb. But Los Alamos was
in charge of the test.
In that fateful winter of 1954, there were addi-
tional hydrogen bomb tests planned for Bikini Atoll.
The Bravo bomb was only the first of what would be
a six-bomb thermonuclear test program in the Castle
series, from March 1 to May 14. Five of the six bombs
had been designed and built by Los Alamos. One,
called Koon, was designed at Livermore. Like the
new laboratory’s previous two efforts, Koon was a
failure. Instead of exploding in the megaton range, as
was planned, Koon was a 110-kiloton dud. The new
Livermore laboratory project was now at serious risk
of being canceled. What good is a competition if one
side cannot seem to compete?
Teller and his protégé Herb York would not
accept failure. Fueled by humiliation, they planned
to outperform the competition at Los Alamos. Four
months after Castle Bravo, the General Advisory
Committee met in Los Alamos for classified discus-
sions about how to move forward with the hydrogen
bomb. The majority of these men were the same
ones who had opposed the creation of the super
bomb just four and a half years before. One person
missing was Robert Oppenheimer. He had been

34
 Tue Evit THInc

stripped of his security clearance, on the grounds

that he was a communist, and banished from gov-
ernment service for life. Oppenheimer’s forced exile
sent a strong message to defense scientists. There
was little room for dissent, and certainly not for
objection on moral grounds. Gone was any further
discussion of ethics, or of the fact that the super
bomb was a dangerous machine. The hydrogen
bomb was part of the U.S. military arsenal now.
As commissioners, these scientists had much work
to do.
Isidor Rabi replaced Oppenheimer as committee
chairman. Rabi now embraced the super bomb as
having created a “complete revolution...in atomic
weapons.” Science had fathered a new generation of
technologically advanced weapons and had paved the
way for a whole new “family” of thermonuclear weap-
ons, Rabi said, “from tactical to multi-megaton stra-
tegic weapons, which would render some stockpile
weapons obsolete or of little utility.”
In an atmosphere of such rapid scientific advance-
ment, the Livermore laboratory remained in a precar-
ious position. Its first three weapons tests—code
named Ruth and Ray, at the Nevada Test Site, and
Koon, in the Marshall Islands—had been failures.
During the July 1954 meeting in New Mexico, the
General Advisory Committee discussed whether or

35
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

not creating the second laboratory had been a mis-

take. Isidor Rabi called the Livermore tests “amateur-
ish,” a failure highlighted by the fact that all Livermore
had to do was work on the hydrogen bomb. The lab
didn’t even have to share any of the national security
burdens that Los Alamos shouldered, Rabi said,
including responsibility for building the nation’s
stockpile. In the summer of 1954, it looked as if the
Livermore laboratory might be closed down.
But Livermore’s chief scientist Herb York, and
Edward Teller, acting as special advisor to Ernest
Lawrence, had already crafted a bold response, and
they had come to New Mexico to present their idea
to the General Advisory Committee. On day three
of the meeting, York and Teller presented an idea for
a new weapon on Livermore’s behalf. Castle Bravo
had been a 15-megaton bomb. Livermore had drawn
plans for two mega-super bombs, which they had
code-named Gnomon and Sundial. This was a play
on words; gnomons and sundials are two of the old-
est scientific devices known to man, used in the
ancient world to measure shadows cast by the sun.
Livermore’s mega-super bombs were each designed
to have a 10,000-megaton yield, York and Teller
said. This weapon was capable of destroying an
entire continent in a single strike.
The idea was met with laughter. Scientists on the
General Advisory Committee were appalled. In the

36
 THe Evit THING

only surviving record of the meeting, one committee

member, Dr. James Whitman, expresses shock and
says that a 10,000-megaton bomb would “contami-
nate the earth.” Teller defended his idea, boasting
that Lawrence had already approached the Air Force,
and the Air Force was interested. Rabi called the
idea “a publicity stunt,” and plans for a 10,000-
megaton bomb were shelved. But Livermore was
allowed to keep its doors open after all.
Decades later, Herb York explained why he and
Edward Teller had felt it necessary to design a
10,000-megaton bomb when the United States had,
only months earlier, achieved supremacy over the
Soviets with the 15-megaton Castle Bravo bomb.
The reason, York said, was that in order to maintain
supremacy, American scientists must always take
new and greater risks. “The United States cannot
maintain its qualitative edge without having an
aggressive R&D [research and development] estab-
lishment that pushes against the technological fron-
tiers without waiting to be asked,” York said, “and
that in turn creates a faster-paced arms race. That is
the inevitable result of our continuing quest for a
qualitative edge to offset the other side’s quantitative
advantage.”
For Herb York, the way for America to maintain
its position as the most militarily powerful country
in the world was through the forward march of

By
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

science. To get the most out of an American scientist

was to get him to compete against equally brilliant
men. That was what made America great, York said.
This was the American way of war. And this was
exactly the kind of vision the Department of Defense
required of its scientists as it struggled for survival
against the Soviet communists. The age of thermo-
nuclear weapons had arrived. Both sides were build-
ing vast arsenals at a feverish pace. There was no
turning back. The only place to go was ahead.
It was time to push against technological frontiers.

38
 CHAPTER TWO

War Games and Computing

Machines

n the west coast of California, in the sunny

() Santa Monica sunshine, the defense scien-
tists at RAND Corporation played war
games during lunchtime. RAND, an acronym for
“research and development,” was the Pentagon’s first
postwar think tank, the brains behind U.S. Air
Force brawn. By day, during the 1950s, analysts
inside RAND’s offices and conference rooms churned
out reports, mostly about nuclear weapons. Come
lunchtime they moved outdoors, spreading maps of
the world across tabletops, taking game pieces from
boxes and playing Kriegspiel, a chess variant once
favored by the powerful German military.

39
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Competition was valued and encouraged at

RAND, with scientists and analysts always working
to outdo one another. Lunchtime war games included
at least one person in the role of umpire, which usu-
ally prevented competitions from getting out of
hand. Still, tempers flared, and sometimes game
pieces scattered. Other times there was calculated
calm. Lunch could last for hours, especially if John
von Neumann was in town.
In the 1950s, von Neumann was the superstar
defense scientist. No one could compete with his
brain. At the Pentagon, the highest-ranking mem-
bers of the U.S. armed services, the secretary of
defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all saw von
Neumann as an infallible authority. “If anyone dur-
ing that crucial period in the early and middle-fifties
can be said to have enjoyed more ‘credibility’ in
national defense circles than all the others, that per-
son was surely Johnny,” said Herb York, von Neu-
mann’s close friend.
Born in 1903 to a well-to-do Hungarian Jewish
family, John von Neumann had been a remarkable
child prodigy. In the first grade he was solving com-
plex mathematical problems. By age eight he had
mastered calculus, though his talents were not lim-
ited to math. By the time von Neumann graduated
from high school, he spoke seven languages. He
could memorize hundreds of pages of text, includ-

40
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

ing long numbers, after a single read-through.

“Keeping up with him was impossible,” remarked
the mathematician Israel Halperin. “The feeling was
you were on a tricycle chasing a racing car.”
“Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid
of,” said his childhood teacher, George Pélya, also a
famous mathematician. “If in the course of a lecture
I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he’d
come to me at the end of the lecture with the com-
plete solution scribbled on a slip of paper.”
By all accounts, von Neumann was gentle and
kind, beloved for his warm personality, his courtesy,
and his charm. “He was pleasant and plump, smiled
easily and often, enjoyed parties and other social
events,” recalled Herb York. He loved to drink, play
loud music, attend parties, and collect toys. He
always wore a three-piece banker's suit with a watch
chain stretched across his plump belly. There exists a
photograph of von Neumann traveling down into
the Grand Canyon on a donkey’s back, outfitted in
the legendary three-piece suit. It is said that the only
things von Neumann carried in his pants pockets
were unsolvable Chinese puzzles and top secret secu-
rity clearances, of which he had many.
To his core, von Neumann believed that man was
violent, belligerent, and deceptive, and that he was
inexorably prone to fighting wars. “I think the USA-
USSR conflict will very probably lead to an armed

41
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

‘total’ collision and that a maximum rate of arma-

ment is therefore imperative,” von Neumann ‘wrote
to Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Com-
mission, three years before the Castle Bravo bomb
exploded—a weapon that von Neumann helped
engineer.
Only in rare private moments would “the deeply
cynical and pessimistic core of his being” emerge,
remarks his daughter Marina von Neumann Whit-
man, a former economic advisor to President Nixon.
“T was frequently confused when he shifted, without
warning....[O]ne minute he would have me laugh-
ing at his latest courageous pun and the next he
would be telling me, quite seriously, why all-out
atomic war was almost certainly unavoidable.” Did
war stain him? During World War II, when his only
daughter was a little girl, John von Neumann helped
decide which Japanese civilian populations would
be targeted for atomic bombing. But far more reveal-
ing is that it was von Neumann who performed the
precise calculations that determined at what altitude
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the atomic bombs
had to explode in order to achieve the maximum kill
rate of civilians on the ground. He determined the
height to be 1,800 feet.
At the RAND Corporation, von Neumann
served as a part-time consultant. He was hired by
John Davis Williams, the eccentric director of

42
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

RAND’s Mathematics Division, on unusual terms:

Von Neumann was to write down his thoughts each
morning while shaving, and for those ideas he would
be paid $200 a month —the average salary of a full-
time RAND analyst at the time. Von Neumann
lived and spent most of his time working in New
Jersey, where he had served as a faculty member at the
Princeton Institute for Advanced Study since the
early 1930s, alongside Albert Einstein.
To the RAND scientists playing lunchtime war
games, less important than beating von Neumann
at Kriegspiel was watching how his mind analyzed
game play. “If a mentally superhuman race ever
develops, its members will resemble Johnny von
Neumann,” Edward Teller once said. “If you enjoy
thinking, your brain develops. And that is what von
Neumann did. He enjoyed the functioning of his
brain.”
John von Neumann was obsessed with what he
called parlor games, and his first fascination was
with poker. There was strategy involved, yes, but far
more important was that the game of poker was
predicated on deception: to play and to win, a man
had to be willing to deceive his opponent. To make
one’s opponent think something false was some-
thing true. Second-guessing was equally imperative
‘to a winning strategy. A poker player needs to pre-
dict what his opponent thinks he might do.
43
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

In 1926, when von Neumann was twenty-three

years old, he wrote a paper called “Theory of Parlor
Games.” The paper, which examined game playing
from a mathematical point of view, contained a
soon-to-be famous proof, called the minimax theo-
rem. Von Neumann wrote that when two players are
involved in a zero-sum game—a game in which one
player’s losses equal the other player's gains—each
player will work to minimize his own maximum losses
while at the same time working to maximize his mini-
mum gains. During the war, von Neumann collabo-
rated with fellow Princeton mathematician Oskar
Morgenstern to explore this idea further. In 1944 the
two men co-authored a 673-page book on the subject,
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The book
was considered so groundbreaking that the New York
Times carried a page one story about its contents the
day it was published. But von Neumann and Morgen-
stern’s book did more than just revolutionize economic
theory. It placed game theory on the world stage, and
after the war it caught the attention of the Pentagon.
By the 1950s, von Neumann’s minimax theorem
was legendary at RAND, and to engage von Neu-
mann in a discussion about game theory was like
drinking from the Holy Grail. It became a popular
pastime at RAND to try to present to von Neumann
a conundrum he could not solve. In the 1950s, two
RAND analysts, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher,

44
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

came up with an enigma they believed was unsoly-

able, and they presented it to the great John von
Neumann. Flood and Dresher called their quandary
the Prisoner's Dilemma. It was based on a centuries-
old dilemma tale. A contemporary rendition of the
Prisoner's Dilemma involves two criminal suspects
faced with either prison time or a plea deal.
The men, both members of a criminal gang, are
believed to have participated in the same crime.
They are arrested and put in different cells. Sepa-
rated, the two men have no way of communicating
with each other, so they can’t learn what the other
man is being offered by way of a plea deal. The
police tell each man they don’t have enough evi-
dence to convict either of them individually on the
criminal charges they were brought in for. But the
police do have enough evidence to convict each man
on a lesser charge, parole violation, which carries a
prison sentence of one year. The police offer each
man, separately, a Faustian bargain. If he testifies
against the other man, he will go free and the part-
ner will do ten years’ prison time. There is a catch.
Both men are being offered the same deal. If both
men take the plea deal and testify against the other,
the prison sentence will be reduced to five years. If
both men refuse the deal, they will each be given
only one year in jail for parole violation—clearly
the best way to minimize maximum losses and

45
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

maximize minimum gains. But the deal is on the

table for only a finite amount of time, the police say.
Von Neumann could not “solve” the Prisoner's
Dilemma. It is an unsolvable paradox. It does not fit
the minimax theorem. There is no answer; the out-
come of the dilemma game differs from player to
player. Dresher and Flood posed the Prisoner's
Dilemma to dozens of RAND colleagues and also
to other test subjects outside RAND. While no one
could “solve” the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the RAND
analysts learned something unexpected from the
results. The outcome of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
seemed to depend on the human nature of the indi-
vidual game players involved—whether the player
was guided by trust or distrust. Dresher and Flood
discovered the participants’ responses also revealed
their philosophical construct, which generally corre-
lated to a political disposition. In interviewing
RAND analysts, almost all of whom were politica
conservatives, Dresher and Flood discovered that
the majority chose to testify against their crimina
partner. They did not trust that partner to follow
the concept of self-preservation, gamble against his
own best interests, and refuse to talk. Five years in
prison was better than ten, the RAND analysts
almost universally responded. By contrast, Dresher
and Flood found that the minority of game players
who refused to testify against their criminal partner

46
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

were almost always of the liberal persuasion. These

individuals were willing to put themselves at risk in
order to get the best possible outcome for both them-
selves and a colleague—just a single year’s jail time.
Dresher and Flood saw that the paradox of the Pris-
oner’s Dilemma could be applied to national security
decisions. Take the case of Robert Oppenheimer, for
example, a liberal. As chairman of the General Advi-
sory Committee, Oppenheimer had appealed to Secre-
tary of State Dean Acheson to try to persuade President
Truman not to go forward with the hydrogen bomb.
To show restraint, Oppenheimer said, would send a
clear message to Stalin that America was offering “lim-
itations on the totality of war and thus eliminating the
fear and raising the hope of mankind.” Acheson, a con-
servative, saw the situation very differently. “How can
you persuade a paranoid adversary to “disarm by exam-
ple?’” he asked.
Von Neumann became interested in the Prisoner's
Dilemma as a means for examining strategic possibil-
ities in the nuclear arms race. The Prisoner’s Dilemma
was a non—zero sum game, meaning one person's
wins were not equal to another person’s gains. From
von Neumann’s perspective, even though two ratio-
nal people were involved —or, in the case of national
security, two superpower nations— they were far less
likely to cooperate to gain the best deal, and far more
likely to take their chances on a better deal for

47
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

themselves. The long-term implications for applying

the Prisoner’s Dilemma to the nuclear arms race were
profound, suggesting that it would forever be a game
of one-upmanship.

In addition to game theory and nuclear strategy,

the RAND Corporation was interested in computer
research, a rare and expensive field of study in the
1950s. The world’s leading expert in computers was
John von Neumann. While no one person can accu-
rately claim credit for the invention of the computer,
von Neumann is often seen as one of the fathers of
modern computers, given the critical role he played
in their early development. His work on computing
machines goes back to World War II, a time when
“computer” was the name for a person who
performed numerical calculations as part of a job.
During the war, at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving
Ground in Maryland, scores of human computers
worked around the clock on trajectory tables, trying
to determine more accurate timing and firing meth-
ods for various battlefield weapons. Bombs and
artillery shells were being fired at targets with ever-
increasing speed, and the human computers at Aber-
deen simply could not keep up with the trajectory
tables. The work was overwhelming. Von Neumann,
one of the nation’s leading experts on ballistics at the
time and a regular presence at Aberdeen, got to talk-

48
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

ing with one of the proving ground’s best “comput-

ets,’ Colonel Herman Goldstine, about this very
problem. Goldstine was an Army engineer and
former mathematics professor, and still he found
computing to be grueling work. Goldstine explained
to von Neumann that on average, each trajectory
table he worked on contained approximately three
thousand entries, all of which had to be multiplied.
Performed with paper and pencil, each set of three
thousand calculations took a man like Goldstine
roughly twelve hours to complete and another twelve
hours to verify. The inevitability of human error was
what slowed things down.
Von Neumann told Colonel Goldstine that he
believed a machine would one day prove to be a bet-
ter computer than a human. If so, von Neumann
said, this could profoundly impact the speed with
which the Army could perform its ballistics calcula-
tions. As it so happened, Colonel Goldstine was
cleared for a top secret Army program that involved
exactly the kind of machine von Neumann was theo-
rizing about. Goldstine arranged to have von Neu-
mann granted clearance, and the two men set off for
the University of Pennsylvania. There, inside a locked
room at the Moore School, engineers were working
on a classified Army-funded computing machine—
the first of its kind. It was called the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC.

49
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

ENIAC was huge and cumbersome: one hundred

feet long, ten feet high, and three feet deep. It had
17,468 vacuum tubes and weighed sixty thousand
pounds. Von Neumann was fascinated. ENIAC was
“the first complete automatic, all-purpose digital
electronic computer” in the world, von Neumann
declared. He was certain ENIAC would spawn a
revolution, and that, indeed, computers would no
longer be men but machines.
Von Neumann began developing ideas for creat-
ing an electronic computer of his own. Borrowing
ideas from the ENIAC construct, and with help
from Colonel Goldstine, he drew up plans for a sec-
ond classified electronic computer, called the Elec-
tronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer, or
EDVAC. Von Neumann saw great promise in a
redesign of the ENIAC computer's memory. He
believed there was a way to turn the computer into
an “electronic brain” capable of storing not just data
and instructions, as was the case with ENIAC, but
additional information that would allow the com-
puter to perform a myriad of computational func-
tions on its own. This was called a stored-program
computer, and it “broke the distinction between
numbers that mean things and numbers that do
things,” writes von Neumann’s biographer George
Dyson, adding, “Our universe would never be the
same.” These “instructions” that von Neumann

50
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

imagined were the prototype of what the world now

knows as software.
Von Neumann believed that this computer could
theoretically speed up atomic bomb calculations
being performed by his fellow Manhattan Project
scientists at Los Alamos, in New Mexico. He and
the team at the Moore School proposed that the
Army build a second machine, the one he called
EDVAC. But the atomic bomb was completed and
successfully tested before EDVAC was finished, and
after the war, EDVAC was orphaned.
Von Neumann still wanted to build his own
computer from scratch. He secured funding from
the Atomic Energy Commission to do so, and in
November 1945, John von Neumann began build-
ing an entirely new computer in the basement of
Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton. Colonel Goldstine arrived to assist him
in the winter of 1946, and with help from a small
staff of engineers, von Neumann first constructed a
machine shop and a laboratory for testing computer
components. Officially the project was called the
Electronic Computing Instrument Computer; von
Neumann preferred to call the machine the Mathe-
matical and Numerical Integrator and Computer, or
MANIAC.
MANIAC was smaller and much more advanced
than ENIAC, which weighed thirty tons. ENIAC

51
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

was rife with limitations; gargantuan and cumber-

some, it sucked power, overheated, and constantly
needed to be rewired whenever a problem came
along. ENIAC technicians spent days unplugging
tangled cables in order to find a solution for a numer-
ical problem that took only minutes to compute.
MANIAC was compact and efficient, a single six-
foot-high, eight-foot-long machine that weighed
only a thousand pounds. But the most significant
difference between ENIAC and MANIAC was that
von Neumann designed his computer to be con-
trolled by its own instructions. These were housed
inside the machine, like a brain inside a human
being.
Indeed, von Neumann had consciously modeled
MANIAC after the human brain. “I propose to store
everything that has to be remembered by the
machine, in these memory organs,” von Neumann
wrote, including “the coded, logical instructions
which define the problem and control the function-
ing of the machine.” In this way, MANIAC became
the world’s first modern stored-program computer.
Von Neumann's friend and colleague Edward Teller
saw great promise in the computer and used
MANIAC to perform calculations for the hydrogen
bomb.
After two and a half years of work, the team at
Princeton tested MANIAC against von Neumann’s

Ly
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

own brain. Initially, von Neumann was able to com-

pute numbers in his head faster than the machine.
But as his assistants entered more and more compli-
cated computational requests, von Neumann finally
did what human beings do: he erred. The computer
did not. It was a revelatory moment in the history of
defense science. A machine had just outperformed a
brain the Pentagon relied on, one of the greatest
minds in the world.

The Pentagon’s strategy for nuclear deterrence in the

1950s was based on a notion called mutual assured
destruction, or MAD. This was the proposition that
neither the Soviets nor the Americans would be will-
ing to launch a nuclear attack against the other
because that action would ensure a reciprocal action
and ultimately guarantee both sides’ demise. At
RAND, analysts began applying the Prisoner’s
Dilemma strategy to a nuclear launch, keeping in
mind that the driving principle of the dilemma was
distrust. This led a RAND analyst named Albert
Wohlstetter to start poking holes in the notion that
MAD offered security. The way Wohlstetter saw it,
MAD most definitely did not. He argued that if one
side figured out a way to decapitate the other in a
so-called “first strike,” it might be tempted to launch
an unprovoked attack to ensure its superiority. The
only solution, said Wohlstetter, was to develop a new

oy]
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

nuclear strategy whereby the United States had more

nuclear weapons in more hardened missile silos
secreted around the American countryside than the
Soviets could decapitate in a preemptive strike.
Wohlstetter’s famous theory became known as “sec-
ond strike.” U.S. policy regarding second strike
deterrence took on the acronym NUTS, for nuclear
utilization target selection.
President Eisenhower began to see the madness of
it all. The year after Castle Bravo, the Soviets success-
fully tested their own deliverable hydrogen bomb. If
something wasn’t done to stop it, the arms race would
only continue to escalate. Speaking to his cabinet,
Eisenhower wondered if it was possible to put an end
to nuclear weapons tests. He launched his adminis-
tration’s first investigation into the possibility of
stopping nuclear science in its tracks. His vision was
short-lived. After a month of study and discussion,
the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion, the CIA, and the Department of Defense were
all unanimous in their opposition to ending nuclear
tests. Atmospheric nuclear weapons tests must con-
tinue, they all said. The safety and security of the
country depended on more nuclear weapons and
more nuclear weapons tests. The president’s advisors
instead encouraged him to focus his attention on
strengthening a national effort to protect civilians in
the event of a Soviet nuclear attack, an unpopular

54
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

program called civil defense. This job fell to the Fed-

eral Civil Defense Administration, a three-year-old
agency with headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The plan for civil defense in the mid-1950s was
to have people prepare to live underground for a
period of time after a nuclear attack. An effort to
build a national network of underground bunkers
had been moving forward in fits and starts. The
president's advisors told him that his endorsement
would boost morale. But the very idea of promoting
civil defense put Eisenhower in an intractable bind.
Ever since he had been shown the fallout map from
the Castle Bravo bomb, Eisenhower knew how
implausible a civil defense program was—how
many tens of millions of Americans were destined to
die in the first few hours of a nuclear attack. The
idea that there was safety to be found in a civilian
underground bunker program was apocryphal. One
needed to look no further than what had happened
to the men in the Station 70 bunker. Station 70 was
a windowless bunker carefully constructed of three-
foot-thick concrete walls with steel doors, buried
under ten feet of dirt and sand. It was surrounded by
a moat and had a secondary blast buttress wall. And
even with a 10,000 factor of shielding, the radiation
nearly killed the men inside; they barely made it off
Enyu alive. After taking cover in the bunker’s urinal
for eleven hours, the men were ultimately evacuated

oy)
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

from the death zone by two Army helicopters in a

carefully orchestrated military operation. The heli-
copter pilots were part of a ten-thousand—man task
force, with unlimited access to state-of-the-art res-
cue and communication equipment. The rescue
teams had fewer than one dozen rescue operations to
perform, the majority of which had been rehearsed.
Castle Bravo was a highly organized scientific test.
In a real nuclear attack, there would be carnage and
mayhem. Each person would be on his or her own.
To be caught outside, en route to a civil defense
shelter, even forty miles away from ground zero,
would be life threatening. The bomb blast and shock
waves would rupture lungs, shred eardrums, and
cause organs to rupture and bleed. Debris—uprooted
trees, sheets of metal, broken glass, electrical wires,
wood, rocks, pipes, poles—everything would be
ripped apart and hurled through the air at speeds of
up to 150 miles per hour. How, in good conscience,
could the president urge the public to support a pro-
gram he knew was more than likely going to kill so
many of them?
Paradoxically, in the event of a Soviet nuclear
attack, there was a fully formed plan in place to keep
the president and his cabinet alive. An executive
branch version of the Station 70 bunker had recently
been completed six miles north of Camp David, just
over the Pennsylvania state line. This underground

56
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

command center, called the Raven Rock Mountain

Complex, was buried inside a mountain of granite,
giving the president protection equivalent to that of
walls a thousand feet thick. The Raven Rock com-
plex, also called Site R, had been designed to with-
stand a direct hit from a 15-megaton bomb. The
idea of an underground presidential bunker was first
conceived by U.S. Army military intelligence (G-2)
during postwar examination of the underground
bunker complexes of the Third Reich. The survival
of so many of the Nazi high command in Berlin was
predicated on the underground engineering skills of
a few top Nazi scientists, including Franz Xaver
Dorsch, Walter Schieber, and Georg Rickhey, all
three of whom were hired by the U.S. Army to work
on secret U.S. underground engineering projects
after the war, as part of Operation Paperclip.
Plans for Raven Rock were first drawn up in
1948, including some by Rickhey. Work began
shortly after the Russians detonated their own
atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, in August
1949, and by 1950, construction crews with top
secret clearances were working around the clock to
build the first underground presidential bunker and
command post. Site R was a three-story complex
with living quarters for the president and his advi-
sors, a hospital, chapel, barbershop, library, and
water reservoir. By the time the bunker was finished,

oF
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

in 1954, the costs had reached $1 billion (roughly

$9 billion in 2015).
In the event of a nuclear strike, the president
would be helicoptered from the White House lawn
to the landing pad at Raven Rock, a trip that would
take roughly thirty-five minutes. But the prospect of
retreating underground in the event of a nuclear
strike made President Eisenhower despondent. To
his cabinet he expressed his view of what governance
would be like after a nuclear attack: “Government
which goes on with some kind of continuity will be
like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind.”
While the president lived with his conundrum,
the civil defense program grew. The details of the
Castle Bravo test remained classified, as did the exis-
tence of the Raven Rock command center, leaving
the public in the dark as to the implausibility of civil
defense. Nuclear tests continued unabated, in Nevada
and in the Marshall Islands. But the press attention
created by the Castle Bravo fallout debate began to
generate strong negative responses to the viability of
civil defense.
In February 1955 the Senate Armed Services Com-
mittee opened a federal investigation into what civil
defense really meant for the American people. The
investigating committee was headed by a Tennessee
Democrat, Senator Estes Kefauver, known for his
crusades against organized crime and antitrust vio-

58
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

lations. The Senate sessions would become known

as the Kefauver hearings, and in the course of them,
shocking new information came to light.
Civil defense had a two-pronged focus: on those
who would stay in the city and seek shelter, and on
those who would try to leave. In the event of a nuclear
attack, which would likely target a big city, some
people living in urban centers were advised to hurry
to air-raid-type shelters that had been built under-
ground. As for those who could leave, the Federal
Civil Defense Administration said that they should
evacuate the cities, promising that this was a better
alternative. During the hearings, the senators had
questions. In the mid-1950s, most land outside big
cities was little more than open countryside. Where
were citizens supposed to evacuate to? And what
were they supposed to eat?
The director of the Federal Civil Defense Admin-
istration, Frederick “Val” Peterson, took the stand.
The former Nebraska governor was under oath. He
revealed that the plan of the administration was to
dig roadside trenches along public highways leading
out of all the big cities across the nation. The trenches
were to be three feet deep and two feet wide. When
the bombs hit the cities, Peterson said, people who
had already made it out were to stop driving,
abandon their automobiles, lie down in the trenches,
and cover themselves with dirt. Senator Kefauver,

59
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

learning this along with the public for the first time,
was dumbfounded. The government could use sci-
ence and technology to create power as great as that
generated by the sun, but when it came to civil
defense, this was the best they could come up with?
What about “food, water [and] sanitation in [these]
trenches?” the incredulous Kefauver asked. Peterson
fumbled for an answer. “Obviously, in these trenches,
if they are built on an emergency basis, there would
be no provisions for sanitation,” he admitted. But
there was an alternative plan. Instead of the dirt
trenches, another idea being discussed involved
using concrete pipes, four feet in diameter, to be laid
down alongside the highways. When the bombs hit
the cities, Peterson said, people who had already
made it out would stop driving, abandon their auto-
mobiles, and crawl into the pipes. Sometime there-
after, Peterson explained, federal emergency crews
would come along and bury the pipes with earth.
Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a Republican from
Massachusetts, expressed astonishment. He told
Peterson that he found it impossible to imagine mil-
lions of “shell-shocked evacuees waiting out a nuclear
war inside concrete pipes,” without fresh air, water,
sanitation, food, or medical care. And for who knew
how long. Senator Saltonstall said he would rather
lie down in a dirt ditch “than get into a concrete pipe
a mile long, with no exit.” Saltonstall shared his

60
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

vision of being crushed in the mayhem by fellow

American citizens fighting to stay alive.
Next came the issue of food. Committee mem-
bers wanted to know how the government was going
to help feed evacuees after a nuclear exchange. Peter-
son replied that the United States would open food
kitchens, but there would be little food to be served.
“We can’t eat canned foods,” he explained, because
radiation could penetrate tin cans. “We won't eat
refrigerated foods,” he conceded, because most elec-
tricity would be out. The truth was not pretty, he
acknowledged, but was “stark, elemental, brutal,
filthy and miserable,” he said under oath. “We will
eat gruel made of wheat cooked as it comes out of
the fields and corn parched and animals slaughtered
as we catch them before radioactivity destroys them.”
The committee told Peterson his agency’s plans for
evacuation were inadequate. In a matter of hours,
the notion of civil defense became the subject of
national ridicule. And yet the nuclear tests contin-
ued unabated.
Over the next two years, the United States
exploded eighteen nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union
exploded twenty-five. Nuclear spending was at an
all-time high, and design originality was key. The
Pentagon ordered hundreds of high-yield hydrogen
bomb warheads, like the one detonated during Cas-
tle Bravo, but also smaller, lighter-weight tactical

61
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

atomic bombs. Herb York flew to Washington, D.C.,

with a full-scale mockup of Livermore’s newest
design, the forty-eight-pound Davy Crockett nuclear
weapon, in his carry-on bag. The Davy Crockett
had the same yield as the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, but advances in science meant that the
powerful weapon was small enough to be handheld.
Thanks to ambition and ingenuity, the Livermore
laboratory had begun to pull ahead from behind.
The computer designed by John von Neumann
played an important role in allowing Livermore sci-
entists to model new nuclear weapons designs before
building them.

In the summer of 1955, John von Neumann was diag-

nosed with cancer. He had slipped and fallen, and
when doctors examined him, they discovered that he
had an advanced, metastasizing cancerous tumor in
his collarbone. By November his spine was affected,
and in January 1956 von Neumann was confined to a
wheelchair. In March he entered a guarded room at
Walter Reed Hospital, the U.S. Army’s flagship medi-
cal center, outside Washington, D.C. John von Neu-
mann, at the age of fifty-four, racked with pain and
riddled with terror, was dying of a cancer he most
likely developed because of a speck of plutonium he
inhaled at Los Alamos during the war. Two armed
military guards never left his side.

62
 War GAMES AND COMPUTING MACHINES

For a while, von Neumann’s mind remained

sharp, but as the end grew near, his mental faculties
began to degrade. Beside him at his bed, von Neu-
mann’s brother Michael read aloud from Goethe’s
tragic play Faust. Michael would read a page and
then pause. Lying on the hospital bed, eyes closed,
faculties failing, for some time von Neumann could
still pick up in the text precisely where his brother
left off. But soon, even John von Neumann’s indom-
itable memory would fail. Friends said the mental
decline was excruciating for him to endure. An athe-
ist all his life, von Neumann used to joke about peo-
ple who believed in God. In a limerick for his wife,
Klara, he’d once written, “There was a young man
who said, Run! / The end of the world had begun! /
The one I fear most / Is that damn Holy Ghost. / I
can handle the Father and Son.” Now von Neumann
sought God and he called upon the services of a
Roman Catholic priest.
But death grew near. In von Neumann’s final,
frightened last days, even the priest could not offer a
reprieve. Weeks before von Neumann died, Herb
York went to Walter Reed hospital to pay his final
respects. “Johnny was in a bed with high, criblike
sides, intended to keep him from falling out or oth-
erwise getting out on his own,” York recalled. “I
tried to start a conversation about some seat
topic I thought would interest and divert him, but

63
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

he would say no more than a simple hello.” Von

Neumann’s brain was failing him. Cancer was rob-
bing him of the thing he valued most, his own mind.
Soon he would not remember. In weeks there would
be nothing left of him. John von Neumann died on
February 8, 1957.
He left behind a single unfinished manuscript
that he had been working on in his final months of
life. It was called “The Computer and the Brain.” A
copy was made for the Los Alamos Scientific Labo-
ratory library, where it remains today. In this paper,
von Neumann draws a comparison between the
computer and the human nervous system. He theo-
rizes that one day the computer will be able to out-
perform the human nervous system by infinite
orders of magnitude. He calls this advanced com-
puter an “artificial automaton that has been con-
structed for human use.” John von Neumann
believed computers would one day be able to think.

64
 CHAPTER THREE

Vast Weapons Systems

of the Future

|: was October 4, 1957, 6:00 p.m. Cocktail hour

at the Officers Club at the Army Ballistic Missile
Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, or “Rocket City,
USA.” Neil H. McElroy, a corporate executive soon
to be confirmed as secretary of defense, had just
arrived in a military jet with an entourage of defense
officials from the Pentagon. Inside the Officers
Club, drinks flowed freely. Appetizers were passed
among the men. McElroy stood chatting with Wer-
nher von Braun, the famous German rocket scientist
who now served as director of development opera-
tions at Huntsville, when a press officer named

65
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Gordon Harris rushed into the room and interrupted

the party with an extraordinary announcement.
“The Russians have put up a successful satellite!”
Harris shouted.
The room fell silent. For several moments only
the background music and the tinkling of ice cubes
could be heard.
“Tt’s broadcasting signals on a common fre-
quency,” Harris said. “At least one of our local ‘hams’
has been listening to it.” A barrage of questions
followed.
It did not take long for news of Sputnik to become
official. The Soviet news agency, TASS, released a
statement providing technical information and spe-
cifics about Iskusstvennyy Sputnik Zemli, or “artifi-
cial satellite of the earth.” The Soviets had beaten
the Americans into space. Not since Pearl Harbor
had the Pentagon been caught by a surprise of such
consequence.
The nation slipped into a panic over what was
seen as superior Soviet scientific prowess. Eisenhower's
attempts to minimize the significance of Sputnik
had a reverse effect, with many Americans accusing
the president of trying to conceal U.S. military
weakness. Sputnik weighed only 184 pounds, but it
had been launched into space by a Soviet ICBM.
Soon the Soviet ICBM would be able to carry a
much heavier payload—such as a nuclear bomb—

66
 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

halfway across the world to any target in the United

States.
The situation was made worse when, on Decem-
ber 20, 1957, someone leaked a top secret analysis of
the Soviet threat, called the Gaither Report, to the
Washington Post. The report “portrays a United
States in the gravest danger in its history,” wrote the
Post. “It shows an America exposed to an almost
immediate threat from the missile-bristling Soviet
Union.” If Sputnik had caused mild panic, the
Gaither Report produced national hysteria.
But the Gaither Report had its own controversial
backstory, one that would remain classified for
decades. In the spring of 1957, seven months before
Sputnik was launched, President Eisenhower asked
his National Security advisors to put together a team
that could answer one question: how to protect the
American people in an all-out nuclear war. A RAND
Corporation co-founder, the venture capitalist H.
Rowan Gaither, was chosen to chair the new presi-
dential research committee. Making up the body of
the panel were officials from NORAD (North
American Air Defense Command), the Strategic Air
Command, the office of the secretary of defense, the
Federal Civil Defense Administration, the Weapons
Systems Engineering Group, and the CIA. There
were representatives from the defense contracting
industry, including Livermore, Sandia, Raytheon,

67
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Boeing, Lockheed, Hughes, and RAND. The cor-

porate advisors on the panel were from Shell Oil,
IBM, Bell Telephone, New York Life Insurance, and
Chase Manhattan Bank.
In the resulting top secret Gaither Report, offi-
cially titled “Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear
Age,” the defense contractors, industrialists, and
defense scientists concluded that there was no way to
protect U.S. citizens in the event of a nuclear war.
Instead, the panel advised the president to focus on
building up the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The most menacing threat came from the Soviet
ICBMs, they said. The individuals who calculated
the exactitude of the Soviet missile threat were Herb
York, scientific director at the Livermore laboratory,
and Jerome Wiesner, a presidential science advisor
and MIT engineering professor.
No figure mattered more. The Soviets had just
successfully launched their first long-range missile
from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in what is now
Kazakhstan, all the way across Siberia—a distance
of three thousand miles. To determine how many
ICBMs the USSR could produce in the immediate
future, York and Wiesner set up shop inside the
Executive Office Building, next door to the White
House, in the summer of 1957 and got to work
doing calculations.
“The issue was both real and hot,” York later

68
 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

recalled. “We took the best data there were on the

Soviet rocket development program, combined them
with what we could learn about the availability of
factory floor space [in Russia] needed for such an
enterprise, and concluded that they [the Soviets]
would produce thousands [of ICBMs] in the next
few years.”
One Castle Bravo—size bomb dropped on Wash-
ington, D.C., would take out the Eastern Seaboard
in a single strike. York and Wiesner’s ICBM analysis
indicated that the Soviets wanted to be able to strike
America a thousandfold. The information was
shocking and alarming. If the Soviets were trying to
produce a thousand ICBMs in only a few years,
clearly there was only one rational conclusion to
draw. The Soviet Union was preparing for total
nuclear war.
It would take years to learn that the number York
and Wiesner submitted to the Gaither Report was
nothing more than a wild guess. In the summer of
1957 the Soviets had a total of four ICBMs built,
and in the “next few years” they would build roughly
one hundred more. This was a far cry from the thou-
sands of missiles York and Wiesner said the Soviets
would be producing in the next few years.
“The estimate was quite wrong,” York conceded
thirty years later. In defense of his error, York said,
“The problem was simple enough. I knew only a little

69
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

about the Soviet missile development program and

nothing about the Soviet industry. In making this
estimate, I was thus combing two dubious analytical
procedures: worst-case analysis and mirror imaging.”
How could such an egregious error have happened,
York was asked? “My alibi is that I was new to the
subject and that, like the rest of the panel, I was an
easy victim of the extreme degree of secrecy that the
Russians have always used to conceal what they are
doing.” York also pointed out that no one on the
Gaither Report panel questioned his and Wiesner’s
math. “I don’t remember [the others] arguing with
our views,” York said.
When President Eisenhower received his copy of
the Gaither Report on November 7, 1957, the timing
could not have been worse. The Sputnik launch had
taken place a mere month before. Eisenhower dis-
agreed with the findings of the report. He had much
better intelligence, from the CIA, but it was highly
classified and no one but a small group of individuals
knew about it. CIA pilot Hervey Stockman had
flown a classified mission over the Soviet Union in a
U-2 spy plane the year before. Stockman returned
from his dangerous mission with thousands of pho-
tographs of Soviet Russia, the first ever (this was
before the Corona satellite program), showing that
the Russians were not preparing for total war. There
was only one person on the Gaither panel who had

70
 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

knowledge of this information, and that was CIA

deputy director Richard Bissell. It was Bissell who
was in charge of the U-2 program, which he ran out
of a secret base called Area 51, in Nevada. No one
else on the Gaither panel had a need to know about
the top secret U-2 program and the multiple missions
it had been flying over the Soviet Union. All the
Gaither panel had to go by was what York and
Wiesner told them, in error, about Soviet ICBMs.
After President Eisenhower rejected most of the
findings of the panel, someone leaked the top secret
report to the press. It was York and Wiesner’s find-
ings about the missile threat that the public focused
on, which was what caused the Sputnik panic to
escalate into hysteria. Eisenhower responded by cre-
ating the President’s Science Advisory Committee to
advise him on what to do next. Among those chosen
was Herb York, the youngest member of the group.
It remains a mystery whether or not the president
knew that York was responsible for the most conse-
quential error in the Gaither Report. York soon left
Livermore for Washington, D.C. He would remain
there for the rest of the Eisenhower presidency.
With the narrative of Soviet aggression spinning
out of control, the president authorized Secretary of
Defense McElroy to proceed with a bold new plan.
McElroy was a master of public relations. A thirty-
two-year veteran of Procter & Gamble, McElroy is

ies
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

considered the father of brand management. He began

as a door-to-door soap salesman and worked his way up
through management. In the mid-1950s, P&G had
four major soap brands—lvory, Joy, Tide, and Oxy-
dol. Sales were lagging until McElroy came up with the
concept of promoting competition among in-house
brands and targeting specific audiences to advertise to.
Tt was McElroy’s idea to run soap ads on daytime
television, when many American housewives watched.
TV. By 1957, P&G soap sales had risen to $1 billion a
year, and McElroy would be credited with inventing
the concept of the soap opera. “Soap operas sell lots of
soap,” he famously said. Now McElroy was the U.S.
secretary of defense. He took office with a clear vision.
“T conceive the role of the Secretary of Defense to be
that of captain of President Eisenhower's defense team,”
he said. His first job as captain was to counter the threat
of any future Soviet scientific surprise.
On November 20, 1957, just five weeks after
assuming office, Secretary McElroy went to Capitol
Hill with a bold idea. He proposed the creation of a
new agency inside the Pentagon, called the Advanced
Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. This agency
would be in charge of the nation’s most technologi-
cally advanced military projects being researched and
developed for national defense, including everything
that would be flown in outer space.
“What we have in mind for that agency,’ McElroy

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 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

told lawmakers, was an entity that would handle “all

satellite and space research and development projects”
but also have “a function that extends beyond the
immediate foreseeable weapons systems of the cur-
rent or near future.” McElroy was looking far ahead.
America needed an agency that could visualize the
nation’s needs before those needs yet existed, he said.
An agency that could research and develop “the vast
weapons systems of the future.”
Congress liked the idea, and McElroy was
encouraged to proceed. The military services, how-
ever, were adamantly opposed. The Army, Air Force,
and Navy were unwilling to give up control of the
research and development that was going on inside
their individual services, most notably in the vast
new frontier that was space. McElroy called the most
senior military leaders into his office in the E-Ring
of the Pentagon to discuss how best to handle “the
new dimension of outer space.”
In separate meetings, Army, Air Force, and Navy
commanders each insisted that outer space was their
service’s domain. To the Army, the moon was simply
“the high ground,” and therefore part of its domain.
Air Force generals, claiming that space was “just a
little higher up” than the area they already con-
trolled, tried to get Secretary McElroy interested in
their plans for “creating a new Aerospace Force.”
The admirals and vice admirals of the U.S. Navy
18)
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

argued that “outer space over the oceans” was a nat-

ural extension of the “underwater, surface and air
regime in which [the Navy] operated” and should
therefore be considered the Navy’s domain. General
Bernard Schriever of the U.S. Air Force told the Sen-
ate Preparedness Subcommittee that he wanted to
state on record his “strong negative against ARPA.”
The Atomic Energy Commission had its own
idea about this new agency McElroy was proposing.
Ever seeking more power and control, the Atomic
Energy Commission lobbied to remove authority
over outer space from the Defense Department
entirely and have it placed under AEC jurisdiction.
The AEC chairman had a bill introduced in Con-
gress to establish an “Outer Space Division.” Defense
contractors also lobbied hard against McElroy’s idea
for a new agency. Many feared that their established
relations with individual military services would be
in jeopardy. Ernest Lawrence of Livermore rushed to
the Pentagon to meet personally with Defense
Secretary McElroy and present his alternative idea
to ARPA. Accompanying Lawrence was Charles
Thomas, the president of Monsanto Chemical Com-
pany, a nuclear defense contractor that would be vil-
ified during the Vietnam War for producing the
herbicide Agent Orange, and made notorious in the
1990s for being the first agrochemical company to

74
 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

genetically modify food crops. Lawrence and Thomas

met with McElroy in his private office and shared
their idea “to adopt some radical new measures... to
meet the Sputnik challenge and cope better with
problems of science and technology in the Defense
Establishment.” They proposed that McElroy allow
the two of them to create and administer a new gov-
ernment agency, classified top secret and modeled
after the Manhattan Project. The meeting lasted sev-
eral hours before McElroy rejected the two defense
contractors’ idea as “infeasible in peacetime.” Law-
rence had a second suggestion. If this new agency
was to work, it would need a brilliant scientist at the
helm. Someone who understood how the military
and industry could put America’s best scientists to
work solving problems of national defense. The per-
fect person, said Lawrence, was Herb York. McElroy
promised to give the suggestion some thought.
McElroy had one last hurdle to overcome, involv-
ing colleagues just one floor away at the Pentagon.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff hated the idea of an
Advanced Research Projects Agency and registered a
formal nonconcurrence on December 7, 1957. But
the attack against ARPA by the military services was
bound to fail. “The fact that they didn’t want an
ARPA is one reason [Eisenhower] did,” said Admi-
ral John E. Clark, an early ARPA employee.

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

President Eisenhower was fed up with the interser-

vice rivalries. Having commanded the Supreme Head-
quarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during
World War II, he held deep convictions regarding the
value of unity among the military services. As presi-
dent, he had been a crusader against the excessive
waste of resources that came from service duplica-
tion. “The Army and Air Force ‘race’ to build almost
duplicate CRBMs [Continental Range Ballistic
Missiles] incensed him,” wrote presidential historian
Sherman Adams.
On January 7, 1958, President Eisenhower sent a
memorandum to Congress authorizing $10 million
in the 1958 fiscal year “for expenses necessary for
the Advanced Research Projects Agency, including
acquisition and construction of such research, devel-
opment and test facilities, and equipment, as may be
authorized by the Secretary of Defense, to remain
available until expended.”
In his State of the Union message two nights
later, Eisenhower announced to the nation the crea-
tion of this new agency. “Some of the important
new weapons which technology has produced do
not fit into any existing service pattern,” Eisenhower
explained. These new weapons should “cut across all
services, involve all services, and transcend all ser-
vices, at every stage from development to operation.”
The rapid technological advances and the revolu-

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 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

tionary new weapons this technology was producing

created a threat as revolutionary to warfare as the
invention of the airplane, Eisenhower said. But
instead of working together, the services had suc-
cumbed to petty “jurisdictional disputes” that
“bewilder and confuse the public and create the
impression that service differences are damaging the
national interest.” This was why ARPA had been
created, Eisenhower said, in “recognition of the need
for single control in some of our most advanced
development projects.”
That the president would publicly admonish the
services outraged top officials, including the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. “So the Agency was controversial
even before it was formed,” wrote Lawrence P. Gise,
ARPA’s first administrator, in an unpublished his-
tory of the agency’s origins. “Beset by enemies inter-
nally, subjected to critical pressures externally, and
starting from scratch in a novel area of endeavor,
ARPA was a tumultuous and exciting place to be.”

It was the second week of February 1958, and

Washington, D.C., was blanketed in snow. A severe
blizzard had wreaked havoc on the nation’s capital.
Subzero wind chills and five-foot snow drifts para-
lyzed traffic. On Monday morning, the Eisenhower
administration advised all nonessential government
workers to stay home. Herb York received a telephone

a7
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

call at his house. It was the personal secretary to Neil

McElroy, asking York to come to the Pentagon right
away for a meeting with the secretary of defense,
alone. Never mind the storm, York recalled. He was
determined to get to the Pentagon.
Herb York was in a remarkable position. If he did
not have time to reflect on this now, he would pay
homage to his humble background later in life. Here
he was, living in Washington, D.C., and advising the
president of the United States on scientific matters,
when he had been the first person in his family to
attend college. York’s father was a New York Central
Railroad baggage man. His grandfather made cas-
kets for a living; his specialty was lining a customer’s
permanent resting place with satin bows and carved
velvet trim. Herb York had been born of humble
means but had a brilliant mind and plenty of ambi-
tion. To think he was only thirty-six years old.
“From the earliest times,’ York recalled, “I
remember [my father] saying he did not want his son
to be a railroad man. He made it clear that that
meant I should go to college, even though he knew
little about what that actually entailed.” York fol-
lowed his father’s advice, spending most of his free
time at the Watertown, New York, public library
reading newspapers, books, and science magazines.
He attended the University of Rochester on a schol-
arship and excelled in the field he chose for himself,

78
 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

physics. Like many other top university physics

graduates of his generation, York was recruited into
the Manhattan Project during the war. In the spring
of 1943 he traveled by bus to faraway Berkeley, Cali-
fornia, where, as circumstance would have it, he was
assigned to work under Ernest O. Lawrence. During
the war, York helped produce uranium in Lawrence’s
cyclotron, material that would eventually make its
way into the core of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
After the war York returned to Berkeley to get his
Ph.D. During his doctoral research, he co-discovered
the neutron pi meson, which elevated him to elite
status among nuclear scientists. In 1952 York became
chief scientist at Livermore. Now, during the Febru-
ary 1958 nor’easter, Herb York wondered what lay
ahead.
“I made my way with difficulty across the river to
the Pentagon and did a lot of walking in deep snow,”
York recalled. He had tried to hail a taxi, but there
were none around. The parking lot at the Pentagon
was almost empty. But the man he had come to see,
Secretary of Defense McElroy, was in his office, busy
at work. York had a feeling he was being considered
for the position of chief scientist at ARPA. Because
of the snowstorm, he would benefit, he said, from
having an “unhurried, hour-long, one-on-one con-
versation that I could not have had with the secre-
tary on an ordinary, busy day.”

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

After the meeting York went home and McElroy

weighed his options. There was one other contender
for the position of ARPA chief scientist, and that was
Wernher von Braun. Von Braun and his team had just
launched America’s first successful satellite, ExplorerL,
and as far as the public was concerned, von Braun’s
star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had infor-
mation on von Braun that the rest of the world most
definitely did not, namely, that he had been an officer
with the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS during
the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of
thousands of slave laborers forced to build the V-2
rocket, in an underground labor-concentration camp
called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.
While McElroy weighed his options for scientific
director, new information came to light. Von Braun
was nothing if not entitled, and in his discussions
regarding the new position, he insisted that were he
to transfer his services over to the Pentagon, a sizable
group of his German rocket scientist colleagues
would have to accompany him there. Army intelli-
gence had classified dossiers on each of von Braun’s
113 German colleagues. They were all part of Oper-
ation Paperclip, the secret intelligence program that
had brought Nazi scientists to America after the war.
Many of von Braun’s rocket team members had been
ardent Nazis, members of ultra-nationalistic para-
military organizations, including the SS and the SA.

80
 VAST WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

“For a while Wernher von Braun appeared to

have the job but to get him it was necessary to take
his 10-15 man package of [German] associates and
that was not acceptable,” wrote ARPA administrator
J. Robert Loftis in a declassified report. Secretary
McElroy offered Herb York the job. York accepted.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime, he said.
York moved into his office in the Pentagon the
following month, in March 1958. He would remain
on the president’s scientific advisory board. On the
wall of York’s new office he hung a large framed
photograph of the moon. Next to it he hung an
empty frame. When people visited they would ask,
why the empty frame? York told them he would
leave the frame empty until it could be filled with a
photograph of the backside of the moon, taken from
a spacecraft to be developed by ARPA. This new
agency Herb York was in charge of at the Pentagon
would be capable of phenomenal things.

With his new Advanced Research Projects Agency

in place, President Eisenhower was more determined
than ever to put an end to nuclear weapons tests.
The week after York hung the moon photograph on
his office wall, Eisenhower took all of his scientific
advisors, including Herb York, to Ramey Air Force
Base, in Puerto Rico, to discuss banning nuclear
weapons tests. The president wanted to know, was

81
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

this good for national security, and if so, could it be

done? Everyone voted yes on both counts, except
Herb York, who abstained.
Decades later, York explained his bias. “I might
well have responded ‘no’ but abstain was the most I
could do under the circumstances.” Just weeks on the
ARPA job, York felt conflicted. He now served the
president of the United States and the secretary of
defense. But he also remained loyal to Ernest Law-
rence, whom he had worked for his entire adult life,
and who was something of a father figure to him.
Edward Teller was York’s mentor, the teacher who
had taught him most of what he knew about nuclear
physics. “Lawrence and Teller were all participants in
the nuclear weapons program,” York later explained.
“Tt was their ox that was about to be gored.” If the
president was able to ban nuclear weapons tests, the
Livermore laboratory would most likely cease to exist.
The following day, after hearing arguments from
the other scientists, York changed his position and
voted in favor of a nuclear weapons test ban. It did
not take long for word to reach Livermore, where
Edward Teller became enraged. “Traitorous!” Teller
said of York to his Livermore colleagues.
Just two weeks after the Puerto Rico trip, Presi-
dent Eisenhower took action. In his memoirs the
president wrote, “I formally proposed to Chairman
Khrushchev a measure we had been considering —a

82
 Vast WEAPONS SYSTEMS OF THE FUTURE

meeting of experts whose technical studies would

precede any political conference.” Come summer,
scientific experts from the United States and the
Soviet Union would meet in Geneva to discuss how
to put an end to nuclear weapons tests once and for
all. The centerpiece was test detection. ARPA would
be in charge of overseeing this new technology,
which included seismic and atmospheric sensing,
designed to make sure no one cheated on the test
ban. The program was called Vela. Its technology
was highly classified and included three subpro-
grams: Vela Hotel, Vela Uniform, and Vela Sierra.
The leaders of the world’s two superpowers each
had a vested interest in making this test ban happen.
Each man was tired of having to live and govern
under the nuclear sword of Damocles. Both Eisen-
hower and Khrushchev would send their most qual-
ified scientists to Geneva, with a mission to sort out
any differences and to make the moratorium hap-
pen. President Eisenhower made a bold and brilliant
move with his choice. Instead of sending one of his
science advisors who wanted nuclear weapons tests
to stop, he chose a scientist who did not: Ernest Law-
rence. So committed to nuclear weapons tests was
Ernest Lawrence that he had recently told Congress,
“If we stop testing.... Well, God forbid...we will
have to use weapons that [will] kill 50 million people
that need not have been killed.”

83
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

President Eisenhower was determined to bring

about a test ban, but he was also determined to ensure
that the Soviets could not and would not cheat. In
sending Lawrence on his behalf, Eisenhower knew
that the Soviet scientists’ intentions would be under
intense scrutiny. For the first time since Castle Bravo,
there was a sense of hope in the air.
Meanwhile, at ARPA, Herb York was about to get
to work on the Vela programs. Vela would soon become
ARPA’s second-biggest program after Defender, which
was ARPA’s colossal effort to advance antiballistic mis-
sile technology. Vela was a joint effort with the Atomic
Energy Commission, the Air Force, and later NASA
to advance sensor technology so the United States
could certify that no nuclear weapons were being det-
onated in secret. Vela Hotel developed a high-altitude
satellite system to detect nuclear explosions from
space. Vela Uniform developed ground sensors able to
detect nuclear explosions underground, and produced
a program to monitor and read “seismic noise” across
the globe. Vela Sierra monitored potential nuclear
explosions in space.
So much rested on the success of the Geneva
Convention of Experts. Putting an end to nuclear
weapons tests would slow the arms race and dramat-
ically reduce the chances for all-out nuclear war. But
could it be done?

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 CHAPTER FOUR

Emergency Plans

ze Herb York, the sense of hopefulness that fol-

lowed him back home from Puerto Rico did not
last long. Shortly after the president announced
his plans for a nuclear test ban, a twenty-two-page
secret document called “The Emergency Plans
Book” arrived on York’s desk at the Pentagon. Its
classified contents were nothing short of apocalyp-
tic. They would remain classified for the next forty
years. When, in 1998, the Defense Department
learned that an author named L. Douglas Keeney
had discovered a copy of “The Emergency Plans
Book” inside a declassified U.S. Air Force file at the
National Archives, the Pentagon immediately reclassi-
fied the report. Keeney made public the contents of

85
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the copy he had come across, but the original docu-

ment remains classified.
For defense officials, “The Emergency Plans
Book” served as the “only approved guidance to
departments and agencies” regarding what to expect
before, during, and after a Soviet nuclear attack on
U.S. soil. Issued by the Office of Emergency Plan-
ning, a federal agency whose function was to coordi-
nate and control wartime mobilization activities, the
book was not a hypothetical war game. It was offi-
cial protocol. To those familiar with its contents, it
would become known as the Doomsday scenario.
The scenario begins on a hypothetical “D-Day”
in the not-so-distant future. Because of the inade-
quacy of U.S. capabilities at the time, the first strike
comes as a surprise. Soviet sleeper cells have man-
aged to “emplace by clandestine means” several
hydrogen bombs inside the continental United
States, and these weapons are the first to explode.
Thermonuclear war has begun.
In quick succession, Soviet submarines swarm
the Eastern and Western Seaboards, firing nuclear
missiles at dozens of inland targets. At roughly the
same time, the Soviets launch a catastrophic air
attack against the United States using bombers and
fighter jets. The U.S. Air Defense Command
destroys a substantial portion of the attacking
swarms, but at least half of the Soviet aircraft are

86
 EMERGENCY P1LANs

able to fire off their tactical nuclear weapons before

being shot down. The opening salvo comes to a cli-
max as hundreds of incoming ICBMs, launched
from the Soviet Union, reach the U.S. mainland.
The majority of these nuclear-armed missiles are
able to outfox the Army’s Nike-Ajax missile batteries
and strike military and civilian targets across the
nation. In less than one hour, 25 million Americans
are dead.
The Soviets have all but decapitated U.S. military
installations, write the authors of “The Emergency
Plans Book,” including most atomic weapons facili-
ties, naval bases, airfields, and Army bases. All major
communication centers, financial districts, and trans-
portation hubs have been targeted for attack, and
the majority of them have suffered catastrophic
losses. America’s infrastructure has been obliterated.
Virtually nothing remains of Washington, D.C.
Even those living in rural America experience death
and destruction on a cataclysmic scale. Because of
automated-targeting errors, many of the nuclear
weapons miss their intended targets and instead
strike at random across the heartland.
Though crippled, the U.S. military has not been
destroyed and the counterattack begins. “Notwith-
standing severe losses of military and civilian per-
sonnel and materiel,’ the authors predict, “air
operations against the enemy are continuing and

87
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

our land and naval forces are heavily engaged. Both

sides are making use of atomic weapons for tactical
air support and in the land battle.” Lightweight
portable nuclear weapons, like Livermore's Davy
Crocket bomb, are deployed across the nation by the
thousands as Soviet ground forces invade. Next
comes a final full-scale nuclear exchange. ICBMs
rain down from the skies by the hundreds. Coastal
naval bases are pummeled with hydrogen bombs.
Ports are clogged with sinking ships. Merchant ship-
ping comes to a halt. Surface transportation and air-
lift capacity are nonexistent.
There are now hundreds of ground zeros across
America, and everything within a five- to ten-mile
radius of each one has been obliterated. The conflu-
ence of fireballs has created a series of major fire-
storms. Forests and cities are in flames. Those who
escape being burned to death are subjected to vary-
ing degrees of deadly radiation. “The surface bursts
have resulted in widespread radioactive fallout of
such intensity that over substantial parts of the
United States the taking of shelter for considerable
periods of time is the only means of survival.”
In the document’s “Post-Attack Analysis,” things
get much worse. One hundred million American
survivors now live in a nation entirely without the
tule of law. The government is paralyzed. Roughly
50 million people are in need of immediate emer-

88
 EMERGENCY PLANS

gency medical attention, half of whom will require

hospitalization for up to twelve weeks. Twelve and a
half million others have received lethal doses of radi-
ation and will die in the next few days, regardless of
treatment. Health resources are in a critical state.
The doctors and nurses who survived the first strike
cannot begin to handle what is now being asked of
them. Of a pre-attack total of 1.6 million U.S. hos-
pital beds, 100,000 remain. Radiation is but one
malady. “Communicable diseases, including typhoid
fever, smallpox, tetanus and streptococcal diseases,
begin to run rampant.” Day-to-day production of
food comes to a halt. Most salvageable food stocks
have been contaminated. Widespread looting has
begun, with survivors hoarding what little remains.
The housing system has gone critical. Millions of
homes were destroyed in the nuclear exchange; mil-
lions of people now have nowhere to live. Fallout has
made vast portions of the Eastern Seaboard unin-
habitable. There is no electricity, no refrigeration, no
transportation, and no community water systems.
Another deadly health menace emerges with the
inability of the survivors to dispose of human waste
or the dead bodies of millions killed in a single day.
Then comes the knockout punch. “Along the coasts,
bubonic plague, cholera and typhus are expected to
emerge,” write the authors, “part of a Soviet biologi-
cal warfare secondary attack.” The authors of the

89
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

secret document clearly believe the Soviets to be the

kind of enemy who will stop at nothing. Americans
who managed to survive nuclear Armageddon must
now prepare for the emergence of incurable diseases
like bubonic plague.
By the twenty-first century, catastrophic narra-
tives like the Doomsday scenario would become a
staple of post-apocalyptic fiction, films, and video
games. But in 1958 this was the first and only known
official document of its kind. Out in Santa Monica,
RAND analysts regularly gamed out first- and
second-strike scenarios as war games, which Air
Force officials would then use to persuade Congress
to allocate more funds for the Strategic Air Com-
mand. But “The Emergency Plans Book” was not a
“what if”; it was a “here’s when.” It was doctrine. An
official reference manual.
It was also not a report that could be ignored.
“The Emergency Plans Book” was sent to the
highest-ranking defense officials in each of the mili-
tary services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of
ARPA, the secretary of defense, each of the assistant
secretaries of defense, and the director of the
National Security Agency. In a cover letter, the
director of the Office of Emergency Planning
instructed recipients to submit changes or indicate
they had none. As for Herb York, when faced with
this portrait of extreme cataclysm, the ARPA direc-

90
 EMERGENCY PLANS

tor did not lose sight of the agency’s mission to pre-

vent strategic surprise. Submitting or not submitting
notes to the Office of Emergency Planning was, for
York, a moot point.
Herb York had another plan in play, a seemingly
preposterous idea that was already several years in
the making. What if ARPA could create a defensive
shield over the entire United States and stop incom-
ing Soviet ICBMs in their tracks? York believed it
could be done on account of a theory that had been
proposed to him by an eccentric, brilliant, and
obscure scientist named Nicholas Christofilos. As
York later explained, Christofilos believed it was
possible to create “an Astro-dome like defensive
shield made up of high-energy electrons trapped in
the earth’s magnetic field just above the atmosphere.”
It sounded ludicrous. Something straight out of a
Marvel comic book. But York thought it just might
work.
Which is why, in the summer of 1958, Herb York
gathered together a group of the nation’s top scien-
tists and had them briefed on this radical, classified
idea. York wanted to know what the top men of sci-
ence thought of what he called the “Christofilos
effect.” The top secret program had already been
given the go-ahead by the president of the United
States. In March 1958 York met with Eisenhower
and personally briefed him on plans for an ARPA

1
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

operation to test the Christofilos effect. By summer,

the idea was no longer just an idea but ARPA’s first
full-scale operation. The top secret, restricted data,
limited distribution Operation Order 7-58 went by
the cover name Project Floral. Its real name, which
was classified, was Operation Argus — for the myth-
ological giant with one hundred eyes.

On July 14, 1958, with top secret clearances in place,

twenty-two defense scientists gathered at the National
War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.,
with the goal of producing “ARPA Study No. 1.”
The gathering went by its own code name, Project
137. Its purpose, explained York, was “to identify
problems not now receiving adequate attention” in
the national security domain.
“Fort McNair was a delightful place to work,”
remembered Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, one of
the Project 137 scientists. The facility was one of the
oldest Army posts in the nation and one of the most
genteel. Each morning the scientists gathered in
Roosevelt Hall, a grand neoclassical building of red
brick with granite trim overlooking the Potomac.
There they listened to Defense Department officials
deliver briefings on America’s “defense problems
selected for their urgency.” Then the scientists gath-
ered in groups to discuss what had been said and
brainstorm science-based solutions. Afternoons were

2
 EMERGENCY PLANS

spent writing. In the early evening, everyone would

dine together, in the War College mess hall, and dis-
cuss Soviet threats. They were dealing with a total of
sixty-eight national security problems and programs,
from submarine warfare and balloon warfare to bio-
logical weapons, chemical sensing, and the possibil-
ity of inventing a laser beam weapon. But the most
interesting program by far, as Goldberger recalled,
was the Christofilos effect.
“Hearing about it required its own special clear-
ance,” Goldberger said.
The Project 137 group was led by John Wheeler, a
Princeton University physicist famous for coining the
term “black hole.” Working alongside Wheeler were
five others from Princeton, four from Berkeley, three
from the University of Illinois, one from Stanford,
one from the University of Chicago, and one from
Cal Tech. Four scientists came from the federally
funded nuclear laboratories, Los Alamos, Livermore,
Oak Ridge, and Sandia. Two scientists came from the
defense industry, one from General Dynamics and
the other from the DuPont chemical company.
These were advanced scientific thinkers of the most
serious kind. The Supermen of hard science. Among
them were particle physicists, theoretical physicists,
astrophysicists, chemists, mathematicians, an econ-
omist, and a nuclear weapons engineer. They were
men who coined terms like hexaquark, wormholes,

3
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and quantum foam. Two of them, Eugene Wigner

and Val Fitch, would win the Nobel Prize in physics.
All of the scientists were experienced in Defense
Department work, and many had been part of the
Manhattan Project during World War II. Stated
requirements for members hip in Project 137 were
“ingenuity, practicality and motivation.”
“We listened to Nick [ Christofilos] discuss the
[Christofilos] effect,” recal ed Goldberger. “He was
a strange kind of genius.”
Christofilos’s theoretical Astrodome-like shield
was the hoped-for result of exploding a large num-
ber of nuclear weapons in space as a means of defend-
ing against incoming Soviet ICBMs. By Christofilos's
count, this likely meant “t housands per year, in the
lower reaches of the atmosphere.” These explosions,
he said, would produce “huge quantities of radioac-
tive atoms, and these in turn would emit high-
energy electrons (beta particles) and inject them into
a region of space where the earth’s magnetic fields
would trap and hold on them for a long time.”
Christofilos figured that this electromagnetic field
could last months, or perhaps longer, and that “the
trapped electrons would cause severe radiation—
and even heat damage—to anything, man or
nuclear weapon, that tried to fly through the region.”
In short, the idea was that the arming and firing

94
 EMERGENCY PLANS

mechanisms on the incoming Soviet ICBMs would

be fried.
Christofilos had presented the idea a few years ear-
lier, back when York was the chief scientist at Liver-
more. “His purpose was of epic proportions,” York
recalled. “His idea was the most amazing and original
of all not only at Livermore but, to my knowledge, in
the entire country,” a plan to create “an impenetrable
shield of high-energy electrons over our heads, a shield
that would destroy any nuclear warhead that might
be sent against us.” But exploding thousands of
nuclear weapons in space each year was an impracti-
cal proposition. “At the time Nick presented these
proposals, I could not conceive of a procedure for
actually carrying them out,” said York. “In sum, there
was simply no place to take an invention like Nick’s.”
Then York became chief scientist at ARPA.
Nicholas Christofilos had an unusual backstory.
He was born in Boston to Greek immigrant parents
but at the age of seven returned with his family to
Athens, where he went to school, dreamed about sci-
ence, and became an amateur radio operator. He
graduated from the National Technical University
in Athens in 1938 and went to work in an elevator
factory. His first job was as an elevator installer.
When the Nazis took over Athens, Christofilos’s ele-
vator factory was converted to a truck repair facility.

5
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Left with “very little to do,” Christofilos kept him-

self busy learning German. Eventually he was able
to read the German-language physics textbooks and
scientific journals that his new Nazi bosses left
lying around the factory. According to Herb York,
Nick Christofilos began “focusing his attention on
the design of high-energy accelerators —cyclotrons
and the like.”
With no formal training, and in a matter of a few
years, Christofilos transformed himself from an ele-
vator technician into one of the most ingenious sci-
entists in the modern world. There are almost no
details about his work during this dark time of occu-
pation and war, but three years after the end of the
war, in 1948, he wrote a letter to the University of
California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, “pur-
porting to describe a new invention,” according to
York. “The letter was, apparently, not easy to deci-
pher.” But when a scientist at Livermore finally did
“puzzle it out,” says York, “he discovered that it was
only another way of describing the synchrocyclo-
tron,” a device that had been invented independently
several years before by Edwin McMillan, a chemist
at Berkeley, and Vladimir Veksler, a physicist in the
USSR. “Papers describing that invention had already
been published more than a year before Nick’s letter
arrived, so it was set aside and forgotten,” said York.
The supposition was that the letter writer could have

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 EMERGENCY PLANS

gotten the information from the academic paper.

Then, two years later, scientists at Livermore received
a second letter from Nicholas Christofilos, this one
describing another type of particle accelerator. “It
was considerably more complex than the first,” said
York, “and whoever was assigned to read it could not
make out what it was trying to say.” Same as the first
letter, it was cast aside.
Two years later, two nuclear physicists at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island
published a paper describing an accelerator, this one
so technologically advanced that for the first time in
the history of science, a machine could “produce
particles with more than one billion electron volts of
energy, noted York. As it so happened, Christofilos
had recently moved to the United States. When he
read the article in a science journal, he contacted the
authors to tell them he had already invented that
machine in his mind, and had described it in a letter
that was on file with the Livermore lab. When
Christofilos demanded due credit for the invention,
a search of the records was made. Sure enough,
according to York, Christofilos had a clear priority
of invention. “Naturally,” recalled York, the discov-
ery that a Greek elevator installer had priority in this
very sophisticated invention produced a flurry of
interest and reaction.” In 1954 Christofilos was
offered a job at Brookhaven, where a huge accelerator

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

based on his invention was being built. But soon

Christofilos became bored with the invention he had
imagined years before. He was already well on to
other ideas. When Herb York learned the strange
story of Nicholas Christofilos, he saw great potential
and hired him.
Resistance came from the federal security clear-
ance people. “They found it hard to believe that an
‘elevator mechanic had accomplished all that Christo-
filos had claimed,” said York. “He must be, they
thought, some sort of mole that the Russians had
pumped full of ideas not his own.” Clearance offi-
cers finally authorized Christofilos to work at Liver-
more, giving him access to top secret information.
But he was denied the coveted Q clearance, which
allows a scientist access to nuclear secrets. At Liver-
more, Christofilos produced one seminal idea after
another. Eventually he was granted higher clearances
than just about everyone else around him. When
Sputnik flew, Christofilos became convinced that the
Russians had gained a too significant scientific advan-
tage over the United States. That they were likely
planning a surprise attack. He threw all his energy
and ingenuity into finding a way to keep this from
happening. Now the Project 137 scientists were at a
crossroads. It was risky and expensive. But if the
Christofilos effect worked, it would be a magic bullet
answer to ballistic missile defense.

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 EMERGENCY PLANS

At Fort McNair, the scientists agreed that the

Christofilos effect was worth investigating. In practi-
cal terms, it was the best idea anyone had come up
with. The scope of national security threats facing the
nation left many of the Project 137 scientists with a
deep sense of foreboding. It caused “responsible people
sleepless nights,” John Wheeler said. Although all of
the scientists had worked on Defense Department
programs before, learning of sixty-eight threats con-
currently “weighed heavily on the conscience,” Gold-
berger recalled.
“Many of the members of Project 137 were deeply
disturbed and others even shocked by the gravity of
the problems with which they found themselves
confronted,” Wheeler wrote in his after-action report
for ARPA. “The group has developed a strong feel-
ing for and deep appreciation of the great crisis with
which the nation is faced. The group senses the rap-
idly increasing danger into which we are inexorably
heading.”
Much rested on the success of Operation Argus,
now set to unfold at the bottom of the world.

Halfway across the earth, in the middle of the South

Atlantic Ocean, the men of Task Force 88 were
assembled as far away from civilization as man can
get without being in Antarctica. The spot had been
chosen because it was outside shipping lanes, in a

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

remote expanse between the tip of South America

and the tip of Africa, east of a dip in the magnetic
field known as the Brazilian Anomaly. The weather
was unpredictable, and there was the issue of
high seas. It was in this rough ocean that the U.S.
military planned to launch three nuclear weapons
into space, off the back of a moving seaplane tender
called the USS Norton Sound. The hope was that the
Christofilos effect would create a great enough dis-
turbance in the earth’s geomagnetic fields, in the
layers of the ionosphere, and in radio waves that it
would ruin the delicate electronics housed inside
any incoming missile.
An extraordinary number of men and machines
were involved in Operation Argus, the only fully clas-
sified test in the history of U.S. nuclear testing; no part
of the operation was made public, nor would the pub-
lic know about it until the New York Times broke the
story six months after its completion. There were
4,500 military personnel, hundreds of scientists and
engineers, twenty-one fixed-wing aircraft, eight Sikor-
sky helicopters, three destroyers, a fleet oiler, an air-
craft carrier, a seaplane tender, more than a dozen
Lockheed X-17A missiles, and three nuclear warheads
involved. ARPA was the agency in charge, with divi-
sions from the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy
shouldering major elements of the operation. Satellites,
each carrying a payload of a hundred pounds of

100
 EMERGENCY PLANS

recording instruments, would be placed in equatorial

and polar orbits by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency
shortly before the tests. The sensors would record
effects and relay data. With so many moving parts, on
so many different continents, any number of things
could go wrong.
Weather was a major unknown to contend with.
Operation Argus involved firing three nuclear-
tipped Lockheed X-17A missiles off the back of a
moving ship. The USS Norton Sound was capable of
launching a missile in winds up to forty-six miles
per hour, but no one had expected waves nearing
twenty feet. The ship could make speed corrections
to compensate for the wind, but the waves threat-
ened to dangerously alter the missile trajectory in its
boost stage. The commander of Task Force 88 was
concerned with the safety of his crew, and with good
reason.
During a practice run of a missile launch, one of
the X-17As failed in flight, after only twenty-five sec-
onds. Had there been a nuclear weapon in the nosec-
one, it would have produced a catastrophic disaster.
The missile would have been just a few thousand
feet up, and exploding at that height would likely
have killed or injured many of the crew. Making
matters seem even more precarious, in the following
test run, the missile failed again, this time just three
seconds after launch.

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Secrecy was paramount to success. If the Christo-

filos effect was achieved, it would produce massive
disturbances across the earth’s upper atmosphere.
These disruptions would be detected by every nation
monitoring these kinds of phenomena, most notably
the Soviets. Total secrecy meant the disturbances
would infuriate the Soviets; they would have no idea
what caused them and would most likely conclude
the United States was working on a top secret high-
altitude weapon. This was one of the desired effects.
Four days before the first nuclear launch, all ships
and aircraft were in place. U.S. reconnaissance aircraft
patrolled the skies over the South Atlantic. Ships car-
rying antiaircraft rockets were at the ready, in the
unforeseen event of Soviet sabotage. The commander
of Task Force 88 sent his final coded message to the
ARPA office at the Pentagon, a prearranged indication
that the operation was a go at his end.
“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” the commander
stated clearly into a ship-to-shore radio microphone.
The first test would take place on August 27, 1958.
Although no one had a name for it at the time,
Operation Argus was the world’s first test of an
electromagnetic pulse bomb, or EMP.

Halfway across the world, in Switzerland, a remark-

able series of events was taking place. It was the

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 EMERGENCY PLANS

height of the summer season, and Ernest O. Law-

rence and his wife, Molly, were attending a party at
the historic Parc des Eaux-Vives, an eighteenth-
century mansion on Lake Geneva. Mist rose off the
lake, the weather was magnificent, and from the vil-
la’s terrace where the couple sat behind protective
glass, there were stunning panoramic views. Ernest
and Molly Lawrence dined and watched fireworks.
Wine flowed. And Ernest Lawrence was having a
miserable time.
For the first time in the history of nuclear weap-
ons, top scientists from the United States and the
Soviet Union had been meeting here in Geneva,
under the strictest of security provisions, to hash out
technical terms so that a nuclear test suspension
could go forward. The Geneva Conference of
Experts marked the ultimate low point in the pro-
lific nuclear weapons career of Ernest Lawrence. For
more than twenty years, Lawrence had been one of
the nation’s most vocal advocates for nuclear weap-
ons development and testing, along with his deputy
Edward Teller. That Eisenhower wanted Lawrence
to represent him distressed Lawrence when he was
first asked, and it upset him even more now that he
was attending the conference.
“The President has asked, so I must go!” he told
Molly before they left California. The very thought

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

rendered Lawrence “depressed over the idea,” accord-

ing to his biographer Herbert Childs, but still he
“felt it was his duty to accept” and to go to Geneva.
The conference lasted all summer, and for Lawrence
the meetings were becoming increasingly stress-
ful. There were so many important technical aspects
to iron out, including ways in which each side could
be certain that the other side would not cheat. For
that, Lawrence brought his Livermore deputy Har-
old Brown, the young physicist who had taken over
York’s job as chief scientist at Livermore.
Here in Geneva, Brown acted as Lawrence’s tech-
nical advisor. In order to stop testing, both super-
powers had to agree to the creation of a network of
170 seismic detection facilities across Europe, Asia,
and North America. This technology effort was
being spearheaded by ARPA through its Vela Uni-
form program. Technology had advanced to the
point where these detection facilities would soon be
able to monitor and sense, with close to 100 percent
certainty, any aboveground nuclear test over 1 kilo-
ton and, with 90 percent certainty, any underground
test over 5 kilotons. Both sides knew that in some
situations it was difficult for detection facilities to tell
the difference between an earthquake and an under-
ground test. These were the kinds of verification
details that the experts were working to hash out.

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 EMERGENCY PLANS

Ernest Lawrence had been attending meetings by

day and social events by night. The situation was
stressful, and now he was exhausted. Lawrence wor-
ried that there was something wrong with his health.
He deeply distrusted the Soviets. Perhaps working
with their scientists was making him ill? He had just
returned from a first-class trip across India and
Europe, traveling in private planes and being driven
by chauffeurs. He and his family had visited with
statesmen and maharajahs. There, he’d felt fine.
Travel always made him feel better, and Molly sug-
gested a day trip to the ski resort at Chamonix-
Mont-Blanc, in the nearby Alps. Lawrence agreed
and off they went, but upon his return, Lawrence
came down with a fever. The next day he was unable
to get out of bed.
“He just didn’t seem to get well, though he didn’t
seem terribly sick,” recalled his colleague Robert
Bacher, one of three nuclear scientists officially rep-
resenting the United States. Fearing her husband
had pneumonia, Molly Lawrence called for a physi-
cian. Dr. Bernard Wissmer examined Lawrence and
noted that he “was cheerful and did not seem acutely
ill, despite fever.”
Lawrence confided in the Swiss doctor. He suf
fered from colitis, or inflammation of the bowels, he
said, and he relapsed when he became tense. Dr.

105
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Wissmer gave him a proctoscopic exam and said he

was in good health. The following day Lawrence
made some effort to attend the conference, but
mostly he had Harold Brown participate on his
behalf. Venturing out of his hotel room, he collapsed
in the hallway. Molly suggested they return home.
“T could never live with myself if I left before this
conference was over,’ Lawrence told his wife. Dr.
Wissmer prescribed penicillin. Then later that week,
after a lakeside lunch with his translator, the Berke-
ley professor and Russian émigré Leonid Tichvinsky,
Lawrence decided that he had had enough. “This is
it, we're going home tonight,” he told his wife.
Arriving: back in California, Lawrence checked
into a hospital. He never left. He was given a blood
transfusion and was told he needed to have his colon
removed. The thought of never being able to defe-
cate like a healthy human horrified him, his biogra-
pher later revealed. Shortly after the surgery, Lawrence
slipped into a coma. On August 27, he died. He had
just turned fifty-seven years old. The Livermore lab-
oratory would be renamed the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.

Halfway across the world in a far corner of the South

Atlantic, outside shipping lanes and near a dip in the
magnetic field, on the same day that Ernest Law-

106
 EMERGENCY PLANS

rence died, the first of the three Argus high-altitude

nuclear weapons was detonated. Argus | suffered an
errant missile trajectory and missed its target —which
was 340 nautical miles above the earth—by more
230 miles. Three days later Argus 2 also failed to
reach its desired altitude and exploded roughly 84
nautical miles above the task force launching area.
The last and final test, Argus 3, was the most precar-
ious, first with a misfire in high winds followed by a
nuclear explosion on September 6, 1958, at an alti-
tude of 115 nautical miles. Operation Argus proved
to be a grand disappointment. The results were
nothing close to what Nicholas Christofilos had pre-
dicted and Herb York had hoped for. While the
Christofilos effect did occur, it was limited in inten-
sity and very short-lived. More nuclear tests were
needed. But the moratorium was coming.
In Switzerland, at the Geneva Conference of
Experts, the scientists submitted their final report.
Given advances in the technology of detection,
American and Soviet scientists now agreed that it
was possible to cease nuclear testing. If one side
cheated, they would be caught. President Eisen-
hower was delighted. The very next day he held a
press conference to announce that the United States
would halt nuclear testing, starting on October 31,
if the Soviets formally agreed to halt testing as well.

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

At Livermore laboratory in California, Edward

Teller was furious. He had no intention of giving up
nuclear testing without protest. Two days after the
death of his colleague and boss Ernest Lawrence,
even before Lawrence was buried, Teller sent a clas-
sified telegram to Brigadier General Alfred Starbird,
the defense official at the Pentagon in charge of
nuclear weapons tests. The telegram, marked “Prior-
ity,” had the subject heading “Thoughts in Connec-
tion to the Test Moratorium.”
Teller told Starbird that the test ban was a threat
to national security. That it showed weakness and
vulnerability and opened America up to a sneak
nuclear attack. “The purpose [of this telegram] is in
part to clarify laboratory plans and in part to point
out dangers in connections with future discus-
sions concerning the test moratorium,” Teller wrote.
“The laboratory must continue research and devel-
opment of nuclear weapons,” he wrote, “in order
to comply with the [president’s] directive.” More
tests needed to be done in order to make sure that it
was safe to comply. Furthermore, he argued, many
of Livermore’s nuclear tests were not tests per se
but rather scientific experiments, as Operation
Argus was.
There was a loophole to be explored, Teller sug-
gested. “Explosions below a kiloton cannot be
detected and identified by any of the methods con-

108
 EMERGENCY PLANS

sidered realistic by any of the delegations at the

Geneva Conference,” he wrote. The United States
could secretly conduct low-yield tests. Yes, it would
be cheating, but the Russians could not be trusted,
and surely they would cheat too.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

Sixteen Hundred Seconds

Until Doomsday

ugene McManus, an electronics technician,

Fees at the top of the world. He had joined
the Air Force, at age seventeen, for adventure
and to learn radar technology, and now here he was
four years later working at a classified ARPA-
activated outpost just nine hundred miles from the
North Pole. This was the Ballistic Missile Early
Warning System (BMEWS) facility, the world’s first
operational missile-detection radar site, and it was
connected directly with the North American Air
Defense Command, or NORAD. McManus and
everyone else who worked here knew the remote,
isolated facility as “J-Site.”

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 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UntIL DoomspAy

“Our job at J-Site amounted to ninety percent

boredom and ten percent panic,” Gene McManus
recalls. “The panic was if the power went off or if
there was a missile scare.”
J-Site was part of ARPA’s secretive 474L System
Program Office, which was responsible for develop-
ing techniques and equipment to track all objects in
space and any ICBMs that might be coming in over
the North Pole. The Air Force ran the place, and
McManus technically worked for RCA, Radio Cor-
poration of America, under its defense contractor
division, RCA Service Company.
The Arctic environment played a role in every-
thing, McManus explains. J-Site was located thir-
teen miles from the main Defense Department base
in Thule, Greenland, an area that was landlocked by
ice nine months of the year. For roughly four of
those months, the sun never came up over the hori-
zon and the temperature stayed around -40 degrees
Fahrenheit. There was darkness all day and all night,
the black sky interrupted only by the low-rising
moon. For the two hundred people who worked at
J-Site each day, the commute was called “the coldest
thirteen miles on wheels.”
The J-site workers—mostly radar technicians
and maintenance crews— rode to the BMEWS site
in a twelve-bus convoy that always traveled in tight
formation. If any bus were to fall behind, get stuck,

tt
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

or have engine failure, it would not take long for the

passengers to freeze to death. In a phase-one bliz-
zard, which was common, bus drivers battled
70-mile-per-hour winds and maintained visibility of
about fifty feet. But if a phase-three blizzard hit, the
worst kind of storm, with winds up to 120 miles per
hour, visibility was reduced to inches, and the road
turned into a giant snowdrift. Bus drivers had to
slow down to a treacherous 10-mile-per-hour crawl.
Driving slower meant the bus engine could stall.
Driving faster meant the bus driver might drive off
the road into deep snow. One Christmas, Gene
McManus and his fellow crewmembers got caught
in a phase-three blizzard, and the commute that nor-
mally took thirty to forty minutes took thirteen
hours. “The anemometer [wind meter] at the BMEWS
site pegged at a hundred and sixty-five miles per
hour,” McManus recalls. He and his crew got
stranded at J-Site, which was particularly unfortu-
nate because the Bob Hope USO tour was visiting
Thule Air Base that holiday, and instead of seeing
the show live, the stranded J-Site workers had to lis-
ten to the gala over the public address system.
J-Site was a futuristic-looking environment with
some of the most modern, most powerful technical
equipment in the world, perched high on a frozen,
treeless bluff overlooking the Wolstenholme Fjord.
Four massive radar antennas, each 165 feet high and

112
 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SecoNDs Untit Doomspay

400 hundred feet long, were programmed to track

objects three thousand miles out. When McManus
arrived in the spring of 1961, workers were building
the radome, a bright white 150-foot-tall microwave
radar dome that looked like a giant golf ball made of
honeycomb pieces in the shape of pentagons and
hexagons bolted together.
In the summer it was beautiful. “We would watch
the icebergs calve from the glaciers, and when the
fjord thawed, the water was clear blue,” McManus
remembers. He and other technicians would take
summer walks around J-Site. The landscape was
barren above the Arctic Circle, but when the snow
melted, from June to early September the tundra
bloomed with moss, cotton, and poppies. Sometimes
you could see arctic foxes and hares if you had sharp
eyes.
At J-Site there were nine buildings attached by
enclosed roadways, like tunnels. Because the ground
was permanently frozen, nothing was built under-
ground. J-Site was a self-supporting facility with its
own mess hall, receiving docks, and machine shop —
all in support of the computer rooms, which were the
heart of the BMEWS facility. The outpost required
85 megawatts of electricity “to provide full power to
the radar and auxiliary equipment, lights, and com-
puters,” McManus explains, enough wattage to power
about fifteen thousand U.S. homes. For this, J-Site

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

had its own power source in the oil-fired turbines on a

Navy ship at anchor in the bay. “The heat generated
by the power ship kept the water in the ship’s perma-
nent mooring thawed, even at minus forty degrees,”
says McManus.
It was Gene McManus’s job as an electronics
technician to take care of the cables at J-Site, and
these were far from any old cables. “Hundreds of
miles of inch-thick multi-conductor cable carrying
control, communication, and radar receiver infor-
mation [were] laid perfectly straight in the cable
tray, never crossing over or under another,” McMa-
nus recalls. “Each was tied down at precise intervals,
with the knots in the cable ties all facing the same
direction. When the cables had to bend around cor-
ners, the radius of the bends of all the cables in the
tray were exactly the same.” Precision was every-
thing. The information flowing through these cables
could start or prevent World War IL.
“The ten percent panic part of the job came when
something unusual was happening with the electric-
ity,” says McManus. “Once we had a water leak in
one of the antennae, in one of the waveguides. The
power was down for about fifteen minutes.” It was
nerve-racking, but it was nothing compared to what
happened the third day J-Site went into twenty-four-
hour operational mode, on October 5, 1960.
Three thousand miles from J-Site, deep inside

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 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS Untit Doomspay

Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, a clock

on the wall read 3:15 p.m. Air Force colonel Robert
L. Gould was sitting in the NORAD War Room
when an alarm light flashed red. NORAD, or North
American Air Defense Command, was an organiza-
tion created in 1958 by the United States and Can-
ada to defend against a Soviet attack. The War
Room was where military personnel monitored air-
space for ICBMs and incoming Soviet military air-
craft. Colonel Gould was facing a freestanding,
twelve-by-twelve-foot transparent plastic display board
with a map of North America and Eurasia drawn on
it. Above the map was an alarm-level indicator made
up of five red lights. Nearby, Air Force technicians
monitored information coming in from the BMEWS
J-Site at Thule.
Suddenly, the Level Three light flashed. Had the
Level One light flashed, NORAD protocol would
have required Colonel Gould to “assemble the battle
staff [and] watch closely.” If the light had flashed on
Level Two, Gould would know “the contact is sig-
nificant. Be ready to move in seconds.” Instead, the
alarm system sounded at Level Three, which
required Gould immediately to contact the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in Washington, the Chiefs of Staff
Committee in Ottawa, and Strategic Air Command
(SAC) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. A flash-
ing Level Four was something every individual in

115
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the War Room knew about from training but

dreaded ever having to deal with because it meant
“You are apparently under attack.” A Level Four
flashing light required an officer to “bring defense
weaponry up, warn SAC to prepare its ICBMs for
launching, get its bombers off the ground and turn
loose the airborne alert force.” Level Five was the
endgame. It indicated “it is 99.9 percent certain that
you are under ICBM attack.”
With Level Three flashing, Colonel Gould picked
up the telephone in the War Room. As he waited to
connect with NORAD’s commander in chief, Air
Force general Laurence Kuter, the alarm level suddenly
went to Level Four, then Level Five. Gould quickly
learned that General Kuter was flying over South
Dakota and could not be reached, so he was instead
put in touch with NORAD’s deputy commander, Air
Marshal Charles Roy Slemon, of Canada. By now,
also on the line was NORAD’s chief of intelligence,
Air Force brigadier general Harris B. Hull.
“Where is Khrushchev?” Air Marshal Slemon
asked Brigadier General Hull.
“In New York City,” Hull quickly replied.
This changed everything. There was a moment’s
pause.
“Do you have any intelligence indications that
would tend to confirm the radar reports” of an
ICBM attack? Slemon asked.

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 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UntIL Doomspay

“None, sir,” Hull said.

What was said next remains classified.
To Air Marshal Slemon, it seemed extremely
unlikely that the Soviets would strike North Amer-
ica when Premier Khrushchev was in New York
City, at the United Nations. But Slemon also
believed that an attack could not be ruled out
entirely and that it was time to get the BMEWS
J-Site on the phone.
The technicians at J-Site, who were manning the
IBM 7094 computers that received data from the
radar, analyzed it, and made calculations were see-
ing very strange radar returns. A radar echo from an
incoming ICBM took one-eighth of a second to
receive. These radar returns were seventy-five sec-
onds long. How could anything be that far away?
But whatever it was that was coming over the hori-
zon, according to the computers there were literally
thousands of them. Here at J-Site, where environ-
ment was everything, someone thought of looking
outside. There, coming up over the horizon, over
Norway, was a huge rising moon.
The BMEWS had not malfunctioned. It was
“simply more powerful than anyone had dreamed,”
said a NORAD spokesman after the story broke on
December 7, 1960. The “BMEWS—thought to
have a range up to three thousand miles—had spot-
ted the moon nearly a quarter of a million miles

117
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

distant,” explained reporter John Hubbell.. The

J-Site computers had not been programmed to read
or express that kind of distance and instead “divided
three thousand miles into the precise distance to the
moon and reported the distance left over —twenty-
two hundred miles—as range.”
It was a defining moment in the history of weap-
ons development and the future of man and
machine. A computer had reported that a thousand-
strong Soviet ICBM attack was under way. And a
human, in this case Air Marshal Charles Roy Sle-
mon, used his judgment to intervene and to over-
rule. At J-Site, the ARPA 474L System Program
Office worked with technicians to teach the BMEWS
computers to reject echoes from the moon.

On October 5, 1960, nuclear Armageddon was

averted, but the underlying reality of national
defense was that the scientists who had created the
hydrogen bomb had created a weapon against which
there was no defense. In ARPA’s first years as an
agency, its single biggest program was Defender,
with a mission to advance antiballistic missile tech-
nology and further develop “early warning systems”
like the one at J-Site in Thule. Defender began with
a publicly announced first-year budget of $100 mil-
lion, roughly half of ARPA’s entire budget. This fig-
ure was misleading, as Herb York explained in now

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declassified memos, because it included only research

and development costs, not operational costs. In its
first two years alone, the Pentagon spent closer to
$900 million on Defender, York said, roughly $7.3
billion in 2015.
The Defender program, also called Ballistic Mis-
sile Defense (BMD), was ARPA’s most important
national security program and the one that received the
most press. People wanted to believe that the brilliant
scientists who had created weapons of mass destruc-
tion in the first place could create a means to defend
against them, especially now that the Soviets had an
arsenal of their own. To Herb York, the situation was
dire, mostly because of the time frame involved. York
ordered ARPA scientists to determine the exact
amount of time it would take for a Soviet ICBM car-
rying a megaton warhead to travel from a launch pad
in Russia to a target in Washington, D.C.
In a secret dossier, “Assessment of Ballistic Missile
Defense Program” (PPD 61-33), obtained through
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and not
known to have been reported before, ARPA mathe-
maticians whittled that number down to an exact
figure—a mere 1,600 seconds. It seemed impossibly
fast. Just twenty-six minutes and forty seconds from
launch to annihilation.
The ARPA report chronicled the journey of the
nuclear-armed ICBM in its three stages: boost,

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midcourse, and terminal phase. The initial boost

stage took three hundred seconds —five minutes.
This included the time it took for the rocket to fire
up off the launch pad, head skyward, and reach
cruising altitude. The second stage, called midcourse,
lasted 1,200 seconds—twenty minutes. This stage
included the time it took for the missile to travel in an
arc-like trajectory over the planet at an altitude of
approximately eight hundred miles above sea level.
The final stage was called the terminal stage. It
accounted for the last one hundred seconds of
flight— 1.6 minutes. This terminal phase began
when the warhead reentered the earth’s atmosphere
and ended when it struck its target-—an American
city. Sixteen hundred seconds. That was it.
The secret “Assessment of Ballistic Missile
Defense” came with a stern forewarning: “The
nuclear-armed ICBM threatens us with annihila-
tion; the stakes are so high that we must explore
every alternative of strengthening our military pos-
ture.” One of the great tragedies, or ironies, here was
that defending against a single ICBM was actually
not too difficult a task. According to the authors of
the ARPA report, the Army’s antiballistic missile
system, called Nike-Zeus, gave “high confidence
that... targets [i.e., incoming Soviet ICBMs] could
be destroyed.” The problem was numerical, the scien-
tists said. It was the sheer volume of megaton weapons

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in existence—with more still being engineered— that

made the situation so hopeless. “The most important
limitation of [Nike-Zeus] is that its firepower will
probably not be able to handle the number of simul-
taneous targets which can reasonably be expected in
an all-out war with the USSR,” the scientists wrote.
For Herb York, it was time to go back to the Super-
men of hard science. Several of the men from Project
137 had formed a defense consulting group of their
own. They called themselves the Jason scientists.
“I suppose you could say I started Jason,” said
Murph Goldberger in a 2013 interview, at the age of
ninety-one. The former Manhattan Project mem-
ber, former science advisor to President Johnson,
former president of the Federation of American
Scientists, and the first American scientist to travel
to communist China on an official government-
sponsored science mission, among other impressive
feats, was living with his full faculties intact at a
retirement home in La Jolla, California, called Casa
de Mafiana, or House of Tomorrow. Eating Hun-
garian goulash in a dining room filled with people
of a similar age, and with a commanding view of the
vast Pacific, Goldberger explained, “I was Jason’s
first director or president. It was an impressive group.
We were scientists committed to solving defense
problems.”
Murph Goldberger had been involved in nuclear

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physics since he was twenty-two years old. During

World War II, as a college student and member of
the enlisted reserves, he was called up to the Army’s
the Manhattan
Special Engineering Departme—nt
Project—after being singled out for his scientific
talent. After the war he earned a Ph.D. in physics
under Enrico Fermi, the scientist who told President
Truman that the hydrogen bomb was “an evil
thing.” Murph Goldberger had been a key player in
Project 137 at Fort McNair. At the time he was
working as a professor of physics at Princeton Uni-
versity, alongside John Wheeler, Oskar Morgen-
stern, and Eugene Wigner. A Life magazine article
about America’s most important scientists carried a
photograph of the four Princeton physicists and
described them with a kind of reverence. Scientists
in the 1950s were seen as modern-day wizards,
alchemists who could unlock the secrets of the uni-
verse. American scientists could win wars, defeat
polio, even travel to the moon.
After Project 137 ended, Goldberger returned to
Princeton, where he soon got an idea. He wanted to
craft a defense consulting group of like-minded col-
leagues. Goldberger contacted four friends outside
the university enclave, scientists whose areas of
expertise had been entwined since the end of World
War II. Kenneth Watson, a nuclear physicist at the
University of California, Berkeley, and protégé of

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 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UntTiIL DOOMSDAY

Edward Teller, had done a postdoctoral fellowship at

the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Keith
Brueckner, a physicist, meteorologist, and former
Los Alamos weapons developer, had studied at the
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory with Watson and
Goldberger and at the Institute for Advanced Study
alongside John von Neumann. Murray Gell-Mann,
the youngest member, had been a doctoral student
of Manhattan Project giant Victor Weisskopf, and
was someone Goldberger considered a prodigy. The
four physicists agreed to start a for-profit defense
consulting company together. Their first idea was to
call it Theoretical Physics, Inc. “The idea was that
we would not work simply as consultants; we'd work
as a formal group, a little business,” Keith Brueckner
recalled, in a 1986 oral history.
Goldberger decided to run the idea by a fourth
colleague and friend, the physicist Charles H.
Townes. Two years earlier Townes had published the
first academic paper on what he called the micro-
wave laser, or maser. In time the maser would
become known as the laser, and it is now considered
one of the most significant inventions of the twenti-
eth century, used widely in both defense and civilian
work. Townes had recently taken a leave of absence
from his position as a professor at Columbia Univer-
sity to serve as vice president of the Institute for
Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally funded research

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

center in Alexandria, Virginia, that served one cus-

tomer: the Department of Defense. Specifically,
IDA served the Office of the Secretary of Defense
(OSD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JGS)aeLe
another service wanted IDA’s assistance researching
a problem, they had to secure permission from OSD
or JCS first. In the early ARPA years, the salaries of
all ARPA directors and program managers were paid
through IDA. Townes thought Goldberger’s idea of
a defense consulting group was excellent, and he
suggested that Goldberger speak with Herb York.
Perhaps the Advanced Research Projects Agency
would fund the group itself, Townes said. He offered
to find out.
“Townes called back to say [ARPA] loved the idea,”
Goldberger remembered. The scientists, mostly uni-
versity professors, were free to consult during the
summer, as they had at the war college at Fort
McNair. The group could remain flexible and inde-
pendent, detached from any Pentagon mindset. To
avoid red tape or bureaucracy, they could be paid
through IDA; besides, most of their work would be
classified. IDA would provide the group with an
administrative assistant.
Goldberger and his colleagues got to work creat-
ing a list of scientists they felt would add to their
group of defense consultants. They wanted to limit
membership to theoretical physicists, said Gold-
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 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UntiIL Doomspay

berger, generalists who had knowledge in a wide

variety of areas and used mathematical models and
abstractions to understand, explain, and predict
phenomena in the natural world. “It was a very elite
operation,” recalled Brueckner. “It was an honor to
be asked.” Goldberger remembered that “everyone
was excited, full of ideas, and very patriotic.” Murph
Goldberger, Keith Brueckner, Kenneth Watson, and
Murray Gell-Mann drew up a list of their most
respected colleagues and asked them to participate.
The group’s first meeting took place at IDA head-
quarters in Virginia on December 17, 1959. George
Kistiakowsky, one of President Eisenhower's science
advisors, led the meeting. Kistiakowsky kept a daily
desk diary in which he recorded his thoughts. “Met
at IDA headquarters with the ‘bright young physi-
cists, a group assembled by Charles Townes to do
imaginative thinking about military problems,” Kis-
tiakowsky noted that day. “It is a tremendously
bright squad of some 30 people.” After the first
meeting Goldberger went home to Princeton Uni-
versity very excited, he recalled. “We knew the group
could contribute significantly to the problems” of
national defense.
Three weeks later, on January 1, 1960, and by
ARPA Project Assignment number 11, the group
became an official entity. What to call it, Murph
Goldberger wondered? “The Pentagon had a machine
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 Tur PENTAGON’S BRAIN

that generated code names for projects,” he said.

Whether the Defense Department naming process
was random or systematic remains a mystery, but
the machine decided that this scientific advisory
group was to be called Project Sunrise. Goldberger
felt disappointed. “The name did not fit,” he recalled.
That night he shared his feelings with his wife and
fellow scientist, Mildred Goldberger; the couple had
met when they were both working on the Manhat-
tan Project during the war. “Mildred thought Proj-
ect Sunrise was a dreadful name,” Goldberger
recalled. This group was going to be doing dynamic
problem solving and groundbreaking consulting
work. Project Sunrise sounded sentimental and
bland. Goldberger recalled Mildred picking up a piece
of paper on the table in front of her, a document from
IDA. The header included the image of an ancient
Greek Parthenon-style building. Ancient Greece
made Mildred Goldberger think about Jason and
the Argonauts, characters from Greek mythology.
Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, is one of history’s
great mythological heroes, the archetype of a man
on a quest. The Argonauts were Jason’s band of war-
riors who accompanied him on his journey to find
the Golden Fleece.
“You should call yourself Jason,” Mildred Gold-
berger said. Which is how one of the most secret and
esoteric, most powerful and consequential scientific

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 SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UNTIL Doomspay

advisory groups in the history of the U.S. Depart-

ment of Defense got its name. Over the course of
the next fifty-five years, the Jason group would
impact ARPA, and later DARPA, with greater sig-
nificance than any other scientific advisory group.
Jason’s first senior advisors were Hans Bethe, George
Kistiakowsky, and Edward Teller.
In April 1960, each member of Jason was granted
a clearance of top secret or above. The Jason scien-
tists’ first official meeting took place in Washington,
D.C., where they were briefed on a set of challenges
to consider. Ballistic missile defense was at the top of
the list. The Jasons were briefed on the classified ele-
ments of the Defender program and asked to think
outside the boundaries of possibility that were cur-
rently being explored by other scientists.
Two months after their first official briefing, the
Jason group held a summer study at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory in California, for-
merly called the Rad Lab. It took place between June
1 and August 15, 1960, and there were about twenty
Jason scientists present. Goldberger recalled that dur-
ing that meeting they learned that ARPA wanted
them to think about measures and countermeasures,
about offense and defense. The Jason scientists were
briefed on the classified results of Operation Argus
and the Christofilos effect. They were asked to think
about new programs to be researched and developed,

Le7
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and also to imagine the programs that Russian sci-

entists might be working on. The 1960 summer
study produced multiple classified reports.
Goldberger described one concept in general
terms. It was a variation of the Christofilos effect.
“The idea was proposed to the [Jason] study group
that the enemy could detonate a nuclear weapon
high up [in the atmosphere] to confuse satellite
detection.” The Jasons were to think about the crea-
tion of an effect similar to the electromagnetic pulse
seen during Argus. One of the Jason scientists who
was present at that meeting, Sidney Drell, tried to
explain the concept in an oral history in 1986. “If
you have a high altitude explosion of a nuclear
weapon, and it makes a [cloud] of NO [nitric oxide
molecules], would that cause a big enough cloud to
last long enough that we wouldn't see the missile
attack launch and we wouldn’t get the early warn-
ing?” In their first summer study, the Jason scientists
were asked to calculate the size of the cloud, the
amount of nitric oxide in the cloud, and the rate of
dispensation in the atmosphere required to nega-
tively impact the electronics on a nearby U.S. satel-
lite system. From their calculations, said Goldberger,
the Jasons concluded that the enemy would have to
explode “many megaton warheads” to have a signifi-
cant effect on the signals, and that this was “imprac-
tical.” For ARPA, this was good news.

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SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UNTIL DOOMSDAY

These were the kinds of hard science problems

the Jasons were excellent at solving, and ARPA
wanted the group to apply this type of “imaginative
thinking” to the Defender conundrum. They came
up with a new idea, one that involved the age-old
warfare concept of using decoys— devices meant to
distract or mislead—like the mythological Trojan
horse. The Jasons suggested the development of a
new technology whereby American ICBM warheads
could be equipped with decoys designed to evade, or
trick, the Soviet’s antiballistic missile defense sys-
tem. If every U.S. warhead was equipped with five
or six decoys, then the entire U.S. arsenal of ICBMs
would have a five or six times greater chance of get-
ting through to a target in the Soviet Union. The
Jasons called this concept “penetration aids.”
On the basis of the Jason scientists’ work, ARPA
created a new program called PENAIDS, short for
penetration aids. PENAIDS suggested the develop-
ment of a far more aggressive offensive posture in
the MAD dilemma, the inventing of new ways for
U.S. missiles to outfox the Soviets’ ballistic missile
defense. Starting in 1962, PENAIDS proof tests at
the missile bases at White Sands, New Mexico, and
at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands delivered prom-
ising results, which the Jason scientists reviewed.
PENAIDS led to another ARPA study called “Pen
X,” which endorsed the engineering of a new kind of

129)
 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

advanced hydrogen bomb warhead called MIRVs,

multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
Their birth initiated a fierce new competition in the
nuclear arms race as both sides rushed to build more
accurate, more powerful, more deceptive MIRVs.
The programs were initially classified, but when
they were made public, MIRVs were vilified as dan-
gerous and destabilizing because they put a premium
ona nuclear first strike.
For their second summer study, in 1961, the Jason
scientists met in Maine, on the Bowdoin College
campus. Jack Ruina, the new director of ARPA,
called Charles Townes at IDA to coordinate his
attending the summer study. Ruina also wanted to
bring several ARPA program managers along.
“Well, we don’t want anybody from ARPA to
attend except you,” Townes told him.
Ruina was stunned. The Jasons worked for
ARPA—and ARPA only. “What do you mean, we
can’t attend?” Ruina said. “We are paying for the
whole thing. You can’t say you're [going to] have a
private meeting when it’s the government that is
paying for it.”
“Sorry, you can’t come to our meetings,” Townes
repeated.
“Charlie, you can’t do that,” Ruina told him.
Townes explained to Ruina that this was how the
Jason scientific advisory group worked. The Jasons

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SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UNTIL DOOMSDAY

sought objectivity, and they wanted to remain free

from government bureaucracy and red tape. They
did not want Pentagon interference during any of
their summer studies. The Jasons gathered together
to solve problems related to national defense. That
was it.
After some back-and-forth, Ruina and Townes
reached an agreement of sorts. As suggested, Jack
Ruina, as director of ARPA, could attend a Jason
summer study, alone.
For the Maine summer study, the focus again was
on the Defender program. The Princeton physicist
John Wheeler had a summerhouse not far from the
college campus, on a wooded island off the coast
called High Island. Wheeler had the group out to
his house for many of the meetings that summer,
where the scientists held clambakes, ate lobsters, and
considered another highly classified program. This
one involved the concept of directed energy. “This
was very exotic science,” Ruina recalled. Directed
energy beams come in two forms: light, which
involves lasers, and charged particles, which involve
electrons or protons. “Particle beam weapons [are]
esoteric weapons systems,” Ruina explained. They
come with a “Buck Rogers death ray image,” noted
an early ARPA summary, because they “work at the
speed of light and involve instantaneous kill.”
The Jason scientists wondered if an incoming

131
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

ICBM could be shot down by a directed energy

beam. The conundrum, according to Ruina, “was
whether you can use a particle beam, earth-based, to
form a beam through the atmosphere and destroy
an incoming warhead.” The concept's originator was
Nick Christofilos; he had first presented the idea
during Project 137, Goldberger recalled. Scientists at
Livermore laboratory had already conducted earlier
proof test experiments under the code name Seesaw.
The classified results were shared with the Jason
scientists, who were impressed. Directed energy
weapons were well worth researching and develop-
ing, they decided, and ARPA moved forward with
Project Seesaw—its first directed energy weapons
program. Goldberger recalled the program being so
highly classified that not even all of the Jasons were
cleared for future work on it.
“Seesaw was a sensitive, limited-access project
which deserves mention in the ARPA history as the
most enduring specific project ever supported by the
agency,” an agency review stated. ARPA’s mission
was and remains getting programs up and running,
then transferring them over to the military services
or other government agencies for field use. Project
Seesaw remained in development at ARPA for fif
teen long years. Then in 1974 it was transferred to
the Atomic Energy Commission. Some unclassified
summaries have been released. Over the next fifty-

132,
SIXTEEN HUNDRED SECONDS UNTIL DOOMSDAY

five years, ARPA’s directed energy weapons pro-

grams would develop and grow. The majority of
them remain highly classified.
“Directed energy is the weapon of the future,”
said retired four-star general Paul F. Gorman in a
2014 interview for this book. “But that is a sensitive
area and we can‘ get into that.”

fii]
 CHAPTER SIX

Psychological Operations

handsome dark-haired war hero named Wil-

liam H. Godel was commanding the atten-
tion of a crowd of reporters outside
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It was June
3, 1959. Godel wore the wire-rimmed glasses of an
intellectual and walked with the slight limp of a
Marine wounded in battle, in his case the hellhole of
Guadalcanal. As director of policy and planning for
the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Godel had
a few facts to share with the press corps about Amer-
ica’s tiniest space pioneers, four black mice. Not far
away from where Godel was standing at the podium,
a seventy-eight-foot Thor Agena A rocket, carrying
the Discoverer III life-sustaining satellite, pointed
upwards at the sky. The four black mice were inside

134
 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

the rocket’s nosecone. They were about to be shot

into space.
The mice, Godel announced, were “happy and
healthy.” They were all males and were about two
months old. These were not “ordinary mice” but
members of the C-57 strain, making them “the best
specimens of a special strain of hardy laboratory ani-
mals, selected and trained specifically for their road
trip into space and planned return to earth.” They had
been selected, at random, from a pool of sixty similarly
trained mice. Their mouse capsule, roughly two feet
long and two feet wide, was air-conditioned and
soundproof. They had a food supply of unsalted
ground peanuts, orange juice, and oatmeal. Each
rodent had a tiny instrument pack on its back contain-
ing mini-transmitters that would record its heartbeat,
pulse, and body temperature and then send that infor-
mation back to Air Force veterinarians on the ground.
Godel cautioned people to be realistic about the
fate of the mice. Most likely they would not return
to earth alive, he said. The chances that the mice
astronauts would live through the journey were
roughly one in seven hundred.
“We don’t want to humanize them in any way,”
said a colleague of Godel’s, an Air Force officer. The
mice were purposely unnamed because “it would
just make it worse for those people who have tender
feelings about these things.”
195
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

So much rested on the success of the mission.

The space race was about creating ICBMs capable of
annihilating the other side, but it was also a psycho-
logical race, about humans and science and who was
best. Both the United States and the Soviet Union
had succeeded in getting animals into space, but
neither side had been able to launch living beings
into space with enough acceleration to escape the
earth’s gravity and achieve orbital motion, that mys-
terious balancing point somewhere between gravity’s
pull on the satellite and a satellite’s inherent inertia.
The satellite had to reach an altitude of 150 miles
above the earth’s surface while traveling at a speed of
about 17,000 miles per hour. Too slow and the satel-
lite would fall back to earth; too fast and it would
disappear into deep space. The plan was for the Dis-
coverer III life-sustaining satellite to achieve orbit,
circle the earth seventeen times, then return back to
earth with the mice, ideally, alive. The Navy had
been rehearsing “a dramatic rescue effort” to retrieve
the capsule once it landed in the ocean.
In the Cold War space race, each side sought to
be the first nation to achieve specific scientific mile-
stones. Getting mice into orbit was a big one. The
Discoverer program was, as a “satellite technology
effort,” a scientific experiment that would eventually
allow humans to travel into space. That was all true,
but there was another side. Discoverer III was a

136
 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

highly classified spying mission, a cover for Ameri-

ca’s first space-based satellite reconnaissance pro-
gram, called Corona. The CIA had done the heavy
lifting in Corona’s early years, with the support of
the U.S. Air Force. ARPA had inherited the pro-
gram from the Air Force in 1958. The mission of
Corona was to photograph the Soviet Union from
space so that the United States could better under-
stand Soviet military hardware on the ground.
Corona would remain one of America’s most closely
guarded secrets, and would stay classified for thirty-
six years, until February 1995. Like the U-2 spy
plane, also a highly classified CIA program, this was
where technology, espionage, and the quest for mili-
tary superiority fused.
It was ARPA’s job to put satellites in space for
intelligence-gathering purposes, and William Godel
oversaw these early programs. Satellite technology
gave birth to a whole new world of intelligence-
collection disciplines, including IMINT, or imagery
intelligence (like Corona); SIGINT, signals intelli-
gence; GEOINT, geospatial intelligence; and
MASINT, measurement and signature intelligence.
Some of ARPA’s most successful early satellite pro-
grams included SAMOS (signals intelligence),
GEODESY (mapping), NOTUS (communica-
tions), TRANSIT (navigation), and MIDAS (early
warning). Most of these programs were highly

137.
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

classified, while others, like TIROS, the Television-

Infrared Observation Satellite Program, amazed and
informed the general public in remarkable ways.
TIROS was the world’s first true weather satel-
lite. ARPA had inherited much of the technology
from an Army program called JANUS. The TIROS
satellite, a first-generation remote-sensing instru-
ment, was developed by RCA. It weighed 270
pounds and contained a television system that trans-
mitted images of the earth’s weather—most nota-
bly its cloud cover—from a 450-mile altitude orbit
back to a ground station at Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey. The first launch took place on April 1, 1960;
by then the program had been transferred to the
newly created National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, or NASA. In its seventy-six-day life,
TIROS transmitted 22,952 images back to earth.
Every image was revolutionary. The spiral banded
structure of oceanic storms, the vastness of mountain-
wave cloud structures, the unexpected rapid changes
in cloud patterns—none of this had been seen
before. Technology offered a view of the planet
previously beyond human comprehension, a new
and spectacular perspective on Mother Earth. Before
TIROS it was unknown.
The first set of photographs were pictures of cloud
formations along the St. Lawrence River, over the
Baja Peninsula, and across Egypt near the Red Sea.

138
 PsYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

They were so magnificent that the director of NASA

personally delivered them to President Eisenhower
for him to see. The president called a press confer-
ence and shared details of the breathtaking photo-
graphs with the American public. The New York
Times ran a four-column page-one article about
TIROS. The very notion that it was now possible to
see photographs of a storm front out at sea, before it
hit land, inspired awe, if not disbelief, in millions of
people. The photographs were marvels of modern
science. National Geographic dedicated a large por-
tion of its August 1960 issue to the seminal images.
To William Godel, satellites provided access to
legions of foreign intelligence. Hired just weeks after
ARPA’s creation, Godel held the second-most-
important job after Herb York. His nebulous title,
originally director of foreign developments, then
director of policy and planning, purposely concealed
the classified nature of Godel’s work. Godel was in
charge of ARPA’s psychological warfare programs as
well as its overseas research programs, both of which
would intensify during the Vietnam War. When
Godel departed the agency under FBI investigation
for financial misconduct in 1964, he left behind the
most controversial and most toxic legacy in the agen-
cy’s fifty-seven-year history. Notably, his presence at
ARPA has been largely erased from the official rec-
ord. “The Pentagon library has no information about
139
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

him in our collection,” confirmed Pentagon librarian

Myron “Mike” Hanson in 2013. Declassified files
located at the National Archives and other docu-
ments obtained through the Freedom of Information
Act reveal a story of intrigue.
William Godel began his career in espionage. By
the time of the Discoverer IIT launch of the four black
mice, Godel had more than a decade of experience
working with and among spies. He moved back and
forth between military intelligence and civilian
intelligence, between the CIA and the Pentagon,
with great self-confidence and aplomb. From his ear-
liest beginnings as a Marine Corps intelligence offi-
cer until he began working for ARPA in February
1958, Godel had already forged a brilliant record in
the uppermost echelons of the U.S. intelligence
community. He was intensely patriotic, physically
brave, and intellectually bold. He joined the Marine
Corps in 1940, at the age of nineteen, and one
month after turning twenty-one he fought at Gua-
dalcanal, the remote jungle-covered island in the
Pacific where Allied forces won their first major
offensive against the Empire of Japan. At Guadalca-
nal, Godel was shot in the leg and suffered a near-
fatal injury that left him with a leg brace and a limp.
After the war, Godel worked at the Pentagon, in
military intelligence. His boss was Major General
Graves B. Erskine, a hard-charging war hero who

140
 PsYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

had already fought in both world wars. In World

War II, the forty-seven-year-old General Erskine led
the Third Marine Division in the battle for Iwo
Jima. In the spring of 1950, Godel was chosen by
General Erskine to accompany him on an elite mis-
sion to Southeast Asia, a mission that would pro-
foundly affect how William Godel saw the world
and how he would do his job at the Pentagon over
the next fourteen years.
On its face, the mission to Southeast Asia in July
1950, led by Erskine and the diplomat John F. Melby,
was a joint State Department—Defense Department
diplomatic effort to determine the long-range nature
of American objectives in the region. Its real purpose,
classified secret, was to examine how communist-
backed fighters, also called insurgents or guerrillas,
were resisting and undermining French colonial rule
in Vietnam. When the Melby-Erskine team arrived
in Vietnam, French military officers handed General
Erskine and his associates five thousand pages of
reports to read. Erskine found the request ridiculous.
The French “haven’t won a war since Napoleon,”
he told Godel and the team. “Why listen to a bunch
of second raters when they are losing this war?”
Instead, General Erskine told his team to go out into
the field with South Vietnamese army units of the
French Expeditionary Corps and make military
intelligence assessments of their own. For several
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weeks the Erskine team accompanied the soldiers on

tours of military installations, including forays into
Vietnam’s neighbors Laos and Cambodia. One
night the Erskine group accompanied a South Viet-
namese army unit on a nighttime ambush of a camp
of communist insurgents. The French ordered the
South Vietnamese unit to capture the communist
soldiers, called Viet Minh, and bring them back to
French Expeditionary Corps headquarters for inter-
rogation. The French believed that the Viet Minh
soldiers had information that could help them gain a
strategic edge.
The ambush was a success but the mission was a
failure. In an after-action report, Godel’s colleague
Captain Nick Thorpe explained why. “The Viet-
namese refused to bring back heads with bodies still
attached to them,” Thorpe wrote. To Godel, the
ramifications were profound. The French wanted
the soldiers’ minds; the South Vietnamese brought
them heads. French commanders wanted intelli-
gence; South Vietnamese soldiers wanted revenge.
The way Godel saw it, the French colonialists
were trying to fight the Viet Minh guerrillas accord-
ing to colonial rules of war. But the South Vietnam-
ese, who were receiving weapons and training from
the French forces, were actually fighting a different
kind of war, based on different rules. Guerrilla war-
fare was irrational. It was asymmetrical. It was about

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cutting off the enemy’s head to send a message back

home. When, in the spring of 1950, William Godel
witnessed guerrilla warfare firsthand in Vietnam, it
shifted his perspective on how the United States
would need to fight future wars. Guerrilla warfare
involved psychological warfare. To Godel, it was a
necessary component for a win.

Halfway across the world in Korea, during some of

the heaviest fighting of the Korean War, a most
unusual element of ARPA’s psychological warfare
programs found its origins near a hilltop called Out-
post Bunker Hill. It was the fall of 1952 on the west-
ern front, and soldiers with the First Marine Division
were freezing and tired in their rat-infested trenches.
For months the Marines had been battling the
enemy here for control of area hills. Once a hilltop
was conquered, the Marines would dig in and build
bunkers and trenches with their shovels. Sometimes
they could rest.
The Korean War, like so many wars, began as a
civil war between the North and the South. In June
1950 the conflict became international when the
United Nations joined the war to support the South,
and the People’s Republic of China joined the war to
support the North. The international war began as a
mobile campaign, with UN forces led by an Ameri-
can, General Douglas MacArthur. The initial

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ground assault was supported by U.S. airpower. But

after more than two years of battle, by the fall of
1952 the conflict had devolved into trench warfare,
the old-fashioned, grueling style of warfare that
defined World War I and had come to symbolize
stalemate.
“We hated to dig,” recalled A. Robert Abboud,
First Marine Division Company commander at
Outpost Bunker Hill. “The Chinese were wonder-
ful diggers. They had tunnels they could drive
trucks through,” said Abboud. “We couldn’t get to
them with our air power because they were under-
ground all the time.”
Yet these tunnels were a lifeline for the Marines
at Outpost Bunker Hill. And so with their shovels
they dug and dug, creating a labyrinth of trenches
and tunnels that provided them with some degree of
safety from enemy attack. “We had lumber, really
six-by-sixes...in the trenches,” explained Abboud,
“that we'd set up and then we'd put a roof of lumber
on top and sand bags on top of that.” In this man-
net, the Marines created firing positions along a
number of the topographical crests. Individual men
maintained guard over their own sliver of the hill.
“You had to make sure that there was integrity, that
nobody came in and infiltrated your area,” said
Abboud. The Marines relied on one another.
It was tough and brutal work, keeping enemy

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infiltrators at bay. The weather was hellish and cold.

It snowed much of the time, and there were rats run-
ning around the trenches. Late at night the youngest
soldiers, whom Abboud called “just kids with bayo-
nets,” got sent out into the darkness, down the hill
and into the rice paddies on patrol. Their job was to
poke their bayonets around on the ground in an
effort to locate Chinese land mines. Other times,
more senior officers led dangerous patrols to check
the integrity of the perimeter wire. Abboud himself
went so many times he lost track of the number.
Sometimes his deputy went, a young machine gun
officer whose safety Abboud felt particularly respon-
sible for, and whose name was Allen Macy Dulles.
The young soldier’s father, Allen Welsh Dulles, was
the deputy director of the CIA.
It was also personal. Abboud and the younger
Dulles had known each other since they were boys.
“T’d known Allen because he’d gone to Exeter and
he was on the debating team,” Abboud recalled. “I
was on the debating [team] at Roxbury Latin,” the
venerable Boston day school. The two boys became
friends, sharing a similar passion for antiquity and a
desire to study ancient Greece. Both did; Allen Macy
Dulles studied classics at Princeton, Abboud at Har-
vard. Now here they were in Korea, together serving
as Marines. Despite his being the son of the deputy
director of the CIA, Allen Dulles sought no special

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treatment in Korea. He insisted on taking his equal

share of the dangerous night patrols, said Robert
Abboud.
While both men came from privilege, Dulles came
from extraordinary privilege. In addition to his
father’s powerful position at the CIA, his uncle John
Foster Dulles was about to become U.S. secretary of
state. From his knowledge of classics, Abboud knew
that the history of warfare—from Carthage to the
present time—was riddled with stories of princes
being captured by enemy forces only to be used as
bargaining chips. These stories almost always had a
tragic end. The thought of the young Allen Macy
Dulles being captured and taken prisoner of war by
the Chinese communists worried Abboud. Some-
times it kept him up at night.
Still, “we took turns going out there to the front
lines,” Abboud recalled. On occasion, Abboud sug-
gested maybe it wasn’t a good idea. “If] said, ‘Allen,
I can’t send you out there. Your father is [deputy]
head of the CIA. What happens if you get captured?’
He’d say, ‘I’m a Marine Corps officer and it’s my
turn to go out there. I’m going to go.”
Which is exactly what Allen Macy Dulles did
one fateful night in November 1952.
“For God’s sake don’t get hurt!” Abboud called
after his friend.
Dulles made his way out of the bunker. Abboud

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 PsYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

watched him climb over the sandbags and head

down the steep slope of the hill, then listened on the
communications system.
“I’m on the radio and I’m listening and my heart’s
in my throat,” Abboud remembered. “God, don’t let
anything happen here,” he prayed.
Dulles walked down the slope a good distance
until he came to where the Marines had constructed
a simple barbed-wire fence. The enemy had cut the
concertina wire there. He pulled a tool from his
pocket and began making repairs. Suddenly the area
was consumed by a loud and deafening noise. The
enemy was launching a mortar attack.
“Lieutenant Dulles has been hit!” cried a voice
over the radio.
Robert Abboud summoned four Marines and a
stretcher. The team ran out of the bunker, down the
hill, and into the open terrain in search of Dulles.
They discovered him not far from the fence, lying
on the ground.
“We found him,” Abboud recalled. The situation
was grim. Dulles’s helmet had been knocked off his
head. Blood and shrapnel covered the ground. He
was unconscious. A low pulse. Abboud picked his
friend’s helmet up off the ground.
“There was a lot of his head in the helmet,”
Abboud said.
The team lay Dulles on the stretcher and ran

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

back to the bunker with what was left of him. When

a rescue chopper finally arrived, they loaded Dulles
inside. Abboud remembered watching the Sikorsky
fly away. News reached Washington, D.C., fast.
“Marine Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles, son of
the deputy director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, has been critically wounded in Korea,” the
Associated Press reported ‘the following day. The
helicopter took Dulles to the hospital ship USS Con-
solation, anchored off the coast of Korea. There he
remained, unconscious but with signs of life. He was
twenty-two years old.
“He was unconscious for three weeks, maybe a
month,” recalled his sister Joan Dulles Talley at age
ninety, in 2014. “Initially there was no cognition.
No response to people or to environmental stimulus.
Then, slowly, he came back. He reemerged. Doctors
told us there would be no hearing in one ear but he
could speak, just like someone who was normal. At
first there was hope. Allen seemed normal when we
took him home. But as month after month passed,
he was not able to make a life for himself. Then we
realized what had been injured was his mind.”
Dulles had suffered a catastrophic traumatic
brain injury. The promising young scholar, brave
Marine, and son of the deputy director of the CIA
was, in the words of his sister, “caught between
worlds. It was as if he were trapped in a faraway

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place,” Talley continued. “Allen was there, but not

really there. It was so terribly tragic. He was so
young. He was someone who had been so gifted in
the mind. Like so many young soldiers he had every-
thing ahead of him, and then...no more.”
In November 1952 the human brain was
uncharted territory. Cognitive science, the study of
the mind and its processes, was still in its dark ages.
Neuroscience, as an interdisciplinary field that now
includes biology, chemistry, genetics, and computer
science, did not yet exist. Not for another three
months would James D. Watson and Francis H. C.
Crick announce that they had determined the struc-
ture of DNA, the molecule that carries genes.
Advanced computers that can image the human
brain and produce high-resolution scans had not yet
been developed. Lobotomies—a neurosurgical pro-
cedure that removes part of the brain’s frontal
lobes—were still being performed in U.S. hospitals
as a means to treat psychiatric illness. Brain science
was as mysterious in 1952 as was the center of the
earth or the surface of the moon. Like a man lost in
space, Allen Macy Dulles had very little hope of ever
returning fully to this world.
A few weeks after Allen Macy Dulles was trans-
ported back to the United States, in January 1953,
his father, Allen W. Dulles, was chosen by President
Eisenhower to be the director of the CIA. Already
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Dulles had decided he would do everything in his

power to help his brain-injured son. Most notably,
he hired a top brain specialist named Dr. Harold G.
Wolff, a world-renowned neurologist and director of
the New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center. In
addition to being the world’s authority on migraine
research, Dr. Wolff was a pioneer in the study of gen-
eral brain behavior, with a specialty in psychosomatic
illness, or mental illness, which in 1953 did not mean
all that much. Dr. Wolff, on the surface, was a man
of distinction. Privately he was a dark, shadowy fig-
ure, though this would take decades to be known.
After graduating from Harvard Medical School in
1923, Wolff traveled to Europe to study neuropa-
thology, or diseases of the nervous system, in Aus-
tria. Next he traveled farther east, to Leningrad,
where he worked under Ivan Pavlov, the famous
Russian physiologist known for his discovery of clas-
sical conditioning, the idea that human behavior
could be strengthened or weakened though punish-
ment and reward. (Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in
medicine in 1904 and will forever be remembered
for his famous dog.)
When Lieutenant Allen Macy Dulles came back
from Korea with his brain injury, CIA director Allen
Welsh Dulles contacted Wolff in New York City,
hoping Wolff could help his son get well. Dr. Wolff
said he would be happy to see what he could do. But

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the following month a national security crisis

gripped the nation, and Allen Dulles was pulled
away. On February 23, 1953, a U.S. Marine colonel
named Frank S. Schwable appeared on TV as a pris-
oner of war of the North Koreans. Schwable, a mem-
ber of the U.S. First Marine Air Wing, had been
shot down on a combat mission over North Korea
seven months earlier, in July 1952. Now, in a six-
thousand-word statement broadcast on Chinese
radio, Colonel Schwable shocked the world with a
startling confession.
Colonel Schwable said that he had been given
detailed orders by his superior officers to participate
in “various elements of bacteriological warfare.”
Schwable cited specific “field tests” which he claimed
had already taken place and said that military com-
manders had discussed with him their plans for
using biological weapons against North Korean
civilians in “regular combat operations.” Schwable
named names, described meetings, and discussed
strategy. Everything Schwable said, if true, violated
the Geneva Conventions. General Mark W. Clark,
UN Supreme Commander in Korea, immediately
denounced the germ warfare charges, declaring
them fabrications, but at the Pentagon, officials were
aware how quickly such a narrative could spin out of
control.
At the Pentagon, the man tasked with handling

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the situation was William Godel, now deputy direc-

tor of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). The
PSB coordinated psychological warfare operations
between the Department of Defense and the CIA.
In response to the Colonel Schwable affair, Godel
convened an emergency meeting of the PSB. This
was psychological warfare of the worst order, Godel
declared; declassified minutes of the emergency PSB
meeting indicate that its members agreed. The posi-
tion of the U.S. government was then, and is now,
that it never engaged in biological warfare in Korea.
So how should the United States respond?
Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson suggested an
“all out campaign to smear the Koreans.” He wanted
the Pentagon to accuse the communists of “a new
form of war crime, and a new form of refinement in
atrocity techniques; namely mind murder, or
menticide.” The CIA thought this was a bad idea.
“Menticide” was too powerful a word, Director Dulles
cautioned, and it conceded too much power to the
communists. But time was critical, and the Pentagon
had to respond. The members of the PSB agreed to a
watered-down version of Secretary Wilson’s sugges-
tion. Hours later, the Department of Defense issued a
statement calling Colonel Schwable’s action the result
of the “mind-annihilating methods of these Commu-
nists in extorting whatever words they want.” Defense
Department officials had a very specific name for

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 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

what the communists were doing to our soldiers, a

word recommended by the CIA. The communists
were “brainwashing” American soldiers, the Pentagon
said.
It was a CIA move that was three years in the
making. In fact, the word “brainwashing” had
entered the English lexicon in September 1950,
courtesy of the CIA, when an article written by a
reporter named Edward Hunter appeared in a
Miami newspaper, the News. “Brain-Washing Tac-
tics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,”
the headline read. Although Hunter had been a
journalist for decades, he also worked for the CIA.
He’d been hired by the agency on a contract basis to
disseminate brainwashing stories through the main-
stream press. “Brain-washing,” wrote Hunter, was a
devious new tool being used by the communists to
strip a man of his humanity and “turn him into a
robot or a slave.” The very concept grabbed Ameri-
cans by the throat. The notion of government mind-
control programs had been a mainstay of dystopian
science-fiction novels for decades, from Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We to Aldous Huxley’s 1932
best-seller Brave New World. But that was science
fiction. This was real, Hunter wrote. To be inciner-
ated in a nuclear bomb attack was an ever-present
Cold War threat, but it was also an abstraction, dif-
ficult to conceptualize on an individual scale. In

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

1950, the idea of being brainwashed, as if controlled

by an evil wizard’s spell—that was somehow much
easier to relate to. Brainwashing terrified people, and
they wanted to know more.
Edward Hunter wrote article after article on the
subject, expanding his stories into a book. The com-
munists, he declared, had developed tactics “to put a
man’s mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is
true for what is untrue, what is right for what is wrong.”
Brainwashing could turn a man into an amnesiac who
could “not remember wrong from right.” Memories
could be implanted in a brainwashed man whereby he
would “come to believe what did not happen actually
had happened, until he ultimately becomes a robot for
the Communist manipulator,” Hunter warned.
In the September 1950 Miami News article, Hunter
claimed to have information proving that the Chinese
had created “brainwashing panels” of experts who
used drugs, hypnosis, and other sinister means that
could render a man “a demon [or] a puppet.” The goal
of the communists, said Hunter, was to conquer
America by conquering its citizens—one at a time. In
a follow-up book on the subject, Hunter explained
the science behind the “mind atrocities called brain-
washing.” Through conditioning, the communists
intended to change human nature. To turn men into
ants. “What the totalitarian state strives for is the
insectivization of human beings,” Hunter declared.

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 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

“Brain changing is the culmination of this whole evil

process,” he said. “The brain created science and now
will be subordinate to it.’ Even Congress invited
Hunter to testify before the Committee on Un-
American Activities, in a session discussing “Commu-
nist Psychological Warfare (Brainwashing).” He was
presented as an author and a foreign correspondent,
with no mention of his role as a CIA operative.
Psychologists across America echoed Hunter's
thinking, adding to the growing fear of mind
control. In an article for the New York Times Maga-
zine, the renowned psychologist and former prisoner
of the Nazis Joost A. M. Meerloo agreed that brain-
washing was real and possible. “The totalitarians
have misused the knowledge of how the mind works
for their own purposes,” Meerloo wrote.
With all this focus on brainwashing and its evil
power, starting with Hunter’s first mention of the
concept in the fall of 1950, it is surprising how
quickly the story of the brainwashed Marine colonel
Frank S. Schwable in the winter of 1953 went away.
At first the situation garnered considerable press, but
then diffused. This was largely due to the behind-
the-scenes efforts of William Godel. Godel had been
assigned to act as liaison between the Pentagon and
the government of North Korea in an effort to get
Schwable and thousands of other Korean War POWs
released. The documents at the National Archives

15D)
 THE PENTAGON'S BRAIN

are limited in number, and many remain classified,

but what surfaces is the notion that William Godel
was extremely effective at his job. By the late summer
of 1953, the majority of the captured pilots had been
returned. Many of them appeared on television and
explained what had been done to them, that they had
been tortured into making false confessions. A solid
narrative emerged. The evil communists had tried to
“brainwash” the Americans, with emphasis on the
word “tried,” and failed. Schwable recanted every-
thing he had said and was awarded the Legion of
Merit. The American public welcomed this idea with
open arms; in his constitution and character, the
American serviceman was stronger than and superior
to the communist brainwashers.

As for Allen Macy Dulles, he was not getting any

better. The brain injury had damaged his prefrontal
cortex, leaving him with permanent short-term
amnesia, also called anterograde amnesia. He had
lost the ability to transfer new information from his
short-term memory to his long-term memory. He
knew who he was, but he could not remember things
like where he was. Or what day it was. Or what he
had done twenty minutes before.
“He was present, one hundred percent present, in
the moment,” his sister Joan Talley said. “But he

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 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

could not hang on to anything that was happening

anymore. He could remember everything about his
life up to the war, up to the injury. Then nothing.”
His days at Exeter, when he was a teenager, were his
fondest memories, all sharp. He retained much
knowledge of the classics, and of ancient Greek war-
fare, which he had studied at Princeton. He could
recall training with the Marines, but from the
moment of the injury, it was all darkness. Just a
blank page. “You would talk to him, and ten min-
utes later he would not remember anything that you
had just said,” Joan Talley recalled. “Poor Allen
began to act paranoid.” Conspiratorial thinking
gripped his mind. It was the fault of the Nazis, he
claimed. The fault of the Jews. His father was not his
father. His father was a Nazi spy. “The psychiatrists
tried to say it was mental illness. That Allen was suf
fering from schizophrenia. That was the new diagno-
sis back then. Blame everything on schizophrenia.”
The ambitious Dr. Harold Wolff could not help
Allen Macy Dulles, nor could any of the other doc-
tors hired by his father. He was moved into a mental
institution, called the Chestnut Lodge, in Rockville,
Maryland. This was the infamous locale where the
CIA sent officers who experienced mental break-
downs. How much doctoring went on at the Chest-
nut Lodge remains the subject of debate, but the

157
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

facility offered safety, security, and privacy. Joan

Talley visited her brother regularly, though it pained
her to see him locked up there.
“Allen was suffering from a terrible brain injury,”
she said. “Of course he wasn’t crazy....Allen had
been absolutely brilliant before the brain injury,
before the war. It was as if somewhere down inside
he knew that he was [once] very intelligent but that
he wasn’t anymore. It drove him mad. That his bril-
liance in life was over. That there would be brilliance
no more.” Allen Macy Dulles was shuffled around
from one mental hospital to another. Eventually he
was sent overseas, to a lakeside sanatorium in Swit-
zerland, where he returned to a prewar life of ano-
nymity. Joan moved to Zurich, to study psychology.
She visited her brother every week.
Dr. Harold Wolff did not disappear. He had
become friendly with CIA director Dulles while
treating his amnesiac son. Now Dr. Wolff had a bold
proposal for the CIA. A research project in a similar
field. What, really, was brainwashing other than an
attempt to make a man forget things he once held
dear? Wolff believed this was rich territory to mine.
The brainwashing crisis with the Korean War POWs
had passed, but there was much to learn from brain-
washing techniques. What if a man really could be
transformed into an ant, a robot, or a slave? What if
he could be made to forget things? This could be a

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 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

major tool in psychological warfare operations. The

CIA was interested, and so was William Godel.
In late 1953 Dr. Wolff secured a CIA contract to
explore brainwashing techniques, together with Dr.
Lawrence Hinkle, his partner at the Cornell Univer-
sity Medical College in New York City. Their classi-
fied report, which took more than two years to
complete, would become the definitive study on com-
munist brainwashing techniques. From there, the
work expanded. Soon the two doctors had their own
ClA-funded program to carry out experiments in
behavior modification and mind control. It was
called the Society for the Investigation of Human
Ecology. One of their jobs was to conduct a study on
the soldiers who had become POWs during the
Korean War. This work would later be revisited by
the CIA and DARPA starting in 2005.
At the Pentagon, having so adroitly dealt with the
POW brainwashing scandal, William Godel was
elevated to an even more powerful position. Starting
in 1953, he served as deputy director of the Office of
Special Operations, an office inside the Office of the
Secretary of Defense. Godel’s boss was General
Graves B. Erskine. Godel acted as liaison between
the Pentagon and the CIA and NSA. So trusted was
William Godel that during important meetings he
would sometimes serve as an alternate for the deputy
secretary of defense. In declassified State Department

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memos, Godel was praised as an “expert from DoD

on techniques and practices of psychological war-
fare.” He worked on many different classified pro-
grams in the years from 1955 to 1957 and left a
footprint around the world. As part of the Joint
Intelligence Group, he was in charge of “collecting,
evaluating and disseminating intelligence in support
of activities involving the recovery of U.S. nationals
held prisoner in Communist countries around the
globe.” He served as deputy director of the Office of
Special Operations, Department of the Navy, and
was in charge of the classified elements of the Navy's
mission to map Antarctica. In March 1956, a five-
mile-wide ice shelf off the coast of Queen Maud
Land, Antarctica, was named after him, the Godel
Iceport. But his true passion was counterinsurgency.
In 1957 Godel traveled around the country, giv-
ing lectures at war colleges to promote the idea that
the United States would sooner or later have to fight
wars in remote places like Vietnam. In many ways,
Godel would say to his military-member audiences,
America was already fighting these wars, just not out
in the open. In his lectures he would remark that by
the time of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the
U.S. had “been paying eighty percent of the bill.”
Godel believed that America had “to learn to fight a
war that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, doesn’t have

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the North German Plain, and doesn’t necessarily

involve Americans.”
Godel believed he knew what the future of war-
fare would look like. How its fighters would act.
They would use irregular warfare tactics, like the
ambushes and beheadings he had witnessed in Viet-
nam. America’s future wars would not be fought by
men wearing U.S. Army uniforms, Godel said. They
would be fought by local fighters who had been
trained by U.S. forces, with U.S. tactics and know-
how, and carrying U.S. weapons. The way Godel
saw it, the Pentagon needed to develop advanced
weaponry, based on technology that was not just
nuclear technology, but that could deal with this
coming threat. Godel formulated a theory, some-
thing he proudly called his “bold summation.”
Insurgents might have superior discipline, organiza-
tion, and motivation, he said. But science and tech-
nology could give “our” side the leading edge.
In February 1958, William Godel was hired on
in a key position at the newly formed Advanced
Research Projects Agency. It was Godel’s role as
director of the Office of Foreign Developments to
handle what would be ARPA’s covert military opera-
tions overseas. For Godel, his experience in Vietnam
back in 1950 left him convinced that if America was
going to defeat the global spread of communism, it

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needed to wage a new kind of warfare called counter-

insurgency warfare, or COIN. Godel was now ina
position to create and implement the very programs
he had been telling war college audiences across the
country needed to be created. Through inserting a
USS. military presence into foreign lands threatened
by communism—through advanced science and
technology—democracy would prevail and com-
munism would fail. This quest would quickly
become Godel’s obsession.
In 1959 ARPA’s Office of Foreign Developments
was renamed the Policy and Planning Division.
Godel retained the position of director. Herb York
moved from chief scientist at ARPA to the director of
the Defense Department of Research and Engineering,
or DDR&E, with all ARPA program managers still
reporting to him. Herb York and William Godel
shared a similar view: the United States must aggres-
sively seek out potential research and development
capabilities to assist anticommunist struggles in for-
eign countries by using cutting-edge technology,
most of which did not yet exist. In early 1960, York
authorized a lengthy trip for Godel and for York’s
new deputy director, John Macauley. The two men
were to travel through Asia and Australia to set up
foreign technology—based operations there. Godel
still acted as ARPA liaison to the NSA and CIA.
Godel traveled to a remote area in South Australia
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 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

called Woomera. Here the Defense Department was

building the largest overland missile range outside the
Soviet Union. The site was critical to ARPA’s Defender
program. Next he went to Southeast Asia, where he
made a general assessment of the communist insur-
gency that was continuing to escalate there, most nota-
bly in Vietnam. Upon his return to the United States,
Godel outlined his observations in a memo. In 1960
the South Vietnamese army had 150,000 men, mak-
ing them far superior, numerically, to what was esti-
mated to be an insurgent fighting force of between
only three thousand to five thousand communists, the
Viet Minh or Vietcong. And yet the South was unable
to control this insurgency, which was growing at an
accelerating rate. South Vietnamese president Ngo
Dinh Diem’s “congenitally trained, conventionally
organized and congenitally equipped military organi-
zations are incapable of employment in anti-guerrilla
operations,” Godel wrote.
For the secretary of defense William Godel pre-
pared lengthy memos on the unique nature of the
insurgency, singling out the growing communist-
backed guerrilla forces in Vietnam and neighboring
Laos and the “potential value of applying scientific
talent to the problem.” Godel suggested that ARPA
create “self-sustaining paramilitary organizations at
the group level,” to be sent into Vietnam to conduct
psychological warfare operations. Godel believed

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

that ARPA should begin providing local villagers

with weapons to use, so as to turn them into counter-
insurgency fighters for the Pentagon. “These forces
should be provided not with conventional arms and
equipment requiring third- and fourth-level mainte-
nance but with a capability to be farmers or taxi driv-
ers during the day and anti-guerrilla forces at night.”
William Godel was suggesting that ARPA take on a
role that until now had been the domain of the Spe-
cial Operations Division of the CIA and U.S. Army
Special Forces teams. Godel believed that ARPA
should create its own army of ARPA-financed fight-
ers who would appear to be civilians by day, but who
would take on the role of paramilitary operators by
night. A new chapter in ARPA history had begun.
Upon returning from Vietnam, Godel roamed
the halls of the Pentagon, intent on garnering sup-
port for his counterinsurgency views. He was largely
ignored. “Godel continued to press his views on peo-
ple throughout the government, many of them well-
placed via his remarkable network of contacts,” said
an ARPA colleague, Lee Huff, but the Eisenhower
administration had little interest in his ideas, and he
was vetoed at every turn. With the arrival of a new
president, this would change.

When a new president takes office, he generally

changes the guard. And the arrival of John Fitzger-

164
 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

ald Kennedy meant the departure of Herb York.

“When John Kennedy won the 1960 election [I]
became what politicians call lame ducks,” York later
observed, adding that he was not sorry to go. “I
didn’t have to spend all my time putting out fires”
anymore. York was proud of the work he had accom-
plished while at ARPA, the “truly revolutionary
changes” he had overseen at the Pentagon. At the
top of the list was the arsenal of nuclear weapons he
had helped build up. “By the end of the Eisenhower
period, we had firm plans and commitments for the
deployment of about 1,075 ICBMs (805 Minute-
men plus 270 Atlas and Titans), York noted with
pride.
He also admitted that these accomplishments
presented a paradox. As he put it, “Our nuclear strat-
egy, and the objective situation underlying it, cre-
ated an awful dilemma.” After his years working on
ARPA’s Defender program, he had “concluded that
a defense of the population was and very probably
would remain impossible in the nuclear era.”
At noon on January 20, 1960, John F. Kennedy
became the thirty-fifth president of the United
States. It would be more than a week before York
would officially leave office. As the “senior holdover
in the [Defense] Department,” York explained, “T
became the Secretary of Defense at the same
moment” the president took office. Former Ford
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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Motor Company president Robert McNamara had

been nominated to serve as Kennedy’s secretary of
defense, but it was not known how long the confir-
mation hearings would take. In the meantime,
someone had to be in charge of the nation’s nuclear
weapons. The practice of the president remaining in
constant contact with the so-called nuclear football,
the briefcase containing the codes and other data
enabling a president to order a nuclear launch, was
not yet in effect. In January 1961 it was the job of
the secretary of defense to carry the case, to be
responsible for, in York’s words, “getting the nuclear
machine ready to go into action when the president
so ordered it.” What this meant was that for now,
Herb York was in charge of America’s entire nuclear
arsenal.
A special red telephone was installed in York’s
bedroom, at his home just outside Washington. It
had a large red plastic light on top that would flash
if York was being called. The red phone was con-
nected to one place only, the War Room located
beneath the Pentagon. The day after Kennedy’s
inauguration, York decided to venture over to the
War Room to see what was going on down there.
“When I knocked at the door, a major opened it a
crack,” York recounted.
From behind the crack in the door, the man
asked, “What do you want?”

166
 PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

“Im the acting secretary of defense,” York

answered.
“Just a minute,” said the man. He closed the door
gently in York’s face. A few moments later, the man,
an Army major, returned and let Herb York inside,
not without some fanfare. York looked around.
Here, the Pentagon was keeping special “watch” on
situations around the globe considered most critical
to national security. One place was the Central Afri-
can Republic of the Congo, not yet called Zaire,
where a rebellion was under way in the mineral-rich
province of Katanga. “The other was Laos,” recalled
York, Vietnam’s turbulent neighbor. The next three
presidents would have their presidencies defined by
the Vietnam War. But at that time, as far as the rest
of America was concerned, “nothing special was
going on in either place, as far as our people knew.
Vietnam was not yet in our sights.”
The following week, Robert McNamara was con-
firmed as the new secretary of defense. No one both-
ered to go to York’s house and retrieve the red
telephone. “It remained there until I left Washing-
ton, permanently, some four months later,” said
York.

167
 PART II

THE VIETNAM WAR

 CHAPTER SEVEN

Techniques and Gadgets

he first two U.S. military advisors to die in

ik Vietnam War were ambushed. Major
Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester
Ovnand were sitting with six other Americans in the
mess hall of a South Vietnamese army camp twenty-
five miles north of Saigon when the attack came.
The lights were off and the men were watching a
Hollywood movie, a film noir thriller called The
Tattered Dress. When it was time to change the reel,
a U.S. Army technician flipped on the lights.
Outside, a group of communist guerrilla fighters
had been surveilling the army post and waiting for
the right moment to attack. With the place now illu-
minated, they pushed the muzzles of their semiauto-
matic weapons through the windows and opened
171
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

fire. Major Buis and Master Sergeant Ovnand were

killed instantly, as were two South Vietnamese army
guards and an eight-year-old Vietnamese boy. In a
defensive move, Major Jack Hellet turned the lights
back off. The communist fighters fled, disappearing
into the jungle from where they had come.
In his first two months in office, President Ken-
nedy spent more time on Vietnam and neighboring
Laos than on any other national security concern.
Counterinsurgency warfare, all but ignored by Pres-
ident Eisenhower, was now a top priority for the new
president. William Godel-finally had an ear, and by
winter, the Advanced Projects Research Agency
made its bold first entry into the tactical arena. On
the morning of his eighth day in office, the new
president summoned his most senior advisors —the
vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary
of defense, the director of the CIA, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the assistant secretary of
defense, and a few others—to the White House.
The subject of their meeting was the “Viet-nam
counter-insurgency plan,” the location still so for-
eign and far away that it was hyphenated in the offi-
cial memorandum. Two days after the meeting,
President Kennedy authorized an increase of $41.1
million to expand and train the South Vietnamese
army, roughly $325 million in 2015. Of far greater
significance for ARPA, President Kennedy signed an

172
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

official “Counter-insurgency Plan.” This important

meeting paved the way for the creation of two high-
level groups to deal with the most classified aspects
of fighting communist insurgents in Vietnam, the
Vietnam Task Force and the Special Group. Wil-
liam Godel was made a member of both groups.
From the earliest days of his presidency, Kennedy
worked to distance himself from a traditional, old
school military mindset. President Eisenhower, age
seventy-one when he left office, had been a five-star
general and served as Supreme Commander of the
Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. Presi-
dent Kennedy was a dashing young war hero, full of
idealism and enthusiasm, and just forty-three years
old. Kennedy sought a more adaptable, collegial style
of policy making when it came to issues of national
security. The Eisenhower doctrine was based on
mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The Kennedy
doctrine would become known as “flexible response.”
The new president believed that the U.S. military
needed to be able to fight limited wars, quickly and
with flexibility, anywhere around the world where
communism threatened democracy. In describing
his approach, Kennedy said that the nation must be
ready “to deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear
or conventional, large or small.”
The new president reduced the number of
National Security Council staff by more than twenty

173
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and eliminated the Operations Coordinating Board

and the Planning Board. In their place, he created
interagency task forces. These task forces were
almost always chaired by men from his inner circle,
Ivy League intellectuals on the White House staff or
in the Pentagon. Kennedy’s secretary of defense,
Robert McNamara, was a Harvard Business School
graduate whose deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, was a
graduate of Yale Law School. The president’s brother
and attorney general, Robert Kennedy, was, like the
president, a Harvard grad. National security advisor
McGeorge Bundy graduated from Yale, as did dep-
uty national security advisor Walt Rostow and Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Secu-
rity Affairs William Bundy (brother of McGeorge
Bundy), who also attended Harvard Law School. The
staffs of many presidential administrations have been
top-heavy with Ivy League graduates, but to many
in Washington, it seemed as if President Kennedy
was making a statement. That a man’s intellectual
prowess was to be valued above everything else. War
was a thinking man’s game, he seemed to be saying.
Intellect won wars. The most powerful men in Sec-
retary McNamara’s Pentagon were defense intellec-
tuals, including many former RAND Corporation
employees. As a group, they would become known
as McNamara’s whiz kids.
“Viet-nam” had to be dealt with, the president's

174
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

advisors agreed. On April 12, 1961, in a memo to

the president, Walt Rostow suggested “Nine Propos-
als for Action” in Vietnam to fight the guerrillas
there. “Action Proposal Number Five,” written by
William Godel, suggested “the sending to Viet-Nam
of a research and development and military hard-
ware team which would explore with General
McGarr which of the various techniques and ‘gadgets’
now available or being éxplored that might be rele-
vant and useful in the Viet-nam operation.” General
Lionel McGarr was the commander of the Military
Assistance Advisory Group, Vietnam (MAAG-V),
and the ongoing “Viet-nam operation,” which involved
training the South Vietnamese army in U.S. war-
fighting skills. Godel’s action proposal called for
ARPA to augment MAAG-V efforts with a new
assemblage of “techniques and ‘gadgets.’ ”
President Kennedy liked Godel’s proposal and
personally requested more information. The follow-
ing week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gil-
patric submitted to the president a memorandum
that elaborated on “Action Proposal Number Five.”
This particular plan of action, according to Gilpat-
ric, involved the use of cutting-edge technology to
fight the communist insurgents. He proposed that
ARPA establish its own research and development
center in Saigon, a physical location where an ARPA
field unit could develop new weapons specifically
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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

tailored to jungle-fighting needs. There would be

other projects too, said Gilpatric—the “techniques”
element of Godel’s proposal. These would involve
sociological research programs and_ psychological
warfare campaigns. The ARPA facility, set up in
buildings adjacent to the MAAG-V center, would be
called the Combat Development and Test Center. It
would be run jointly by ARPA, MAAG-V, and the
South Vietnamese armed forces (ARVN). The
ARPA program would be called Project Agile, as in
flexible, capable, and quick-witted. Just like the pres-
ident and his advisors.
The following month, President Kennedy sent
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to meet person-
ally with South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh
Diem and garner support for the “techniques and
‘gadgets’” idea. Photographs of the two men dressed
in matching white tuxedo jackets and posing for
cameras at Diem’s Independence Palace in Saigon
were reprinted in newspapers around the world.
Johnson, who was six foot four, towered over the
diminutive Diem, whose head barely reached John-
son’s shoulder. Both men smiled broadly, expressing
commitment to their countries’ ongoing partner-
ship. Communism was a scourge, and together the
governments of the United States and South Viet-
nam intended to eradicate it from the region.
President Diem, an avowed anticommunist and

176
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

fluent English speaker, was Catholic, well educated,

and enamored of modernity. These qualities made
him a strong ally of the U.S. government but alien-
ated him from many of his own people. In the early
1960s, the majority of Vietnamese were agrarian
peasants— Buddhist and Taoist rice farmers who
lived at the subsistence level in rural communities
distant from Saigon. By the time President Diem
met with Vice President Johnson to discuss fighting
communist insurgents with techniques and gadgets,
Diem had been in power for six years. Diem ruled
with a heavy hand and was notoriously corrupt, but
the Kennedy administration believed it could make
the situation work.
During the meeting, Johnson asked Diem to
agree to an official memo of understanding, to “con-
sider jointly the establishment in [Saigon] of a facility
to develop and test [weapons], using the tools of
modern technology and new techniques, to help
[both parties] in their joint campaign against the
Communists.” Diem agreed and the men shook
hands, setting Project Agile in motion and giving
ARPA the go-ahead to set up a weapons facility in
Saigon.
“(Diem] is the Winston Churchill of Asia!” John-
son famously declared.
The following month, on June 8, 1961, William
Godel traveled to Vietnam with Project Agile’s first
7,
 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

research and development team to set up ARPA’s

Combat Development and Test Center (CDTC).
Project Agile was now a “Presidential issue,” which
gave Godel authority and momentum to act. The
new R&D center was located in a group of one-story
stone buildings facing the Navy Yard, near the Saigon
River. Each building had heavy shutters on the win-
dows and doors to keep out the intense Saigon heat.
Ceiling fans were permanent fixtures inside all the
buildings, as were potted palms and tiled floors. On
the walls hung large maps of Vietnam and framed
posters of the CDTC logo, an amalgamation of a
helmet, wings, an anchor, and a star. Desks and
tabletops were adorned with miniature freestanding
U.S. flags, and there were large glass ashtrays on
almost every surface. Some buildings housed ARPA
administrators, while others functioned as laborato-
ties where scientists and engineers worked. Photo-
graphs in the National Archives show “ARPA”
stamped in bold stenciling on metal desks, tables,
and folding chairs.
During the trip, Godel met three separate times
with President Diem. On one visit Diem toured the
CDTC, and in photographs he appears confident
and pleased as he strolls down the pebble pathways,
wearing his signature Western-style white suit and
hat. Accompanying Diem is his ever-present entou-
rage of military advisors, soldiers dressed in neat

178
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

khaki uniforms, aviator sunglasses, and shiny shoes.

In Godel’s first field report he notes President’s Diem
insistence that U.S. military involvement in South
Vietnam remain disguised. This, warned Diem, was
the only way for the two countries to continue their
successful partnership. The success of Project Agile
rested on discretion and secrecy. Godel agreed, and a
large open-sided workspace—similar to an airplane
hangar but without walls—was constructed adja-
cent to the CDTC. Here, local Vietnamese laborers
toiled away in plain sight, building components for
Project Agile’s various secret weapons programs.
By August, ARPA’s Combat Development and
Test Center was up and running with a staff of
twenty-five Americans. Colonel William P. Brooks,
USS. Army, served as chief of the ARPA R&D field
unit, while President Diem’s assistant chief of staff,
Colonel Bui Quang Trach, was officially “in charge,”
which was how he signed documents related to the
CDTC. ARPA’ first staffers included military offi-
cers, civilian scientists, engineers, and academics.
Some had research and development experience and
others had combat experience. The CDTC was con-
nected by a secure telephone line to room 2B-261 at
the Pentagon, where Project Agile had an office.
Agile’s budget for its first year was relatively modest,
just $11.3 million, or one-tenth of the budget for
ARPA'’s biggest program, Defender. By the following
Tae,
 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

year, Project Agile’s budget would double, -trans-

forming it into the third-largest ARPA program,
after Defender and Vela.
Upon returning to Washington, D.C., from Sai-
gon, Godel traveled across the nation’s capital, giv-
ing briefings on Project Agile to members of the
departments of State and Defense, and the CIA. On
July 6, 1961, he gave a closed seminar at the Foreign
Service Institute. There he discussed the first four
military equipment programs to be discreetly intro-
duced into the jungles of Vietnam—a boat, an air-
plane, guns, and dogs. At first glance, they hardly
seem high-tech. Two of the four programs, the boats
and the dogs, were as old as warfare itself. But
ARPA’s “swamp boat” was a uniquely designed pad-
dlewheel boat with a steam engine that burned cane
alcohol; it carried twenty to thirty men. What made
it unusual was that it was engineered to float almost
silently and could operate in as little as three inches
of water. In 1961, the night in Vietnam was ruled by
the Vietcong communist insurgents, which meant
the boat had to be able to travel quietly down the
Mekong Delta waterways so that U.S. Special Forces
working with South Vietnamese soldiers could infil-
trate enemy territory without being ambushed.
ARPA’s canine program was far more ambitious
than using dogs in the traditional role of sentinels.
“One of the most provoking problems [in Vietnam]

180
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

is the detection and identification of enemy person-

nel,” ARPA chemists A. C. Peters and W. H. Allton
Jr. stated in an official report, noting how Vietcong
fighters were generally indistinguishable from local
peasants in South Vietnam. ARPA’s dog program
sought to develop a chemical whose scent could be
detected by Army-trained dogs but not by humans.
As part of a tagging and tracking program, the plan
was to have Diem’s soldiers surreptitiously mark
large groups of people with this chemical, then use
dogs to track whoever turned up later in a suspicious
place, like outside a military base.
ARPA’s canine program was an enormous under-
taking. The chemical had to work in a hot, wet ale
mate, leave a sufficient “spoor” to enable tracking by
dogs, and be suitable for spraying from an aircraft.
The first chemical ARPA scientists focused their
work on what was called squalene, a combination of
shark and fish liver oil. German shepherds were
trained in Fort Benning, Georgia, and then sent to
the CDTC in Saigon. But an administrative over-
sight set the program back when Army handlers
neglected to account for “temperatures reaching a
level greater than 100 F.” After forty-five minutes of
work in the jungles of Vietnam, the ARPA dogs
“seemed to lose interest in any further detection tri-
als.” The German shepherds’ acute sense of smell
could not be sustained in the intense jungle heat.

181
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

The first Project Agile aircraft introduced into

the war theater was a power glider designed for audio
stealth —light, highly maneuverable, and able to fly
just above the jungle canopy for extended periods on
a single tank of gasoline. Godel called it “an airborne
Volkswagen.” Because it flew so close to the treetops,
guerrilla fighters found it nearly impossible to shoot
down. ARPA’s power glider would pave the way for
an entirely new class of unconventional military air-
craft, including drones.
The most significant weapon to emerge from the
early days of Project Agile was the AR-15 semiauto-
matic rifle. In the summer of 1961, Diem’s
small-in-stature army was having difficulty handling
the large semiautomatic weapons carried by U.S. mil-
itary advisors. In the AR-15 Godel saw promise,
“something the short, small Vietnamese can fire with-
out bowling themselves over,” he explained. Godel
worked with legendary gun designer Eugene M.
Stoner to create ten lightweight AR-15 prototypes,
each weighing just 6.7 pounds. Vietnamese com-
manders at the CDTC expressed enthusiasm for this
new weapon, Godel told Secretary McNamara, pre-
ferring it to the M1 Garand and Browning BARs they
had been carrying.
Inside the Pentagon, the military services had
been arguing about a service-wide infantry weapon —
since Korea. With Agile’s “Presidential issue” author-

182
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

ity, Godel cut through years of red tape and oversaw

the shipment of one thousand AR-15s to the CDTC
without delay. U.S. Special Forces took the AR-15
into the battle zone for live-action tests. “At a dis-
tance of approximately fifteen meters, [a U.S. sol-
dier] fired the weapon at two VC [Vietcong] armed
with carbines, grenades, and mines,” read an after-
action report from 340 Ranger Company. “One
round in the [VC’s] head took it completely off.
Another in the right arm took it completely off, too.
One round hit him in the right side, causing a hole
about five inches in diameter. It can be assumed that
any one of the three wounds would have caused
death,” the company commander wrote.
In 1963 the AR-15 became the standard-issue
rifle of the U.S. Army. In 1966 it was adapted for
fully automatic fire and redesignated the M16 assault
rifle. The weapon is still being used by U.S. soldiers.
“The development of the M-16 would almost cer-
tainly not have come about without the existence of
ARPA,” noted an unpublished internal ARPA
review, written in 1974.

The Combat Development and Test Center was up

and running with four weapons programs, but doz-
ens more were in the works. Project Agile “gadgets”
would soon include shotguns, rifle grenades, short-
ened strip bullets, and high-powered sound canons.
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

ARPA wanted a proximity fuse with an. extra

75-millisecond delay so bombs dropped from air-
craft could be detonated below the jungle canopy
but just above the ground. Big projects and small |
projects, ARPA needed them all. Entire fleets of
Army vehicles required retrofitting and redesign to
handle rugged jungle trails. ARPA needed resupply
aircraft with short takeoff and landing capability. It
had plans to develop high-flying helicopters and
low-flying drones. ARPA needed scientists to create
disposable parachutes for aerial resupply, chemists to
develop antivenom snakebite and leech repellent
kits, technicians to create listening devices and seis-
mic monitoring devices that looked like rocks but
could track guerrilla fighters’ movement down a jun-
gle trail. ARPA needed teams of computer scientists
to design and build data collection systems and stor-
age systems, and to retrofit existing air, ground, and
ocean systems so all the different military services
involved in this fight against the Vietnamese com-
munists could communicate better.
But there was one weapons program—highly
classified —that commanded more of Godel’s atten-
tion than the others. This particular program was
unlike any other in the Project Agile arsenal in that it
had the potential to act as a silver bullet—a single
solution to the complex hydra-headed problem of
counterinsurgency. It involved chemistry and crops,

184
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

and its target was the jungle. Eventually the weapon

would become known to the world as Agent Orange,
and instead of being a silver bullet, Agent Orange was
a hideous toxin. But in 1961, herbicidal warfare was
still considered an acceptable idea and William Godel
was in charge of running the program for ARPA.
At Fort Detrick, in Maryland, ARPA ran a toxi-
cology branch where it worked on chemical weapons—
related programs with Dr. James W. Brown, deputy
chief of the crops division of the Army Chemical
Corps Biological Laboratories. ARPA had Dr. Brown
working on a wide variety of defoliants with the goal
of finding a chemical compound that could perform
two functions at once. ARPA wanted to strip the
leaves off trees so as to deny Vietcong fighters pro-
tective cover from the jungle canopy. And they
wanted to starve Vietcong fighters into submission
by poisoning their primary food crop, a jungle root
called manioc.
On July 17, 1961, Godel met with the Vietnam
Task Force to brief its members on what was then a
highly classified defoliation program, and to discuss
the next steps. “This is a costly operation which
would require some three years for maximum effec-
tiveness,” Godel said. The use of biological and
chemical weapons was prohibited by the Geneva
Convention and from his experience in Korea,
Godel knew how easily the international spotlight

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

could turn its focus on claims of Geneva Conven-

tion violations. For this reason, anyone briefed on
the defoliation campaign and all personnel working
at the CDTC were advised to move forward, “sub-
ject to political-psychological restrictions (such as
those imposed by Communist claims of U.S. biolog-
ical warfare in Korea).” The classified program
would be called “anticrop warfare research,” as
destroying enemy food supplies was not against the
rules of war. In the field, operational activities were
to be referred to as “CDTC Task Number 20,” or
“Task 20” for short.
While it is interesting to note ARPA’s unity with
the Vietnam Task Force on the question of allowing
this controversial decision to proceed, the record indi-
cates that the meeting was a formality and that Godel
had already gotten the go-ahead. On the same day
Godel met with the Vietnam Task Force, the first
batch of crop-killing chemicals—a defoliant called
Dinoxol—arrived at the Combat Development and
Test Center in Saigon. A few days later, spray aircraft
were shipped. And a week after that, Dr. James W.
Brown, deputy chief of the crops division at Fort
Detrick, arrived at the CDTC to oversee the first
defoliation field tests.
The first mission to spray herbicides on the jun-
gles of Vietnam occurred on August 10, 1961. The
helicopter—an American-made H-34 painted in

186
 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

the colors of the South Vietnamese army and

equipped with an American-made spray system
called a HIDAL (Helicopter Insecticide Dispersal
Apparatus, Liquid) —was flown by a South Viet-
namese air force pilot. President Diem was an enthu-
siastic advocate of defoliation, and two weeks later
he personally chose the second target. On August 24
a fixed-wing aircraft sprayed the poisonous herbicide
Dinoxol over a stretch of jungle along Route 13, fifty
miles north of Saigon.
The defoliation tests were closely watched at the
Pentagon. R&D field units working out of the
CDTC oversaw Vietnamese pilots as they continued
to spray herbicides on manioc groves and mangrove
swamps. Godel and his staff were working on a more
ambitious follow-up plan. A portion of the Mekong
Delta believed to contain one of the heaviest Viet-
cong populations, designated “Zone D,” was chosen
to be the target of a future multiphase campaign.
Phase I set a goal of defoliating 20 percent of the
manioc groves and mangrove swamps over a thirty-
day period. This was to be followed by Phase II, with
a goal of defoliating the remaining 80 percent of
Zone D, meaning the entire border with North
Vietnam. Together, the two-part operation would
take ninety days to complete. After Phase I and
Phase II were completed, Phase III called for the
defoliation of another 31,250 square miles of jungle,

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

which was roughly half of South Vietnam. Finally,

ARPA’s R&D field units would be dispatched to
burn down all the resulting dead trees, turning the
natural jungle into man-made farmland. This way,
Godel’s team explained, once the insurgency was
extinguished, it would not be able to reignite. The
projected cost for the Project Agile defoliation cam-
paign was between $75 and $80 million, more than
half a billion dollars in 2015. The only foreseeable
problem, wrote the staff, was that the program’s
ambitious scope would require more chemicals than
could realistically be manufactured in the United
States.

In 1961, few Americans outside elite government

circles knew what was happening in Vietnam. Inside
Washington, the power struggles over how best to
handle the communist insurgency were becoming
contentious as the rift between the White House
and the Pentagon widened. Just three months after
taking office, Kennedy experienced the bitter low
point of his presidency when a CIA-sponsored,
military-supported paramilitary invasion of the Bay
of Pigs in Cuba failed. More than a hundred men
were killed and twelve hundred were captured. The
fiasco damaged the president's relationship not only
with the CIA but also with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Publicly, President Kennedy assumed full blame.
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 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

“Tm the responsible official of the government,” he

famously said. But to his closest White House advi-
sors, he said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had failed
him.
“The first advice I’m going to give my successor,”
Kennedy told Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee,
“is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that
just because they were military men their opinion[s]
on military matters were worth a damn.” The situa-
tion seemed to strengthen his perception that his
group of intellectually minded White House advi-
sors and civilian Pentagon advisors, the so-called
McNamara whiz kids, not only were more trustwor-
thy but also had better ideas on military matters
than did the military men themselves.
After the Bay of Pigs, in the summer of 1961 Pres-
ident Kennedy created a new position on his White
House staff called military representative of the pres-
ident. The post was created specifically for General
Maxwell Taylor, a dashing multilingual World War
II hero who had written a book critical of the Eisen-
hower administration. According to a memo that
outlined General Taylor’s duties as military repre-
sentative of the president, he was to “advise and assist
the President with regard to those military matters
that reach him as Commander in Chief of the
Armed Forces.” General Taylor was also to “give his
personal views to assist the President in reaching

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

decisions,” and he was to have a role in offering

“advice and assistance in the field of intelligence.” It
was a position of enormous influence, particularly in
light of the coming war in Vietnam. General Taylor
was to advise the president on all military matters,
and yet he was part of the White House staff, not
the Pentagon.
General Taylor was dispatched to Vietnam as
head of a delegation that would become known as
the Taylor-Rostow mission. The purpose of the mis-
sion was to investigate what future political and mil-
itary actions were necessary there. Accompanying
Taylor on this trip was William Godel. The two
men shared similar views on counterinsurgency pro-
grams; in fact, Godel would write major portions of
Taylor's trip report. Godel took General Taylor to
ARPA’s new Combat Development and Test Center
and showed him some of the gadgets and techniques
being developed there. In Taylor's report to Presi-
dent Kennedy, he praised the CDTC’s work, noting
“the special talents of the U.S. scientific laboratories
and industry” on display.
The Taylor-Rostow mission left Washington on
Sunday, October 15, 1961, stopped for a briefing in
Honolulu, and arrived in Saigon on October 18.
Godel joined the party in Saigon. General Taylor
wore civilian clothes and requested that there be no
press briefings, no interviews, no social functions,

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 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

and most of all no military formalities. To the presi-

dent, General Taylor described the Vietnam situa-
tion as “the darkest since the early days of 1954,” a
reference to the year when the French lost Dien Bien
Phu. Taylor warned how dangerous the terrain had
become, noting that the “Vietcong strength had
increased from an estimated 10,000 in January 1961
to 17,000 in October; they were clearly on the move
in the delta, in the highlands, and along the plain on
the north central coast.” He painted the picture fac-
ing the government of South Vietnam in the bleak-
est of terms. President Diem and his generals “were
watching with dismay the situation in neighboring
Laos and the negotiations in Geneva, which con-
vinced them that there would soon be a Communist-
dominated government in Vientiane,” the capital of
Laos, Taylor wrote, and proposed that President
Kennedy take “vigorous action” at once.
“If Vietnam goes, it will be exceedingly difficult
if not impossible to hold Southeast Asia,” Taylor
warned. “What will be lost is not merely a crucial
piece of real estate, but the faith that the U.S. has
the will and the capacity to deal with the Commu-
nist offensive in that area.” General Taylor’s message
was clear. The United States needed to expand its
covert military action in Vietnam. In his report to
President Kennedy, Taylor suggested making use of
ARPA’s gadgets and techniques, most notably “a

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

very few ‘secret weapons’ on the immediate horizon”

at the CDTC. One such “secret weapon” was herbi-
cide. As the program moved forward, however, there
was a hitch.
In the fall of 1961, Radio Hanoi in North Viet-
nam made public ARPA’s secret defoliation tests.
The United States had “used poisonous gas to kill
crops and human[s],” Radio Hanoi declared in a
condemnatory broadcast. The revelatory radio pro-
gram was then rebroadcast on Radio Moscow and
Radio Peking, but surprisingly, it did not produce
the kind of international uproar that the Vietnam
Task Force had cautioned against in the July 17
meeting. But the president’s advisors agreed that a
formal decision had to be made about whether to
proceed with ARPA’s defoliation program or to halt
it. The Vietnam Task Force asked the Joint Chiefs
of Staff to weigh in.
On November 3, they expressed their opposition.
Mindful of the Geneva Protocols, they wrote, “the
Joint Chiefs of Staff are of the opinion that in con-
ducting aerial defoliant operations [against] food
growing areas, care must be taken to assure that the
United States does not become the target for charges
of employing chemical or biological warfare.” Echo-
ing earlier concerns from the Vietnam Task Force,
the Joint Chiefs warned that the world could react
with solemn condemnation, and that “international

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 TECHNIQUES AND GADGETS

repercussions against the United States could be

most serious.”
Even deputy national security advisor Walt Ros-
tow, just back from the trip to Vietnam with Gen-
eral Taylor and William Godel, felt compelled to
point out to the president the reality behind spray-
ing defoliants. In a memorandum with the subject
line “Weed Killer,” Rostow told President Kennedy,
“Your decision is required because this is a kind of
chemical warfare.” There was no uncertainty in
Walt Rostow’s words.
On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy
approved the chemical defoliation program in Viet-
nam. The program, said Kennedy, was to be consid-
erably smaller than the Advanced Research Projects
Agency had originally devised, and it should instead
have a budget between $4 million and $6.5 million.
With President Kennedy’s blessing, the genie was
out of the bottle. By war's end, roughly 19 million
gallons of herbicide would be sprayed on the jungles
of Vietnam. A 2012 congressional report determined
that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million
and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed
to Agent Orange.
From his ARPA office at the Pentagon, William
Godel sent a memo, marked “Secret,” to Dr. James
Brown, the Army scientist at Fort Detrick, as king
Brown to come see him at once. During the meeting,

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Dr. Brown was informed that he was now officially

the person in charge of defoliation operations in
Vietnam and that he was a representative of the sec-
retary of defense. “He was advised to be ignorant of
all other technical matters,” notes a declassified
memo. “If friendly authorities requested informa-
tion on biological anticrop or antipersonnel agents
or chemical agents or protective measures or detec-
tion kits, etc., etc. he [Dr. Brown] was to state he
knew nothing about them and suggest that they
direct their inquiries to Chief MAAG [Military
Assistance Advisory Group].”
Like much of ARPA’s Project Agile, the defolia-
tion campaign was a “Presidential issue.” Details
about the program, what it involved, and what it
sought to accomplish were matters of national secu-
rity, and the narrative around this story needed to be
tightly controlled. In the words of Walt Rostow, the
Agent Orange campaign was “a kind of chemical
warfare.” But it was also a “secret weapon,” and had
the potential of serving as a magic bullet against
communist insurgents in Vietnam.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

RAND and COIN

t the RAND Corporation in sunny Santa

Aeris California, by 1961 war game play-
ing had expanded considerably since the days
of John von Neumann and the lunchtirhe matches
of Kriegspiel. For several years now, RAND had been
simulating counterinsurgency war games played out
between U.S. forces and guerrilla fighters in Viet-
nam. These counterinsurgency games were the
brainchild of Ed Paxson, an engineer from the math-
ematics department, who called the game series
Project Sierra. Unlike the old lunchtime matches,
the Sierra games lasted months, sometimes more
than a year, and involved various scenarios, includ-
ing ones in which U.S. forces used nuclear weapons
against communist insurgents. One day back in the

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

mid-1950s, while observing one of the Sierra war

games, an analyst named George Tanham made an
astute observation. He mentioned that the entire
Sierra series was unrealistic because the RAND ana-
lysts were assuming Vietnamese communist fighters
fought like American soldiers, which they did not.
In the mid-1950s it was generally agreed that
Tanham knew more about counterinsurgency than
anyone else at RAND. A Princeton University grad-
uate and former U.S. Air Force officer, Tanham was
a highly decorated veteran of World War II. After
the war he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford in uncon-
ventional warfare and joined RAND in 1955. Tan-
ham’s observations about the Sierra war games
impressed RAND president Frank Collbohm, who
sent Tanham to Paris to study counterinsurgency
tactics, and to learn how and why the French army
lost Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Tanham’s
study was paid for by the Pentagon and was classi-
fied secret. When a sanitized version appeared in
1961, George Tanham became the first American
author to publish a book about communist revolu-
tionary warfare.
At the Pentagon, Tanham’s book caught Harold
Brown’s eye. Brown, who had taken over Herb York’s
job as director of Defense Department Research and
Engineering (DDR&E), was the man to whom
ARPA directors reported. Like Herb York, Harold

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 RAND anv COIN

Brown had served as chief scientist at Livermore lab-

oratory before coming to Washington, D.C. Harold
Brown reached out to Tanham and asked him to pay
a visit to ARPA’s Combat Development Test Center
in Saigon and write up his assessment of CDTC
progress there. Tanham’s 1961 report remains classi-
fied, but he referred to some of his observations in a
report three years later, since declassified. ARPA’s
weapons programs in Vietnam—-CDTC’s “gad-
gets” —needed to expand, said Tanham. And so
did psychological warfare efforts—CDTC’s “tech-
niques.” But equally important, said Tanham, was
the war’s presentation back home. He suggested that
the conflict be presented to the American people as a
“war without guns being waged by men of good will,
half a world away from their native land.”
When Tanham returned from Saigon, he met
with the Vietnam Task Force, the Special Group,
and the CIA. The following month Harold Brown
sent a classified letter to Frank Collbohm asking the
RAND Corporation to come on board and work on
Project Agile in Vietnam. RAND was needed to
work on “persuasion and motivation” techniques,
programs designed to win the hearts and minds of
the Vietnamese people.
In its “persuasion and motivation” campaign,
ARPA began pursuing a less traditional defense sci-
ence program involving social science research.

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Accepted as an offshoot of anthropology, and gener-

ally looked down upon by nuclear physicists like
those in the Jason advisory group, social science con-
cerned itself with societies and the relationships
among the people who live in groups and communi-
ties. Harold Brown told Frank Collbohm that ARPA
needed studies performed that could answer ques-
tions that were confounding defense officials at the
Pentagon. Who were these people, the Vietnamese?
What made one Vietnamese peasant become a com-
munist and another remain loyal to President Diem?
How did these foreign people live, work, strategize,
organize, and think? The idea was that if only ARPA
could understand what motivated Vietnamese peo-
ple, the Pentagon might be able to persuade them to
see democracy as a form of government superior to
communism.
It was an enticing proposal for RAND. Social sci-
ence research was far afield from the RAND Corpo-
ration’s brand of nuclear war analysis and strategy,
and of game theory. But defense contractors need to
stay relevant in order to survive, and Frank Coll-
bohm recognized that with President Kennedy in
office, there was much new business to be had in
counterinsurgency studies and strategy. Here was an
opportunity for RAND to expand its Defense
Department contracts beyond what it had become
famous for.

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 RAND anpd COIN

RAND formed two counterinsurgency commit-

tees to strategize how best to handle Harold Brown’s
requests. One committee was called the Third Area
Conflict board and was run by Albert Wohlstetter,
the man behind RAND’s legendary “second strike”
nuclear strategy, also known as NUTS. The second
committee was run jointly by RAND vice president
George H. Clement, an expert on missiles, satellites,
and “weapons systems philosophy,” and Bob Bucheim,
head of the aero-astronautics department. Proposals
were written, and in a matter of months, ARPA and
RAND entered into an initial Project Agile contract
for $4 million (roughly $32 million in 2015), to be
paid out over a period of four years. With funding
secure, RAND was given its own office inside the
Combat Development Test Center in Saigon, where
a secretary answered telephones, typed letters, and
received mail. RAND analysts could reside in a
French colonial villa down the street from the
MAAG-YV headquarters at 176 Rue Pasteur, or they
could have their own apartments. In early 1962,
RAND began sending academics, analysts, and
anthropologists to Saigon. Soon the number of
RAND staff working out of the CDTC would more
than double the number of Pentagon employees
there.
The first two RAND analysts to arrive in Saigon,
in January 1962, were Gerald Hickey and John

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Donnell. Both men were eminently qualified anthro-

pologists and spoke fluent Vietnamese. Hickey had
been a professor at Yale University, where he special-
ized in Vietnamese culture. Donnell taught social
sciences at Dartmouth College. Both had spent time
working in Vietnam as government consultants.
Before working for RAND, Hickey was part of the
Michigan State University Group, whose members,
at the behest of the State Department, counseled
President Diem’s government in how to be better
administrators. Donnell, who also spoke Chinese,
consulted for the State Department on Asian affairs.
Saigon in January 1962 was a beautiful city,
resplendent with French colonial architecture and
still called the Paris of the Orient. Its broad boule-
vards were lined with leafy trees, and the streets were
filled with bicycles, rickshaws, and cars. Locals
relaxed outside in parks or in European-style cafés.
Vendors sold flowers, and President Diem’s police
forces patrolled the streets. But for Hickey and Don-
nell, there was a not so subtle indication that things
had changed in Saigon since their last visits in the
ate fifties. “Signs of conflict had replaced the feeling
of peace,” Hickey later wrote. “Everyone was con-
cerned with security.”
The road from the airport to RAND's office at
the CDTC was crowded with military vehicles.
During dinner their first night in Saigon under the

200
 RAND anpvp COIN

ARPA contract, Hickey and Donnell sat in a roof-

top café at the Caravelle Hotel listening to mortar
explosions in the distance and watching flares light
up the edges of the city. “Both John and I were some-
what astonished how the advent of the insurgency
had changed the atmosphere of Saigon,’ Hickey
recalled.
The plan was for the two anthropologists to travel
into the central highlands and study the mountain
people who lived there, the Montagnards. President
Diem told his American counterparts that he
. doubted the loyalty of the mountain dwellers, and
Hickey and Donnell were being sent to assess the
situation. Before leaving for the mountains, they
checked in with ARPA’s Combat Development and
Test Center, where they were met by a CIA officer
named Gilbert Layton, who told them there had
been a change of plans. The CIA was working on its
own project with the Montagnards, Layton said,
and there was not room for both programs. Hickey
and Donnell would have to find another group of
people to study.
Hickey and Donnell discussed the situation, con-
sulted with RAND headquarters back in Santa
Monica, and agreed on a different study to pursue.
There was another important program that the
Defense Department and the CIA had been work-
ing on with President Diem called the Strategic

201
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Hamlet Program, or “ural pacification.” The plan

was for the South Vietnamese army to move peas-
ants away from the “Vietcong-infested” countryside
and into new villages, or hamlets, where they would
allegedly be safe. The Strategic Hamlet Program
offered financial incentives to get the villagers to
move. Using Defense Department funds, Diem’s
army would pay the villagers to build tall, fortress-
like walls around their new jungle settlements.
Building these fences required weeks of intense
labor. First, a deep ditch had to be dug around each
new hamlet. Next, concrete posts needed to be sunk
down into the ditch at intervals of roughly ten feet.
Finally, villagers were to venture out into the jungle
forests, cut down hundreds of thick stalks of bam-
boo, and make spears, which would then be used to
build the fence. The South Vietnamese army would
provide the villagers with the concrete posts and also
with large rolls of barbed wire, courtesy of the Penta-
gon. The rest of the labor was for the villagers to do.
Defense Department officials saw U.S. investment
in the Strategic Hamlet Program as an effective
means of pacification and a way to help President
Diem gain control over the region. The idea was that
in exchange for their safety, the Vietnamese farmers
would develop a sense of loyalty toward President
Diem. But there was also a far more ambitious plan
in place whereby ARPA would collect enough infor-

202
 RAND anp COIN

mation on strategic hamlets to be able to “monitor”

their activity in the future.
After the CIA canceled Hickey and Donnell’s
Montagnard project, the men decided to study the
Strategic Hamlet Program. It is unlikely they knew
about ARPA’s future monitoring plans. Hickey and
Donnell rented a Citroén and set off for a village
northwest of Saigon called Cu Chi.
In Cu Chi, at a small shop, they came across a
group of village farmers drinking tea. At first they
found the villagers to be reticent, but after they spent
a few days talking with them in their own language,
tongues loosened up. As anthropologists, Hickey
and Donnell were familiar with local farming tech-
niques, and they also understood the villagers’
deeply held beliefs in spirit culture, or animism, the
idea that a supernatural power organizes and ani-
mates the material world. After a few more after-
noon visits, the villagers began offering information
to Hickey and Donnell about what had been going
on in their village as far as the Strategic Hamlet Pro-
gram was concerned.
“Without our asking, the Cu Chi villagers com-
plained about the strategic hamlet,” Hickey wrote in
his report. The program had required villagers to
move away from where they had been living, deep in
the jungle, to this new village they did not consider
their own. The mandatory relocation was having a

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

devastating effect. People were distraught over hav-

ing been forced to leave their ancestral homes and
their ancestors’ graves. Here, in this new village,
farmers now faced a new challenge as they struggled
to plant crops on unfamiliar land. Villagers were
angry with the Diem government because they had
been told that in exchange for digging ditches and
building walls, they would be paid ten piasters a day
and given lunch. President Diem’s forces were sup-
posed to have provided them with concrete posts
and barbed-wire fence. Instead, the villagers said,
Diem’s soldiers had rounded up groups of men,
forced them to work, refused to feed them, and
charged them money for building supplies. The
forced labor lasted roughly three months, with only
one five-day break for the New Year festival. The
labor program coincided with the most important
planting time of the year, which meant that many
farmers had been unable to plant their own crops.
Asa result, they would likely end up producing only
one-tenth of their usual annual yield. “One bad crop
year can put a Vietnamese farmer in debt for several
years afterwards because [farmers] live on a very
narrow subsistence margin,” Hickey wrote. Subsis-
tence farmers live season to season, producing just
enough food to feed their families, meaning they
rarely have anything left over to spare or save.
In one interview after another, Hickey and Don-

204
 RAND anv COIN

nell found widespread dissatisfaction with the Stra-

tegic Hamlet Program. Most villagers had never
wanted to leave their original homes in the first place.
The “compulsory regrouping” and “protracted forced-
labor” had caused villagers undue emotional suffer-
ing. President Diem promised political and economic
reforms, but nothing had materialized. Even on a
practical level, the program was failing. A group of
villagers showed Hickey and Donnell a deep under-
ground tunnel that had been dug by the Vietcong. It
ran directly under the perimeter defense wall and up
into the center of the village. Vietcong could come
and go as they wished, the villagers said. And they
did.
Hickey and Donnell spent three months inter-
viewing villagers in Cu Chi. The conclusion they
drew cast the Strategic Hamlet Program in a very
grim light. In the winter of 1962, strategic hamlets
were being erected at a rate of more than two hun-
dred per month. The Defense Department had set a
goal of establishing between ten thousand and
twelve thousand hamlets across South Vietnam over
the next year.
Hickey and Donnell presented their findings to
General Paul Harkins, the new commander of the
recently renamed Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam, or MACV. The anthropologists believed
that General Harkins would be unhappy with the

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

news but that he would take seriously the villagers’

egitimate concerns. Years later, when the ARPA
report was finally declassified, Hickey recalled the
meeting. “I said, in essence, that strategic hamlets
had the potential of bringing security to the rural
population but they would not work if they imposed
economic and social burdens on the population,”
he said. If President Diem wanted villager support,
he had to hold up his end of the bargain and pay the
workers, as agreed. “General Harkins replied that
everyone wanted protection from the Viet Cong, so
they would welcome the strategic hamlets.” The dis-
cussion was over, General Harkins told Hickey and
Donnell, and the anthropologists left Harkins’s
office in Saigon.
Hickey and Donnell were flown to the Pentagon,
where they were scheduled to brief Harold Brown
and Walt Rostow, the president’s national security
advisor, on the Strategic Hamlet Program. The Pen-
tagon was a world away from Saigon and from Cu
Chi, and yet the anthropologists knew firsthand
what an impact the Defense Department’s work was
having on the villagers living there. They made their
way through security, into the mezzanine, past the
food shops and the gift shops and the employee
banks. They walked up stairs, down corridors, and
into Harold Brown’s office in the E-Ring, not far
from the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of

206
 RAND anv COIN

Staff. Brown’s office was spacious and well deco-

rated, with large leather chairs and couches, and a
view of the Potomac River.
Hickey recalled paraphrasing from their written
ARPA report. “In the present war,” he said, “the
Vietnamese peasant is likely to support the side that
has control of the area in which he lives, and he is
more favorably disposed to the side which offers him
the possibility of a better life.” Hickey and Donnell
told Brown and Rostow that Diem’s army was sim-
ply not holding up its end of the bargain. As a result,
and despite the well-intended efforts of the Strategic
Hamlet Program, local Vietnamese peasants were
more likely to side with the Vietcong.
Then something strange happened. “As we began
our first debriefing at the Pentagon with Harold
Brown,” Hickey noted, “[he] swung his heavy chair
around and looked out the window, leaving us to
talk to the back of his chair.” Hickey and Donnell
kept talking. Perhaps Brown was simply contem-
plating the severity of the situation.
“Parmers were unwilling to express enthusiasm
for the program and appeared to harbor strong
doubts that the sacrifices of labor and materials
imposed on them could yield any commensurate
satisfaction,” the anthropologists explained. If some-
thing wasn’t done, the entire Strategic Hamlet Pro-
gram was at risk of collapse. Hickey and Donnell

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

suggested that the Pentagon put pressure on Diem’s

forces to pay the farmers a small amount of compen-
sation, immediately.
Harold Brown did not respond. Throughout
most of the meeting, he kept his back turned on the
two men, and though now they had finished their
briefing, Brown still didn’t turn around to face
them. National security advisor Walt Rostow, who
had been paying attention, looked away. An aide
walked into the room, and Hickey and Donnell
were shown the door.
Escorted out of Harold Brown’s office, the two
men were led down the corridor to where they were
scheduled to brief Marine Corps lieutenant general
Victor “Brute” Krulak, now serving as special assis-
tant for counterinsurgency and special activities. Kru-
lak was a hard-charging militarist. During World
War II he had masterminded the invasion of Oki-
nawa, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific
theater and the last battle of the war. In the Korean
War, Krulak had pioneered the use of helicopters in
battle. Krulak was not happy with what Hickey and
Donnell had to say, and he was demonstrative in his
disapproval. He told them that he wasn’t going to
pay a bunch of Vietnamese peasants for their sup-
port. “He pounded his fist on the desk [and said]
that ‘we’ were going to make the peasant do what’s

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 RAND anp COIN

necessary for the strategic hamlets to succeed,”

Hickey recalled.
The anthropologists from RAND were shown
the door. Their thirty-page report, originally pre-
pared for ARPA as an unclassified report, was now
given a classification of secret, which meant it could
not be read by anyone without an appropriate gov-
ernment clearance. Harold Brown told RAND pres-
ident Frank Collbohm about his dissatisfaction with
what he saw as Hickey and Donnell’s overly pessi-
mistic analysis of the Strategic Hamlet Program.
The anthropologists’ findings were “too negative,”
ARPA officials complained, and they prepared an
official rebuttal to be attached to each copy distrib-
uted around the White House and the Pentagon.
Determined to repair any damage that Hickey
and Donnell might have done, Collbohm sent a new
set of RAND researchers to Saigon with specific
instructions to reevaluate the Strategic Hamlet Pro-
gram. This included Fulbright scholar Joe Carrier,
who worked in cost analysis at RAND, and Vic
Sturdevant, from systems analysis. With no previ-
ous knowledge of Southeast Asia, and with no local
language skills, the two men studied incidents in
strategic hamlets initiated by the Vietcong over a
nine-month period, from December 1962 to
September 1963. Their findings were markedly
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

different from Hickey and Donnell’s. In this new

ARPA report on the Strategic Hamlet Program,
Carrier and Sturdevant concluded that it would
likely prove promising in the long run, if only the
Defense Department would take a “more patient
approach.”
Another RAND analyst dispatched to Vietnam
to write a similarly themed report was George B.
Young, an expert in missile design, aerodynamics,
and nuclear propulsion. Young, who was Chinese
American, became the first RAND employee assigned
full-time to the Combat Development Test Center
in Saigon. His analysis of the Strategic Hamlet Pro-
gram was enthusiastic. Young said the villagers were
committed to participating. In his ARPA report,
called “Notes on Vietnam,” Young wrote about the
fluid “delivery of intelligence” information that was
taking place. Locals in the program had been taught
to make written notes on any Vietcong activity they
observed, Young reported. In turn, that information
was taken to village elders, who wrote up reports for
the Diem government. Soon, Young declared, the
Vietcong forces would be “ground to a pulp.”
George Tanham returned to the CDTC in Sai-
gon in 1963, now under a long-term ARPA contract.
Much had changed since Tanham’s first trip, at Har-
old Brown’s behest, in the summer of 1961. In his
“Trip Report: Vietnam, 1963,” Tanham showed

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great optimism about how things were shaping up

in Vietnam. An Air Force officer from the Combat
Development and Test Center took Tanham in an
airplane ride over the strategic hamlet regions, just
outside Saigon — some of the very same hamlets that
Gerald Hickey and John Donnell had written so
pessimistically about in their report, the one that
caused Harold Brown to turn his back on them.
Tanham marveled at the little villages down below.
He said he could see the bamboo huts, the barbed-
wire fences, even the distinct perimeter ditches, and
that it all looked wonderful. In Tanham’s estima-
tion, the Defense Department could look ahead to
“successfully concluding the war in two or three
years or even less.” He included in his report an
interview with an officer from the U.S. Air Force
who said that the Air Force was “proud of its contri-
bution to the war in Vietnam” and that it planned
to “leave behind helicopters and airplanes when it
left, ideally sometime in 1964.” Things were looking
very positive, Tanham wrote. He quoted a high-
ranking general as telling him, “Given a little luck
we can wind this one up ina year.”

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 CHAPTER NINE

Command and Control

I: October 1962, a quiet forty-seven-year-old

civilian scientist from Missouri arrived at the
Pentagon to begin a new job with the Advanced
Research Projects Agency. His work would change
the world. By 2015, 3 billion of the 7 billion people
on the planet would regularly use technology con-
ceived of by him. The man, J. C. R. Licklider,
invented the concept of the Internet, which was orig-
inally called the ARPANET.
Licklider did not arrive at the Pentagon with the
intent of creating the Internet. He was hired to
research and develop command and control systems,
most of which were related to nuclear weapons at the
time. The idea that a bright red telephone, like the
one installed in Herb York’s bedroom in the first

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 COMMAND AND CONTROL

week of the Kennedy presidency, was the only way

for heads of state to communicate the dreaded “go
or no-go” decision in a potential nuclear launch sce-
nario was absurd. In the world of push-button war-
fare, fractions of seconds mattered. World leaders
could not afford the extra seconds it would take to
dial a 1962 telephone.
The mandate to update the command and con-
trol system, which would become known as C2,
came from the president. Within months of taking
office, Kennedy ordered Congress to allocate funds
to rapidly modernize the U.S. military command
and control system, specifically to make it “more
flexible, more selective, more deliberate, better pro-
tected, and under ultimate civilian authority at all
times.” The directive for “new equipment and facili-
ties” was sent to the Pentagon, where it was tasked to
ARPA. Harold Brown recruited J. C. R. Licklider
for the job.
Licklider was a trained psychologist with a rare
specialization in psychoacoustics, the scientific study
of sound perception. Psychoacoustics concerns itself
with questions such as, when a person across a room
claps his hands, how does the brain know where that
sound is coming from? It involves elements of both
psychology and physiology, because sound arrives at
the ear as a mechanical sound wave, but it is also a
perceptual event. People hear differently in different
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situations, and those “conditions have consequences,”

Licklider liked to say. During World War II, while
working at Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic
Laboratory, Licklider conducted experiments with
military pilots in all kinds of flight scenarios, with
the goal of developing better communication sys-
tems for the military. Aircraft were not yet pressur-
ized, and at altitudes of 35,000 feet, cockpit
temperatures descended below freezing, which pro-
foundly affected how pilots heard sound and how
they responded through speech. Licklider conducted
hundreds of experiments with B-17 and B-24
bomber pilots, analyzed data, and published papers
on his findings. By war’s end, he was considered one
of the world’s authorities on the human auditory
nervous system.
After the war, Licklider left Harvard for the Lin-
coln Laboratory at MIT, where he became interested
in how computers could help people communicate
better. Engineers at the Lincoln Laboratory were
working on an IBM-based computer system for the
Air Force called the Semi-Automatic Ground Envi-
ronment, or SAGE, which was being built to serve
as the backbone of the North American Air Defense
Command (NORAD) air defense system. SAGE
was the first computer to integrate radar with com-
puter technologies, and to perform three key func-
tions simultaneously: receive, interpret, and respond.

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The SAGE system received information from track-

ing radar; it interpreted data as it came in; and in
response, it pointed America’s defensive missile sys-
tems at incoming threats. It was a gargantuan
machine, so large that technicians walked inside it
to work on it. SAGE system operators were among
the first computer users in the world required to
multitask. While sitting at a console, they watched
display monitors, typed on keyboards, and flipped
switches as new information constantly flowed into
the SAGE system through telephone lines.
Licklider was inspired by the SAGE system. To
him, it exemplified how computers could do more
than just collect data and perform calculations. He
imagined a time in the future when man and
machine might interact and problem-solve to an
even greater degree. He wrote a paper outlining
this concept, called “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” in
which he described a partnership between humans
and “the electronic members of the partnership,” the
computers. Licklider envisioned a day when a com-
puter would serve as a human’s “assistant.” The
machine would “answer questions, perform simula-
tion modeling, graphically display results, and
extrapolate solutions for new situations from past
experience.” Like John von Neumann, Licklider saw
similarities between the computer and the brain,
and he saw a symbiotic relationship between man
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and machine, one in which man’s burdens, or “rote

work,” could be eased by the machine. Humans
could then devote their time to making important
decisions, Licklider said.
Licklider believed that computers could one day
change the world for the better. He envisioned
“home computer consoles,” with people sitting in
front of them, learning just about anything they
wanted to. He wrote a book, Libraries of the Future,
in which he described a world where library resources
would be available to remote users through a single
database. This was radical thinking in 1960 yet is
almost taken for granted today by the billions of
people who have the library of the Internet at their
fingertips twenty-four hours a day. Computers would
make man a better-informed being, Licklider wrote,
and one day, “in not too many years, human brains
and computing machines will be coupled... [and]
the resulting partnership will think as no human
brain has ever thought.”
It was exactly this kind of revolutionary thinking
that interested the Advanced Research Projects
Agency and why the work of J. C. R. Licklider
caught ARPA’s attention. Computing power needed
to be leveraged beyond its present capabilities in
order to advance command and control systems,
andJ. C. R. Licklider was the man for the job. ARPA
director Jack Ruina telephoned Licklider and asked

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him to come to Washington and give a series of sem-

inars on computers to Defense Department officials.
Then he offered Licklider a job. When Licklider
arrived at the Pentagon just a few months later for
his first day of work, the sign on his door read
“Advanced Research Projects Agency, Command
and Control Research, J. C. R. Licklider, Director.”
It was a small office, in both physical size and relative
importance. At the time, it was impossible to imag-
ine just how colossal a program command and con-
trol would become. In 1962, it was just an idea.
When Licklider arrived at the Pentagon in the
fall of 1962, the Department of Defense purchased
more computers than any other organization in the
world, and ARPA had just entered the world of
advanced computer research. The agency inherited
four computers from the Air Force, old dinosaurs
called Q-32 machines. Each was the size of a small
house. These were the computers that the SAGE
program had run on at the MIT Lincoln Labora-
tory, starting in 1954; there was no way the Penta-
gon was going to throw them away. The Q-32s,
built by Systems Development Corporation, a sub-
division of RAND, had been incredibly expensive to
construct, each costing $6 million (roughly $50
million in 2015). ARPA had inherited them, and
Licklider was given the job of making sure they got
used.

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Fifteen days after Licklider’s arrival at the Penta-

gon, the most harrowing of conflicts set the world
on a razor’s edge. Photographs taken by a U-2 spy
plane revealed that the Soviets had covertly placed
nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, ninety miles off the
coast of Florida. President Kennedy demanded that
the missiles be removed, but Premier Nikita Khrush-
chev refused. For thirteen days, starting on October
16, the United States and the Soviet Union played a
game of nuclear chicken. At the height of the crisis,
on October 24, the United States set up a military
blockade off the island and a standoff in the ocean
ensued. By all accounts, this thirteen-day period was
the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war,
before or since. The president raised the defense con-
dition to DEFCON 2 for the first and only time in
history. And yet new information from ARPA’s his-
tory has recently come to light that paints an even
more dramatic Cuban Missile Crisis than was previ-
ously understood.
“Guess how many nuclear missiles were deto-
nated during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” asks Paul
Kozemchak, special assistant to DARPA director
Arati Prabhakar, during an interview for this book.
Kozemchak is a thirty-year veteran of DARPA,
which makes him the longest-serving employee in
its history. “I can tell you that the answer is not
 COMMAND AND CONTROL

‘none, ” said Kozemchak. “The answer is ‘several.’”

In this case, “several” refers to four.
By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eisen-
hower’s test ban had failed, and the United States
and the Soviet Union had both returned to nuclear
weapons testing. Twice during the height of the
Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 20 and October
26, 1962, the United States detonated two nuclear
weapons—code-named Checkmate and Bluegill
Triple Prime—in space. These tests, which sought
to advance knowledge in ARPA’s pursuit of the
Christofilos effect, are on the record and are known.
What is not known outside Defense Department
circles is that in response, on October 22 and Octo-
ber 28, 1962, the Soviets also detonated two nuclear
weapons in space, also in pursuit of the Christofilos
effect. In recently declassified film footage of an
emergency meeting at the White House, Secretary
of Defense McNamara can be heard discussing one
of these two Soviet nuclear bomb tests with the presi-
dent and his closest advisors. “The Soviets fired three
eleven-hundred-mile missiles yesterday at Kapustin
Yar,” McNamara tells them, one of which contained a
300-kiloton nuclear warhead. “They were testing ele-
ments of an antimissile system in a nuclear burst
environment.”
It is hard to determine what is more shocking, that

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

this information, which was made public by Russian

scientists in the early 1990s, is not generally known, or
that four nuclear weapons were detonated in space, in
a DEFCON 2 environment, during the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis. Firing off nuclear weapons in the middle of
a nuclear standoff is tempting fate. The BMEWS sys-
tem, at J-Site in Thule, could easily have misidentified
the Soviet missile launches as a nuclear first strike.
“The danger of the situation simply getting out of
control, from developments or accidents or incidents
that neither side—leaders on either side—were even
aware of, much less in control of, could have led to
war,” says the former CIA officer Dr. Raymond Gar-
thoff, an expert in Soviet missile launches.
The information about the Soviet high-altitude
nuclear tests remained classified until after the Berlin
Wall came down. The Soviet nuclear weapon deto-
nated on October 28, 1962, over Zhezqazghan in
Kazakhstan at an altitude of ninety-three miles had a
consequential effect. According to Russian scientists,
“the nuclear detonation caused an electromagnetic
pulse [EMP] that covered all of Kazakhstan,” includ-
ing “electrical cables buried underground.”
The Cuban Missile Crisis made clear that com-
mand and control systems not only needed to be
upgraded but also needed to be reimagined. It was
J.C. R. Licklider who first challenged his ARPA col-
leagues to rethink old ideas about what computers

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could do beyond mathematical tasks like payroll and

accounting. Licklider proposed the development of a
vast multiuser system, a “network” of computers that
could collect information across multiple platforms—
from radar and satellites to intelligence reports, com-
munication cables, even weather reports—and to
integrate them. What was needed, said Licklider, was
a partnership between man and machine, and
between the military and the rest of the world.
Of his ARPA bosses, Licklider wrote, “I kept try-
ing to convince them of my philosophy that what
the military needs is what the business man needs, is
what the scientist needs.” Six months after arriving
at ARPA, he sent out a memo calling this network
the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” At the time,
different computers spoke different programming
languages, something Licklider saw as a hurdle that
needed to be immediately overcome. It was an
extreme problem, he wrote, one “discussed by sci-
ence fiction writers: How do you get communica-
tions started among totally uncorrelated sapient
beings?” Finding the answer would take decades,
but it began at ARPA in 1962.

J. C. R. Licklider is sometimes called modern com-

puting’s “Johnny Appleseed” for planting the first
seeds of the digital revolution. What is not generally
known about Licklider is that he ran a second office

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at the Pentagon called the Behavioral Sciences Pro-

gram, an office that would eventually take on much
more Orwellian tasks related to surveillance pro-
grams. This office grew out of a study originally
commissioned by Herb York, titled “Toward a Tech-
nology of Human Behavior for Defense Use.” This
study examined how computers, or “man-machine
systems,” could best be used in conflict zones. The
results, today, are far-reaching.
In its Behavioral Sciences Program, ARPA wanted
to “build a bridge from psychology into the other
social sciences” using computers, according to an
early ARPA report. Because Licklider was trained as
a psychologist, ARPA director Jack Ruina believed
he was the right man for this job, too.
One task of the Behavioral Sciences Program was
to imagine a future world where computers could be
used by the Defense Department as teaching tools.
This was visionary thinking in 1962, when comput-
ers still took up entire rooms and cost millions of
dollars to build and operate. “Computer assisted
teaching systems and computer assisted gaming and
simulation studies are examples of work chosen [for]
human performance research believed to be defense
relevant,’ read an internal ARPA report. Training
President Diem’s South Vietnamese army was a solid
example. ARPA sought ways in which to teach Viet-
namese recruits to be better soldiers and more

ze
 COMMAND AND CONTROL

efficient administrators so they could defeat commu-

nism. This was arduous, labor-intensive work. Lan-
guage and culture barriers added an extra layer of
toil. One idea behind the Behavioral Sciences Pro-
gram was that computers could one day shoulder the
burden of this kind of work.
The Behavioral Sciences Program initiated a
number of projects. These were programs that had a
public face but also had highly classified compo-
nents. ARPA secretly opened a second Combat
Development Test Center, this one on the outskirts
of Bangkok, five hundred miles to the northwest of
Saigon. Like its Vietnamese counterpart, this new
CDTC would also research and develop techniques
and gadgets but with a focus on longer-term coun-
terinsurgency goals, including Licklider’s plans for
computer-assisted teaching, gaming, and simulation
studies. Congress was not told about the new Com-
bat Development Test Center in Bangkok, nor was
the House Committee on Appropriations, though
the Defense Department was legally required to
notify it before constructing new facilities.
“Thailand was the laboratory for the soft side and
Vietnam was the laboratory for the hard side, or things
that go boom,” explained James L. Woods, an ARPA
officer who worked at the CDTC in Thailand.
There was a bigger plan in play, until now unre-
ported. Secretary McNamara was eager to have

rp)
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

ARPA create additional Combat Development Test

Centers around the world, something he considered
an important part of the president's national secu-
rity policy of flexible response. Insurgent groups,
also called terrorist organizations, were on the rise
across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and
the Middle East. “The U.S. would need to support
Limited Wars in these remote areas,” one Project
Agile report declared, adding that “similar represen-
tation is being considered by OSD [Office of the
Secretary of Defense] in other areas of the world.”
ARPA called its worldwide program “Remote Area
Conflict” and hired the defense contractor Battelle
Memorial Institute to open and operate two “Remote
Area Conflict Information Centers,” one in Wash-
ington, D.C., and the other in Columbus, Ohio, to
keep track of programs at the Combat Development
Test Centers in Saigon and Bangkok and all future
CDTCs, and to write summary reports and produce
analyses of progress made. As early as 1962, ARPA
drew up plans for CDTCs in Beirut and Tehran under
this new “Remote Area Conflict” banner. The
declassified CDTC files housed at the National
Archives have been miscataloged and are lost. The
only known copies remain with Battelle. Though the
copies are more than fifty years old, Battelle declined
to release them, stating that “unfortunately, it is Bat-
telle policy not to release copies of Battelle reports.”

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In Thailand, the new CDTC flourished. ARPA

engineers in Licklider’s Behavioral Sciences Program
office believed that computers could be used to
model social behavior. Data could be collected and
algorithms could be designed to analyze the data
and to build models. This led Licklider to another
seminal idea. What if, based on the data collected,
you could get the computer to predict human behav-
ior? If man can predict, he can control. “Much of
the work is theoretical and experimental,” stated
T. W. Brundage, the first director of the CDTC in
Bangkok, “and for the time being is mainly non-
hardware oriented.” Brundage was referring to one
of the first tests of Licklider’s theory to be conducted
at the new center. It was called “Anthropometric
Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces,” and
involved 2,950 Thai soldiers, sailors, and pilots. It
was an example of a CDTC program with a public
face but a classified motive. The Thai government
was told that the purpose of the program was “to
provide information on the body size of Thai mili-
tary personnel,” which could then be used for
“design and sizing of clothing and equipment” of
the Thai armed forces in the future. ARPA techni-
cians took fifty-two sets of measurements from each
of the 2,950 Thai participants, things like eye
height, seated height, forearm-to-hand length, and
ankle circumference. But the Thai participants were
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

also asked a bevy of personal questions—not just

where and when they were born, but who their
ancestors were, what their religion was, and what
they thought of the king of Thailand.
The true purpose of the “Anthropometric Survey
of the Royal Thai Armed Forces,” and dozens of other
surveys like it, was “data collection and data process-
ing.” The information was sent back to the Computer
Branch of the U.S. Army Natick Laboratories in
Natick, Massachusetts. “After coding the background
information, all of the data were transferred from the
data sheets to punched cards,” reads a declassified
report. A digital profile was then made “on each of
the men in the series.” ARPA wanted to create a pro-
totype showing how it could monitor third world
armies for future use. The information would be
saved in computers stored in a secure military facility.
In 1962 Thailand was a relatively stable country, but
it was surrounded by insurgency and unrest on all
sides. If Thailand were to become a battle zone, ARPA
would have information on Thai soldiers, each of
whom could be tracked. Information—like who
deserted the Thai army and became an enemy
combatant— could be ascertained. Using computer
models, ARPA could create algorithms describing
human behavior in remote areas. Eventually these
patterns could lead to predictive computer modeling,
Licklider believed.

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There were other individuals working with and

for Licklider in his predictive modeling programs.
One was Ithiel de Sola Pool, a left-leaning revolu-
tionary in the field of social science. Doing contract
work for ARPA, Pool became one of the first social
scientists to use computers to create models for ana-
lyzing human behavior. He would become the
world’s first authority on the social impact of mass
media. J. C. R. Licklider and Ithiel de Sola Pool put
together a series of proposals for ARPA to consider.
Computer models could be used to answer impor-
tant questions, the men said. They proposed that
studies be done on “peasant attitudes and behavior,”
“stability and disorder’ in several countries,” and
“cultural patterns.”
Pool and Licklider both served on ARPA’s Behav-
ioral Sciences Panel, and in that capacity they exam-
ined Hickey and Donnell’s study of the Strategic
Hamlet Program. “They [Hickey and Donnell] have
yielded much useful information and opened up
promising areas for investigation,” Licklider and
Pool wrote, “but with regard to the solution of these
important, complex problems, they have barely
scratched the surface.” The two behavioral scientists
recognized that the information Hickey and Don-
nell had collected on the villagers could also be used
to create computer models and to predict how these
kinds of individuals might act in future conflicts.
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

“These are important tools,” said Licklider, for they

can lead to a better understanding of the “inexorable
flow from conditions to consequences.” With base-
line data ina Defense Department computer system,
the behavior of the villagers could be covertly moni-
tored, analyzed, and modeled. This was an effective
means of command and control.
But as with the history of warfare, the desire to
control and the ability to control are often at odds.
Despite inventive government efforts to influence a
population, events occur that are beyond military
control. What happened next in Vietnam had con-
sequences that could not be undone.

May 8, 1963, marked the 2,527th birthday of the

Buddha, and a group of religious followers gathered
in the village of Hue to celebrate. Protest was in the
air. Buddhists were being repressed by President
Diem’s autocratic Catholic regime. The villagers of
Hue had been told not to fly Buddhist flags, but they
did anyway. The mood was festive, and a large crowd
of nearly ten thousand people had assembled near
the Hue radio station when eight armored vehicles
and several police cars arrived on the scene in a show
of force. Police ordered revelers to disperse, but they
refused. Police used fire hoses and tear gas, still with
no effect. Someone threw a grenade onto the porch

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of the radio station, killing nine people, including

four children. Fourteen others were severely injured.
A huge protest followed. The event became a cata-
lyst for people across South Vietnam to express
widespread resentment against President Diem and
his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was head of the
secret police. The Buddhists demanded the right to
fly their own flags and to have the same religious
freedoms accorded to members of the Catholic
Church. When the government refused, more than
three hundred monks and nuns convened in Saigon
for a protest march, including an elderly monk
named Thich Quang Duc. The group made its way
silently down one of Saigon’s busiest boulevards to a
crossroads, where everyone stopped and waited.
Thich Quang Duc sat down on a cushion in the
middle of the street and assumed the lotus position.
A crowd gathered around him, including New York
Times reporter David Halberstam. Two other monks,
each carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline, walked
up to Thich Quang Duc and poured gasoline on
him. One of them handed Thich Quang Duc a sin-
gle match. He struck the match, touched it to his
robe, and set himself on fire.
David Halberstam described the devastation he
felt watching the monk catch fire and burn to death
right in front of him on the Saigon street. “Flames

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were coming from a human being; his body was

slowly withering and shriveling up, his head black-
ening and charring,” Halberstam wrote. “Tn the air
was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn
surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the
sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering.
I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes
or ask questions, too bewildered even to think....As
he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a
sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to
the wailing people around him.”
During the selfimmolation, somehow the monk
was able to remain perfectly still. He did not writhe
or scream or show any indication of pain. Even as he
was consumed by fire, Thich Quang Duc sat upright
with his legs folded in the lotus position. His body
burned for about ten minutes until finally the
charred remains toppled over backwards.
Journalist Malcolm Brown, the Saigon bureau
chief for the Associated Press, took a photograph of
the burning monk, and this image was printed in
newspapers around the world. People everywhere
expressed outrage, and overnight President Diem
became an international pariah.
But instead of showing empathy or capitulating
to the Buddhists’ wishes, President Diem, together
with his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and Nhu’s wife, the
glamorous Madame Nhu, began to slander the Bud-

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dhists. Madame Nhu went on national TV in

pearls and a black dress, fanning herself with a fold-
ing fan, to say that Buddhist leaders had gotten
Thich Quang Duc drunk and set him up for suicide
as a political ploy.
“What have the Buddhist leaders done?” asked
Madame Nhu on television. “The only thing they
have done, they have barbecued one of their monks
whom they have intoxicated. ...Even that barbecu-
ing was done, not even with selfsufficient means
because they used imported gasoline.” By the end of
summer, the crisis was full-blown. The White House
advised President Diem to make peace with the
Buddhists immediately. Diem ignored the request
and instead, in August 1963, declared martial law.
In late October, the U.S. ambassador to South
Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., told President Ken-
nedy that a coup d’état was being organized against
President Diem by a group of Diem’s own army gen-
erals. In the now famous “Hillman cable,” the presi-
dent, the ambassador, and diplomats Averell
Harriman and Roger Hillman agreed not to interfere
with the overthrow of Diem by his own military. In
the cable, Ambassador Lodge gave secret assurances
to the South Vietnamese generals that it was fine with
the White House for them to proceed with the coup.
On November 1, 1963, a group of Diem’s gener-
als overthrew the government of South Vietnam.

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President Diem and his brother escaped to the Sai-

gon district of Cholon, where they hid inside a Cath-
olic church. The following morning, November 2,
the brothers were discovered. Diem and Nhu were
thrown into the back of an American-made armored
personnel carrier and driven away. Sometime shortly
thereafter, President Diem and his brother were exe-
cuted. Their bullet-riddled bodies were photo-
graphed, then buried in an unmarked grave in a plot
of land adjacent to Ambassador Lodge’s house.
When the leader of the Vietnamese communist
movement, Ho Chi Minh, learned of the assassina-
tion, even he was surprised. “I can scarcely believe the
Americans would be so stupid,” he said.
Out in the countryside across South Vietnam,
the garrison state constructed by President Diem
and the U.S. Department of Defense began to crum-
ble. The local people, be they paddy rice farmers or
committed Vietcong, began tearing down the fabri-
cated enclaves the Diem regime had forced them to
build as part of the Strategic Hamlet Program. News
footage seen around the world showed farmers
smashing the fortifications’ bamboo walls with
sledgehammers, shovels, and sticks, as the strategic
hamlets disappeared. Seizing the opportunity, the
communists began sending thousands of Vietcong
fighters to infiltrate the villages of South Vietnam.
They came down from the North by way of a series

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of footpaths and jungle trails, which would become

known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Soon it would be
impossible to tell a neutral farmer from a committed
communist insurgent.
Command and control was an illusion in Viet-
nam. Despite millions of dollars, hundreds of men,
and the use of lethal chemicals as part of a herbi-
cide warfare campaign, ARPA’s Project Agile—
with its cutting-edge gadgets and counterinsurgency
techniques—was having little to no effect on the
growing communist insurgency spreading across
South Vietnam. Perhaps Americans in Saigon might
have been able to foresee the fall of President Ngo
Dinh Diem, but it is unlikely that anyone could
have predicted what happened shortly thereafter,
halfway around the world in Texas. Twenty days
after the execution of Diem and his brother, while
riding in an open car through Dealey Plaza in Dal-
las, President John Kennedy was shot dead by an
assassin.
Another president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would
inherit the hornet’s nest that was Vietnam.

wos
 CHAPTER TEN

Motivation and Morale

Te anthropologist Gerald Hickey leaned out

the side of a low-flying military aircraft watch-
ing the sea snakes swimming below. The
weather was warm, the sea calm, and as the aircraft
he shared with a team of ARPA officials approached
Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Siam, the water was
robin’s egg blue. It was the winter of 1964, and
Hickey was back in Vietnam, working for the
RAND Corporation on another ARPA contract,
this time studying how U.S. military advisors got
along with their Vietnamese counterparts. The war
that did not officially exist marched on.
The ARPA officers were heading out to the island
to test weapons and gear which they would then
turn over to their junk fleet commander counter-

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 MoTIVATION AND MORALE

parts, local Vietnamese fishermen paid by the Pen-

tagon to patrol the coasts and keep an eye out for
Vietcong. Hickey was here to interview participants
on both sides. “En route, the ARPA officers tested
the new AR-15, an early version of the M-16, by
shooting at long sea snakes, which when hit, flew
into the air,” Hickey recalled.
Once on the island the group set up a beach-
front camp, stringing ARPA-engineered hammocks
between palm trees and setting up ARPA-engineered
tents before heading over to the steep sea cliffs,
where they tested the ruggedness of ARPA-designed
military boots. Hickey tagged along, notebook in
hand, taking notes and asking questions, as he
always did. After the day’s work, the men sat around
a fire pit eating grilled shark and giant sea turtle,
washing it down with rice and La Rue beer.
After the Phu Quoc Island trip, Hickey headed
back to Saigon and then up to the U.S. military
facility at Da Nang, conducting dozens of interviews
along the way. On July 4, 1964, he caught a ride in
an H-34 Marine helicopter and headed into the Ta
Rau Valley to a Special Forces camp located at Nam
Dong.
“Known as deep VC territory,’ Hickey noted in
his journal.
Captain Roger Donlon, commander of the unit
at Nam Dong, met Hickey at the dirt landing pad
aap
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

when his helicopter touched down. Hickey noted

how heavily fortified the camp was, its perimeter
ringed with anti-sniper ‘sandbags, machine gun
posts, mortar pits, and concrete bunkers. Hickey
was here at Nam Dong to interview each member of
the twelve-man Special Forces team as well as their
Vietnamese counterparts, young men who were
mostly Nung people, an ethnic minority of Chinese
descent.
The team at Nam Dong was here in the Ta Rau
Valley to protect five thousand Vietnamese who
lived in the surrounding area. In addition to patrol-
ling the jungle, the Special Forces team organized
locals’ efforts to dig wells and build schools. There
was little else to do here, and Hickey recalled that
“the A-team members were happy to have an anthro-
pologist in town.”
His first day in Nam Dong, Hickey accompanied
Captain Donlon out to one of the villages where
there had been reports of chemicals being sprayed
out of aircraft. “Rice crops had been destroyed and
villagers were sick,” Hickey noted. Captain Donlon
told the sick villagers that he would send their com-
plaints up the chain of command. Hickey had no
way of knowing that the organization paying for his
report, ARPA, was the same organization behind
the science program that had sprayed the chemicals
on the villagers and their rice crops.

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 MorTivATION AND MORALE

The men drove back to the base in an Army jeep,

careful to get to the camp before nightfall. Once the
sun disappeared behind the mountains, the valley
was plunged into darkness, making travel dangerous
and difficult. Back at Nam Dong, Hickey filled out
a timesheet, required by RAND to be submitted
each week, and dropped it in the command center's
U.S. mailbox. He ate dinner with the Nung soldiers,
interviewing them in their native language. The
Nung soldiers told Hickey they believed a Vietcong
attack was imminent, and he took the news to Cap-
tain Donlon. A team meeting was organized, and
Donlon ordered the Vietnamese strike force to dou-
ble its outer perimeter security and also ordered the
helicopter landing zone to be fortified. Donlon gave
Hickey an AR-I5 and told him to sleep with it close
by his bed.
In the middle of the night, at 2:26 a.m., a mas-
sive explosion knocked Hickey out of bed. More
explosions followed, and suddenly the camp was filled
with white phosphorus smoke. With the sound of
automatic weapons fire coming from every direction,
Hickey grabbed his eyeglasses and his AR-I5 and
started to run. “Suddenly bullets were piercing the
bamboo walls,” he later recalled.
Outside his bunkroom, the mess hall and supply
room were on fire. “Mortar rounds landed every-
where, grenades exploded, and gunfire filled the air.

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

In a matter of minutes,” Hickey recounted, “the

camp had become a battlefield.” For a moment, he
felt all was lost. That he would die here in Nam
Dong. Instead, the anthropologist raised his AR-15
and assumed the role of a soldier, fighting alongside
the Green Berets and the Nung commandos through
the night.
When light dawned and the Vietcong retreated
back into the jungle, Hickey surveyed the carnage.
Sixty Nung, two Americans, and one Australian
had been killed. “There were bodies and pieces
of bodies everywhere—on the cluttered parade
ground, in the grasses, and on the [perimeter] wires.”
One of the Nung soldiers he had eaten dinner with
the night before was dead, recognizable only by the
insignia on his shirt. “The smoky air was heavy with
the odor of death,” Hickey recalled. Overcome by a
wave of nausea, he threw up.
“The July 1964 Nam Dong battle foreshadowed
the fury of the struggle that would become known
as the Vietnam War,” wrote Hickey. “As that war,
with its modern technology and armaments and
large armies, drew all of South Vietnam into its vor-
tex and captured the world’s attention, the battle of
Nam Dong faded into obscurity.” Americans stil
did not know they were fighting a war in Vietnam.
Captain Roger Donlon was awarded the Congres-
sional Medal of Honor, the first of the Vietnam War,

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 MortTIvATION AND MORALE

and Gerald Hickey would continue his work as an

anthropologist, writing more than a dozen reports
for ARPA, on subjects including the role of the
AR-15 in battle and the effects of Agent Orange on
the Vietnamese.

Back in America, RAND Corporation president

Frank Collbohm had set his focus on securing a
lucrative new contract with the Advanced Research
Projects Agency. Collbohm and analyst Guy Pauker
flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with ARPA offi-
cials. RAND’s Third Area Conflict Board believed
that the firm’s social scientists could help stop the
Vietcong insurgency by researching and analyzing
for the Pentagon the “human problems” connected
to insurgent groups. The broad-themed contract
they sought had enormous potential value and
would turn out to be RAND’s single-biggest con-
tract during twelve years of war in Vietnam. It was
called the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Proj-
ect, and it was secured in a single meeting in Wash-
ington, D.C.
In Washington, Collbohm and Pauker met with
Seymour Deitchman, Harold Brown’s new special
assistant for counterinsurgency at ARPA. Before
Deitchman took over the counterinsurgency reins,
ARPA’s Project Agile programs had been overseen
by William Godel. But the situation with Godel had
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

taken a bizarre turn. For eighteen months, Godel

had received high praise from the White House and
the Pentagon for his counterinsurgency work, win-
ning the prestigious National Civil Service League
award and being named one of the nation’s ten top
government administrators in 1962. But suddenly
and mysteriously, financial incongruities within
Project Agile’s overseas expense accounts were brought
to the attention of Secretary of Defense McNamara,
and the FBI was brought in to investigate. Godel was
at the very center of the investigation. Counterinsur-
gency was too significant a program to leave in the
hands of a man under suspicion, and Deitchman, an
aeronautical and mechanical engineer working at
the Institute for Defense Analyses, or IDA, was cho-
sen to replace Godel.
Also present during the meeting was the power-
ful William H. Sullivan, a career State Department
official and the head of President Johnson’s new
Interagency Task Force on Vietnam. In a few
months’ time, Sullivan would become ambassador to
Laos. Between Sullivan and Deitchman, the officials
in the room had the power to award a significant
counterinsurgency contract to whomever they saw
fit, in this case RAND. Which is exactly what the
record shows happened next.
William Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper and
set it in front of Collbohm and Pauker. On the paper

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 MotTIvATION AND MORALE

was a list of twenty-five topics that the Interagency

Task Force and the Pentagon wanted researched.
Down at the bottom, near the end, one topic leaped
out at Guy Pauker. It read:
“Who are the Vietcong? What makes them tick?”
Pauker was electrified. “Where did this question
come from?” he asked.
“That question came directly from Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara,” Sullivan said, “who
keeps asking the question.”
“Frank and I agreed on the spot that RAND
would try to answer the Defense Secretary's ques-
tion,” Pauker recalled.
Guy Pauker, born in Romania, was a staunch
anticommunist. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard in
Southeast Asian studies, and was an expert on how
Stone Age cultures, such as the Navajo, do or do not
adapt to the modern world. He felt excited by this
counterinsurgency challenge. The Vietcong were
like a Stone Age people, Pauker believed, and he wel-
comed the opportunity to determine what it was that
made them tick. Collbohm and Pauker returned to
RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, where they
put together an outline for the new project and a bid.
Over at the Pentagon, the question “What makes
the Viet Cong tick?” had also been confounding the
Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The original
intent” of the RAND program, as Seymour
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Deitchman later explained it, was to understand the

nature of the Vietcong revolutionary movement by
finding answers “to such questions as, what strata of
society its adherents came from; why they were
adherents; how group cohesiveness was built into
their ranks; and how they interacted with the popu-
lace.” By the summer of 1964, the secretary of
defense had grown frustrated by the lack of progress
being made in the “techniques” area of Project Agile.
Three years into the conflict and still no one seemed
to have a handle on who these Vietcong insurgents
really were. ARPA needed quality information on
the enemy combatant, said Deitchman, and for this,
to help facilitate the new RAND Corporation study,
the secretary of defense made a deal with the CIA.
Joseph Zasloff was the lead social scientist on the
original Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project,
and in 2014 he recalled the premise of the RAND
study. “The CIA had detention centers and prisons
in South Vietnam,” Zasloff said, facilities that were
not supposed to exist. It was in these secret deten-
tion centers that the CIA kept captured communist
POWs, from whom various case officers tried
to extract information. “We interviewed these pris-
oners for our study,” explained Zasloff. “We learned
a lot from them about what had been going on.
Some were old and had fought at Dien Bien Phu.
Some were just teenagers. They were all very

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 MotTIVATION AND MORALE

dedicated. Had great discipline and commitment.

They were indoctrinated into the communist way of
thinking.”
Joe Zasloff and his wife, Tela, arrived in Saigon
for the Motivation and Morale Project in the sum-
mer of 1964. Zasloff, an expert on Southeast Asian
studies, had spent the previous year at RAND work-
ing ona report for the U.S. Air Force called The Role
of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency. In this
report, which he produced from his office in Santa
Monica, Zasloff concluded that the North Vietnam-
ese were responsible for fueling the insurgency in the
South. Through the lens of history this is hardly
news, but in 1964 Zasloff’s findings were considered
original. He was sent to Saigon to lead this new
RAND study. Zasloff did not have the kind of
hands-on social science research experience that
Gerald Hickey and John Donnell had, but he had
been to Vietnam, in the late 1950s, as a university
professor teaching social science at the Faculty of
Law in downtown Saigon.
Because Zasloff would be working directly with
the highest-ranking members of the MACY, he was
given a civilian rank equal to the rank of general, as
well as accommodations fit for a general. The Zasl-
offs settled into ARPA’s elegant two-story villa at
176 Rue Pasteur, just down the street from the Com-
bat Development Test Center. Their front yard had

243
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

trees and a grassy lawn. A wide wooden veranda and

second-story balconies added to the French colonial
feel, as did the staff of servants who took care of
housekeeping needs. Tela Zasloff had the maids
string white lights throughout the garden, said to be
inhabited by ghosts. A ten-foot-tall concrete wall
had been constructed around the villa’s perimeter as
an added security precaution.
The villa’s first-floor interior was grand, laid out
like a posh hotel lobby, with rattan furniture and
potted palm trees. The downstairs served as a work
area for the RAND researchers who came and went.
At night, the Zasloffs frequently hosted dinner
patties.
One month after the Zasloffs got the place up
and running, John Donnell, the author with Hickey
of the unfavorable Strategic Hamlet Program report,
arrived. Donnell was to be Zasloff’s partner on the
new ARPA project, examining communist motiva-
tion and morale. The success of the program relied
on getting accurate information from POWs, and
Donnell spoke Vietnamese. Zasloff also hired local
academics to act as interpreters, French-speaking
Vietnamese intellectuals who were considered wealthy
by national standards. The Vietnamese interpreters
were often invited to the Zasloffs’ dinner parties and
were asked to share their thoughts and perceptions.
The interpreters were candid and open, admitting

244
 MoTIVATION AND MORALE

freely that they knew almost nothing about Viet-

namese peasants who lived in villages outside Sai-
gon. They were all citizens of the same country, but
with very little in common. Most farmers, the inter-
preters said, lacked dreams and aspirations and were
generally content. Most had no ambition to do any-
thing but farm. All the peasants wanted out of this
life, the interpreters said, was to live with their fami-
lies in peace, in rural villages, without being harassed
or disturbed.
The interpreters set out with Zasloff and Donnell
to interview prisoners of war in the secret CIA pris-
ons across the South. The group interviewed prison-
ers inside the notorious Chi Hoa prison in Saigon as
well as in many smaller detention centers out in
the provinces. Most of the POW interviews were
done with either Zasloff or Donnell and one Viet-
namese interpreter, who also acted as a stenographer
or note taker. There were no uniformed officials
present, which meant the prisoners often loosened
up and spoke freely.
“We interviewed all kinds of prisoners,” Zasloff
recalled. “Some from the North and some from the
South” Most of the northern-born fighters had
made their way to the South along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. While their histories unfolded, the initial
assumptions of the interpreters from Saigon began
to change, including the preconception that all a

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Vietnamese farmer wanted was to own a small plot

of land and be left in peace. As work progressed, the
RAND researchers started to learn more about what
was actually fueling the insurgency. It was a rela-
tively simple answer that was echoed among the
prisoners. What motivated Vietcong fighters, the
prisoners said, was injustice, “grievances the peas-
ants held against the Saigon government.” The pris-
oners told Zasloff and Donnell they believed that
through communism, they could have a better life,
one that was not based on corruption. The prisoners
expressed “ardent aspirations they had for education,
economic opportunity, equality and justice for
themselves and their descendants,” Zasloff and
Donnell wrote.
The POWs also talked of being tortured by the
government of South Vietnam. Some prisoners
showed the RAND analysts scars they claimed were
the results of incessant torture by prison guards.
They spoke of being forced to watch summary exe-
cutions of fellow prisoners, without explanation or
trial. There was no way to verify the veracity of what
they were told, but Zasloff and Donnell felt com-
pelled to report these Geneva Convention violations
to Guy Pauker at RAND. When Pauker forwarded
the information on to the Pentagon in a memo titled
“Treatment of POWs, Defectors and Suspects in
South Vietnam,” Seymour Deitchman got involved.

246
 MoTIVATION AND MORALE

He asked questions: How did Zasloff and Don-

nell know that the prisoners were not lying? Why
believe a prisoner in the first place? Instead of look-
ing into Zasloff and Donnell’s claims, Deitchman
later commissioned a RAND study on how to detect
when a Vietcong prisoner was telling a lie. In “Esti-
mating from Misclassified Data,” RAND analyst
S. James Press used a probability theorem called
Bayes’ theorem to refute the idea that POW inter-
views could always be trusted. “The motivation for
the work had its genesis in a desire to compensate
for incorrect answers that might be found in
prisoner-of-war interviews,” Press wrote. After forty-
eight pages of mathematical calculations that placed
Vietcong POWs’ answers in hypothetical categories,
Press concluded, “It is clear that if hostile subjects
were aiming at an optimal strategy, they would lie
independently of all the categories.”
The same summer that Zasloff and Donnell pre-
sented their concerns to Seymour Deitchman, some-
thing totally unexpected happened at the Pentagon,
a situation that still confounded Joseph Zasloff after
more than fifty years. His earlier RAND mono-
graph, The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern
Insurgency, began making its way around the upper
echelons of the Pentagon. In this report Zasloff had
concluded that the North Vietnamese were respon-
sible for most insurgent activity in the South. “Much
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

of the strength and sophistication of the insurgent

organization in South Vietnam today is attributable
to the fact that North Vietnam plans, directs, and
coordinates the over-all campaign and lends mate-
rial aid, spiritual leadership and moral justification
to the rebellion,” Zasloff had written. A copy went
to the Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay.
The overall war policy at the time called for “gradu-
ated pressure,” a strategy that Robert McNamara
had developed for President Johnson to avoid mak-
ing the war in Vietnam official. Only a few months
remained until the November presidential election;
Johnson desperately wanted to maintain what was
known at the Pentagon as his “hold until Novem-
ber” policy. This strategy allowed for so-called tit-
for-tat bombing raids, small-scale U.S. Air Force
attacks against communist activity. Up to this point
in the conflict, Hanoi, the capital of the North, had
not been targeted.
Reading Zasloff’s The Role of North Vietnam in
the Southern Insurgency, General LeMay decided the
paper was the perfect report on which to base his
argument to bomb North Vietnam. Unknown to
Zasloff, his RAND report would now become the
centerpiece of LeMay’s new strategy for the secretary
of defense. In this unconventional war, which Amer-
ica was still not officially fighting, the role of bomb-

248
 MOTIVATION AND MORALE

ing had been fraught with contention. In the

summer of 1964, the U.S. Air Force was playing a
subordinate role to the U.S. Army, which led efforts
on the ground. General LeMay had been arguing
that airpower was the way to quell the insurgency,
but his arguments had been falling on deaf ears. As
LeMay geared up to use Zasloff’s RAND study in a
new push with Secretary McNamara, a major inci-
dent and turning point in the war occurred.
In the first week of August 1964, U.S. naval forces
clashed with North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the
Gulf of Tonkin. It served as a casus belli, an act or
event used to justify war. President Johnson went on
national television, interrupting regular program-
ming across the country to announce North Viet-
namese aggression and request from Congress the
authority to take military action. This was the offi-
cial beginning of the Vietnam War. In a matter of
days, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,
giving President Johnson the authority to take what-
ever actions he saw necessary, including the use of
force. At the Pentagon, Zasloff’s study was now at
the center of a perfect storm. On August 17, 1964,
General LeMay sent a memorandum to Genera
Earle “Bus” Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. “The best chance” for winning
the war in Vietnam, LeMay wrote, was to choose

249
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

ninety-four targets in North Vietnam already iden-

tified by the Pentagon as “crucial” to the commu-
nists and therefore necessary to destroy. Zasloff’s
study, also sent to General Wheeler, was the center-
piece of LeMay’s argument. At the time, Zasloff had
no idea.
In Saigon, Zasloff and Donnell were getting close
to the end of their prisoner of war study, the first of
the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project
reports for ARPA. The men had conducted 145
interviews over five months, in multiple CIA pris-
oner facilities. In December 1964, Guy Pauker flew
to Saigon to help compile the information. In the
downstairs mezzanine of the ARPA villa on Rue
Pasteur, the three men labored for weeks to put
together Zasloff and Donnell’s final report, which
was fifty-four pages long.
Once it was completed, the RAND analysts
briefed General William Westmoreland, at MACV
headquarters just down the street. The Vietcong
insurgents, Zasloff and Donnell said, saw the Amer-
icans as invaders and would do anything they could
to make them give up and leave. Ten years earlier,
participants from the same movement had fought to
kick the French out, and had succeeded. Now they
were fighting for the same cause. The insurgency
was not an insurgency to the locals, Zasloff and

250
 MOTIVATION AND MORALE

Donnell said. It was a nationalist struggle on behalf

of the people of Vietnam. The insurgents saw them-
selves as being “for the poor,” the analysts said, and
they saw the Americans as the villains, specifically
“American imperialists and their lackeys, the GVN
[Government of Vietnam].” Zasloff and Donnell
said that in their POW interviews they had learned
that very few fighters understood what communism
meant, what it stood for. Hardly any of the Vietcong
had even heard of Karl Marx. It was a fact that the
Vietcong had patrons among the Chinese commu-
nists and that the same patrons had been helping the
North Vietnamese, giving them weapons and teach-
ing war-fighting techniques. But what the local peo-
ple were after was independence. South Vietnamese
peasants had aspirations, too. They wanted social
justice, economic opportunity. And they wanted
their land back—land that had been taken from
them during dubious security operations like the
Strategic Hamlet Program. That was what made the
Vietcong tick, Zasloff and Donnell told General
Westmoreland.
Next, the men briefed General Maxwell Taylor,
whom Johnson had made U.S. ambassador to Viet-
nam. After that, it was back to MACV headquarters
to brief the senior staff, as well as the ARPA officials
at the Combat and Development Test Center. In
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

each facility, to each person or group of people, they

said the same thing. The Vietcong were a formida-
ble foe. They “could only be defeated at enormous
costs,” Zasloff and Donnell said, “if at all.”

Under the aegis of the Viet Cong Motivation and

Morale Project, the Advanced Research Projects
Agency sought to determine what made the Viet-
cong tick. But the agency did not want to hear that
the Vietcong could not be defeated. Seymour
Deitchman took the position that Zasloff and Don-
nell had gone off the rails, same as Hickey and Don-
nell had done with the Strategic Hamlet Program
report a few years before. According to other RAND
officers, Deitchman perceived the POW report as
unhelpful. RAND needed to send researchers into
the field whose reports were better aligned with the
conviction of the Pentagon that the Vietcong could
and would be defeated. Frank Collbohm took to the
hallways of the RAND headquarters he was in
charge of in Santa Monica. “I am looking for three
senior, imaginative fellows to go over to Vietnam,”
he said, and to get a handle on the chaos in South-
east Asia. He needed to replace Zasloff and was
looking for a quality analyst to take over the Viet
Cong Motivation and Morale Project. Collbohm
found what he was looking for in a controversial
nuclear strategist named Leon Gouré.

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 MoTIVATION AND MORALE

Leon Gouré, born in Moscow in 1922, was a

Sovietologist who loathed Soviet communism. He
was born into a family of Jewish socialist intellectu-
als who were part of a faction called the Mensheviks,
who came to be violently persecuted by the Lenin-
ists. When Gouré was one year old, the family went
into exile in Berlin, only to flee again a decade later
when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The
Gourés moved to Paris but in 1940 were again forced
to flee. Gouré once told the Washington Post that his
family left Paris on the last train out, and that only
when he arrived in America did he finally feel he had
a home. Gouré enlisted in the U.S. Army, became a
citizen, and was sent back to Germany to fight the
Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge. As a member of the
Counterintelligence Corps, America’s Army intelli-
gence group, he became fluent in German and
French. He also became a valuable interrogator,
learning how to draw information out of captured
prisoners, and to write intelligence reports.
After the war, Gouré earned an undergraduate
degree from New York University and a master’s
degree from Columbia. In 1951 he became an ana-
lyst with RAND, and in no time he was working on
post-nuclear war scenarios with the firm’s elite
defense intellectuals, including Albert Wohlstetter
and Herman Kahn. Gouré’s particular area of exper-
tise was post-apocalypse civil defense, and in 1960 he
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

traveled to Moscow on a civil defense research trip

for RAND. In 1961 his findings were published as a
book that caused a national outcry.
Gouré claimed that during his trip to Moscow,
he had seen firsthand evidence indicating that the
Soviet Union had built a vast network of under-
ground bunkers, which would protect the Russian
people after a nuclear first strike against the United
States. The Soviet action would inevitably be fol-
lowed by a U.S. nuclear response. The concept of
mutual assured destruction was based on the idea
that the superpowers would not attack each other,
provided they remained equally vulnerable to a
nuclear strike. Gouré’s frightening premise sug-
gested that the Soviet Politburo believed they could
survive a nuclear war and protect the majority of
their population as well. Like Albert Wohlstetter’s
second-strike theory, Gouré’s findings suggested
that since the Soviets believed they could survive,
they might attempt a decapitating first strike.
Gouré’s critics said his work was unreliable. That
he hated Soviet communism with such passion that
he was biased to the point of being blind. In Decem-
ber 1961 an article attacking Gouré’s work appeared
in the New York Times under a headline that read
“Soviet Shelters: A Myth or Fact?” Reporter Harri-
son E. Salisbury had taken a month-long trip across
the Soviet Union, covering roughly twelve thousand

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 MOTIVATION AND MORALE

miles. He said that he “failed to turn up evidence of

a single Soviet bomb shelter,” and that the under-
ground bomb shelters purported to have been built
across Moscow were nothing more sinister than sub-
way tunnels. He singled out “Leon Gouré, research
specialist of the Rand Corporation,” who, Salisbury
wrote, “has presented several studies contending that
the Russians have a wide program for sheltering pop-
ulation and industry from atomic attack.” Salisbury
had interviewed scores of Russians for his article and
learned that Gouré’s reports had been “vigorously
challenged by observers on the scene.” Close scru-
tiny of the alleged facts, wrote Salisbury, revealed
that no shelters had been constructed. “Diplomats,
foreign military attaches and correspondents who
have traveled widely in the Soviet Union report that
there is no visible evidence of a widespread shelter
program.” The Gouré report, Salisbury suggested,
served only one master, RAND’s single largest
customer, the U.S. Air Force, in its quest for tens of
millions more dollars from the Pentagon for its
ever-growing bomber fleets.
The acrimonious debate over the legitimacy of
Goureé’s civil defense report raged for months and
then subsided. Gouré disappeared from the head-
lines but continued to write reports for RAND.
Now, as 1964 drew to a close, Frank Collbohm
tapped Leon Gouré to replace Joseph Zasloff as the
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

lead social scientist on the ARPA Viet Cong Motiva-

tion and Morale Project in Saigon. Zasloff saw this
appointment as a disaster waiting to unfold.
“Still, after fifty years, I get red in the face just
thinking of what Leon Gouré did,” Zasloff said in
2014. Within a matter of weeks Gouré was in Sai-
gon. And he was ready to take charge.

In Saigon, stability and security were quickly deterio-

rating as chaos enveloped the city. On Christmas
Eve, 1964, two Vietcong fighters drove a car packed
with two hundred pounds of explosives into the
underground parking garage beneath the Brink
Bachelor Officers Quarters, a seven-story hotel leased
by the Defense Department to provide housing for
its officers in Saigon. The bomb demolished three
floors of the building, killing two U.S. servicemen
and injuring sixty-three Americans, an Australian
Army officer, and forty-three Vietnamese civilians.
Suddenly faced with the possibility that Saigon
could fall to the Vietcong, Secretary of Defense
McNamara pressured President Johnson to take
action. On February 7, 1965, a limited bombing
campaign called Operation Flaming Dart began.
Eleven days later, Johnson ordered the Joint Chiefs
of Staff to initiate Rolling Thunder I, the air cam-
paign that General LeMay had been arguing for. On
 MOTIVATION AND MORALE

March 8, the Marines landed in the city of Da Nang.

Tt was war. Officially now.
Leon Gouré settled into the RAND Saigon villa
previously occupied by the Zasloffs and got to work.
His first report for the Viet Cong Motivation and
Morale Project drew conclusions that were diametri-
cally opposed to what Zasloff and Donnell had
found.
“By and large,” wrote Gouré, “Vietnamese farm-
ers hold no strong political views.” Indeed, it was
“the ideological apathy of the peasant” that allowed
most Vietnamese to concentrate on “personal sur-
vival,” not political aspirations, Gouré wrote. The
majority of the Vietnamese were neutral, he said,
and unlike people from the West, they did not
adhere to the democratic notion that “they have a
real freedom of choice.” Gouré argued that bombing
was the pathway to victory in Vietnam. Bombing
weakened the morale of the Vietcong, he said.
“Gouré gave the Pentagon exactly what the Air
Force wanted to hear, about bombing [Vietnam],”
Zasloff said. But to Zasloff, what was particularly
egregious was that Gouré used the transcripts of
Zasloff and Donnell’s prisoner interviews to draw his
own conclusions. These conclusions, said Zasloff,
“simply were not there.” Gouré did not interview any
Vietcong prisoners on his own for his original report.

Zor
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

In the winter of 1965, RAND’s Guy Pauker flew to

Washington to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and to sell an expanded idea for the Viet Cong Moti-
vation and Morale Project, now being run by Leon
Gouré. The premise, Pauker said, was to determine
how best to “break the backbone of the VC [Viet-
cong] hard core.” In this new study, Gouré would
interview Vietcong prisoners himself, and by doing
so, he would best be able to determine the psycho-
logical effect that airpower and heavy weapons were
having on the Vietcong. “Judicious exploration” of
this concept, Pauker said, “offered considerable
promise” about the way to win this war. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff agreed, and the ARPA project was
expanded. With no previous experience studying
Southeast Asia, Leon Gouré, RAND’s leading Sovi-
etologist and civil defense expert, was put in charge
of the expanded Viet Cong Motivation and Morale
Project.
The villa at Rue Pasteur was now a regular meet-
ing place for RAND anthropologists and social sci-
entists working on various ARPA projects over the
course of the long war. This group included Gerald
Hickey, now back in Saigon to work on studies
about how Special Forces worked with Montagnards
and how Vietnamese beliefs in “cosmic forces” fac-
tored into the war. In his memoir, Hickey recalled
how a rising star at the Pentagon named Dan Ells-

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 MoTIVATION AND MORALE

berg regularly came around the RAND villa. Hickey

had met Ellsberg the previous summer and was
aware of his reputation as a brilliant Harvard econo-
mist who had written a fascinating paper on how
diplomacy was similar to blackmail. Ellsberg was
now working in Vietnam for the Defense Depart-
ment, with the mysterious title of “special liaison” to
the Pentagon. One particular evening with Daniel
Ellsberg stuck in Hickey’s mind.
“In November 1965, I was invited to have an
informal dinner with Dan Ellsberg at his Saigon
villa next to the heavily guarded villa of General
Westmoreland,” Hickey recalled. “Dan was affable
as we talked about many subjects relating to Viet-
nam, and then he produced a packet of photos taken
on trips into the countryside with [Lieutenant Colo-
nel] John Paul Vann. In the photographs he carried
an automatic weapon, which he said he often fired
into the thick foliage along the road where the Viet-
cong might be hiding. Talking about these trips,”
recalled Hickey, “Dan became more excited by the
bravado, the adventure, something I had seen in
other such men (combattant manqué [frustrated
fighter], the French called them) who came to Viet-
nam for reasons I could never understand.”
Vietnam was a complicated, labyrinthine place to
work and to live, with professionals serving many
masters on many projects about whose real meaning
aN
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

they had no idea. This was the nature of classified

defense work, with individual scientists and soldiers
given but a sliver of the truth, just enough to be able
to do the job without always knowing the reason
behind it. Ellsberg’s bravado may not have made
much sense to Hickey in 1965. In the fall of 1972,
things would become illuminated when Ellsberg
took actions against the Pentagon that would force
him to go underground as, for a time, the most
wanted man in America.

Leon Gouré continued to produce reports for ARPA,

almost all of which promised the Pentagon that
Vietcong fighters were rapidly losing motivation and
morale. In “Some Impressions of Viet Cong Vulner-
abilities: An Interim Report,” Gouré and co-author
C. A. H. Thomson declared that Vietcong soldiers
had become “discouraged and exhausted,” and that
“life in the Viet Cong has become more dangerous
and that the hardships are greater than in 1964.”
These findings, Gouré said, drew upon a record of
450 interviews with Vietcong captives, “a body of
evidence yielding more or less reliable impressions...
of the Viet Cong’s current vulnerabilities.” Further-
more, wrote Gouré, Vietcong cadres had confided
in him that they had lost hope. In recent months, as
he put it, Vietcong “soldiers have spoken more often
of their probable death in the next battle, of never

260
 MOTIVATION AND MORALE

seeing their families again.” There is no mention in

these reports that Vietcong fighters also expressed a
willingness to die for their nationalist cause. Instead,
Gouré’s reports served as pithy endorsements for
continued U.S. Air Force bombing campaigns. “Fear
of air power,” Gouré promised, would “bring the
VC to their knees.”
In 1965 Leon Gouré became an advisor to Secre-
tary McNamara. It was not unusual for him to be
picked up at the RAND villa on Rue Pasteur and
helicoptered to an aircraft carrier stationed off the
coast of Vietnam, where he would brief field com-
manders on the studies that RAND was doing for
ARPA and the Pentagon. When summoned. to
Washington, Gouré was treated with equal fanfare.
The word among defense intellectuals was that Pres-
ident Johnson walked around the White House with
a copy of Gouré’s findings in his back pocket.
“When Gouré would return from Vietnam to
[RAND headquarters in] Santa Monica, he would
stay long enough to change shirts, then fly off to
Washington to brief McNamara,” recalled Guy
Pauker, who had begun to sour on the truthfulness
of Gouré’s findings. For as much as Gouré was
respected by the Pentagon and the White House, he
was creating enemies inside RAND. Gouré’s undo-
ing began in late 1965, when RAND’s work on the
Viet Cong Motivation and Moral Project came

261
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

under scrutiny by Congress. During a hearing before

the Subcommittee on International Organizations
and Movements, Congressman Peter H. B. Freling-
huysen demanded to know why the RAND Corpo-
ration had been hired to do so much work on the
Vietcong when it seemed that what they were gath-
ering was “straight military intelligence.” That work
“should be done by the military,” Frelinghuysen
said, not “highly-paid consultants like Rand.”
“As a matter of convenience, [we] gave the con-
tract to the Rand Corporation, as an instrument of
the military systems, to perform the study,” ARPA’s
Seymour Deitchman said. ARPA did not want to
send its own people into the field—people like
Deitchman—because they were “heavily occupied
with operational problems associated with the war,
and would not have time to spend several months on
these detailed questions—important as they were,”
Deitchman explained. A think tank like Rand had
the manpower, the expertise, and the time.
Congressman Frelinghuysen did not agree. Not
only was the work expensive, but also its conclusions
were puerile, he said. He quoted from one of Gouré’s
reports, calling the work so banal “it was something
a child could have come up with.”
Frelinghuysen’s accusations caught the attention
of Senator J. William Fulbright, who in turn made
himself familiar with Gouré’s reports and was

262
 MoTIVATION AND MORALE

appalled by what he saw as Gouré’s manipulation of

prisoner of war interviews. “TWe have] received
reports of recent surveys conducted by the RAND
Corporation and others concerning the attitudes of
the Viet Cong defectors and prisoners,” Fulbright
wrote to Secretary McNamara. It appeared to him
that “those in charge of the project may have manip-
ulated the results in such a way as to affect the
results.” Senator Fulbright demanded that the entire
RAND effort be reviewed.
When McNamara assigned an Air Force officer
to investigate, the Air Force found nothing wrong
with the RAND work. But the national attention
that Congress had directed at RAND made the cor-
poration look bad. Despite RAND's initial support
of Leon Gouré, the controversy surrounding him
could no longer be ignored. Gouré needed to be
removed. RAND president Frank Collbohm sent
analyst Gus Shubert to Saigon to take over the
ARPA contract. Gouré was relieved of his duties
while the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project
continued on. By 1968, RAND analysts had con-
ducted more than 2,400 interviews related to Viet-
cong fighters, which were typed up into 62,000
pages of text and compiled into more than fifty
ARPA reports.
Leon Gouré was not alone in his downfall. Wil-
liam Godel, the man responsible for Project Agile to

263
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

begin with, was arrested by the FBI in August 1964 on

charges that he had siphoned ARPA monies into his
own personal bank account. On December 16, a fed-
eral grand jury indicted Godel and two former Penta-
gon colleagues for defrauding the U.S. government
and embezzling a total of $57,000 in Defense Depart-
ment funds. Godel and his attorney worked hard to
clear Godel’s name. Depositions were taken on his
behalf from U.S. ambassador to Vietnam general
Maxwell Taylor and others. A judge granted Godel
permission to travel to Vietnam to take depositions
from a Vietnamese general and Thai prince, but to no
avail. At trial, the government produced 150 exhibits
and a large number of eyewitnesses to testify against
him. After eight days of testimony and ten hours of
jury deliberation, William Godel was convicted on
two counts of embezzlement and conspiracy to mis-
handle government funds. The judge ordered that he
serve concurrent five-year prison terms on both counts.
William Godel, war hero, spy, diplomat, and the
architect of many of ARPA’s most controversial pro-
grams in Vietnam, including its counterinsurgency
efforts and the Agent Orange defoliation campaign,
was sent to a low-security federal correctional insti-
tution in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. His personal
financial benefit from the embezzlement scheme was
determined to have been $16,922, roughly $135,000
in 2015.

264
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Jasons Enter Vietnam

uring the Vietnam War, the RAND Corpo-

1D. ration handled soft science programs for the
Advanced Research Projects Agency. For
hard science programs, in fields characterized by the
use of quantifiable data and methodological rigor,
ARPA looked to the Jason scientists. The Jasons
were an elite, self-selected club mostly of physicists
and mathematicians interested in solving problems
that seemed unsolvable to the rest of the world. All
throughout the 1960s, their only client was ARPA,
the majority
which meant that all of their reports—
of which were classified secret, top secret, or secret
restricted data (involving nuclear secrets) —wound up
on the desk of the secretary of defense. The Jasons
were quintessential defense scientists, following in

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the footsteps of John von Neumann, Ernest Law-

rence, and Edward Teller. The core group, including
Murph Goldberger, Murray Gell-Mann, John
Wheeler, and William Nierenberg, had been closely
intertwined, academically, since the Manhattan
Project during World War II. In the early 1960s, the
Jasons began expanding, bringing some of their
Ph.D. students on board, including a young geo-
physicist named Gordon MacDonald.
In the Jason scientists’ first four years they had
performed scientific studies for ARPA covering some
of the most esoteric problems facing the Pentagon,
including high-altitude nuclear explosions, electro-
magnetic pulse phenomena, and particle beam
lasers. Their reports had titles like “The Eikonal
Method in Magnetohydrodynamics” (1961), “Radar
Analysis of Waves by Interferometer Techniques”
(1963), and “The Hose Instability Dispersion Rela-
tion” (1964).
“We were interested in solving defense problems
because they were the most challenging problems to
solve,” Murph Goldberger explained in 2013 in an
interview for this book, and for the first several years
this was generally the case. Then came Vietnam.
“The high goals set by the originators of the Jason
concept were being met when the Vietnam War
intervened,” said Gordon MacDonald, who joined
the Jasons in the summer of 1963. “Murray Gell-

266
 Tue Jasons ENTER VIETNAM

Mann called to ask if I’'d like to join Jason. I

respected Murray a great deal,” and said yes to join-
ing. The first year as a Jason, MacDonald recalled,
“my contribution was principally related to [nuclear
effects] —what happens to the ionosphere when you
set off nuclear explosions, things of that sort.” But as
individual Jasons became interested in Vietnam, so
did the group. The first Jason to be very interested
was Murray Gell-Mann.
Gell-Mann was one of the most respected think-
ers in the Jason group, and one of the most esoteric.
In 1969 he would win the Nobel Prize in physics for
his discovery of quarks, a subatomic particle the
nature of which is far beyond the grasp of most peo-
ple. But Gell-Mann’s areas of interest were also
incredibly plebeian; he liked to think about things
common to all men, including mythology, prehis-
tory, and the evolution of human language. During
the 1961 summer study in Maine, Gell-Mann led a
seminar called “White Tiger.” It addressed the grow-
ing counterinsurgency movement in Vietnam from
the standpoint of “tribal warfare.” This was well
before any of the other Jason scientists were thinking
about the Vietnam problem, Goldberger recalled.
Gell-Mann had unsuccessfully tried to get the
California Institute of Technology, where he was a
professor, to open a department of behavioral sci-
ences. To Gell-Mann, guerrilla warfare was a topic
267
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

well worth examining. “Because he was intrigued,

the Jasons became intrigued,” Goldberger recalled.
“We thought, well, if the Jasons can understand
the sociology behind counterinsurgency, perhaps
the Vietnam problem” could be solved. And so
in the summer of 1964, ARPA asked the Jasons to
conduct a formal summer study on Vietnam. Wil-
liam Nierenberg, a former Manhattan Project scien-
tist, was chosen to lead the study, which was
conducted in La Jolla. This was not the first time the
Jasons examined what Goldberger called “the Viet-
nam problem,” but it was the first time they wrote a
report about it.
Murray Gell-Mann invited the revered war corre-
spondent and political scientist Bernard Fall to come
and speak to the Jason scientists that summer in La
Jolla. In 1964 Fall was considered one of the most
knowledgeable experts on Southeast Asia. His book
Street Without Joy, published in 1961, chronicled the
brutal eight-year conflict between the French army
and the Vietnamese communists, ending with the
staggering defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu.
“Street Without Joy” was the name given by French
troops to the communist-held stretch of road
between the villages of Hue and Quang Tri.
Fall had personal experience with insurgency and
counterinsurgency groups. A Jew born in Vienna in
1926, he fled with his parents to Paris after the Nazis

268
 Tue JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

annexed Austria. Fall’s father joined the French

resistance but was captured, tortured, and murdered
by the Gestapo. Fall’s mother was deported to Aus-
chwitz, then murdered in the gas chamber there. An
orphan by the age of sixteen, Fall joined the French
resistance and learned firsthand what a resistance
movement was about. After France was liberated in
1944 he joined the French army, and after the war
he worked as an analyst for the Nuremberg war
crimes tribunals. Fall won a Fulbright scholarship
and moved to America, where he was initially known
as a scholar and political scientist. But wanting to
see the guerrilla war in Indochina up close, he
became a war reporter. Still a French citizen in the
1950s, he was allowed to travel behind enemy lines
with French soldiers and reported from the battle-
field. Bernard Fall knew what it was like to be a sol-
dier. Soldiers and scholars alike admired him. He
became a U.S. citizen and was one of the few Ameri-
cans ever invited to Hanoi to interview Ho Chi
Minh.
Fall believed in and advocated for U.S. develop-
ment of counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam.
Asymmetrical warfare was a formidable foe; Fall had
seen it in person. At Dien Bien Phu, French forces
had far more sophisticated weaponry, but the com-
munist Viet Minh won the battle with the crafty use
of shovels, a Stone Age tool. The communists literally
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

dug a trench around French forces and encircled

them. Then they brought in the heavy artillery and
bombarded the French soldiers trapped inside. The
battle of Dien Bien Phu marked the climactic end of
the French occupation of Vietnam, and with the
signing of the Geneva Accords, Vietnam was divided
at the seventeenth parallel. Control of the North
went to Ho Chi Minh, and control of the South
went to Emperor Bao Dai, with Ngo Dinh Diem as
prime minister.
Fall believed that unless the Americans wanted to
repeat what had happened to the French in Viet-
nam, their efforts had to match guerrilla warfare
tactics in ingenuity. After Fall’s briefing, the Jasons
wrote a report titled “Working Paper on Internal
Warfare.” It has never been declassified but is referred
to in an unclassified report for the Naval Air Devel-
opment Center as involving a “tactical sensor system
program.” The information in this report—the
Jasons’ seminal idea of using “tactical sensors” on
the battlefield in a counterinsurgency war—would
soon become central to the war effort. In 1964 this
was considered just too long-term an idea and it was
shelved.
Two and a half years after he participated in the
Jason summer study in La Jolla, educating physicists
and mathematicians about counterinsurgency war-
fare in Vietnam, Bernard Fall was killed by a land

270
 THE JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

mine in Vietnam. With terrible irony, the place

where Fall was killed was the same stretch of road
that had given his book its title, Street Without Joy.
Fall’s book would become one of the most widely
read books among U.S. officers during the Vietnam
War. In 2012 General Colin Powell, now retired,
told the New York Times Book Review that Fall's
book was one that deeply influenced his thinking
over the course of his career from a young soldier to
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to secretary of
state. “Street Without Joy, by Bernard Fall, was a text-
book for those of us going to Vietnam in the first
wave of President Kennedy’s advisors,” Powell said.

The Jason scientists were expanding their work and

commitment to the Vietnam War, and in the process,
there was growing discord among them about how to
proceed, specifically in the scientific gray area called
social science. Some, like Murray Gell-Mann, saw
promise in understanding human motivation. Others
believed that using advanced technology was the only
way to win the war. In Gordon MacDonald’s opin-
ion, ingenuity needed to be applied across the board,
including the use of weather as a weapon. Climate
change is, and always has been, “4 driver of wars, he
believed. Drought, pestilence, flood, and famine push
people to the limits of human survival, often resulting
in war for control over what few resources remain.
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

With war escalating in Vietnam, the Pentagon sought

new ways to use weather as a weapon. As a Jason sci-
entist, MacDonald had a rare front-row seat at these
events. Most of what occurred remains classified; but
some facts have emerged. They come from the story
of Gordon MacDonald, one of the most influential
and least remembered defense science advisors of the
twentieth century.
Gordon MacDonald was born in Mexico in 1929.
His father, a Scotsman, was an accountant at a
Canadian bank in Mexico City. His mother, a secre-
tary, worked in the American embassy down the
street. His first passion was rocks, which he embraced
as a child with the enthusiasm of a geologist until his
childhood was shattered by illness. In the second
grade, MacDonald contracted a mysterious disease
that left him temporarily paralyzed in both legs and
one arm. He had polio, an acute, virulent infectious
disease that was not immediately diagnosable in
Mexico in the 1930s. He was transported by railcar
to Dallas, where, like so many child polio sufferers,
he was left alone in a hospital, feeling abandoned.
This was “not a pleasant experience,” he confided to
a fellow scientist in 1986, in a rare discussion about
his childhood trauma. From tragedy springs inspira-
tion. While recovering in the Texas hospital, Mac-
Donald developed two skills that would shape his
life: reading everything made available to him, then

ove
 Tue Jasons ENTER VIETNAM

discussing and debating the contents with a person

of equal or greater intellect.
“One very positive thing that came out of that
[experience] was an uncle, Dudley Woodward,” who
lived not far away from the hospital, MacDonald
recalled. “He made it a practice of virtually every
day coming by to see me.” Dudley Woodward was a
man of many interests, an attorney who also served
as chairman of the Board of Regents at the Univer-
sity of Texas. “He subscribed to the Dallas Morning
News for me,” said MacDonald. “I would read the
paper and be ready to discuss world events with him
every morning. We did this every single day.” Gor-
don MacDonald was just nine years old.
The young boy returned home to Mexico, but
with an acute physical disability. For seven long
years he could not attend school. “There was a gap
in my edu cat ion ,” as he put it. “Fr om sec ond to nin th
grade. ..I had tak en my firs t yea rs [of sch ool ing ] in
a Mex ica n sch ool , a chu rch sch ool , and the n I had
no for mal edu cat ion . I did a grea t dea l of rea din g at
hom e” Wha t his unc le Dud ley Wo od wa rd had
tau ght him in the hos pit al in Tex as had sha rpe ned
his abil ity to lea rn wit hou t for mal tea chi ng. His
her also hel ped , thr oug h tut ori ng. Fin all y he
mot
was well enough to attend school again and “made
he
the leap into high school.” In an understatement
added, “And I was able to do very well.”

Cake)
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

He left home for a military boarding school, San

Marcos Baptist Academy, in rural Mexico, a day and
a half away from Mexico City by train. School “was
difficult with the disability.” He explained, “I still
continued to suffer from physical deficiency, [while]
trying to maintain standing with the corps of
cadets.” San Marcos was a religious school, but it
also had a football team. “My principal ambition
was to overcome my physical defect, and so in the
last year I was there, I played football, became a
member of their starting team, and that I regarded
as a very great achievement.” During summer vaca-
tions he worked at the American Smelting and
Refining Company plant in San Luis Potosi, by the
sea, where it was his job to collect ore samples in the
field to bring back for study in the lab. During this
time, he refined his interest in rocks to specific min-
erals and crystals. To keep current with world events,
he listened to shortwave radio while he worked. In
his junior year in high school, he decided to apply to
Harvard University, and was accepted—on a foot-
ball scholarship.
The year was 1946, and Gordon MacDonald had
never been out of Mexico, except when he was in the
hospital in Texas. He took the train up from San
Luis, stopping for a short stay with an aunt in New
York City, never before having visited a city outside
Mexico or ridden on a subway. Finally, he arrived at

274
 Tue Jasons ENTER VIETNAM

the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mas-

sachusetts. “By a very good fortune I had been placed
in Massachusetts Hall, which is the oldest of the
dormitories at Harvard, and my room was right over
the room of Jim Conant, who was president [of Har-
vard].” Jim Conant was James Conant, the famous
American chemist who had just returned from
working on the Manhattan Project. “I got to know
[Conant] very well later in life” MacDonald said,
but their first meeting was far more commonplace.
“He made a point of letting [me] know I was living
over his office, and to be appropriately quiet during
the daytime hours.”
MacDonald chose physics as a course of study
but soon decided that Harvard had “miserable”
physics teachers. “I began to see the difference
between memory and understanding when it comes
to difficult subjects,” he said, meaning that to learn
facts by rote was one thing, but to understand con-
cepts on a fundamental level required serious intellec-
tual discipline. After six months of physics, he decided
to shift his concentration to geology and math.
Socially he struggled. Many students had matricu-
lated from exclusive boarding schools—St. Paul’s,
Andover, and Exeter—and coming from a Bible
the
school in Mexico, he felt outclassed. Playing on
football team proved almost impossible, but he
refused to give up and instead persevered.
275
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

In his second year at Harvard, his interest in

weather peaked during a confrontation with a visit-
ing professor. The venerable Dr. Walter Munk, one
of the world’s greatest oceanographers, was giving a
seminar on the variable rotation of the earth and, as
Munk later recalled, “how that was associated with a
seasonal change in the high-altitude jet stream that
had just been discovered.” So, “feeling reasonably
secure that no one in the audience knew anything
about this, I was surprised when a student in the first
row interrupted [me] with rude comments about
neglect of tides, variable ocean currents, and such
like.” Dr. Munk was not amused and dismissed the
student's questions as inconsequential. The student
was Gordon MacDonald. “Four years later I gave a
much-improved account at MIT; there he was again
sitting in the front row, complaining that I had not
answered his questions of four years ago.”
In 1950 MacDonald graduated summa cum
laude from Harvard, the first ever to do so in the
geology department. Despite his physical limita-
tions, he managed to play football and row crew in
intercollegiate scull racing. He was granted mem-
bership in Harvard’s legendary Society of Fellows,
making him one of twenty-four scholars from
around the world who were given complete freedom
to do what they wanted to do, all expenses paid, for
three years. He was the youngest fellow on record,

276
 THE JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

and remains so to date. MacDonald traveled around

the country and the world, returning to Harvard for
a master’s degree in 1952 and a Ph.D. in geology and
geophysics in 1954. Some of his fondest memories of
that period in his life were the so-called Monday
night sherry dinners hosted by the Society of Fel-
lows. During them, he enjoyed long discussions with
physics giants like Enrico Fermi, with whom he dis-
cussed the earth’s rotation, its core, and its crust—
still rather mysterious concepts in 1959. “And with
Adlai Stevenson, who was a candidate for president,
I talked about science policy,” said MacDonald. “I
became aware that there was this much larger world,
other than the world of rocks, minerals, and ther-
modynamic relationships.” Suddenly it all “sort of
fitted together.” He wanted to learn everything he
could about the geophysical world, but also about
how those who inhabited it used science for their
own benefit.
His academic output was phenomenal. MacDon-
ald was able to see, in ways other scientists before him
had not, how elements of the earth were connected.
“Paleontology is not distinct from astronomy,” he
said, In an award from the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1959, he was praised for his
groundbreaking studies. His work, the academy
declared, “brought together very distinct parts of
geophysics: meteorology, oceanography, the interior

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

of the earth, and astronomical observations about

the earth’s rotation.” In 1958 he appeared on Walter
Cronkite’s program The World Tomorrow, in the
first-ever public discussion on American television
about how man would soon be able to explore the
moon. Then he became a consultant for the Penta-
gon, for ARPA, and for NASA. “I was very enthusi-
astic,” he said. “I felt we could learn a great deal about
the earth by looking at the moon, and so I was eager
to participate.”
As passionate as MacDonald could become about
earth sciences, he could also lose interest in a subject
as quickly. By 1960, he said, “I was becoming more
interested in the atmosphere, working on climate
problems.” The University of California, Los Ange-
les, was developing a program in atmospheric sci-
ence, and he accepted a position there as director of
the Atmospheric Research Laboratory. At UCLA he
found himself working on weather and the iono-
sphere. This led him to become interested in climate
control. In 1962 he was appointed to the National
Academy of Sciences and its Committee on Atmo-
spheric Sciences. In 1963 MacDonald was elected
chairman of the Panel on Weather and Climate
Modification, which was part of the National Acad-
emy of Sciences.
In 1963, weather modification was still legal. The
job of the panel, MacDonald wrote, was “to take a

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 THE JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

deliberate and thoughtful review of the present sta-

tus and activities in this field, and of its potential
and limitations for the future.” The public was told
that the National Academy of Sciences was investi-
gating weather modification for “benign purposes
only,” in areas that included making rain by seeding
clouds. “There is increasing but somewhat ambigu-
ous evidence that precipitation from some types of
clouds and storm systems can be modestly increased
and redistributed by seeding techniques,” MacDon-
ald wrote in a 1963 report.
At the same time, in his classified work, Gordon
MacDonald was becoming deeply interested in
weather modification. He told the Journal of the
American Statistical Association: “I became increas-
ingly convinced that scientists should be more
actively engaged in questions of environmental mod-
ification, and that [the] federal government should
have a more organized approach to the problem.
While research could take place in both the public
and the private sector, the government should take
the lead in large-scale field experiments and monitor-
ing, and in establishing appropriate legal frameworks
for private initiatives.”
At the Pentagon, where the uses of weather weap-
ons were being explored, MacDonald had an addi-
tional job: serving as a scientific consultant. In the
winter of 1965 there was a feeling of “hesitancy” at
229.
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the Pentagon about how to proceed in Vietnam, and

by late fall, the feeling was moving toward what he
called “complexity.” Secretary of Defense McNa-
mara and his colleagues “were searching, almost
desperately, for a means to contain the war,” Mac-
Donald told an audience of fellow Jasons in 1984. In
December 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
secretary of defense authorized ARPA to research
and develop “forest fire as a military weapon” in
Vietnam.
The secret program, called Project EMOTE, was
developed by ARPA, ostensibly to study the use of
“environmental modification techniques.” It was
conducted in partnership with the Department of
Agriculture’s Forest Service, under ARPA Order
818. The central premise of the program was to
determine how to destroy large areas of jungle
growth by firestorm. Jungles are inherently damp
and nonflammable. In order to modify the jungle’s
natural condition to “support combustion,” ARPA
scientists discovered that the lush jungle canopy had
to be destroyed with chemicals before it would effec-
tively burn to the ground. ARPA already had the
arsenal of chemicals to do this, from its ongoing
Project Agile defoliant campaign. The herbicides,
varied in composition, were now being called Agent
Orange, Agent Purple, Agent Pink, and other colors
of the rainbow. Project EMOTE called for millions

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 THE JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

of gallons of Agent Orange to be sprayed in the for-

ests as one element of the “weather modification
campaign.”
Since the earliest days of recorded history, forest
fire has been used as a weapon, and the authors of
the ARPA study quoted from the Bible to make this
point. “The battle was fought in the forest of
Ephraim; and the forest devoured more people that
day than the sword,” they wrote, citing 2 Samuel 18.
In Vietnam, forests provided cover for the enemy, as
they had since time immemorial. “Forests were a
haven and refuge for bandits, insurgents and rebel
bands,” the report stated. Leaders from “Robin
Hood [to] Tito to Castro had learned to conduct
successful military operations from forest lairs.”
Chairman Mao boasted that insurgents were like
“fish who swim in the sea of peasants,’ but to the
ARPA scientists working on weather modification,
the insurgents were more like jungle cats, hiding in
the forest to prey on unsuspecting villagers. “A recent
study of VC [Vietcong] bases showed that 83 per-
cent were located in the dense forest,” the report noted.
Forests had served the enemy throughout history.
Now, modern technology was working to put an
end to that.
In late March 1965, the 315th Air Commando
Group conducted a firebombing raid, code-named
Operation Sherwood Forest, “against” the Boi Loi

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Forest, twenty-five miles west of Saigon. Aircraft

loaded with 78,800 gallons of herbicide sprayed
Agent Orange over the jungle, after which B-52
bombers dropped M35 incendiary bombs. But it
had rained earlier in the day and the experiment did
not result in “appreciable destruction of forest cover,”
as was hoped. ARPA postponed the next test until
the height of the dry season, ten months later. Oper-
ation Hot Tip, on January 24, 1966, mimicked the
earlier raid but with slightly better results, mostly
because there was no rain.
The first full-scale operation occurred a year later,
again at the height of the dry season, and was code-
named. Operation Pink Rose. This time, U.S. Air
Force crews, flying specially modified UC-123B and
UC-123K aircraft, sprayed defoliants on a first pass,
then sprayed a chemical drying agent on a second
pass. Next, the Air Force flew B-52 bombers that
dropped cluster bombs to ignite the chemicals. Tar-
gets included “known enemy base areas” and also vil-
lage power lines. Short of “killing” the jungle and an
unknown number of its inhabitants, and starting
localized fires, no “self-sustaining firestorm” occurred.
There were simply too many environmental factors at
issue, ARPA scientists concluded. Rain and humidity
consistently got in the way.
One year later a secret operation, code-named
Operation Inferno, was launched against the U

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 THE JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

Minh Forest, the Forest of Darkness. Instead of using

defoliants, the Air Force flew fourteen C-130s low
over the jungle canopy, pouring oil from fifty-five-
gallon drums over each target area, four times. A for-
ward air controller then ignited the fuel by sending
white phosphorus rockets to each target. An intense
inferno ignited and burned. But as soon as the fuel
was consumed, the fire died down and went out.
ARPA’s final 170-page report, originally classified
secret, is kept in the Special Collections of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture in Maryland. The report
indicates that forest flammability depended primar-
ily on two elements. One was weather, which could
not be controlled. The other was “the amount of
dead vegetation on or near the ground surface,”
which scientists determined could be controlled.
“Forest flammability can be greatly increased by
killing all shrub vegetation, selecting optimum
weather conditions for burning, and igniting fires in
a preselected pattern,” ARPA scientists wrote. But to
kill all shrub vegetation was too big a task even for
ARPA, and the idea of using forest fire as a military
weapon was shelved.

As war in Vietnam widened, the Jason scientists

were continuously consulted for hard science ideas
about how to defeat the communist insurgents. In
1965 they were asked to focus on the Ho Chi Minh

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Trail, the Pentagon’s name for that system of 1,500

miles of roads and pathways that stretched from
North Vietnam, through Laos and Cambodia, and
down into South Vietnam. Some of the roads were
wide enough for trucks and oxcarts; others were
meant for bicycles and feet. The Defense Intelli-
gence Agency (DIA) determined that each day some
two hundred tons of weapons and supplies made
their way down communist supply routes, from the
North to the South, by way of the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. The trail contained storage depots, supply
bunkers, underground command and control facili-
ties, even hospitals. A top secret report by the
National Security Agency, declassified in 2007,
described the trail as “one of the great achievements
in military engineering of the twentieth century.”
Cartographers, geographers, and map designers
briefed the Jason scientists on the Ho Chi Minh
Trail and its terrain. The Jasons read the RAND
prisoner of war transcripts, originally compiled by
Joe Zasloff and John Donnell, to learn more about
how things worked on the trail. ARPA’s Seymour
Deitchman, still overseeing Project Agile at the Pen-
tagon, sent the Jason scientists dozens of reports on
the trail, classified and unclassified. To Jason scien-
tist William Nierenberg, the trail seemed almost
alive, “an anastomosed structure,” he wrote, like a
human body or a tree, a “network of interconnected

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 THE JASONS ENTER VIETNAM

channels,” like blood vessels or branches, which

depended on one another to flow. The Pentagon
wanted the Jasons to figure out how to sever the
trail’s arteries.
ARPA doubled the Jasons’ annual budget, from
$250,000 to $500,000, roughly $3.7 million in
2015, and the scientists began working on tactical
technologies they thought might be useful in
obstructing movement along the trail. At least three
studies the Jasons performed during this time period
remain classified as of 2015; they are believed to be
titled “Working Paper on Internal Warfare, Viet-
nam,” “Night Vision for Counterinsurgents,” and
“A Study of Data Related to Viet Cong/North Viet-
namese Army Logistics and Manpower.” Because
the contents are still classified, it is not known how
they were received by Secretary McNamara. But
according to Murph Goldberger, McNamara felt the
ideas the Jasons were proposing would take too long
to implement. “We did our studies based on the
assumption of a relatively long war lasting several
years,” he said, and the secretary of defense wanted
more immediate results. So McNamara asked the
Jason scientists to determine if it would be effective
to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Ho Chi Minh
Trail.
The Jasons’ top secret restricted data report “Tac-
tical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia” remained
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

classified until 2003, when the Nautilus Institute in

Berkeley, California, obtained a copy under the
Freedom of Information Act. “The idea had been
discussed at the Pentagon,” said Seymour Deitch-
man in 2003, in response to the outrage the report
created. Deitchman recalled that Secretary McNa-
mara believed the Jason scientists were best equipped
to decide if using nuclear weapons was a wise idea.
“Mr. McNamara would have said, ‘There has been
some talk about using tactical nuclear weapons to
close the passes into Laos; tell me what you think of
the idea,” according to Deitchman, who says the
Jasons were asked to determine “whether it made
sense to think about using nuclear weapons to close
off the supply routes [along] the Ho Chi Minh trail
through Laos over which the supplies and people
moved.”
For a possible nuclear target, the Jasons focused
on the Mu Gia Pass, a steep mountain roadway
between Vietnam and Laos. Thousands of Viet-
cong, as well as weapons and supplies, moved
through this pass, which the Jasons described as “a
roadway carved out of a steep hillside, much like the
road through Independence Pass southeast of Aspen,
Colorado.” If nuclear weapons were to be used
against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Jasons con-
cluded, they should be tactical nuclear weapons,
lightweight and portable like the Davy Crockett

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nuclear weapon, a mockup of which Herb York had

transported from California to Washington, D.C.,
in his carry-on luggage aboard a commercial flight
in 1959.
But the Jason scientists calculated that use of
nuclear weapons to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail
would not be as easy as one might think. Indeed,
“the numbers of TNW [tactical nuclear weapons]
required will be very large over a period of time,” the
Jason scientists wrote. “At least one TNW is required
for each target, and the targets are mostly small and
fleeting. A reasonable guess at the order of magni-
tude of weapons requirements...would be ten per
day or 3000 per year.” The Vietcong were tenacious,
the Jasons said, and it was likely that even if the pass
were destroyed in a nuclear strike, the battle-
hardened communist fighters would simply create a
new pass and new supply trails. As an alternative,
the Jason scientists proposed dropping radioactive
waste at certain key choke points along the trail,
thereby rendering it impassable. But radioactivity
decays, they explained, and the window of impass-
ability would also pass. In the end, the Jasons argued
against using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam
and Laos. They warned that if the United States
were to use them, China and the Soviet Union would
be more likely to provide similar tactical nuclear weap-
ons from their own arsenals to the Vietcong and to
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the government of North Vietnam. “A very serious

long-range problem would arise,” the Jasons warned,
namely, “Insurgent groups everywhere in the world
would take note and would try by all means avail-
able to acquire TNW [tactical nuclear weapons] for
themselves.”
The study was read by many at the Pentagon.
Dropping a few thousand nuclear bombs was not an
option, and the Jasons were told to come up with
another idea to solve the Ho Chi Minh Trail prob-
lem. “We put our thinking caps on,” recalled Murph
Goldberger, and got to work. Their next idea would
totally revolutionize the way the U.S. military con-
ducts wars.

288
 CHAPTER TWELVE

The Electronic Fence

ieutenant Richard “Rip” Jacobs had a terrible

[see for someone who flew on combat
missions in a war zone. “Rip” made many of
the other fliers and crewmembers in VO-67 Navy
squadron think of RIP, “Rest in peace,” a phrase
used after a person is dead.
The real reason Jacobs was called Rip was because
of a mishap in high school, just a few years before, in
Georgia. “I stepped on this girl’s dress at a high
school dance and I accidentally tore it,” Rip Jacobs
explains. “Then I kind of got the nickname.”
Now it was February 27, 1968, and Rip Jacobs,
age twenty-four, stood on the tarmac of the Nakhon
Phanom Royal Thai Air Base in Thailand, eighteen
miles from the border with Vietnam. Jacobs was
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

preparing for a highly classified mission he knew

very little about, other than that it involved drop-
ping high-technology sensors mounted on racks
beneath an OP-2E Neptune armed reconnaissance
aircraft onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He was part of
Lucky Crew Seven, and today’s assigned target was
in Khammouane Province, in Laos, about fifteen
miles southwest of the Ban Karai Pass. This was
deeply held enemy territory. Jacobs had been on
twelve missions like this, but recently things had
gotten bad.
Six weeks before, on January 11, 1968, Crew Two
was lost. Nine men KIA. Killed in action. Bodies
not recovered. They had left early in the morning on
a sensor-dropping mission. Their aircraft lost radio
and radar contact at 9:57 a.m., and they never
returned to base. “It didn’t cross my mind they
wouldn’t come back,” Jacobs remembered in 2013.
The men had left on an ordinary mission that morn-
ing, same as they always did. They even had the
Crew Two mascot with them, a black-and-white
puppy everyone called Airman Snoopy Seagrams.
“Tt got somewhat routine. Then word spread. ‘Crew
Two down. No parachutes, no beeper. No Jolly
Greens,” meaning search and rescue crews.
On February 17, a similar thing had happened.
Crew Five was lost. They had completed the first

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 THE ELECTRONIC FENCE

target run. During the second run, one of the escort

aircraft reported the OP-2E Neptune’s starboard
engine had been hit and was on fire. During the last
radio transmission, one of the Neptune pilots was
heard saying, “We're beat up pretty bad.” Then
nothing after that. Nine men KIA. Bodies not recov-
ered. No beepers, no parachutes, no Jolly Greens.
The area was filled with Vietcong.
On this morning, February 27, 1968, Crew Seven
consisted of nine men—eight crew and a com-
mander. Navy captain Paul L. Milius would be fly-
ing the aircraft. Navy airmen like Rip Jacobs knew
well enough to stay focused and cheerful, but at
times a foreboding crept in. This was mission num-
ber thirteen. Jacobs checked his flight suit. Checked
his gear. Checked the rack of technology that was
the centerpiece of the mission.
Each mission was different, depending on the
technology. Sometimes the OP-2E Neptunes had to
fly in low and level over the trail, as was the case
when crews were dropping listening devices called
acoubuoys. Each sensor was jettisoned from the air-
craft with its own small parachute attached. Aircraft
needed to fly low on these missions because too
much altitude raised the likelihood that the para-
chute lanyards would get tangled up in too much air
and fail to emplace themselves in the canopy of trees.

29
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

But flying low and level made them an easy target

for the Vietcong antiaircraft guns that were so prev-
alent along the trail.
Other missions involved sensors that had to be
dropped from a higher altitude, around five thou-
sand feet. This was the case with Crew Seven’s mis-
sion today. They would be dropping Air Delivered
Seismic Intrusion Detectors, or ADSIDs. The seis-
mic devices were made by Sandia weapons labora-
tory for ARPA and were based on technology
developed for an earlier ARPA program, Vela Hotel,
which involved ground sensors for detecting nuclear
tests. The ADSID sensors were approximately two
and a half feet long and five inches in diameter. Each
one looked like a miniature missile, or a large dart,
with tail spikes that were released outward once the
ADSID was lodged firmly in the ground. ADSIDs
were designed to penetrate the earth from a high
speed and to be deployed from the OP-2E without a
parachute.
Standing on the tarmac preparing for the mis-
sion, Rip Jacobs was ready. He double-checked his
parachute. Then he climbed aboard the aircraft.
Crew Seven left the tarmac on time. Roughly an
hour into the mission, Captain Milius reported his
position not far from the Ban Karai Pass. Rip Jacobs
was standing near the deck hatch, observing ord-
nance drops. Ensign Tom Wells was seated in a well-

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 THE ELECTRONIC FENCE

armored chair, with his face in the Norton bombsite,

calling out coordinates when suddenly the aircraft
was engulfed in flames. “That's how it happens,”
Wells explained in 2013. “You're flying fine, then
wham, you're hit.”
An antiaircraft projectile fired by the Vietcong
had come up through the bottom skin of the air-
plane and exploded in the radar well. “Now every-
thing was on fire,” Wells recalled. “I grabbed the fire
extinguisher next to the hydraulic panel, but it was
on fire. It burned the skin off my hands.” In a matter
of seconds the flight deck area was filled with dense,
dark smoke.
Lieutenant Barney Walsh, the co-pilot, climbed
out of his seat and started to make his way to the
back. “We couldn’t control anything” in the cock-
pit, he says. “I’m yelling ‘Get out!’ That was the only
choice. That was it.” Someone else hollered, “Hatch
open, parachutes ready to go!”
There was blood everywhere. In the chaos, Rip
Jacobs tried to ascertain what was going on. Then he
realized Petty Officer John F. Hartzheim, an avion-
ics technician, had been hit badly.
“He wasn’t wearing his parachute,” Wells says.
“He had taken it off because it was so hot,” Jacobs
explains. “He was bleeding badly. Mortally wounded.
I thought about trying to get a parachute on him. The
smoke and flames were so intense. The G-forces. I

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

was standing in a pool of [Hartzheim’s] blood and I

slipped and fell down on the floor. The plane was
going down. In your mind you're saying, “With the
last crew, nobody got out.’”
Someone hollered again. “Parachutes, get ready.
Go!”
Rip Jacobs turned to the deck hatch. He jumped
out of the burning airplane and began to fall. He
pulled his ripcord. The chute opened. What hap-
pened after that he can’t get his memory to recall.
Time passed. Was he dead? After a while he realized
he had landed in a tree.
“I was alive. Everything hurt. Back. Legs. I
looked down and I was covered in blood.” The way
he had landed in the tree canopy, his body was par-
allel to the ground. The parachute lanyards had
wrapped around him in a way that made it impossi-
ble for him to wriggle free. “Did I remember to hit
my locator button when I was falling through the
air?” He asked himself this question again and
again.
He tried to reach the button with his chin. It was
out of reach.
“T was pretty sure I’d set off my locator button,”
Jacobs recalls. “But what if I didn’t? What if I hadn’t
activated the locator? I’d die up here. What if no one
knows where I am?”
Then a worse thought. He heard sounds. The

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 THE ELECTRONIC FENCE

unmistakable sound of gunfire. Single shots. One

after the next. Getting closer. There were Vietcong
on the ground looking for VO-67 crewmembers
who had made it out of the burning airplane they
had just shot down. More gunfire. What if the Viet-
cong spotted him up here in this tree?
“I had to be real quiet,’ Jacobs recalls. “Every
time I tried to move at all, all the dead stuff around
me fell to the ground.” During missions, there were
F-4 Phantom fighter jets that protected the OP-2E
Neptunes from any approaching enemy MiGs. “One
[F-4] flew over the top of my head. Did he see me?”
Three, maybe four hours passed. “It felt like
eternity.”
Suddenly, Rip Jacobs heard the faint sound of a
helicopter. Or was he imagining things? Then he
was certain. He was hearing the unmistakable sound
of helicopter blades. A Jolly Green. He saw it in the
distance. A rescue team. Then a crushing thought.
“What if it didn’t see me? What if it was out search-
ing a wide area?” If he hadn’t hit his locator button,
no one would know he was here in this tree.
And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the
helicopter slow down. Slower. Closer. The Jolly Green
was hovering overhead.
Out of the helicopter came a Pararescue crew-
man. The man was sitting on a little seat attached to
a metal cable. The cable got longer and the man got

295,
 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

closer as he was lowered down to where Rip Jacobs

was tangled up in the tree.
“He reached out to me. I saw his two arms. Then
he folded down this little seat next to his seat. He
pulled out a knife and cut me from the shroud lines.”
Rip Jacobs climbed onto the seat beside the Para-
rescue crewman. “I never talked to him. The heli-
copter was deafening. We were extremely high up.
Adrenaline was pumping through my body. I was
covered in blood.” Jacobs was pulled into the Jolly
Green. “There were medical people inside. They
told me I was bleeding badly, but mostly I was cov-
ered in Hartzheim’s blood.”
The Jolly Green made its way back to Nakhon
Phanom Air Base. Once the helicopter touched
down, hundreds of people swarmed out onto the
tarmac. It seemed like everyone from the VO-67
Navy squadron was there. It was overwhelming,
Jacobs recalled. “To go from that terrified to that
relieved.” He was taken into a room for a debriefing.
Hartzheim had died in the aircraft. Captain Milius
was MIA, missing in action. Everyone else made it
out alive and was rescued by now. “An Air Force
officer started asking me a lot of questions. It took a
moment to register that he was asking about the sen-
sor devices. The devices were laid out in a string,
with timing. He kept asking about the devices. I
kept thinking I could care less about where those

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 THE ELECTRONIC FENCE

things went right now. But he kept talking about the

devices. It was absurd.”
At the time, Rip Jacobs had no idea that the sensor
technology program he was part of was the highest-
priority program of the war. He had no idea that the
top secret program had cost well over $1 billion to bring
from conception to fruition. Or that it was the brain-
child of the Jason scientists—an idea they had come
up with less than two years before, during a Jason sum-
mer study in Santa Barbara in 1966.
The Jasons called their idea the “Anti-Infiltration
Barrier.” The Pentagon gave it a series of code names as
it transitioned from theory to reality. First it was called
Project Practice Nine, then Illinois City, then Dyer
Marker, then Igloo White and Muscle Shoals. After
the war was over and parts of the program were
made public, it would become known—and often
ridiculed —as McNamara’s electronic fence.

The electronic fence idea was born in the summer of

1966, shortly after the Jason scientists completed the
study about whether or not the Pentagon should use
nuclear weapons to cut off weapons traffic along the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Defense Department was
desperately seeking new ways to win the Vietnam
War. The bombing campaigns were failing. ARPA’s
Project Agile was having no effect on the commu-
nist insurgency. Weather warfare wasn’t working.
297.
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Nuclear weapons were not an option. Soon there

would be 385,000 U.S. military personnel in South
Vietnam. And yet despite these numbers and the
efforts of so many involved, Ho Chi Minh’s men
and matériel kept pouring down the Ho Chi Minh
Trail in a steady, unrelenting stream.
Secretary McNamara wanted an unassailable
solution, and he looked to the Jason scientists to help
figure out a way to sever the trail’s arteries. Their idea
involved creating a series of electronic barriers across
major access routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
so-called “denial fields,” running through central
and eastern Laos, into Vietnam. The Jasons proposed
to bug the battlefield so as to be able to “hear” what
was happening on the trail, then send in strike air-
craft to bomb Vietcong troops and truck convoys on
the move.
As ARPA’s head of counterinsurgency, Seymour
Deitchman organized the Jason summer study and
then flew out to Santa Barbara to oversee efforts.
Secretary McNamara personally made sure that
General Maxwell Taylor and William Sullivan, the
U.S. ambassadors to Vietnam and Laos, traveled to
Santa Barbara to brief the Jasons on the Pentagon’s
electronic barrier idea. The ambassadors’ presence
that summer underscored just how badly the Penta-
gon needed the concept to work, even if the diplomats
thought privately that the fence was a foolish idea.

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 THE ELECTRONIC FENCE

“Secretary McNamara asked me if I would go out

with General Taylor, to talk to the Jason group out
at Santa Barbara, where they were working on some
electronics,” Ambassador Sullivan later recalled.
“Neither Taylor nor I thought very much of it. My
expectations of it were never very high.”
The electronic fence had two faces, one public
and one classified. The program that the public
would be told about was a physical fence or barrier
that was being constructed by the Pentagon to dis-
rupt traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This fence
would be built by Army engineers and guarded by
Army soldiers. “A mechanical barrier built of chain
link fencing, barbed wire, guard towers, and a
no-man’s land,” as Jason scientist William Nieren-
berg later described it. But the secret fence the Jason
scientists were to design required no soldiers to keep
guard. Instead, high-technology sensors would be
covertly implanted along the trail.
Since their creation in 1960, the Jason scientists
had been involved in many of the most classified
sensor programs ARPA initiated, including the
Navy's development of sonobuoys and magnetic
detectors, Sandia’s development of seismic sensors,
and the Army’s development of infrared sensors.
Now, during the 1966 summer study, the Jason sci-
entists developed a plan to fuse, or merge, various
sensor technologies and to make them work together

299
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

as a system, borrowing anti-submarine warfare tac-

tics used by the Navy. Except instead of listening for
Soviet submarines in a vast ocean expanse, the anti-
infiltration barrier would listen for Vietcong fighters
in a sea of jungle trails.
The prototype for the Santa Barbara summer
study was ARPA Study No. 1, also called Project
137, which had taken place-at the National War Col-
lege at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., in the
summer of 1958. This time, in Santa Barbara, the
scientists lived in University of California dormito-
ries looking out over the Pacific Ocean. In the morn-
ings, they gathered in a university lecture hall for
daily briefings. They wrote reports in the afternoon
and gathered together again in the evening for din-
ner and to share ideas. They studied history’s great
barriers and walls built over the previous two thou-
sand years, from the walls around Jerusalem, to the
Great Wall of China, to the Nazis’ Siegfried Line.
During breaks, Murph Goldberger recalled playing
tennis. The particle physicist Henry Kendall surfed
in the Pacific waves. The nuclear physicist Val Fitch
and the experimental physicist Leon Lederman took
long walks around the campus grounds. It was an
interesting idea, this electronic fence. But could it be
done?
The Jasons produced a classified study called Air-
Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier. In it, they con-

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cluded that an electronic fence could in fact be built

across and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The bar-
rier would be constructed of the most advanced sen-
sors available in the United States, including audio
and seismic sensors, but also thermal, electromag-
netic, and chemical sensors designed to detect fluc-
tuations in body heat, engine heat, and even scent.
Initially, these sensors would be implanted along the
trail by being dropped out of aircraft, like the OP-2E
Neptune, flying low over the trail. Some of the small,
camouflaged sensor packages would be carried down
to the ground by small parachutes, while others
would be jettisoned into the earth like spears. The
idea was that enemy troops moving down the trail
would trigger these sensors with movement or
sound. The sensors would in turn relay the informa-
tion to overhead reconnaissance and surveillance
aircraft, which would in turn relay the information
to the “brain” of the progra—a m room full of com-
puters inside a highly classified Infiltration Surveil-
lance Center, most likely at a U.S. air base in
Thailand.
Computers would play a key role, the Jason scien-
tists imagined. The machines would analyze and
interpret the sensor data. Technicians would then use
the information to pinpoint the exact locations of
communist fighters, trucks, and other transport vehi-
cles, including bicycles and oxen carts. Military

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commanders would then dispatch aircraft to drop

SADEYE cluster bombs on jungle fighters moving
down the trails. These unguided, or “dumb,” bombs
each carried a payload of 665 one-pound tennis-
ball-sized BLU-26B fragmentation, or “frag,” bombs,
each with a delay fuse that allowed the submunitions
to blow up just above the ground, spraying razor-
sharp steel shards in a kill radius of roughly eight
hundred feet. Jason scientist Richard Garwin, a
nuclear physicist and ordnance expert who, years
before, helped design the Castle Bravo hydrogen
bomb, held a seminar on the SADEYE cluster bomb
and other munitions that would be most effective when
accompanying the sensors on the trail. The Jason scien-
tists determined that the trail should be seeded with
button bomblets, small, “aspirin-size”? mini-bombs
designed to make a firecracker-like noise when stepped
on, thereby triggering the airdropped acoustic sen-
sors. Two anti-truck bombs were also included in
the design, coin-sized “Gravel mines,” and larger
land mines called Dragontooth mines, so named
because they looked like giant teeth. These anti-
truck bombs were designed to damage vehicle tires,
which would slow convoys down and give strike air-
craft more time to hit their targets. When stepped
on they were powerful enough to remove a person’s
foot.
The electronic fence concept was a colossal under-

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taking with many moving parts. The Jason scientists

were very specific regarding the numbers of bombs it
required: “20 million Gravel mines per month; pos-
sibly 25 million button bomblets per month; 10,000
SADEYE-BLU-26B clusters per month,” the sum
total of which made up “by far the major fraction [of
what] has been estimated to be about $800 million
per year” in operational costs alone. “It is difficult to
assess the likely effectiveness of an air-supported bar-
rier of this type,” the Jasons concluded in their writ-
ten report. “We are not sure the system will make the
[trail] nearly impenetrable, but we feel it has a good
claim of being the foundation of a system that will,
over the years.” Finally, a prescient warning: “We see
the possibility of a long war.”
With the work complete, the summer study came
to an end. On September 1, 1966, Goldberger,
Deitchman, and several other Jasons flew to the
Pentagon to brief Secretary McNamara on their
final proposal for an electronic fence. The projected
costs had risen to roughly one billion to get the fence
up and running, they said, and it could be con-
structed in about a year and a half. McNamara was
impressed.
Meanwhile, that same summer, Secretary McNa-
mara had assembled a second group of scientists on
the east coast—made up of Jason scientists and
non-Jason scientists from Harvard and MIT —also

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working on the electronic fence idea. This group,

called Jason East, conducted its work on the campus
of Dana Hall, a girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachu-
setts. The two study groups were given similar infor-
mation, classified and unclassified, and came up
with likeminded ideas about what would work best
on this fence project and why. Pleased with both sets
of results, McNamara merged the two studies into
one.
A second briefing took place on September 6,
1966, this time at the Cape Cod summer home of
Jason East member Jerrod Zacharias. Secretary
McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense John
McNaughton, and Director of Defense Department
Research and Engineering John Foster (who, like his
predecessors Herb York and Harold Brown, had served
as director of the Livermore laboratory before work-
ing at the Pentagon as the liaison between ARPA and
the secretary of defense) helicoptered in to the meet-
ing on Cape Cod. Gordon MacDonald represented
the Jason group at the secret briefing. “The occasion
was highly informal,” he remembered, in one of the
only known written recollections of the meeting.
“Maps were spread out on the floor, drinks were
served, a dog kept crossing the demilitarized zone as
top secret matters were discussed. Even though the
subject was the Jason study, I was the only Jason pres-
ent.’ Seymour Deitchman did most of the talking, “It

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was, you know, a typical social occasion,” MacDon-

ald recalled, except the participants were “just...
deciding the next years of the Vietnam War.”
But at the Pentagon, McNamara’s electronic
fence idea was belittled by most of the generals.
When McNamara sent the final Jason study to Gen-
eral Earle Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for
review, they rejected the idea. General Wheeler
thought it was too expensive and feared it would
pull valuable resources away from the front lines.
“The very substantial funds required for the barrier
system would be obtained from current Service
resources thereby affecting adversely important cur-
rent programs,” General Wheeler wrote in his
response. Admiral Ulysses Sharp, commander in
chief of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), saw the
entire construction effort as “impractical.” The Joint
Chiefs felt that McNamara’s electronic fence idea
would require too much time and treasure, and
relied too heavily on technology, some of which did
not yet exist. “It [is] CINCPAC’s opinion that main-
tenance of an air supported barrier might result in a
dynamic ‘battle of the barrier, and that the intro-
duction of new components into the barrier system
would depend not only on R&D and production
capability, but would also depend on the capability
to place the companions in the right place at the
right time.” It was simply too complicated—not

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just to implement but to create. “CINCPAC con-

cluded that even if the US were to invest a great deal
of time, effort, and resources into a barrier project, it
was doubtful that such a barrier would improve
appreciably the US position in RVN [the Republic
of Vietnam].” The commander of Military Assis-
tanceerations Vietnam, kept his opinion suc-
cinct: “It is necessary to point out that I strongly
Oppose commitment to create and man a barrier.”
On September 15, 1966, McNamara reviewed
the negative opinions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the commander in chief of the Pacific, and others,
and overruled them. The secretary of defense had
the authority to move ahead with the electronic
fence with or without the support of his military com-
manders, and he did, with the classification of top
secret. That same day McNamara appointed Lieu-
tenant General Alfred D. Starbird head of Joint Task
Force 728. Starbird, an Army officer, was a favorite
of the secretary of defense. He knew how to handle
highly classified, highly sensitive military projects
that involved thousands of people and billions of
dollars. Starbird had overseen the nuclear detona-
tions in space, code-named Checkmate and Bluegill
Triple Prime, during the height of the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis. Now he was in charge of developing the
barrier and overseeing its deployment in the war the-
ater. He had an impossible deadline of one year.

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General Starbird was a master bureaucrat, soldier,

government advisor, and engineer. Fast and thor-
ough, he was a consummate athlete with a brilliant
mind. He’d competed in Hitler’s Olympics in 1936,
in the pentathlon. After serving in World War II,
Starbird had served in Europe as director of the
Army’s Office of the Chief of Engineers. During the
development of the hydrogen bomb, he served as
director of Military Applications for the Atomic
Energy Commission, acting as liaison between the
Defense Department and the AEC. He had a photo-
graphic memory and never lost his cool.
Joint Task Force 728, also called the Defense
Communications Planning Group, was in charge of
planning, preparing, and executing the electronic
fence. Starbird got to work immediately, acquiring
space at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington,
D.C., as his headquarters in the United States. He
began outlining projects, designating assignments,
and creating schedules. For his Scientific Advisory
Committee, Starbird hired seven of the fifteen Jason
scientists who had worked on the original Santa Bar-
bara summer study, including Murph Goldberger
and Gordon MacDonald. A skillful diplomat, Star-
bird pulled together leaders from the four services.
He had an enormous task in front of him, just the
kind of operation he was used to. Technology, muni-
tions, aircraft, ground systems, and “high-speed”

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

computers. In October, McNamara and Starbird

traveled to Vietnam to meet with field commanders.
When McNamara returned, he briefed President
Johnson on the barrier program, officially, for the
first time. On January 12, 1967, the classified
National Security Action Memorandum No. 358
gave the top secret electronic fence, then code-
named Project Practice Nine, the “highest national
priority” for expenditures and authorization. For
reasons not explained, Walt Rostow signed for the
president of the United States. Starbird had a billion
dollars at his disposal and the authority to get the
electronic fence up in one year’s time. The program
was the single most expensive high-technology proj-
ect of the Vietnam War. It is nothing short of aston-
ishing that the VO-67 Navy squadron was actually
flying combat missions one year later, in January
1968.

A few months before the sensor-dropping missions

began, General Starbird decided that he needed a
liaison in Saigon, someone who could keep an ear to
the ground inside CIA prisons and detention facili-
ties to determine if the Vietcong had gotten word
about what the U.S. military was planning on the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was hard to find a qualified
person. Starbird asked around at ARPA and was
referred to RAND's George Tanham, who in turn

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 THE ELECTRONIC FENCE

referred Starbird to Leon Gouré. After having been

embarrassed during congressional hearings on the
spurious nature of ARPA’s Viet Cong Motivation
and Morale Project, Gouré had been keeping a low
profile at RAND. Now General Starbird wanted
Gouré to take the lead on an important new ARPA
study for the Defense Communications Planning
Group, this time related to the highly classified elec-
tronic fence project. With a new contract in place,
in August 1967 Gouré returned to Saigon to con-
duct interviews with Vietcong prisoners being held
in secret CIA prisons. According to Gouré, the
enemy had not heard a thing about Americans
building a high-technology fence.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons

called an “anti-infiltration barrier,’ was constructed
along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 bil-
lion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little
effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did
not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting
off enemy supplies. Most of the failures were
technology-based. Sensors were temperature sensi-
tive, and in the extreme heat of the jungle, batteries
drained quickly and sensors went dead. The VO-67
aircrews were often unable to place sensors accu-
rately along the trail. In 1968 there was no such
thing as advanced laser-guided technology. Rip Jacobs
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and his fellow Navy airmen relied on an electrical

device called a “pickle switch” to release sensors
from the OP-2E Neptunes, hoping they would land
where they were supposed to along the trail. Instead,
many sensors landed hundreds, sometimes thou-
sands, of feet away. But far-reaching seeds were
sown.
Gradually, commanders changed their opinions
about McNamara’s electronic fence. In 1969, speak-
ing to members of the Association of the U.S. Army
at a luncheon at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Wash-
ington, D.C., retired four-star general William
Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. military
operations in Vietnam, spoke of the power of the
electronic fence. “We are on the threshold of an
entirely new battlefield concept,” Westmoreland told
his audience of former soldiers. “I see battlefields on
which we can destroy anything we locate through
instant communications and the almost instanta-
neous application of a lethal firepower.”
In 1985, during a banquet to celebrate the twenty-
five-year anniversary of the Jason program, Gordon
MacDonald discussed how profound a moment in
history the development of the barrier concept had
been. “The most important element of the barrier
study was its definition of a system concept,” he said.
Tiny sensors covertly placed in a war zone acted like
eyes, ears, and fingertips on the ground, then relayed

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information back to a computer system far away,

which filtered and analyzed it for a commander who
would in turn decide what tactical action to take
next. This was the first time anyone thought of cre-
ating a “system of systems,” MacDonald observed. It
gave birth to the “basic concept of unmanned sensors
gathering tactical intelligence to be used for manag-
ing the delivery of munitions.” As John von Neu-
mann first imagined, and J. C. R. Licklider later
discussed, this was the first truly symbiotic relation-
ship between man and machine and the battlefield.
The electronic fence had initially been dismissed
by a majority of defense officials, who saw it as new-
fangled gadgetry. But by the 1980s, the concept of
the fence would be reinterpreted as visionary. And
by the 1990s, the electronic battlefield concept
would begin its transformation into the most revolu-
tionary piece of military technology of the twentieth
century, after the hydrogen bomb.
In a summary of the work performed by VO-67
Navy squadron, whose crewmembers dropped elec-
tronic sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, U.S. Air
Force colonel Warren H. Peterson wrote a top secret
cable and a sixty-four-page report for the commander
in chief. “It is worth observing that the program itself
was visionary,” Colonel Peterson said. “From its out-
set, [the electronic battlefield concept] combined
extremes of the technically sophisticated with the

HU
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

amazingly primitive. How would an ordinary, rea-

sonably educated layman, for instance, be likely to
react when told of a system that proposed to detect
enemy troops moving along jungle trails, but using
modern electric acoustic detectors, which had to be
activated by the detonations of firecrackers which
the troops were expected to step on? Yet it must be
remembered that this report covers only the stone
age of what may be a long era of development.”
Colonel Peterson could have been speaking about
ARPA as a whole, about what it was doing and what
it would do. The agency was growing used to taking
old technologies and accelerating them into future
ways of fighting wars. By the twenty-first century the
electronic battlefield concept would be ubiquitous.

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 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The End of Vietnam

ik downfall of the Jason scientists during the

Vietnam War began with a rumor and an
anonymous phone call to Congress. On Feb-
ruary 12, 1968, Carl Macy, the staff director of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, received a tip
saying that the committee should look into why the
Pentagon had sent a nuclear weapons expert, Dr.
Richard Garwin of Columbia University, to Viet-
nam. The battle of Khe Sanh was raging, the tipster
said, and rumor had it that the Pentagon was con-
sidering the use of nuclear weapons against the
Vietcong.
“Within a week the rumor had gone around the
world and involved the President of the United
States, the Prime Minister of Britain and leaders of

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Congress in a discussion over whether or not the

United States was considering using tactical nuclear
weapons in Vietnam,” reported the New York Times.
The White House expressed outrage, calling the
accusations “false,” “irresponsible,” and “unfair to
the armed services.” But there was truth behind the
allegation. The tipster was likely alluding to the
highly classified Jason report “Tactical Nuclear
Weapons in Southeast Asia,” in which the Jason sci-
entists advised against such use. The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee was not convinced and con-
vened a closed-door meeting where senators echoed
similar concerns. The New York Times reported that
one senator “said he had also picked up rumors that
the Administration was considering the use of tacti-
cal nuclear weapons in Vietnam, perhaps in defense
of Khesanh if necessary to save the Marine Corps
garrison there.”
The Pentagon issued a statement saying that Dr.
Garwin and other scientists had been sent to Viet-
nam to oversee “the effectiveness of new weapons,”
ones that “have no relationship whatsoever to atomic
or nuclear systems of any kind.” This was true.
Although the statement did not reveal the classified
program itself, the “new weapons” the Pentagon was
referring to were essential to McNamara’s electronic
fence.
Jason scientists Richard Garwin, Henry Kendall,

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and Gordon MacDonald were in Vietnam to

problem-solve issues related to the sensor technol-
ogy. The Tet Offensive was under way, and the Viet-
cong were in the process of cutting off access to the
Marine base at Khe Sanh. There were fears at the
Pentagon that what had happened to the French at
Dien Bien Phu in 1954 could now happen to the
Marines at Khe Sanh. The similarities were striking,
including the fact that the Vietnamese general who
had led the communists to victory at Dien Bien Phu,
General Vo Nguyen Giap, was again leading com-
munist fighters in the battle for Khe Sanh.
VO-67 Navy squadron crewmembers were called
upon to assist. More than 250 sensors were dropped
in a ring around the Marine outpost at Khe Sanh in
an effort to help identify when and where the Viet-
cong were closing in. The target information officer
at Khe Sanh, Captain Harry Baig, was having trou-
ble with the technology, and so Richard Garwin,
Henry Kendall, and Gordon MacDonald were flown
to the classified Information Surveillance Center at
Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, to help. Unable to solve
the problem from Thailand, MacDonald offered to
be helicoptered in to the dangerous Marine outpost
at Khe Sanh.
“Tt was a scary place,” MacDonald later recalled,
“because you knew you were isolated. There were
something on the order of four thousand Marines

o15:
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and to many [it seemed as if] there was little hope of

getting them out. It was a dreadful situation.” What
was remarkable was that MacDonald offered to be
inserted into the middle of the battle in the first
place. A polio survivor and now a presidential advi-
sor, he could easily have chosen to stay in the safety
of neighboring Thailand with Kendall and Garwin.
The nuclear physicist and ordnance expert Rich-
ard Garwin later stated that he was likely the source
of the information leak that set off the downfall of
the Jasons. “I had probably told people I was going
to Vietnam, which I shouldn’t have,” Garwin told
Finn Aaserud, director of the Niels Bohr Archive, in
1991. “Colleagues with overheated imaginations and
a sense of mission thought someone should know
about this,” he surmised.
As reporters began digging into Garwin’s back-
story, the connection with the Jason scientists and
the Advanced Research Projects Agency emerged.
The classified report on barrier technology did not
surface at this time, but the title of the Jasons’ report,
“Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia,” did.
For antiwar protesters, this information—that the
Pentagon had actually considered using nuclear
weapons —led to outrage. Many of the Jason scien-
tists held positions at universities, and they were now
targeted by antiwar protesters for investigation and
denunciation.

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 THE END OF VIETNAM

A powerful antiwar coalition called the Mobiliza-

tion Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or “the
Mobe,” had been organizing massive demonstrations
across the country. The previous spring, hundreds of
thousands of people had attended an antiwar march
in New York City, walking from Central Park to the
United Nations building, where they burned draft
cards. The march, which was led by Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., made news around the world. The
Mobe’s March on the Pentagon, in the fall of 1967,
had turned violent when protesters clashed with U.S.
marshals and heavily armed military police assigned
to protect the building. Six hundred and eighty-two
people were arrested, including the author Norman
Mailer and two United Press International reporters.
Now, after it was revealed that many university pro-
fessors were discreetly working on classified weapons
projects as defense scientists, the Mobe’s under-
ground newspaper, the Student Mobilizer, began an
investigation that culminated in a report called
“Counterinsurgency Research on Campus, Exposed.”
The article contained excerpts from the minutes of a
Jason summer study, reportedly stolen from a profes-
sors unlocked cabinet. It contained additional
excerpts from classified documents written for
ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center in
Bangkok, Thailand, also allegedly stolen.
In March 1968, students at Princeton University

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

learned that the Jasons’ advisory board was the Insti-

tute of Defense Analyses, or IDA, the federally
funded think tank that served the Department of
Defense— and that IDA maintained an “ultra secret
think-tank” on the Princeton campus, inside Von
Neumann Hall (named in honor of John von Neu-
mann). Further investigation by student journalists
revealed that the windows of this building were
made of bulletproof glass. Student journalists broke
the story in the Daily Princetonian, reporting that
inside this Defense Department—funded building,
and using state-ofthe-art computers, “mathemati-
cians worked out problems in advanced cryptology
for the National Security Agency” and did other
“war research work.” University records showed that
the computer being used was a 1.5-ton CDC-1604,
the “first fully transistorized supercomputer” in the
world. When it arrived at the university in 1960, the
supercomputer had a “staggering 32K of memory.”
The journalists also revealed that at Princeton, IDA
was working on “long range projects with ARPA—
The Defense Department’s Advanced Research
Projects Agency...in the field of communication.”
The student journalists discovered, too, that Princ-
eton University president Robert F. Goheen was also
a member of IDA’s twenty-two-man board of trustees
and that numerous current and former Princeton
physics professors, including John Wheeler, Murph

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 THE END oF VIETNAM

Goldberger, Sam Treiman, and Eugene Wigner, had

worked on IDA-ARPA projects related to war and
weapons. As a result of these revelations, the antiwar
group Students for a Democratic Society staged a
sit-in, demanding that IDA be kicked off campus.
The faculty voted that Princeton should terminate
its association with IDA, and when university trust-
ees overruled the demand, students chained the
front doors of Von Neumann Hall shut, preventing
anyone from getting in or out for several days. The
issue died down until the following year. When stu-
dents learned IDA was still operating on campus,
protestors initiated a five-day siege of Von Neumann
Hall, spray painting anti-Nixon graffiti across the
front of the building, engaging with police officers,
and chanting, “Kill the computer!”
Still, there was very little public mention of the
Jason scientists and their position as the elite advisory
group to the Pentagon, or that all their consulting fees
were paid for by ARPA. But what happened at Prince-
ton and elsewhere, as links between university profes-
sors and the Department of Defense became known,
was just the tip of a very large iceberg that would take
until June 13, 1971, to be fully revealed.

For the Pentagon, the antiwar protests were a com-

mand and control nightmare. For ARPA it meant
the acceleration of a “nonlethal weapons” program
o19.
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

to research and develop ways to stop demonstrators

through the use of painful but not deadly force.
There was a sense of urgency at hand. Not only
were the protesters gaining support and momentum
in their efforts, but also they were now controlling
the narrative of the Vietnam War. “The whole world
is watching!” chanted activists at an antiwar rally
outside the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago in August 1968. The phrase spread like
wildfire and drew attention to National Guardsmen,
in Chicago and elsewhere, as protesters were threat-
ened with guns and fixed bayonets. In these antiwar
protests, and also in civil rights protests across the
nation, state police, military police, and the National
Guard used water cannons, riot batons, electric
prods, horses, and dogs to control and intimidate
crowds.
ARPA’ research into nonlethal weapons was clas-
sified and highly controversial. To keep this research
secret, laboratories were set up abroad under an innoc-
uous program name, Overseas Defense Research.
This research took place at the Combat Development
and Test Center (CDTC) in Bangkok, which had
been renamed the Military Research and Develop-
ment Center. Progress reports were delivered to ARPA
program managers with a cover letter that stated,
“This document contains information affecting the
National Defense of the United States within the

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means of the Espionage Laws.” The program was

overseen by defense contractor Battelle Memorial
Institute, in Columbus, Ohio, and was considered
part of Project Agile’s Remote Area Conflict program.
A rare declassified copy of one such report, from April
1971, was obtained through the Freedom of Informa-
tion Act.
“Nonlethal weapons are generally intended to
prevent an individual from engaging in undesirable
acts,” wrote E. E. Westbrook and L. W. Williams,
the authors of the report. “Apart from the moral
arguments in the present and future use of nonlethal
weapons, public officials find it prudent to examine
nonlethal force using a framework that it was keep-
ing ‘innocent bystanders’ from being hurt.” At the
overseas CDTCs, ARPA chemists examined a vari-
ety of incapacitating agents for future use against
protesters, including dangerous chemical agents
with a wide range of effects, from vomiting to skin
injury to temporary paralysis.
Possible irritants for use against demonstrators
included “CN (tear gas)...CS (riot contro
agent)...CX (blister agent),” also called phosgene
oxide—a potent chemical weapon that causes tem-
porary blindness, lesions on the lungs, and rapid
local tissue death. CS was seen as a viable option:
more than 15 million pounds of CS had already
been used in Vietnam to flush Vietcong out of

321
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

underground tunnels on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

CX was also recommended for crowd control. It
“produced a corrosive injury to the skin, including
tissue injury,’ but because the worst damage was
inside the lungs, the harm would be disguised. Anti-
cholinergics were considered, chemicals that cause
physical collapse. “Probably the most promising of
the anticholinergics (agents which block passage of
impulses through parasympathetic nerves),” wrote
the chemists, were compounds that produced “rapid
heart rate, incoordination, blurred vision, delirium,
vomiting, and in cases of higher doses, coma.”
Emetic agents, chemicals that induce vomiting, were
also recommended.
A second program involved delivery systems.
Mechanisms for delivery included liquid stream pro-
jectors, able to shoot a twelve-inch-diameter stream
of liquid across a distance of up to forty feet, as well
as grenades thrown by hand or discharged from a
small rocket. A more powerful option was the E8-CS
man-portable tactical launcher and cartridge, which
could be fired electrically or manually into rioting
crowds at a distance of up to 750 feet. “It is nonle-
thal in the impact area, but its high muzzle velocity
creates a lethal hazard at the muzzle during firing,”
the scientists wrote.
Poison darts were discussed as a possible “means
for injecting an enemy [i-e., a protester] with an inca-

22,
 THE END OF VIETNAM

pacitating agent.” Also recommended were tranquil-

izing darts, historically effective in subduing wild or
frightened animals. The problem, the ARPA chem-
ists cautioned, was that “using these kinds of darts
was not entirely safe as accurate dosage was based on
the weight of the animal.” One advantage was that
the “use of a dart allows selection of an individual
target, perhaps the leader of a group or a particularly
destructive person, without injuring others around
him.” Further, the darts “possess a psychological
advantage not shared by many other systems,” noted
the scientists. “The victim may wonder what he has
been hit with and whether or not it is essential that
he find an antidote.” This benefit needed to be
weighed against another danger, however, which
was that if someone was hit in the head or neck, it
could be fatal. “Darts are not regarded by many as
an ‘acceptable’ weapon,” the scientists wrote. Fol-
lowing the dart discussion was a long treatise on
whether or not the use of the electric cattle prod
against human protesters would be defensible.
The 130-page report offered hundreds of addi-
tional development ideas about how to incapacitate
demonstrators without killing them, programs that
were currently being researched for battlefield use
but had not yet been deployed in Vietnam. “Photic
driving” was a phenomenon whereby the application
of stroboscopic light within a certain frequency

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

range could cause a person’s brain waves “to become

entrained to the same frequency as the flashing
light.” But early studies showed that this kind of
flickering light was effective in only about 30 per-
cent of the population. Laser radiation was suggested
as a potential way of temporarily blinding people,
also called flash blindness. One drawback, the ARPA
scientists noted, was that “the laser must be aimed
directly at the eye,” which “diminishes its practical-
ity in a confrontation situation.” Microwaves could
potentially be used to incapacitate individuals by
burning their skin, but the science had not yet been
adequately advanced. “Surface skin burns using
microwaves would not form soon enough to create
tactical advantage,” the scientists wrote. Also, trying
to burn someone with a microwave beam would be
“ineffective against a person who is wearing heavy
clothing or who is behind an object,” the scientists
wrote.
Another series of tests researched “the use of loud
noises to scare people or to interfere with communi-
cations.” But the ARPA scientists cautioned that
sound would have to be “so offensive and repugnant
that hearers leave the scene,” meaning a volume so
high that it presented the danger of permanent hear-
ing loss. “Most subjects experience pain at about
140 db [decibels], and at about 160 db, the eardrum
is torn.”

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Tagging was an option, to help police make

arrests after a demonstration. “The marking of peo-
ple for later apprehension is another technique which
has been tried. in some situations,” the scientists
wrote, suggesting specific materials including “invis-
ible markings which were sensitive to ultraviolet
light” and “odor identifying markings, sensed by
dogs or gas chromatographs.”
Crowd control had long been an engineering
challenge at the Pentagon. To be effective, nonlethal
weapons need to deliver enough power to produce a
dispersal effect but not enough power to cause seri-
ous injury or harm. Most historical accounts of the
use of nonlethal weapons in the United States cite
the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of
1968 as a turning point. The act established the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a
federal agency within the U.S. Department of Jus-
tice designed to assist state police forces across the
nation in upgrading their riot control hardware and
officer-training programs. The act also provided $12
billion in funding over a period of ten years.
Police forces across America began upgrading their
military-style equipment to include riot control sys-
tems, helicopters, grenade launchers, and machine
guns. The LEAA famously gave birth to the special
weapons and tactics concept, or SWAT, with the
first units created in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.
325,
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

“These units,” says an LAPD historian, “provided

security for police facilities during civil unrest.” But
what has not been established before this book is that
much of this equipment was researched and devel-
oped by ARPA in the jungles of Vietnam and Thai-
land during the Vietnam War.

In America, antiwar protests raged on. Not even

computers could escape the hostility between the
Pentagon and the antiwar establishment. In early
1970, a Defense Department computer at the Uni-
versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, called the
ILLIAC IV, came under fire. ILLIAC IV was the
fastest computer on earth at the time. The scientist
in charge of the project for ARPA was Professor
Daniel L. Slotnick, a mathematician and computer
architect. A former student of John von Neumann,
Slotnick had worked with von Neumann on
MANIAC, at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton, starting in 1952. It was there that Slot-
nick developed his first thoughts about centrally
controlled parallel computers. A pioneer in his field,
Slotnick was one of the first to develop the concept
of parallel computing, a form of computation in
which multiple calculations are carried out simulta-
neously by separate computers and solved concur-
rently. Slotnick co-authored the first paper on the
subject, in 1958. His goal with ILLIAC IV was to

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build a machine that could perform a billion instruc-

tions per second. Although it used the same archi-
tecture conceived by John von Neumann, ILLIAC
IV was a far cry from MANIAC in terms of com-
puting power.
ILLIAC IV was fifty feet long, ten feet tall, and
eight feet wide. The machine’s power supply units
were so massive they had to be moved with a spe-
cially designed forklift. The supercomputer was
made up of a group of sixty-four processor elements,
with a potential for up to 256—a groundbreaking
number of processing units at the time. The machine
was designed to cut down exponentially on the time
it took to complete basic computational science and
engineering tasks. Approximately two-thirds of the
computer's time was designated for work on Depart-
ment of Defense weapons programs, including
“computational requirements for ballistic missile
defense.” Specifically, the calculations sought to dif-
ferentiate a missile from the background noise, the
problem that had been plaguing the Jason scientists
since they first began studying the topic in 1960.
ILLIAC IV was also used for climate modeling, and
for weather modification schemes, as part of a still-
classified ARPA program called Nile Blue. Not until
July 1972 would the U.S. government renounce the
use of climate modification techniques for hostile
purposes. In May 1977 an international treaty, the

327
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any

Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification
Techniques, would be signed, in Geneva, by forty-
eight nations. Until then, weather modification
schemes were pursued.
Slotnick and his team called the ILLIAC IV “the
ultimate number cruncher.” ARPA officials believed
that if they had two of these computers, their capabil-
ity would cover “all the computational requirements
on planet earth.” The building of ILLIAC IV, most
of which was done by graduate students, was the
largest and most lucrative Defense Department con-
tract in the history of the University of Illinois. By
late 1969, the university had received more than $24
million in funds, roughly $155 million in 2015.
Plans for a fancy new facility to house the machine
were in place, with groundbreaking ceremonies to
begin sometime during the following year. The spe-
cifics of the arrangement between Slotnick and
ARPA were classified, but it was not a secret that a
supercomputer was being built at the university.
What it would be used for was obscure until Janu-
ary 5, 1970, when the Illinois Board of Higher Edu-
cation met for a budget review and a student reporter
managed to attend. The following day, on January 6,
1970, a headline in the Daily Illini declared, “Depart-
ment of Defense to employ UI [University of Illinois]
computer for nuclear weaponry.”

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The revelation that the university was working

with the Defense Department on nuclear weapons
work had an explosive effect on an already charged
student body. “The University has proven that it is
nota neutral institution,” declared the antiwar group
Radical Union, “but is actively supporting the efforts
of the military-industrial complex.” One article after
the next alleged malevolent intentions on the part of
Professor Slotnick and the dean of the Graduate
College, Daniel Alpert, in having tried to conceal
from the student body the true nature of the com-
puter. “The horrors ILLIAC IV may loose on the
world through [the] hands of military leaders of this
nation” could not be underestimated, the Daily Illini
editorialized. “We fear the military...will use the
computer to develop more ways to kill people and
spend the people’s money.” In another article, a
group of concerned students wrote, “Considering
the evil demonstrated by our military in recent years,
we would rather have seen the University resistant to
the evil... than complicit with it.”
Professor Slotnick tried to justify the Pentagon
funding by pointing out that other institutions
were unwilling to fund such an important but far-
sighted program as building this supercomputer. “If
I could have gotten $30 million from the Red Cross,
I would not have messed with the DoD,” Slotnick
said. ARPA took offense, calling Slotnick a “volatile
329
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

visionary.” The board tried to throw a blanket over

the fire by declaring the “more important” parts of
the computer “non-military.” Despite attempts to
humanize the machine, the debate only grew. A
teach-in was organized against ILLIAC IV. Students
wanted the machine gone.
On February 23, 1970, the protests took a violent
turn when unknown persons firebombed the cam-
pus armory, causing $2,000 worth of damage. Then
on March 2, five hundred protesters disrupted a job-
recruiting session with General Electric, the defense
contractor that helped build ILLIAC IV. Windows
were broken and three people were injured. Officers
who tried to arrest people were pummeled with mud
balls. The crowd grew to as many as three thousand.
When antiwar demonstrators broke windows in the
chancellor's office, state police wearing full riot gear
appeared on the scene. Not until late that night was
peace restored. Twenty-one students were arrested,
eight seriously injured. On March 9, the university’s
faculty senate took a vote to oppose ILLIAC IV; it
failed. Two days later, the Air Force recruiting sta-
tion in Urbana was firebombed, the sixth local arson
attack of the month.
The spring of 1970 was a tempestuous time on col-
lege campuses across America. On April 30, 1970,
President Nixon went on national television to

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announce the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, yet another

expansion of the Vietnam War. Nixon’s disclosure
that 150,000 more soldiers would now be drafted
sparked major protests across the nation. Four days
later, on May 4, four students at Kent State University
in Ohio were shot dead by the National Guard.
The following day, the ILLIAC IV protests at the
University of Illinois ratcheted up even further when
two thousand demonstrators stoned police vehicles
parked on campus. On the morning of May 6 the
National Guard moved in, and on May 7, ten thou-
sand students and faculty held a peace rally. When
the university refused to fly flags at halfmast for the
victims of the Kent State shootings, students pulled
down the American flag that had been flying on the
university fire station flagpole and set it on fire. On
May 9, demonstrators staged a sit-in in front of the
building that housed the ILLIAC IV. Protests and
arrests continued until May 12.
In June, university officials told ARPA that they
could no longer guarantee the safety of its supercom-
puter. ARPA began looking for a new facility to
house the ILLIAC IV and in 1971 entered into a new
contract with a federal research facility in California.
Each side—the protesters and the government—
believed strongly in the legitimacy of its position.
Students at the University of Illinois and elsewhere

Beil
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

across the nation continued to protest against war;

the Department of Defense continued its weapons
research and its war in Vietnam.
The supercomputer was packed up and taken to
California. By the spring of 1972, ILLIAC IV was
up and running at NASA's Institute for Advanced
Computation at the Ames Research Center. This
was adjacent to the U.S. Navy’s west coast facility
where highly classified antisubmarine warfare work
was taking place. ILLIAC IV began making
calculations for the Navy’s Project Seaguard, a clas-
sified program to track submarines using acoustics,
another ARPA program, with research taking place
at ARPA’s classified Acoustic Research Center, deep
underwater in a lake in northern Idaho.
The submarine research facility was one of
ARPA’s best-kept secrets, an underwater test site
located at the south end of a small resort community
on Lake Pend Oreille in Bayview, Idaho. The forty-
three-mile-long lake is 1,150 feet deep in places,
making it the perfect locale to conduct secret sub-
marine research. Acoustic sensors placed on the floor
of the lake recorded and processed data which were
then fed into ILLIAC IV, allowing for major Cold
War advances in antisubmarine warfare.

The ILLIAC IV controversy coincided with a major

turning point in the history of the Advanced Research

B32.
 THE END OF VIETNAM

Projects Agency. Public opposition to the Vietnam

War, coupled with rising inflation, put an unwel-
come spotlight on ARPA when Senator Mike
Mansfield, an antiwar Democrat from Montana,
introduced a bill that barred the Defense Depart-
ment from using funds “to carry out any research
project or study unless the project or study had a
direct relationship to [a] specific military function.”
The Mansfield Amendment, introduced in late 1969
as an amendment to the Military Authorization Act,
focused “the public’s desire for practical outcomes”
against the idea that not only was the Pentagon fail-
ing to end the war in Vietnam, but also its spending
was out of control. The amendment put military
research and development under intense scrutiny and
had a direct impact on ARPA. Because most of its
work was speculative, looking ten to twenty-five years
into the future, directors of the agency would now
have to present much more detailed information to
Congress before their budgets could be passed.
Then in February 1970 came another devastating
blow for ARPA. The secretary of defense authorized
a decision that the entire agency was to be removed
from its coveted office space inside the Pentagon to a
lackluster office building in the Rosslyn district of
Arlington, Virginia, two and a half miles away.
Desks, chairs, file cabinets, and furniture were all
boxed up and moved.
28)
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

The Pentagon was the seat of military might, the

locus of power. Moving even a short distance away
was, as one insider put it, “the epitome of the Agen-
cy’ss downgrading.” The underlying message being
sent to staff was that the Advanced Research Proj-
ects Agency might just fold. Even the ARPA director
at the time, the electrical engineer and telecommu-
nications expert Eberhardt Rechtin, appeared to
have lost confidence in the agency he was in charge
of. Rechtin confided to a colleague, “It wouldn't sur-
prise me that all of a sudden [a secretary of defense]
would decide to kill ARPA.” Since its inception in
1958, ARPA had been a place where there was always
more money than ideas. Suddenly, “the dollar situa-
tion was so bad, [the agency] had far more ideas
than money,” Rechtin said. Without money, there
was less power, and without power, there was greater
tension.
To many on the ARPA staff, it seemed as if
Rechtin did not particularly care whether the agency
survived. “The staff just didn’t know what was going
to happen next,” one program manager told a gov-
ernment historian in 1974. “They didn’t know who
was boss. They didn’t know who to follow. They
didn’t know whether anyone cared.” The staffer con-
tinued: “At least if you kill something][,] you know.
You line it up against the wall, you take aim, you
spend five minutes at the job and you kill it right.

334
 THE END OF VIETNAM

But to let it wither away by not even allowing it to

have a Director [who cared] is almost [worse]. The
feeling was: he [Rechtin] doesn’t care anymore... he
is selling us down the river...we’ve become the
pawn, and we are moving away from the center.” An
“apocalyptic feeling” overwhelmed the ARPA staff.
“We had terrible feelings that this [was] the end,”
said another unidentified staffer.
As ARPA director, Rechtin believed he knew why
the agency had run into so many difficulties during
the Vietnam War. He called it the “chicken-and-egg
problem” in congressional testimony related to the
Mansfield Amendment. When asked by a commit-
tee member if it was appropriate to describe the
Advanced Research Projects Agency as a “premili-
tary research organization within the Defense
Department,” Rechtin said that if the word “mili-
tary” were replaced with the word “requirement,”
then that assessment would be correct. Unlike the
regular military services, Rechtin said, ARPA was a
“pre-requirement” organization in that it conducted
research in advance of specific needs. “By this I mean
that the military services, in order to do their work,
must have a very formal requirement based on spe-
cific needs,” Rechtin said, “and usually upon tech-
nologies that are understood.” ARPA existed to
make sure that the military establishment was not
ever again caught off guard by a Sputnik-like
opi}
 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

technological surprise. The enemy was always eye-

ing the future, he said, pursuing advanced technol-
ogy in order to take more ground. And ARPA was
set up to provide the Defense Department with its
pre-requirement needs.
“There is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem in
other words, in requirements and technology,”
Rechtin explained. “The difficulty is that it is hard
to write formal requirements if you do not have the
technology with which to solve them, but you
cannot do the technology unless you have the
requirements.” The agency’s dilemma, said Rechtin,
was this: if you can’t do the research before a need
arises, by the time the need is there, it’s clear that the
research should already have been done.

Rechtin had defended ARPA’s mission but wasn’t

long for the job and would soon move on to a more
powerful position higher up the ladder at the
Department of Defense. In December 1970 he
resigned his post at ARPA and returned to the Pen-
tagon, to take over as principal acting deputy of
Defense Department Research and Engineering
(DDR&E), the person to whom the ARPA director
reports. The rest of the agency employees waited for
the other shoe to drop.
Drop it did. On June 13, 1971, the first install-
ment of the Pentagon Papers appeared on the front

336
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page of the New York Times. The classified docu-

ments had been leaked to the newspaper by former
Pentagon employee and RAND Corporation ana-
lyst Daniel Ellsberg. The papers unveiled a secret
history of the war in Vietnam—three thousand
narrative pages of war secrets accompanied by four
thousand pages of classified memos and supporting
documents, organized into forty-seven volumes.
Back in 1967, when he was secretary of defense,
Robert McNamara had commissioned the RAND
Corporation to write a classified “encyclopedic his-
tory of the Vietnamese War,” neglecting to tell the
president he was undertaking such a project. The
Pentagon Papers covered the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam since the end of World War II. Revealed in
the papers were specifics on how every president
from Truman to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,
and Nixon had misled the public about what was
really going on in Vietnam. The classified docu-
ments were photocopied by Ellsberg, with the help
of RAND colleague Anthony Russo, the individual
who had worked extensively with Leon Gouré on
the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project. Both
Ellsberg and Russo had originally supported the war
in Vietnam but later came to oppose it.
The papers revealed secret bombing campaigns,
the role of the United States in the Diem assassina-
tion, the CIA’s involvement with the Montagnards,

337,
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

and so much more. With respect to ARPA, the

papers revealed the extensive role of the Jason scien-
tists throughout the war— specifically that they had
designed sensors, strike aircraft retrofits, and cluster
bombs for the electronic fence. The scientists had
first been brought into the spotlight back in Febru-
ary 1968 when the scandal broke over the possible
use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Mu Gia
Pass. Like so many controversies during the war,
that scandal came and went. But now, with the reve-
lations of the Pentagon Papers, the Jason scientists
were caught in a much harsher spotlight. In the
words of former ARPA director Jack Ruina, the
Jason scientists were now portrayed as “the devil.”
All across the country, and even overseas, the Jason
scientists became targets for antiwar protesters. The
words “war criminal” were painted on the pavement
outside Kenneth Watson’s house in Berkeley. Gor-
don MacDonald’s Santa Barbara garage was set on
fire. Herb York got a death threat. The Jasons’ sum-
mer study office in Colorado was vandalized. In
New York City, a consortium of professors at Colum-
bia demanded that the scientists resign from Jason
or resign from the university. In Paris, Murray Gell-
Mann was booed off a stage. Riot police were called
to a physics symposium in Trieste where Jason scien-
tist Eugene Wigner was speaking as an honored
guest. In New York City, Murph Goldberger was

338
 THE END OF VIETNAM

getting ready to deliver a lecture to the American

Physical Society when a huge crowd interrupted his
talk in a very public way. Goldberger had recently
led the first-ever State Department-sanctioned dele-
gation of American scientists to communist China,
but as he began to speak, the demonstrators raised
huge placards reading “War Criminal!” He tried to
keep his composure and continue his talk about
China, but the protesters kept interrupting him,
shouting out questions about the Jason scientists and
their role as weapons designers for the Vietnam War.
“Look, Pll talk about China or I won't talk about
anything,” Goldberger told the crowd, but his voice
was drowned out by boos. He tried a different tactic
and said that he would discuss Jason and Vietnam
after his speech if the protesters were willing to secure
a venue where they could have a conversation some-
where nearby after he was done. The protesters
agreed. As soon as Goldberger finished giving his lec-
ture about China, he walked over to the East Ball-
room of the New York Hilton hotel and politely took
questions from a crowd of what was now more than
two hundred people, including lots of reporters.
“Jason made a terrible mistake,” Goldberger said
in a voice described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as
“anguished” and fraught with moral guilt. We
“should have told Mr. McNamara to go to hell and
not become involved at all,” said Goldberger.

339.
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

No Jason scientist was spared defamation. A

group of antiwar protesters learned the home address
of Richard Garwin in upstate New York and showed
up on his front lawn with hate signs. Another time,
when Garwin was on an airplane, a woman sitting
in the seat next to him recognized him, stood up,
and declared, “This is Dick Garwin. He is a baby
killer!”
An Italian physicist at the Institute of Theoretical
Physics in Naples, Bruno Vitale, spearheaded an
international anti-Jason movement. Vitale saw the
revelations in the Pentagon Papers about the Jason
scientists as a “perfect occasion to see bare the hypoc-
risy of the establishment physicists; their lust for
power, prestige; their arrogance against the people.”
In a monograph titled “The War Physicists,” he
charged that the scientific world had become divided
into insiders and outsiders. “Jason people are insid-
ers,” Vitale wrote. “They have access to secret infor-
mation from many government offices.” On the
opposite side of the coin, “those who engage in criti-
cism of government policies without the benefit of
such inside access are termed outsiders.” Vitale
argued that scientists needed to stand together in
their outrage and not accept what he called phony
arguments. “When a debate arises between insiders
and outsiders, invariably the argument is used that
only the insiders know the true facts and that there-

340
 THe END OF VIETNAM

fore the outsiders’ positions should not be taken

seriously.”
Vitale’s crusade garnered international support,
and in December 1972 a group of European scien-
tists, three of whom were Nobel Prize winners, wrote
a very public letter to the Jason scientists, which was
published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The
land mines that formed part of the electronic fence
“have caused terrible wounds among Vietnamese
civilians,” they charged, and asked the Jasons to
respond. In the weeks that followed, in letters to the
editor, other scientists demanded that the Jason
researchers “explain how they could justify to their
consciences” the work they had done designing land
mines. Famed British physics professor E. H. S.
Burhop wrote: “The scientists became, to some
extent, prisoners of the group they had joined....At
what point should they have quit?” In Science, a
reader wrote in to say that the Jasons “should be
tried for war crimes.” The Jasons did not collectively
respond. Looking back in 2013, Goldberger said of
the group he co-founded, “We should never have got-
ten involved in Vietnam.”

By 1973, ARPA’s new director, Stephen Lukasik, felt

it was time for the agency to distance itself from the
Jason scientists. For years the group had been at the
“intellectual forefront of everything we were trying
341
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

to do to prevent technological surprise,” Lukasik

later remarked. But he also felt that the Jason scien-
tists suffered from an intellectual superiority com-
plex. “The word ‘arrogant’ [was] associated with
Jason,” Lukasik acknowledged. He had worked with
the Jasons for a decade, going back to the time when
he was head of ARPA’s Nuclear Test Detection
Office, which handled the Vela program. On more
than one occasion, Lukasik felt that the Jasons had
displayed a “pattern of arrogance.” That they were a
selfcongratulating group. “They picked their mem-
bers. And so they had in 1969 the same members
they had in 1959.” Lukasik wanted new blood. The
Jasons still “didn’t have any computer scientists.
They didn’t have any materials scientists. They
weren't bringing in new members.” Lukasik notified
the Jason scientists, through their oversight commit-
tee at IDA, that it was time for them to move on. “I
probably was seen as an enemy of the Jasons,” Luka-
sik admitted. In the winter of 1973, without any
resistance, the Jasons departed IDA for the Stanford
Research Institute, in California. “It was an agree-
able move,” Goldberger recalled. Before leaving
IDA, the Jason scientists had had only one client,
the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Now, said
Goldberger, the Jasons were free to work “for whom-
ever we pleased.”
Not all those affiliated with ARPA were feeling

342
 THE END OF VIETNAM

liberated. In their new office building away from the

Pentagon, ARPA employees were at a crossroads.
Feeling banished from the center of power and with
budgets slashed, they feared that the future of ARPA
was more uncertain than it had ever been. Who
could have imagined this precarious time would give
way to one of the most prosperous, most influential
eras in the history of the Advanced Research Projects
Agency?

343
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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rise of the Machines

uring the Korean War, when Allen Macy

1D Dulles left the trench at Outpost Bunker
Hill and headed down to check the fence, he
was doing what soldiers have done for millennia. He
was going out on patrol. The moment when Dulles
saw someone had cut the fence, he likely sensed dan-
ger was near. But before he had time to notify any-
one of the incursion, the twenty-two-year-old soldier
took enemy shrapnel to the head, suffered a trau-
matic brain injury, and was rendered amnesic. Like
millions and millions of soldiers before him, he
became a war casualty. The Vietnam electronic
fence, conceived and constructed hastily during the
war, created the opportunity to change all that.
Technology could do what humans had been doing

347
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

all along: patrol and notify. The fence required no

human guard. It guarded itself. From ARPA’s
research and development standpoint, the concept
of the electronic fence was a sea change. It set in
motion a fundamental transformation of the battle-
field. This change did not happen overnight. By
2015 it would be irreversible.
By the winter of 1973, almost no one in America
wanted anything more to do with the Vietnam War.
On January 27, the Paris Peace Accords were signed
and U.S. troops began fully withdrawing from Viet
nam. On February 12, hundreds of long-held Amer-
ican prisoners of war began coming home. And in
keeping with the Mansfield Amendment, which
required the Pentagon to research and develop
programs only with a “specific military function,”
the word “defense” was added to ARPA’s name.
From now on it would be called the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
If the agency was going to survive and prosper, it
needed to reinvent itself, beginning with the way it
was perceived. Any program associated with the
Vietnam War would be jettisoned. Project Agile
became the scapegoat, the punching bag. In internal
agency interviews, three former ARPA directors,
each of whom had overseen Project Agile during the
Vietnam War, spoke of it in the most disparaging
terms. “We tried to work the counter-insurgency

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business,” lamented Eberhardt Rechtin, “and found

we couldn't. All the things we tried
— radar systems
and boats and whatev—er” didn’t work. “Agile was
an abysmal failure; a glorious failure,” said Charles
Herzfeld. “When we fail, we fail big.” Even William
Godel, now freed from federal prison for good
behavior, spoke candidly about failure. “We never
learned how to fight guerrilla warfare and we never
really learned how to help the other guy,” Godel said
in a rare recorded interview, in July 1975. “We didn’t
do it; we left no residue of good will; and we didn’t
even explain it right.” Still, Godel insisted that the
problem of counterinsurgency was real, was multiply-
ing, and was not going to go away anytime soon. “We
did a goddamn lousy job of solving those problems,
and that did happen on my watch,” he said.
But for DARPA, Vietnam was far from a failure; it
could not be spoken of in any one way. The enormous
sums of money, the volumes of classified programs,
the thousands of scientists and technicians, academ-
ics, analysts, defense contractors, and businessmen,
all of whom worked for months, years, some more
than a decade, to apply their scientific and industrial
acumen to countless programs, some tiny, some
grand, some with oversight, others withoutthe
—
results of these efforts could by no means be gener-
alized as success or failure any more than they could
be categorized as good or bad. Granted, the results

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of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project,

with its thousands of hours of interviews of prison-
ers, peasants, and village elders —allegedly to deter-
mine what made the Vietcong tick—amounted to
zero, that mysterious number one arrives at when
everything gained equals everything lost. The Stra-
tegic Hamlet Program, the Rural Security System
Program, the COIN games, the Motivation and
Morale studies: it is easy to discount these as fool-
hardy, wasteful, colonialist. But not all the ARPA
Vietnam programs could or would be viewed by
DARPA as failures. Among the hardware that was
born and developed in those remote jungle environs,
there was much to admire from a Defense Depart-
ment point of view.
Testifying before Congress in 1973, director Ste-
phen Lukasik said that DARPA’s goal was to refocus
itself as a neutral, non-military service organization,
emphasizing what he called “high-risk projects of rev-
olutionary impact.” Only innovative, groundbreaking
programs would be taken on, he said, programs that
should be viewed as “pre-mission assignments” or
“pre-requirement” research. The agency needed to
apply itself to its original mandate, which was to keep
. the nation from being embarrassed by another
Sputnik-like surprise. At DARPA, the emphasis was
on hard science and hardware.
Project Agile was abolished, and in its place came

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a new office called Tactical Technology. Inside this

office, components of the electronic fence were sal-
vaged from the ruins of the war. The program, with
its obvious applications in the intelligence world,
was highly classified. When asked about the sensor
program in an agency review in 1975, acting direc-
tor Dr. Peter Franken told colleagues that even he
was not cleared to know about it. “It was most diffi-
cult to understand the program,” Franken told the
interviewer, attributing the inscrutable nature of
sensor research to the fact that “special clearance
requirements inhibited even his access to the sensor
program.” In keeping with the mandate to develop
advanced technology and then turn it over to the
military for implementation, sensor programs
were now being pursued by all of the services and
the majority of the intelligence agencies. All born of
the Vietnam War.
DARPA’ early work, going back to 1958, had
fostered at least six sensor technologies. Seismic sen-
sors, developed for the Vela program, sense and rec-
ord how the earth transmits seismic waves. In
Vietnam, the seismic sensors could detect heavy
truck and troop movement on the Ho Chi Minh
Trail, but not bicycles or feet. For lighter loads, strain
sensors were now being further developed to moni-
tor stress on soil, notably that which results from a
person on the move. Magnetic sensors detect residual

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magnetism from objects carried or worn by a per-

son; infrared sensors detect intrusion by beam inter-
ruption. Electromagnetic sensors generate a radio
frequency that also detects intrusion when inter-
rupted. Acoustic sensors listen for noise. These were
all programs that were now set to take off anew.
In the early 1970s, the Marine Corps took a lead
in sensor work. The success of the seismic sensors
placed on the ground during the battle for Khe Sanh
had altered the opinions of military commanders
about the use of sensors on the battlefield. Before
Khe Sanh, the majority opposed sensor technology;
after the battle, it was almost unanimously embraced.
Before war’s end, the Marines had their own sensor
program, Project STEAM, or Sensor Technology as
Applied to the Marine Corps. STEAM made room
for sensor platoons, called SCAMPs, or Sensor Con-
trol and Management Platoons. Within SCAMP
divisions there were now Sensor Employment Squad
Sensors, called SES, and Sensor Employment Teams,
called SETs. The Marines saw enormous potential in
sensor technology, not just for guard and patrol, but
for surveillance and intelligence collection. These
programs would develop, and from the fruits of these
programs, new programs would grow.
Two other technologies that would greatly impact
the way the United States would fight future wars
also emerged from the wreckage of Vietnam. Night

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vision technology expanded into a broad multi-

tiered program as each of the services found great
strategic value in being able to see at night while the
enemy remained in the dark. So did stealth technol-
ogy, a radical innovation originally developed by the
CIA for reconnaissance purposes, starting in 1957,
when the agency first tried to lower the radar cross-
section of the U-2 spy plane. ARPA’ original work
in audio stealth began in 1961 with William Godel’s
sailplane idea, one of the four original Project Agile
gadgets, along with the AR-15, the riverboat, and
the sniffer dogs. During the course of the Vietnam
War, Project Agile’s sailplane had developed success-
fully into the Lockheed QT-2 “quiet airplane,” a
single-engine propeller plane that flew just above the
jungle canopy and was acoustically undetectable
from the ground. Dedicated to surveillance and
packed with sensor technology, the QT-2 would
glide silently over Vietcong territory with its engine
off. In 1968 ARPA turned the program over to the
Army, which made modifications to the aircraft,
now called the Lockheed YO-3 Quiet Star. After the
war, DARPA sought to expand its stealth program
from acoustically undetectable sailplanes to aircraft
that were undetectable even by the most sophisti-
cated enemy radar. In 1974 DARPA’s Tactical Tech-
nology Office began work on a highly classified
program to build “high-stealth aircraft.” The

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following year, DARPA issued contracts to McDon-

nell Douglas and Northrop, considered by DARPA
to be the two defense contractors most qualified for
the stealth job.
There was a fascinating twist. By the mid-1970s,
Lockheed had already achieved major milestones in
stealth technology, having developed the highly clas-
sified A-12 Oxcart spy plane for the CIA. (The A-12
later became the unclassified SR-71 reconnaissance
aircraft, flown by the Air Force.) Knowledge of the
CIA’s classified stealth program was so tightly con-
trolled that even DARPA director George Heilmeier
did not have a need to know about it. In 1974, when
management at Lockheed Skunk Works learned of
DARPA’ “high-stealth aircraft” efforts—and that
they had not been invited to participate—they
asked the CIA to allow them to discuss the A-12
Oxcart with Heilmeier. After the discussion, Lock-
heed was invited to join the competition and even-
tually won the DARPA stealth contract.
The first on-paper incarnation of what would
become the F-117 stealth fighter was called the
Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled
the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engi-
neers were not initially certain it would fly. “We
designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like
mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,”
remembers Edward Lovick, who worked as a lead

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physicist on the program. After the Hopeless Dia-

mond went through a number of drafts, the project
became a classified DARPA program code-named
Have Blue. Two aircraft were built at the Lockheed
Skunk Works facility in Burbank, California, and
test flown at Area 51 in Nevada in April 1977. Satis-
fied with the low observability of the aircraft, the
U.S. Air Force took over the program in 1978. Stealth
technology was a massive classified endeavor involy-
ing more than ten thousand military and civilian
personnel. The power of this secret weapon rested in
keeping it secret. To do so, the Air Force set up its
own top secret facility to fly the F-117, just north of
Area 51 outside Tonopah, Nevada. The base was
nicknamed Area 52.
The 1970s were a formative time at DARPA from
a historical perspective. Away from the Pentagon,
DARPA came into its own. Congress remained
averse to ARPA’s former herd of social science pro-
grams, which it criticized in post-Vietnam oversight
committees as having been egregiously wasteful,
foolhardy, and without oversight. Any mention of
the phrase “hearts and minds” in the Pentagon made
people wince. To avoid the “red flag” reaction from
Congress, ARPA programs that touched on behav-
ioral sciences were renamed or rebranded.
ARPA’s social science office (which actually
existed during the Vietnam War) was called Human

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Resources Research Office, or HumRRO. But in

the post-Vietnam era, HumRRO programs focused
on improving human performance from a physiologi-
cal and psychological standpoint. Two significant
ideas emerged. The first was to research the psycho-
logical mechanisms of pain as related to military
injuries on the battlefield. ARPA scientists sought to
understand whether soldiers could suppress pain in
combat, and if so, how. The second major project
was a research program on “self-regulation” of bodily
functions previously believed to be involuntary. The
general, forward-thinking question was, how could
a soldier maintain peak performance under the radi-
cally challenging conditions of warfare?
It was a transformative time at DARPA. The
agency already had shifted from the 1950s space and
ballistic missile defense agency to the 1960s agency
responsible for some of the most controversial pro-
grams of the Vietnam War. And now, a number of
events occurred that eased the agency’s transition as
it began to change course again. Under the direction
of the physicist Stephen Lukasik, in the mid-1970s
the agency would take a new turn—a new “thrust,”
as Lukasik grew fond of saying. In this mid-1970s
period of acceleration and innovation, DARPA
would plant certain seeds that would allow it to grow
into one of the most powerful and most respected
agencies inside the Department of Defense.

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* * *

“The key to command and control is, in fact, com-

munication,” said Stephen Lukasik shortly after he
took over the agency. Command and control, or C2,
had now expanded into command, control, and
communication, or C3, and this concept became
the new centerpiece of the DARPA mission under
Lukasik. The advancement of command, control,
and communication technology relied heavily on
computers. Since 1965 the power of microchips,
then called integrated electronic circuits, had been
doubling every year, a concept that a computer engi-
neer named Gordon E. Moore picked up on and
wrote about in Electronics magazine. In “Cramming
More Components into Integrated Circuits,” Moore
predicted that this doubling trend would continue
for the next ten years, a prescient notion that has
since become known as Moore’s law. Doubling is a
powerful concept: 10 x 10 = 100; 100 x 100 =
10,000; 10,000 x 10,000 = 100 million. In 2014,
Apple put 2 billion transistors into its iPhone 6.
In 1974, DARPA’s supercomputer, ILLIAC IV,
now up and running at the Ames Research Center
in California, was the fastest computer in the world.
Its parallel processing power allowed for the devel-
opment of technologies like real-time video process-
ing, noise reduction, image enhancement, and data
compression —all technologies taken for granted in

Boe
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the twenty-first century but with origins in DARPA

science. And Lukasik’s C3 program also relied
heavily on another emerging DARPA technology,
the ARPANET.
It had been more than a decade since J. C. R.
Licklider sent out his eccentric memo proposing the
Pentagon create a linked computer network, which
he called the “Intergalactic Computer Network.”
Licklider left the Pentagon in 1965 but hired two
visionaries to take over the Command and Control
(C2) Research office, since renamed the Information
Processing Techniques Office. Ivan Sutherland, a
computer graphics expert who had worked with
Daniel Slotnick on ILLIAC IV, and Robert W.
Taylor, an experimental psychologist, believed that
computers would revolutionize the world and that a
network of computers was the key to this revolution.
Through networking, not only would individual
computer users have access to other users’ data, but
also they would be able to communicate with one
another in a radical new way. Licklider and Taylor
co-wrote an essay in 1968 in which they predicted,
“In a few years, men will be able to communicate
more effectively through a machine than face to
face.” By 2009, more electronic text messages would
be sent each day than there were people on the planet.
Sutherland and Taylor began asking DARPA con-

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tractors at various university research laboratories

around the country what they thought about the net-
worked computer idea. The feedback was unanimous
in favor of it. In general, scientists and engineers were
frustrated by how little access to computers they had.
This got Sutherland and Taylor thinking. Why not try
linking several of these university computers together
so the DARPA contractors could share resources? To
do so would require building a system of electronic
links between different computers, located hundreds
of miles apart. It was a radical undertaking, but
Sutherland and Taylor believed it could be done.
Bob Taylor went to DARPA director Charles
Herzfeld to request enough money to fund a net-
worked connection linking four different university
computers, or nodes. Herzfeld told Taylor he thought
it sounded like a good idea but he was concerned
about reliability. If all four computers were linked
together, Herzfeld said, when there was a problem, it
meant all four computers would be down at the
same time. Thinking on his feet, Taylor said he
intended to build a concept into the system called
network redundancy. If one connection went down,
the messages traveling between the computers would
simply take another path. Herzfeld asked how much
money Taylor thought be needed. Taylor said a
million dollars.

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Herzfeld asked, “Is it going to be hard to do?”

“Oh, no. We already know how to do it,” Taylor
said, when really he was guessing.
“Great idea,” said Herzfeld. “You've got a million
dollars more in your budget right now.” Then he
told Taylor to get to work.
Taylor left Herzfeld’s office and headed back to his
own. He later recalled the astonishment he felt when
he looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he thought.
“That only took twenty minutes.” Even more conse-
quential was the idea of network redundancy—
making sure no single computer could take the system
down—that emerged from that meeting. It is why in
2015, no one organization, corporation, or nation can
own or completely control the global system of inter-
connected computer networks known as the Internet.
To think it came out of that one meeting, on the fly.
The first four university sites chosen were Stan-
ford Research Institute in northern California; the
University of California, Los Angeles; the Univer-
sity of California, Santa Barbara; and the University
of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1969, ARPA contractor
Bolt, Beranek and Newman became the first east
coast node. By 1972 there were twenty-four nodes,
including the Pentagon. The person largely respon-
sible for connecting these nodes was an electrical
engineer named Robert Kahn. At the time, Kahn

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called what he was working on an “internetwork.”

Soon it would be shortened to Internet.
This network of ARPA nodes was growing, and
Kahn wanted to devise a common language, or pro-
tocol, so that all new nodes could communicate with
the existing nodes in the same language. To do this,
Kahn teamed up with another DARPA program
manager named Vint Cerf, and together the men
invented the concept of Transmission Control Pro-
tocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), which
would allow new nodes seamless access to the
ARPANET. Today, TCP/IP remains the core com-
munications protocol of the Internet. By 1973 there
were thirty-six ARPANET nodes connected via tele-
phone lines, and a thirty-seventh, in Hawaii, con-
nected by a satellite link. That same year the
Norwegian Seismic Array became connected to the
ARPANET, and J. C. R. Licklider’s vision for an
“Intergalactic Computer Network” became an inter-
national reality.
In 1975 DARPA transferred its ARPANET sys-
tem over to the Defense Communications Agency,
and in 1982 standards for sending and receiving
email were put in place. In 1983 the Pentagon split
off a military-only network, called MILNET. Today
the ARPANET is often referred to as “the most
successful project ever undertaken by DARPA.”

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* * Ed

Between the advances in computer technology, net-

working power, and the ARPANET, DARPA was
primed for the development of an entirely new
C3-based weapons system. Sometime in 1974,
DARPA commissioned several classified studies on
how the Pentagon could best prepare itself for a
Soviet invasion of western Europe. The strategist
leading one analysis was the former RAND mathe-
matician Albert Wohlstetter, author of the nuclear
second-strike doctrine, or NUTS. Wohlstetter, now
a professor at the University of Chicago, sought “to
identify and characterize” new military technolo-
gies that would give the president a variety of
“alternatives to massive nuclear destruction.” Wohl-
stetter assembled a study group, called the Strategic
Alternatives Group, to assist him in his analytic
efforts. In February 1975 the group completed
the generically titled “Summary Report of the
Long Range Research and Development Planning
Program.”
In the report, Wohlstetter concluded that several
Vietnam-era DARPA projects merited renewed
attention. Topping the list was the effectiveness of
laser-guided bombs and missiles. In the last year of
the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force sent 10,500
laser-guided bombs into North Vietnam. Roughly
one-half of these bombs, 5,100 in total, achieved a

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“direct hit,” with another 4,000 achieving “a circu-

lar error probable (CEP) of 25 feet.” Compared to
the success rate of unguided “dumb” bombs of pre-
vious wars, including World War II, Korea, and
most of Vietnam, these statistics were to be inter-
preted as “spectacularly good,” wrote Wohlstetter.
The best example was the bombing of the Thanh
Hoa Bridge, a 540-foot steel span across the Song
Ma River, roughly seventy miles south of Hanoi.
The bridge was an important supply route for the
North Vietnamese during the war, and they kept it
defended with garrison-like strength. The bridge
was surrounded by a ring of three hundred antiair-
craft systems and eighty-five surface-to-air missile
systems. A wing of Soviet-supplied MiG fighter jets
was stationed nearby. For years in the late 1960s,
the Air Force and the Navy tried to destroy the
bridge but could not. By 1968, eleven U.S. aircraft
had been shot down trying to bomb the bridge.
Then, in May 1972, after a four-and-a-halfyear
bombing halt, fourteen F-4 fighter bombers equipped
with newly developed laser-guided bombs were sent
on a mission to bomb the bridge. With several direct
hits, the bridge was destroyed. “It appears that non-
nuclear weapons with near-zero miss may be feasibly
and militarily effective,’ Wohlstetter wrote in praise
of these new “smart” weapons.
Also of interest to Wohlstetter were DARPA’s

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early efforts with mini-drones, which had played a

major role in advancing laser-guided weapons
technology—a fact largely underreported in mili-
tary history books. DARPA’s Vietnam drone pro-
gram had grown out of DDR&E John Foster’s love
of model airplanes and remote control. Two of the
mini-drones, called Praerie and Calere, caught Wohl-
stetter’s eye. Praerie and Calere were exceptionally
small at the time, each weighing seventy-five pounds,
including a twenty-eight-pound payload that could
be a camera, a small bomb, or an “electronic warfare
payload.” Each was powered by a lawnmower engine
and could fly for up to two hours. Praerie carried a
TV camera and used laser target technology. It was
the first drone to direct a cannon-launched guided
projectile to a direct hit on a tank, a milestone
achieved at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, during an
undated field test. The Calere drone was equally
groundbreaking. It carried forward-looking infrared,
or FLIR, another Vietnam-era invention, which
allowed the drone to “see” at low altitudes in the dark
of night.
DARPA also developed another, much larger,
“more complicated” drone that interested Wohlstet-
ter, as revealed in an obscure 1974 internal DARPA
review. Nite Panther and Nite Gazelle were helicop-
ter drones, “equipped with a real time day-night bat-
tlefield reconnaissance capability including armor

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plate and self-sealing, extended-range fuel tanks.”

The drone helicopters were deployed into the battle-
field, starting in March 1968, in response to an
urgent operational request from the Marine Corps.
To create the Nite Panther drone, DARPA modified
a Navy QH-50 DASH antisubmarine helicopter—
originally designed to fire torpedoes at submerged
submarines—and added a remotely controlled tele-
vision system, called a “reconnaissance-observation
system,” which could transmit real-time visuals back
to a moving jeep, acting as a ground station. The jeep
was loaded with racks of telemetry and television
equipment, antennae, and a power supply. The drone
operator sitting in the jeep was able to operate and
monitor the drone helicopter from takeoff to touch-
down. Images captured by the drone, flying over
enemy territory, were recorded by the equipment on
the jeep, then relayed back to a shipboard control sta-
tion, where commanders could send high-performance
strike aircraft to bomb targets identified by the drone.
This was groundbreaking technology during the
war. In 1974 Wohlstetter recognized its future poten-
tial. Conceivably, as computers got smaller and were
able to process data faster, a drone could be sent deep
behind enemy lines to photograph targets and send
the images to commanders in real time.
Another significant DARPA technology that
allowed these Vietnam-era systems to converge was

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a satellite-based navigation technology called Global

Positioning Systems, or GPS. GPS began as a classi-
fied military program, the purpose of which was to
direct weapons to precise targets. DARPA’s pioneer-
ing GPS program was called TRANSIT. It began in
1959, when ARPA contracted with the Johns Hop-
kins Applied Physics Laboratory to create the first
satellite positioning system, using six satellites, three
for positioning and three as spares.
After several failed launches, TRANSIT finally
took up residence in space in June 1963. To deny
enemy access to this kind of precise targeting infor-
mation, the system was originally designed with an
offset feature built in, called selective availability
(SA). If an individual were able to access the GPS
system with a private receiver, the information would
be offset by several hundred feet.
Over the next ten years, the Navy and the Air
Force developed their own satellite-based naviga-
tional systems, but each system was incompatible
with the other. In 1973 the Pentagon ordered
DARPA to create a single system shared by all the
military services, and a new DARPA program called
NAVSTAR Global Positioning System emerged. It
was a herculean effort filled with technical stum-
bling blocks and failed rocket launches. Finally,
starting in 1989 a constellation of twenty-four satel-
lites, each fitted with atomic clocks to keep them in

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sync, was sent aloft and began orbiting the earth.

The U.S. military now had precise navigational cov-
erage of the entire world, in all weather conditions,
in real time.
During the 1990s, interest in satellite-based global
positioning technology grew, and European compa-
nies began developing GPS-like systems for civilian
use. In an effort to keep the United States at the fore-
front of the burgeoning new industry, in May 2000
President Clinton discontinued the selective avail-
ability feature on GPS, giving billions of people
access to precise GPS technology, developed by
DARPA.

To Albert Wohlstetter, working on the DARPA

analysis in the mid-1970s, the fusion of various
Vietnam-era technology systems—sensors, comput-
ers, laser-guided weapons, the ARPANET, drones—
offered great promise and potential in the development
of what he called a “system of systems.” The following
year, on the basis of suggestions made in the “Sum-
mary Report of the Long Range Research and Devel-
opment Planning Program,” DARPA initiated a new
weapons program called Assault Breaker. A series of
once disparate technologies could come together to
fulfill Lukasik’s vision to “command, control, and
communicate.” Using technologies that also included
radar tracking and camera confirmation, Assault

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Breaker would one day allow commanders to pre-

cisely strike targets—even moving targets—deep
behind enemy lines. Imagining a system in which this
kind of weaponry and technology could work together
was unprecedented. All of it had emerged from the
Vietnam War.
In the 1970s, the Soviets were notorious for main-
taining a network of spies in and around Washing-
ton, D.C., and it did not take long for the Russians
to learn about DARPA’s classified Assault Breaker
plans. When they did, the Soviet military brass
began studying the concept and planning counter-
measures. In 1978 an article about Assault Breaker
appeared in the classified Soviet military journal
Military Thought. That the Soviets knew about
DARPA’s “system of systems” might have gone
unnoticed had it not been for the sharp eyes of
Andrew W. Marshall, a former RAND analyst and
Wohlstetter protégé who now had his own office
inside the Pentagon. Marshall served as director of
the Office of Net Assessment, created by the Nixon
White House in 1973 and dedicated to forecasting
future wars. At RAND, Marshall had secured his
reputation as a master game theorist, and at the Penta-
gon, his wizardry in prognosis and prediction earned
him the nom de guerre Yoda, or the Jedi Master. It
also put him in regular contact with DARPA direc-

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tors and program managers, as he continued to be

for over forty years.
Part of Andrew Marshall’s job in the 1970s was
to monitor what Soviet generals were writing in their
classified journals. In reading Military Thought,
Marshall learned that the Soviets felt so threatened
by the prospects of an Assault Breaker—like system
of systems that they were running exercises to prac-
tice countermeasures against one. Soviet fears of
DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept did not stop there
but made their way to the top of the Soviet military
chain of command. In 1984 Marshall Nikolai Ogar-
kov, chief of the general staff of the armed forces of
the Soviet Union, worried in a classified memo that
Assault Breaker gave the Americans the ability to
conduct “automated reconnaissance-and-strike com-
plexes,” a capability that must be regarded as a
“military-technical revolution.” Marshall renamed
the Russian pronouncement a “revolution in military
affairs,” which had since become a celebrated Penta-
gon maxim. The saying defines what happens when
one country or fighting force creates a technology or
tactic that makes everything else subordinate to it
and makes many of the other side’s earlier weapons
systems obsolete.
Just a decade before, in the wake of the Vietnam
War and with his agency’s budget slashed, Stephen

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Lukasik had appealed to Congress to allow DARPA

to pursue “high-risk projects of revolutionary impact.”
Lukasik told Congress that in the modern world, the
country with the most powerful weapons would not
necessarily have the leading edge. He argued that as
the twenty-first century approached, the leading
edge would belong to the country with the best
information—with which it could quickly plan,
coordinate, and attack. Eleven years later, his vision
proved correct. The Soviets felt deeply threatened by
DARPA’s C3-based revolution in military affairs.
Technology continued to advance at a radical
new pace. In 1977 Harold Brown became President
Carter's secretary of defense, making Brown the first
nuclear scientist to lead the Department of Defense.
Brown believed that technological superiority was
imperative to military dominance, and he also
believed that advancing science was the key to eco-
nomic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technol-
ogy leadership into a national strategy,” remarks
DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising
inflation and unemployment, DARPA’s budget was
doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making
stunning advances. High-speed communication
networks and Global Positioning System technolo-
gies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s
highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs,
including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided muni-

370
 RisE OF THE MACHINES

tions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black.

Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle
ready. From all of this work, entire new industries
were forming.

In the fall of 1978, Captain (later Colonel) Jack A.

Thorpe, a thirty-four-year-old Air Force officer with
a Ph.D. in psychology, was sitting inside a flight sim-
ulator at the Flying Training Division of Williams
Air Force Base in Arizona when he got a radical idea.
The flight simulator here at the Human Resources
Laboratory was one of two of the most advanced
simulators in the country —and the most expensive,
having cost more than $25 million to build, roughly
$100 million in 2015. The computer-driven simula-
tor was mounted on a hydraulic motion system that
moved like a carnival ride. The simulator Captain
Thorpe was sitting inside was connected to a second
computer, which made the pair state of the art and
one of a kind.
“The other flyer’s aircraft appeared in the corner
of my screen like a small cartoonish icon,” Thorpe
remembers. “What this meant in 1978 was that this
flight simulator was the only one in America where
two pilots could engage in flight training research
operations together, at the same time.”
Thorpe was struck with an idea. What if an Air
Force pilot could sit inside a small room like the one

oil
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

he was sitting in now, but instead of looking at car-

toonish icons moving across a computer screen, he
saw the world in front of him in three dimensions?
What if it felt like he was actually inside the air-
plane, with his wingman flying alongside? Jack
Thorpe had a name for what he imagined. It was a
“high-fidelity simulator,” a virtual world.
Back at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington,
D.C., where he was stationed, Thorpe put his
thoughts down on paper. In “Future Views: Aircrew
Training, 1980-2000,” Thorpe described a flight-
training situation in which a whole squadron of
pilots could prepare for combat readiness together,
training on individual but networked flight simula-
tors. Each airman would be flying a separate aircraft
but in the same battle space. In this virtual reality,
pilots would be in visual contact with one another
and in audio contact with a commander, who would
work from a remote information center, imagined as
a real place, which Thorpe called a Tactical Develop-
ment Center. Thorpe’s Tactical Development Center
would have “a three dimensional, holographic, elec-
tronic sand table,” he wrote, “a place where tacticians
and strategists could see what the pilots in their sim-
ulators were doing.” In this computer-generated
environment, a commander would be able to “see”
what was happening in the battle space, in real time,
thanks to an overhead satellite source delivering

o72
 RISE OF THE MACHINES

data. In this new virtual world, pilots would train

and their commanders would strategize.
These simulators would allow for “real-time dress
rehearsals,” Thorpe wrote, teaching pilots how to
train in groups, with the immediacy of real battle
situations but without the lethal consequences. On
the basis of the outcomes of various simulations,
commanders could quickly decide what course of
action each pilot should take. Without having access
to any information about DARPA programs, and
certainly not being privy to newly formulated classi-
fied details of the Assault Breaker program, Thorpe
had envisioned almost the same thing that Wohl-
stetter saw. Only Thorpe’s high-fidelity simulator
was a training tool for war, played in a virtual world,
and Assault Breaker was a billion-dollar weapons
system to be developed and deployed in a real war.
Thorpe was invited to present his thoughts to a
group of senior officials. “They were all command
pilots, each with thousands of hours of flight time,”
Thorpe recalls. “Here I am, this clown with no
wings, proposing to take away flight training time
from air officers. I did not articulate myself very
well. I got my lunch handed to me.” The senior offi-
cials chuckled at his idea.
Thorpe figured he was missing a key piece of this
puzzle he was designing, but he just did not know
what it was yet. “There is nothing like getting yelled

S73,
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

at to make you think harder, to really reflect,”

Thorpe says. “I figured out you can’t take away flight
training time. The simulator would be a better place
to practice certain combat skills that can never be
practiced except in battle,” he says. “For example,
you could practice with equipment like jammers,
which you would never turn on in peacetime, [which]
an opponent could [potentially] see. As soon as I had
the ‘ah-hah’ moment, that the real value of the simu-
lator was to teach and practice skills you could not
practice until the first day of real combat, that’s when
the way to design the simulator became clear to me.”
Thorpe ran the idea by a few senior officers, but it
was just too difficult a concept for most people to visu-
alize. Then, “by happenstance,” says Thorpe, “I was
offered the services of a graphic artist in the Pentagon,
and he illustrated the key components of the proposed
concept.” Thorpe’s paper, which now included elegant
drawings, was reviewed by senior Pentagon staff.
“Everyone said, “Hey, that’s cool,” Thorpe recalls.
“But they also said, “The fact is, the technology isn’t
there yet.” Most colleagues who looked at Thorpe’s
drawings said to him, “We don’t even know how to
start building something like that yet.”
One of the greatest stumbling blocks to Thorpe’s
vision in 1978 was how these simulators could possibly
be connected to one another. “The idea of networks

374
 Rise OF THE MACHINES

connecting distant military installations was not yet

imagined,” says Thorpe. “The ARPANET experi-
ments connecting a small number of computers
between different universities were under way, but the
results were not well known.” Mostly they were still
classified. With his vision for the future seeming more
science fiction than science, Thorpe’s paper was
shelved.
Thorpe went back to school, to the Naval War
College in Newport, Rhode Island, and in January
1981 he was assigned to DARPA, on loan from the
Air Force. He was made a program manager in the
Systems Science Division, next door to the Informa-
tion Processing Technology Office that was being
run by Bob Kahn, the man who, together with Vint
Cerf, had invented the Transmission Control Proto-
col/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Thorpe recalls
what an exciting time it was at DARPA, “the center
of the universe for gadgets.” DARPA was located at
1400 Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia, and
the Systems Science Division had its own demonstra-
tion facility across the street, “a place to try out all the
new gadgets, take them apart, put them back together
again, or maybe integrate one with another system.”
Thorpe remembers one such example when one of the
world’s first compact disc players arrived in America,
at DARPA, in 1981 or 1982. It had been sent from a

MN
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

small electronics company in Japan. “There were only

a few CDs in the world at the time,” Thorpe recalls,
“and they had music on them. Our director wasn’t
interested in listening to music, but we were interested
in thinking about using the technology for data stor-
age.” The CD player was the size of a suitcase.
In the DARPA building, down the hallway from
Thorpe’s office, was the Cybernetics Technology
Office, where DARPA’s artificial intelligence work
was under way. One day Thorpe’s boss, Craig Fields,
the former program director of cybernetics technol-
ogy, asked Thorpe if he had any bright ideas.
“T pulled out the old high-fidelity simulator draw-
ings,” recalls Thorpe. “Fields, a brilliant guy, and
later the director of DARPA, says, ‘I like that.” He
suggested we go talk to the director, Larry Lynn.”
Thorpe explained his idea to Lynn, who said he liked
it, too.
“How much to build this synthetic world?”
Thorpe recalls Lynn asking.
“Seventeen million,” Thorpe told him.
“Let’s do it,” Larry Lynn said.
“So we went ahead and started the program,” says
Thorpe.
Captain Jack Thorpe’s paper was now a DARPA
program called Simulator Networking, or SIM-
NET. Broadly speaking, the goal of SIMNET was

376
The 15-megaton Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb, exploded in the Marshall
Islands in 1954, was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United
States. If unleashed on the eastern seaboard today it would kill roughly 20 mil-
lion people. With this weapon, authorized to proceed in secret, came the cer-
tainty of the military-industrial complex and the birth of DARPA. (USS.
Department of Energy)

\al- (02-5
1-9 -54

An elite group of weapons engineers rode out the Castle Bravo thermonuclear
explosion from inside this bunker, code-named Station 70, just nineteen miles
from ground zero. (The National Archives at Riverside)
 In the 1950s, John von Neu-
mann—mathematician, physi-
cist, game theorist, and
inventor—was the superstar
defense scientist. No one could
compete with his brain. (U.S.
Department of Energy)

Rivalry spawns supremacy,

and in the early 1950s, a sec-
ond national nuclear weapons
laboratory was created to fos-
ter competition with Los Ala-
mos. Ernest O. Lawrence
(left) and Edward Teller (cen-
ter) cofounded the Lawrence
Livermore National Labora-
tory. Herb York (right) served
as first director. In 1958, York
became scientific director of | ~
the brand new Advanced
Research Project Agency
(ARPA), later renamed
DARPA. (Lawrence Liver-
more National Laboratory)

In his farewell address to

the nation in Janua 1961,
President Eisenhower
warned the American peo-
ple about the “total influ-
ence” of the
military-industrial com-
plex. The warning was a
decade too late. (Dwight
D. Eisenhower Presidential
Library)
 Edward Teller and Herb
York—shown here with
Livermore colleague Luis
Alvarez—envisioned a
10,000-megaton nuclear
weapon designed to deci-
mate and depopulate much
® of the Soviet Union. (Law-
rence Livermore National
Laboratory)

Harold Brown was twenty-

four years old when he was
put in charge of thermo-
nuclear bomb work at Liver-
more. He followed Herb
York to the Pentagon and
oversaw ARPA weapons
programs during the Viet-
nam War. In 1977, Harold
Brown became the first sci-
entist to be secretary of
defense. (U.S. Department
of Defense)

Physicist and presidential

science advisor Marvin
“Murph” Goldberger
cofounded the Jason advi-
sory group in 1959, paid for
solely by ARPA until the
end of the Vietnam War.
The Jasons, still at work
today, are considered the
most influential and secre.
tive defense scientists in
America. Photographed
here in his home, age 90 in
2013, Goldberger examines
a photo of himself and Pres-
ident Johnson. (Author’s
collection)
Senator John F. Kennedy visiting Senator Lyndon B. Johnson at the LBJ ranch
in Texas. Each man, as President, would personally authorize some of the most
controversial ARPA weapons programs of the Vietnam War. (Lyndon B. John-
son Presidential Library, photo by Frank Muto)

In 1961 Kennedy sent Johnson

to Vietnam to encourage South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh
Diem to sign offon ARPA’s
weapons lab in Saigon. In this
photograph are (roughly front to
back) Ngo Dinh Diem, Lady
Bird Johnson, Madame Nhu,
Lyndon Johnson, Nguyen Ngoc
Tho, Jean Kennedy Smith,
Stephen Smith, and Ngo Dinh
Nhu, the head of the secret
police. In 1963, Diem and Nhu
were murdered in a White
House—approved coup d’état.
(Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential
Library, photo by Republic of
Vietnam)
 President Diem’s small-in-stature
army had difficulty handling
large, semi-automatic weapons
carried by U.S. military advisors
in Vietnam. ARPA’s William
Godel cut through red tape and
j sent 1,000 AR-15 rifles to Sai-
gon. In 1966 the weapon was
adapted for fully automatic fire
and re-designated the M16 assault
rifle. “One measure of the weap-
on’s success is that it is still in use
across the world,” says DARPA.
(NARA, photo by Dennis
Kurpius)

The use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange was an AR PA-devised scheme.
“Your decision is required because this is a kind of chemical warfar advisor
Walt Rostow told President Kennedy, who signed off on the program in 1961.
In 2012 Congress determined that between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Viet-
namese were directly exposed to Agent Orange with the number of U.S. veter-
ans remaining the subject of debate. (NARA, photo by Bryan K. Grigsby)

Secretary of Defense Robert

S. McNamara explains the
situation in Vietnam, during
Pentagon press conference
in February 1965. Many of
today’s advanced technology
weapons systems were devel-
oped by ARPA during the
Vietnam War. (U.S. Depart-
ment of Defense)
 In 1965, the Jason scien-
tists studied the use of
tactical nuclear weapons
in Vietnam to close off
supply routes on the Ho
Chi Minh Trail. (U.S.
Army)

The Jason scientists were the brains

behind McNamara’s electronic
fence, a system of advanced sensors
designed to detect Viet Cong trail
traffic. Initially ridiculed and later
embraced, DAR PA advanced the
concept into Combat Zones That
See. In this photo, an Air Delivered
Seismic Intrusion Detector
(ADSID) sensor is about to be
dropped on the trail, near Khe
Sanh. (U.S. Air Force)

No amount of technology
could stop Vietnam War pro-
testers from gaining control of
| the war narrative. (Lyndon B.
Johnson Presidential Library,
photo by Frank Wolfe)
 As the seventeenth secre-
tary of defense Richard
“Dick” B. Cheney oversaw
the Gulf War in Iraq, which
put decades of DAR PA's
advanced weapons technol-
ogy on display. (Office of
the Secretary of Defense)

Students train in an
M1 Abrams tank
SIMNET simulator,
the brainchild of
DARPA’s Jack
Thorpe. (U.S. Depart-
ment of Defense)

A staff sergeant armed with an M16A2 assaulterifle maintains security over an

F-117 stealth fighter, during refueling. (U.S. Department of Defense)
 The superiority of
U.S. weapons tech-
nology used in the
Gulf War is made
evident along Iraq’s
Highway 80, or
“Highway of Death.”
(U.S. Department of
Defense, Tech Sgt.
Joe Coleman)

AUS. Marine helicop-

ter flies over a residen-
tial area in Mogadishu,
Somalia, in 1992. The
following year, the Bat-
tle of Mogadishu caused
DARPA to rethink
what future weapons
systems would be
needed for urban com-
bat. (U.S. Department
of Defense, Tech Sgt.
Perry Heimer)

An early 1990s model of

what the Pentagon
thought an urban com-
bat scenario might look
like, seen here at the
Military Operations in
Urban Terrain (MOUT)
' training center. But
combat zones like Mog-
adishu, Fallujah, and
Kabul look nothing like
this. (U.S. Department
of Defense, Visual
Information Center)
 Retired Vice Admiral
John M. Poindexter,
known for his role in the
Iran-Contra affair, served
as director of DARPA’s
Information Awareness
Office, starting in 2001.
Allegedly shut down,
many electronic
surveillance programs
were transferred to NSA.
(NARA)

President George W.
Bush and Secretary of
Defense Donald
Rumsfeld at the west-
ern face of the Penta-
gon, the day after the
9/11 terrorist attacks.
(U.S. Department of
Defense, photo by R.
D. Ward)

US. and coalition flags fly outside Saddam Hussein’s former Al Faw Pala ie,
taken over by U.S. military and renamed Camp Victory, Iraq. Master Sergeant
Craig Marsh lived here and oversaw the efforts of bomb disposal (EOD) tech-
nicians and DARPA robots. (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Staff Sgt.
Caleb Barrieau)
DARPA’s Talon robot approaches a deadly improvised explosive device (IED)
in Rajah, Iraq. (U.S. Army, photo by Specialist Jeffrey Sandstrum)

A micro air vehicle (MAV) prepares for its first combat mission in Iraq, in 2005,
Many of DARPA’s advanced MAV’s are now small enough to fit in the palm of
the hand. (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Sgt. Doug Roles)
The seven-ounce Wasp drone, part of DAR PA’s Combat Zones That See, gath-
ers real-time video and works in a swarm. (U.S. Department of Defense)

Vice President Cheney, his wife, and their daughter are greeted by General
David Petraeus in Baghdad, in 2008. Petraeus wrote the first U.S. Army counter-
insurgency manual since Vietnam and supported the DARPA-born Human
Terrain System program which focused on winning “the hearts, minds, and
acquiescence of the population.” (U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Mas-
ter Sgt. Jeffrey Allen)
 The Predator drone
inside a hangar at
Creech Air Force
Base, Nevada, in 2009.
(Author’s collection)

The charred alley in

Chehel Gazi, Afghani-
stan, where Human
Terrain Team member
Paula Loyd was set on
fire by an emissary of
the Taliban. (USA
Criminal Investigation
Command)
 j ae HY cits " s aD
DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar and Marine Corps Commandant General
James F. Amos pose with DARPA’s LS3 land robot, designed to carry heavy
equipment over rugged terrain, in 2014. (U.S. Marine Corps, photo by Sgt.
Mallory S. VanderSchans)

An armored truck with an assault rifle mounted on top keeps guard outside the
Los Alamos National Laboratory where Dr. Garrett Kenyon and his team work
on artificial intelligence for DARPA. (Author’s collection)
 When the IBM Roadrunner
supercomputer was built for Los
Alamos, in 2008, it was the fastest
computer in the world, able to
perform 1 million billion calcula-
tions per second. By 2013,
advances in chip technology ren- ‘
dered it obsolete. In 2014, part of
what remains of Roadrunner is
used to power DARPA’ artificial
intelligence project. (Los Alamos
National Laboratory)

The DARPA Modular Prosthetic Limb.

The work advances robotics but is it
helping warfighters who lost limbs?
(U.S. Department of Defense, courtesy
of Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory)

DAR PA’s Atlas robot is a high-

mobility humanoid robot built by
Boston Dynamics. Its “articulated
sensor head” has stereo cameras and §
a laser range finder. (Defense
Advanced Research Projects §
Agency)
 Allen Macy Dulles and his
sister, Joan Dulles Talley. A
brain injury during the
Korean War, in 1952, made
it impossible for Dulles to
record new memories.
DAR PA's brain prosthetics
program alleges to help
brain-wounded warriors
like Dulles, but program
details remain highly classi-
fied. (Author’s collection)

lates! nae Be Nee :

The Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or MAARS robot kills
human targets from almost two miles away. MAARS robots have motion
detectors, acoustic sensors, siren and speaker systems, non-lethal laser dazzlers,
less-than-lethal grenades, and encryption technology to make the robotic killer
“extremely safe and tamper proof,” says DARPA. (U.S. Army)
 DARPA Head-
quarters in Arlington,
Virginia, bears no
identifying signs and
maintains a “force
protection environ-
ment,” for security
purposes. (Author’s
collection)

VEEEE MUNN ees Ss

- oe m =

The Pentagon. U.S. Department of Defense, photo by Senior Airman Perry

Aston)
 RISE OF THE MACHINES

to add a new element to command and control (C2),

namely training. C2 would eventually become C2U,
“with a ‘U’ for university,” says Thorpe.
In April 1983, SIMNET was just another DARPA
program. Nothing like it had ever been attempted
before, and like other blue-sky science endeavors at
DARPA, SIMNET was given room to succeed or to
fail. “DARPA, unlike most agencies, is allowed to
fail some fraction of the time,” says Joe Mangano, a
former DARPA program manager.
“In the early 1980s, most people in the defense
community accepted the notion that building an
affordable, large-scale, free-play, force-on-force world-
wide networked war-fighting system was impossible,”
retired colonel Neale Cosby recalled in 2014. Cosby
served as a SIMNET principal investigator for
DARPA for five years. But SIMNET would astonish
everybody, not only for its military application but for
the multibillion-dollar industry it would help create.
“William Gibson didn’t invent cyberspace,” Wired
magazine reported in 1997, referring to the science
fiction author who coined the term in 1982, “Air
Force captain Jack Thorpe did.” SIMNET was the
first realization of cyberspace, and it was the world’s
first massively multiplayer online role-playing game,
or MMORPG—more commonly known as an
MMO.

oe,
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

MMOs first became popular in the gaming com-

munity in the late 1990s, and by 2003 they had
entered the mainstream. MMOs are now able to
support enormous numbers of game players simulta-
neously, with each individual gamer connected to
the game by the Internet. One of the most popular
MMOs is World of Warcraft, which sold more than
$2.5 billion worth of subscriptions in its first ten
years. Each month, some 10 million monthly World
of Warcraft subscribers explore fantastic virtual land-
scapes, fight monsters, and complete quests using an
avatar.
MMO users became so great in number that in
2008, the CIA, the NSA, and DARPA launched a
covert data-mining effort, called Project Reynard, to
track World of Warcraft subscribers and discern how
they exist and interact in virtual worlds. To do so,
CIA analysts created their own avatars and entered
the virtual world of World of Warcraft. That the CIA
was spying on MMO users was classified and
remained unknown until 2013, when former National
Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden dis-
closed top secret documents detailing the program,
which also involved British intelligence agencies.
“Although online gaming may seem like an innocu-
ous form of entertainment, when the basic features
and capabilities are examined, it could potentially
become a target-rich communication network,” reads

378
 RISE OF THE MACHINES

one top secret report, “WoW [World of Warcraft] may

be providing SIGINT [signals intelligence] targets a
way to hide in plain sight.”
But back in 1983, SIMNET was just getting
started. MMOs were far in the future and still a fig-
ment of the imagination. SIMNET was about train-
ing warfighters for battle. And Jack Thorpe had
more than a decade of work ahead of him.

au
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Star Wars and Tank Wars

n the evening of March 23, 1983, a long

() black limousine pulled up to the south gate
of Ronald Reagan’s White House. In the
back sat Edward Teller, now seventy-five years old.
Teller was not exactly sure why he was here. He had
just flown in from California, where he lived,
because the aide who called him three days earlier
said President Reagan thought it was important that
he be at the White House on this night.
Walking with a limp and a cane, Teller made his
way through the White House foyer, up the stairs,
and into the Blue Room. There he was greeted by
Admiral John Poindexter, the Military Assistant to
the President for National Security Affairs. Poindex-
ter suggested Teller have a seat. Thirty-six chairs had

380
 STAR WARS AND TANK WARS

been set up in neat rows. Teller sat down and waited.

In another seat was the Jason scientist and Nobel
laureate Charles H. Townes, the principal inventor
of the laser.
At 8:00 p.m., in a nationally televised address,
President Reagan announced to the world his deci-
sion to launch a major new research and development
program to intercept Soviet ICBMs in various stages
of flight. The program, the Strategic Defense Initia-
tive (SDI), would require numerous advanced tech-
nology systems, the majority of which were still in the
development stage. DARPA would be the lead agency
in charge until SDI had its own organization.
President Reagan said that the reason for this
radical new initiative was simple. When he first
became president, he was shocked to learn that in
the event of a Soviet nuclear strike, his only option
as commander in chief was to launch an all-out
nuclear attack against the Soviets in response.
Reagan said he was not willing to live in the shadow
of nuclear Armageddon — mutual assured destruc-
tion. The United States needed the capability to
strike down incoming Soviet missiles before they
arrived. This bold new SDI program would allow
for that.
For decades, defense scientists like the Jason sci-
entists had been grappling with this conundrum of
ballistic missile defense and had concluded that

381
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

there was no way to defend against an onslaught of

incoming ICBMs. Now, Reagan believed that tech-
nology had advanced to the point where this could
be done sometime in the not-so-distant future.
The Strategic Defense Initiative involved huge
mirrors in space, space-based surveillance and track-
ing systems, space-based battle stations, and more.
But the element that got the most attention right
away was the x-ray laser, which scientists at the Law-
rence Livermore National Laboratory had been
working on since the 1970s. Very few people outside
the Livermore group understood the science behind
an x-ray laser, and even fewer knew that x-ray lasers
were powered by nuclear explosions.
Several days after Reagan’s speech, Secretary of
Defense Caspar Weinberger was leaving the Penta-
gon to brief Congress on SDI. Walking alongside
him was Undersecretary Richard D. DeLauer, a bal-
listic missile expert. Secretary Weinberger was hay-
ing trouble grasping the science behind SDI and
DeLauer was trying to explain it to him.
“But is it a bomb?” Secretary Weinberger asked.
DeLauer was candid. As the former executive vice
president of the missile company TRW, Inc., and
with a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering, DeLauer
understood the science behind the x-ray laser. “You're
going to have to detonate a nuclear bomb in space,”

382
 Star WARS AND TANK WARS

he told the secretary of defense. “That’s how you're

going to get the x-ray.”
This put Secretary Weinberger in an untenable
position. President Reagan had assured the public
that his new program would not involve nuclear
weapons in space. “It’s not a bomb, is it?” Wein-
berger asked a second time.
DeLauer chose his words carefully. He said that
the x-ray laser didn’t have to be called a bomb. It
could be described as involving a “nuclear event.”
In a 1985 interview for the Los Angeles Times,
DeLauer relayed this story verbatim. He said that
the secretary of defense “didn’t understand the tech-
nology,” adding, “Most people don’t.”
The laser was invented in the late 1950s by
Charles Townes, who in 1964 was awarded the
Nobel Prize in physics. In the most basic sense a laser
is a device that emits light. But unlike with other
light sources, such as a lightbulb, which emits light
that dissipates, in a laser the photons all move in the
same direction in lockstep, exactly parallel to one
another, with no deviation. To many, the laser is
something straight out of science fiction. In a 2014
interview for this book, Charles Townes, then age
ninety-eight, confirmed that he had been inspired to
create the laser after reading Alexei Tolstoi’s 1926
science-fiction novel The Garin Death Ray. “This

383
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

idea of a flashing death ray also has a mystique that

catches human attention,” said Townes, “and so we
have Jove’s bolts of lightning and the death rays of
science fiction.” A half century after Tolstoi wrote
about the Garin death ray, George Lucas modern-
ized the concept with Luke Skywalker’s light saber
in the science-fiction film Star Wars.
One of the first sets of experiments involving
lasers, mirrors, and space took place in 1969 and has
been largely lost to the history books. The experi-
ment began on July 21 of that year, said Townes,
when, for the first time in history, two men walked
on the moon. While on the lunar surface, “astro-
nauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin [Buzz] Aldrin set
up an array of small reflectors on the moon and
faced them toward the Earth.” Back here on earth—
which is 240,000 miles from the moon
— two teams
of astrophysicists, one team working at the Univer-
sity of California’s Lick Observatory, on Mount
Hamilton, and the other at the University of Texas’s
McDonald Observatory, on Mount Locke, took care-
ful notes regarding where, exactly, the astronauts
were when they set down the mirrors. “About ten
days later, the Lick team pointed the telescope at
that precise location and sent a small pulse of power
into the tiny piece of hardware they had added to
the telescope,” said Townes. Inside the telescope, a
beam of “extraordinarily pure red light” emerged

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from a crystal of synthetic ruby, pierced the sky, and

entered the near vacuum of space. A laser beam.
Traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per
second, the laser beam took less than two seconds to
hit the mirrors left behind on the moon by Arm-
strong and Aldrin, and then the same amount of
time to travel back to earth, where the Lick team
“detected the faint reflection of its beam,” explained
Townes. The experiment delivered volumes of scien-
tific data, but one set was truly phenomenal. “The
interval between launch of the pulse of light and its
return permitted calculation of the distance to the
moon within an inch, a measurement of unprece-
dented precision,” said Townes. The laser beam was
able to measure what stargazers and astronomers
have wondered since time immemorial: Exactly how
far away from earth is the moon?
While the astrophysicists were using laser technol-
ogy for peaceful purposes, the Defense Department
was already looking at using lasers as directed-energy
weapons (DEW). In 1968 ARPA had established a
classified laser program called Eighth Card, which
remains classified today, as do many other laser pro-
grams, the names of which are also classified.
Directed-energy weapons have many advantages,
none so great as speed. Traveling at the speed of light
means a DEW could hit a target on the moon in less
than two seconds.

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* * *

After hearing Reagan’s historic announcement from

a front-row seat in the White House Blue Room,
Edward Teller and Charles Townes had decidedly
different reactions. Teller embraced the idea and
would become a leading scientist on the Strategic
Defense Initiative and the follow-up program, called
Brilliant Pebbles. Charles Townes did not believe
Reagan’s SDI concept could work.
“For a president who doesn’t know the technol-
ogy one can see why [it] might be appealing,” said
Townes. “It doesn’t really seem very attractive to me,
or doable. But you can see how from a matter of
principle it sounded good to Reagan. It’s like an
imaginary story of what might be done.”
The day after the speech, Senator Edward Ken-
nedy criticized the president’s initiative, calling it a
“reckless “Star Wars’ scheme.” The name stuck.
From then on, the president’s program became
known around the world as “Star Wars.” Science fic-
tion and science had crossed paths once again. For
the general population, real-world lasers, death rays,
and directed-energy weapons were scientifically
impossible to grasp. Science fiction was not so hard.
Congress worried that SDI was not technically
feasible and that it was politically irresponsible. That
even if the technology were successful, it could trigger
a dangerous new arms race with the Soviets. But after

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debating the issue, Congress gave the Reagan White

House the go-ahead for the Strategic Defense Initia-
tive, and over the next ten years, nearly $20 billion
was spent. It is often said that the Clinton administra-
tion canceled the SDI program, when in fact it can-
celed only certain elements of the Strategic Defense
Initiative. SDI never really went away. In 2012 the
Fiscal Times reported that more than $100 billion had
been spent on SDI technologies in the three decades
since Reagan first proposed the idea, $80 billion of
which had been spent in the past decade.

Space remains a domain where domination has long

been sought but where all-out war has never been
fought. For scientists and engineers working on
DARPA’s SIMNET program, the focus would
remain on land. There had been steady progress
with the SIMNET program in the year since direc-
tor Larry Lynn gave it the go-ahead, including the
fact that the Army was now involved. Which is how,
in the spring of 1984, Jack Thorpe, now a major,
found himself maneuvering a sixty-ton M1 Abrams
tank up over a muddy hill deep in the pine-forested
back lot of the legendary armor school at Fort Knox,
Kentucky.
“When we started SIMNET, the threat was on
Soviet armor warfare,’ says Thorpe, “meaning
tanks.” This meant that simulating tank warfare was

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SIMNET’s first priority. The desired goal was to

create a virtual reality that felt real. So Thorpe and
the DARPA team were at Fort Knox, driving
through the mud, attempting to “capture the sense of
tankness,” says Thorpe. DARPA had big plans for
SIMNET, with a goal of building four SIMNET
centers to house a total of 360 simulators, roughly
90 per site. At the time, Thorpe and the DARPA
team were working on the first two simulators,
which would be models of M1 Abrams tanks.
Because there would be no motion in these simu-
lators, the emphasis was placed on sound. Science
Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of La
Jolla was in charge of working with field units at instru-
mented training ranges and collecting data. The
defense contractor Perceptronics Corporation of
California was hired to design the fiberglass and ply-
wood simulators and wire them for sound. “For
someone on the outside, the sound of the hundred-
and-five-millimeter tank gun firing at a target down-
range is incredibly loud, but for a person inside the
tank the experience is totally different,” says Thorpe.
Because of the overpressure, there is almost no noise.
“Tt’s incredibly quzet.” What there is inside is move-
ment, which, Thorpe says, “is a totally different kind
of sound.” The audio specialists with Perceptronics
replicated the sound inside the tank by simulating
the loose parts that vibrate when the gun fires.

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“Coins in the glove box,” recalls Thorpe, “loose

bolts, anything that’s not tied down.” Back in the
laboratory, to convey that rattling sound, audio
engineers filled a metal pie plate with nuts and bolts,
then glued the pie plate to the top of a subwoofer
which they hid behind the fiberglass in the tank sim-
ulator. Then Bolt, Beranek and Newman of Boston,
which had been a principal contractor on ARPA-
NET, developed the networking and graphics tech-
nology for the simulators.
The 1986 annual armor conference at Fort Knox
was a milestone in SIMNET history, the first test
run of two DARPA SIMNET simulators. General
Frederic “Rick” Brown and another general would
test the systems, and there was a lot resting on what
they thought of a simulated war game. Thorpe
recalls the first two simulators as being “about eighty
percent [complete], made of fiberglass and plywood,
with one hand control to control the turret.” The
two SIMNET tank simulators had been set up
roughly twenty feet apart. The generals took their
seats and the DARPA team piled inside.
“Neither general had any experience in the vir-
tual world,” says Thorpe. “Here’s General Brown
looking at a screen in front of him with an icon of
the other tank. I say, “There in that tank, that is the
[opposing] general.’ He doesn’t get it. So I say, “Turn
the turret and point it toward the other tank.’ The
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turret turns. General Brown got a little giddy. He

gets it, I think,” Thorpe recalls. “I tell him to load a
sabot [round]. ‘Sir, I say, ‘if you trigger here, you
can shoot the general.”
General Brown fired the virtual weapon. On the
screen, General Brown watched the other general’s
tank blow up. “Everything went dark,” Thorpe
recalls, in the virtual world, “the general and his
crew were ‘dead.’” From the other tank, in the other
fiberglass and plywood box, Thorpe heard the other
general call out, “‘Reinitialize!’” Inside his simula-
tor, the second general’s tank came back to life. He
swung his turret around, put General Brown in his
sights, and fired at him.
In that “reinitialize” moment, Thorpe says, he
became convinced that both generals were sold on
SIMNET. “The behavior in a virtual world is the
same behavior as the behavior in the real world,”
Thorpe says.
After its initial trials, and with the endorsements
from two U.S. Army generals, the SIMNET project
had considerable momentum, and the DARPA
teams went into production mode. In nine months,
DARPA had constructed a building at Fort Knox
the size of a small Costco. Inside there were roughly
seventy tank simulators, each made of fiberglass,
and each with the approximate dimensions of an
MI Abrams tank or a Bradley fighting vehicle. “The

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building was designed like a hockey rink,” Thorpe

says. Power and networking cables dropped from
the ceiling. “Entire tank battalions would enter the
SIMNET center and begin training together, as if
they were in a real tank battle.” Real-world problems
had been built into the system. “If you left your vir-
tual electricity on overnight, in the morning your
battery would be dead,” Thorpe recalls. “If you
didn’t pay attention to landmarks and disciplined
map reading, you got lost in the virtual battle ter-
rain. It was force on force. One group against
another.” Competition drove the training to a whole
new level. “The desire to win forced people to invent
new concepts about how to beat their opponents.”
A second SIMNET center was built at Fort Ben-
ning, Georgia, then another at Fort Rucker, in Ala-
bama, for attack helicopter training. In 1988 a
fourth SIMNET center went up at the U.S. Army
garrison in Grafenwoehr, Germany, also for armor
vehicles. In DARPA’s SIMNET, the U.S. Army saw
a whole new way to prepare for war. Then an unex-
pected new center was requested by the Department
of Defense.
“The high rankers at the Pentagon wanted a sim-
ulation center of their own,” recalls Neale Cosby,
who oversaw the engineering on this center. The
facility chosen as the host was DARPA’s longtime
partner the Institute for Defense Analyses, just down

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the street from DARPA in Alexandria. The IDA

offices were located in a collegiate-looking yellow-
brick and glass building located at 1801 North
Beauregard Street. In 1988, Cosby recalls, much of
the ground floor, including the cafeteria, was taken
over by DARPA so an IDA simulation center could
be built there for Pentagon brass. Cosby recalls the
production. “We covered all the windows with cam-
ouflage, laid down a virtual tarmac made of foam,
set up fiberglass helicopters, tanks, and aircraft cock-
pits, then networked everything and wired it for
sound.” Finally, a mysterious feature was added, one
that no other SIMNET center had. For reasons of
discretion, Cosby and Thorpe called the feature a
“flying carpet.”
“Tt was a way for [participants] to put themselves
into the virtual world not as a pilot or a tank driver or
a gunner, but anywhere” in flight, says Cosby. “It was
as if you were invisible.” At the time, the details of the
invisible component were classified because the flying
carpet feature was a way for Pentagon officials with
high clearances to experience what it would be like to
fly through a virtual battle in a stealth fighter jet.
These were the results of DARPA’s “high-stealth air-
craft” program, which began in 1974.
Over a ten-year period, DARPA and the Army
spent $300 million developing simulation technol-
ogy. In the summer of 1990 the SIMNET system

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was transferred over to the U.S. Army. Its first large-

scale use was to simulate a war game exercise under-
taken by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM),
in Tampa, Florida. For years CENTCOM had
sponsored a biennial war game exercise called Oper-
ation Internal Look, based on a real-world contin-
gency plan. The Internal Look war games trained
CENTCOM’s combatant commander and his staff
in command, control, and communications tech-
niques. The exercises involved a pre-scripted war
game scenario in which U.S. forces would quickly
deploy to a location to confront a hypothetical Soviet
invasion of a specific territory. In the past, the war
games had taken place in Cold War settings like the
Zagros Mountains in Iran and the Fulda Gap in
Germany.
In the summer of 1990 the Cold War climate had
changed. The Berlin Wall had come down eight
months before, and CENT'COM commander in
chief General Norman Schwarzkopf decided that
for Internal Look 90, U.S. forces would engage in a
SIMNET-based war game against a different foe,
other than the Soviet Union. A scripted narrative
was drawn up involving Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein and his military, the fourth largest in the
world. In this narrative, Iraq, coming off its eight-
year war with Iran, would attack the rich oil fields of
Saudi Arabia. In response, U.S. armed forces would

95
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

enter the conflict to help American ally Saudi Ara-

bia. Because new SIMNET technology was involved,
realistic data on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and neighboring
Kuwait were incorporated into the war game scenario,
including geography, architecture, and urban popula-
tions, this for the first time in history. In playing the
war game, CENTCOM battle staff drove tanks,
flew aircraft, and moved men across computer-
generated Middle Eastern cities and vast desert ter-
rain with the astonishing accuracy and precision of
SIMNET simulation.
“We played Internal Look in late July 1990, set-
ting up a mock headquarters complete with comput
ers and communications gear at Eglin Air Force
Base,” General Schwarzkopf wrote in his memoir.
And then to everyone's surprise, on the last day of the
simulated war game exercises, on August 4, 1990,
Iraq invaded its small, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait—
for real. It was a bizarre turn of events. Science and
science fiction had crossed paths once again.
Months later, after the Gulf War began and
ended, General Schwarzkopf commented on how
strangely similar the real war and the simulated war
gamehadbeen.
“As the exercise [i.e., the Gulf War] got under
way, General Schwarzkopf said, “the movements of
Iraq’s real-world ground and air forces eerily paral-
leled the imaginary scenario of the game.”

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 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Gulf War and Operations

Other Than War

Se of Defense Dick Cheney sat in his

office in the E-Ring of the Pentagon eating
Chinese food. It was shortly after 6:00 p.m. on
January 16, 1991. On the round table in front of him
there were paper cartons of food: steamed vegeta-
bles, egg rolls, and rice. On a television set mounted
on the wall, CNN war correspondents were report-
ing from Baghdad, Iraq, where it was the middle of
the night. Secretary Cheney listened carefully as he
ate his dinner. He would later say that what struck
him as odd, even surreal, as he watched the news
feed was just how ignorant the reporters and every-
one else in Baghdad were regarding the reality that
O97)
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

was about to unfold. Tomahawk land attack mis-

siles, the engines of which were created by DARPA,
and F-117A stealth fighter aircraft, also a DARPA-
born program, were on their way to destroy parts of
the city. The Tomahawks could not be recalled. War
was less than an hour away.
Below the office of the secretary of defense, just
one floor down, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Colin Powell, sat reviewing target
lists. The missiles and bombs were set to strike and
destroy Saddam Hussein’s military command cen-
ters, communication towers, electrical plants, radar
sites, and more. The plan was to “give them the full
load the first night,” Cheney later observed. Any
kind of gradual escalation carried the stench of Viet-
nam. It was an ambitious strategy. Baghdad had a
sophisticated air defense network and was the sec-
ond most heavily air-defended city in the world,
after Moscow.
Tt was a little after 2:30 a.m. Baghdad time and
the moonless sky over the city was dark as Major
Greg “Beast” Feest prepared to drop the first bomb
of the Persian Gulf War. Piloting his F-117A stealth
fighter toward the target, Major Feest was over-
whelmed by a wave of apprehension.
“Two thoughts crossed my mind,” Feest later
recalled. “First, would I be able to identify the tar-
get? Second, did the Air Force want me to drop this

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bomb?” But the doubts were fleeting and lasted only

a few seconds. “As I approached the target area, my
adrenaline was up and instinct took over. My bomb
was armed.”
Major Feest’s target was the Information Opera-
tions Center at the Nukayb Airbase, southwest of
Baghdad, a key link between Iraq’s radar network
and its air defense headquarters. Destroying this tar-
get would allow other, non-stealth aircraft to enter
Iraq undetected. Feest looked down at the display
panel in front of him. “My laser began to fire as I
tracked the target,” he said. “All I had to do was play,
what I called, a highly sophisticated video game, and
in 30 minutes I would be back in Saudi Arabia.”
At precisely 2:51 a.m. local time, the weapons bay
doors opened on Feest’s F-117A and a two-thousand-
pound laser-guided GBU-27 dropped from the
fighter aircraft, headed for the target. On the display
in front of him Feest watched what happened next.
“I saw the bomb go through the cross-hairs and pen-
etrate the bunker. The explosion came out of the
hole the bomb had made and blew out the doors of
the bunker.” Feest’s bomb hit and destroyed one-half
of the Iraqi air defense center at Nukayb.
“The video game was over,” Feest recalled think-
ing. Except this was not a video game. This was war,
and Major Feest had just dropped the first bomb.
Precisely one minute later, a second laser-guided

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bomb from a second F-117A took out the remaining

half of the building at Nukayb. As Feest headed
back to the base in his stealth aircraft, he was
stunned by what he saw. The sky was filled with a
barrage of antiaircraft artillery shooting blindly at
him. “I watched several SAMs [surface-to-air mis-
siles] launch into the sky and fly through my alti-
tude both in front [of] and behind me,” as Feest
ater described it. But not a single missile was guided
to hit him. The F-117A was invisible to radar. DAR-
PA’s stealth technology program had created a revo-
ution in warfare.
Ten additional F-117As were on their way to drop
bombs on targets in downtown Baghdad. In the first
twenty-four hours of the war, a total of forty-two
stealth fighters, which accounted for only 2.5 per-
cent of the U.S. airpower used in the campaign,
destroyed 31 percent of Iraqi targets. This was tech-
nology in action, and it gave the United States not
only a tactical advantage but a psychological one as
well. Stealth was like a silver bullet. It had allowed
U.S. fighter jets to sneak into Iraqi airspace, destroy
the country’s air defense system, and leave without a
loss. Still, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein declared,
“The great showdown has begun! The mother of all
battles is under way.”
The U.S. air campaign against Baghdad devas-

398
 THE GULF WAR AND OPERATIONS

tated Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party military infra-

structure. Between the laser-guided bombs, the
infrared night-bombing equipment, and the stealth
fighter aircraft, the Iraqi air force never had a chance
to engage. In retaliation, the Iraqis launched Scud
missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but almost imme-
diately, a U.S. Patriot missile shot down an Iraqi
Scud missile, making the Patriot the first antimissile
ballistic missile fired in combat. The Pentagon pro-
moted the Patriot as having near-perfect perfor-
mance. But in classified communications a different
story was unfolding. There were twenty-seven Patriot
missile batteries in Saudi Arabia and Israel, and each
battery was shooting nearly ten missiles at each
incoming Iraqi Scud. At first the numbers did not
make any sense, certainly not to U.S. Army vice
chief of staff General Gordon R. Sullivan. How
could it take ten U.S. Patriot antimissile missiles to
shoot a single Iraqi Scud out of the sky? A classified
investigation revealed that because of poor-quality
engineering, the Iraqi Scuds were breaking apart in
their terminal phase, shattering into multiple pieces
as they headed back down to earth. These multiple
fragments were confusing Patriot missiles into
thinking that each piece was an additional warhead.
Shoddy workmanship had inadvertently created a
poor man’s version of the highly sophisticated

399
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MIRV— multiple independently targetable reentry

vehicle—the deceptive penetration aid originally
dreamed of by the Jason scientists thirty years before.
For the U.S. military, the Gulf War was an oppor-
tunity to demonstrate what its system of systems was
capable of. While the stealth fighter aircraft received
most of the attention, as far as high technology was
concerned, there were other DARPA systems flying
over Iraq that were equally revolutionary, just not as
visible or as sleek. Drones played a prominent role in
the system of systems, largely unreported. Remotely
piloted vehicles, small and large, collected mapping
information that helped steer Tomahawks to their
targets. Some 522 drone sorties were flown, totaling
1,641 hours, many of them based on DARPA tech-
nology going back to the Vietnam War. Equipped
with infrared sensors, the drones’ cameras easily
located ground troops and vehicles hidden behind
sand berms or covered in camouflage. The drones
relayed back the information, which was then used
to take out the targets. In one instance, a group of
Iraqi soldiers stepped out from a hiding place and
waved the white flag of surrender at the eye of a tele-
vision camera attached to a drone that was hovering
nearby. This became the first time in history that a
group of enemy soldiers was recorded surrendering
to a machine.
Another DARPA technology workhorse was the

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 THe GuLF WAR AND OPERATIONS

four-engine Boeing 707-300 lumbering 42,000 feet

above the battlefield. This was DARPA’s JSTARS,
or Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, a
command, control, and communication center fly-
ing overhead in racetrack formation, managing
much of the action going on down below. JSTARS,
run jointly by the Air Force and the Army, involved
aircraft equipped with a forty-foot-long canoe-
shaped radar dome mounted under the front of the
fuselage. Inside the dome, a radar antenna the height
of a two-story house was able to send precise target
information to Army ground stations below. The
radar could detect, locate, and track vehicles moving
deep behind enemy lines, making JSTARS the first
and only airborne platform in operation that could
maintain “real time surveillance over a corps-sized
area of the battlefield.” The system software on
board JSTARS was so complex it required almost
600,000 lines of code, roughly three times more
than any other C3 system previously developed by
the U.S. military. Sixteen years earlier, DARPA had
begun developing this system of systems concept
with Assault Breaker. Now it was in play in the war
theater.
JSTARS was like an all-seeing commander in the
sky. It could “see” some 19,305 square miles of ter-
rain below, and it could detect moving targets 200
to 250 miles away. It could “see” in darkness and
401
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

bad weather, including clouds and sandstorms. Two

of these prototype JSTARS were flown in the Gulf
War, providing what DARPA historical literature
describes as a “real-time tactical view of the battle-
field never seen before in the history of warfare.”
When, on February 1, a ten-mile-long column of
Iraqi armored tanks headed into Saudi Arabia,
JSTARS saw it and sent coalition aircraft to destroy
the column. As bombing continued from the air,
sorties passed the forty thousand mark—ten thou-
sand more missions than the U.S. Army Air Force
flew against Japan in the last fourteen months of
World War II. The Pentagon began releasing mind-
numbing statistics on what its system of systems had
destroyed: 1,300 of Iraq’s 4,280 tanks, 1,100 of
Iraq’s 3,110 artillery pieces, and 800 of Iraq’s 2,870
armored tanks.
Next came the ground war, which began on Sunday,
February 24, at 4:00 a.m. Saudi time. Saddam Hus-
sein delivered a radio broadcast telling his troops to
kill “with all your might.” The decisive battle that
ended the Gulf War two days later would become
known as the Battle of 73 Easting, the last great tank
battle of the twentieth century. But unlike so many
of history’s great tank battles, which were named
after the cities in which they were fought, the Battle
of 73 Easting was named after a GPS coordinate, or
gridline.
 THE GULF WAR AND OPERATIONS

On February 25, eight hundred M1A1 Abrams

tanks lined up on Iraq’s southern border with Saudi
Arabia, and the following morning, the initial
attack against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard
Tawakalna tank division began with an assault by
the Second Armored Cavalry Division. Spearhead-
ing the attack were three troops: Ghost, Eagle, and
Iron. The Second Armored Cavalry Division had
been stationed in Grafenwoehr, Germany, and had
trained on DARPA’s SIMNET simulators before
deploying to the Persian Gulf. The M1 Abrams
tanks that Jack Thorpe and his DARPA team had
driven around at Fort Knox had since been outfitted
with a powerful new weapons system: night vision
thermal imaging.
On the day of the battle that ended the Gulf War,
there had been terrible weather all morning. After a
night of rain, the flat, trackless desert remained
encumbered by thick fog and clouds. Around 3:30
p.m. the sun briefly emerged, but then a sandstorm
kicked in. Between the bad weather and the thick
black smoke moving across the desert from the burn-
ing Kuwaiti oil fields, visibility was reduced to nil.
The gunners in the Iraqi Tawakalna tank division
were blind. Not so the Second Armored Cavalry.
Equipped with thermal imaging systems, the M1A1
tanks made it possible for U.S. soldiers to see in the
dark. Night vision was a science DARPA had been

403
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

advancing since 1961, when ARPA wrote the first

handbook on the subject, the Handbook of Military
Infrared Technology. Infrared vision was developed
in Vietnam to help soldiers see through dense jungle
canopies. Now it was being used in the desert.
“We had thermal imagery,” says Major Douglas
Macgregor, who saw action in the Battle of 73 East-
ing as commander of Cougar Squadron, and “the
Iraqis did not. Yes, our firepower was extremely
accurate, pinpoint accurate, but we could see what
we were firing at and they could not.” When the
Second Armored Cavalry’s Eagle Troop launched its
attack around 4:10 p.m., it caught the Iraqi Republi-
can Guard unawares. In less than half an hour, Eagle
Troop destroyed twenty-eight T-72 Iraqi tanks, six-
teen armored personnel carriers, and thirty-nine
trucks, with no losses of its own. “The battle took
twenty-three minutes to win,” retired four-star gen-
eral Paul Gorman told Congress. “The U.S. alone
enjoyed the advantage of satellite navigation and
imagery, and of thermal-imaging fire control.”
The Iraqi army was overpowered. Iraqi soldiers
started to give up and abandon their posts en masse.
During a vast exodus of Iraqi troops from Kuwait
City, JSTARS pinpointed thousands of fleeing vehi-
cles for coalition attack aircraft to bomb. The stark
photographs of destroyed vehicles along Iraq’s High-
way 80 provided a striking visual image of how a

404
 THE GuLF WAR AND OPERATIONS

system of systems worked. Between JSTARS, stealth

aircraft, GPS satellite navigation, bomber aircraft,
laser-guided bombs, and night vision, the United
States and its technological firepower wrought mega-
death. Between 1,500 and 2,000 charred and aban-
doned vehicles were left littering the road, including
Iraqi tanks, Mercedes-Benz sedans, stolen Kuwaiti
fire trucks, and minivans. There were charred bod-
ies and loose flip-flops, suitcases, and fruit crates.
Some of the victims had been flash-heated to death
in crawling and stretching motions, like the famous
bodies from Pompeii. The international press called
the four-lane stretch of highway between Iraq and
Kuwait the “Highway of Death.”
Concerned about the negative narrative unfold-
ing in the press, Colin Powell met with General
Schwarzkopf to discuss the matter.
“The television coverage,” said Powell, is “start-
ing to make us look as if we engaged in slaughter for
slaughter’s sake.”
“T've been thinking the same thing,” Schwarz-
kopf told him.
Powell asked General Schwarzkopf what he
wanted to do.
“One more day should do it,” Schwarzkopf said,
indicating he was authorizing one more day of
bombing.
Late the following day, on February 27, President

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

George H. W. Bush declared “suspension of offense

combat” in the Persian Gulf and laid out conditions
for a permanent cease-fire with Iraq. The Gulf War
had lasted one month and twelve days.

One week after the cease-fire, back in Washington,

D.C., DARPA director Victor Reis met with Gen-
eral Gordon Sullivan, vice chief of staff of the Army,
for lunch. General Sullivan had formerly served as
the deputy commander of the Armor Center at Fort
Knox and was a fan of SIMNET. To this lunch Gen-
eral Sullivan carried with him a copy of the Stars
and Stripes newspaper. Pointing to a headline,
“Ghost Troops Battle at the 73 Easting,” General
Sullivan asked Reis if DARPA could put the Battle
of 73 Easting in reverse simulation, as a training
tool. Reis said he would see what he could do.
Reis brought the idea to Neale Cosby at the IDA
SIMNET Center. “I told Vic it was a great idea,”
Colonel Cosby recalled in 2014. “I said, we can do it
and we should do it.” Reverse simulation of the Bat-
tle of 73 Easting, he thought, would be “the ulti-
mate after-action report.” There was much to learn
from technology.
In a matter of days, a team from DARPA, led by
Colonel Gary Bloedorn, flew to Iraq to interview
soldiers who had fought in the battle. Bloedorn and

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the DARPA team heard varying accounts, read

notes and radio transcripts, and listened to an audio-
tape made by a soldier in one of the command vehi-
cles. The team traveled to the GPS gridline at 73
Easting, where they walked around the battlefield,
recorded forensic evidence, and measured distances
between U.S. firing positions and destroyed Iraqi
vehicles. Then they returned to IDA to input data
and reconstruct the battle down to fractions of sec-
onds. The process took six months.
With a draft version complete, the reconstruction
team traveled to Germany, where most of the battle’s
participants were stationed. The DARPA team
showed the soldiers the SIMNET version of the bat-
tle, took notes, and made final adjustments for accu-
racy. Back at IDA the team worked for another six
months, then met with the key leaders of the battle
one last time for a final review. They proved that
“capturing live combat” after the fact could be done,
says Cosby. Now it was time to take the show to
Congress.
On May 21, 1992, members of the Senate Armed
Services Committee were shown the DARPA simu-
lation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Retired general
Paul Gorman led the opening remarks. But before
playing the SIMNET simulation, Gorman pointed
to the simulator and introduced the machine.

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

“This somewhat daunting graphic apparatus

before you is an instrument of war,” Gorman told
the committee members, “a mechanism designed to
enable humans to understand the complexity, the
kinetics, the chaos of battle.” Gorman reminded his
audience what General Patton once said, “that it is
men, not machines, who fight and win wars.” But
the world had changed, Gorman said, and now
machines were there to help. In the past, war stories
were the only record of battle. Computer simulation
had now changed that.
“IT am here to urge [you] that all must recognize
that simulation is fundamental to readiness for war,”
Gorman said. With that, he played the twenty-three-
minute simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Con-
gress, Cosby recalled, was “wowed.” The military
services would begin moving toward computer simu-
lation as a primary training tool for war.
DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept had delivered
results in the Gulf War, and at the Pentagon,
renewed excitement was in the air. Ever since the
Vietnam War, the Defense Department had strug-
gled with a public perception of the military rooted
in impotency and distrust. The Gulf War had
changed that. The Pentagon was potent once again.
The Gulf War was over fast, the death toll remark
ably low: 390 Americans died, with 458 wounded in
action. There were 510 casualties from all allied

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 THE GULF WAR AND OPERATIONS

forces. President George H. W. Bush even trium-

phantly declared, “By God, we've licked the Viet-
nam Syndrome once and for all!”
But the optimism would not last long.

It was the early afternoon of October 3, 1993, in

Mogadishu, Somalia, a lawless, famine-stricken city
run by armed militias and warlords. What had
begun as a peacekeeping mission ten months prior
had devolved into a series of quick-action Special
Forces operations. On this particular day, a joint
special operations task force named Task Force
Ranger, made up of elite U.S. military personnel
including Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Delta
Force, embarked on a mission to capture two high-
level Somali lieutenants working for the warlord and
president-elect General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. A
group of Aidid’s lieutenants were holed up in a two-
story building downtown, not far from the Olympic
Hotel.
It was fifteen minutes into the mission and every-
thing was going according to plan. Ground forces
had arrived at the target location and were loading
twenty-four captured Somali militants into convoy
trucks when a series of deadly events began to
unfold. A Black Hawk helicopter, call sign Super 61,
was heading toward the target building with a plan
in place to transport U.S. soldiers back to base, when

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

suddenly a group of Somali militants scrambled

onto a nearby rooftop, took aim at the helicopter,
and fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
Norm Hooten, one of the Special Operations
team leaders, watched in horror. The Black Hawk
“took a direct hit toward the tail boom and it started
a slow rotation” down, Hooten recalled. “It was a
catastrophic impact.” Super 61 began spinning out
of control. It crashed in the street below, killing both
pilots on impact. In a videotape recording of the
crash released by the Defense Department in 2013,
a voice can be heard shouting over the military com-
munications system, “We got a Black Hawk going
down! We got a Black Hawk going down!”
A fifteen-man combat search and rescue team
and an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter raced to the
crash site to assist. But hundreds of angry Somalis
were gathering in the surrounding streets, creating
barricades made of burning tires and garbage, inhib-
iting access. A firefight ensued, trapping the Ameri-
cans and pitting them against a violent mob. The
situation grew dramatically worse when a second
Black Hawk, call sign Super 64, was shot down.
Another mob of Somalis charged to the second crash
site, where they killed everyone except one of the
pilots, Michael Durrant. Ranger and Delta Force
teams took to the streets in an attempt to provide
search and rescue, and cover to their trapped fellow

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 THE GULF WAR AND OPERATIONS

soldiers. A chaotic, deadly battle ensued, lasting all

through the night and into the morning. By the time
it was over, eighteen Americans, one Pakistani, and
one Malaysian soldier were dead and eighty were
injured. An unknown number of Somalis, estimated
to be roughly three thousand, had been killed.
This was asymmetric warfare—a battle between
two groups with radically different levels of military
power. The superior military force, the United
States, killed a far greater number of the opposition
while its own losses were played out on television
screens around the world. Videotaped images of
mobs of Somalis dragging the semi-naked, bloodied
bodies of the dead American pilots and soldiers
through the streets were shocking.
It was a watershed moment and a turning point
in modern U.S. military affairs. The might and
morale of the United States military, made evident
in the Gulf War, had been weakened. Every war
planner, going back at least 2,500 years, knows bet-
ter than to fight a battle in a crowded place. “The
worst policy,” wrote Sun Tzu, “is to attack cities.”
The battle of Mogadishu was not part of any plan.
There was no rehearsal for what happened. U.S.
forces were drawn into a hellish situation, and the
result was more lives lost than in any other combat
situation since Vietnam.
“The Americans were not supermen, commented

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Somali clan leader Colonel Aden. “In these dusty

streets, where combat was reduced to rifle against
rifle, they could die as easily as any Somali.” Tech-
nologically advanced weaponry had been disabled
by sticks, stones, AK-47s, and a few rocket-propelled
grenades.
After the battle of Mogadishu, DARPA convened
a senior working group (SWG) to analyze what had
happened in Somalia and make recommendations
for how the Pentagon could best prepare for future
conflicts of a similar nature—situations called Mili-
tary Operations Other Than War, or OOTW. The
group, led by General Carl W. Stiner, former com-
mander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations
Command, focused on solutions that would require
new technologies to be developed. The group
involved itself in ten study sessions over two months
and spent six months preparing a written report.
The opening lines read like a salvo. “The world is
no longer bipolar,” the Senior Working Group wrote.
“The post-Cold War strategic environment is ill-
defined, dynamic and unstable.” During the Cold
War, America knew who the enemy was. Not so any-
more. Terrorist organizations, paramilitary groups,
and militia were destined to emerge from multiple
chaotic urban environments around the globe. Third
World instability, ideological and religious extrem-
ism, and intentional terrorism and narco-terrorism

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 THE GULF WAR AND OPERATIONS

meant that the whole world was the new battlefield.

In future military operations other than war, irregu-
lar enemy forces would include a “diverse range of
adversaries equipped with an ever increasing array of
sophisticated weapons,” including some that were
atomic, chemical, and biological in design. The
United States was not properly prepared to deal with
these emerging new threats, the SWG warned.
DARPA needed to refocus its attention on urban
warfare. It needed to research and develop new
weapons systems to deal with this threat, now grow-
ing across the Third World.
In one part of the report, the group listed danger-
ous insufficiencies that DARPA had to shore up at
once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological
weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate
underground bunker detection; limited secure, real-
time command and control to lower-echelon units
lie, getting the information to soldiers on the
ground]; limited ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance] and dissemination; inadequate mine,
booby trap and explosive detection capabilities; inad-
equate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating
agents]; inadequate modeling/simulation for train-
ing, rehearsal and operations; no voice recognition or
language translation; inadequate ability to deal with
sniper attacks.” The SWG proposed that DARPA
accelerate work in all these areas and also increase

413
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

efforts in robotics and drones, human tagging and

tracking, and nonlethal weapons systems for crowd
control.
DARPA had its work cut out. The agency had
been leading military research and development for
decades against a different enemy, one with an army
of tanks and heavy weaponry. The new focus was on
urban warfare. What happened in Mogadishu was a
cautionary tale. “Military operations that were of lit-
tle consideration a decade ago are now of major con-
cern,” the study group warned.
The following year, DARPA asked RAND to
study OOTW and write an unclassified report. The
RAND report was called “Combat in Hell: A Con-
sideration of Constrained Urban Warfare.” It began
with the prescient words: “Historical advice is con-
sistent. Sun Tzu counseled that ‘the worst policy is
to attack cities.” Accordingly, avoid urban warfare.

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 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Biological Weapons

n December 11, 1991, a mysterious forty-one-

() year-old Soviet scientist named Dr. Kanatjan
Alibekov arrived in Washington, D.C., one
of a thirteen-man Soviet delegation. The group was
part of a trilateral mission that also involved scien-
tists from the United States and Great Britain. The
purpose of this visit was allegedly to allow each dele-
gation to inspect the other countries’ military facili-
ties that had, decades earlier, been involved in
biological weapons programs. But really there was a
lot more than just that going on. Back in 1972, the
Biological Weapons Convention Treaty had made
germ weapons illegal, and all three countries had
pledged to renounce biological warfare. But recently
American intelligence officers had discovered that

415
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the Soviets had not given up bioweapons work and

instead had created a far more nefarious and fright-
ening program than any military scientist in the
Western world had imagined. This information was
first learned two years earlier, in October 1989, and
the Americans and the British had been puzzling
out what to do about it ever since. This trilateral
mission was a piece of that puzzle.
In December 1991 the Soviets did not know that
American and British intelligence officers were
aware of their covert bioweapons program, which
was called Biopreparat. Nor did the Soviets realize
that American intelligence officers knew that the
mysterious Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov was deputy direc-
tor of Biopreparat, meaning he was second in com-
mand of a program that involved roughly forty
thousand employees, working in forty facilities,
twelve of which were used solely for offensive biolog-
ical weapons work.
That the Soviet delegation was in the United
States at all was a highly sensitive issue. Secretary of
Defense Cheney did not want the details made pub-
lic, and to ensure secrecy, his office issued a press
blackout around the mission. The only people out-
side the Defense Department cleared on the Soviet
scientists’ whereabouts were individuals with the
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases (USAMRIID), who served as escorts.

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 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

The group traveled to Dugway Proving Grounds,

in Utah, where deadly pathogens had once been
tested in the open air, but whose Cold War-era
buildings had since been abandoned. They traveled
to Pine Bluffs Arsenal, in Arkansas, where the
United States had once manufactured biological
weapons on an industrial scale, but where there was
now nothing left but weedy fields and rusting rail-
road tracks. They went to Fort Detrick, in Freder-
ick, Maryland, the former locus of U.S. bioweapons
research and development, where USAMRIID now
had its headquarters.
Years later Dr. Alibekov would write a memoir, and
in it he described the 1991 trip as one on which he was
less interested in what he saw at the former weapons
facilities than in the lifestyle of abundance that so
many Americans seemed to enjoy. He regarded with
wonderment “the well-paved highways, the well-
stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordi-
nary Americans lived.” Democracy, he concluded,
offered more to its citizens than communism ever did.
The trip to America in 1991 was Dr. Alibekov’s
first. He spoke not a word of English and had met
just thirteen Westerners in his lifetime, all members
of this same trilateral mission who had visited the
Soviet Union earlier that same year. During that visit,
Dr. Alibekov had acted as one of the tour guides. The
Soviets were producing germ weapons, and it was

417
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Alibekov’s job to make sure that the Western scien-

tists were steered clear of any sights that might belie
the Soviets’ illegal weapons work.
Born in Kazakhstan in 1950, Alibekov had
trained as an infectious disease physician, specializ-
ing in microbiology and epidemiology. At the age of
twenty-four, he joined the military faculty at the
Tomsk Medical Institute in Siberia and began work-
ing inside what he later described as “a succession of
secret laboratories and installations in some of the
most remote corners of the Soviet Union.” With
each job came financial privilege, which was unusual
for a non-Russian. Kazakhs were generally consid-
ered second-class citizens during the Cold War. But
Alibekoy was a talented microbiologist and a hard
worker, which served him well and paid off. By the
1990s, “with the combined salary of a senior bureau-
crat and high-ranking military officer,” he wrote, “I
earned as much as a Soviet government minister.”
As the tour of the American facilities was taking
place, Russia was in a state of pandemonium. The
Berlin Wall had come down two years earlier, but
the red flag of the Soviet Union still flew over the
Kremlin. The geopolitical landscape between the
superpowers was in flux. “It wasn’t so clear the [Soviet
leaders] weren't going to re-form,” remembers Dr.
Craig Fields, DARPA’s director at the time. “There
was a lot of anxiety about the fact that they might

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 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

re-form.” The two nations had been moving toward

normalized relations, but for the Pentagon this was a
time of great instability. While the world rejoiced
over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Defense Depart-
ment had been coping with a myriad of national
security unknowns. Would a unified Germany join
NATO? How to handle troop reductions through-
out Europe? What about all the nuclear weapons the
Soviets possessed? The Soviet Union had spent the
past five decades building up its weapons of mass
destruction, in a shoulder-to-shoulder arms race
with the United States. Who, now, would control
the Soviet arsenals of WMD? At any given moment
the Russians had more than eleven thousand nuclear
warheads aimed at carefully selected targets inside
the United States, as well as an additional fifteen
thousand nuclear warheads stored in facilities across
the sprawling Russian countryside, including mobile
systems fitted onto railway cars.
One person uniquely familiar with these kinds of
questions, numbers, and threats was Lisa Bronson,
the Pentagon official leading the delegation of Soviet
scientists on their tour. Still in her thirties, Bronson
was a lawyer and a disarmaments expert. As deputy
director for multilateral negotiations with the Office
of the Secretary of Defense, Bronson had. helped
conceive and design the visit by the Soviet team. She
had also accompanied the U.S. and British scientists

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

on their tour around Soviet facilities earlier in the

year. She was one of the thirteen Westerners Dr.
Alibekov had met before this trip. Now, with the
facilities visited and the mission coming to a close,
Lisa Bronson took the Russian scientists on a walk-
ing tour of the nation’s capital.
It was during this part of the trip that a fortuitous
exchange of words between Dr. Alibekov and Lisa
Bronson occurred. Alibekov recalled the conversa-
tion in his memoir. “At various stops along the way,
she had challenged us about the Soviet biological
weapons program,” he wrote. “Naturally, we denied
we had one. But I admired her persistence.”
Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, just down the
road from the White House, one of Alibekov’s col-
leagues asked Bronson how much money an Ameri-
can scientist could earn in a year.
“That depends on your experience,” she answered.
“A government scientist can make between fifty thou-
sand and seventy thousand dollars, but a scientist in
the private sector could earn up to two-hundred
thousand dollars a year,” about $350,000 in 2015.
Alibekov was astonished. Throughout the trip he
remained impressed by how much better everything
was in America, from public infrastructure to per-
sonal living conditions. He thought of his own life
in Moscow. How hard he worked and how little he
had to show for it in comparison. And most of all

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how grim the future looked now that the wall was
down. “At the time,” he wrote, “a top-level Russian
scientist could make about one hundred dollars a
month.” Emboldened, Alibekov decided to speak
up. Through an interpreter he asked Bronson a ques-
tion of his own.
“With my experience could I find a job here?” he
asked.
Bronson gently told Dr. Alibekov that he would
have to learn English first.
Through the translator, Alibekov thanked his
Pentagon host. Then he made a joke. “Okay,” he
said, “if I ever come here, I'll ask for your help.”
Lisa Bronson just smiled.
“Everyone started to laugh,” Alibekov recalled,
“including me.”

Dr. Kanatjan Alibekoy returned to Moscow with

the Soviet delegation. Just a few days later, on
December 25, 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev
resigned. On New Year’s Eve, the red flag of the
Soviet Union, with its iconic hammer and sickle
beneath a gold star, was taken down from the flag-
pole at the Kremlin. The tricolored flag of the newly
formed Russian Federation was raised in its place.
The Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Two weeks later, Dr. Alibekov handed the director
of Biopreparat, General Yury Kalinin, his resignation

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

papers in Moscow. Then, using an intermediary,

Alibekov reached out to Lisa Bronson to let her know
that he wanted to defect to the United States. This
was a military intelligence coup for the Pentagon. For
two years now, all the intelligence on Biopreparat—
including the revelation that it existed in the first
place—had come from a single source, a former
senior-level Soviet scientist named Vladimir Pasech-
nik, now in British custody. The Pentagon wanted its
own high-level defector. Soon they would have Dr.
Kanatjan Alibekovy.
As for Vladimir Pasechnik, his defection had
come out of the blue. In October 1989 Pasechnik
had been sent to France on an official business trip,
to purchase laboratory equipment. Instead, he called
the British embassy from a phone booth and said he
was a Soviet germ warfare scientist who wanted to
defect to England. British Secret Intelligence Service
agents picked him up in a car, flew him to England,
and took him to a safe house in the countryside.
The handler assigned to Pasechnik was a senior
biological warfare specialist on Britain’s defense
intelligence staff named Christopher Davis. Pasech-
nik stunned Davis with a legion of extraordinary
facts. The fifty-one-year-old Pasechnik had worked
under Dr. Alibekov in a Biopreparat facility in Len-
ingrad called the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological
Preparations. As a senior scientist at Ultra-Pure, Pas-

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 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

echnik had made such significant contributions

that he was given the honorary military title of gen-
eral. At Biopreparat, scientists weaponized classic
pathogens like anthrax, tularemia, and botulinum
toxin, standard operating procedure in a bioweap-
ons program. But at Ultra-Pure, scientists had been
working to genetically modify pathogens so they
were resistant to vaccines and antibiotics. Pasechnik
told Davis that at Ultra-Pure, he had been assigned
to work on a strategic antibiotic-resistant strain of
the mother of all pathogens, bubonic plague.
The Soviets called their laboratory-engineered
version of history's most prolific killer Super Plague.
In the thirteenth century, the bubonic plague killed
off roughly every third man, woman, and child in
Europe; but it lost its potency in the twentieth cen-
tury, when scientists discovered that the antibiotic
streptomycin was effective against the infectious
disease. When Christopher Davis learned that the
Soviets were developing a genetically modified,
antibiotic-resistant strain of plague, he interpreted it
to mean one thing. “You choose plague because
you're going to take out the other person's country,”
Davis said. “Kill all the people, then move in and
take over the land. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”
For months, Christopher Davis and an MI6
colleague spent long hours debriefing Pasechnik.
The information was then shared with American

423
 Tuer PENTAGON’S BRAIN

intelligence counterparts. In the first month alone,

Vladimir Pasechnik provided the British govern-
ment with more information about the Soviet bio-
logical weapons program than all the British and
American intelligence agencies combined had been
able to piece together without him over a period of
more than twenty-five years. The United States’ vast
network of advanced sensor technology had proved
useless in detecting biological weapons. Bioweapons
can be engineered inside laboratories hidden in
buildings or underground. Unlike work on missiles,
which require launch tests from proving grounds
that are easily observable from overhead satellites or
aircraft, biological weapons work can continue for
decades undetected. And at Biopreparat it did.
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent by
U.S. military and intelligence agencies on high-tech
reconnaissance and surveillance systems, on the
ground, in the air, and in space, collecting SIGINT,
MASINT, OSINT, GEOINT, and other forms of
technology-based intelligence, a single human being
had delivered so much that was unknown simply by
opening his mouth. Pasechnik provided HUMINT,
human intelligence.
“The fact that Vladimir [Pasechnik] defected was
one of the key acts of the entire ending of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War,” says Davis. “It
was the greatest breakthrough we ever had.” Once

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 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

Davis briefed his U.S. counterparts on Pasechnik’s

information, things moved quickly. The United
States sent the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist
Dr. Joshua Lederberg to England on a secret mission
to interview Pasechnik. Lederberg came home
unnerved. That the Soviets were working on Super
Plague was shocking. But Lederberg also learned that
scientists at Biopreparat had been working to weap-
onize smallpox, which was duplicitous. In the late
1970s the international health community, including
doctors from the Soviet Union, had worked together
on a worldwide effort to eradicate the killer virus. In
1980 the World Health Organization declared small-
pox dead. That the Soviets would weaponize
smallpox by the ton was particularly nefarious.
Lederberg confirmed for the Pentagon that Vlad-
imir Pasechnik was credible, level-headed, and
blessed with an impeccable memory. “He never, ever
stretched things,” says Christopher Davis. Using
classified CIA satellite data, including photographs
going back decades, the Pentagon located, then con-
firmed, the multiple biological weapons facilities
revealed in Pasechnik’s debriefings. Many of the key
photographs were from ARPA satellites that had
been sent aloft in the earliest days of the technology.
With confirmation in place, it was now time to tell
President George H. W. Bush about the Soviets’ pro-
digious, illegal biological weapons program.

425
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

The wall had been down for only a few months,

and from the perspective of the Pentagon, it was a
precarious time as far as international security was
concerned. There was a growing worry that Presi-
dent Mikhail Gorbachev was losing control of the
Russian military. With this in mind, in the winter
of 1990, President Bush decided it was best to keep
the Soviets’ biological weapons program a secret. To
reveal it, Bush decided, would make Gorbachev
appear weak. Gorbachev was being hailed interna-
tionally as a reformer. He needed credibility to keep
moving his country out of a Cold War mentality and
into the twentieth century. The world could not
allow Russia to fall into chaos. The revelation of the
Soviet bioweapons program could backfire. It needed
to stay hidden, at least for now.
The single greatest unknown at this juncture was
how much, if anything, did President Gorbachev
actually know? Vladimir Pasechnik could not say
with authority. The Pentagon needed a second
source. Back in the fall of 1989 and the winter of
1990, no such second source existed. Pasechnik had
been reticent at first but gradually became more
comfortable with his British handlers. Then he
started to name names, including that of Dr. Kanat-
jan Alibekov, deputy director of Biopreparat.
The Pentagon got to work setting in motion the
trilateral _mission—which is how Alibekov and

426
 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

twelve colleagues wound up at Fort Detrick in

December 1991. After the U.S. trip, Alibekov had
been back in Russia for just three weeks when he
made up his mind to defect to the United States.
Arrangements were made. In the dead of night,
Alibekov left Russia with his wife and children, never
to return.
By the time Gorbachev was set to leave office,
USS. intelligence had confirmed that he had in fact
been aware of the Soviet bioweapons program. Gor-
bachev had received classified memos regarding
operations, including how to deceive U.S. inspectors
during trilateral mission facilities tours. The CIA
also confirmed that Russia’s new president, Boris
Yeltsin, had been made aware of the program — and
that he was allowing it to move forward. On Janu-
ary 20, 1992, British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite
and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd met with Pres-
ident Yeltsin in Moscow. Since Pasechnik’s defec-
tion, Ambassador Braithwaite had been trying, to
no avail, to get the Russians to admit that they had a
biological weapons program, which would be the
first step toward its safe dissolution. This time, when
the subject was brought up, Yeltsin stunned the Brit-
ish diplomats by acknowledging that he knew about
Biopreparat.
“T know all about the Soviet biological weapons
program,” Yeltsin confessed. “It’s still going ahead.”

427
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

He also said that the Russian scientists who ran the

program were determined to continue their work.
“They are fanatics, and they will not stop voluntar-
ily,” Yeltsin said. He vowed to put an end to it. “I’m
going to close down the institutes,” he promised, to
“retire the director of the [Biopreparat] program.”
“We were stunned,” Braithwaite recalled in his
memoir, “and we could do no more than thank
him.”
Boris Yeltsin had admitted what every other
Soviet leader, including Gorbachev, had been lying
about for twenty-three years. With the information
now public, the U.S. Congress got involved. So did
the American press. Countering biological weapons
was poised to become a massive new industry,
expanding and proliferating at a phenomenal rate.
DARPA would lead the way.

In America, Dr. Alibekov changed his name to

sound more American. He was Dr. Ken Alibek now.
He moved his family into a home in the suburbs
outside Washington, D.C. This was the Soviet sci-
entist who, over decades, had weaponized the bacte-
rial infection glanders, orchestrated test trials of
Marburg hemorrhagic fever, overseen the creation of
the Soviet Union’s first tularemia bomb, and created
a “battle strain” of anthrax, Strain 836, hailed as
“the most virulent and vicious strain of anthrax

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known to man.” He was working for the U.S. gov-

ernment now.
Each day Alibek drove along the well-paved high-
ways, past the big homes and the well-stocked stores,
to an office building in Virginia just twenty minutes
outside the nation’s capital, where he now worked.
There, inside a secure room on the second floor, he
answered questions asked of him by individuals
from a wide variety of U.S. intelligence agencies,
military agencies, and civilian organizations about
Russia’s biological weapons programs.
Alibek confirmed what Vladimir Pasechnik had
told British intelligence about Soviet advances in
biotechnology and the development of Super Plague.
But as deputy director of Biopreparat, Alibek had
had access to many more classified programs than
Pasechnik did, including delivery systems for the
germ bombs. This work, Alibek said, took place
inside a top secret unit of Biopreparat called the Bio-
logical Group, located inside the Soviet General
Staff Operations Directorate. Here, weapons design-
ers crafted specially designed missiles that would be
used in a biological warfare attack against the United
States. Weaponized pathogens are, for the most part,
fragile microbes. They generally cannot withstand
extreme temperature fluctuations, as happens in
flight. The Soviets had solved this problem, Alibek
said, by retrofitting long-range ICBM missiles with

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mini—space capsules, like the ones astronauts rode

in. The missile was a MIRV, a multiple indepen-
dently targetable reentry vehicle, meaning each
ICBM was capable of carrying ten warheads over a
range of six thousand miles. Its NATO reporting
name was SS-18 Satan.
Alibek also provided chilling details about a Soviet
bioweapons programs called Chimera, whereby genetic
material from two or more different organisms was
combined to produce more virulent germs. Alibek told
his handlers they should be very worried about this
program, and said he had direct knowledge of a trial
developed in the late 1980s in which a chimera, or
hybrid, strain was created by inserting Venezuelan
equine encephalomyelitis genes into smallpox. One of
the ultimate goals of Chimera, Alibek said, was to cre-
ate a monster hybrid of smallpox and Ebola. Alibek
warned his handlers that the Soviets had sold secrets
about genetically modified bioweapons to Libya, Iran,
Iraq, India, Cuba, and former Soviet bloc countries in
eastern Europe. U.S. officials took notes and listened.
Alibek’s greatest frustration, he would later say, was
that these officials did not seem to comprehend the
potentially catastrophic consequences of the Soviet
program.
“They did not care about our genetic work,”
Alibek lamented. “When it came to strategic ques-
tions,” his interrogators told him that they were

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uninterested in what he had to say. “We are only

interested in what you know,” they said, “not what
you think could happen.” The Pentagon was happy
to learn what he knew about the inner workings of
Biopreparat. Alibek’s information was useful, he was
told, but his opinions were unwelcome. Soon, this
too would change.
There had been a blind spot at the Pentagon and
at DARPA since the earliest days of the Cold War,
an aloof indifference to the opinions of biologists.
Officials at the White House and the Defense
Department were much more interested in what the
hard scientists, like the Jason scientists, had to say.
Back in 1968 Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg
pointed out this disadvantage in a science column
he wrote regularly for the Washington Post, accusing
the federal government of “blindness to the pace of
biological advance and its accessibility to the most
perilous genocidal experimentation.” Lederberg was
referring to biological weapons. Starting in 1945,
with the advent of the atomic bomb, the Pentagon
had largely relied on the advice and counsel of physi-
cists and mathematicians as far as advanced weap-
onry was concerned, but rarely biologists.
If World War I had been the chemists’ war and
World War II the physicists’ war, now, given the
threats facing the Pentagon, would World War III
be the biologists’ war?

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Briefed on Alibek’s revelations about the Soviet

bioweapons program, DARPA was quick to note
this blind spot and to take action. “DoD had very
little capability in biology” in the early 1990s, recalls
Larry Lynn, DARPA’s director from 1995 to 1998.
Now DARPA recognized just how worrisome it was
that biology, and the life sciences in general, could
lead the next revolution in military affairs, and rec-
ognized, too, that the Department of Defense was
behind the curve. The Pentagon needed its own core
group of advisors, American scientists at the leading
edge of biology. The Jason scientists were contacted.
Since leaving the Institute of Defense Analyses in
1973, the Jason scientists had had several homes. For
the first eight years they received their defense con-
tracts through the Stanford Research Institute in
Menlo Park, California. SRI was a longtime ARPA
contractor and an information technology pioneer,
and had been one of the first four nodes on the
ARPANET. Under the SRI in the 1970s, the Jasons
brought several computer scientists and electrical
engineers into their ranks. And because they no
longer served ARPA alone, their client list had
expanded. Under the SRI banner, the Jasons con-
ducted studies and wrote reports for the CIA, the
Navy, NASA, the Department of Energy, the
Defense Nuclear Agency, the National Science
Foundation, and others.

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In 1981 the Jason scientists moved their head-

quarters to the east coast once again, this time under
the MITRE Corporation banner. There, Gordon
MacDonald, himself a Jason scientist, served as
MITRE’s chief scientist. Business continued to
grow, with the Jasons still conducting most of their
work as summer studies.
In 1986, defense contractor General Dynamics
gave the Jason scientists their own room, back in Cal-
ifornia again, on its sprawling 120-acre La Jolla cam-
pus, which they still used as of 2014. “It’s a SCIF,”
Murph Goldberger explained in a 2014 interview,
referring to a “sensitive compartmented information
facility,” meaning it was built to Defense Department
security specifications and ringed by a barbed-wire
perimeter. The room at General Dynamics was not
exactly a college dormitory with a view of the ocean,
but as Goldberger noted, “times have changed.”
After the Berlin Wall came down and the bio-
weapons threat ratcheted up, Jason “was told it was
wise to bring biologists into the ranks,” said Gold-
berger. DARPA director Larry Lynn reached out per-
sonally to Joshua Lederberg. After decades of
forewarning, Lederberg was finally brought on
board as a defense scientist. He would now serve as
chairman of DARPA’s science advisors for biology.
In 1994, DARPA director Larry Lynn and a team
traveled to Moscow, laying plans for how to use

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technology to keep track of what was going on there.

The details of this trip remain classified.
Biological weapons were the new national secu-
rity concern, and in the fall of 1995, in an effort to
have sanctions against his country relieved, Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein disclosed to the United
Nations that Iraq had been producing biological
weapons by the ton, including botulinum toxin,
camelpox, and hemorrhagic conjunctivitis. Iraq
admitted it had hundreds of scientists working in at
least five separate facilities, a number of which were
located underground, and which had survived
destruction in the Gulf War. In 1996, the CIA pro-
vided President Clinton with reports on the biologi-
cal weapons programs believed to be in existence
inside North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria—
all still classified in 2015. In 1997, the Jasons were
asked to conduct a summer study on biological
weapons threats. The group had a new scientist in
their ranks, the microbiologist Stephen M. Block,
who, several years later, published some of the
unclassified findings of this Jason summer study.
The most significant threat, noted Block, was the
accelerated pace at which discoveries in molecular biol-
ogy were being made. “Recent advances in life sciences
have changed the nature and scope” of microbiology,
he wrote, revealing “inevitably, a dark side.” The Jason
scientists warned just how dangerous the threat of

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genetically engineered pathogens had become. Mod-

ern bioscience has made “possible the creation of
entirely new WMD, endowed with unprecedented
power to destroy,” Block wrote. “Was [this alarmist]
hype, or largely warranted?” he asked. Block said the
Jason scientists had concluded “the latter.” In Block’s
opinion, “it seems likely that such weapons will even-
tually come to exist, simply because of the lamentable
ease with which they may be constructed.” They were
cheap, easy to make, and, if you knew what you were
looking for and could find out how to create them,
freely available in the public domain.
The ability to genetically engineer pathogens had
raised the threat level. For use as a weapon, the pos-
sibilities were limitless. “If you were to mix Ebola
with the communicability of measles to create a
pathogen that would continue to alter itself in such a
way to evade treatment,” wrote Block, the rate of
Ebola’s transmission and infectivity would skyrocket.
These stealth viruses, which Alibek called chimeras,
were even more menacing from a psychological
perspective, Block said.
“The basic idea behind a stealth virus is to pro-
duce a tightly regulated, cryptic viral infection,
using a vector that can enter and spread in human
cells, remaining resident for lengthy periods without
detectable harm,” Block wrote, calling this a “silent
viral load.” One example that exists naturally is

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herpes simplex, or the common cold sore. The virus

lies dormant until it is one day triggered by what is
believed to be an environmental assault on the body,
like sunburn or stress. Similarly, an unwitting popu-
lation could be “slowly pre-infected with a stealth
virus over an extended period, possibly years, and
then synchronously triggered,” Block wrote. This
wicked concept had enormous potential in the realm
of psychological warfare. As far as using a stealth
virus as a weapon, the Jasons were dually concerned.
Stealth viruses carried with them “a utility beyond
that of traditional bioweapons,” they concluded. “For
example they could be disseminated and used to
blackmail a population based on their activation.”
If the notion of a stealth virus, or silent load,
sounded improbable, Block cited a little-known con-
troversy involving the anti-polio vaccination cam-
paign of the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to
Block, during this effort millions of Americans risked
contracting the “cryptic human infection” of mon-
key virus, without ever being told. “These vaccines,”
writes Block, “were prepared using live African green
monkey kidney cells, and batches of polio vaccine
became contaminated by low levels of a monkey
virus, Simian virus 40 (SV40), which eluded the
quality control procedures of the day. As a result,
large numbers of people—probably millions, in
fact—were inadvertently exposed to SV40.” Block

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says that two possible outcomes of this medical

disaster remain debated. One side says the 98 mil-
lion people vaccinated dodged a bullet. The other
side believes there is evidence that the vaccine did
harm. “A great deal of speculation occurs about
whether [simian virus] may be responsible for some
disease” that manifests much later in the vaccinated
person’s life, says Block, including cancer. The sub-
ject remains highly contentious, with vaccine makers
and the National Institutes for Health engaged in
acrimonious debate with scientists who have found
the SV40 monkey virus in cancerous human tumors.
The 1997 Jason report on biological weapons
remains classified. Shortly after it was completed,
President Clinton issued two Presidential Decision
Directives, PDD 62 and PDD 63, both of which
addressed the biological weapons threat and both of
which also remained classified as of 2015. Biological
warfare defense was now a “very high DARPA prior-
ity.” In 1996, DARPA opened a new office called the
Unconventional Countermeasures Program. Con-
gress quickly funded this “high-priority initiative”
with $30 million for its first fiscal year. “DARPA is
seeking partnerships with the research community
and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries
to develop innovative new treatment, prevention and
diagnostic strategies for biological warfare threats,”
read one of the earliest program overview memos.

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Initially, DARPA’s primary focus was on protecting

US. soldiers. An internal memo noted, “Troops, ports,
airfields, supply depots, etc. are vulnerable to biologi-
cal attacks,” and yet, paradoxically, “most likely first
use [of bioweapons] will be against population cen-
ters of ours or our allies.” DARPA had a mission to
develop “broad strategies to counter the threat.”
This effort explored four areas: sensing, protection,
diagnosis, and countermeasures. But DARPA as an
agency was dedicated to advanced research and
development, and the first three areas, sensing,
protection, and diagnosis, were “only marginally
protective.” DARPA wanted its scientists and
researchers to strive for revolutionary goals, to focus
on innovative countermeasures that did not yet exist.
Larry Lynn told program managers that he wanted to
create the “Star Wars of biology,” a reference to Presi-
dent Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Lynn chal-
lenged DARPA scientists to push existing biotech
boundaries and to come up with a vaccine, gene, or
chemical that could allow the human body to “inca-
pacitate or debilitate” a biological agent on its own,
before the pathogen made its host sick. It was a bril-
liant, bold idea. But could it work? Was there time?

The 1994 international nonfiction best-seller The

Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, is about the origins
of, and incidents involving, the Ebola virus. Three

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years later, in 1997, Preston wrote a fictional account

of a bioterrorism attack in New York City, titled The
Cobra Event. Preston’s genetically engineered biologi-
cal weapon, a chimera virus called Cobra, is imagi-
nary, but his information was based on real reporting.
He had interviewed Christopher Davis, the Royal
Navy surgeon who had been Vladimir Pasechnik’s
original handler, as well as Ken Alibek and many top
scientists at USAMRIID.
President Clinton read The Cobra Event shortly
after it was published and was alarmed. He asked
Secretary of Defense William Cohen to read the
book and have an intelligence analysis of the viabil-
ity of a real-life Cobra event written up. Secretary of
Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala also
read The Cobra Event and included a plot summary
in a journal article she authored for the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. The following year,
in 1998, Richard Preston testified before Congress
in Senate hearings on the question “Threats to Amer-
ica: Are We Prepared?”
“Biopreparat was like an egg,” Preston said of the
Soviet program. “The outside part was devoted to
peaceful medical research. The hidden inner part,
the yolk, was devoted to the creation and production
of sophisticated bioweapons powders—smallpox,
black plague, anthrax, tularemia, the Marburg
virus, and certain brain viruses.” In this public

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forum, Preston outlined Russia’s capacity to launch

a biological weapons attack on the United States.
Using smallpox as an example, Preston said that as
recently as a few years prior, Soviet-era ICBMs fitted
with specially loaded MIRV warheads stood ready
and able to launch. Those warheads, Preston said,
carried “twenty tons of freeze-dried small-pox pow-
der” and “probably...an equal number of Black
Death [plague] warheads.” Before the Berlin Wall
came down, Preston summarized, if the Soviets had
decided to launch a biological weapons attack
against the United States, his research indicated that
they “could have easily hit the one-hundred largest
cities in the United States with devastating com-
bined outbreaks of strategic smallpox and Black
Death, an attack that could easily kill as many peo-
ple as a major nuclear war.” The Soviet Union no
longer existed, but the warheads and their contents
did. The congressional hearings supported the idea
that biological warfare was an apocalyptic night-
mare waiting to happen. Something radical had to
be done. The bioweapons defense industry was like a
sleeping giant, now awakened.

Ken Alibek had been in the United States for six

years. He spoke English now, had friends, held lucra-
tive defense contractor jobs, and was primed to enter
the public domain. In February 1998 Alibek made

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his first television appearance on the ABC News

program Primetime Live. In planning for World War
III, Alibek said, the Russians had prepared “hun-
dreds of tons” of bioweapons. Now, even with the
wall down, Alibek said, the Russians “continue to
do research to develop new biological agents.” In
March, Richard Preston profiled Dr. Alibek for the
New Yorker magazine. Copies of the article were dis-
tributed to members of Congress through the Con-
gressional Record.
Before the Primetime Live airing, Ken Alibek was
not a public figure. He had been moving quietly in
U.S. government, military, and intelligence circles,
sharing information with individuals who held
national security clearances similar to his own. Now,
his opinions found a much wider audience. Ameri-
can citizens were interested in what he had to say
and so were the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In May 1998
Alibek testified before a congressional committee
hearing on terrorism and intelligence. He even had a
private meeting at the Pentagon, in the E-Ring,
where he briefed General Joseph W. Ralston, the vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the second-
highest-ranking military officer in the United States.
The narrative of the biological weapons threat was
gaining traction in the mainstream press. In June
1998, President Clinton asked Congress to provide
$294 million in funding for anti-bioterrorism

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programs. In October, Alibek was featured in the

PBS Frontline documentary “Plague War.”
In the six years since his defection, Ken Alibek
had been a busy man professionally. For the first few
years of his new life in America, he held various
research and consulting positions at the National
Institutes of Health and the CIA and with private
defense contractors. Notably, he developed a rela-
tionship with Dr. Charles Bailey, former chief scien-
tist at USAMRIID. “I helped to build Alibek’s
reputation with the military,” said Bailey. “A lot of
people were impressed with Alibek. I was impressed.”
When Bailey went to work for a defense contractor
in Huntsville, Alabama, he brought Dr. Alibek
along. Later, from 1996 to 1998, Alibek served as
program manager at SRS Technologies, an informa-
tion technology company based in California. In
1998 he and Bailey both worked as program manag-
ers for Battelle Memorial Institute, the defense con-
tractor that handled ARPA’s Vietnam-era Project
Agile reports. In April 1999, Alibek became presi-
dent of a defense contractor called Hadron Advanced
Biosystems, Inc., located in Manassas, Virginia, whose
mission was to “develop innovative solutions for the
intelligence community... including intelligent weap-
ons systems and biological weapons defense.” Dr. Bai-
ley served as vice president. Hadron became a go-to

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place for several former Soviet bioweapons engineers,

microbiologists Alibek had formerly worked with at
Biopreparat. Among them was Sergei Popov.
Popov was an expert in synthetic bioweapons and
had been a member of the Biopreparat team that
worked on the nefarious Chimera program in the
Soviet Union, recombining genes to make stealth
viruses. At Biopreparat, Popov had helped create a
class of bioweapons with “new and unusual proper-
ties, difficult to recognize, difficult to treat,” Popov
told the PBS program Nova in 1998. “Essentially I
arranged the research towards more virulent agents
causing more death and more pathological symp-
toms.” Like Alibek, Popov had defected to the
United States after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
At Hadron Advanced Biosystems, Alibek, Popov,
and Bailey expressed their determination to find a
cure-all against bioweapons, a broad-spectrum anti-
dote that could shoot down dangerous pathogens in
the body before they were able to infect a human
host. This was similar to what DARPA director
Larry Lynn was seeking when he asked his program
managets to create a “Star Wars of biology” pro-
gram. On Nova, Popov described what the doctors
were working on as a countermeasure with the abil-
ity to “induce so-called ‘unspecific immunity, which
would be efficient in protecting people against quite

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

a big range of different diseases.” Alibek called the

concept an “immune booster.” Other military
research scientists called the idea impossible.
One noteworthy skeptic was Dr. Phillip K. Rus-
sell, the former commanding general of the Army
Medical Research and Development Command.
Dr. Russell told the Wall Street Journal that search-
ing for a booster for the immune system was “com-
plex and fraught with risk. Turn it on, and it does
things that can be detrimental as well as protective.”
Dr. Russell also stated that Dr. Alibek was better at
theorizing than at experimenting, and that the
former Soviet bioweapons engineer was “as much an
enigma as a scientist as he is as an individual.”
Alibek stayed focused on his research goals. In 1999
he approached DARPA. Here was an agency that
was willing to take risks. And with a recent infusion
of money from Congress, there were many new con-
tracts to be had in biological warfare defense. As the
chief scientist at defense contractor Hadron, Dr. Ken
Alibek was in a prime position to receive DARPA
contracts.
In the fall of 1999, Hadron Advanced Biosystems
was awarded its first one-year DARPA contract, for
$3.3 million, roughly $4.6 million in 2015. Alibek
issued a press statement reading, “We hope this
[DARPA] program is just the beginning of new,
innovative research, funded by government agen-

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 BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

cies.” Alibek told colleagues that one day he hoped

to build a drug manufacturing plant in the former
Soviet republic of Ukraine. He also told colleagues
that if terrorists got their hands on biological weap-
ons, all of America would be at risk.
In October 1999, DARPA invited Dr. Alibek to
testify before the House Committee on Armed Ser-
vices’ Subcommittee on Research and Development
and Subcommittee on Procurement. In his opening
statement, Alibek told members of Congress in no
uncertain terms what they should be afraid of. “What
we need to expect,” Alibek said, is biological weapons
in the hands of “some terrorist organization.”
Which is exactly what may or may not have
happened two years later, in October 2001.

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 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Transforming Humans for War

etired four-star general Paul F. Gorman

recalls first learning about the “weakling of
the battlefield” as a young soldier in the
1950s. This was before Gorman fought in Vietnam,
before he served as special assistant to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, before the Department of Defense
detailed him to the CIA, and before he completed
his uniformed service and became commander in
chief of the U.S. Southern Command.
“Soldiers get tired and soldiers get fearful,” said
Gorman, age eighty-nine in 2014, in an interview
for this book. “Frequently, soldiers just don’t want to
fight. Attention must always be paid to the soldier
himself.” Since its inception in 1958, DARPA’s focus
has been on the research and development of vast

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

weapons systems of the future. Starting in 1990, and

owing to individuals like General Gorman, a new
focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors. On
transforming humans for war.
General Gorman learned about the weakling of
the battlefield while reading S. L. A. Marshall, the
U.S. Army combat historian during World War II.
After interviewing soldiers who participated in the
Normandy beach landings, Marshall concluded,
“On the field of battle man is not only a thinking
animal but a beast of burden.” It was fatigue that
was responsible for an overwhelming number of
casualties, Marshall learned.
“I didn’t know my strength was gone until I hit the
beach,” Sergeant Bruce Hensley told Marshall. “I was
carrying part of a machine gun. Normally I could run
with it... but I found I couldn’t even walk with it....
So I crawled across the sand dragging it with me. I felt
ashamed of my own weakness, but looking around I
saw the others crawling and dragging the weights they
normally carried.”
And Staff Sergeant Thomas B. Turner told Mar-
shall, “Under fire we learned what we had never been
told—that fear and fatigue are about the same in their
effect on an advance,” such as storming a beach.
Reading these soldiers’ accounts of exhaustion
from the sheer weight of what they carried into bat-
tle planted an idea in Paul Gorman’s brain. Decades

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

later, in the 1970s, Gorman was at the Los Alamos

National Laboratory, in New Mexico, “working on
a sensitive program,” when he got an idea about how
to strengthen the weakling of the battlefield. It could
be done, he thought, with a strength-amplifying
mechanical suit.
“Los Alamos was developing a suit for people who
had to be encapsulated because they were working in
a radioactive environment,” Gorman recalls. The
suits were lead-lined, heavy, and cumbersome. “Much
of the science focused on how to lighten the load.”
But Gorman noticed something else as well. “The
[people] inside the suits struggled with sensory depri-
vation,” he says, “and when deprived of sensory inputs,
a person cannot function at capacity for very long.”
Soldiers need strength and endurance, which led to
Gorman’s pioneering idea for a battle suit of the
future: the “quintessential man-machine interface
[for] the soldier who fights on foot.”
General Gorman retired from the Army in 1985
and began working for DARPA. In 1990 he wrote a
paper describing an “integrated powered exoskeleton”
that could transform the weakling of the battlefield
into a veritable super-soldier. Gorman’s SuperIroop
concept would make the soldier stronger and give him
enhanced command, control, communication, and
intelligence capabilities. This was the origin of the now
famous DARPA exoskeleton.

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

The exoskeleton Gorman proposed offered pro-

tection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic,
and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50
caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual and
haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explains, including
thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for
the ears, and fiber optics from head to fingertips. Its
interior would be climate controlled, and each sol-
dier would have his own physiological specifications
embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a
soldier donned his ST [SuperItoop] battledress,”
Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a
slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his per-
sonal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giv-
ing the twenty-first-century soldier an extraordinary
ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.
“The exoskeleton would require a very powerful
computer,” Gorman surmised. Since the technology
did not yet exist, he proposed that the SuperTroop
concept be fielded first through SIMNET simula-
tors. A program called the Soldier System Model
and Simulation was born, and work on the DARPA
exoskeleton began.
DARPA had spent the previous three decades
focusing on advancing weapons platforms. Now the
agency would research and develop technologies for
the dismounted soldier. The biological weapons
threat caused DARPA to bring biologists into its

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

ranks, and with the life sciences at the fore, DARPA

began to look inside the human body, toward a sci-
entific capability that could transform soldiers from
the inside out.
Throughout the 1990s, the exponential progress
of three technologies made this possible: biotechnol-
ogy, information technology, and nanotechnology. In
1999 DARPA created the Defense Sciences Office
(DSO) and made Michael Goldblatt its director.
With twenty-eight program managers under his con-
trol, Goldblatt would be overseeing the single largest
number of program managers at DARPA, an agency
that in 1999 had 140 program managers in total.
Michael Goldblatt came to DARPA with a radi-
cal vision. He believed that through advanced tech-
nology, in twenty or fifty years’ time, human beings
could be the “first species to control evolution.” In
an interview for this book in 2014, Goldblatt
described the climate at DARPA when he arrived.
“Biology was an area where the Defense Department
was underserved. War was shifting. The pattern of
warfare was shifting. So was the thinking.” The turn
of the century “was a radical time to be at DARPA,”
Goldblatt says, and in this time of momentous
change he saw great opportunity. “Suddenly, there
were zoologists in the office.” As director of DSO at
DARPA, Goldblatt believed that defense sciences
could demonstrate that “the next frontier was inside

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

of our own selves.” In this way, at DARPA, Goldb-

latt became a pioneer in military-based transhuman-
ism—the notion that man can and will alter the
human condition fundamentally by augmenting
humans with machines and other means.
When Goldblatt arrived at DARPA in 1999, the
Biological Warfare Defense Program was two and a
half years old. “The threat was growing far faster
than the solutions were coming in. It was a hard
problem,” Goldblatt recalls. “[President] Clinton
gave lots of money to the countermeasures program
for unconventional pathogens,” he says. “There was
ots of money for biology programs at DARPA.”
Goldblatt saw the creation of the super-soldier as
imperative to twenty-first-century warfare. “Soldiers
having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limi-
tation will be key to survival and operational domi-
nance in the future,” Goldblatt told his program
managers just a few weeks after arriving at DARPA.

How did Michael Goldblatt, a biologist and venture

capitalist from the Midwest, end up running what
would be one of the most consequential defense sci-
ences programs of the early twenty-first century?
“In the mid-1990s I had not heard of DARPA,”
Goldblatt insists. But as chief science officer and vice
president of research, development, and nutrition at
McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food restaurant

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chain, Goldblatt had his finger on the pulse of food-

related national health scares. When, in 1993, four
children died and 623 people fell seriously ill after
eating E. coli-infected hamburgers sold at Jack in
the Box restaurants, Goldblatt became hyper-aware.
All of a sudden, a previously unknown bacterium,
O157:H7, “was on everybody’s radar,” says Goldb-
latt. Every person in the fast food business “was on
pathogen alert.”
Goldblatt, the venture capitalist, got an idea. “In
an effort to identify ways to enhance food safety and
eliminate unwanted pathogens, a guy I was working
with, Alvin Chow, and I came up with a technology
for selfsterilizing packages—packages that steril-
ized products in the field.” McDonald’s decided not
to use the technology that Goldblatt and Chow had
developed, so the two men sought out a different
buyer. “We thought this technology would be useful
to the government,” Goldblatt says. “We did some
research and found this group called DARPA. I
called them. No response. I wrote to them. No
response. I called again. I said, “This is Michael
Goldblatt from McDonald’s. I'd like to speak with
Larry Lynn, ” the director of DARPA. “After a short
while, he called me back. He thought I was with
McDonnell Aircraft. I said, ‘No, McDonald’s ham-
burgers. There was riotous laughter,’ Goldblatt
recalls. “I told Larry about the self-sterilizing pack-

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

ages. How they could be used in field hospitals or on

the battlefield. Larry was blown away. He said, ‘We
want you to come to DARPA,’ And I did.”
At DARPA, Goldblatt realized that almost any-
thing that could be imagined could at least be tried.
In the Defense Sciences Office, programs were initi-
ated to develop technologies that would make sol-
diers, also called warfighters, stronger, smarter, more
capable, and would give them more endurance than
other humans. One program, called Persistence in
Combat, addressed three areas that slowed soldiers
down on the battlefield: pain, wounds, and excessive
bleeding.
Goldblatt hired a biotechnology firm to develop a
pain vaccine. “It works with the body’s inflamma-
tory response that is responsible for pain,” Goldblatt
explained in 2014. The way the vaccine would work
is that, ifa soldier got shot, he would experience “ten
to thirty seconds of agony then no pain for thirty
days. The vaccine would reduce the pain triggered
by inflammation and swelling,” allowing the warf-
ighter to keep fighting so long as bleeding could be
stopped. To develop new ways to try to stop bleeding,
Goldblatt initiated another program that involved
injecting millions of microscopic magnets into a per-
son, which could later be brought together into a
single area to stop bleeding with the wave of a wand.
The scientist in charge of that program, Dr. Harry

453
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

T. Whelan, worked on several “rapid healing” pro-

grams under the banner “DARPA Soldier Self Care.”
Another idea regarding ways to allow wounded sol-
diers to survive blood loss and avoid going into shock
involved figuring out a way to get a human to go into a
kind of hibernation, or suspended animation, until
help arrived. Achieving this goal would give a soldier
precious hours, or even days, to survive while awaiting
evacuation or triage. Bears hibernate. Why can’t man?
DARPA DSO scientists asked these and other ques-
tions, including, could a chemical compound like
hydrogen sulfide produce a hibernation-like state in a
man?
Sleep was another field of intense research at
DSO. In the Continually Assisted Performance pro-
gram, scientists worked on ways to create a “24/7
soldier,” one who required little or no sleep for up to
seven days. If this could be achieved, the enemy’s
need for sleep would put them at an extreme disad-
vantage. Goldblatt’s program managers hired marine
biologists studying certain sea animals to look for
clues. Whales and dolphins don’t sleep; as mam-
mals, they would drown if they did. Unlike humans,
they are somehow able to control the lobes of their
left and right brains so that while one lobe sleeps,
the opposite lobe stays awake, allowing the animal
to swim. While some DARPA scientists ruminated

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

over the question of how humans might one day

control the lobes of their own brains, other scientists
experimented with drugs like Modafinil, a powerful
medication used to counter sleep apnea and narco-
lepsy, to keep warfighters awake.
To address strength and endurance issues, Goldb-
latt initiated a program called the Mechanically
Dominant Soldier. What if soldiers could have ten
times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What
if they could leap seven feet and be able to cool down
their own body temperature? What if the military
benchmark of eighty pull-ups a day could be raised
to three hundred pull-ups a day? “We want every war
fighter to look like Lance Armstrong as far as meta-
bolic profile,” program manager Joe Bielitzki told
Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau a decade before
Armstrong resigned from athletics in disgrace.
Under the DSO banner, in a program called the
Brain-Machine Interface, DARPA scientists studied
how brain implants could enhance cognitive ability.
The program’s first goal was to create “a wireless
brain modem for a freely moving rat,” said DARPA’s
Dr. Eric Eisenstadt in 1999. The scientists would
implant a chip in the rat’s brain to see if they could
remotely control the animal’s movements. “The
objective of this effort,” Eisenstadt explained, “is to
use remote teleoperation via direct interconnections

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

with the brain.” DARPA’s bigger vision for its Brain-

Machine Interface program was to allow future “sol-
diers [to] communicate by thought alone.”
Dr. Eisenstadt asked his program managers to
“picture a time when humans see in the UV [ultravi-
olet] and IR [infrared] portions of the electromag-
netic spectrum, or hear speech on the noisy flight
deck of an aircraft carrier.” What might sound like
science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was
future science. “Imagine a time when the human
brain has its own wireless modem so that instead of
acting on thoughts, warfighters have thoughts that
act, Eisenstadt suggested. Fifteen years later, the
Brain-Machine Interface program would astound.
But turn-of-the-millennium critics cried foul, and a
spotlight was turned on DARPA’s super-soldier pur-
suits. Critics said that the quest to enhance human
performance on the battlefield would lead scientists
down a morally dangerous path. Michael Goldblatt
disagreed.
“How is an exoskeleton or a brain implant differ-
ent from a pacemaker or a cochlear implant or a
prosthetic?” Goldblatt asked in a 2014 interview.
For Goldblatt, the scientific exploration into trans-
humanism is personal. His daughter Gina was born
with cerebral palsy, a group of permanent physical
disorders related to movement that get worse over

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

time, never better. Goldblatt believes that the physi-

cally impaired or weak have every right to compete
with their fellows, and if science allows them a way
and a means to do so, that science should be pur-
sued. “When we learned Gina had cerebral palsy,”
said Goldblatt, “I called the smartest person I knew.
He said to me, ‘It’s permanent. Now accept that.”
Goldblatt could still recall the long, dark silence that
followed that statement until finally the smart per-
son on the other end of the phone said to him, “Now
ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?”
For Goldblatt, the answer was clear. He would
provide his daughter with every opportunity to com-
pete with other children, through performance
enhancements like a motorized wheelchair and the
best computers available, with everything in her
bedroom remotely controlled. This vision carried
over to DARPA, where, as director of DSO, Goldb-
latt would oversee performance enhancements for
the warfighter on a national scale, spending over
$100 million on programs to reengineer the twenty-
first-century soldier fighting on foot.
Asked about that morally dangerous path, Gold-
blatt rephrases his question, “How is having a
cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear any differ-
ent than having a chip in your brain that could help
control your thoughts?” When questioned about

457
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

unintended consequences, like controlling humans

for nefarious ends, Goldblatt insists, “There are
unintended consequences for everything.”

It was June 2001 and the new president, George W.

Bush, had been in office for six months. The biolog-
ical weapons threat continued to interest the public
and was regularly featured in the news. And war
games, including the computer-based SIMNET,
had become an integral part of national security
strategizing. But in some arenas, old school role-
playing prevailed. In the third week of June, a group
of fifteen former senior officials and two journalists
assembled at Andrews Air Force Base in Washing-
ton, D.C., to carry out a script-based, asymmetrical
attack simulation called Dark Winter. In the fic-
tional game scenario, the nation has been pummeled
into chaos after terrorists attack Oklahoma with a
biological weapon containing smallpox. The Dark
Winter exercise involved three National Security
Council meetings taking place over a period of two
weeks. In the war game, the National Security
Council members were role-played by former offi-
cials. The onetime U.S. senator and chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn,
played Dark Winter's fictional president; the former
special counselor to the president and White House
communications director, David Gergen, played the

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 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

national security advisor; a former vice chief of staff

of the U.S. Army, General John. H. Tilelli, played
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the former
director of the CIA, James Woolsey, played Dark
Winter's fictional CIA, director; and the sitting gov-
ernor of Oklahoma, Frank Keating, played the fic-
tional governor of Oklahoma. Dark Winter's wat
game plot revolved around how the players would
respond to a hypothetical biological weapons attack.
First, the game players were “briefed” on back-
ground events. “Last month Russian authorities, with
support from the FBI, arrested Yusuuf Abdul Aziiz, a
known operative in Al-Qaida and a close personal
friend and suspected senior lieutenant of Usama bin
Laden,” read the Dark Winter script. “Yusuuf was
caught in a sting operation that had been developing
during the last year. He was attempting to acquire
50 kilograms of plutonium and was also attempting
to arrange the purchase of several biological patho-
gens that had been weaponized by the Soviet Union.”
The war game scenario also involved Iraq. Dark
Winter game players were told that two days earlier,
“Traqi forces in the South of Iraq moved into offensive
positions along the Kuwaiti border,” just as they had
done in real life in 1990, which set the Gulf War in
motion. Also on background, the war gamers learned
about domestic conditions: “US Economy is in good
shape. Polls show a slim majority of Americans oppose
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

a major deployment of US troops to the Persian Gulf.

Most Americans agree that Saddam’s Iraqi regime
represents a real threat to stability in the region and to
American interests.” It is worth noting that in real life,
the first two fictional statement were based in fact,
but the third one, that most Americans saw Saddam’s
Iraq as a threat, was not a fact. What was factual was
that the man who had been secretary of defense dur-
ing the Gulf War, Dick Cheney, was now the vice
president of the United States, and he saw Saddam’s
Iraq as a threat. As for Dark Winter, the game began
when the fictional governor of Oklahoma informed
the National Security Council that his state has been
attacked with a smallpox weapon.
Over the course of the fourteen days, for the game
players, the scenario went from bad to worse to calam-
itous. Entire states shut down, chaos reigned, massive
traffic jams ensued, civil liberties were suspended,
many banks and post offices closed. As vaccines ran
out, “angry citizens denounce[d] the government’s
failure to stop the smallpox epidemic.” Civilians
started shooting policemen. The National Guard
started shooting civilians. Finally, a fictional “promi-
nent Iraqi defector claim[ed] that Iraq arranged the
bioweapons attack on the US through intermediar-
ies,’ most likely Yusuuf Abdul Aziiz, the fictional
deputy of the real Osama bin Laden.
In the Dark Winter war game, 3 million Ameri-

460
 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

cans died of smallpox. As a result, a fictional CNN-

Gallup poll revealed that 48 percent of Americans
wanted the president to consider using nuclear weap-
ons in response. The game ended there.
One month later, on July 23, 2001, former chair-
man of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam
Nunn—the man who played Dark Winter's fic-
tional president—told Congress during a House
hearing on combating biological terrorism that the
real emergency revealed in the war game was just
how unprepared America was to handle an actual
biological weapons attack.
“T was honored to play the part of the President in
the exercise Dark Winter,” Nunn told Congress.
“You often don’t know what you don’t know until
you've been tested,” he said. “And it’s a lucky thing
for the United States that, as the emergency broad-
cast network used to say, ‘this is just a test, this is not
a real emergency.’ But Mr. Chairman, our lack of
preparation is a real emergency.”
No one said, “But Dark Winter was only a game.”
Lines were being blurred. Games were influenc-
ing reality. Man was merging with machine. What
else would the technological advances of the twenty-
first century bring?

In August 2001, scientists from Los Alamos and the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory— renamed

461
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

in honor of its founder, Ernest O. Lawrence—

traveled to the West Desert Test Center at Dugway
Proving Ground in Utah. There, inside the Special
Programs Division, the scientists tested a new sensor
system designed to detect killer pathogens such as
anthrax and botulinum toxin. The name of the pro-
gram was the Biological Aerosol Sentry and Informa-
tion Systems, or BASIS. It was hailed as a plan for
“guarding the air we breathe.” In truth, all BASIS
could do was “detect to treat.” Unlike chemical weap-
ons, the presence of which could now be identified
before release through an advanced technology called
acoustic detection, biological weapons could be
detected only after the fact. Even worse, the sensor
systems were notorious for giving false alarms; the fil-
ter system was flawed. In open literature, Livermore
acknowledged that false alarms were a serious con-
cern but did not admit that their own problem was
widespread. “Any technology that reports a terrorist
incident where none exists may induce the very panic
and social disruption it is intended to thwart. There-
fore, the rate of false-positive alarms must be zero or
very nearly so.”
By the summer of 2001, Vice President Cheney
was becoming increasingly concerned about a possi-
ble biological weapons attack directed at the White
House. Plans were put in place to install Livermore’s

462
 TRANSFORMING HUMANS FOR WAR

BASIS system throughout the White House and its

grounds.
In the summer of 2001, DARPA’s biological weap-
ons defense initiative was one of the fastest-growing
programs in the defense sciences world. A decade
earlier, before the defection of the Soviet scientists,
the threat was not even known to exist. Now the
industry was a several-hundred-million-dollar-a-year
field.
Programs were largely speculative: as of yet, in a
conundrum that ran parallel to ARPA’s first quandary,
ballistic missile defense, there was no way to defend
against a biological weapons attack. Only if there were
a terrorist attack involving the release of a deadly path-
ogen on American soil could biological weapons
defense truly be put to the test. Defensive programs
and countermeasure programs would then skyrocket.
Which is exactly what happened next.

463
 PART IV

THE WAR ON
TERROR
 CHAPTER NINETEEN

Terror Strikes

Be: on the morning of September 11, 2001,

twenty-four-year-old David A. Bray was in
Atlanta, at the U.S. Centers for Disease Con-
trol (CDC), for a briefing with the Laboratory
Response Network for Bioterrorism. Bray was the
information technology chief for the Bioterrorism
Preparedness and Response Program at CDC, a pro-
gram established by President Clinton under his U.S.
policy on counterterrorism. It was Bray’s job to make
sure people got good information when and as they
needed it. There was so much information out there,
filtering out the important information was key. A
man cannot drink from a fire hose. The meeting on
September 11 was supposed to start at 9:00 a.m.
“When I signed up for work in bioterrorism I

467
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

thought to myself; what kind of world requires my

job?” asks Bray. That spring, he says, “we had received
a memo that said, “Be on alert for Al Qaeda activity
June through August 2001.’ It specifically ended in
August.”
It was September now, and Bray and his team were
getting ready for the Bioterrorism Preparedness and
Response team briefing when an airplane hit the
North Tower of the World Trade Center. “We got the
news. Details were sketchy.” At 9:03, he recalls, “when
the second airplane hit, we definitely knew it was a
terrorism event.”
Many of the CDC employees were dispatched
elsewhere. “A large group started piling computers
into cars and were sent to an undisclosed offsite
bunker,” says Bray, explaining, “We were concerned
that a second event would involve bioterrorism.”
David Bray has always been a remarkably focused
person. His area of expertise is informatics, the sci-
ence of how information is gathered, stored, and
retrieved. The son of a minister and a teacher, Bray
started winning national science prizes in middle
school. By age fifteen, he had his first job with the
federal government, with the Department of Energy
at its Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facil-
ity in Newport News, Virginia.
“I was trying to understand the universe, and the
lab was looking for new energy sources,” Bray says of

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 TERROR STRIKES

his youth, when he had to get a special permit to

work for the Department of Energy so as to comply
with federal laws regarding child labor. By the time
Bray was sixteen, he had been written up in the
Washington Post for inventing a prizewinning com-
puter program that predicted how best to clean up
an oil spill. At age seventeen Bray was working for
the Department of Defense. Before he had turned
twenty-one, he had added jobs with the National
‘Institutes of Health and the Department of Agricul-
ture to his résumé. In between jobs he attended col-
lege, studying science, biology, and journalism. One
summer he worked in South Africa as a health
reporter for the Cape Argus News. What interested
Bray most was information. How people get infor-
mation and what they do with the information they
have.
As a reporter covering the AIDS crisis in South
Africa, Bray observed how informed people were
still willing to ignore dangers right in front of them.
In 1997 more than one out of six people in South
Africa had the AIDS virus, and the epidemic was
spreading out of control. Bray went around the
countryside talking to South African students about
the risks they faced, and how easily they could
protect themselves with prophylactics. “They knew
that they should wear protection,” Bray says, “but I
asked them if they would wear protection, and they

469
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

said they would not.” This was hardly shocking.

Bray said many Americans had the same attitude:
“Tt’s not going to happen to me.” He began thinking
about how to get people to follow the best course of
action, certainly as far as public health goes, based
on the information they have. At the Centers for
Disease Control, he found a place where he could
focus on this idea.
The terrorist attacks on the morning of Septem-
ber 11 created what Bray calls a “hyper-turbulent
environment.” In this kind of fear-fueled setting,
“knowledge is the most strategically significant
resource of an organization,” says Bray. Not more
knowledge but better knowledge. Good, clear, fac-
tual information. Data about what is going on.
Immediately after 9/11, says Bray, “we began reach-
ing out to fifty states. We worked from the idea that
the second event would be a biological event. We
wanted to have information channels [open] with
all fifty states” in the event that a bioterrorism attack
were to occur.
DARPA had been sponsoring a surveillance pro-
gram called Bio-ALIRT, for Bio-Event Advanced
Leading Indicator Recognition Technology, an
information-based technology program designed to
enable computers to quickly recognize a bioweapons
attack. To get a computer to “recognize” a bioweap-

470
 TERROR STRIKES

ons attack from the data was an extraordinary enter-

prise, and the program wasn’t capable enough by 9/11.
Originally designed to protect troops on foreign
soil, the program had recently expanded with plans
for a national surveillance program of U.S. civilians,
using an individual’s medical records. The ramifica-
tions for collecting medical information on Ameri-
cans for purposes of national security, but without
their knowledge or consent, were profound. The
Bio-ALIRT program fell under an emerging new
industry called “biosurveillance,” a contentious con-
cept that has largely avoided public scrutiny. DAR-
PA’s military partner in this effort was the Walter
Reed Army Institute of Research. Its civilian part-
ners were the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Labo-
ratory, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie
Mellon University, and the Stanford University
Medical Informatics group. DARPA’s defense con-
tractor partners were General Dynamics Advanced
Information Systems and the IBM Corporation.
The science behind Bio-ALIRT was intended to
determine whether or not “automated detection
algorithms” could identify an outbreak in either a
bioweapons attack or a naturally occurring epi-
demic, like bird flu. Never mind the people—the
doctors, nurses, and clinicians — reporting from the
field. The idea behind Bio-ALIRT was to take

471
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

human “bias” out of the equation and. allow

computers to do the job faster. As part of Bio-
ALIRT, supercomputers would scan vast databases
of medical records, in real time, as doctors entered
data. Simultaneously, and also as part of Bio-ALIRT,
supercomputers would scan sales at pharmacies of
both prescription and nonprescription drugs, in real
time. A privately held company called Surveillance
Data, Inc., was hired to provide “de-identified” out-
patient data, meaning that Surveillance Data, Inc.,
would “scrub” the medical information of personal
details, such as names, social security numbers, and
home addresses. It is unclear how much medical
history was considered personal and how much
the Bio-ALIRT supercomputers needed to differen-
tiate between chronic medical conditions and new
symptoms.
There were many flaws in the system, privacy
issues among them, but one flaw rendered the pro-
gram all but worthless. Bio-ALIRT’s automated
detection algorithms—the software that told the
supercomputers what to look for—were based on
data from the World Health Organization’s Interna-
tional Classification of Diseases, ninth revision,
known as ICD-9. But the biological weapons that
were the most deadly—the chimera viruses and the
recombinant pathogens like the ones the Soviet defec-
tors Ken Alibek, Vladimir Pasechnik, Sergei Popov,

472
 TERROR STRIKES

and others had been working on at Biopreparat—

were neither listed in nor identifiable by ICD-9. If
Bio-ALIRT programs had been further along than in
their earliest stages, the CDC could potentially have
benefited from the system. But on 9/11, the biosur-
veillance industry was still in its infancy, and the Lab-
oratory Response Network for Bioterrorism, which
Bray led as information chief, had to rely on humans
in all fifty states for receiving information. Bray and
his team had an overwhelming amount of work cut
out for themselves in this hyper-turbulent environ-
ment. Bray welcomed the challenge.
“Tt was a very long day,” recalls Bray, who was
personally doing the work that one day a computer
might do.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, when the

first airplane hit the North Tower of the World
Trade Center, at 8:46 a.m., Vice President Dick
Cheney was sitting in his office in the West Wing of
the White House. He immediately focused his atten-
tion on the television screen. “It was a clear day, there
were no weather problems, and then we saw the sec-
ond airplane hit,” Cheney recalled in his memoir.
“At that moment, you knew this was a deliberate act.
This was a terrorist act.”
Vice President Cheney called President Bush,
who was in Sarasota, Florida, visiting an elementary

473
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

school. Vice President Cheney was on the phone

with a presidential aide in Florida when his door
burst open and a Secret Service agent rushed in. “He
grabbed me and propelled me out of my office, and
into the underground shelter in the White House,”
Cheney told CNN’s John King. Later that same
night, the Secret Service transferred the vice presi-
dent to a more secure underground location outside
the capital. En route from the White House in a
helicopter, Cheney asked to view the damage to the
Pentagon, which had been struck by a third plane at
9:37 am. “As we lifted off and headed up the
Potomac, you could look out and see the Pentagon,
see that black hole where it'd been hit,” Cheney
recalled. For the first time in the Pentagon’s history,
the very symbol of American military power stood
broken and exposed with a huge gash in one of its
five sides.
Cheney was helicoptered to an “undisclosed loca-
tion,” which was Site R, the underground bunker
facility inside the Raven Rock Mountain Complex
seventy-five miles from the White House, near Camp
David. The location was disclosed in 2004 by jour-
nalist James Bamford. This was the Cold War-era
underground command center that had caused Pres-
ident Eisenhower so much grief back in 1956, dur-
ing the heated post—Castle Bravo debate over civil
defense. Site R was originally designed to be the

474
 TERROR STRIKES

place where the president would be taken in the

event of a nuclear attack. Eisenhower had struggled
with the concept throughout his presidency, mind-
ful that it was designed to provide safety for the pres-
ident and his close advisors during a time when the
very population the president was sworn to protect
would be most vulnerable, exposed, and unaware.
At Raven Rock, Vice President Cheney began
laying plans for war.

Also on the morning of September 11, 2001, shortly

before 9:40 a.m., Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld was sitting in his office on the third floor
of the Pentagon listening to a prescheduled briefing
by the CIA. Rumsfeld took notes on a small, round
wooden table once used by General William Tecum-
seh Sherman, famous for his scorched earth and
total war policies, and for saying, “War is hell.” Ear-
lier that same morning, terrorists had hijacked four
airplanes and had, by now, flown two of them into
the North and South towers of the World Trade
Center in New York. Outside the door of the office
of the secretary of defense, a Pentagon police officer
named Aubrey Davis was standing guard.
“There was an incredibly loud ‘boom,’” Davis
later told British journalist Andrew Cockburn. Ter-
rorists had just crashed an American Airlines com-
mercial jet into the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld

475
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

emerged from his office and asked Davis what was

going on. Davis, relaying information that was com-
ing over his portable radio, told the secretary of
defense that he was getting reports that an airplane
had hit the Pentagon. Rumsfeld listened, then hur-
tied down the corridor. Davis followed after him.
The smell of smoke filled the air. People were run-
ning down the hallways, yelling and screaming.
“They're bombing the building, they're bombing
the building!” someone hollered. After several min-
utes of walking, Rumsfeld, Davis, and others who
had joined the group arrived at what looked like a
wall of fire.
“There were flames, and bits of metal all around,”
Davis recalled. A woman was lying on the ground
right in front of him, her legs horribly burned. “The
Secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal,”
Davis remembered. “I was telling him that he
shouldn’t be interfering with a crime scene when he
looked at the inscription on it and [it read], ‘Ameri-
can Airlines.” Amid the chaos and smoke, there
were shouts and cries for help. Someone passed by
with an injured person laid out on a gurney. Secre-
tary Rumsfeld helped push the gurney outside.
By 10:00 a.m. Rumsfeld was back inside the Pen-
tagon. After calling the president from his office in
the E-Ring, he was moved to a secure location else-
where in the building, likely underground. From

476
 TERROR STRIKES

there, Rumsfeld spoke with Vice President Cheney,

who was still in the bunker beneath the White
House. At 12:05 p.m. Rumsfeld received a call from
CIA director George Tenet, who reported that the
National Security Agency had just intercepted a call
between one of Osama bin Laden’s deputies and a
person in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia dis-
cussing the “good news,” a clear reference to the ter-
rorist strikes. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were
responsible for the attacks, the CIA director told the
secretary of defense.
A little after 2:00 p.m. Rumsfeld gathered a core
group of military advisors and Pentagon staff and
began discussing what steps he wanted taken next.
The people in the room included General Richard
Myers, acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for
intelligence; Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokes-
woman; and a Pentagon lawyer. Cambone and
Clarke took notes with pen and paper. During the
meeting, Rumsfeld discussed the possibility of going
after Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a response to that
morning's terrorist attack. The notes of the under-
secretary for intelligence, later reviewed by the 9/11
Commission, revealed that Rumsfeld asked for “Best
info fast... judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H.
[Saddam Hussein] @ same time—not only UBL
[Usama bin Laden].” Rumsfeld asked the lawyer in

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the room to discuss with Deputy Secretary of

Defense Paul Wolfowitz “connection with UBL
[Usama bin Laden]” and Iraq.

Two days later, on September 13, Vice President Dick

Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national security
advisor Condoleezza Rice gathered for dinner at
Holly Lodge, Camp David, which is located just a
few miles from the Site R underground command
center. The topic discussed, according to matching
accounts in three of the four advisors’ memoirs, was
how America would respond to the 9/11 attacks.
“We all knew the outcome would be a declara-
tion of war against the Taliban,” Rice wrote. “But
the discussion was useful in teasing out the ques-
tions the President would need to address.”
“We were embarking on a fundamentally new
policy,” Cheney wrote in his memoir. “We were not
simply going to go after individual cells of terrorists
responsible for 9/11. We were going to bring down
their networks and go after the organizations,
nations, and people who lent them support.”
“T argued that our strategy should be to put them
on the defensive,” wrote Rumsfeld. “The emphasis
on a global campaign was important, I believed.”
Preemption was the new way forward. Thwarting
the enemy before he made his next move.

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 TERROR STRIKES

On September 16, CIA director George Tenet

sent out a memo to CIA staff. In the “Subject” line
he wrote, “We're at war.” Tenet told his CIA staff
that in order to successfully “wage a worldwide war
against al-Qaida and other terrorist organiza-
tions... [t]here must be absolute and full sharing of
information, ideas, and capabilities.” For George
Tenet, information was the way to win this war.
At the CDC in Atlanta, David Bray and his col-
leagues continued to work around the clock, keep-
ing channels open between the CDC and health
professionals in all fifty states. Each day that passed
without receiving health-related information that
might suggest a bioterrorism event was under way
meant another day of relief. “On October first we
were told to stand down,” Bray recalls. On October
3, he flew to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
There, inside the George H. W. Bush Center for
Intelligence, Bray gave the Interagency Intelligence
Committee on Terrorism a briefing about what the
CDC’s Laboratory Response Network would do in
the event of a bioterrorism attack. It was a seminal
moment for Bray, only twenty-four years old and
with considerable responsibility, and there was some-
thing he learned at CIA headquarters that still
amazed him fourteen years later.
“The agency didn’t know we existed,” says Bray.
He was the chief technology officer for the CDC

479
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

team that would handle a biological weapons event

were it to happen, and yet, according to Bray, no one
in the audience at CIA headquarters seemed to know
anything about it. For Bray, it was a revelatory
moment.
“We were created by public law, Presidential Deci-
sion Directive Thirty-nine,” Bray explains. “But they
[the CIA] did not have that information.” If knowl-
edge is the most strategically significant resource of
an organization, as David Bray believes and as George
Tenet stated in his “We're at war” memo, the U.S.
bioterrorism defense community had a very long way
to go. For Bray, bridging the gap between having
good information and effectively disseminating good
information would become a professional crusade.
He would continue this work over the next decade as
an information specialist for DARPA in Afghani-
stan, for James Clapper in the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and as
the chief information officer for the Federal Com-
munications Commission, starting in 2013. The les-
sons learned in the hyper-turbulent environment
would shape his career.
The day after David Bray briefed an auditorium
full of intelligence officials at CIA headquarters in
Langley, he traveled back to the CDC’s Atlanta
offices, where he learned about a serious new devel-
opment. Bray was told that a sixty-three-year-old

480
 TERROR STRIKES

Florida man had been hospitalized in Boca Raton

with inhalation anthrax.
“You're joking,” Bray remembers saying. The
man was Bob Stevens, and he was a photo editor
with American Media, Inc., the publisher of the
National Enquirer. Twenty-four hours later, Bob Ste-
vens was dead.
Things very quickly went from bad to worse. The
FBI was now involved. On October 12, an NBC
employee in New York City tested positive for
anthrax. On October 15, Senate majority leader
Tom Daschle told reporters that anthrax had been
found in his Senate office. The Hart Senate Office
Building was evacuated and put under quarantine.
Hundreds of people lined up for anthrax tests. The
Capitol itself was swept clear of vehicles and nones-
sential visitors. A bunker mentality took hold. “A
war of nerves is being fought in Washington,” a
senior White House official told the New York
Times, “and I fear we're not doing as well as we
might be.”
Over the next few days, more individuals tested
positive for anthrax poisoning after letters contain-
ing the substance were mailed to ABC, CBS, and
the U.S. State Department. People were beginning
to die. When the 1,271,030-square-foot Hart Build-
ing needed to be decontaminated, DARPA was
asked to provide science advisors to help with the

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

enormous undertaking. A team of DARPA scientists

reviewed decontamination technologies and deliv-
ered “quick turn-around testing on three separate
candidates to determine efficacy.” The test that
proved most effective happened to be the “chlorine
dioxide approach.” This approach was based on
technology that DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office
director, Michael Goldblatt, together with scientist
Alvin Chow, had created for self-sterilizing packages
in the wake of the F. coli Jack in the Box scandal.
“We'd created it in a solid-state form to be triggered
by light or humidity,” Goldblatt explains. “My inter-
pretation was a human scale; [DARPA’s] solution
was a huge scale.” For this, says Goldblatt, he feels “a
little bit of pride.”

Three days after Senator Daschle told reporters that

anthrax had been found in his office, Vice President
Cheney paid a visit to ground zero, his first visit to
the World Trade Center site since the 9/11 attacks.
It was a little after 1:00 p.m. on October 18, 2001,
when Cheney boarded Air Force Two and headed to
New York City. He had been airborne for just a short
time when his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby,
received a telephone call.
“There had been an initial positive test result
indicating a botulinum toxin attack on the White
House,” Cheney revealed in his memoir. “If the

482
 TERROR STRIKES

result was confirmed, it could mean the president

and I, members of the White House staff, and prob-
ably scores of others who had simply been in the
vicinity had been exposed to one of the most lethal
substances known to man.” Botulinum toxin was a
deadly neurotoxin for which there was no reliable
antidote or cure. It kills by attacking the central ner-
vous system and causing death by paralysis.
The positive hits had come from the BASIS sen-
sor system that had been installed throughout the
White House complex shortly after the Dark Winter
bioterrorism attack war game. Livermore and Los
Alamos had promoted the BASIS system as being
able to deliver “a virtually zero rate of false-positive
detection.” Cheney also knew that “a single gram of
botulinum toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, can
kill a million people.” He needed to call the presi-
dent but decided to have Scooter Libby get a second
set of test results first.
In the interim, the vice president stuck to his
schedule. He met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and
Governor George Pataki for a briefing on New York
City affairs. He toured ground zero. He shook hands
with recovery workers who were sorting through
rubble at the crash site. When he returned to his
hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria later that after-
noon, he discovered Libby waiting for him there,
with very bad news. “He told me there had been two

483
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

positive hits for botulinum toxin on one.of the

White House sensors,” wrote Cheney. More tests
were being run and results would be available at
noon the following day. It was time to call the
president.
Cheney was scheduled to deliver the keynote
address at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial
Foundation dinner that evening in the Waldorf
Astoria ballroom. Wearing white tie and tails, he sat
down in front of a secure video screen in his hotel
room and called President Bush, who was attending
a summit in Shanghai. Accompanying the president
were Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. All three
had been in the White House complex; all three
could have been exposed to botulinum toxin.
“Mr. President,” Vice President Cheney said,
“the White House biological detectors have regis-
tered the presence of botulinum toxin, and there is
no reliable antidote. We and many others may well
have been exposed,” Cheney recalled telling the
president.
President Bush turned to Condoleezza Rice, who
was standing beside him in Shanghai. In her mem-
oir, Rice recalls hearing the president say, “Go call
Hadley and find out what the hell is going on.” Ste-
phen Hadley was the president’s deputy national
security advisor. Hadley told Rice that lab mice were
now being tested.

484
 TERROR STRIKES

“Let’s put it this way,” said Hadley, who could

also have been exposed. “If the mice are feet down
tomorrow, we are fine. If they're feet up, we're toast.”
In New York City, Vice President Cheney headed
downstairs. During his speech, he talked about the
bravery, generosity, and grace shown to him by aver-
age Americans digging through the rubble at ground
zero that day. “I promised to deliver justice to the
people responsible,” Cheney said. He talked about
the dilemma that America would now face with this
new enemy, the terrorist. “We are dealing here with
evil people who dwell in the shadows, planning
unimaginable violence and destruction,” he said. The
banquet hall at the Waldorf Astoria erupted into
resounding applause.
The following day, the results of the BASIS sensor
system were returned. The $50 million system had
delivered a false positive. There had been no biologi-
cal weapons attack. No terror strike on the White
House. If knowledge is the most strategically signifi-
cant resource in a hyper-turbulent environment, sci-
entists at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos
national laboratories had failed. Still, in his 2003 State
of the Union address, President Bush announced he
was “deploying the nation’s first early warning net-
work of sensors to detect biological attack.” BASIS
sensors would now be set up in more than thirty cit-
ies around the country, at an initial cost of roughly

485
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

$30 million, with another $1 million per city, per

year, estimated in maintenance costs. Between 2003
and 2008, newspapers reported more than fifty false
alarms from BASIS sensors in public spaces. The full
details of BASIS, including its locations, operational
costs, and precise number of false positives, as well
as emergency response efforts, if any, to those false
positives, remain classified.
But in Shanghai, in October 2001, Condoleezza
Rice happily received the good news.
“Feet down, not up,” she told President Bush.
“The President smiled,” she wrote in her memoirs.
“Tm sure the Chinese thought it was some kind of
coded message.”
The president, vice president, secretary of state,
national security advisor, and others had dodged a
bullet. A photo editor, two postal workers, a female
hospital employee, and a ninety-four-year-old woman
from Connecticut were dead from anthrax. As of
2014, the mystery of who killed them has yet to be
definitively solved.

At the end of October, ABC News reported that the

anthrax mailed to Senator Daschle’s office could be
tied to the Iraqi bioweapons program through an
additive called bentonite. The White House denied
the link. A few nights later, ABC News reported that

486
 TERROR STRIKES

the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed

Atta, “had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intel-
ligence agent in Prague.” The report kicked off a
firestorm of related news articles, including some
that confirmed the story of the Iraq link, some that
discredited the story, and some that blamed the CIA
for engaging in a disinformation campaign.
Congress asked DARPA director Anthony Tether
to brief the House Armed Services Committee on
efforts currently being undertaken by DARPA with
regard to its Biological Warfare Defense Program.
Tony Tether had been DARPA director for only
three months when the airplanes hit the buildings,
but he had decades of experience in the Department
of Defense and the CIA. Tether had a Ph.D. in elec-
trical engineering from Stanford University, and a
long career at the Pentagon and in the intelligence
world. Since 1978 he had been working in both
intelligence and defense, serving as the director of
the national intelligence office in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense from 1978 to 1982, and from
1982 to 1986 as the director of DARPA’s Strategic
Technology Office, the agency’s liaison to the CIA.
The specifics of his job remain classified, but as an
indication of his significance, at the end of his ten-
ure in 1986, Director of Central Intelligence Bill
Casey honored him with the National Intelligence

487
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Medal, while his superior at the Pentagon, Secretary

of Defense Caspar Weinberger, presented him with
the Department of Defense Civilian Meritorious
Service Medal.
In information submitted to Congress, Tether
categorized biological weapons defense according to
what DARPA considered to be the five stages of a
biological weapons attack, in chronological order.
“Prior to a BW attack” involved the development of
vaccines. “During an attack” focused on cutting-
edge sensor and biosurveillance technologies. “In the
minutes and hours after an attack” included devel-
oping immediate ways to protect people. “In the
hours and days after an attack” involved more effi-
cient ways to get information out to first responders
and better management of medical systems. “In the
days and perhaps years after an attack” focused on
decontamination technology, Tether said.
In February 2002, just four months after the first
U.S. murder by anthrax, Congress approved a $358
million budget for biological warfare defense for the
next year, nearly three times what it had been the
year before the 9/11 terror attacks. That same
month, George Mason University announced it
would be building a Center for Biodefense “to
address issues related to biological terrorism and the
proliferation of biological weapons.” A press release
stated, “Kenneth Alibek, former first deputy chief of

488
 TERROR STRIKES

the civilian branch of the Soviet Union’s Offensive

Biological Weapons Program, and Charles Bailey,
former commander for Research at the U.S. Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,”
would serve as executive administrators of the cen-
ter. “Alibek was now in charge of finding solutions
to problems he helped create,” says Michael Goldb-
latt, who oversaw some of Alibek’s work for DARPA.
In May, DARPA awarded Alibek’s company an
additional $2 million to create “prototype biode-
fense products,” the silver bullet DARPA was still
looking for. Alibek spoke to reporters about the
exciting prospects that lay ahead. The goal was to
create a product that could “enhance the body’s
innate immune response against a wide variety of
biological weapons threats,” Alibek said. “Our
research continues to yield promising results, and we
are pleased that DARPA has awarded us additional
funding to develop advanced protection against bio-
logical threat agents.” Ken Alibek also used the
opportunity to talk about future business prospects
for his new corporate ventures. “At the appropriate
time, our Company intends to explore potential
opportunities to license its developing technology
to, or seek a joint venture with, a partner to com-
plete the necessary clinical trials, regulatory approv-
als, and the development, manufacturing, and
marketing of any future products that might arise

489
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

from this work.” Some months later, another com-

pany run by Alibek began selling pills on the Internet
with labels that read “Dr. Ken Alibek’s Immune Sys-
tem Support Formula.” The pills claimed to help the
body’s innate immune system defend against a wide
variety of harmful pathogens. They could be pur-
chased for $60 a bottle at a website called DrAlibek.
com.

In government, it is a generally accepted rule that

someone has to take the blame when government
fails. For DARPA, whose job it was to safeguard the
nation from technical surprise, there was no clear
mission failure on 9/11, at least not in the public eye.
The weapons used by the terrorists were fixed-blade
utility knives, invented during the Great Depres-
sion. The flint knife, prehistory’s utility blade, is
roughly 1.4 million years old. Al Qaeda used Amer-
ican technology against America, hijacking four
fully fueled aircraft and successfully piloting three
of them, as missiles, to their targets. It is believed
that Al Qaeda spent less than $500,000 planning
and executing the attacks.
The public’s perception, generally, was that the
intelligence community was to blame for 9/11, a sur-
prise attack that rivaled Pearl Harbor in its death toll
and future consequence. Most fingers were pointed
at the CIA and the FBI. Because the National Secu-

490
 TERROR STRIKES

rity Agency maintained a lower public profile at the

time, it was not held accountable to the same degree.
History has made clear, however, that errors by the
NSA were indelible. On September 10, 2001, it
intercepted from terrorists, already being monitored
by the NSA, two messages in Arabic.
“The match is about to begin,” read one message.
“Tomorrow is zero hour,” read the other message.
The sentences were not translated until Septem-
ber 12. “In fact these phrases [might] have not been
translated with such a quick turnaround had the hor-
tific events not happened,” in-house DARPA litera-
ture notes. DARPA is responsible for much of the
technology behind advanced information collection
as well as real-time translation capabilities. In the
wake of 9/11, DARPA rapidly began to advance
these technologies, and others related to them, so its
partner, NSA, could do its job better.
Despite all the advanced technology at the dis-
posal of the U.S. government, the national security
establishment did not see the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attack coming. Nor was its arsenal of
advanced technology able to stop the attack once it
began. As a consequence, the American military
establishment would begin a hyper-militarization
not seen since the explosion of the 15-megaton Cas-
tle Bravo hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in 1954.

491
 CHAPTER TWENTY

Total Information Awareness

he nuclear physicist John Poindexter is rarely

T= for his prowess in nuclear physics.
Instead he is almost always referred to as the
retired Navy admiral and former national security
advisor to President Ronald Reagan during the Iran-
Contra affair who was convicted on five felony counts
of lying to Congress, destroying official documents,
and obstructing congressional investigations.
The day after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Poind-
exter was pulling his car out of the quiet suburban
subdivision where he lived outside Washington,
D.C., when he was struck with an idea for DARPA.
He had worked for the agency before, as a defense
contractor in the late 1990s. By then Poindexter’s
Iran-Contra notoriety had died down, and he was

492
 TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS

able to return to public service. A U.S. court of

appeals had reversed all five of Poindexter’s felony
convictions on the grounds that his testimony had
been given under a grant of immunity.
In the decade after the scandal, Poindexter put
his focus into computer technology. Because he had
retained his full Navy pension after Iran-Contra, he
did not have to look for a job. Fascinated by com-
puters, Poindexter began teaching himself computer
programming languages, and soon he could write
code. In 1995, through a defense contractor called
Syntek, Poindexter began working on a DARPA
project called Genoa. The goal of Genoa was to
develop a complex computer system —an intelligent
machine— designed to reach across multiple classi-
fied government computer databases in order to pre-
dict the next man-made cataclysmic event, such as a
terrorist attack. Poindexter, a seafaring man, espe-
cially liked Genoa’s name. A genoa is a boat’s jib, or
foresail, typically raised on a sailboat to increase
speed.
Poindexter’s boss on the project, the person in
charge of all “next-generation” information-processing
ideas at DARPA in the late 1990s, was a man named
Brian Sharkey. After a little more than a year working
on the project, Syntek’s contract ended. Poindexter
and Sharkey had gotten along well during phase one
of Genoa and kept each other’s contact information.
493
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

The way Poindexter tells the story, on the morning

after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he was struck with
the idea that the time had come to revitalize the
Genoa program. He pulled his car to the side of the
road and began scrolling through contacts on his
cell phone until he found Brian Sharkey’s number.
“That’s funny,” Poindexter recalls Sharkey saying
to him. “I was just thinking about calling you.”
Both men agreed that it was time to accelerate
the Genoa program. Sharkey had left DARPA to
serve as senior vice president and chief technology
officer for the California-based defense contracting
giant Science Applications International Corpora-
tion, or SAIC. With so many surveillance-related
defense contracts on its roster, SAIC was often jok-
ingly referred to as NSA West. Another one of
SAIC’s prime clients was DARPA. Brian Sharkey
knew the current DARPA director, Tony Tether,
quite well.
“We need to talk to Tony,” Poindexter told Sharkey.

In Washington, Tony Tether was well regarded as a

top innovator. Someone who saw the future and
made it happen. When he was serving as director of
DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, back in the
1980s, he advocated maximizing technology for sur-
veillance capabilities. Now, two decades later, these
kinds of technologies had advanced exponentially. In

494
 ToTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS

this post-9/11 environment, Tether’s enthusiasm for,

and experience in, surveillance collection would
prove invaluable in his role as DARPA director.
Brian Sharkey and Tony Tether knew each other
from SAIC. In the 1990s, after leaving government
service for defense contracting, Tether had served as
vice president of SAIC in its advanced technology
sector. Now Sharkey was a senior vice president at
SAIC. During the September 12 phone call between
Sharkey and Poindexter, the men agreed that Shar-
key would set up a meeting with Tether to discuss
Genoa.
Since 1995, DARPA had spent roughly $42 mil-
lion advancing the Genoa concept under the Infor-
mation Systems Office. The program was part of a
concept DARPA now called Total Information
Awareness (TIA). But the existing Genoa program
was nowhere near having the “intelligence” neces-
sary to recognize another 9/11-style plot. Poindexter
and Sharkey aimed to change that.
The following month, on October 15, 2001, Shar-
key and Tether met at a seafood restaurant in Arling-
ton, Virginia, Gaffney’s Oyster and Ale House, to
discuss Total Information Awareness. Tether embraced
the idea, so much so that he asked Brain Sharkey to
leave his job at SAIC and return to DARPA to lead
the new effort. But Sharkey did not want to leave his
job at SAIC. The corporation was one of the largest

495
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

employee-owned companies in America, and Shar-

key had accumulated considerable stock options. If
he were to return to government service, he would
have to let go of profit participation. John Poindex-
ter was the man who should serve as the director of
the Total Information Awareness program, Sharkey
said. SAIC could act as DARPA’s prime contractor.
A few days later, Sharkey and Poindexter went
sailing on Poindexter’s yacht, Bluebird, to discuss
next steps. Poindexter later recalled feeling excited.
He had big ideas. He believed he knew exactly how
extensive this program had to be to succeed. Poind-
exter knew what the subtitle of the program should
be. In his pitch to Tether, his opening slide would
read “A Manhattan Project on Countering Terror-
ism.” Artificially intelligent computers were the
twenty-first century’s atomic bomb.
Tether had Poindexter come to his office at
DARPA and present the slide show. Poindexter’s
background was in submarines, and there was an
analogy here, he told Tether. Submarines emit sound
signals as they move through the sea. The 9/11
hijackers had emitted electronic signals as they
moved through the United States. But even if the
NSA had been listening, its system of systems was
not intelligent enough to handle the load in real
time. The hijackers had rented apartments, bought
airplane tickets, purchased box cutters, received

496
 TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS

emails and wire transfers. All of this could have been

looked at as it was happening, Poindexter said. Ter-
rorists give out signals. Genoa could find them. It
would take enormous sums of time and treasure, but
it was worth it. The 9/11 attacks were but the open-
ing salvo, the White House had said. The time was
right because the climate was right. People were
terrified.
Tony Tether agreed. If John Poindexter was will-
ing to run the Information Awareness Office,
DARPA would fund it. In January 2002 the Infor-
mation Awareness Office was given the green light
to proceed, with a colossal initial start-up budget of
$145 million and another $183.3 million earmarked
for the following year. John Poindexter was now
officially DARPA’s Total Information Awareness
czar.

“In our view, information technology is a weapon,”

says Bob Popp, the former deputy director of the
Information Awareness Office, John Poindexter’s
number two. Popp is a computer scientist with a
Ph.D. in electrical engineering, a prolific author and
patent holder. He rides a motorcycle and is an active
participant in and lifetime member of HOG, or
Harley Owners Group. His areas of expertise include
anti-submarine warfare and ISR (intelligence, sur-
veillance, and reconnaissance). When he was a

497
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

younger man, Popp welded Trident nuclear subma-

rines for General Dynamics.
Before 9/11, “information technology was a huge
unexploited weapon for analysts,” Popp says. “They
were using it in a very limited capacity. There were a
lot of bad guys out there. No shortage of data. Ana-
lysts were inundated with problems and inundated
with data. The basic hypothesis of TIA was to create
a system where analysts could be effective. Where
they were no longer overwhelmed.”
It was Bob Popp’s job as John Poindexter’s deputy
to oversee the setting up of multiple programs under
the TIA umbrella. The Evidence Extraction and
Link Discovery program (EELD) was a big office
with a large support staff. Its function was to suction
up as much electronic information about people as
possible— not just terror suspects but the general
American public. The electronic information to be
gathered was to include individual people’s phone
records, computer searches, credit card receipts,
parking receipts, books checked out of the library,
films rented, and more, from every military and
civilian database in the United States, with the hope
of determining who were the terrorists lurking
among ordinary Americans. The primary job of the
EELD office was to create a computer system so
“intelligent” it would be able to review megadata on
285 million people a day, in real time, and identify

498
 TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS

individuals who might be plotting the next terror

event.
In 2002, DARPA senior program manager Ted
Senator explained how EELD would work. The
plan, Senator said, was to develop “techniques that
allow us to find relevant information —about links
between people, organizations, places, and things—
from the masses of available data, putting it together
by connecting these bits of information into patterns
that can be evaluated and analyzed, and learning
what patterns discriminate between legitimate and
suspicious behavior.” It was not an easy task. Using the
needle-in-the-haystack metaphor, Senator explains
just how hard it was. “Our task is akin to finding
dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of nee-
dle pieces. This is much harder,” he points out, “than
simply finding needles in a haystack: we have to
search through many stacks, not just one; we do not
have a contrast between shiny, hard needles and
dull, fragile hay; we have many ways of putting the
pieces together into individual needles and the nee-
dles into groups of needles; and we cannot tell if a
needle or group is dangerous until it is at least par-
tially assembled.” So, he says, “in principle at least,
we must track all the needle pieces all of the time
and consider all possible combinations.”
Because terrorists do not generally act as lone
wolves, a second program would be key to TIA’s

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success, namely, the Scalable Social Network Analy-

sis. The SSNA would monitor telephone calls, confer-
ence calls, and ATM withdrawals, but it also sought
to develop a far more invasive surveillance technol-
ogy, one that could “capture human activities in sur-
veillance environments.” The Activity Recognition
and Monitoring program, or ARM, was modeled
after England’s CCTV camera. Surveillance cam-
eras would be set up across the nation, and through
the ARM program, they would capture images of
people as they went about their daily lives, then save
these images to massive data storage banks for com-
puters to examine. Using state-of-the-art facial recog-
nition software, ARM would seek to identify who
was behaving outside the computer’ pre-
programmed threshold for “ordinary.” The parame-
ters for “ordinary” remain classified.
Facial recognition software expert Jonathan Phil-
lips was brought on board to advance an existing
DARPA program called Human Identification at a
Distance. Computer systems armed with algorithms
for the faces of up to a million known terrorists
could scan newly acquired surveillance video, cap-
tured through the ARM program, with the goal of
locating a terrorist among the crowd.
TIA was a many-tentacled program. The prob-
lem of language barriers had also long been a thorn
in the military’s side. DARPA needed to develop

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computer-based translation programs in what it

called “the war languages,” Arabic, Pashto, Urdu,
Dari, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian
dialects. Charles Wayne was brought on board to
run two programs, TIDES and EARS, to develop
computer programs that could convert foreign lan-
guages to English-language text. There would be a
war games effort inside TIA, too, called War Gam-
ing the Asymmetric Environment, and led by Larry
Willis. In this office, terrorism experts would create
fictional terror networks, made up of individual
characters, like avatars, who would begin plotting
fake terror attacks. The point was to see if TIA’s
myriad of surveillance programs, working in con-
cert, could identify the avatar-terrorists as they plot-
ted and planned. To further this effort, a group
inside the group was formed, called the Red Team,
headed by former DARPA director Stephen Luka-
sik. Red teaming is a role-playing exercise in which a
problem is examined from an adversary’s or enemy’s
perspective.
Finally there was Genoa II, the centerpiece of the
program, the software that would run the system of
information systems. Its director, Thomas P. Armour,
described Genoa II as a “collaboration between two
collaborations.” One group of collaborators were the
intelligence analysts, whose goal was “sensemaking,”
Armour said. These collaborators had the tricky job

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of collaborating among themselves, across multiple

organizations, including the CIA, NSA, DIA, and
others. It was the job of the sensemakers to construct
models or blueprints of how terrorists might act.
This group would then collaborate with “policy-
makers and operators at the most senior level,” who
would evaluate the intelligence analysts’ work and
develop options for a U.S. response to any given sit-
uation. Genoa II, Armour told his team, “is all about
creating the technology to make these collaborations
possible, efficient, and effective.”
To Armour, there was hardware, meaning the
machinery, software, meaning the computer pro-
grams, and wetware, meaning the human brain.
Armour saw the wetware as the weakest link. The
challenge was that intelligence agencies historically
preferred to keep high-target terrorist information
to themselves. “The ‘wetware’ whose limitations I
mentioned is the human cognitive systems,’ Armour
told defense contractors who were bidding on the
job. “Its limitations and biases are well documented,
and they pervade the entire system, from perception
through cognition, learning, memory, and decision,”
Armour told his team. In this system of systems,
which was based on collaborative efforts between
humans and their machines, Armour believed that
the humans represented the point where the system
was most vulnerable. “These systems,” said Armour,

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referring to human brains, “are the product of evolu-

tion, optimized by evolution for a world which no
longer exists; it is not surprising then that, however
capable our cognitive apparatus is, it too often fails
when challenged by tasks completely alien to its bio-
logical roots.”
Unlike so many of the new technologists working
on TIA, Tom Armour was a Cold Warrior. He was
also a former spy. After flying combat missions during
Vietnam asa U.S. Air Force navigator on the AC-119K
gunship, he began a long career with the CIA, start-
ing in 1975. Armour was an expert on Soviet nuclear
weapons systems, missile technology, and strategic
command and control. At the CIA, under the Direc-
torate of Intelligence, he served as chief of comput-
ing and methodological support, bringing the agency
into the twenty-first century with computers for
intelligence analysis.
But when the Berlin Wall came down, Armour
saw new threats cropping up everywhere. “People
then were talking giddily about a ‘peace dividend, >»
he told a group of DARPA technologists at a confer-
ence in 2002, but reminded the audience that his
former boss at the CIA, James Woolsey, knew bet-
ter. “Woolsey pointedly said that while the ‘big bad
bear’ was gone, the woods were still filled with lots
of poisonous snakes,” Armour said. The terrorists
had since emerged as the new snakes, “what we now

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call the asymmetric threat.” Armour believed that

the job of the twenty-first-century intelligence analyst
was to find the snakes, using computers.
Humans were frail. As technical collectors, they
could be manipulated either by assets trying to give
them bad information or by their own biases and
mental blocks. This weakness “has long been called
“deception and denial’ in intelligence circles,” Armour
said. Genoa II’s predecessor, Genoa, was about mak-
ing the machines smarter. Each machine had been
overseen by what was called a “Lone Ranger,” a single
intelligence analyst. With Genoa II, Armour wanted
to get “smarter results.” He wanted “cognitive ampli-
fication.” Smarter machines and smarter humans.
Armour created what he called “bumper sticker
phrases” that captured Genoa II’s automation goals,
phrases that read like words George Orwell could
have written in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-
Four because they sounded like doublethink. “Read
everything without reading everything,” Armour
told Genoa II analysts. “There is too much that must
be read to actually read.” Armour also said that TIA
analysts would need to “begin the trip to computers
as servants, to partners, to mentors,” meaning that
analysts needed first to view their computers as assis-
tants and eventually view them as advisors. Ulti-
mately, Genoa II’s computers would know more
than a human could know.

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As John von Neumann had predicted on his

deathbed in “The Computer and the Brain,” the
“artificial automaton” would one day be able to
think. TIA was a system of information systems that
could read everything without reading everything.
It was a system of systems that could observe and
then connect everything the human eye could not
see.

On January 14, 2002, the Information Awareness

Office opened its doors, temporarily, on the fourth
floor of the DARPA office building at 3710 North
Fairfax Drive in Arlington, while John Poindexter
worked to secure an independent facility where TIA
analysts could settle permanently. One of the first
people Poindexter would visit was Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Over lunch in Rums-
feld’s office in the Pentagon, the two men discussed
TIA. It was agreed that DARPA would build the
system, then help its customers get the system up
and running. The customers were the CIA, FBI, and
NSA, but also the service agencies. Tether felt that
the best place to house the new Total Information
Awareness system was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a
division of the Army’s Intelligence and Security
Command, INSCOM.
Tony Tether set up a meeting with INSCOM’s
commanding officer, Lieutenant General Keith

505
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Alexander. At Fort Belvoir, Alexander ran his opera-

tions out of a facility known as the Information
Dominance Center, with an unusual interior design
that deviated significantly from traditional military
decor. The Information Dominance Center had
been designed by Academy Award—winning Holly-
wood set designer Bran Ferren to simulate the bridge
of the Starship Enterprise, from the Star Trek tele-
vision and film series. There were ovoid-shaped chairs,
computer stations inside highly polished chrome pan-
els, even doors that slid open with a whooshing sound.
Alexander would sit in the leather captain’s chair,
positioned in the center of the command post, where
he could face the Information Dominance Center’s
twenty-four-foot television monitor. General Alexan-
der loved the science-fiction genre. INSCOM staff
even wondered if the general fancied himself a real-
life Captain Kirk.
An arrangement was made between DARPA and
INSCOM whereby General Alexander gave John
Poindexter and his team an area to work out of inside
the Information Dominance Center. “The initial
TIA experiment was done at INSCOM, worldwide
command,” says Bob Popp. “The plan was to have
attachments, or nodes, across the world. Multiple
agencies would work on multiple problems.” Poind-
exter began inviting other agencies to work along-

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side TIA as collaborators. One by one they joined,

including the CIA, NSA, and FBI.
Poindexter believed that another attack was
already well along in its planning phase. It could
happen at any time. Many other senior officials were
motivated by the same fear.
“We felt as if we were really battling terrorism,”
says Popp. “The network grew. We set up another
node in Germany.” The future of TIA seemed
bright. Then suddenly, as Bob Popp recalls, “we had
our own battle, with Congress.”

In August 2002, John Poindexter unveiled TIA at the

DARPATech conference in Anaheim, California.
This technology conference marked the beginning
of the program’s public end. In November 2002, a
New York Times headline read “Pentagon Plans a
Computer System That Would Peek at Personal
Data of Americans.” Reporter John Markoff wrote
that the Department of Defense had initiated a mas-
sive computer-based domestic surveillance program,
“a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal
information as part of the hunt for terrorists around
the globe— including the United States... without
a search warrant.” Markoff named DARPA as the
agency in charge, and reported that the computer
system was called Total Information Awareness. The

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logo of the Information Awareness Office became

the focus of much ire. It featured the Eye of Provi-
dence icon—the same as the one on the back of the
dollar bill—casting a searchlight over a globe.
DARPA’s Latin motto, Scientia Est Potentia, or
“Knowledge Is Power,” fueled its own comparisons
to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Several days later, columnist William Safire wrote
about TIA, focusing on the fact that John Poindex-
ter, of the Iran-Contra affair scandal, was its director.
The Pentagon had given a “disgraced admiral...a
$200 million budget to create computer dossiers on
300 million Americans,” Safire wrote, listing the
myriad of electronic transactions a person makes in
any day, week, or year: “Every purchase you make
with a credit card, every magazine subscription you
buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site
you visit and e-mail you send or receive.” If DARPA
got its way, the TIA program would be able to moni-
tor them all. “This is not some far-out Orwellian sce-
nario,” Safire wrote. “It is what will happen to your
personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poin-
dexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.”
When Safire’s column ran, TIA’s existence had
been a matter of public knowledge for seven months
but no one had paid much attention to it. In the
thirty days after Safire’s column appeared, there were
285 stories about TIA, the majority of which were

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overwhelmingly negative. Many of the articles

focused on the $200 million figure cited by Safire. In
a press conference on November 20, Undersecretary
of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology
Edward “Pete” Aldridge stated that the budget for
the TIA system was $10 million through the 2003
fiscal year. This was highly inaccurate. According to
records from the Defense Technical Information
Center comptroller’s office, the actual budget for the
Information Awareness Office through fiscal year
2003 was $586.4 million. The true numbers had
been concealed inside other DARPA Research,
Development, Test and Evaluation budgeting.
Although the numbers controversy wouldn’t be
revealed for months, the privacy concerns took cen-
ter stage.
Americans wanted answers. Lawmakers sent a list
of questions for DARPA. John Poindexter was sent
to Capitol Hill, where he was expected to clarify
details about TIA to roughly fifty members of Con-
gress and their staff. Bob Popp went too. “Me, Poin-
dexter, Tony [Tether], and our Hill liaison went to
the Hill to brief the House and Senate,” Popp
recalled in 2014. Their meeting with the House Per-
manent Select Committee on Intelligence “went
well,” Popp says. “Questions, answers, fine.” Then
they moved on to the Senate Permanent Select Com-
mittee on Intelligence.

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

At the Senate, Poindexter began his testimony

with a background of his own personal history, start-
ing with his early education at a military academy.
After roughly fifteen minutes, a Senate staffer
shouted out, “Hey, when are you going to start talk-
ing about the reason you're here?”
“Poindexter said, ‘If you'll just give me a
chance— ” Popp recalls.
At which point, Poindexter was interrupted by
another staffer.
“What's all this invasion of privacy!” someone
else yelled.
Popp says, “John Poindexter was polite, but
Stern}
“Get to the data mining!” the staffer yelled,
which infuriated Poindexter.
The staffer shouted, “We want answers now!”
Which is when John Poindexter lost his compo-
sure. “Will you sit down!” he shouted back, far too
loudly. Then, “I’m not going to let you drive the
agenda!”
Poindexter gave the rest of his presentation, but
word of what had happened was already making its
way back to the Pentagon. It was the beginning of
the end of TIA. Secretary of Defense Donald Rums-
feld was brought into the loop. What was DARPA
to do? Rumsfeld issued an order. John Poindexter

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was not to speak to anyone. No interviews with any-

one from Congress. No interviews with the press.
Poindexter’s second fall from grace happened
quickly. With him went the program, at least as far
as the public was told. A multitude of newspaper
articles generated a further wave of public outcry,
including over the fact that the Pentagon had allo-
cated a quarter of a billion dollars for TIA through
2005. Poindexter was portrayed as a villain and
DARPA was cast as a surveillance machine.
A reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld about TIA.
“I don’t know much about it,” Rumsfeld answered.
Poindexter “explained to me what he was doing at
DARPA,” he said, “but it was a casual conversation.
I haven't been briefed on it; I’m not knowledgeable
about it. Anyone who is concerned ought not be.”
When asked about Poindexter the man, Rumsfeld
said he didn’t “remember him much.” Rumsfeld told
the reporter that, as was often the case with the Amer-
ican public, there was far too much “hype and alarm.”
Of the surveillance program Rumsfeld said, “Anyone
with any concern ought to be able to sleep well
tonight.” TIA was a research program, he clarified,
not an intelligence-gathering operation.
In the wake of the scandal, the Total Information
Awareness program was briefly renamed the Terror-
ism Information Awareness program, but the public

yu
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

controversy did not die down. Secretary of Defense

Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that John Poindexter
would resign or be fired. Ultimately, Poindexter
offered his resignation to Tony Tether and told
reporters he was leaving DARPA and looking for-
ward to spending more time sailing on the Chesa-
peake Bay. Secretary Rumsfeld then went back to
making plans to invade Iraq.
Months later, in the fall of 2003, Congress elimi-
nated funding for the Total Information Awareness
program, saying it was “concerned about the activi-
ties of the Information Awareness Office.” The
House and Senate jointly directed “that the Office
be terminated immediately.”
But “the [TIA] programs did not end,” Bob Popp
explained in 2014. Instead, many of the clandestine
electronic surveillance programs were classified and
transferred to NSA, DHS, CIA, and the military
services. Program names were changed. Certain
members of Congress were cleared to know about
some of them, but not all of them. Major elements
of DARPA’s Evidence Extraction and Link Discov-
ery (EELD) and Genoa II programs, including the
physical nodes that already existed at INSCOM and
in Germany, were folded into a classified NSA system
called PRISM—a massive covert electronic surveil-
lance and data-mining program that would create
an international uproar in 2013 after NSA whistle-

12
 TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS

blower Edward Snowden leaked thousands of pages

of classified documents to the press.
Some DARPA programs with public faces were
transferred to the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity, including the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-
screening System (CAPPS), Activity Recognition
and Monitoring (ARM), and Human Identification
at a Distance (HumanID). These programs, man-
aged by the Office of Biometric Identity Manage-
ment and the TSA, oversaw identity recognition
software systems at airports and borders, and in
public transportation systems and other public
spaces.
For use abroad, other TIA programs were trans-
ferred to the Army for its Biometrically Enabled
Intelligence programs, meant ultimately to collect
biometrics on foreign individuals using eye scans, fin-
gerprint scans, and facial scans. And the CIA initi-
ated a program called Anonymous Entity Resolution,
based on TIA’s Scalable Social Network Analysis
(SSNA), examining links between individuals
through electronic systems like ATM withdrawals
and hotel reservations.
For use in future war zones, DARPA recycled
some of the most invasive TIA surveillance and data-
mining technologies into a program designed for
video collection, pattern analysis, and targeting
acquisition for use in military operations in urban

513
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

terrain. This program was called Combat. Zones

That See.

Any future invasion strategy needed a “new strategic

context,” according to Secretary Rumsfeld. Future
wars would be fought according to DARPA’s system
of systems concept —advanced weapons platforms
linked by a network of advanced computer systems.
In 2003 this could not exactly be sold to the Ameri-
can people as “Assault Breaker Warfare,” which
would require a paragraph of explanation and
sounded dull. Rumsfeld had been thinking about
articulating a new strategic context for the Depart-
ment of Defense ever since he took office, and shortly
after the 9/11 attacks he tasked the job of choosing a
name to retired vice admiral Arthur Cebrowski,
director of the Office of Force Transformation.
The Office of Force Transformation was an
in-house Pentagon think tank personally created by
Rumsfeld in the wake of 9/11. The mandate of this
new office was “to challenge the status quo with new
concepts for American defense to ensure an over-
whelming and continuing competitive advantage.”
The name that the Office of Force Transformation
came up with for this new way of waging war was
“network-centric warfare.” It was a phrase DARPA
had been using for years, based on its Assault Breaker
concept back in 1974. Soon the whole world would

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start hearing about network-centric warfare. When

Secretary Rumsfeld presented the Pentagon’s “Trans-
formation Planning Guidance” to the president in the
winter of 2003, he summed up the way forward as
“drawing upon unparalleled Command, Control,
Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveil-
lance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities.” So
much had changed since the days of command and
control.
Arthur Cebrowski was a decorated Navy pilot
who had flown 154 combat missions during the
Vietnam War. He had also served in Operation Des-
ert Storm, commanding a carrier air wing, a heli-
copter carrier, and an aircraft carrier. He retired
from the Navy in August 2001. Regarding this nam-
ing issue, in internal documents sent to Rumsfeld in
2003 Cebrowski simplified why the concept of
network-centric warfare would work. It offered a
“New Theory of War based on information age prin-
ciples and phenomena,’ Cebrowski wrote. And
network-centric warfare offered a “new relationship
between operations abroad and homeland security,”
meaning the lines between homeland security and
fighting foreign wars would become intentionally
blurred. Finally, Cebrowski wrote, network-centric
warfare would provide a “new concept/sense of secu-
rity in the American citizen.” Cebrowski was an
avowed American patriot, and he believed that

O15)
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

everyone else should be too. Network-centric war-

fare “had great moral seductiveness,’ Cebrowski
said.
With the doctrine of network-centric warfare in
place, on March 19, 2003, the United States
and its allies launched Operation Iraqi Freedom and
invaded Iraq. After the U.S. military completed its
so-called “major combat operations” in just twenty-
one days of “shock and awe,” Cebrowski told PBS
how pleased he was. “The speed of that advance was
absolutely unheard of,” he said. He attributed this
“very high-speed warfare” to “network-centric war-
fare.” He espoused the idea that a war that relied on
advanced technology was a morally superior war.
America did not have to resort to “wholesale slaugh-
ter” anymore, Cebrowski said. We did not have to
“kill a very large number of them,” meaning Iraqis,
or “maim an even larger number,” because advanced
technology now allowed the Defense Department to
target specific individuals. This, said Cebrowski,
was a good and moral thing.
“There’s a temptation to say that to develop that
sense in the minds of an enemy that they are in fact
defeated, you have to kill a very large number of
them, maim an even larger number, destroy a lot of
infrastructure and key elements of their civilization,
and then they will feel defeated. I think that’s
wrong,” Cebrowski said. “I think we are confronted

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now with a new problem, in a way the kind of prob-

lem we always wanted to have, where you can achieve
your initial military ends without the wholesale
slaughter. Because, remember,” he said, “this always
cuts two ways. You have a moral obligation not just
to limit your own casualties and casualties of non-
participants but also those of the enemy itself. So
we're moving in the more moral direction, which is
appropriate... We need to come to grips with this
reality.”
History would reveal that Arthur Cebrowski
spoke too soon. All the technology in the world
could not win the war against terrorists in Iraq or
Afghanistan. Local populations did not see network-
centric warfare and targeted killing by drones, in
their neighborhoods, as morally superior. And a new
wave of terrorist organizations would emerge, form,
and terrorize.

O17
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

IED War

n May 26, 2003, Private First Class Jeremiah

() D. Smith, a twenty-five-year-old soldier from
Missouri, was driving in an Army vehicle
outside Baghdad when the convoy he was traveling
in came upon a canvas bag lying in the road. It was
Memorial Day, which meant that back in the United
States this was a day to remember the millions of
American soldiers who died while serving in the
armed forces. Private Smith had been a proud mem-
ber of the U.S. Army for a little over a year.
Three and a half weeks earlier, on May 1, 2003,
President George W. Bush had stood on the deck of
the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced that
major combat operations in Iraq were over. “In the
battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have

518
 IED War

prevailed,” he declared. The invasion, which began

on March 21, had been swift. Baghdad fell on April
9. Standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier in a
dark suit and a red tie (he’d more memorably arrived
on board wearing a flight suit), the president exuded
confidence. A banner behind him, designed by the
White House art department, read “Mission Accom-
plished.” At one point during his speech, the presi-
dent gave the thumbs-up.
Now it was Memorial Day, and Private Smith
was heading into dangerous territory. His convoy
was escorting heavy equipment out of Baghdad,
traveling west. Smith was a gunner and was sitting
on the passenger side of the Humvee. As the vehicle
approached the canvas bag lying in the road, not far
from the Baghdad International Airport, the driver
had no way of knowing it contained an improvised
explosive device, or IED, and he simply drove over
it. As the vehicle passed over the bag, the device
exploded, killing Private Smith. In his death, Smith
became the first American to be killed by an IED in
the Iraq war.
The blast could be heard for miles. Twenty-two-
year-old Specialist Jeremy Ridgley was one of the
first people to come upon the inferno. “I was a gun-
ner in the Eighteenth Military Police Brigade,”
recalled Ridgley in a 2014 interview. “We were driv-
ing about five hundred yards behind, in a totally

Oe)
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

separate convoy. The explosion was extremely loud.

We'd been informed that people were dropping
things off overpasses, so every time we went under
one, we sped up and came out in a different lane.
Someone threw something at our vehicle, then I
heard the explosion. I swung my gun around. It all
happened so fast.” The explosion Ridgley heard was
the IED detonating as Private Smith’s vehicle drove
over it.
Ahead of him, Ridgley saw the burning Humvee in
the road. Two bloodied soldiers emerged from the
thick black smoke and staggered toward his vehicle,
dazed. “One of the guys was trying to push something
up his arm,” recalls Ridgley, “like he was trying to fix
his sleeve. When he got closer I saw it was skin. Skin
was just falling off of his arm.” A second bloodied
soldier followed behind. “He asked me if he had
something on his face,” Ridgley recalls. “Most of his
face was missing. It was horrible. He was horribly,
horribly burned.”
Ridgley’s team leader, Sergeant Phillip White-
house, ran toward the burning vehicle. Whitehouse
discovered Private First Class Jeremiah Smith
unconscious, trapped inside. “He pulled Smith out.
That's when the vehicle started to cook off,” Ridgley
remembers. “All the ammo inside started to catch
on fire. There were massive explosions going off all
around. I caught some shrapnel. A little burn near

520
 IED War

my sleeve. I was sitting on the gun platform think-

ing, I need to call in a report.”
Ridgley called for a Medevac and remembers
looking around. “There were these Iraqi kids play-
ing soccer in a field,” Ridgley recalls, “and I told the
Medevac the helicopter could land there. Everything
seemed like slow motion.” Ridgley had never seen
mortally wounded people before, and he was having
trouble focusing. “The Medevac arrived and the sol-
diers were loaded onboard. From the time I called it
in until the time the helicopter took off was about
twenty minutes,” recalls Ridgley. “But it sure seemed
like it lasted all day,” he says. “Time stood still.”
Later, Jeremy Ridgley learned that Private First Class
Jeremiah Smith had died.
On May 28, the Department of Defense identi-
fied Private Smith as having been killed in Iraq while
supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Pentagon
attributed Smith’s death to “unexploded ordnance,”
as if what had killed him had been old or forgotten
munitions left lying in the road. Two weeks later, in
an article in the New York Times titled “After the
War,” a Defense Department official conceded that
the unexploded ordnance that killed Smith might
have been left there deliberately.

An IED is made up of five components: the explo-

sive, a container, a fuse, a switch, anda power source,

521
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

usually a battery. It does not require any kind of

advanced technology. With certain skills, an IED is
relatively easy to make. The primary component of
the IED is the explosive material, and after the inva-
sion, Iraq was overflowing with explosives.
“There’s more ammunition in Iraq than any place
I’ve ever been in my life, and it’s not securable,” Gen-
eral John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central
Command (CENTCOM), told the Senate Appro-
priations Committee in September 2003. “I wish I
could tell you we had it all under control, but we
don’t.”
The month after Private Smith was killed by an
IED, the casualty toll from IED attacks began to
climb. In June there were twenty-two incidents. By
August the number of soldiers killed by IEDs in Iraq
was greater than the number of fatalities by direct
fire, including from guns and rocket-propelled gre-
nades. By late 2003, monthly IED fatalities were
double that of deaths by other weapons. In a press
conference, General Abizaid stated that American
troops were now fighting “a classical guerrilla-style
campaign” in Iraq. This kind of language had not
been used by the Defense Department since the
Vietnam War.
“A new phenomenon [was] at work on the battle-
field,” says retired Australian brigadier general
Andrew Smith, who also has a Ph.D. in political

O22
 IED War

studies. “IEDs caught coalition forces off guard.

‘Surprise’ is not a word you want to hear on the bat-
tlefield.” Smith was one of the first NATO officers
to lead a counter-IED working group for Combined
Joint Task Force 7, in Baghdad. Later, in 2009, Brig-
adier General Smith oversaw the work of 350 NATO
officials at CENTCOM, all dealing with countering
IEDs. “The sheer volume of unsecured weapons in
Iraq was staggering,” Smith says, “a whole lot of
explosives left over from Saddam.” In 2003, there
were an estimated 1 million tons of unsecured explo-
sives secreted around the country in civilian hands.
These were former stockpiles once controlled by
Saddam Hussein’s security forces, individuals who
quickly abandoned their guard posts after the inva-
sion. A videotape shot by a U.S. Army helicopter
crew in 2003 shows the kind of explosive material
that was up for grabs across Iraq. In the footage, an
old aircraft hangar is visible, stripped of its roof and
its siding. From the overhead perspective, row after
row of unguarded bombs can be seen. One of the
men in the helicopter says, “It looks like there’s hun-
dreds of warheads or bombs” in there.
The IEDs kept getting more destructive. Three
months after Private First Class Jeremiah Smith was
killed, a truck bomb was driven into the United
Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty-
two people, including the UN special envoy to Iraq,

VAs}
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Sergio Vieira de Mello. The Pentagon added a new

IED classification to the growing roster. This was
called the VBIED, or vehicle-borne improvised
explosive device, soon to be joined by the PBIED, a
person-borne improvised explosive device, or suicide
bomber. When Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsi-
bility for the IEDs, the resounding psychological
effects were profound. Before the invasion, there had
been no Al Qaeda in Iraq.
DARPA’s long-term goals were now subordinated
to this immediate need inundating the Pentagon.
Initial counter-IED efforts involved Counter Radio-
Controlled Electronic Warfare (CREW) systems, or
jamming devices, that were installed on the dash-
boards of Army vehicles and cost roughly $80,000
each. The triggering mechanism on most IEDs con-
sisted of simple wireless electronics, including compo-
nents found in cell phones, cordless telephones, wireless
doorbells, and key fobs. Early jammers were designed
to interrupt the radio signals insurgents relied on to
detonate their IEDs. First dozens, then hundreds of
classified jamming systems made their way to
coalition forces in Iraq, with code names like Juke-
box, Warlock, Chameleon, and Duke. At the same
time, DARPA worked on a next generation of jam-
mets, developing technology that could one day
locate IEDs by sensing chemical vapors from the rel-
ative safety of a fast-moving vehicle. The program,

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called Recognize IED and Report, or RIEDAR,

would work from a distance of up to two miles away.
The ideal device would be able to search 2,700
square meters per second, could be small and porta-
ble, and able to alert within one second of detection.
But these were future plans, and the Pentagon
needed ways to counter the IED threat now. By Feb-
ruary 2004, IED attacks had escalated to one hun-
dred per week. The five hundred jammers already in
Iraq were doing only a little good. In June, General
Abizaid sent a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld and
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Mey-
ers, sounding an alarm. The Pentagon needed what
Abizaid called a “Manhattan-like project” to address
the IED problem.

In Washington, Congress put DARPA in the hot

seat when, in the spring of 2004, in a research study
report for Congress, the concept of network-centric
warfare was taken to task. Congress asked whether
the Department of Defense had “given adequate
attention to possible unintended outcomes resulting
from over-reliance on high technology,” with the
clear suggestion being that it had not. The unin-
tended consequence that had Congress most con-
cerned was the IED, presently killing so many
American soldiers in Iraq. In its report, Congress
wondered if, while the Pentagon had been pursuing

ye)
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

“networked communications technology,” the ter-

rorists were gaining the upper hand by using “asym-
metric countermeasures.” Congress listed five other
areas of concern: “(1) suicide bombings; (2) hostile
forces intermingling with civilians used as shields;
(3) irregular fighters and close-range snipers that
swarm to attack, and then disperse quickly; (4) use
of bombs to spread ‘dirty’ radioactive material; or
(5) chemical or biological weapons.”
To the press, Arthur Cebrowski claimed that he
had been misunderstood. The so-called godfather of
network-centric warfare complained that Congress
was misinterpreting his words. “Warfare is all about
human behavior,” said Cebrowski, which contra-
dicted hundreds of pages of documents and memos
he had sent to Secretary Rumsfeld. “It’s a common
error to think that transformation has a technology
focus. It’s one of many elements,” Cebrowski said.
Even the Defense Department's own Defense Acqui-
sition University, a training and certification
establishment for military personnel and defense
contractors, was confused by the paradox and sent a
reporter from its magazine Defense AT&L to
Cebrowski’s office to clarify. How could the father
of network-centric warfare be talking about human
behavior, the reporter asked. “Network-centric war-
fare is first of all about human behavior, as opposed
to information technology,” Cebrowski said. “Recall

526
 IED War

that while ‘a network’ is a noun, ‘to network’ is a

verb, and what we are focusing on is human behay-
ior in the networked environment.”
It seemed as if Cebrowski was stretching to make
sense, or at least resorting to semantics to avoid
embarrassing the secretary of defense. Nowhere in
Secretary Rumsfeld’s thirty-nine-page monograph
for the president, a summation of Cebrowski’s vision
titled “Transformation Planning Guidance,” was
human behavior mentioned or even alluded to.
While Cebrowski did television interviews address-
ing congressional concerns, the Office of Force
Transformation added four new slides to its “Trans-
forming Defense” PowerPoint presentation. One of
the two new slides now addressed “Social Intelli-
gence as a key to winning the peace,” and the other
addressed “Social Domain Cultural Awareness” as a
way to give warfighters a “cognitive advantage.”
On PBS NewsHour, Cebrowski defended
network-centric warfare and again reminded the
audience that the United States had, he believed,
achieved operational dominance in Iraq, completing
major combat operations in just twenty-one days.
“That speed of advance was absolutely unheard of,”
Cebrowski said. But now, “we’re reminded that war-
fare is more than combat, and combat’s more than
shooting.” It was about “how do people behave?” To
win the war in Iraq, Cebrowski said, the military

VG
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

needed to recognize that “warfare is all about human

behavior.” And that was what network-centric war-
fare was about: “the behavior of humans in the net-
worked environment... how do people behave when
they become networked?”
If Cebrowski could not convincingly speak of
human behavior, he found a partner in someone
who could. Retired major general Robert H. Scales
was a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and
recipient of the Silver Star. As the country sought a
solution to the nightmare unfolding in Iraq, Scales
proposed what he called a “culture-centric” solution.
“War is a thinking man’s game,” Scales wrote in Pro-
ceedings magazine, the monthly magazine of the
United States Naval Institute. “Wars are won as
much by creating alliances, leveraging nonmilitary
advantages, reading intentions, building trust, con-
verting opinions, and managing perceptions—all
tasks that demand an exceptional ability to under-
stand people, their culture, and their motivation.”
As if reaching back in time to the roundtable discus-
sions held by JFK’s Special Group and Robert
McNamara’s Pentagon, Scales was talking about
motivation and morale.
In 2004, amid the ever-growing IED crisis, Scales
proposed to Cebrowski that the Pentagon needed a
social science program to get inside how the enemy
thought. The United States needed to know what

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 IED War

made the enemy tick. Cebrowski agreed. “Knowl-

edge of one’s enemy and his culture and society may
be more important than knowledge of his order of
battle,” Cebrowski wrote in Military Review, a
bi-monthly Army journal. The Office of Force
Transformation now publicly endorsed “social intel-
ligence” as a new warfighting concept, the idea that
in-depth knowledge of local customs in Iraq and
elsewhere would allow the Pentagon to better deter-
mine who was friend and who was foe in a given war
theater. “Combat troops are becoming intelligence
operatives to support stabilization and counterinsur-
gency operations in Iraq,” Cebrowski’s office told
Defense News in April 2004. It was hearts and minds
all over again, reemerging in Iraq.

With chaos unfolding across Iraq, all the agencies

and military services attached to the Pentagon were
scrambling to find solutions. At DARPA, the former
deputy director of the Total Information Awareness
program, Bob Popp, got an idea. “I was the deputy
director of an office that no longer existed,” said
Popp in a 2014 interview. The Information Aware-
ness Office had been shut down, and Poindexter’s
Total Information Awareness program was no mote,
at least as far as the public was concerned. “Some of
the TIA programs had been canceled, some were
transitioned to the intelligence community,” says

O29
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Popp with an insider’s knowledge available to few,

most notably because, he says, “the transitioning
aspects were part of my job.” Popp was now serving
as special assistant to DARPA director Tony Tether.
“Tony and I met once a month,” recalls Popp. “He
said, ‘Put together another program, and I did.”
Working with DARPA’s Strategic Technology
Office, Popp examined data on what he felt was the
most important element of TIA, namely, “informa-
tion on the bad guys.” After thinking through a num-
ber of ideas, Popp focused on one. “I started
thinking, why do certain areas harbor bad guys?”
He sought counsel within his community of Defense
Department experts, including strategists, econo-
mists, engineers, and field commanders. Popp was
surprised by the variety of answers he received, and
how incongruous the opinions were. “They were not
all right and they were not all wrong,” Popp recalls.
But as far as harboring bad guys was concerned,
Popp wanted to know who was harboring them, and
why. He wanted to know what social scientists
thought of the growing insurgencies in Iraq and
Afghanistan. “I looked around DARPA and realized
there was not a single social scientist to be found,”
Popp says, so he began talking to “old-timers” about
his idea of bringing social scientists on board. “Most
of them were cautious. They said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.
You should listen to the commanders in Afghani-

930
 IED War

stan and Iraq.’” Then someone suggested to Bob

Popp that he talk to an anthropologist named Mont-
gomery McFate.
When Bob Popp first spoke with McFate in 2004,
she was thirty-eight years old and worked as a fellow
at the Office of Naval Research. Before that, McFate
worked for RAND, where she wrote an analysis of
totalitarianism in North Korean society. A profile in
the San Francisco Examiner describes her as “a punk
tock wild child of dyed-in-the-wool hippies... . close-
cropped hair and a voice buttery. ..a double-doc Ivy
Leaguer with a penchant for big hats and American
Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny
dent of a piercing 25 years closed.” If her personal
background seemed to separate her from the conser-
vative organizations she worked for, her ideas made
her part of the defense establishment.
McFate says that in addition to being approached
by DARPA’s Bob Popp for help in social science
work, she also received a call from a science advisor
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hriar S. Cabayan, who
was calling from the war theater. “We're having a
really hard time out here,’ McFate remembers
Cabayan saying. “We have no idea how this society
works. ... Could you help us?”
In 2004 the insurgency in Iraq was growing at an
alarming rate. Criticism of the Pentagon was reach-
ing new heights, most notably as stories of dubious

531
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

WMD intelligence gained traction in Congress and

around the world. For the Department of Defense,
it was a tall order to locate anthropologists willing to
work for the Pentagon. Academic studies showed
that politically, the vast majority were left-leaning,
with twenty registered Democrats to every one reg-
istered Republican. Not only was McFate rare for an
anthropologist, but also she was enthusiastic about
the war effort. Like many Americans, she had been
propelled into action by 9/11. In 2004, Montgom-
ery McFate decided to make it her “evangelical mis-
sion” to get the Pentagon to understand the culture
it was dealing with in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In November 2004, DARPA co-sponsored a con-
ference on counterinsurgency, or COIN, with the
Office of Naval Research. For the first time since the
Vietnam War, DARPA sought the advice of behay-
ioral scientists to try to put an end to what General
Abizaid called a “guerrilla-style” war. The DARPA
conference, called the Adversary Cultural Knowl-
edge and National Security Conference, was orga-
nized by Montgomery McFate and took place at the
Sheraton Hotel in Crystal City, Virginia. The key
speaker was retired major general Robert Scales.
From the podium, the decorated Vietnam War vet-
eran told his audience what he believed was the key
element in the current conflict: winning hearts and
minds. Scales was famous for his role in the battle of

532
 IED War

Dong Ap Bia, known as the Battle of Hamburger

Hill because the casualty rate was so high, roughly
70 percent, that it made the soldiers who were there
think of it as a meat grinder.
An entire generation of Vietnam War officers like
himself had retired or were in the process of retiring,
Scales told his audience. He and his colleagues were
men who had engaged in battle before the age of
“network-centric warfare.” Vietnam-era officers had
been replaced by technology enthusiasts, Scales said,
many of whom “went so far as to claim that technol-
ogy would remove the fog of war entirely from the
battlefield.” These were the same individuals who
said that one day soon, ground forces would be
unnecessary. That the Air Force, the Navy, and per-
haps a future space force would be fighting wars from
above, seated in command centers far away from the
battlefield. Scales said it was time to reject this idea.
Guerrilla warfare was back, he warned. Just like in
Vietnam. Technology did not win against insur-
gents, Scales said. People did.
“The nature of war is changing,” Scales wrote
that same fall in Proceedings magazine. “Fanatics
and fundamentalists in the Middle East have
adapted and adopted a method of war that seeks to
offset U.S. technical superiority with a countervail-
ing method that uses guile, subterfuge and terror
mixed with patience and a willingness to die.” Scales
533
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

warned that this new kind of warfare would allow

the weaker force, the insurgents in Afghanistan and
Iraq, to take on the stronger force, the United States,
and win. Since the Israeli War of Independence,
Scales wrote, “Islamic armies are 0 and 7 when fight-
ing Western style and 5 and 0 when fighting uncon-
ventionally against Israel, the United States, and the
Soviet Union.”
The Pentagon moved forward with DARPA’s
idea to bring anthropologists into the Iraq war, and
McFate garnered exclusive permission to interview
Marines coming home from Iraq. In July 2005 she
authored a paper in Joint Force Quarterly, a maga-
zine funded by the Department of Defense, titled
“The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary
Culture.” In it she stated clearly her opinion about
what had gone wrong in Iraq. “When the U.S. cut
off the hydra’s Ba’thist head, power reverted to its
most basic and stable form—the tribe,” wrote
McFate. “Once the Sunni Ba’thists lost their presti-
gious jobs, were humiliated in the conflict, and got
frozen out through de-Ba’thification, the tribal net-
work became the backbone of the insurgency.” As
an anthropologist, McFate believed that “the tribal
insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding
the Iraqi culture.”
Soldiers in the field had information, McFate
said, but it was the wrong information. “Soldiers

534
 IED War

and Marines were unable to establish one-to-one

relationships with Iraqis, which are key to both intel-
ligence collection and winning hearts and minds.”
McFate issued a stern warning to her Pentagon col-
leagues: “Failure to understand culture would
endanger troops and civilians at a tactical level.
Although it may not seem like a priority when bul-
lets are flying, cultural ignorance can kill.”
McFate was hired to perform a data analysis of
eighty-eight tribes and sub-tribes from a particular
province in Iraq, and the behavioral science program
she was proposing began to have legs. At DARPA,
Bob Popp was enthusiastic. “It was not a panacea,’
he says, “but we needed nation rebuilding. The
social science community had tremendous insights
into [the] serious problems going on [there], and a
sector of DoD was ready to make serious invest-
ments into social sciences,” he says of DARPA’s
efforts.
Arthur Cebrowski died of cancer the following
year. The Office of Force Transformation did not
last long without him and within a year after his
death closed down, but the social intelligence pro-
grams forged ahead. Montgomery McFate found a
new advocate in General David Petraeus, com-
mander of the Multi-National Security Transition
Command, Iraq, who shared her vision about the
importance of winning hearts and minds. Petraeus

535
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

began talking about “stability operations” and using

the phrase “culture-centric warfare” when talking to
the press. He said that understanding people was
likely to become more important in future battles
than “shock and awe and network-centric warfare.”
The DARPA program originally conceived broadly
by Bob Popp to bring social scientists and anthro-
pologists into the war effort was fielded to the U.S.
Army. Montgomery McFate became the lead social
scientist in charge of this new program, now called
the Human Terrain System. But what did that
mean? The program’s stated mission was to “counter
the threat of the improvised explosive device,” which
seemed strangely at odds with a hearts and minds
campaign. Historically, the battle for hearts and
minds focused on people who were not yet commit-
ted to the enemy’s ideology. The Army’s mission
statement made the Human Terrain System sound
as if its social scientists were going to be persuading
terrorists not to strap on the suicide vest or bury the
roadside bomb after all. The first year’s budget was
$31 million, and by 2014, the Pentagon would spend
half a billion dollars on the program. Unlike in
ARPA's Motivation and Morale program during the
Vietnam War, the social scientists who were part of
the Human Terrain System program during the war
on terror would deploy into the war zone for tours of
six to nine months, embedded with combat brigades

536
 IED War

and dressed in full battle gear. Many would carry

guns. So many elements of the program were incon-
gruous, it was easy to wonder what the intent actu-
ally was.
“I do not want to get anybody killed,” McFate
told the New Yorker. “I see there could be misuse.
But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these
mistakes happen over and over as people get killed,
and do nothing.” Major General Robert Scales, the
keynote speaker at the DARPA counterinsurgency
conference organized by McFate, wrote papers and
testified before Congress in support of this new
hearts and minds effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. In
the Armed Forces Journal Scales wrote, “Understand-
ing and empathy will be important weapons of war.”
Then he made a bold declaration. “World War I was
a chemists’ war,” Scales said. “World War II was a
physicists’ war,” and the war on terror was “the social
scientists’ war.”
The program quickly gathered momentum. The
Human Terrain System was a countermeasure against
IEDs, and counterinsurgency was back in U.S. Army
nomenclature. In December 2006 the Army released
its first counterinsurgency manual in more than
twenty years, Counterinsurgency, Field Manual, No.
3-24, Lieutenant General David Petraeus oversaw the
manual’s publication. Montgomery McFate wrote
one of the chapters. “What is Counterinsurgency?”

a3,
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the manual asks its readers. “If you have not studied
counterinsurgency theory, here it is in a nutshell:
Counterinsurgency is a competition with the insur-
gent for the right to win the hearts, minds, and acqui-
escence of the population.” As it had done in
Vietnam, the COIN manual stressed nation-building
and cultural understanding as key tactics in winning
a guerrilla war.
It was as if the Vietnam War had produced amne-
sia instead of experience. On its official website, the
U.S. Army erroneously identified the new Human
Terrain System program as being “the first time that
social science research, analysis, and advising has
been done systematically, on a large scale, and at the
operational level” in a war.

538
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Combat Zones That See

or the Pentagon, trying to fight a war in an

Prise center was like fighting blind. From the
chaotic marketplace to the maze of streets,
there was no way of knowing who the enemy was.
DARPA believed that superior technology could
give soldiers not just sight but omnipotence. Their
new effort was to create “Combat Zones That See.”
In the second year of the Iraq war, DARPA
launched its Urban Operations Program, the largest
and most expensive of the twenty-first century, as of
2014. “No technological challenges are more imme-
diate, or more important for the future, than those
posed by urban warfare,” DARPA’s deputy director,
Dr. Robert Leheny, told a group of defense contrac-
tors, scientists, and engineers in 2005. “What we are

web
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

seeing today [in Iraq] is the future of warfare.” While

the short-term priority remained the IED, the long-
term solution required a larger vision. It was less
about locating the bombs than about finding the
bomb makers, Tony Tether told Congress in 2005.
With Vietnam came the birth of the electronic
fence, with a goal of sensing and hearing what was
happening on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. With Iraq
came the birth of the electronic battle space, with
eyes and ears everywhere—on the ground, in the
ait, behind doorways and walls. DARPA needed to
bolster its research and development programs to
produce wide-scale surveillance technology for urban
combat zones—total surveillance of an area wher-
ever and whenever it was needed. This was the plan
for Combat Zones That See.
“We need a network, or web, of sensors to better
map a city and the activities in it, including inside
buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment
from civilians and their equipment, including in
crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers, or
IEDs,” Tether told the Senate Armed Services Com-
mittee. “We need to watch a great variety of things,
activities, and people over a wide area and have great
resolution available when we need it.” Through
information technology the United States could
gain the upper hand against the terrorists in Iraq
and places like it. “And this is not just a matter of

540
 CoMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

more and better sensors,” he explained, “but just as

important, the systems needed to make actionable
intelligence out of all the data.” Director Tether
requested half a billion dollars to fund the first phase
of development.
The timing was right. Congress had eliminated
funding for DARPA’s Total Information Awareness
programs in the fall of 2003, citing privacy concerns.
But Iraq was a “foreign battle space.” Civil liber-
ties were not at issue in a war zone. “Closely related
to this [network of sensors] are tagging, tracking,
and locating (TT&L) systems that help us watch
and track a particular person or object of interest,”
said Tether. “These systems will also help us detect
the clandestine production or possession of weapons
of mass destruction in overseas urban areas.”
DARPA partnered with the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency (NGA), a dual combat support
and intelligence agency that had been drawing and
analyzing military maps since 1939. With the inven-
tion of the satellite, NGA became the lead agency
responsible for collecting “geospatial intelligence,”
or GEOINT, interpreting that intelligence, and
distributing its findings to other agencies. The
NGA remains one of the lesser-known intelligence
agencies. The majority of its operations are born
classified.
In Iraq, DARPA and the NGA worked together

541
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

to create high-resolution three-dimensional maps of

most major cities and suspected terrorist hideouts.
The mapping efforts became part of a system of sys-
tems, folded into a DARPA program called Hetero-
geneous Urban Reconnaissance, Surveillance and
Target Acquisition, or HURT. Entire foreign civil-
ian populations and their living spaces would be
surveyed, observed, and scrutinized by the U.S. mil-
itary and American allies so that individual people—
insurgents—could be targeted, then captured or
killed. In urban warfare situations, DARPA knew,
terrorists tried to blend in among heterogeneous
crowds, much as the Vietcong had done with trees
on the trail. DARPAS HURT program was tech-
nology designed to deprive terrorists of people cover.
To implement the terrain-based elements of the
HURT program, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
defense contractors were dispatched to Iraq, captur-
ing digital imagery along at least five thousand miles
of streets using techniques similar to those used for
Google Maps. Many details of the program remain
classified, including which cities were targeted and
in what order, but from Tether’s own testimony
Congress learned that thousands of tiny surveillance
cameras and other microsensing devices had been
discreetly mounted on infrastructure, designed to
work like England’s CCTV system. Tether described
these surveillance cameras to Congress as “a net-

542
 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

work of nonintrusive microsensors.” Unclassified

documents from the NGA described these sensors as
including low-resolution video sensors placed close
to the ground to monitor foot traffic; medium-
resolution video sensors placed high on telephone
poles to watch motor vehicle and pedestrian streams,
and high-resolution video sensors placed at an
opportune height to capture “skeletal features and
anthropometric [body measurement] cues.” The
resulting three-dimensional maps laid the ground-
work for the first of many Combat Zones That See.
DARPA program managers joked that their goal
was “to track everything that moves.”
One of the drones in the HURT program was
the Wasp, a tiny unmanned aerial vehicle with a
fourteen-inch wingspan and weighing only 430
grams, or less than a pound. Providing real-time
overhead surveillance to soldiers on the ground, a
fleet of Wasps took to the airspace over Iraqi cities
and supply routes. The Wasp was one of the smart-
est drones in the drone fleet in 2005. Powered by
batteries, it flew low and carried an exceptional pay-
load of technology packed inside, including a color
video camera, altimeter, GPS, and autopilot. The
Wasps worked together in the system of systems,
bird-sized drones flying in pairs and in threes.
“The [HURT] system can get reconnaissance
imagery that high-altitude systems can not,” says Dr.

543
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Michael A. Pagels, a HURT program manager who

oversaw field operations in Iraq. “It can see around
and sometimes into buildings.” Because of the
Wasp’s micro size, some could enter into buildings
undetected, through open windows and doorways,
then fly around inside. The drones’ capabilities were
tailored for specific urban combat needs. If two of
the Wasps were taking surveillance photos of the
same area, their advanced software was able to merge
the best of both images in a “paintbrush-like effect,”
updating the images captured in near real time, then
sending them to small computers carried by soldiers
on the ground. At a soldier’s behest, the HURT sys-
tem could pause, rewind, and play back the Wasp’s
surveillance video. This was a key feature if a soldier
was hunting a terror cell planting an IED and
needed to know what an area looked like three min-
utes, or three hours, before. The HURT system even
had several self-governing features. It knew when
one of its drones was low on fuel and could coordi-
nate refueling times to ensure that surveillance was
maintained by other drones in the system. The Wasp
was also designed to recognize when it was running
low on battery power. It could transmit its status to
an operator. “HURT is designed to be agnostic,”
Pagels says, meaning that if one part of the system
goes down, the other parts of the system quickly
adapt to compensate for the loss. Mindful of what

544
 Comsat Zones Tuat SEE

DARPA called the “chaotic fog of war and the mind-

numbing complexity of the urban environment,”
the system’s creators aimed to achieve “Persistent
Area Dominance.” HURT was part of that domina-
tion. With HURT, humans and machines would
work together to maintain situational awareness in
dangerous urban environments.
Giant unmanned blimps were also involved in
surveillance, in DARPA’s Tactical Aerostat program,
also called the “unblinking eye.” Originally designed
for U.S. border patrol surveillance, these forty-five-
foot-long airships were tethered to mobile launching
platforms by reinforced fiber-optic cable. The
moored balloons were then raised to heights of
between one thousand and three thousand feet.
They were designed to be compact and portable,
able to go up and down before insurgents could
shoot them out of the sky. Fiber optics allowed for
secure communication between the classified sur-
veillance systems carried inside the blimps and the
operators on the ground. The blimps were helpful
for keeping watch over increasingly dangerous roads,
like Main Supply Route Tampa, a fifteen-mile
stretch of road out of Baghdad, and Route Irish, the
deadly road to the Baghdad International Airport.
Unclassified DARPA literature reveals that some-
times the system of systems worked. Other times,
elements failed. Sandstorms made visibility difficult,

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and when that happened, terrorists could sneak in

and plant their IEDs under cover of weather. When
the sandstorm cleared, it was often impossible to
distinguish windblown trash from newly planted
bombs. Several of the blimps and drones also either
were shot down or crashed on their own.
But DARPA’s defense contractors and scientists
back home persevered. The system of systems being
built by DARPA was long term, and had ambitious,
well-funded goals. The ultimate objective for Com-
bat Zones That See was to be able to track millions
of people and cars as they moved through urban
centers, not just in Iraq but in other urban areas that
potentially posed a threat. Cars would be tracked by
their license plates. Human faces would be tracked
through facial recognition software. The supercom-
puters at the heart of the system would process all
this information, using “intelligent computer algo-
rithms [to] determine what is normal and what is
not,” just as the Total Information Awareness office
proposed. Combat Zones That See was similar to
TIA’s_ needle-in-a-haystack hunt. It was bigger,
bolder, and far more invasive. But would it work?
In Combat Zones That See, DARPA’s goal was
for artificially intelligent computers to process what
it called “forensic information.” Computers could
provide answers to questions like “Where did that
vehicle come from? How did it get here?” In this

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 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

manner, the computers could discover “links between

places, subjects and times of activities.” Then, with
predictive modeling capabilities in place, the artifi-
cially intelligent computers would eventually be able
to “alert operators to potential force protection risks
and hostile situations.” In other words, the comput-
ers would be able to detect non-normal situations,
and to notify the humans in the system of systems as
to which hostile individuals might be planning an
IED or other terrorist attack.

In the winter of 2005, the Washington Post reported

that an IED attack occurred inside Iraq every forty-
eight minutes. The primary countermeasure was
still the electronic jamming device, designed to
thwart IED activation by remote control. But these
jammers were doing only a little good. In Iraq, coali-
tion forces were up against an electromagnetic
environment that was totally unpredictable and
impossible to control. Iraq had an estimated 27 mil-
lion people using unregulated cell phones, cordless
phones, walkie-talkies, and satellite phones, and
DARPA jammers were failing to keep up. Jammers
were even getting jammed: Al Qaeda bomb makers
developed a rudimentary radio-controlled jamming
signal decoder that the Americans called the “spi-
der.” The U.S. military appeared to be losing con-
trol. Despite DARPA’s lofty goals of Persistent Area

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Dominance through battle space surveillance, in

reality the Combat Zones That See concept was col-
lecting lots of information but providing little
dominance.
DARPA had dozens of potential solutions in var-
ious stages of development. The Stealthy Insect Sen-
sor Project, at Los Alamos National Laboratories,
was now ready to deploy. As part of the animal sen-
tinel program, going back to 1999, scientists had
been making great progress training honeybees to
locate bombs. Bees have sensing capabilities that
outperform the dog’s nose by a trillion parts per sec-
ond. Using Pavlovian techniques, scientists cooled
down groups of bees in a refrigerator, then strapped
them into tiny boxes using masking tape, leaving their
heads, and most of their antennae, poking out the
top. Using a sugar water reward system, the scientists
trained the bees to use their tongues to “sniff out”
explosives, resulting in a reaction the scientists call a
“purr.” After training, when the scientists exposed the
bees to a six-second burst of explosives, some had
learned to “purr.”
DARPA officials traveled to Los Alamos to
observe the tests, filming the event for later review.
The bees, transported in little boxes, were tested with
various explosives, including TNT and C4. As a
proof-of-concept test, a van configured like a vehicle-
borne improvised explosive device, or VBIED, was

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 CoMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

packed with explosives. Remarkably, the bees were

able to sniff out the explosive material inside, their
tiny tongues “purring” when they came in proximity.
The DARPA team was excited by the science and the
prospects. But when the Army learned that DARPA
planned to send bees to Iraq as a countermeasure to
the IED threat, they rejected the idea. The reality of
depending on insect performance in a war zone was
implausible, the Army said, so the Los Alamos bees
never traveled to Iraq.
On the urban battlefield the casualty rate contin-
ued to escalate. An even more deadly IED emerged,
called the explosively formed penetrator, or EFP.
Crafted from a cylindrical firing tube and packed
with explosives, the unique EFP had a front end that
was sealed by a concave liner, usually a copper disk.
When the EFP fired, the intense heat of the blast
turned the copper disk into an armor-piercing mol-
ten slug, propelling itself forward on a straight path
at 2,000 meters per second, more than double the
speed of a .50 caliber bullet. The EFP was designed
with an infrared trigger, which meant it was largely
jammer proof. As for other IEDs, terrorists had cre-
ated new measures to defeat U.S. jamming counter-
measures. They were now engineering IEDs to be
“victim activated,” triggered by a human foot or
vehicle tire. By 2006, roughly two thousand jammers
had been installed on the dashboards of coalition
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

force vehicles in Iraq. None of these could defeat the

dreaded “victim activated” pressure plate.
DARPA enhanced its body armor efforts through
a program called Hardwire HD Armor. Scientists
and engineers developed an entirely new class of
body armor made of a hybrid metallic-composite
material that weighed less than steel armor but could
defend better against armor-piercing rounds. The
manufacturing company Hardwire LLC specialized
in building blast-resistant bunkers before it started
designing bulletproof vests. But the IEDs kept com-
ing, increasing in lethality and terror. Armor pro-
tects the chest but leaves limbs, sexual organs, and
the brain exposed. All across Iraq, from Mosul to
Najaf, IEDs continued to rip apart soldiers’ bodies,
tearing away their limbs, shredding their penises
and testicles, gravely injuring their brains. The
improvised explosive device—a low-technology
bomb constructed for as little as $25—-was now
responsible for 63 percent of all coalition force
deaths.
By 2006, the Pentagon had spent more than $1
billion on “defeat-the-IED” technology. Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recommended
the creation of a permanent program, and on Febru-
ary 14, 2006, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device
Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) was established to
deal with the ever-increasing IED threat. With a

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 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

first-year budget of $3.6 billion, JIEDDO was

described as its own mini—Manhattan Project. Hun-
dreds more electronic warfare specialists were sent to
the war theater in Iraq. To the explosive ordnance
disposal technicians, called EOD techs, working to
defuse bombs in the war theater, there was some-
thing that DARPA was working on that could not
get there fast enough: its force of next-generation
robots.

Master Chief Petty Officer Craig Marsh was a Master

Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician,
assigned to the first ever Combined Joint Counter-
IED Task Force, otherwise known as CJTF Troy.
EOD techs are part of the Special Operations com-
munity and frequently operate alongside Navy Seals,
Green Berets, and other Special Warfare units on
classified missions. In 2006, Marsh deployed to Iraq
to help establish CJTF Troy as the Operations ( J3)
senior noncommissioned officer. Marsh was trained
to respond to and dispose of bombs planted under-
water and aboveground, including nuclear, chemical,
and biological weapons. When he was a younger
sailor, he served on the classified Mark 6 Marine
Mammal System program, swimming with highly
trained bottlenose dolphins to detect and mark the
location of underwater intruders and explosives.
In Iraq, the daily work of EOD techs was among

551
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the most crucial, most deadly, and most nerve-

racking of jobs. IEDs were ubiquitous. Defusing
these homemade bombs, and collecting intelligence
about the bombs and the bomb makers, made for an
extraordinarily stressful workload. In Hollywood,
the efforts of EOD technicians would be made
famous by the Academy Award-winning film The
Hurt Locker. In Iraq, the work was overwhelming,
and many of the younger technicians were largely
unprepared for what they were up against. “We were
dealing with thousands and thousands of IEDs,”
Craig Marsh recalls. “Ninety-five percent of the guys
had never seen an IED before.”
At forty-two years old, Marsh had nearly twenty
years of experience in the EOD community defus-
ing bombs. In Baghdad, it was his job to oversee the
work of eighty EOD teams spread across Iraq, each
composed of two or three technicians, and he was to
coordinate the fragmentary orders (FRAGOs) from
the Multi-National Corps-Iraq three-star generals
across the entire Joint Task Force Troy.
At Task Force Troy, Marsh lived on the fourth
floor of the Al Faw Palace, or Water Place, formerly
inhabited by Saddam Hussein and his entourage.
The palace had roughly sixty-two rooms and twenty-
nine bathrooms. It was loaded with garish gold
chandeliers and expensive marble tile. The Al Faw
was surrounded by artificial ponds filled with large,

552
 ComBAT ZONES THAT SEE

hungry carp, notorious for attacking and devouring

ducks that landed on its shimmering surface. The
Americans set up a headquarters here and renamed
the place Camp Victory, Iraq. Combined Joint Task
Force Troy lived inside.
Over time, Camp Victory would grow larger and
come to be encircled in twenty-seven miles of con-
crete wall, making it the largest of a total of 505
bases operated by the United States in Iraq. Even
Saddam Hussein and his cousin Ali Hassan al
Majeed, known as “Chemical Ali,” lived at Camp
Victory during the war. The two men were impris-
oned in a top secret building on an island in the cen-
ter of one of the ponds. Accessible only by a
drawbridge, the prison was code-named Building
114. In the mornings, Marsh would pass by the
island on his morning jog.
Task Force Troy was the first operational counter-
IED task force in U.S. military history, and the unit
was only a few months old when Marsh arrived. “In
2006, everyone was still running around with their
hair on fire,” he recalls. “We were still trying to
determine who the good guys were and who the bad
guys were.” There were thousands of bombs to
defuse. Too many to count. “All eighty teams would
be out in the field, working eighteen, twenty hours a
day. Some guys would clear ten locations, then come
back, then get sent back to the same hole” after
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

another IED had been planted in it. “There were

snipers to deal with. The cost was tremendous,”
Marsh says. Death was commonplace. “It was pain-
ful and frustrating. Within the first couple of
months, one of the sailors I was working with was
blown up and killed.”
Another part of Craig Marsh’s job was to coordi-
nate the work between the teams that were trying to
locate bomb makers and the lab technicians examin-
ing evidence. At every location, before and after an
IED blast, there was forensic evidence to collect, a
potential means of identifying and capturing mem-
bers of local terrorist cells. Task Force Troy worked
in concert with a forensic counter-IED team called
the Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell, or “sexy”
(CEXC) for short. CEXC had an electronics shop
and laboratory at Camp Victory where technicians
worked around the clock examining evidence. This
was home to some of the most technologically
advanced forensic equipment in the world, includ-
ing high-powered microscopes, reflective ultraviolet
imaging system fingerprint scopes, and x-ray photo-
graphing machines.
‘Task Force Troy had access to some sensor tech-
nology, but it did not do much good in the field.
“Sensors are great for identifying anomalies at the
bottom of the ocean,” says Marsh. “Technology can
be very good for gathering intelligence. But when it

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 ComBAT ZONES THAT SEE

comes to assessing technology, nothing comes close

to an experienced human. The ‘ah-hah’ moments
almost always came from a guy in the lab at CEXC.”
Human intelligence, HUMINT, offered Task
Force Troy some of the best leads in trying to iden-
tify who might be building and planting the IEDs.
Task Force Troy teams would go out in the field and
talk to locals, taking paper-and-pen notes. “We'd
follow up on these leads,” relates Marsh, only to dis-
cover “we were now dealing with death squads.” For
Iraqis, working with Americans carried a high price.
“These guys would kill entire families just for talk-
ing to us. It was brutal. We'd find vans stuffed with
bodies. Villagers who talked to us would wind up
dead, blindfolded, left by the side of the road.”
Corpses went unidentified and lay rotting in the
streets because extended family members were afraid
to claim the bodies, fearing reprisal. As the violence
swelled, trust disappeared.
The psychological toll grew heavy. Marsh remem-
bers being back at Camp Victory one night, longing
for some kind of a break, when he and a colleague
were watching a training video illustrating how a
DARPA robot could allow first sighting of visible
wires and other components of a partially buried
IED. Marsh recalls what he saw. “The robot's work-
ing the road. Then the robot blows up. The dust
clears. Along comes another robot and it starts
ey
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

working on a second IED in the road.” EOD teams

had used DARPA robots before, “but there were not
enough of them to go around,” says Marsh. “The
few robots [we had] were taking a beating due to
IED blasts. DARPA was the momentum behind
pushing the much-needed volume of robots into the
hands of those of us who really needed them.” When
Marsh learned more robots were coming to Task
Force Troy, “that was a ‘thank God’ moment,” he
recalls.
The workhorse of all the counter-IED robots was
DARPA’s Talon robot, first developed for DARPA
by Foster-Miller, Inc., in 1993. The robot was origi-
nally conceived as a counter-mine robot, designed to
work in shallow ocean waters, called the surf zone.
In the aftermath of the Bosnian war, Talon robots
were used to remove unexploded munitions. On
9/11, Talon robots were used on-site at the World
Trade Center, searching through the rubble for survi-
vors. And Talon robots were the first robots used in
the war on terror. They accompanied Special Forces
during action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on
a classified mission in Afghanistan in 2002. “Talon
robots have been in continuous active military duty
ever since,’ DARPA literature reports.
Now, a fleet of combat-ready, man-portable Talon
robots was finally ready for battle in Iraq. It was
2006. This generation of Talon was small and squat,

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 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

weighing just one hundred pounds. It had a robotic

arm and was mounted on a four-wheeled platform
that rolled along on two tank treads. The robot was
operated from a portable control unit through a two-
way radio or a fiber-optic link.
The EOD techs gave the Talons high praise—and
human names.
“Sorry for the late report on Gordon the robot,”
reads one EOD operator report. “While I was in
direct control of Gordon, 8 deep buried IED’s were
disposed of, 7 houses were cleared of possible
HBIEDs [house-borne improvised explosive devices],
13 Unexploded Ordinances (UXO) found in houses
that were to be placed as IEDs, 18 landmines.
Approximately 300 lbs of HME [homemade explo-
sive] was disposed of.”
Several days after that report, Gordon the robot
was launched out the back of an EOD truck and was
searching an intersection for a deeply buried IED
when a bomb detonated approximately ten feet from
where Gordon was working. “Still functioning, he
continued to search the area,” the EOD tech
reported. “On the opposite side of the road, another
IED was detonated and had turned him upside
down. Everything was still working until a fire fight
started. Gordon took 7 rounds to the underside and
was done for the day.” The EOD technician took
Gordon back to the robot shop for repair. He was
557
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

fixed, returned to the team, and sent back out into

the field.
Not long after, Gordon was searching a gate near
a house, looking for possible booby traps, when an
IED detonated right next to where he was working.
“Gordon was mangled beyond repair. Now his
replacement, ‘Flash, is here to finish his job,” wrote
the tech. The beauty of robots, says Craig Marsh, is
simple to understand. “Some leaders say you can’t
take the man out of the mine field. But the bottom
line is, robots save lives. EOD technicians will
choose to work smarter instead of harder when at all
possible.” The Talon robots cost between $60,000
and $180,000 per unit, depending on what sensor
technology the robot is fitted with.
The longer-term goal of Task Force Troy was to
turn the bomb detection and defusing technology
over to the Iraqis themselves. “We were trying to
establish a partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of
Police, but we got a lot of pushback,” Marsh recalls.
“We'd say, here’s how DNA works. Here’s how fin-
gerprinting works. And they'd look at us like we were
talking about magic.” In Marsh’s experience, the way
the Iraqi police force worked in 2006 was based on a
man’s word. “They'd ask someone, a suspect, ‘Did
you build this IED?’ And if he said ‘no, that worked
for them. Proof to them was an eyewitness. Judges
would ask, ‘Are there any eyewitnesses to back this

558
 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

up?’ If the answer was no, and [the suspect] said he

didn’t do it, he would be let go. The system was based
on deceptions. On a lot of untruths.”
Task Force Troy worked with CEXC to build
what it called “targeting packages,” files of evidence
that could be used by Iraqi police before a judge. “It
made things complicated and frustrating. Trying to
assist the Iraqi judicial system—vwe were not sup-
posed to say ‘train’ —and to prosecute the war.”
There was a major turning point in cooperative
science on February 22, 2006. Early that morning,
sixty-five miles north of Baghdad, in the city of
Samarra, a massive IED blast tore apart the Golden
Dome of the Askariya Shrine, one of Shia Islam’s
holiest shrines. “This is like 9/11 in the United
States,” declared Abdel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s
two vice presidents, a Shiite Muslim.
When Craig Marsh learned about the bombing,
he walked across the Al Faw Palace compound to
update his commander, Colonel Kevin Lutz, on the
other side of Camp Victory. The two men discussed
next steps. “There was so much evidence to collect
at the Golden Dome,” says Marsh. “We wanted to
get eyes on the incident site and at least do our best
to preserve the evidence for collection without dam-
aging an already sensitive relationship with Iraqi
leadership. CEXC guys were well equipped to han-
dle that.” The Iraqi government in Baghdad was
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

not. But now they saw how they could “benefit from
the science,” says Marsh. For the first time since Task
Force Troy had been set up, the government of
Baghdad, which was led by Shiite Muslims, agreed
to allow CEXC to investigate something that had
nothing to do with coalition force deaths. A team of
Task Force Troy CEXC technicians descended on
the rubble of the Golden Mosque.
In working with forensic science to identify the ter-
rorists who blew up the Golden Dome, Iraqi leaders in
Baghdad warmed to science in general, says Marsh.
Then advances in science took a bizarre and tragic turn.
Marsh learned that Iraqi security forces were relying on
a device to detect bombs that had no science behind it
at all. Word was the device, called the ADE 651, “was a
totally bogus piece of equipment,” he says. It was a
small handheld black box with a swiveling antenna
attached to the top. The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s
General Directorate for Combating Explosives had
purchased more than 1,500 of the devices from a pri-
vate company in England called ATSC.
Craig Marsh took the problem to senior officers,
who invited top Iraqi officials to Task Force Troy for
a technology demonstration. “We had the Iraqis
come to the laboratory and we had DoD guys dem-
onstrate” that it did not work, Marsh recounts. The
ADE 651 “did not detect explosives of any kind. We
took it apart. We had it x-rayed. It had no electronic

560
 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

components inside.” There was also no power source.

The Iraqis insisted the device worked on “nuclear
magnetic resonance, or NMR.” Despite overwhelm-
ing evidence coming from the CEXC lab at Task
Force Troy that the device had no scientific value
whatsoever, Iraqi officials stood behind the ADE
651 bomb detector, which cost $60,000 per device.
Soon, almost every Iraqi guard at every major check-
point across the country was using the worthless
device in place of any kind of physical inspection. It
was dangerous and frustrating. “Insurgents were able
to get dump truck bombs past checkpoints” into
Baghdad, Marsh says. “Coalition checkpoints did
not use this device because we had actual explosive
detection systems at our disposal.” The ADE 651
“was nothing more than a magic wand.”
“Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about
is it detects bombs,” Major General Jehad al-Jabiri,
head of the General Directorate for Combating
Explosives, told the New York Times. “I know more
about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I
know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”
Years later, the maker of the phony device, ATSC
president Jim McCormick, was arrested in England
and convicted for fraud after a whistleblower revealed
that McCormick knew he was selling bogus equip-
ment. In 2011, Major General al-Jabiri was arrested for
taking millions of dollars in bribes from McCormick.

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

As of 2014 he had not been tried, and the bogus devices

were still being used in Iraq.

The same month that terrorists in Iraq blew up Shia

Islam’s revered shrine, attacks against coalition
forces numbered more than two an hour, or fifty a
day. By 2007 that figure had doubled to one hun-
dred attacks a day, or three thousand a month. An
estimated $15 billion had been spent by that point
on counter-IED efforts—on jammers, robots, sur-
veillance systems, and more. The situation was only
getting worse. DARPA’s Combat Zones That See
program was having little effect on the war effort,
despite a classified number of dollars being spent on
a program that collected video images of Iraqi citi-
zens walking around cities and driving in cars and
housed them in classified data storage facilities for
access at a later date. America was rapidly losing con-
trol of the war, and in response, in January 2007, an
additional thirty thousand troops were deployed to
Traq in what would become known as “the surge.”
To support the tens of thousands of new soldiers
heading into battle, Tony Tether appeared before the
House Armed Services Committee to discuss several
new technology programs DARPA was sending into
the war zone. The Boomerang was DARPA’s response
to sniper threats, Tether said. It was an acoustic sensor
system made up of seven small microphones that

562
 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

attached to a military vehicle, listened for shooter

information, and notified soldiers precisely where the
fire was coming from, all in less than a second. The
Boomerang system was able to detect shock waves
from a sniper’s incoming bullets, as well as the muzzle
blast, then relay that information to soldiers. For exam-
ple, when a shot was detected, Boomerang might call
out, “Shot. Two o'clock. 400 meters.” Tether told Con-
gress that DARPA had fielded sixty Boomerang units
to the Army, Marine Corps, and Special Forces, and
was now working on a more advanced Boomerang-
based technology called CROSSHAIRS (Counter
Rocket-Propelled Grenade and Shooter System with
Highly Accurate Immediate Responses).
CROSSHAIRS was a vehicle-mounted system
that fused radar and signal-processing technologies
to quickly detect much larger projectiles coming at
coalition vehicles, including rocket-propelled gre-
nades, antitank guided missiles, and even direct
mortar fire. A sensor system inside the CROSS-
HAIRS would be able to identify where the shot
came from and relay that information to all other
vehicles in a convoy. The terrorists would be able to
get one shot off, then Boomerang and CROSS-
HAIRS would allow coalition shooters to respond
by targeting and killing the enemy shooter—in
under one second.
To help snipers with accuracy, immediacy, and

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

portability, DARPA was also fielding the smallest,

lightest-weight sniper rifle in the history of warfare,
the DARPA XM-3.
Tether also told Congress about DARPA’s new
Radar Scope, a tiny, 1.5-pound handheld unit that
allowed U.S. forces to “sense” through nonmetallic
walls, including concrete, and determine ifa human
was hiding inside a building or behind a wall. In the
winter of 2007, DARPA fielded fifty Radar Scopes
to the Army, Marines, and Special Forces for evalua-
tion in the war theater. Tether hinted at bigger plans
for this same technology, including ways to sense
human activity underground, up to fifty feet deep.
Broad intelligence, surveillance, and reconnais-
sance efforts fused with massive data collection and
data-mining operations would continue to be DAR-
PA's priority in urban area operations, Tether told
Congress. “By 2025, nearly 60 percent of the world’s
population will live in urban areas,” Tether said, “so
we should assume that U.S. forces will continue to be
deployed to urban areas for combat and post-conflict
stabilization.” Tether listed numerous unclassified pro-
grams, each with a suitable acronym. DARPA’s
WATCH-IT (Wide Area All Terrain Change Indi-
cation Technologies) program analyzed data col-
lected from foliage-penetrating radar. DARPA’s
LADAR (Laser Detection and Ranging) program
sensors obtained “exquisitely detailed, 3-D imagery

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 COMBAT ZONES THAT SEE

through foliage to identify targets in response to these

cues.” DARPA’s ASSIST (Advanced Soldier Sensor
Information System and Technology) program
allowed soldiers to collect details about specific Iraqi
neighborhoods and then upload that information into
a database for other soldiers to use.
DARPA’s HURT (Heterogeneous Urban Recon-
naissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition)
program was flying more than fifty drones in sup-
port of coalition infantry brigades. HURT was able
to reconnoiter over hundreds of miles of roadways,
support convoys, and EOD tech teams. HURT pro-
vided persistent perimeter surveillance at forward
operating bases and was playing a role in stopping
an ever-increasing number of suicide bombers who
were targeting U.S. military bases. In 2007 the
HURT program would discreetly change its name to
HART (Heterogeneous Airborne Reconnaissance
Team) after unnamed sources suggested that the
acronym was in poor taste.
To merge its growing number of surveillance and
data-collection technologies, DARPA engineered a
multimedia reporting system called TIGR (Tactical
Ground Reporting) to be used by soldiers on the
ground in Iraq. Congress was told that TIGR’s web-
based multimedia platform “allows small units, like
patrols, to easily collect and quickly share ‘cop-on-the-
beat’ information about operations, neighborhoods,

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people and civil affairs.” It was like a three-dimensional

Wikipedia for soldiers in combat zones. U.S. soldiers
told MIT Technology Review that TIGR allowed them
to “see locations of key buildings, like mosques,” and
to access data on “past attacks, geo-tagged photos of
houses...and photos of suspected insurgents and
neighborhood leaders.” In testimony the following
year, the Armed Services Committee was told that
TIGR was “so successful in Operation Iraqi Freedom,
it was [being] requested by brigades going to Afghani-
stan.” Which, in the fall of 2008, was where tens of
thousands of additional coalition forces would soon be
headed.
After five years of relative stability in Afghani-
stan, the country was again spiraling into violence
and chaos. Critics cried foul, declaring that the Bush
administration had lost control of an insurgency
force it had already defeated and pacified in 2002.
That in diverting the great majority of American
military resources, as well as intelligence and recon-
struction resources, from Afghanistan into Iraq, the
White House and the Pentagon had created a dual
insurgency nightmare. Afghanistan and Iraq were
being called quagmires in the press. These wars were
unwinnable, critics said. This was Vietnam all over
again. And, as had been the case for fifty years,
DARPA was heading straight into the war zone.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Human Terrain

t 9:20 p.m. on the night of June 13, 2008,

Ac truck bombs, or vehicle-borne IEDs
(VBIEDs), pulled up to the gates of the Sar-
posa prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and exploded
in massive fireballs, knocking down large sections of
the mud brick walls. Taliban militants on motorcy-
cles quickly swarmed into the area in a coordinated
attack, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault
rifles at prison guards, killing fifteen of them. It was
a scene of carnage and mayhem. By the time coali-
tion forces arrived, roughly an hour later, not one of
the 1,200 incarcerated prisoners remained. In the
morning, Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President
Hamid Karzai and the head of the provincial coun-
cil in Kandahar, declared that “all” of the Sarposa

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prisoners had escaped, including as many as four

hundred hard-core Taliban.
The prison break was dangerous for the citizens
of Kandahar and embarrassing for NATO-led coali-
tion forces, officially called the International Secu-
rity Assistance Force. The Taliban issued a press
release claiming responsibility and stating that the
freed prisoners were happy to be back living in their
Kandahar homes. Coalition force soldiers conducted
door-to-door searches looking for Taliban escapees,
but there was almost no way to determine who had
been in the prison. Fifteen prison guards were dead,
and those still alive were not cooperating.
As a result of the security failure, the Pentagon
redoubled efforts regarding its biometrics program
in Afghanistan. Thousands of Handheld Inter-
agency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE)
units were shipped to coalition forces with instruc-
tions on how to collect eye scans, fingerprints, facial
images, and DNA swabs from every Afghan male
between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four that coali-
tion soldiers and Afghan security forces came into
contact with. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had
given birth to a new form of U.S. intelligence exploi-
tation called bio-intelligence, or BIOINT. This con-
cept found its genesis in DARPA’s Information
Awareness Office. The mission of BIOINT, bulleted
out ina DARPA program memo from 2002, was to

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“produce a proto-type system to [gather] biometric

signatures of humans.” The biometrics system had
been fielded to the Army, with the first hardware
units appearing in Fallujah, Iraq, in December
2004.
The U.S. commander in Iraq, General David
Petraeus, was an advocate of collecting biometrics in
counterinsurgency operations. “This data is virtually
irrefutable and generally is very helpful in identifying
who was responsible for a particular device [i.e., an
TED] in a particular attack, enabling subsequent tar-
geting,” Petraeus said. “Based on our experience in
Iraq, I pushed this hard here in Afghanistan, too, and
the Afghan authorities have recognized the value and
embraced the systems.” Over the next three years,
coalition forces would collect biometrics on more
than 1.5 million Afghan men, roughly one out of
every six males in the country. In Iraq the figure was
even higher—reportedly 2.2 million male Iraqis, or
one in four, had biometric scans performed on them.
The month after the Sarposa prison break, in July
2008, Democratic presidential candidate Senator
Barack Obama took his first official trip to the
region, spending two days in Iraq and two days in
Afghanistan. Senator Obama called the situation in
Afghanistan “precarious and urgent,” and said that
if elected president, he would make Afghanistan the
new “central front in the war against terrorism.”

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‘Two days later the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, appeared on PBS
NewsHour to discuss the growing violence in
Afghanistan and the need for a ten-thousand- to
twenty-thousand-troop surge there.
Summer became fall, and now it was November
2008. It had been four years since DARPA had
sponsored its first social science and counterinsur-
gency conference since the Vietnam War, the Adver-
sary Cultural Knowledge and National Security
Conference organized by Montgomery McFate. The
results of the conference had borne fruit in what was
now the Army’s Human Terrain System program,
and at least twenty-six teams of social scientists and
anthropologists had been sent to Iraq and Afghani-
stan. On November 4, one of those Human Terrain
Teams was a three-person unit stationed at Combat
Outpost Hutal, Afghanistan, fifty miles west of
Kandahar. On this day back home, Americans were
voting for a new president, and here in the war the-
ater, anthropologist Paula Loyd, security contractor
Don Ayala, and former combat Marine Clint Coo-
per were heading out on regular patrol.
The area around Kandahar was particularly dan-
gerous and hostile to coalition forces. Kandahar had
long been the spiritual center of the Taliban, and
now, after the prison break five months earlier, an
unusual number of hard-core Taliban were living

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among the people, making the situation even more

precarious. On patrol that November morning,
Paula Loyd, Don Ayala, and Clint Cooper were
accompanied by three local interpreters and one pla-
toon of U.S. Army infantry soldiers with C Com-
pany, 2-2 Infantry Battalion. Paula Loyd was a
dedicated anthropologist, a Wellesley College grad-
uate, thirty-six years old and engaged to be married.
Petite and striking, with long blond hair hanging
out the back of her combat helmet, Loyd had served
in the U.S. Army for four years after college, includ-
ing a post as a vehicle mechanic in the DMZ in
South Korea. She was hardworking, curious, and
respected by her peers; one former colleague said,
“An indefinable spirit defined her.” Nearing the cen-
tral market in the village of Chehel Gazi, the Human
Terrain Team spread out. Paula Loyd stopped in a
dirt alleyway and started handing out candy and
pens to local children walking to school. The alley-
way was about twenty-five feet wide and lined on
either side by tall mud brick walls. Running down
the center of the alleyway was a shallow creek, its
sloping banks lined with tall leafy trees. As adults
passed by, through an interpreter Loyd asked ques-
tions about the local price of cooking fuel, a key
indicator as to whether or not the Taliban had
hijacked supply lines. As Loyd interviewed people,
she took notes in her notebook, information that

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was to be uploaded into a military databaseat the

end of each day.
A young bearded man walked up to Loyd, shoo-
ing the local children away. The man carried a con-
tainer, like a jug. Loyd asked her interpreter to
translate.
“What's in your jug?” Loyd asked the man.
He told her it was fuel. Gasoline for his water
pump at home.
“How much does petrol cost in Maiwand?” Loyd
asked.
He told her it was very expensive. She asked about
his job. He said he worked for a school.
“Would you like some candy?” she asked.
“T don’t like candy,” the man said. His name was
Abdul Salam. He wore blue sweatpants, a long-
sleeved shirt, and a blue-striped vest. Abdul Salam
asked Loyd’s interpreter if she smoked. The conver-
sation continued for a while, then tapered off. Then
Abdul Salam wandered away. After a while he came
back. The interpreter noticed he was playing with a
plastic lighter, turning it over in one hand. In the
other hand he held the jug of fuel.
Ina flash, Abdul Salam raised the jug and poured
gasoline over Paula Loyd. He struck the lighter and
set her on fire. Some witnesses described hearing a
whoosh sound. Others described seeing Paula Loyd
being consumed by an inferno of flames. The heat

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was so intense and powerful that no one near her

could immediately help without catching fire as
well. Loyd’s interpreter later recalled seeing her
burning as his mind raced for a way to put the fire
out. She called out his name. Nearby, a twenty-six-
year-old platoon leader named Matthew Pathak
shouted out that soldiers should get her into the
creek. He filled his helmet with water and threw it
on Loyd. People tossed dirt and sand on her, trying
to get the fire out. Finally, soldiers dragged her across
the alleyway and into the creek. The flames were not
out. Loyd had third-degree burns on 60 percent of
her body. She was still conscious.
“Tm cold,” she said. “I’m cold.” It was one of the
last things she said.
When Abdul Salam set Paula Loyd on fire, peo-
ple started screaming. Human Terrain Team mem-
ber Don Ayala was standing roughly 150 feet down
the alleyway. He drew his pistol and raced toward
the commotion. As Ayala ran toward Loyd, Abdul
Salam was running away from the crime scene,
toward Ayala. Soldiers pursuing Salam screamed,
“Stop that man! Shoot him!” Ayala tackled Salam
and, with the help of two soldiers, put him in flex
cuffs.
Don Ayala was not a social scientist or an anthro-
pologist; he was a security contractor, or bodyguard.
Ayala had previously guarded Afghan president

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Hamid Karzai and Iraqi prime minister Nouri

al-Maliki. His job was to keep Paula Loyd from get-
ting killed. Witnesses watched him work to immo-
bilize Abdul Salam, who resisted detention, while
soldiers and interpreters about 150 feet away tried to
help the critically injured Loyd, whose clothes had
melted into her skin and who was in terrible pain.
Specialist Justin Skotnicki, one of the U.S. Army
infantry soldiers who had witnessed the attack, went
over to Ayala and told him what had happened to
Paula Loyd, that Abdul Salam had thrown gasoline
on her and set her on fire. Ayala called out for an
interpreter.
“Don had the interpreter inform [Abdul Salam]
that Don thought the man was the devil,” Skotnicki
later recalled. Then Don Ayala pulled his 9mm pis-
tol from his belt, pressed it against Abdul Salam’s
temple, and shot him in the head, killing him.
Paula Loyd was transported to Brooke Army
Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. She was in
the burn unit there for two months until she died of
her injuries on January 7, 2009. The Taliban claimed
credit for her death.
Earlier that spring, in May, Don Ayala was tried
for murder in a Louisiana courtroom. He pled guilty
to manslaughter. U.S. District Senior Judge Claude
Hilton showed leniency and gave Ayala probation
and a $12,500 fine instead of jail time. “The acts

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that were done in front of this defendant would pro-

vide provocation for anyone” who was present, Judge
Hilton said. “This occurred in a hostile area, maybe
not in the middle of a battlefield, but certainly in the
middle of a war.”
The entire situation was grotesque. An anthro-
pologist handing out candy to children was set on
fire by an emissary of the Taliban and died a horri-
ble death. The security contractor hired to protect
the anthropologist was unable to do so and instead
took justice into his own hands. But none of this was
exactly as it seemed. Why was Ayala on the Human
Terrain Team in the first place? He had no qualifica-
tions in anthropology or social science. Why weren’t
the U.S. Army infantry soldiers considered capable
of protecting her? According to Montgomery McFate,
all Human Terrain Team members “advise brigades
on economic development, political systems, tribal
structures, etc.; provide training to brigades as
requested; and conduct research on topics of interest
to the brigade staff,” but Ayala was not qualified in
any of those areas, except for the “etc.” part.
Court documents revealed that Don Ayala was
paid $425 a day, each day he worked in Afghani-
stan, and that in Iraq he had been paid $800 a day,
which meant he earned more in two days than any of
the soldiers in C Company made in a month. What
service could Don Ayala perform that the C Company

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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

soldiers were unable to do? Over the next five years the
Human Terrain System would cost taxpayers $600
million. What actual purpose did it serve? The
answer would ultimately lead back to DARPA.
But first there was subterfuge and misinforma-
tion, starting with the wide gap between how
McFate and other social scientists presented the pro-
gram to the public—knowingly or not—and how
the program was actually positioned in the Defense
Department hierarchy.
To the public, the Human Terrain System was
sold as a culture-centric program, a hearts and minds
campaign. But in U.S. Army literature, the Human
Terrain System was in place “to help mitigate IEDs,”
and the program was funded by the Joint Impro-
vised Explosive Device Defeat Organization
(JIEDDO), with members like Paula Loyd working
alongside EOD technicians, DARPA jammers, and
Talon robots. In press releases, the Army was
oblique. “Combat commanders [do] not have a good
understanding of the cultural and social implica-
tions of military operations in urban environments,”
said one. Anthropologists and social scientists were
going into the battle zone “to provide social science
support to military commanders.” The important
word was “support.” It would take until this book
for a fuller picture to emerge of what was being
supported.

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The Human Terrain System program was con-

troversial from the start. The American Anthropo-
logical Association, which was founded in 1902, and
whose credo for anthropologists was “first do no
harm,” denounced the program as “a disaster wait-
ing to unfold.” Its executive board condemned the
Human Terrain System as “a problematic applica-
tion of anthropological expertise, most specifically
on ethical grounds,” and in a letter to Congress
called the program “dangerous and reckless” and “a
waste of the taxpayers’ money.” In an article for
Anthropology Today, Roberto Gonzalez, associate pro-
fessor of anthropology at San Jose State University,
called the program “mercenary anthropology.” Cath-
erine Lutz, chair of the anthropology department at
Brown University, charged that the Defense Depart-
ment was promoting a dangerous and false idea “that
anthropologists’ ‘help’ will create a more humane
approach on the part of the U.S. military towards
the Iraqi people.” Lutz believed the notion of help-
ing people to be “a very seductive idea,” but she
encouraged anthropologists to step back and ask,
“Help what? Help whom, to do what?”
Hugh Gusterson, professor of anthropology at
George Mason University, accused the Army of try-
ing to convince anthropologists that “Americans
have a mission to spread democracy” and that
“Americans have only the well-being of other people

577 :
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

in mind.” Gusterson saw that as manipulative and

believed that once a person convinced himself or
herself of that, “you start to think of it [war] as some
kind of cultural miscommunication. And you start
to ask naive, misshapen questions [like], If we only
understood their culture, how could we make them
ike us? Why do they hate us so much?’” Gusterson
believed the answer was simple. “They hate us
because we are occupying their country, not because
they don’t understand our hand signals and because
occasionally we mistreat their women,’ Gusterson
said. “So if you ask the wrong questions you get the
wrong answers and more people on both sides
will die.”
“T think the idea that there can be a kinder, gen-
tler counterinsurgency war isa myth,” said Gonzalez.
“T think it’s a hope that many people have. It’s a kind
of dream that they [anthropologists] can somehow
do things differently. I do think it’s a myth, though,
and I think we have lots of historical evidence to
back that up.”
With the debate escalating, the Pentagon culti-
vated two succinct narratives regarding the Human
‘Terrain System, as exemplified in educational courses
taught at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Mili-
tary Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the U.S.
Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and
the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode

578
 HUMAN TERRAIN

Island. One narrative was that Human Terrain

Teams helped make way for “the moral prosecution
of warfare.” That time and again, the teams enabled
soldiers to narrowly avert disaster. That putting
anthropologists on the battlefield made soldiers bet-
ter able to engage in so-called “honorable warfare.”
The experiences of Major Philip Carlson and his
unit in the wrongful arrest of an Iraqi village elder,
as taught by the Army, illustrate this point of view.
“My very first time out in an HTT [Human Ter-
rain Team] in Iraq, we had a company airmobile to
the countryside because of the IED threat on the
road,” said Carlson. The Human Terrain Team was
attached to a patrol fire squadron in the Second
Armored Cavalry Regiment and was carrying out
“random interviews and know and search opera-
tions.” Carlson was having problems with his local
interpreters, whom he described as “young, gung-ho
Shiites who were motivated to capture terrorists.”
In one particular house, Major Carlson recalled,
coalition forces discovered an older man in posses-
sion of a rifle scope and a closetful of books. The
interpreters insisted that the books were “jihadist in
nature and the [rifle] scope was for a sophisticated
sniper rifle,” said Carlson. The man, Mr. Alawi, was
arrested and “paraded through the village back to
the patrol base.” There, a Human Terrain Team’s
cultural expert, Dr. Ammar, questioned Alawi

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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

further and decided he was not a radical but a

“kindly old school teacher.” His books, said Carl-
son, were textbooks from a school. The scope was
from an air rifle that he used to shoot birds.
According to Major Carlson, if the Human Ter-
rain Team had not been present, the coalition forces
would not have understood how important it was to
restore Alawi’s honor. They simply would have
released him and let him return to his house on his
own. This would have been a grave mistake, said Dr.
Ammar, who instructed the soldiers on the specifics
of honor restoration. In the Army-sanctioned story,
Major Carlson did not elaborate on what the specif
ics of honor restoration entail, nor did he explain
what happened to the gung-ho Shi'ite interpreters
who presented their U.S. Army employers with false
information. According to Carlson, “the news [of
the honor restoration] spread like wildfire.” Instead
of having created a foe in Mr. Alawi, they had cre-
ated a friend. The son of the village elder showed
Major Carlson where an IED was buried and where
eighty mortar tubes were hidden. “That is the power
of understanding and operating appropriately within
a culture,” said Major Carlson.
A second Pentagon narrative, conveyed by the
Navy, held that work done by the Human Terrain
Teams sometimes seemed futile but had_ positive
outcomes later on. This narrative is exemplified by

580
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the writings of Human Terrain Team advisor Nor-

man Nigh. In “An Operator’s Guide to Human Ter-
rain Teams,” written for the U.S. Naval War
College’s Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed
Groups, Nigh asks, when considering counterinsur-
gency doctrine and COIN application, “Can doc-
trine be applied despite an unwilling population?”
To answer the question, he tells the story of an
Afghan village elder called Haji Malma.
Norman Nigh was a member of a Human Ter-
rain Team attached to a group of coalition forces
from Canada, assigned to the village of Nakhonay,
Afghanistan, located about ten miles southwest of
Kandahar, in the Taliban heartland, not far from
where Paula Loyd was set on fire. Most of the sol-
diers on Nigh’s combat patrol despised Haji Malma,
“a stoic village elder, known Taliban judge, and sus-
pected architect of countless Canadian deaths.” For
several years, NATO forces had been trying to build
a case against Haji Malma and other Taliban leaders
like him, but could not. Malma reveled in the fact
that there was nothing the coalition forces could do to
him, Nigh says. “Like most sophisticated Taliban lead-
ers in Afghanistan,’ Nigh explains, “Malma was tak-
ing advantage of [America’s] COIN war. On the
surface, he appeared to be a benign village elder, inter-
ested only in the well-being of the people of Nakhonay,”
when in fact he was a “key Pakistani-educated

581
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Al-Qaida supporter who controlled one of the most

dangerous and_ strategically important areas in
Kandahar.”
Haji Malma regularly sought development funds
from aid organizations and NATO troops, and reg-
ularly received financial support. The same went for
the rest of the duplicitous elders running Nakhonay
village affairs. The Human Terrain Team found
that the situation was infuriating soldiers, who were
“unable to realize justice for the friends they’ve lost.”
This, says Nigh, was dangerous for the broader effort
in Afghanistan, since “these heightened emotions
often blur an operator’s ability to understand the
population and wage an effective COIN war.”
The Human Terrain Team suggested that coali-
tion forces, in this case Task Force Kandahar, “pull
back and take a long-horizon perspective.” Nigh and
his colleagues determined that Afghanistan was “a
country that lacks a rule of law,” ranking 176 out of
178 on the State Department’s Corruption Perception
Index. “Corruption and kickbacks of public procure-
ment act as a necessary evil to mitigate risk, leverage
against liabilities, and promote cooperation.” The
Human Terrain Team also conducted a comprehen-
sive ethnographic study on the topic of corruption,
interviewing the majority of villagers and asking them
what they thought. “Virtually the entire village agreed

582
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that the Western term ‘bribery’ was nothing more

than zarrun, an Afghan word for contract or agree-
ment,” Nigh explained.
Right around this same time, Task Force Kanda-
har was preparing for what was called a “clearing
operation” in the area—the removal of Taliban
leaders and the installation of more coalition-
friendly men. But in the opinion of the Human Ter-
rain Team, “many previous clearing operations had
resulted in little to no change.” They suggested a
different strategy, something Nigh referred to as
the “oil spot plan...to divide and conquer the
population.” The oil spot COIN strategy worked
analogously to the way cheesecloth works, writes
Nigh, with each drop of oil representing a stability
initiative, or a municipal service, or an offer of agri-
cultural development assistance. “Drops of oil, one
at a time and over time, eventually cover the entire
cloth,” according to Nigh, “each oil spot [represent-
ing] a visible manifestation of the desired end state
for the entire war.” The oil spot concept was a strat-
egy endorsed by Dr. Karl Slaikeu, the psychologist
and conflict resolution specialist who replaced Paula
Loyd. The oil spot strategy was put into effect in
Nakhonay, and in his Naval War College narrative
Nigh writes, “The strategy appears to be working.”
The international press did not agree. In an October

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2010 issue of Military World Magazine, published in

England, Nakhonay would be described as “a town
now infamous as a killing zone.”
The mainstream press largely disparaged the pro-
gram as the deaths of Human Terrain Team mem-
bers made headline news. Michael Bhatia, an
anthropologist with degrees from Brown University
and Oxford University, and who was working on a
Ph.D. dissertation on the mujahedeen of Afghani-
stan, was killed in May 2008 while traveling through
Khost, Afghanistan. His unit was en route to help
negotiate a peace process between two warring tribes
when his vehicle drove over an IED buried in the
road. Witnesses say the explosion was loud, horrific,
and all-consuming. Bhatia and two Army soldiers
were instantly killed. As an Associated Press article
about his death put it, “Michael Bhatia was on the
frontlines of a Pentagon experiment.” The following
month, in Iraq, Human Terrain Team member
Nicole Suveges, a political scientist from Johns Hop-
kins University, was also killed by an IED, planted
by terrorists inside a district council building in Sadr
City. Killed alongside Suveges were eleven other
people, military and civilian, including U.S. soldiers,
Traqi government officials, and U.S. Embassy person-
nel. Her team was trying to identify ways that ordi-
nary Iraqi citizens could learn how to assist a

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transitioning government achieve their political

aims, according to the Pentagon.
The Human Terrain System continued to grow.
In 2010 it was reported that team members earned
$200,000 a year. Ever vilified by the press, Human
Terrain Team members were likened to de facto
intelligence agents because the judgments they pro-
vided to coalition forces about who was friend and
who was foe often amounted to who would live and
who would die. Comparisons were made to the
CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix and CORDS programs,
whereby the CIA enlisted local Vietnamese leaders
to help choose targets for assassination. The truth
about the Human Terrain System was hidden in
plain sight. It was, truly, about human terrain. In
the same way that cartographers map terrain, the
U.S. Army was mapping people. The program
supported DARPA’s technology-driven concept of
creating Combat Zones That See.
Each day, after going out on patrol, Human Ter-
rain System members fed information into a mega-
database, called Map-HT, or Mapping Human
Terrain. Map-HT uses a suite of computer tools to
record data gathered by Army intelligence officers,
Human Terrain Team members, and coalition forces,
including HUMINT and BIOINT. All the informa-
tion is uploaded into a massive database. Some of the

585
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

information is sent to the Human Terrain System

Reach-Back Research Center at Fort Leavenworth.
The more sensitive information “is stored in a classi-
fied facility at the National Ground Intelligence Cen-
ter, outside Charlottesville, Virginia,” says former
Army lieutenant colonel Troy Techau, who served as
director of the Biometrics Program of U.S. Central
Command J2X in post-invasion Iraq.
When retired vice admiral Arthur Cebrowski
told PBS NewsHour that network-centric warfare
was about “the behavior of humans in the networked
environment,” he was speaking factually. To fight
the war on terror, the Pentagon would collect, syn-
thesize, and analyze information on as many humans
as possible, and maintain that information in classi-
fied and unclassified networked databases.
“People use human networks to organize the con-
trol of resources and geography,” explains Tristan
Reed, an analyst with the private intelligence firm
Stratfor Intelligence. “No person alone can control
anything of significance. Presidents, drug lords, and
CEOs rely on people to execute their strategies and
are constrained by the capabilities and interests of
the people who work for them.”
Afghanistan was a nation controlled by warlords.
Iraq was a nation controlled by religious militia
groups. The Pentagon needed to understand who
was controlling what, and how. Mapping the terrain

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of individual humans was a means of connecting the

networks’ data points. In 2012, coalition forces
withdrew from Iraq, and with them the Human
Terrain Teams. In Afghanistan, thirty-one teams
continued to map the human terrain. Army intelli-
gence took over parts of the program from JIEDDO
and retooled it for “Phase Zero pre-conflict,” or the
phase before the next war.
“Whether it’s counterinsurgency, or whether it’s
Phase Zero pre-conflict, there are critical questions
to ask before you decide on a course of action or if
you decide to take any action,” says U.S. Army colo-
nel Sharon Hamilton, who directs the program. “If
we raise the level of understanding [among the U.S.
military], we establish a context baseline of beliefs,
values, dreams and aspirations, needs, requirements,
security —if we can do all that in Phase Zero, we
might not be talking about being somewhere else for
10 years.” As of 2014, there are MAP-HT teams
operating all over the globe, from Africa to Mexico.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, by 2011 the Army had
intrusively mapped the human terrain of at least 3.7
million foreigners, many of whom were enemy com-
batants in war zones. Apart from the effectiveness of
any of that work—and as of 2015 the Islamic State
controlled much of Iraq, while Afghanistan was
spiraling into further chaos— there exists an impor-
tant question for Americans to consider. In the

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summer of 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden

released classified information that showed the
National Security Agency had a clandestine data-
mining surveillance program in place, called PRISM,
which allowed the NSA to collect information on
millions of American citizens. Both of these pro-
grams had origins in DARPA’s Total Information
Awareness program. In the wake of the Snowden
leak, the NSA admitted, after first denying, that it
does collect information on millions of Americans
but stated that none of the information is synthe-
sized or analyzed without a warrant. But the data are
all stored in classified NSA facilities, available for
NSA reach-back. Is the NSA mapping the human
terrain in America in this same way?
Several data-mining surveillance programs
described in the fiscal year 2015 budget estimate for
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
raise privacy concerns. For its biomedical technol-
ogy program, an element of “bio-warfare defense,”
DARPA requested from Congress $112 million to
develop a technology “to allow medical practitioners
the capability to visualize and comprehend the com-
plex relationships across patient data in the elec-
tronic medical records system.” Specifically, the
technologies being developed ostensibly would allow
practitioners “to assimilate and analyze large amounts
of data and provide tools to make better-informed deci-

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sions for patient care.” It is not clear under what

authority patient data would be shared with the fed-
eral government, and DARPA declined to answer
questions for this book.
The Nexus 7 program, whose 2015 budget was
classified, monitors social media networks. Specifi-
cally, Nexus 7 “applies forecasting, data extraction
and analysis methodologies to develop tools, tech-
niques and frameworks for [examining] social net-
works.” The classified program was used operationally
in Afghanistan by a unit called DARPA Forward
Cell and won the Defense Department Joint Merito-
rious Unit Award. From 2007 to 2011, dozens of
DARPA personnel traveled “far behind enemy
lines...to ensure the latest research and technologi-
cal advances inform their efforts,’ according to
DARPA literature associated with the award. The
unit emplaced High-Altitude LIDAR Operations
Experiment (HALOE) sensors into the battle space
as well as Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar
(VADER) pods. How Nexus 7 is used in the United
States is classified, and DARPA declined to answer
general questions.
For the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text
(DEFT) program, DARPA requested from Congress
$28 million to develop computer algorithms to allow
machines to scour a vast array of text-based messages
from “free-text or semi-structured reports, messages,

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

documents or databases,” so as to pull “actionable

intelligence” out of ambiguously worded messages.
“A key DEFT emphasis is to determine the implied
and hidden meaning in text through probabilistic
inference, anomaly detection and disfluency analy-
sis.” The only way to determine if a person’s message
or part of a message was anomalous or irregular
would be to have a much larger database of that user’s
messages to compare it to. How DEFT is used in the
United States is classified, and DARPA declined to
answer general questions. These are just three out of
nearly three hundred DARPA programs that were in
development for fiscal year 2015, with a requested
budget of $2.91 billion, not counting classified
budgets.
It is impossible for American citizens to know
about and to comprehend more than a fraction of the
advanced science and technology programs that
DARPA is developing for the government. And at
the same time, it is becoming more possible for the
federal government to monitor what American citi-
zens are doing and saying, where they are going, what
they are buying, who they are communicating with,
what they are reading, what they are writing, and
how healthy they are.
All this raises an important question. Is the world
transforming into a war zone and America into a
police state, and is it DARPA that is making them so?

590
 PART V

FUTURE WAR
 talon tendle
ure 7 ne =

Joe Whine
Hg aie (patio maa
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 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Drone Wars

IF May 2013, President Barack Obama gave a

long-anticipated speech at the National Defense
University, at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.,
in which he said it was time to bring the war on ter-
ror to a close. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he
said, and quoted the 1795 warning by James Madi-
son, who stated, “No nation could preserve its free-
dom in the midst of continual warfare.” It was
President Obama’s first war speech of his second
term.
In the context of the history of the modern Amer-
ican war machin the advanced science and tech-
— e
nology of which is spearheaded by DARPA— there
was significance in the president's words and sym-
metry in the locale. It was here at Fort McNair that,
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

fifty-five years earlier, twenty-two defense scientists

gathered to produce ARPA Study No. 1, the first of
thousands of secret and unclassified DARPA studies
outlining which weapons would best serve the
United States in coming wars.
“America is at a crossroads,” President Obama
said. “We must define the nature and scope of this
struggle” — meaning the war on terror—“or else it
will define us.” Much of the rest of the president's
speech focused on the use of armed drones. He men-
tioned drone strikes on fourteen separate occasions
in his roughly fifteen-minute talk. The summary
point reported across news outlets was that President
Obama was curtailing the use of drones.
He was doing no such thing, nor, really, did the
president say he was. He merely said, “I’ve insisted on
strong oversight of all lethal action,” meaning that
White House and CIA lawyers would continue to be
in the loop before individual terrorists were targeted
for assassination by unmanned systems, including
American citizens living overseas. As commander in
chief, the president had twice endorsed significant
Department of Defense reports, “Unmanned Systems
Integrated Roadmap FY 2011-2036” and
“Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY 2013—
2038,” which called for the amplification, not the
curtailment, of the Pentagon’s pursuit of robotic war-
fare. These two reports, roughly three hundred pages

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in total, made clear that Pentagon drones were posi-

tioned to lead the way forward over the next twenty-
five years of war.
DARPA’s vast weapon systems of the future will
involve an entire army of drones. They will include
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), unmanned
ground systems (UGS), unmanned surface vehicles
(USV), unmanned maritime systems (UMS), and
unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), weapons that
reach from the depths of the ocean into outer space.
At present and in the future, the Pentagon’s drones
will fly, swim, crawl, walk, run, and swarm as they
conduct missions around the globe. Some of these
drones will be cyborgs, or what DARPA calls “bio-
hybrids,” which are part animal and part machine.
And the technology, which has been building for
decades, is closer than the average citizen might
think.

In the very heart of Washington, D.C., across the

street from the White House, sits a public park
called Lafayette Square, so named to honor the Rev-
olutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. The
park has a storied history. It briefly housed a grave-
yard and for a while a racetrack. Slaves were sold
here. During the War of 1812, the seven-acre park
served as a soldiers’ encampment. In the modern era
it has become home to war protests. It was here,

ond
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

during an antiwar rally in the fall of 2007, that Ber-

nard Crane, a prominent Washington, D.C., attor-
ney, saw one of the strangest things he had ever seen
in his life.
“My daughter had asked me to take her to the
demonstration, so I did,’ Crane explains. “I cer-
tainly wouldn’t have been there on my own. I was
half-paying attention to what was going on onstage
and half-looking around when I saw three incredibly
large dragonflies overhead,” says Crane. “They
moved in unison, as if they were in lockstep. My first
thought was, ‘Are those dragonflies mechanical? Or
are they alive?’”
Nearby, someone shouted, “Oh my God, look at
those!” Many people looked up. Vanessa Alarcon, a
college student from New York, recalled her reac-
tion. “I’m like, “What the hell is that?’ They looked
kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters.” But she
felt certain about one thing. “Those are not insects,”
Alarcon said.
Likewise, Bernard Crane surmised that the crea-
tures were not hatched of this world. “All three
moved together,” says Crane. “They would move to
the left together, then they would move to the right
together.” It was bizarre. “I had just returned from a
two-week vacation at a lake house in Maine,” Crane
says. “I'd spent a lot of time lying on my back watch-
ing dragonflies. I'd become familiar with how they

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 Drone WARS

move. How they hover. How they generally fly alone.

Dragonflies are not like carpenter ants. They don’t
do the same thing as the next dragonfly over, cer-
tainly not at the same time.”
At the protest in Lafayette Square, Bernard Crane
scrutinized the flying objects. Around him, protest-
ers led by the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan waved
signs that read “End the War!” Onstage, the Libyan-
born surgeon and president of the Muslim Ameri-
can Society, Dr. Esam Omeish, railed against the
U.S. government and insisted that President Bush
be impeached. “We must prosecute those who are
responsible!” Omeish shouted. “Let us cleanse our
State Department, our Congress, and our Pentagon
of those who have driven us into this colossal
mistake!”
The war in Iraq was at a boiling point in 2007.
Despite the recent U.S. troop surge there, violence,
mayhem, and death had reached astonishing new
levels. One month earlier, in a single day of carnage,
terrorists detonated multiple truck bombs in public
places, killing 500 people and wounding 1,500
others— the worst coordinated attacks of the war by
a factor of three. From the podium in Lafayette
Square, Omeish blamed this kind of horror— the
“blood of the Middle East people” —on the Bush
administration. “Impeach Bush today!” he shouted
again and again.
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Dr. Esam Omeish was a controversial figure. He

served on the board of directors of the Dar Al-Hijrah
Islamic Center, the Virginia mosque where two of
the 9/11 hijackers prayed before the terrorist attacks.
Omeish reportedly played a role in hiring the
mosque’s imam during that dark time, a radical
cleric named Anwar Al-Awlaki: By 2007, Al-Awlaki,
a U.S. citizen, had fled to Yemen, where he was
revealed to be a member of the Al Qaeda leadership.
From Yemen, Al-Awlaki encouraged Muslims
around the world to commit terrorist attacks against
the United States. (Some would, including Major
Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people and injured
at least thirty more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood
in Texas in 2009.) Al-Awlaki also served as imam at
the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque, from January 2001 to
April 2002. Not for another four years would Anwar
Al-Awlaki become the first U.S. citizen officially
assassinated by the U.S. government, in a drone
strike on a desert highway in Yemen. Dr. Esam
Omeish had been an associate of Anwar Al-Awlaki,
through Dar Al-Hijrah, but association is not a
crime. Were the dragonflies in Lafayette Park insect-
inspired drones sent to spy on the doctor and the
antiwar crowd? Or were they just unusually large
dragonflies?
The month after the Lafayette Square rally, the
Washington Post reported a handful of similar sight-

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ings of insect-shaped spy drones flying overhead at

political events in Washington and New York.
“Some suspect the insect-like drones are high-tech
surveillance tools,” wrote Post reporter Rick Weiss.
“Others think they are, well, dragonflies—an
ancient order of insects that even biologists concede
look about as robotic as a living creature can look.”
No federal agency would admit to having deployed
insect-sized spy drones. “But a number of U.S. gov-
ernment and private entities acknowledge they are
trying,” wrote Weiss.
By the time of the 2007 antiwar protest, DARPA
had been actively developing insect-inspired drones,
called micro air vehicles (MAVs), for at least four-
teen years. The first DARPA micro air vehicles feasi-
bility study was conducted in 1993, by the RAND
Corporation. “Insect-size flying and crawling sys-
tems could help give the United States a significant
military advantage in the coming years,’ the RAND
authors wrote. Shortly thereafter, DARPA began
soliciting scientists and awarding grants under its
Tactical Technology Office.
DARPA’s original insect-drone prototype, called
Black Widow, was built by AeroVironment, a
defense contractor in Simi Valley, California. The
six-inch mini-drone weighed 40 grams and had wings
fashioned from plastic model airplane propellers, cut
and sanded for better lift. For years, scientists with

599
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

AeroVironment struggled to get Black Widow to fly

with a payload, and by March 1999, with help from
MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, DARPA finally had its
first-generation micro air vehicle able to fly recon-
naissance missions. Powered by two lithium batter-
ies, this 56-gram variant of Black Widow carried a
black-and-white micro video camera, had excellent
maneuverability, and could even hover, or loiter, for
up to twenty-two minutes before returning to its
base. Black Widow “cannot be heard above ambient
noise at 100 feet,” reported scientists in the field,
“and unless youre specifically looking for [it] you
can’t see it.” Even birds were fooled. “It looks more
like a bird than an airplane,” the scientists wrote.
“We have seen sparrows and seagulls flocking
around the MAV several times.”
DARPA was enthusiastic; remember, this was
March 1999. “The Black Widow MAV program has
been quite successful in proving that a 6-inch air-
craft is not only feasible, but that it can perform
useful missions that were previously deemed impos-
sible,” read an after-action report. Then came the
more important idea. A RAND analyst named Ben-
jamin Lambeth concluded that mini-drones like the
Black Widow had enormous potential, not just in
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, but
ultimately as a means of assassination. Mini-drones
disguised as insects, Lambeth wrote, could one day

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be outfitted with “micro-explosive bombs... able to

kill moving targets with just grams of explosive.”
DARPA expanded its micro air vehicle program to
include at least three research efforts, or “thrusts,”
each of which relies on the animal kingdom for inspi-
ration and ideas. The results of these programs are
called biosystems, biomimetics, and biohybrids. Bio-
systems involves the use of living, breathing insects or
animals trained for military use. During the Vietnam
War, German shepherds were trained to track Viet-
cong fighters tagged with chemicals. During the Iraq
war, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico trained bees to locate buried IEDs.
These are two examples of biosystemic programs.
Biomimetics research is a field closely related to
bionics. In DARPA’s biomimetics programs, scien-
tists build mechanical systems to imitate creatures
from the natural world. DARPA designed biomi-
metic drones, like the Black Widow MAY, including
ones that appear to be hummingbirds, bats, beetles,
and flies. If DARPA has dragonfly drones, they
would fall under the rubric of biomimetics. Biomi-
metic drones have been used by the intelligence com-
munity since at least 1972, when the CIA built a
prototype dragonfly drone it called “insectothopter.”
A miniature engine powered the drone’s wings to
move up and down. Insectothopter ran on a thimble-
ful of gas.

601
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Biohybrids tread on entirely new ground. DAR-

PA’s micro air vehicle programs are built on decades
of aviation technology, aerospace engineering, com-
puter science, and nanotechnology, which is the sci-
ence of making things small. Then at the turn of the
twenty-first century, a new field called nanobiology,
or nanobiotechnology, came into being. Once rele-
gated to the pages of science fiction, this burgeoning
new discipline allows scientists to “couple” biologi-
cal systems with machines. In 1999 DARPA
awarded grants for biohybrid programs. The stated
goal was to create cyborgs—part living creatures,
part machines.
DARPA’s biohybrid programs remain shrouded
in mystery. Biohybrid military applications are
largely classified, but a few prototype programs have
been unveiled. As nanobiotechnology advanced in
the early years of the twenty-first century, tiny
machines could realistically be wired into animals
brains, bodies, and wings. Starting in 2002, DARPA
began periodically releasing incremental informa-
tion into the public domain.
That year, news of an early prototype emerged
from a DARPA-funded laboratory at the State Uni-
versity of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in
Brooklyn, led by researcher Sanjiv Talwar. Scientists
implanted electrodes in the medial forebrain bundle
of a rat’s brain, a region that senses reward. Wires

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 DRONE WARS

the size of a human hair connected the electrodes to

a microprocessor sewn onto the rat’s back, like a
backpack. From a laptop 500 meters—a third of a
mile—away, Talwar and his team of scientists sent
electronic pulses to the rat’s medial forebrain. After
using Pavlovian techniques to train the rat to
respond to stimuli, DARPA scientists were able to
control the rat, steering it left, right, and forward
through a maze via brain stimulation.
Animal rights activists cried foul. “The animal is no
longer functioning as an animal,” lamented Gary Fran-
cione, an animal welfare expert at Rutgers University
School of Law. But for the majority of Americans, lab
rats are synonymous with scientific experimentation.
The idea being it’s okay to experiment on rats, to con-
trol their brains, in the spirit of progress. The rat was
not generally perceived as a cyborg per se. It was just a
lab rat hooked up to a machine.
Over the next five years, DARPA’ biohybrid pro-
grams advanced at an astonishing pace. Micropro-
cessor technology was doubling in capacity every
eighteen months. By June 29, 2007, when Apple
rereleased its first-generation iPhone, Americans
could now carry in their pockets more technology
than NASA had when it sent astronauts to the moon.
One of the first insect cyborgs was unveiled in
2009. Inside a DARPA-funded laboratory at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, Professor Michel
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 THe PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Maharbiz and his colleagues coupled a green June

beetle with a machine. The scientists implanted
electrodes into the brain and wings of a 2-centimeter-
long beetle and sewed a radio receiver onto its back.
By remotely delivering electrical pulses to the beetle’s
brain, they were able to start and stop the beating of
the beetle’s wings, thereby steering and controlling
the insect in flight.
In 2014, DARPA scientists working at North
Carolina State University again broke new ground,
this time with the Manduca sexta moth, or goliath
worm, an insect with a metamorphic life cycle that
lasts forty days. During the late pupa stage, DARPA
scientist Dr. Alper Bozkurt and his team surgically
inserted an electrode in the dorsal thorax of the
moth, between its neck and abdomen. “The tissue
develops around the implanted electrodes and
secures their attachment to the insect’s body over the
course of a few days,” explains team member Alex-
ander Verderber. “The electrodes emerge as a part of
the insect’s body in the final adult stage as a moth.”
By “taking advantage of the rebuilding of the insect’s
entire tissue system during metamorphic develop-
ment,” says Verderber, the scientists were able to
create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine.
“One use of the biohybrid would be for use in appli-
cations such as search and rescue operations,”
Bozkurt says. DARPA scientists working on such

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cyborg programs invariably describe the programs

as designed to help society. Certainly, subjects like ,
free will, ethics, and the consequences of manufactur-
ing cyborgs are worthy of and ripe for discussion.
Another question: What are DARPA’ plans for aug-
menting humans with machines?
By 2014, DARPA had handed over many of its
micro air vehicle programs to the military services.
An unclassified in-house 2013 U.S. Air Force
Research Laboratory animated video revealed the
burgeoning new role that biosystemic, biomimetic,
and biohybrid micro air vehicles would play in future
weapons systems. The video begins with hundreds
of mini-drones, shaped like living creatures, being
dropped from a much larger drone. The MAVs rain
down onto an urban center below. At ground level, a
man parks a van in front of a cement-block safe
house. Across the street, a pigeon sits on an electrical
wire.
“The small size of MAVs allows them to be hid-
den in plain sight,” says the video’s narrator. A
close-up of the “pigeon” reveals that the bird is a sur-
veillance drone, its head a high-resolution video
camera. “Once in place,” the narrator explains, “an
MAV can enter a low-power, extended surveillance
mode for missions lasting days or weeks. This may
require the MAV to harvest energy from environ-
mental sources such as sunlight or wind, or from

605
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

manmade sources such as power lines and vibrating

machinery.”
The pigeon drone transmits information to an
Air Force technician sitting at a desk in an informa-
tion operations center at a remote location. Using
biometrics, the technician confirms that the man
driving the van is a terror suspect.
The man exits the van and walks down an alley-
way. The pigeon takes flight, now joined by a beetle-
shaped drone. The pigeon falls away and the beetle
MAV follows the suspect through a maze of alley-
ways. “MAVs will use micro-sensors and micropro-
cessor technology to navigate and track targets
through complicated terrain such as urban areas,”
says the narrator. As the terror suspect enters an
apartment building, the beetle drone follows along.
“Small in size, agile flight will enable MAVs to
covertly enter locations inaccessible by traditional
means of aerial surveillance,” the narrator says, but
“MAVs will use new forms of navigation, such as a
vision-based technique called ‘optic flow’ This
remains robust when traditional techniques such as
GPS are unavailable.” The drone can navigate and
see on its own.
In the video, once inside the building, the beetle
drone hovers near an apartment, loitering above the
doorway, out of sight. When the door opens, a man
steps out into the hallway and looks around before

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exiting the apartment. He closes the door behind

him, but not before the beetle drone is able to slip
surreptitiously inside. Now, a swarm of additional
flying insect drones join in the mission. “Multiple
MAVs, each equipped with small sensors, will work
together to survey a large area,” the narrator explains.
“While some MAVs may be used purely for visual
reconnaissance, others may be used for targeting or
tagging of sensitive locations.” Inside the apartment,
a terrorist with a high-powered sniper rifle is seen
setting up a kill shot. As the enemy sniper prepares
to fire his weapon out an open window, one of the
beetle-sized micro air vehicles flies toward him and
hovers near the back of his head.
“Individual MAVs may perform direct attack
missions,” says the narrator, “can be equipped with
incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads, or
even explosives for precision targeting capabilities.”
As the beetle hovers near the sniper’s head, its pay-
load explodes. The sniper falls over, dead. The ani-
mated video ends.

In addition to missions that involve targeted kills,

DARPA’s vast weapon systems of the future will
involve an army of drones on intelligence, surveil-
lance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The
MAVs are but one element. DARPA has scores of
programs for biologically inspired robotic systems
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 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

that fly. While micro air vehicles will fly slow and
low, DARPA’s hypersonic stealth drones will fly high
and fast. The armed Falcon HT V-2, launched from
a rocket, will travel at Mach 20 (13,000 miles per
hour), or twenty-two times faster than a commercial
jet. According to DARPA documents, “at HTV-2
speeds, flight time between New York City and Los
Angeles would be less than 12 minutes.” The Mach
20 drone will be able to strike any target, anywhere
in the world, in less than an hour. As the Defense
Department grows increasingly reliant on satellite
technology, DARPA must provide the Pentagon
with “quick, affordable and routine access to space,”
says DARPA. The XS-1 experimental space drone,
announced in the fall of 2013, is DARPA’s seminal
hypersonic low-earth-orbit drone, designed to be
able to fly faster on consecutive around-the-world
missions than any other drone in U.S. history. Spe-
cifics about the weapons systems on board the XS-1
are classified.
The oceans are vast, and DARPA’s plans for
unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) are equally
immense. One program is Hydra, an undersea sys-
tem that includes a fleet of baby submersibles com-
bined with a mother ship. The baby UUVs are being
designed to deploy from the mother ship into shal-
low coastal waters and harbors, and then return.
Integrated into this underwater system will also be

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airborne drones, with encapsulated UAVs able to

eject from the Hydra mother ship, surface, launch,
become airborne, and fly reconnaissance or combat
missions. In this way, Hydra will serve as a subma-
rine, a transport aircraft, and a communications
center in one. In another undersea DARPA pro-
gram, called Upward Falling Payloads, unmanned
sensor systems are placed on the deep-ocean floor,
where they lie undetected for years at a time, gather-
ing intelligence. “These deep-sea nodes could be
remotely activated when needed and recalled to the
surface,” according to DARPA; hence “they fall
upward.”
Ground robotic systems are advancing with equal
pace. There is Atlas, a high-mobility humanoid
robot, strong and coordinated enough to navigate
rough outdoor terrain, climb stairs, and manipulate
environments with its hands. Atlas’s head, made up
of sensors, includes stereo cameras and a laser range
finder. Similarly anthropomorphic is the six-foot-
two Valkyrie robot, built by NASA for the DARPA
robotics challenge. It opens windows and wears
clothes. NASA hopes to send Valkyrie to Mars as a
humanoid avatar and one day assemble structures
there.
Accompanying the humanoid robots are
Unmanned Ground System robots, many of which
resemble animals. The AlphaDog robot, which is
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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

about the size of a small rhinoceros, is able to trav-

erse rugged terrain with the ease of a four-legged
animal while carrying 400 pounds of military
equipment. It can recognize its squad leader’s com-
mands and right itself after falling over. The MIT
cheetah robot, presently the fastest legged robot in
history, can run twenty-eight miles per hour and
jump over obstacles in its path. Cheetah runs on a
quiet electric motor, giving it stealth like a cat. Other
land-based robots roll over terrain on continuous
track treads. There is the Talon SWORD (Special
Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection
System) robot, one of the fastest in the fleet, and a
next-generation incarnation of the bomb disposal
robots fielded to EOD technicians in Iraq. The
Talon SWORD carries an M249 Squad Automatic
Weapon and a 6mm rocket launcher, each of which
can be remotely controlled from half a mile away. Its
more powerful cousin, the MAARS (Modular
Advanced Armed Robotic System), is designed to
conduct reconnaissance and surveillance missions,
and then to kill human targets from almost two
miles away. In addition to firing machine guns and
grenade launchers from their robotic arms, the
MAARS robots are equipped with motion detec-
tors, acoustic sensors, siren and speaker systems,
nonlethal laser dazzlers, less-than-lethal grenades,
and encryption technology to make the robotic

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killer “extremely safe and tamper proof,” according

to unclassified DARPA documents.
DARPA’s LANdroids (Local Area Network droids)
program is one of the smallest of the tread-borne
robotic ground systems. LANdroids are “small, inex-
pensive, smart robotic radio network relay nodes” that
work in a fleet, or swarm, says DARPA. These hand-
size robots are dropped by dismounted soldiers as they
deploy into urban combat zones, capable of leveraging
their stealth and mobility “to coordinate and move
autonomously” on their own. If one of the LANdroids
is destroyed in battle, the others rearrange themselves
accordingly. The LANdroids program aims to develop
“intelligent autonomous radio drones,” a concept that
is critical to understanding where the Pentagon’s army
of robots is headed over the next twenty-five years.
“The program seeks to demonstrate the capabilities
of selfconfiguration, selfoptimization, self-healing,
tethering, and power management,’ according to
DARPA. In this sense, DARPA’s LANdroids program
is a prototype for future robotic systems that aim
toward autonomy, or self-governance. Autonomy lies
at the heart of the Pentagon’s newest revolution in mil-
itary affairs. To be clear about what “autonomy” is, the
concept is spelled out by the Pentagon, using a drone
as an example: “When an aircraft is under remote con-
trol, it is not autonomous. And when it is autonomous,
it is not under remote control.” It governs itself.

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James

A. Winnefeld made this explicit in the Pentagon’s
drone warfare report: “The autonomous systems are
self-directed toward a goal in that they do not require
outside control, but rather are governed by laws and
strategies that direct their behavior.” The nontechni-
cal term for an autonomous drone is a hunter-killer
robot, a robotic system “intelligent” enough to be
shown a photograph of a person and told to return
when the target has been killed.
This is science, not science fiction. It is also Penta-
gon policy. Department of Defense Directive
3000.09, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems,” released
in 2012, mandates that “autonomous and semi-
autonomous weapon systems shall be designed.” And
like all advanced scientific endeavors, the technology
must evolve, from vision to reality. It is DARPA’s job
to lead the way. “DoD envisions unmanned systems
seamlessly operating with manned systems while
gradually reducing the degree of human control and
decision making...with an ultimate goal of full
autonomy.
According to the Defense Department’s 2011
“Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap,” the pro-
gression from semiautonomy to full autonomy over
the next twenty-five years would be a fourfold pro-
cess. To begin with, unmanned systems would be
“human operated,” or entirely controlled by man, as

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 Drone WARS

they are today. The second step involves “human

delegated” systems, with drones learning how to
“perform many functions independently of human
control.” The third level involves “human super-
vised” systems, in which the machines perform tasks
independently after being given “top-level permis-
sions or directions by a human.” Finally, the robotic
systems would become “fully autonomous,” whereby
“the system receives goals from humans and trans-
lates them into tasks to be performed without
human interaction.” A note accompanies the level-
four goal: “A human could still enter the loop in an
emergency or change the goals, although in practice
there may be significant time delays before human
intervention occurs.” Time is everything. It still
takes only 1,600 seconds for a nuclear weapon to
travel halfway around the earth.
The world has reached an epoch-defining moment
the magnitude of which has not been seen since the
decision to engineer the thermonuclear bomb. If we
give machines autonomy, the potential for unintended
consequences is unparalleled. Some civilian-sector
robotics experts say the technology for self-governing
machines is simply not there, and won't be for decades.
That autonomous machines require true artificial
intelligence, and Al capabilities are not yet anywhere
near the threshold of selfgovernance. But at least one
very powerful individual at the Pentagon disagrees.
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“Dramatic progress in supporting technologies sug-

gests that unprecedented, perhaps unimagined
degrees of autonomy can be introduced into current
and future military systems,” Ashton B. Carter, then
undersecretary of defense, wrote in 2010 in a letter
tasking defense scientists to study the technology.
“This could presage dramatic changes in military
capability and force composition comparable to the
introduction of ‘Net-Centricity’” In February 2015,
Ashton Carter took office as President Obama’s secre-
tary of defense.
So what is the status of artificial intelligence? Are
hunter-killer robots right around the bend? In order
to discern DARPA’s AI capabilities, I traveled to the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It
was here, starting in 1943, that U.S. defense scien-
tists engineered the world’s first atomic bomb. And
it is here, in the spring of 2014, that DARPA scien-
tists were working to create an artificial brain.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Brain Wars

‘T= Los Alamos National Laboratory sits at the

top of a mountain range in the high desert of
northern New Mexico. It is a long, steep drive
to get there from the capital city of Santa Fe, through
the Tesuque Indian Reservation, over the Rio
Grande, and into the Santa Fe National Forest. Iam
headed to the laboratory of Dr. Garrett T. Kenyon,
whose program falls under the rubric of synthetic
cognition, an attempt to build an artificial brain.
Roboticists define artificial brains as man-made
machines designed to be as intelligent, self-aware, and
creative as humans. No such machine yet exists, but
DARPA scientists like Dr. Kenyon believe that, given
the rapid advances in DARPA technologies, one day
soon they will. There are two technologies that play

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key roles in advancing artificial intelligence, and

they are computing, which involves machines, and
neuroscience, which involves the human brain.
During the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
of the 2.5 million Americans who served, more than
300,000 returned home with brain injuries. DARPA
calls these individuals brain-wounded warriors. One
of the most severe forms of brain injury sustained by
brain-wounded warriors is traumatic brain injury, or
TBI, which occurs when an object, such as a bullet
or piece of mortar or shrapnel from an IED, pierces
the skull and enters the brain tissue. To address TBI,
as well as other brain injuries sustained in modern
warfare, DARPA has publicly stated that it has a
multitude of science and technology programs in
place. The agency’s long-term goals in brain science
research, it says, revolve around trying to restore the
minds and memories of brain-wounded warriors.
Through the Office of the Secretary of Defense
(OSD), I submitted multiple written requests to
interview one or more brain-wounded warriors who
are currently participating in DARPA’s brain
research programs. OSD and DARPA repeatedly
declined.
Traumatic brain injury is as old as war. U.S. sol-
diers have sustained traumatic brain injuries in each
and every one of America’s wars since the Revolu-
tion. When I learned that Allen Macy Dulles, the

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brain-wounded warrior from the Korean War, was,

at age eighty-four, living just down the road from the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, I arranged to visit
him—before heading to Dr. Kenyon’s laboratory
and its artificial brain.
Allen Macy Dulles, the only son of the former
CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles, lives off the old
Santa Fe Trail, down a small side road, inside a large
brown adobe brick home. When I visit him in the
spring of 2014, he has been living with a severe form
of traumatic brain injury for almost sixty-two years.
Allen Macy Dulles stopped being able to record new
memories back in November 1952, when he was
twenty-two years old. He was the young soldier I
wrote about earlier in this book, the Marine Corps
officer who went out on patrol on the western front
in Korea, near a hilltop called Outpost Bunker Hill,
and got hit by enemy mortar fire. He has been alive
all this time and has been well taken care of by his
older sister and guardian, Joan Dulles Talley.
When I arrive, he looks like any elderly gentle-
man might look, sitting in a chair in his kitchen,
waiting for his lunch. There are flowers on the table
and there is artwork on the walls. Physically Allen
Macy Dulles is healthy, with a big smile and a neatly
combed mustache. “He looks just like our father,”
Joan Dulles Talley says. I come in and sit down
across from him, take out my digital tape recorder,

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and begin our interview. Allen speaks clearly and

eloquently. Remarkably, he can discuss the Egyptian
pharaohs and the ancient Greeks with the ease of the
classics scholar he once was, because he studied and
learned these subjects before his brain was injured.
His neural network allows him to access this infor-
mation, as memory, and yet he cannot recall what he
had for dinner last night or for breakfast this morn-
ing. When I leave, he will have no memory of my
having been here, his sister Joan explains.
Joan Talley, a Jungian analyst by training, age
ninety in 2014, is tall, gentle, fiercely knowledgeable,
and has Katharine Hepburn’s voice. Her first hus-
band worked as a spy during World War II and later
served as the U.S. ambassador to Iran. After their
divorce, Joan Talley moved to Switzerland, where she
trained as a psychotherapist specializing in the psy-
chology of the unconscious, and regularly visited her
brother Allen at the mental institution where he lived
for a while, on Lake Geneva. After their father died,
Joan Talley brought her brother back to America and
has been his guardian ever since.
The injury in Korea left Allen Macy Dulles
mostly deaf in his left ear. To compensate for this
deficiency he uses a machine, a 1990s-era listening
aid that includes a handheld transmitter, and a
microphone attached to the transmitter by long
wires. In his left ear he wears an earpiece. To speak

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with him, I pick up the microphone and talk into it.

To Allen, this is high technology and does not make
much sense. It did not exist in the world he is capa-
ble of remembering, the world before November
1952.
“What are your plans for the day?” I ask.
“Nothing in particular,” he says, “although I do
like going to secondhand stores.”
“What do you buy?”
“Anything that happens to do with books or sci-
entific devices,” Allen says. He delivers a short lec-
ture on scientific devices. But he is talking about
science from before 1952.
“Will you remember this conversation in an
hour?” I ask.
“Probably not,” he says. “As you know, my [short-
term] memory is practically nonexistent.”
I ask Allen to share a memory with me from
before his brain injury, something from high school.
“T remember a good class on constitutional inter-
pretation,” he says.
“Why did you decide to join the Marines?” I ask.
“Well, you see,” he says with conviction, “I was
seventeen years old, I had the opportunity to enlist.
The war in Europe had ended. I knew there were
going to be more wars. There is no shortage of wars.”
Allen discusses war. Greek warfare. The wars in
Europe. The war with Nazi Germany. The war in

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Korea against the Chinese. He can talk about all the

wars leading up to 1952, and then his knowledge of
war, and of the science and technology that have
resulted from wars, abruptly ends for him. He has
lived through every event and invention discussed in
this book—the Castle Bravo bomb, the ICBM, the
ARPANET, the Internet, the Vietnam War, the
Gulf War, GPS, stealth technology, robots and com-
puters, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan— but
he has no memory or knowledge of any of it having
happened. Allen Macy Dulles is a living anachro-
nism. He belongs to a world that no longer exists.
For him, time stands still. It stopped in 1952, before
science and technology transformed and shaped the
modern world in which we live.
Carl Sagan once stated, “It is suicidal to create a
society dependent on science and technology in which
hardly anybody knows anything about the science
and technology.” But I imagine if Carl Sagan had met
Allen Macy Dulles, he would have given the man a
pass. As for the rest of us, Sagan’s message applies.

DARPA leads the nation in advancing science and

technology. DARPA makes the future happen.
Starting in 2013, DARPA teamed up with the White
House on the BRAIN (Brain Research through
Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative
and declared this decade to be the decade of the

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brain. The White House calls the BRAIN initiative

“a bold new research effort to revolutionize our
understanding of the human mind and uncover new
ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like
Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy and
traumatic brain injury.” These are important goals.
But DARPA’ stated goal is advancing weapons tech-
nology, not curing mental illness. What is DARPA’s
primary goal in researching the brain?
To help brain-wounded warriors, DARPA has
several programs of note. In Restoring Active Mem-
ory (RAM), scientists have developed and are test-
ing implantable wireless “neuroprosthetics” as a
possible means of overcoming amnesia. As part of
the RAM program, soldiers allow the tiny machines,
or chips, to be implanted in their brain. The Reor-
ganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recov-
ery (REPAIR) program seeks to understand how the
brain makes computations and organizes them. This
too requires the surgical implantation of a brain
chip, as does the Restorative Encoding Memory
Integration Neural Device (REMIND). Despite
multiple appeals through the Office of the Secretary
of Defense, DARPA declined to grant me an inter-
view with any of these brain-wounded warriors.
DARPA would also not answer specific questions
about RAM, REPAIR, or REMIND.
According to the Pentagon, “mental disorders are

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

the leading cause of hospital bed days and the sec-

ond leading cause of medical encounters for active
duty servicemembers.” To address this problem,
DARPA has developed brain implants for the treat-
ment of war-related mental, or neuropsychological,
illnesses. The Systems-Based Neurotechnology for
Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program seeks to
treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by surgi-
cally implanting multiple electrodes in various
regions of the brain as well as a microchip between
the brain and skull of the brain-wounded warfighter.
The chips wirelessly transmit data back to an infor-
mation operations center, which has the capacity to
send electrical impulses remotely to different regions
of the warfighter’s brain to relieve symptoms like
anxiety and delayed reaction time—a kind of twenty-
first-century electroshock therapy on the go. In tech-
nical terms, DARPA states that its goals are a way to
“incorporate near real-time recording, analysis and
stimulation in next-generation devices inspired by
current Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS).” The Office
of the Secretary of Defense and DARPA declined to
grant access to any SUBNETS test subjects or to
answer specific questions about the program.
If the past teaches us about the present, it is clear
that DARPA’: stated goals regarding its brain pro-
grams are not DARPA’ only goals. DARPA is not pri-
marily in the business of helping soldiers heal; that is

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the job of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

DARPA’ job is to “create and prevent strategic sur-
prise.” DARPA prepares vast weapons systems of the
future. So what are the classified brain programs really
for? What is the reason behind the reason?
DARPA’ limb prosthetics program might offer a
number of clues. In 2005, with IEDs dominating
the war news, DARPA initiated a program called
Revolutionizing Prosthetics. Over the next two years
the program was split in two parts. DEKA Research
and Development Corporation, in New Hampshire,
was given a DARPA contract to make a robotic pros-
thetic arm. Johns Hopkins University’s Applied
Physics Laboratory was given a DARPA contract to
create a “thought-controlled” robotic arm. These
were highly ambitious goals.
Of Johns Hopkins’s amazing progress, MIT Tech-
nology Review reported in 2007, “They have demon-
strated for the first time that neural activity recorded
from a monkey’s brain can control fingers on a
robotic hand, making it play several notes on a
piano.” But this was not entirely accurate, according
to Jonathan Kuniholm, a former engineer officer
with the First Battalion, Twenty-third Marines.
Kuniholm lost his right arm to an IED buried along
the Euphrates River in Haditha, Iraq. The home-
made bomb was disguised as a discarded olive oil
can. After recuperating, Kuniholm signed on with

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

DARPA and Revolutionizing Prosthetics.. “The

Intrinsic hand was physically capable of all the indi-
vidual movements necessary to play the piano,”
Kuniholm wrote in JEEE Spectrum, the trade maga-
zine for the world’s largest professional association for
the advancement of technology, “but it could not be
controlled by a person in real time. There was no
muscle twitch or electrical signal being decoded by
signal-processing algorithms in real time. The hand
was preprogrammed, like a player piano.” In some
regards, Revolutionizing Prosthetics did more for
DARPA’s image than it did for warfighters who had
lost limbs in war.
Major news organizations wrote stories about the
DEKA arm, hailing it as revolutionary, spectacular,
and astounding. In 2009, Dean Kamen, DEKA’s
founder, recalled on 60 Minutes what it was like
when DARPA officials came to him proposing to
build a robotic arm. “They said, “We want these kids
to have something put back on them that will essen-
tially allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a
grape off the table, know the difference without
looking at it’” Kamen welcomed the challenge, and
he and his team of forty engineers spent a year work-
ing on the problem; DARPA spent $100 million.
But when the cameras go off, the arms usually go
backto the DARPA laboratories, where they gener-
ally sit on shelves. “Most of us strap back on our

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Captain Hook arms,” said one participant, who lost

an arm in Iraq and who has appeared on national
television modeling the DEKA arm but asked not to
be identified by name. This individual has become
frustrated with DARPA, whose motives he sees as
something other than getting better prosthetics to
war veterans, though he does not claim to know
what DARPA’s ulterior motives might be. The
DEKA arm, which costs up to $650,000 to engi-
neer, has yet to find a partner to mass-produce its
system. In November 2014 the FDA approved mar-
keting the device, which reportedly can respond to
multiple simultaneous commands from a wearer's
brain. In a press statement, DARPA said it was
happy “to repay some of the debt we owe to our Ser-
vice members,” but acknowledges there is no time-
line on when the DEKA arm will become available
to amputees. America’s wounded warriors continue
to wear what amputees have worn since World War
I, the so-called Captain Hook arm, which is offi-
cially called the Dorrance hook, invented by D. W.
Dorrance in 1912.
It is likely that DARPA’s primary goal in advanc-
ing prosthetics is to give robots, not men, better arms
and hands. Robotics expert Noel Sharkey, who serves
as a United Nations advisor and chairman of the
International Committee for Robot Arms Control,
explains: “You hear DARPA talk about a robot they

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 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

are designing, being able to turn a valve inside a

Fukushima-type power plant. Yes, that is an example
of robots keeping humans safe. But that robotic hand
will also soon be able to turn a valve onboard, say, a
ship.” A ship that a robot has been sent to take over in
a military operation.
The technologies DARPA is pursuing in its brain
and prosthetics programs have dual use in DARPA’s
efforts to engineer hunter-killer robots. Coupled
with the quest for artificial intelligence, all this
might explain why DARPA is so focused on looking
inside people’s brains.

High on the top of a forested plateau in the Jemez

Mountains, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is
a storied place with a rich and complex history of
nuclear weapons research. The Los Alamos National
Laboratory is also one of the largest producers of
defense science in the nation, with a mission state-
ment that reads, “Delivering science and technology
to protect our nation and promote world stability.”
Although the list of DARPA contracts here at Los
Alamos is not public knowledge, it is voluminous.
Most of the contracts are classified. These are not
the programs that DARPA’s public affairs officers
are quick to promote in the press. The classified pro-
grams are not like the ones people read about in
mainstream magazines and newspapers, about bul-

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lets that bend, prosthetics that can pick up a grape,

cars that can drive themselves, technology you can
swallow, and robots that can fall down and get back
up again. Here, in the classified laboratories at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, and in other classified
national laboratories and research facilities like this
one, is where some of DARPA’s highest-risk, highest-
payoff programs evolve. The consequential weapons
systems of the future are born black, as in classified,
and, like the hydrogen bomb, McNamara’s elec-
tronic fence, Assault Breaker, and stealth technol-
ogy, are unveiled to the public only after they have
created a revolution in military affairs.
Within the thirty-six-square-mile Los Alamos
campus, there are 1,280 buildings, eleven of which
are nuclear facilities. Even the cooks who work in
some of the kitchens have top secret Q clearances.
There are sixty-three miles of gas lines inside the labo-
ratory campus, thirty-four miles of electrical lines,
and a power plant. There are roughly ten thousand
employees and contract workers at the lab, and accord-
ing to the historian at the Los Alamos Historical
Society, roughly half of them have Ph.D.s. One scien-
tist who has a DARPA contract and is at liberty to
discuss some of his work on the artificial brain is Dr.
Garrett T. Kenyon.
Outside Dr. Kenyon’s office at Los Alamos there
is an armored truck with a machine gun mounted

627
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

on top. It is parked in the red zone, by the front

entrance. Inside the building, Dr. Kenyon and his
team work on artificial intelligence, man’s quest to
create a sentient machine. Dr. Kenyon is part of the
synthetic cognition group at Los Alamos National
Laboratory. He and his team are simulating the pri-
mate visual system, using a supercomputer to power
the operation. Specifically, the team is trying to cre-
ate a precise computer model of the human eye,
including all of its neural networks, to understand
the relationship between visual cognition and the
brain. This is not necessarily an impossible task, but
it does require one of the fastest computers in the
world to model such a complex neural network as
that of the human eye. Neuroscientists currently
believe that there are 100 billion neurons inside a
human brain and that every sensory message the
brain receives involves an exponential number of
neural connections between these networks.
To do their work, Dr. Kenyon and his team use a
part of the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, or what
is left of it. When Roadrunner was built in 2008 it
was the fastest computer in the world, able to perform
1 million billion calculations per second, setting the
world’s record for petaflops per second data-processing
speeds. That is a far cry from the World War I-era
ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Moore School, which completed five thousand opera-

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tions per second. But science builds. Visions become

reality. Thus the ENIAC inspired John von Neu-
mann to build MANIAC, which inspired Daniel
Slotnick to build the ILLIAC IV, which led to the
IBM Roadrunner. In 2014, the world’s fastest super-
computer, located at China’s National University of
Defense Technology and called Tianhe-2, could
reportedly perform some 30 quadrillion calculations
per second, or 33.86 petaflops.
As for the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer,
between its unveiling in 2008 and my visit in 2014,
it has become obsolete. The machine cost $100 mil-
lion to build but has since become too power-
inefficient to continue to run. The machine cannot
be recycled, though, because it holds many of the
nation’s nuclear secrets. Computers never entirely
lose the information they record. Because of this,
and since the Los Alamos National Laboratory
requires a bigger, faster, more efficient computer,
Roadrunner is being destroyed. Some of what is left
of it is being used by Dr. Kenyon’s team in their
quest for artificial intelligence. The banks of com-
puters they use fit into a room about the size of a
basketball court.
Dr. Kenyon takes me to look at the supercom-
puter. It is located inside the brick and glass building
that houses his laboratory, beyond the armored
truck, down a long corridor and behind a single

629
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

locked door. Dr. Kenyon and I peer in through a

small window at the Roadrunner supercomputer.
The lights are low. The banks of processors are alight
with tiny red and white blinking lights. There are
racks of machines in rows. There are bundles of
cables on the floor. Kenyon points inside. “It’s a giant
abacus,” he says. “The real power is in the human
brain.” Kenyon taps his forehead. “So small, so
infinite.”
We walk through another part of the building.
While we wait for an elevator, Dr. Kenyon unfolds a
dinner-size napkin and holds it up in the air in front of
his forehead. “This is about the size of your brain,
spread out,” he says. “The part that matters. The cere-
bral cortex.” The 100 billion neurons there are also
known as the brain’s gray matter. “And the human
brain does things beyond anyone's comprehension.
Evolution created the smartest machine in this world.”
Dr. Kenyon explains the concept behind the
DARPA-funded project he is working on, in layman’s
terms. “Today, my twelve-year-old daughter repro-
grammed my smart phone so it has facial recognition
software,” he says. “But seventy to eighty percent of
the time it doesn’t recognize me.” He holds up his
phone to his face. “The smart phone can’t always see
it’s me. I can see it’s me. There’s the double chin, like
it or not. So why can’t my phone recognize me all
the time? Why can’t it perform a function that my

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dog can, the minute I walk in the door? For all the
things the smart phone can do, it can’t do the sim-
plest things that biological systems can. Recognize
someone all the time.”
Kenyon notes that if a person’s teenaged child
recognized him only 70 to 80 percent of the time,
there would be something seriously wrong with the
child’s brain. “Sentient beings recognize through
sight,” he explains. “My phone, on the other hand, is
just comparing a set of stored features with a set of
features extracted from the input coming from its
camera. It’s not ‘seeing’ anything. My phone is not
resolving the pixels into a rich scene, with all the
interrelationships implicit therein. My phone is just
finding a few key points and constructing a high-
dimensional feature vector that it can compare to a
stored feature vector.”
At present, true recognition—as in cognition, or
acquiring knowledge and understanding through
thought, experience, and the senses—is done only
by sentient beings. “We think that by working hard
to understand how biological systems solve this
problem, how the primate visual system recognizes
things, we can understand something fundamental
about how brains solve the problems they do, like
recognition. Until then, computers are blind,” Ken-
yon says. “They can’t see.”
Which raises at least one technical problem

631
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

regarding artificial intelligence and autonomous

hunter-killer drones. “I think robot assassins are a
very bad idea for a number of reasons,” Garrett Ken-
yon asserts. “Moral and political issues aside, the
technical hurdles to overcome cannot be under-
stated,” he says. “It’s misleading to think just because
my smart phone can ‘identify’ me seventy percent of
the time that it has thirty percent to go.” We are
talking about orders of magnitude. “The chances
that my daughter might not recognize me, or mis-
identify me from a short distance, or because I am
wearing a hat,” he says, “are about one in 0.0001.
And we still do not understand how neural systems
work.”
Dr. Kenyon is excited by his research. He is con-
vinced that neuroscientists of today are like alche-
mists of the Middle Ages trying to understand
chemistry. That all the exciting discoveries lie ahead.
“Think of how much chemists in the Dark Ages did
not understand about chemistry compared to what
we know now. We neuroscientists are trapped in a
bubble of ignorance. We still don’t have a clue about
what's going on in the human brain. We have theo-
ries; we just don’t know for sure. We can’t build an
electrical circuit, digital or analogue or other, that
mimics the biological system. We can’t emulate the
behavior. One day in the future, we think we can.”
Dr. Kenyon says that one of the most powerful

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facts about DARPA as an organization is that it

includes theoretical scientists and engineers in its
ranks. The quest for artificial intelligence, he says, is
similar to getting humans to Mars. Once you have
confidence you can do it, “then getting to Mars is an
engineering problem,” he says. In his laboratory,
metaphorically, “we just don’t know where Mars is
yet.” But Dr. Kenyon and his team are determined.
“T don’t think it’s that far away,” he says of artificial
intelligence. “The question is, who will be the
Columbus here?”

Columbus was an explorer looking for a new land.

DARPA is looking for ways to use science to fight
future wars.
Interviews with DARPA scientists of today give a
sense that in the twenty-first century, programs that
once existed in the realm of science fiction are rap-
idly becoming the science of the here and now. If
Dr. Garrett Kenyon’s Los Alamos laboratory repre-
sents the future of the mind, the laboratory of Dr.
Susan V. Bryant and Dr. David M. Gardiner at the
University of California, Irvine, represents the future
of the human body. Dr. Bryant and Dr. Gardiner
are a husband-and-wife team of regeneration biolo-
gists. Dr. Bryant also served as the dean of the School
of Biological Sciences and the vice chancellor for
research at U.C. Irvine. Dr. Gardiner is a professor

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of developmental and cell biology and maintains the

laboratory where he does research as a regenerative
engineer.
This laboratory looks like many university sci-
ence labs. It is filled with high-powered microscopes,
dissection equipment, and graduate students wear-
ing goggles and gloves. The work Dr. Gardiner and
Dr. Bryant do here is the result of a four-year con-
tract with DARPA and an extended five-year con-
tract with the Army. Their work involves limb
regeneration. Gardiner and Bryant believe that one
day soon, humans will also be able to regenerate
their own body parts.
Dr. David Gardiner, who is in his sixties, exam-
ines a set of lab trays on the countertop. Crawling
around inside the trays are multi-limbed aquatic sal-
amanders called axolotls. The creatures look both
prehistoric and futuristic, with large, bug-like eyes.
Some are pink; others are unpigmented, a naturally
occurring mutation that makes them look transpar-
ent; you can see the bones and blood vessels inside.
This species of salamander, a urodele amphibian, is
able to regenerate lost body parts as an adult.
“Regeneration is really coming alive now,” Dr.
Gardiner says. “Sue and I have been studying the
science for years. DARPA was the first time anyone
ever asked us to regenerate anything. They did this
with the mouse digit,” he says, referring to the tip of

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a mouse finger, which they and another team of sci-

entists had been able to get to grow back, thereby
setting a scientific milestone. “DARPA said, ‘Great.
Can you scale it up?’ As in pigs. As in humans. They
asked, ‘Is this possible?’ We said yes. They asked,
‘Do you know how to do it?’ We said no. They said,
‘Well, then, we'll fund you.’” Gardiner believes that
therein lies the genius of DARPA. “DARPA funds
questions,” he says.
Dr. Gardiner searches through the trays of sala-
manders and locates the one he is looking for. This
axolotl has an extra limb coming out the right side
of its body. A second right front limb. “If we look at
this extra limb on the salamander, we understand
we [humans] have all the info to make an arm.”
To explain the concept of limb regeneration, Dr.
Gardiner first provides a brief summary of mutagen-
esis, the process by which an organism’s genetic
information is changed, resulting in a mutation.
“Mutations occur in nature, as the result of exposure
to a mutagen,” he says. “Natural mutations can be
beneficial or harmful to an organism, and this drives
evolution. Mutations can also be performed as
experiments, in laboratories. DNA can be modified
artificially, by chemical and biological agents, result-
ing in mutations.” One consequential example of
harmful mutagenesis that we discuss occurred as a
result of ARPA’s Project Agile defoliation campaign.

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People who were exposed to Agent Orange during

the Vietnam War suffer a higher rate of children
born with mutations. This includes Vietnamese
people who were sprayed with the herbicides and
also a vigorously debated number of American ser-
vicemen who were involved in the spraying.
“Mutations tell us about signals,” Gardiner
explains. “Cells talk to each other using signals.
Every cell has an identity. All cells have information.
There are no dumb cells. Cells talk to each other to
stimulate growth. They talk to each other to make
new patterns.” Pointing to the see-through axolotl
with the extra limb, Gardiner says, “People look at
this salamander and say, ‘Salamanders are special.
We [humans] will never regenerate like a salaman-
der’” Dr. Gardiner and Dr. Bryant do not agree.
“We say, ‘Oh, really? How do you know?’ The most
compelling evidence is you have an arm.”
There is no regeneration gene, says Gardiner. It
happens at a cellular level. “People regenerate. Look
how we started ab initio. As a single cell. Once upon
a time, each one of us was a one-cell embryo that
divided. Every human being on this planet regener-
ated his or her own cells, in the womb.”
Dr. Bryant uses differentiation to simplify things.
“The difference between salamanders and humans,”
she says, “is that when salamanders’ limbs are ampu-
tated, they grow new ones. When humans’ limbs are

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amputated, they produce scar tissue. We humans

respond to injury by making scar tissue. Why?” she
asks.
“At the heart of limb regeneration is evolution,”
Dr. Gardiner adds. What his wife is pointing out, he
says, is that “at the heart of genetics is diversity.”
“Some people make mega-scars,” says Dr. Bryant.
“The scars can be bigger than the wound. If you cut
the scar tissue off, it grows back. There is the same
evidence at the other end of the scarring spectrum.
Some people produce scars that can go away.”
Dr. Gardiner suggests looking at cancer research
as an analogy. “Cancer equals our bodies interacting
with the environment,” he says. “Cancer shows us
we have remarkable regenerative ability. The path-
ways that drive cancer are the same pathways that
cause regeneration. In the early days, no one had any
idea about cancer. There was one cancer. Then along
came the idea of ‘cancer-causing’ carcinogens. Well,
we have found salamanders are very resistant to
cancer. Inject a carcinogen into a salamander and it
regulates the growth and turns it into an extra limb.”
“Where is this leading?” I ask.
“We are driving our biology toward immortal-
ity,” Dr. Gardiner says. “Or at least toward the foun-
tain of youth.”
In April 2014, scientists in the United States and
Mexico announced they had successfully grown a

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complex organ, a human uterus, from tissue cells, in

a lab. And in England, that same month, at a North
London hospital, scientists announced they had
grown noses, ears, blood vessels, and windpipes in a
laboratory as they attempt to make body parts using
stem cells. Scientists at Maastricht University, in
Holland, have produced laboratory-grown beef burg-
ers, grown in vitro from cattle stem cells, which food
tasters say taste “close to meat.”
“Can science go too far?” I ask Dr. Gardiner and
Dr. Bryant.
“The same biotechnology will allow scientists to
clone humans,” says Dr. Gardiner.
“Do you think the Defense Department will
begin human cloning research?” I ask.
“Ultimately, it needs to be a policy decision,”
Gardiner says.
In 2005 the United Nations voted to adopt the
Declaration on Human Cloning, prohibiting “all
forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incom-
patible with human dignity and the protection of
human life.” But in the United States there is cur-
rently no federal policy banning the practice. The
Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 (H.R. 2560)
did not pass. So the Defense Department could be
cloning now. And while neither Dr. Bryant nor Dr.
Gardiner has the answer to that question, we agree

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that what is possible in science is almost always tried

by scientists.
“These are discussions that need to be had,” Dr.
Gardiner says.
In the twenty-first-century world of science,
almost anything can be done. But should it be done?
Who decides? How do we know what is wise and
what is unwise?
“An informed public is necessary,” Dr. Bryant
says. “The public must stay informed.”
But for the public to stay informed, the public
has to be informed. Dr. Bryant and Dr. Gardiner’s
program was never classified. They worked for
DARPA for four years, then both parties amiably
moved on. What DARPA is doing with the limb
regeneration science, DARPA gets to decide. If
DARPA is working on a cloning program, that pro-
gram is classified, and the public will be informed
only in the future, ifat all.
If human cloning is possible, and therefore inevi-
table, should American scientists be the first to
achieve this milestone, with Pentagon funding and
military application in mind? If artificial intelligence
is possible, is it therefore inevitable?
Another way to ask, from a DARPA frame of
mind: Were Russia or China or South Korea or India
or Iran to present the world with the first human

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clone, or the first artificially intelligent machine,

would that be considered a Sputnik-like surprise?
DARPA has always sought the technological and
military edge, leaving observers to debate the line
between militarily useful scientific progress and
pushing science too far. What is right and what is
wrong?
“Look at Stephen Hawking,” says Dr. Bryant.
Hawking, a theoretical physicist and cosmolo-
gist, is considered one of the smartest people on the
planet. In 1963 he contracted motor neuron disease
and was given two years to live. He is still alive in
2015. Although Hawking is paralyzed, he has had a
remarkably full life in the more than fifty years
since, working, writing books, and communicating
through a speech-generating device. Hawking is a
proponent of cloning. “The fuss about cloning is
rather silly,” he says. “I can’t see any essential distinc-
tion between cloning and producing brothers and
sisters in the time-honored way.” But Hawking
believes that the quest for artificial intelligence is a
dangerous idea. That it could be man’s “worst mis-
take in history,” and perhaps his last. In 2014 Hawk-
ing and a group of colleagues warned against the
tisks posed by artificially intelligent machines. “One
can imagine such technology outsmarting financial
markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-
manipulating human leaders, and developing weap-

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ons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-

term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the
long-term impact depends on whether it can be con-
trolled at all.”
Stephen Hawking is far from alone in his warn-
ings against artificial intelligence. The physicist
and artificial intelligence expert Steve Omohundro
believes that “these [autonomous] systems are likely
to behave in anti-social and harmful ways unless
they are very carefully designed.” In Geneva in 2013,
the United Nations held its first-ever convention on
lethal autonomous weapons systems, or hunter-killer
drones. Over four days, the 117-member coalition
debated whether or not these kinds of robotic sys-
tems should be internationally outlawed. Testifying
in front of the United Nations, Noel Sharkey, a
world-renowned expert on robotics and artificial
intelligence, said, “Weapons systems should not be
allowed to autonomously select their own human
targets and engage them with lethal force.” To coin-
cide with the UN convention, Human Rights Watch
and the Harvard Law School International Human
Rights Clinic released a report called “Losing
Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots.”
“Fully autonomous weapons threaten to violate
the foundational rights to life,” the authors wrote,
because robotic killing machines “undermine the
underlying principles of human dignity.” Stephen

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Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights

Watch, said, “Giving machines the power to decide
who lives and dies on the battlefield would take
technology too far.”
In an interview for this book, Noel Sharkey relayed
a list of potential robot errors he believes are far too
serious to ignore, including “human-machine interac-
tion failures, software coding errors, malfunctions,
communication degradation, enemy cyber-attacks,”
and more. “I believe there is a line that must not be
crossed,” Sharkey says. “Robots should not be given
the authority to kill humans.”
Can the push to create hunter-killer robots be
stopped? Steve Omohundro believes that “an auton-
omous weapons arms race is already taking place,”
because “military and economic pressures are driv-
ing the rapid development of autonomous systems.”
Stephen Hawking, Noel Sharkey, and Steve Omo-
hundro are three among a growing population who
believe that humanity is standing on a precipice.
DARPA’ goal is to create and prevent strategic sur-
prise. But what if the ultimate endgame is humani-
ty’s loss? What if; in trying to stave off foreign
military competitors, DARPA creates an unexpected
competitor that becomes its own worst enemy? A
mechanical rival born of powerful science with intel-
ligence that quickly becomes superior to our own.
An opponent that cannot be stopped, like a runaway

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train. What if the twenty-first century becomes the

last time in history when humans have no real com-
petition but other humans?
In a world ruled by science and technology, it is
not necessarily the fittest but rather the smartest that
survive. DARPA program managers like to say that
DARPA science is “science fact, not science fiction.”
What happens when these two concepts fuse?

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Pentagon’s Brain

I: April 2014 I interviewed Charles H. Townes,

the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the laser.
When we spoke, Professor Townes was just about
to turn ninety-nine years old. Lucid and articulate,
Townes was still keeping office hours at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, still writing papers, and
still granting reporters’ requests. I felt delighted to
be interviewing him.
‘Two things we discussed remain indelible. Charles
Townes told me that once, long ago, he was sharing
his idea for the laser with John von Neumann and
that von Neumann told him his idea wouldn’t work.
“What did you think about that?” I asked Townes.
“If you're going to do anything new,” he said,
“you have to disregard criticism. Most people are

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against new ideas. They think, ‘If I didn’t think of

it, it won't work.’ Inevitably, people doubt you. You
persevere anyway. That’s what you do.” And that
was exactly what Charles Townes did. The laser is
considered one of the most significant scientific
inventions of the modern world.
The second profound thing Charles Townes said
to me, and I mentioned it earlier in this book, was
that he was personally inspired to invent the laser
after reading the science-fiction novel The Garin
Death Ray, written by Alexei Tolstoi in 1926. It is
remarkable to think how powerful a force science fic-
tion can be. That fantastic, seemingly impossible
ideas can inspire people like Charles Townes to
invent things that totally transform the real world.
This notion that science fiction can profoundly
impact reality remains especially interesting to me
because in researching and reporting this book, |
learned that during the war on terror, the Pentagon
began seeking ideas from science-fiction writers,
most notably a civilian organization called the
SIGMA group. Its founder, Dr. Arlan Andrews, says
that the core idea behind forming the group was to
save the world from terrorism, and to this end the
SIGMA group started offering “futurism consult-
ing” to the Pentagon and the White House. The
groups motto is “Science Fiction in the National
Interest.”

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Those responsible for safeguarding the . nation

“need to think of crazy ideas,” says Dr. Andrews, and
the SIGMA group helps the Pentagon in this effort,
he says. “Many of us [in SIGMA] have earned Ph.D.’s
in high tech fields, and some presently hold Federal and
defense industry positions.” Andrews worked as a
White House science officer under President George
H. W. Bush, and before that at the nation’s nuclear
weapons production facility, Sandia National Labora-
tories, in New Mexico. Of SIGMA members he says,
“Each [of us] is an accomplished science fiction author
who has postulated new technologies, new problems
and new societies, explaining the possible science and
speculating about the effects on the human race.”
One of the SIGMA group members is Lieutenant
Colonel Peter Garretson, a transformation strategist
at the Pentagon. In the spring of 2014 Garretson
arranged for me to come to the Pentagon with two
colleagues, Chris Carter and Gale Anne Hurd.
Chris Carter created The X-Files, one of the most
popular science-fiction television dramas of all time.
The X-Files character the Cigarette Smoking Man is
a quintessential villain who lives at the center of goy-
ernment conspiracies. Gale Anne Hurd co-wrote
The Terminator, a science-fiction classic about a
cyborg assassin sent back across time to save the
world from a malevolent artificially intelligent
machine called Skynet. In The Terminator, Skynet

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becomes smarter than the defense scientists who cre-

ated it and initiates a nuclear war to achieve machine
supremacy and rid the earth of humankind.
Carter and Hurd have joined me on a reporting
trip to the Pentagon not to offer any kind of futur-
ism consulting but to listen, discuss, and observe.
It’s a warm spring day in 2014 when we arrive at the
Pentagon. The five-sided, five-floored, 6.5-million-
square-foot structure looms like a colossus. We pass
through security and check in. Security protocols
require that we are escorted everywhere we go,
including the bathroom. We head into the Pentagon
courtyard for lunch, with its lawn, tall trees, and
wooden picnic tables. Garretson’s colleague Lieuten-
ant Colonel Julian Chesnutt, with the Defense Intel-
ligence Agency, Defense Clandestine Service, tells
us a story about the building at the center of the Pen-
tagon courtyard, which is now a food court but used
to be a hot dog stand. Chesnutt explains that during
the height of the Cold War, when satellite technol-
ogy first came into being, Soviet analysts monitor-
ing the Pentagon became convinced that the
building was the entrance to an underground facil-
ity, like a nuclear missile silo. The analysts could
find no other explanation as to why thousands of
people entered and exited this tiny building, all day,
every day. Apparently the Soviets never figured it
out, and the hot dog stand remained a target

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throughout the Cold War—along with the rest of

the Pentagon. It’s a great anecdote and makes one
wonder what really is underneath the Pentagon,
which is rumored to have multiple stories
belowground.
During lunch, seated at a long picnic table, we
engage in a thought-provoking conversation with a
group of Pentagon “future thinkers” about science
fact and science fiction. These defense intellectuals,
many of whom have Ph.D.s, come from various mil-
itary services and range in age from their late twen-
ties to early sixties. Some spent time in the war theater
in Iraq, others in Afghanistan. The enthusiasm
among these futurologists is palpable, their ideas are
provocative, and their commitment to national secu-
rity is unambiguous. These are among the brains
at the Pentagon that make the future happen.
After lunch we are taken to the E-Ring, home to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense.
The maze-like corridors buzz with fluorescent light-
ing as we pass through scores of security doors and
travel up and down multiple flights of stairs. Finally,
we arrive in the hallway outside the office of the sec-
retary of defense. Hanging on the corridor walls are
large life-sized oil portraits of the nation’s former
defense secretaries. I see the five past secretaries of
defense portrayed in this book. Neil McElroy asked
Congress to approve the creation of DARPA, which

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he promised would steward America’s vast weapons

systems of the future, and it has. Robert McNamara
believed that intellect and systems analysis could
win wars, and peopled the upper echelons of the
Pentagon with whiz kids to accomplish this goal.
Harold Brown, hydrogen bomb weapons engineer,
became the first physicist secretary of defense and
gave America its offset strategy— the ability of com-
manders to fight wars from a continent's distance
away. Dick Cheney demonstrated to the world that
overwhelming force could accomplish certain goals.
Donald Rumsfeld introduced the world to network-
centric warfare.
As we walk the corridors looking at artwork and
photographs of weapons systems adorning the Pen-
tagon’s walls, our group expands, as does the conver-
sation about science fact and science fiction. One
officer says he has a poster of the Cigarette Smoking
Man hanging on his office wall. Another says that
for an office social event, his defense group made
baseball caps with Skynet written across the front.
Science fiction is a powerful force. Because of the
fictional work of Carter and Hurd, many sound-
minded people take seriously at least two significant
science-fiction concepts: that (as in The Terminator)
artificially intelligent machines could potentially
outsmart their human creators and start a nuclear
war, and that (as in The X-Files) there are forces

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inside the government that keep certain truths

secret. As a reporter, I have learned that these con-
cepts also exist in the real world. Artificially intelli-
gent hunter-killer robots present unparalleled
potential dangers, and the U.S. government keeps
dark secrets in the name of national security. I’ve
also found that some of the most powerful Pentagon
secrets and strategies are hidden in plain sight.
The day after the Pentagon reporting trip, I went
to see Michael Goldblatt, the man who pioneered
many of DARPA’ super-soldier programs. Goldblatt,
a scientist and venture capitalist, ran DARPA’s
Defense Sciences Office from 1999 until 2004, and
oversaw program efforts to create warfighters who
are a mentally and physically superior breed.
Goldblatt asked me to come to his home for our
interview, and as a car took me from my hotel room
in Pentagon City out to where Goldblatt lives in the
suburbs, the trip took on the feel of an X-Files epi-
sode. Traveling through the woodsy environs of
McLean, Virginia, down Dolley Madison Boule-
vard (Dolley’s husband, James Madison, called war
the dreaded enemy of liberty), we passed by the
entrance to CIA headquarters, Langley, and turned
in to a nearby residential neighborhood.
Inside his home, Michael Goldblatt and I dis-
cussed transhumanism, DARPA’ efforts to augment,
or increase, the performance of warfighters with

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machines, pharmaceuticals, and other means. Under

Goldblatt’s tenure, unclassified programs included
Persistence in Combat, Mechanically Dominant
Soldier, and Continually Assisted Performance.
These programs focused on augmenting the physi-
cal body of warfighters, but today I am most inter-
ested in the DARPA programs that focus on
augmenting the human brain. Not just the brains of
brain-wounded warriors but those of healthy soldiers
as well. DARPA calls this area of research Aug-
mented Cognition, or AugCog. The concept of
AugCog sits at the scientific frontier of human-
machine interface, or what the Pentagon calls
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In DARPA’s
robo-rat and Manduca sexta moth programs, scien-
tists created animal-machine biohybrids that are
steerable by remote control. Through Augmented
Cognition programs, DARPA is creating human-
machine biohybrids, or what we might call cyborgs.
DARPA has been researching brain-computer
interfaces (BCI) since the 1970s, but it took twenty-
first-century advances in nanobiotechnology for
BCI to really break new ground. DARPA’s AugCog
efforts gained momentum during Goldblatt’s tenure.
By 2004, DARPA’ stated goal was to develop “orders
of magnitude increases in available, net-thinking
power resulting from linked human-machine
dyads.” In 2007, in a solicitation for new programs,
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DARPA stated, “Human brain activity must be inte-

grated with technology.” Several unclassified pro-
grams came about as a result, including Cognitive
Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) and
Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts (NIA).
Both programs use “non-invasive technology” to
accelerate human capacity to detect targets. The
CT2WS program was designed for soldiers looking
for targets on the battlefield and for intelligence
operatives conducting surveillance operations in
hostile environments. The NIA was designed for
imagery analysts looking for targets in satellite pho-
tographs. The program participants wear a “wire-
lesss EEG [electroencephalography] acquisition
cap,” also called a headset, which jolts their brains
with electrical pulses to increase cognitive function-
ing. DARPA scientists have found that by using this
“non-invasive, brain-computer interface,” they are
able to accelerate human cognition exponentially, to
make soldiers and spies think faster and more accu-
rately. The problem, according to DARPA program
managers, is that “these devices are often cumber-
some to apply and unappealing to the user, given the
wetness or residue that remains on the user’s scalp
and hair following removal of the headset.” A brain
implant would be far more effective.
After Goldblatt left the agency, in scientific jour-
nals DARPA researchers identified a series of

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“groundbreaking advances” in “Man/Machine Sys-

tems.” In 2014 DARPA program managers stated
that “the future of brain-computer interface tech-
nologies” depended on merging all the technologies
of DARPA’s brain programs, the noninvasive and
the invasive ones, specifically citing RAM, REPAIR,
REMIND, and SUBNETS. Was DARPA conduct-
ing what were, in essence, intelligence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance missions inside the human
brain? Was this the long-sought information that
would provide DARPA scientists with the key to
artificial intelligence? “With respect to the Presi-
dent's BRAIN initiative,” write DARPA program
managers, “novel BCI [brain-computer interface]
technologies are needed that not only extend what
information can be extracted from the brain, but
also who is able to conduct and participate in those
studies.”
For decades scientists have been trying to create
artificially intelligent machines, without success. AI
scientists keep hitting the same wall. To date, com-
puters can only obey commands, following rules set
forth by software algorithms. I wondered if the
transhumanism programs that Michael Goldblatt
pioneered at DARPA would allow the agency to tear
down this wall. Were DARPA’s brain-computer
interface programs the missing link?
Goldblatt chuckled. He’d left DARPA a decade

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ago, he said. He could discuss only unclassified pro-

grams. But he pointed me in a revelatory direction.
This came up when we were discussing the Jason
scientists and a report they published in 2008. In
this report, titled “Human Performance,” in a sec-
tion called “Brain Computer Interface,” the Jasons
addressed noninvasive interfaces including DARPA’s
CT2WS and NIA programs. Using “electromag-
netic signals to detect the combined activity of many
millions of neurons and synapses” (in other words,
the EEG cap) was effective in augmenting cognition,
the Jasons noted, but the information gleaned was
“noisy and degraded.” The more invasive programs
would produce far more specific results, they observed,
particularly programs in which “a micro-electrode
array [is] implanted into the cortex with connections
to a ‘feedthrough’ pedestal on the skull.” The Jason
scientists wrote that these chip-in-the-brain programs
would indeed substantially improve “the desired out-
come,” which could allow “predictable, high quality
brain-control to become a reality.”
So there it was, hidden in plain sight. If DARPA
could master “high quality brain-control,” the possi-
bilities for man-machine systems and brain-computer
interface would open wide. The wall would come
down. The applications in hunter-killer drone war-
fare would potentially be unbridled. The brain chip
was the missing link.

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But even the Jasons felt it was important to issue,

along with this idea, a stern warning. “An adversary
might use invasive interfaces in military applica-
tions,” they wrote. “An extreme example would be
remote guidance or control of a human being.” And
for this reason, the Jason scientists cautioned the Pen-
tagon vot to pursue this area, at least not without a
serious ethics debate. “The brain machine interface
excites the imagination in its potential (good and
evil) application to modify human performance,”
but it also raises questions regarding “potential for
abuses in carrying out such research,” the Jasons
wrote. In summary, the Jason scientists said that cre-
ating human cyborgs able to be brain-controlled was
not something they would recommend.
This warning echoed an earlier Jason warning,
back during the Vietnam War, when Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara asked the Jasons to con-
sider using nuclear weapons against the Ho Chi
Minh Trail. The Jasons studied the issue and con-
cluded it was not something they could recommend.
Using nuclear weapons in Vietnam would encour-
age the Vietcong to acquire nuclear weapons from
their Soviet and Chinese benefactors and to use
them, the Jasons warned. This would in turn encour-
age terrorists in the future to use nuclear weapons.
In their 2008 study on augmented cognition and
human performance, the Jason scientists also said

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they believed that the concept of brain control would

ultimately fail because too many people in the mili-
tary would have an ethical problem with it. “Such
ethical considerations will appropriately limit the
types of activities and applications in human perfor-
mance modification that will be considered in the
USS. military,” they wrote.
But in our discussion of the Jason scientists’
impact on DARPA, Goldblatt shook his head, indi-
cating I was wrong.
“The Jason scientists are hardly relevant any-
more,” Goldblatt said. During his time at DARPA,
and as of 2014, the “scientific advisory group with
the most influence on DARPA,” he said, “is the
DSB,” the Defense Science Board. The DSB has
offices inside the Pentagon. And where the DSB finds
problems, it is DARPA’s job to find solutions, Goldb-
latt explained. The DSB had recently studied man-
machine systems, and it saw an entirely different set
of problems related to human-robot interactions.
In 2012, in between the two Pentagon roadmaps
on drone warfare, “Unmanned Systems Integrated
Roadmap FY 2011-2036” and “Unmanned Systems
Integrated Roadmap FY 2013-2038,” the DSB
delivered to the secretary of defense a 125-page
report titled “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Sys-
tems.” The report unambiguously calls for the Pen-
tagon to rapidly accelerate its development of

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artificially intelligent weapons systems. “The Task

Force has concluded that, while currently fielded
unmanned systems are making positive contribu-
tions across DoD operations, autonomy technology
is being underutilized as a result of material obsta-
cles within the Department that are inhibiting the
broad acceptance of autonomy,” wrote DSB chair-
man Paul Kaminski in a letter accompanying the
report.
The primary obstacle, said the DSB, was trust—
much as the Jason scientists had predicted in their
report. Many individuals in the military mistrusted
the idea that coupling man and machine in an effort
to create autonomous weapons systems was a good
idea. The DSB found that resistance came from all
echelons of the command structure, from field com-
manders to drone operators. “For commanders and
operators in particular, these challenges can collec-
tively be characterized as a lack of trust that the
autonomous functions of a given system will operate
as intended in all situations,” wrote the DSB. The
overall problem was getting “commanders to trust
that autonomous systems will not behave in a man-
ner other than what is intended on the battlefield.”
Maybe the commanders had watched too many
X-Files episodes or seen any of the Terminator films
one too many times. Or maybe they read Depart-
ment of Defense Directive 3000.09, which discusses

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“the probability and consequences of failure in

autonomous and semi-automatic weapons systems
that could lead to unintended engagements.” Or
maybe commanders and operators want to remain
men (and women), not become cyborg man-
machines. But unlike the Jason scientists, the
Defense Science Board advised the Pentagon to
accelerate its efforts to change this attitude—to per-
suade commanders, operators, and warfighters to
accept, and to trust, human-robot interaction.
“An area of HRI [human-robot interaction] that
has received significant attention is robot ethics,”
wrote the DSB. This effort, which involved internal
debates on robot ethics, was supposed to foster trust
between military personnel and robotic systems, the
DSB noted. Instead it backfired. “While theoreti-
cally interesting, this debate on functional morality
has had unfortunate consequences. It increased dis-
trust in unmanned systems because it implies that
robots will not act with bounded rationality.” The
DSB advised that this attitude of distrust needed to
change.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that DARPA has a pro-
gram on how to manipulate trust. During the war
on terror, the agency began working with the CIA’s
own DARPA-like division, the Intelligence Advanced
Research Projects Agency, or IARPA, on what it calls
Narrative Networks (N2), to “develop techniques to

658
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

quantify the effect of narrative on human cognition.”

One scientist leading this effort, Dr. Paul Zak,
insists that what DARPA and the CIA are doing
with trust is a good thing. “We would all benefit if
the government focused more on trusting people,”
Zak told me in the fall of 2014, when I visited his
laboratory at Claremont Graduate University in
California. When I asked Zak if the DARPA
research he was involved in was more likely being
used to manipulate trust, Zak said he had no reason
to believe that was correct.
Paul Zak is a leader in the field of neuroeconom-
ics and morality, a field that studies the neurochem-
ical roots of making economic decisions based on
trust. Zak has a Ph.D. in economics and postdoc-
toral training, in neuroimaging, from Harvard. In
2004 he made what he describes as a groundbreak-
ing and life-changing discovery. “I discovered the
brain’s moral molecule,” Zak says, “the chemical in
the brain, called oxytocin, that allows man to make
moral decisions [and that] morality is tied to trust.”
In no time, says Zak, “all kinds of people from
DARPA were asking me, ‘How do we get some of
this?” Zak also fielded interest from the CIA. For
DARPA’s Narrative Networks program, Zak has
been developing a method to measure how people’s
brains and bodies respond when oxytocin, i.e., “The
brain’s moral molecule,” is released naturally.

659
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

Researchers at the University of Bonn, not affili-

ated with DARPA, have taken a different approach
with their studies of oxytocin. In December 2014,
these researchers published a study on how the
chemical can be used to “erase fear.” Lead researcher
Monika Eckstein told Scientific American that her
goal in the study was to administer oxytocin into
the noses of sixty-two men, in hopes that their fear
would dissipate. “And for the most part it did,” she
said. A time might not be too far off when we live in
a world in which fear can be erased.

Why is the Defense Science Board so focused on

pushing robotic warfare on the Pentagon? Why
force military personnel to learn to “trust” robots
and to rely on autonomous robots in future warfare?
Why is the erasure of fear a federal investment? The
answer to it all, to every question in this book, lies at
the heart of the military-industrial complex.
Unlike the Jason scientists, the majority of whom
were part-time defense scientists and full-time uni-
versity professors, the majority of DSB members are
defense contractors. DSB chairman Paul Kaminski,
who also served on President Obama’s Intelligence
Advisory Board from 2009 to 2013, is a director of
General Dynamics, chairman of the board of the
RAND Corporation, chairman of the board of
HRL (the former Hughes Research Labs), chairman

660
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

of the board of Exostar, chairman and CEO of Tech-

novation, Inc., trustee and advisor to the Johns Hop-
kins Applied Physics Lab, and trustee and advisor to
MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory—all companies and
corporations that build robotic weapons systems for
DARPA and for the Pentagon. Kaminski, who also
serves as a paid consultant to the Office of the Secre-
tary of Defense, is but one example. Kaminski’s fel-
low DSB members, a total of roughly fifty persons,
serve on the boards of defense contracting giants
including Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics,
Northrop Grumman, Bechtel, Aerospace Corpora-
tion, Texas Instruments, IBM, Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories,
and others.
One might look at DARPA’s history and say that
part of its role— even its entire role—is to maintain a
USS. advantage in military technology, in perpetuity.
Former DARPA director Eberhardt Rechtin clearly
stated this conundrum of advanced technology war-
fare when he told Congress, back in 1970, that it was
necessary to accept the “chicken-and-egg problem”
that DARPA will always face. That the agency must
forever conduct “pre-requirement research,” because
by the time a technological need arises on the battle-
field, it becomes apparent, too late, that the research
should already have been done. DARPA’s contractors
are vital parts of a system that allows the Pentagon to
661
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

stay ahead of its needs, and to steer revolutions in mil-

itary affairs. To dominate in future battles, never to
be caught off guard.
One might also look at DARPA’s history, and its
future, and say that it’s possible at some point that
the technology may itself outstrip DARPA as it is
unleashed into the world. This is a grave concern of
many esteemed scientists and engineers.
A question to ask might be, how close to the line
can we get and still control what we create?
Another question might be, how much of the
race for this technological upper hand is now based
in the reality that corporations are very much
invested in keeping DARPA’s “chicken-and-egg”
conundrum alive?
This is what President Eisenhower warned Amer-
icans to fear when he spoke of the perils of the
military-industrial complex in his farewell speech in
January 1961. “We have been compelled to create a
permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,”
the president said.
In the years since, the armaments industry has
only grown bigger by the decade. If DARPA is the
Pentagon’s brain, defense contractors are its beating
heart. President Eisenhower said that the only way
Americans could keep defense contractors in check
was through knowledge. “Only an alert and knowl-
edgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing

662
 THE PENTAGON’S BRAIN

of the huge industrial and military machinery of

defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so
that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Anything less, and civilians cede control of their
own destiny.
The programs written about in this book are all
unclassified. DARPA’s highest-risk, highest-payoff
programs remain secret until they are unveiled on
the battlefield. Given how far along DARPA is in its
quest for hunter-killer robots, and for a way to cou-
ple man with machine, perhaps the most urgent
question of all might be whether civilians already
have.
Can military technology be stopped? Should it
be? DARPA’s original autonomous robot designs
were developed as part of DARPA’s Smart Weapons
Program decades ago, in 1983. The program was
called “Killer Robots” and its motto offered pre-
scient words: “The battlefield is no place for human
beings.”
This book begins with scientists testing a weapon
that at least some of them believed was an “evil thing.”
In creating the hydrogen bomb, scientists engineered
a weapon against which there is no defense. With
regard to the thousands of hydrogen bombs in exis-
tence today, the mighty U.S. military relies on wish-
ful optimism—hope that the civilization-destroyer is
never unleashed.

663
 Tue PENTAGON’S BRAIN

This book ends with scientists inside the Penta-

gon working to create autonomous weapons systems,
and with scientists outside the Pentagon working to
spread the idea that these weapons systems are inher-
ently evil things, that artificially intelligent hunter-
killer robots can and will outsmart their human
creators, and against which there will be no defense.
There is a perilous distinction to call attention to:
when the hydrogen bomb was being engineered, the
military-industrial complex—tled by defense con-
tractors, academics, and industrialists—was just
beginning to exert considerable control over the Pen-
tagon. Today that control is omnipotent.
Another difference between the creation of the
hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s and the accelerat-
ing development of hunter-killer robots today is that
the decision to engineer the hydrogen bomb was
made in secret and the decision to accelerate hunter-
killer robots, while not widely known, is not secret.
In that sense, destiny is being decided right now.

664
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Pentagon's Brain begins in 1954 with defense

scientists who worked on the hydrogen bomb and
ends in 2015 with defense scientists who work on
robots, cyborgs, and biohybrids. In researching a
book about extreme science, one very human non-
scientific story stands out. Richard “Rip” Jacobs
shared it with me during an interview. Jacobs was a
member of the VO-67 Navy squadron whose job it
was to lay down military sensors on the Ho Chi
Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. I write about
the experiences of Jacobs and his fellow airmen from
Crew Seven earlier in this book; they were shot
down over enemy territory on February 27, 1968.
Two were killed, the rest of them—somewhat
miraculously— survived.
Forty-two years later, in 2010, sixty-six-year-old
Rip Jacobs had just finished playing golf and was
walking back to his car, parked in the Lake Hefner
Golf Club parking lot in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

when he spotted a bumper sticker on a nearby car.

In an instant, billions of neurons fired in his brain as
memory flooded back. The bumper sticker con-
- tained the logo of the Jolly Green Giants, the heli-
copter search and rescue squadrons from the
Vietnam War.
Rip Jacobs stared at the image. As his neurons
sparked he remembered being tangled up in a tree in
the jungle canopy over the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
forty-two years earlier. After parachuting out of a
crashing aircraft, Jacobs had landed in the trees with his
parachute’s lanyards wrapped around him in a way
that made it impossible for him to wriggle free.
Everything hurt. He was covered in blood. Immo-
bile, and with his senses heightened, he remembered
hearing the dreaded sounds of small arms fire on the
ground as Vietcong searched for him. In his mem-
ory, Rip Jacobs recalled the internal panic he felt
decades before over whether or not he’d set off his
locator button. If he had, there was a chance that a
Jolly Green helicopter might be able to locate and
rescue him. If he hadn't, surely he'd die. And then
he remembered hearing the whap-whap-whap of the
Jolly Green helicopter blades and knowing that his
fellow Americans were coming to rescue him. Forty-
two years had passed, but as Rip Jacobs stood there
in the golf club parking lot, he could almost see the
little seat come out of the helicopter, see the two

666
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

arms that reached out for him back on February 27,

1968. Then the memory was gone.
“I found a pen and paper and I left a note on the
windshield of the car,” Rip Jacobs recalls. “In the
note I said something like, ‘if you know anything
about the Jolly Green Giants in Vietnam, please call
me. I signed my name.”
That night the phone rang.
The person on the telephone line introduced
himself as Chief Master Sergeant Clarence Robert
Boles Jr. “He said he was eighty-six years old,” Jacobs
remembers. “He said I’d left a note on his car.”
Rip Jacobs asked Clarence Boles if he knew any-
thing about the Jolly Greens in Vietnam. Boles said,
“I was with one of the Jolly Greens working out of
Nakhon Phanom, Thailand.” Then Boles said some-
thing astounding. “In fact,” Bole said, “I recognize
your name. I was the guy that rescued you out of
that tree.”
How could that be?
Clarence Boles drove over to Rip Jacobs’s house.
The local television news channel came too. The
reporters filmed a segment on the amazing, chance
reunion of the two former Vietnam veterans, after
forty-two years. Back during the Vietnam War,
when Rip Jacobs was in the rescue helicopter, after
Boles had cut his parachute lanyards with his knife,
Jacobs never said a word. He was in shock. But

667
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Clarence Boles kept a list of the names of every per-

son his Jolly Green team rescued that day and all the
other days. And for decades, Boles had been telling
the story of the person he’d rescued from the tree.
Boles never imagined he’d meet the man he rescued
again and he didn’t particularly feel the need to
search him out. It was a story from the past, a
moment in a war. The incident in the golf club park-
ing lot was an astonishing coincidence that brought
the two men together again. And to think that they
were living in nearby towns in Oklahoma, just a few
dozen miles away from each other.
How could that be? It’s hard to explain some
things. Not every answer is found in science. Some of
the most mysterious and powerful puzzles are simply
about being human.
Researching and reporting this book required the
assistance of many individuals who generously
shared their wisdom and experiences with me. I wish
to thank all the scientists, engineers, government
officials, defense contractors, academics, soldiers,
sailors, and warfighters who spoke to me on the rec-
ord and all those who spoke on background and
asked not to be named. I thank Joan Dulles Talley,
Murph Goldberger, and Michael Goldblatt for
allowing me to interview them in their homes.
Thank you Garrett Kenyon, Paul Zak, Sue Bryant,
and David Gardiner for inviting me into their labo-

668
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ratories. | thank Peter Garretson for arranging for

Gale Anne Hurd, Chris Carter, Dori Carter, and me
to come to the Pentagon. Thanks to David A. Bray
for inviting the four of us to join his group for Chi-
nese food. Thank you Fred Hareland for taking me
to China Lake, Damon Northrop for showing me
around SpaceX, and Robert Lowell for the visit to
JPL. Thank you Dr. Steve Bein for your generosity
with the introductions. I thank Finn Aaserud for
compiling the Jason scientists’ oral histories in the
1980s; this book benefited greatly as a result. And
thank you Richard Van Atta for taking the time to
speak with me and for stewarding so much of the
historical record on DARPA over the past several
decades.
At the National Archives and Records Adminis-
tration, College Park, MD, I would liketo thank
Richard Peuser, David Fort, and Eric Van Slander.
At the National Archives at Riverside, thank you
Matthew Law and Aaron Prah. Thank you Aaron
Graves, Major Eric D. Badger, and Sue Gough in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense; Thomas D.
Kunkle and Kevin Neil Roark, Los Alamos National
Laboratory; Karen Laney, National Nuclear Secu-
rity Administration; Byron Ristvet, Defense Threat
Reduction Agency; Christopher Banks, LBJ Library;
Eric J. Butterbaugh, DARPA Public Affairs; Robert
Hoback, U.S. Secret. Service; Chris Grey, USA

669
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Criminal Investigation Command (CID), Quan-

tico, VA; Pamela Patterson, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory.
I am most grateful to the team. Thank you John
Parsley, Jim Hornfischer, Steve Younger, Tiffany
Ward, Nicole Dewey, Liz Garriga, Malin von Euler-
Hogan, Morgan Moroney, Heather Fain, Michael
Noon, Amanda Heller, and Allison Warner. Thank
you Alice and Tom Soininen, Kathleen and Geof-
frey Silver, Rio and Frank Morse, Marion Wroldsen,
Keith Rogers, and John Zagata. And my fellow writ-
ers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill,
Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, and
Annette Murphy.
The only thing that makes me happier than fin-
ishing a book is the daily joy I get from Kevin,
Finley, and Jett. You guys are my best friends.

670
 NOTES

Abbreviations Used in Notes

ARCHIVES

CIA Central Intelligence Agency Library, digital

collection
DSOH U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian,
digital collection
Geisel Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego,
CA
JFK John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum,
Boston, MA
LANL Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library,
Los Alamos, NM
LOC Library of Congress, Washington, DC
NACP National Archives and Records Administration at
College Park, MD
NAR National Archives and Records Administration at
Riverside, CA
UCSB American Presidency Project, University of Califor-
nia, Santa Barbara, CA
VO67A VO-67 Association, Navy Observation Squadron
Sixty-Seven, digital collection
 NOTES

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES & AFFILIATES

ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency

DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DNA Defense Nuclear Agency
GAO General Accounting Office
IDA Institute for Defense Analyses

Prologue
DARPA as an agency: Inspector general’s report, “Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency Ethics Program Met
Federal Government Standards,” January 24, 2013;
“Breakthrough Technologies for National Security,” DARPA
2015.
“We are faced”: DARPA press release, ‘President’s Budget Request for
DARPA Aims to Fund Promising Ideas, Help Regain Prior
Levels,” March 5, 2014.
eighty-seven nations: Interview with Noel Sharkey, August
2013.

Chapter One The Evil Thing

“an evil thing”: “Minority report,” General Advisory Committee,
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, October 30, 1949, LANL.
facing an unknown fate: Eyewitness information is from interviews
with Alfred O’Donnell, 2009-2013; interviews with Jim
Freedman, 2009-2011. See also O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages;
Ogle, Daily Diary, 1954, LANL; DNA, Castle Series 1954,
LANL.
miniaturized: Principles of the hydrogen bomb were demonstrated
two years earlier with Ivy Mike, which was the size of a small
factory and weighed eighty-two tons.
buried under ten feet of sand: Holmes and Narver photographs,
W-102-5, RG 326, Atomic Energy Commission, NAR.

672
 Nores

scientists running this secret operation: Ogle, Daily Diary, 1954,

95-99, LANL.
“Tn the bunker”: Quotes are from O’Keefe, 166, 173-175.
Out at sea: Quotes are from interview with Jim Freedman; See also
Castle Series 1954, 123.
largest-ever nuclear fireball: Memorandum to Dr. John von
Neumann from Lt. Col. N. M. Lulejian, February 23, 1955,
LANL; In time, the Soviets’ Tsar Bomba would be larger.
weather station: Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, 1V-285.
No one had any idea: Joint Task Force Seven, Operation Castle,
46-61.
wind direction: “The Effects of Castle Detonations Upon the
Weather,” Task Force Weather Central, Special Report,
October 1954, 3-7, LANL; Hansen, Swords of Armageddon,
IV-289-290.
“The explosion”: Quotes are from O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages, 178.
scientist in charge: John C. Clark, “We Were Trapped by Radioactive
Fallout,” Saturday Evening Post, July 20, 1957.
mystical apparition: Lapp, 28.
unprecedented destruction: Castle Series 1954, 182-185. It would
take Atomic Energy Commission historians thirty-four years to
acknowledge that technical success was a veil and “just behind
it were the frightening problems—some that threatened human
existence itself.”
news blackout: Memorandum from Brigadier General K. E. Fields to
Alvin Graves, March 4, 1954, LANL.
“very inconsequential”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The President’s
News Conference,” March 10, 1954, UCSB.
“routine atomic test’: Memorandum from Brigadier General K. E.
Fields, director of Military Application, USAEC to CJTF 7,
March 15, 1954, LANL; Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, IV-298.
fallout pattern: RG 326 Atomic Energy Commission, “Distance
From GZ, Statute Miles, Off-site dose rate contours in r/hr at
H+1 hour,” Document 410526, figures 148-150, NAR.

673
 Notes

roentgens: Hewlett and Holl, 182.

“exterminating civilian populations”: Memorandum, General
Advisory Committee, October 25, 1949, LANL. Secrecy
elements are discussed in York, Advisors, 51.
fierce competition: “Race for the Superbomb,” American Experience,
PBS, January 1999.
“We must know more”: Quotes are from York, Advisors, 60-65.
“taking profit out of war”: Ernest Lawrence, transcript, Bohemian
Club Speech, February 8, 1951, York Papers, Geisel.
“horse laughs”: York, Advisors, 134.
Castle series: Ogle, Daily Diary, 1954, LANL. A total of 22.5
megatons would be detonated.
“weapons obsolete”: Minutes, Forty-first Meeting of the General
Advisory Committee (GAC), U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission, July 12-15, 1954, 12-24, LANL; Fehner and
Gosling, 116.
only surviving record: Ibid.
“quantitative advantage”: York, Making Weapons, 77.

Chapter Two War Games and Computing Machines

U.S. Air Force brawn: Abella, photographs, (unpaginated).
game pieces scattered: Leonard, 339.
“credibility”: York, Making Weapons, 89.
remarkable child prodigy: S. Bochner, John Von Neumann, 1903—
1957, National Academy of Sciences, 442-450.
“unsolved problem”: P. R. Halmos, “The Legend of John Von
Neumann,” Mathematical Association of America, Vol. 80,
No. 4, April 1973, 386.
“He was pleasant”: York, Making Weapons, 89.
“I think”: Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, 63.
“all-out atomic war”: Whitman, 52.
maximum kill rate: “Citation to Accompany the Award of the Medal
of Merit to Dr. John von Neumann,” October 1946, Von
Neumann Papers, LOC.

674
 NOTES

“a mentally superhuman race”: Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 45.

Prisoner’s Dilemma: Poundstone, 8-9, 103-106.
something unexpected: Abella, 55-56; Poundstone, 121-123.
“How can you persuade”: McCullough, 758.
Goldstine explained: Information on Goldstine comes from Jon
Edwards, “A History of Early Computing at Princeton,”
Princeton Alumni Weekly, August 27, 2012.
von Neumann declared: Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 73.
“Our universe”: George Dyson, “‘An Artificially Created Universe’:
The Electronic Computer Project at IAS,” Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton (Spring 2012), 8-9.
secured funding: Maynard, “Daybreak of the Digital Age,” Princeton
Alumni Weekly, April 4, 2012.
he erred: Jon Edwards, “A History of Early Computing at Princeton,”
Princeton Alumni Weekly, August 27, 2012, 4.
Wohlstetter’s famous theory: Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of
Terror,” 1-12.
Debris: Descriptions of shock wave and blast effects are described in
Garrison, 23-29.
Georg Rickhey: Information on Rickhey comes from
Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg and RG 330 JIOA Foreign
Scientist Case Files, NACP. See also Jacobsen, Operation
Paperclip, 252.
a hospital, chapel, barbershop: Interview with Dr. Leonard
Kreisler, March 2012. Kreisler was the post doctor at Raven
Rock.
“land of the blind”: Keeney, 19.
the senators had questions: For testimony from the hearings, see U.S.
Senate Committee, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Civil
Defense of the Committee on Armed Services, 119-21.
speck of plutonium: Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, podcast.
“Johnny was”: York, Making Weapons, 96-97.
He theorizes: John von Neumann, “The Computer and the Brain,”
60, 74.

675
 Nores

Chapter Three Vast Weapons Systems of the Future

“successful satellite”: Details of this incident are from Brzezinski,
164-165.
“portrays a United States”: Cited in “Missile and Satellite Hearings.”
CQ Almanac 1958, 14th ed., 11-669-11-671. Washington, DC:
Congressional Quarterly, 1959. The actual title was
“Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age,” York Papers,
Geisel.
national hysteria: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 20.
presidential research committee: Gaither had to withdraw because of
illness in September 1957.
“The issue”: For this account, see York, Making Weapons, 98.
Russians were not preparing: Interview with Hervey Stockman,
August 2009; Jacobsen, Area 51, 86-89.
in error: Allen Dulles, “Memorandum from the Director of Central
Intelligence to the Executive Secretary of the National Security
Council,” December 24, 1957, CIA. According to Dulles, the
CIA’s information was “far more detailed than that contained
in the Gaither report itself.”
“Soap operas sell”: Hafner and Lyon, 14.
He proposed: McElroy wanted to create the agency without
authorization from Congress. He first ran the idea by his
general counsel, who informed him that he did not have the
authority to create such an agency. As per the National
Security Act of 1947, McElroy would have to notify the
chairman of the Armed Services Committee and present him
with a proposal.
“vast weapons systems”: House Subcommittee on Department of
Defense Appropriations, The Ballistic Missile Program, Hearings,
85th Cong,, Ist sess., November 20-21, 1957, 7.
“the new dimension”: Quotes and information in this section are
from The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958-1974,
RichardJ. Barber Associates, December 1975 (hereafter
Barber), II-1-22, located in York Papers, Geisel.
their service's domain: Aviation Week, February 3, 1958.

676
 NOTES

State of the Union: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the

Congress on the State of the Union,” January 9, 1958, UCSB.
unpublished history: Barber, II-10-25.
grandfather made caskets: General Biographical History, Notes,
Series 1: biographical materials, York Papers, Geisel.
“From the earliest times”: York, Making Weapons, 7.
“I made my way with difficulty”: General Biographical History,
Notes, Series 1: biographical materials, York Papers, Geisel.
von Braun’s 113 German colleagues: Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip,
16-17, 88, 95-96.
“not acceptable”: Barber, I1-25.
good for national security: Kistiakowsky, 198.
York explained: York, Making Weapons, 117.
“Traitorous!”: Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, 318.
“T formally proposed”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to Nikita
Khrushchev, Chairman, Council of Ministers, U.S.S.R., on the
Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapons Tests, May 16, 1959,
UGSB:
“If we stop testing”: “Lawrence in the Cold War, Ernest Lawrence
and the Cyclotron,” American Institute of Physics, History
Center Exhibit, digital collection.
about to get to work: Barber, I-27. Vela started small, officially in
ARPA’s second year. The scientific limitations in nuclear
detection were not entirely clear at the 1958 Geneva Conference
of Experts. It was after Project Argus that scientists first
determined how difficult it was to detect nuclear explosions in
space.
Vela Sierra monitored: Information about Vela follow-on programs
can be found in Van Atta et al, DARPA Technical
Accomplishments, Volume 3, I-2, II-4; Barber, IV-28-30.

Chapter Four Emergency Plans

York’s desk: Details from this section are from Herb York, Diaries
Series, appointment books, date books, and wall calendars,
York Papers, Geisel.

677
 Notes

Keeney made public: Keeney, 22-33.

on account of a theory: Barber, II-27.
the “Christofilos effect”: Advanced Research Projects Division,
Identification of Certain Current Defense Problems and Possible
Means of Solution, IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, August 1958
(hereafter IDA-ARPA Study No. 1); interview with Charles
Townes, March 2014.
Project Floral: DNA, Operation Argus 1958, 3, 53.
code name, Project 137: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1; Wheeler oral
history interview, 61-63.
“defense problems”: Finkbeiner, 29.
“its own special clearance”: Quotes are from interviews with Marvin
“Murph” Goldberger, June-August, 2013. See also Goldberger
oral history interview.
“ingenuity, practicality and motivation”: Finkbeiner, 28.
Astrodome-like shield: Barber, VI-II. For quotes from York, see
Making Weapons, 129-30.
unusual backstory: Melissinos, Nicholas C. Christofilos: His
Contributions to Physics, 1-15.
“responsible people”: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, 19.
“The group has”: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, 19.
Brazilian Anomaly: Operation Argus 1958, 19.
so many moving parts: Ibid., 22-26.
missile trajectory: Ibid., 48; list of shipboard tests and remarks, 56.
“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”: Ibid., 34.
watched fireworks: Childs, 525.
“The President has asked”: Ibid., 521.
detection facilities: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 58.
‘Wissmer examined Lawrence: Childs, 526.
had Harold Brown participate: Supplement 5 to “Extended
Chronology of Significant Events Leading Up to
Disarmament,” Joint Secretariat, Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 21,
1961, (unpaginated), York Papers, Geisel.
“T could never”: Childs, 527.

678
 NOoreEs

Christofilos effect did occur: Argus 1958, 65—68; Interview with

Doug Beason, June 2014; “Report to the Commission to Assess
the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse
(EMP) Attack,” 161.
The telegram marked: Edward Teller, telegram to General Starbird,
“Thoughts in Connection to the Test Moratorium,” August 29,
1958, LANL.

Chapter Five Sixteen Hundred Seconds Until Doomsday

“Our job”: Interview with Gene McManus, October 2013.
“coldest thirteen miles”: Berry, “The Coldest 13 Miles on Wheels,”
Popular Mechanics, February 1968.
twenty-four-hour operational mode: Richard Witkin, “U.S. Radar
Scans Communist Areas: Missile Warning System at Thule Is
Put in Operation on a 24-Hour Basis,” New York Times,
October 2, 1960.
sitting in the NORAD War Room: John G. Hubbell,“ “You Are
Under Attack!’ The Strange Incident of October 5,” Reader's
Digest, April 1961.
coming in from the BMEWS J-Site: Interview with Gene McManus,
who arrived at J-Site three months later. The story was
legendary at BMEWS. The technicians involved were
McManus’s colleagues. A NORAD spokesman described the
conversation for the Reader’s Digest magazine six months after
the crisis.
the story broke: “Moon Stirs Scare of Missile Attack,” Associated
Press, December 7, 1961.
closer to $900 million: This information comes from ODR&E
Report, “Assessment of Ballistic Missile Defense Program” PPD
61-33, 1961 (fifty-four pages, unpaginated), York Papers,
Geisel.
Twenty-six minutes and forty seconds: Ibid.
“The nuclear-armed ICBM”: Ibid.
“high confidence”: Ibid., Appendix 1.

679
 NoTEs

“I started Jason”: Quotes are from interview with Murph Goldberger,

June 2013. He passed away the following year, in November
2014.
had been entwined: Brueckner oral history interview, 4; Lukasik oral
history interview, 27.
a little business”: Brueckner oral history interview, 7.
most significant inventions: Interview with Charles Townes, March
2014.
IDA served: Interview with Richard Van Atta, May 2014; Barber,
L8.
most respected colleagues: Interview with Murph Goldberger, July
20153
“tremendously bright squad”: Kistiakowsky, 200-202.
contribute significantly: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2014. See also Finkbeiner.
official entity: Draft, DoD Directive, Subjects: Department of
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, No. 5129.33,
December 30, 1959, York Papers, Geisel.
Mildred Goldberger said: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June,
2014; see also Goldberger oral history interview.
“confuse satellite detection”: Drell oral history interview, 14.
“imaginative thinking”: Barber, V-24.
PENAIDS proof tests: Van Atta et al, DARPA Technical
Accomplishments, Volume 2, IV-4—5; Hansen, Swords of
Armageddon, Volume 7, 491.
“Pen X”: Ruina oral history interview.
deceptive MIRVs: H. F. York, “Multiple Warhead Missiles,” Scientific
American 229, no. 5 (1973): 71.
Ruina and Townes reached an agreement: Ruina oral history
interview.
“instantaneous kill”: Barber, [X-31.
“whether you can use a particle beam”: Finkbeiner, 53.
Project Seesaw: Barber, IV-23, IX-32; for Christofilos, see York,
Making Weapons, 129-30.

680
 NOoreEs

“Seesaw was a sensitive”: Barber, [X-31. See also Jason Division, IDA,
Project Seesaw (U).
“Directed energy”: Interview with General Paul F. Gorman (retired),
October 2014.

Chapter Six Psychological Operations

Thor Agena A: Ruffner, Corona: America’s First Satellite Program, 16.
“the best specimens”: Space and Missile Systems Organization, Air
Force Systems Command, “Biomedical Space Specimens, Fact
Sheet,” June 3, 1959, Appendix C.
“We don’t want to humanize”: Bill Willks, “Satellite Carrying Mice
Fails,” Washington Post, June 4, 1959.
“dramatic rescue effort”: Ruffner, Corona: America’s First Satellite
Program, 16.
classified spying mission: Ibid., x.
TIROS: Barber, III-15.
22,952 images: Conway, 29.
photographs of a storm front: John W. Finney, “U.S. Will Share
Tiros I Pictures,” New York Times, April 5, 1960.
“no information”: Email correspondence with Mike Hanson,
September 17, 2013.
story of intrigue: Files are from RG 330, Office of the Secretary of
Defense, ARPA, Project Agile, NACP; RG 330, Records of
Robert S. McNamara, 1961-1968, Defense Programs and
Operations, NACP.
forged a brilliant record: Barber, V-37.
a limp: Interview with Kay Godel, September 2013. The limp was
not always obvious.
“since Napoleon”: Spector, 111.
“The Vietnamese refused”: Ibid., 112.
“We hated to dig”: Quotes throughout this discussion are from
Abboud oral history interview, 15-16; see also Bernard C.
Nalty, Stalemate: U.S. Marines from Bunker Hill to the
Hook, 4.

681
 Notes

Chinese land mines: Abboud oral history interview, 15.

both men came from privilege: All quotes in this section are from
interviews and email correspondence with Joan Dulles Talley,
March 2014—May 2015.
shadowy figure: Correspondence between Allen W. Dulles and Dr.
Harold G. Wolff, New York Hospital, CIA; “Biographical
Note,” Harold Wolff, M.D. (1898-1962), Papers, Cornell
University Archives, digital collection.
spin out of control: Memorandum, Gordon Gray to Allen Dulles,
October 29, 1951, CIA.
Godel convened: As per National Security Council directives NSC
10/2, NSC 10/5, NSC 59/1, Papers of Gordon Gray, Harry S.
Truman Library and Museum, digital collection.
“mind-annihilating methods”: See “Forced Confessions,”
Memorandum for the Record, National Security Council Staff,
May 8, 1953, and “Brainwashing During the Korean War,”
Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) Central Files Series, PSB
702.5 (no date), Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, digital
collection.
“brainwashing”: This account is drawn from Marks, 133.
“insectivization of human beings”: Edward Hunter, “Brain-Washing
Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,” Miami
News, September 1950.
Congress invited Hunter: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee
on Un-American Activities, “Communist Psychological
Warfare (Brainwashing),” March 13, 1958.
Joost A. M. Meerloo: Tim Weiner, “Remembering Brainwashing,”
New York Times, July 6, 2008.
Schwable recanted: “Marines Award Schwable the Legion of Merit,”
New York Times, July 8, 1954.
mental breakdowns: Officers such as Frank Olson, a biological
weapons expert who committed suicide, or was killed, when he
suffered a breakdown after being covertly dosed with LSD by
his CIA bosses.
Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology: Marks, chap. 9.

682
 NOTES

even more powerful position: Official Register of the United States

Civil Service Commission, 1955, 108.
Godel was praised: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961-1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
“collecting, evaluating and disseminating intelligence”: Document
210, Foreign Relations, 1961-1963, Volume I, Vietnam,
DSOH; IAC-D-104/4 23, April 1957, CIA.
Godel would say: Barber, V-36.
“bold summation”: Ibid., V-37.
outlined his observations: W. H. Godel, director, Policy and
Planning Division, ARPA, Memo for assistant secretary of
defense, Subject: Vietnam, September 15, 1960, RG 330,
Project Agile, NACP.
“applying scientific talent”: Barber, V-39.
“anti-guerrilla forces at night”: Spector, 111-114.
ARPA-financed fighters: In May 1960 three U.S. Army Special
Forces Teams of ten men each arrived in Vietnam to work with
President Diem. With them were thirteen U.S. Army
intelligence specialists and three psychological warfare
specialists. They trained Vietnamese soldiers for roughly two
months; Spector, 353.
“Godel continued”: Barber, V-2, V-4.
departure of Herb York: For quotes, see York, Making Weapons, 194,
203.

Chapter Seven Techniques and Gadgets

pushed the muzzles: Karnow, 10.
Kennedy spent more time: Barber, V-39.
“Viet-nam counter-insurgency plan”: “Summary Record of a
Meeting, the White House,” Washington, D.C., January 28,
1961, DSOH.
“to deter all wars”: “Special Message to Congress on Urgent National
Needs,” May 25, 1961, National Security Files, JFK.
“techniques and ‘gadgets’”: Document 27, Foreign Relations, 1961—
1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.

683
 Notes

develop new weapons: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961-1963,

Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH. /
garner support: Document 59, Foreign Relations, 1961-1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
Johnson asked Diem: Document 56, Foreign Relations, 1961-1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
gave Godel authority: Barber, V-35.
Each building had: ARPA Field Unit, Vietnam, Monthly Report,
CDTC, photographs (n.d.), RG 330, Project Agile, NACP.
entourage of military advisors: Ibid., photograph (n.d.).
laborers toiled away: Ibid., photographs (n.d.).
giving briefings: Viet-Nam Working Group Files, Lot 66, D
193, Minutes of Task Force Meetings, National Security
Files, JFK.
canine program: “The Use of a Marking Agent for Identification
by Dogs,” March 11, 1966, RG 330, Project Agile, NACP;
see also ARPA Field Unit, ARPA Order 262-67, July 7,
1961.
Godel called it: Document 96, Foreign Relations, 1961-1963,
Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
AR-15 prototypes: Barber, V-44.
“would have caused death”: Ezell, 187.
“development of the M-16”: Barber, V-44.
“maximum effectiveness”: Document 96, Foreign Relations,
1961-1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
“subject to political-psychological restrictions”: Letter from
Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale, assist. SECDEF to
Dir/Defense Research & Engineering, subject: Combat
Development Test Center, Vietnam, May 16, 1961. National
Security Files, JFK.
first batch: Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand, 11, 208n.
first mission to spray herbicides: Brown, Vegetational Spray Tests in
South Vietnam, 17, 23, 45.
more ambitious follow-up plan: Ibid., 68.

684
 NOortEs

roughly half of South Vietnam: Buckingham, Operation Ranch

Hand, 15.
“The first advice”: Bradlee, 22.
General Maxwell Taylor: As Army chief of staff, Taylor believed the
Eisenhower doctrine of massive retaliation put too much
emphasis on nuclear weapons and not enough emphasis on the
Army. Under Eisenhower, the Army was reduced by 500,000
men, while the Air Force gained 30,000. See also McMaster,
Dereliction, 8-17.
According to a memo: Historical Division Joint Secretariat, Joint
Chiefs of Staff, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1960-1968,
ix, 74. .
Godel took General Taylor: Document 169, Foreign Relations,
1961-1963, Volume I, Vietnam, DSOH.
Taylor-Rostow mission: Telegram from the President’s Military
Representative (Taylor) to the Department of State, Saigon,
October 25, 1961, DSOH.
General Taylor described: Quotes are from “Vietnam Report on
Taylor-Rostow Mission to South Vietnam,” November 3, 1961,
RDT&E Annex, National Security Files, JFK.
Radio Hanoi: “PsyWar Efforts and Compensation Machinery in
Support of Herbicide Operations,” Subject: Chemical
Defoliation and Crop Destruction in South Viet-Nam,
Washington, April 18, 1963, National Security Files, JFK.
“Joint Chiefs of Staff”: Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand, 16;
McMaster, Dereliction, 114.
“Weed Killer’: Memorandum from Rostow to President, November
21, 1961, National Security Files, JFK.
Kennedy approved: National Security Action Memorandum 115,
Subject: Defoliant Operations in Viet-nam, November 30,
1961, National Security Files, JFK.
2012 congressional report: Martin, “Vietnamese Victims of Agent
Orange and U.S.-Vietnam Relations,” 2, 15.

685
 NotTeEs

“He was advised”: RG 330, Project Agile ARPA Field Unit, Vietnam,
Memorandum for record, “Meeting with Mr. William Godel,”
December 4 and December 12, 1961, NACP; Brown, Anticrop
Warfare Research, Task-O1, 135.

Chapter Eight RAND and COIN

lunchtime matches: Jardini, chap. 2. Jardini’s book is available only
on Amazon Kindle, hence no page numbers.
Project Sierra: Weiner, 4-9.
Tanham’s observations: Elliott, 27. Mai Elliott’s book is the definitive
work on RAND during the Vietnam War era. She worked on
ARPA programs, in Saigon, during the war.
Tanham’s 1961 report: Elliott, 17-18; George K. Tanham, “Trip
Report: Vietnam, January 1963,” RAND Corporation, March
2219635
Rand was needed: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 25.
generally looked down: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013.
“weapons systems philosophy”: George H. Clement, “Weapons
Systems Philosophy,” RAND Corporation, 1956.
first two RAND analysts: J. Donnell and G. Hickey, Memo RM-
3208-ARPA, August 1962, ARPA Combat Development &
Test Center, Vietnam, Monthly Report (n.d.), RG 330, Project
Agile, NACP.
“Signs of conflict”: Hickey, Window, 19, 90-91.
change of plans: Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam
(U), 114; Hickey, Window, 91.
effective means of pacification: Memorandum from the director of
the CIA to Secretary of Defense McNamara on the Strategic
Hamlet Program, July 13, 1962, CIA.
“monitor”: Ehlschlaeger, “Understanding Megacities with the
Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence Paradigm,” xii.
Cu Chu villagers: Hickey, Window, 93.
“T said, in essence”: Ibid., 99.

686
 NOTES

Hickey recalled paraphrasing: Ibid., 99.

ARPA officials complained: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 342.
“more patient approach”: Elliott, 33.
“ground to a pulp”: Ibid., 38.
Tanham showed great optimism: Tanham, War Without Guns,
25-29.
“Given a little luck”: Elliott, 31.

Chapter Nine Command and Control

command and control: “Special Message to Congress on the Defense
Budget,” March 28, 1961, JFK speeches, JFK.
Brown recruited J. C. R. Licklider: Ruina oral history interview.
world’s authorities: Hafner and Lyon, 28.
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment: Interview with Jay Forrester,
October 2013.
“Man-Computer Symbiosis:” J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer
Symbiosis,” [RE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics,
volume HFE-1, March 1960, 4-11.
“in not too many years”: Ibid., 4-5.
The agency inherited: Barber, V-4.
“Guess how many nuclear missiles”: Interview with Paul Kozemchak,
April 2014.
“The Soviets fired three”: Peter Kuran, Nukes in Space: The Rainbow
Bombs, DVD (2000).
could easily have misidentified: Interview with Gene McManus,
October 2014.
“could have led to war”: Kuran, Nukes in Space.
detonated... over Zhezqazghan: EIS [Electric Infrastructure
Security] Council, “Report: USSR Nuclear EMP Upper
Atmosphere Kazakhstan Test,” 184, 1.
Licklider wrote: “Memorandum For: Members and Affliates of the
Intergalactic Computer Network, From: J. C. R. Licklider,”
April 23, 1963; discussed in Barber, V-50-53.
related to surveillance programs: Barber, VI-53.

687
 NOTES

used in conflict zones: Smithsonian Institution Archives, “Toward a

Technology of Human Behavior for Defense Use (1962),”
Record Unit 179, York Papers, Geisel.
“build a bridge”: Cited in Barber, V-54.
“Computer assisted teaching”: Ibid.
legally required: U.S. General Accounting Office, Activities of the
Research and Development Center: Thailand, 13.
“Thailand was the laboratory”: Woods oral history interview.
“The U.S. would need”: ARPA, Project Agile: Remote Area
Research and Engineering, Semiannual Report, I July-31
December 1963, 2.
miscataloged: Interview with archivist Eric Van Slander at National
Archives, College Park, February 2014.
“policy not to release”: Email correspondence with Charles E. Arp,
Battelle Enterprise content manager, January 21, 2014.
“theoretical and experimental”: Brundage, “Military Research and
Development Center, Quarterly Report,” October 1, 1963—
December 31, 1963.
“Anthropometric Survey”: Information is drawn from Robert White,
“Anthropometric Survey of the Royal Thai Armed Forces.”
They proposed that studies: Joseph Hanlon, “Project Cambridge
Plans Changed After Protests,” Computer World, October 22,
1969.
“barely scratched the surface”: Salemink, 222.
“important tools”: J. C. R. Licklider, New Scientist, February 25, 1971,
423
monitored, analyzed, and modeled: The Utilization of ARPA-
Supported Research for International Security Planning, 6, 13-15 >
33-42.
Someone threw a grenade: U.S. Department of State Central Files,
cable, POL 25, S Viet, May 9, 1963, DSOH.
“Flames were coming”: Halberstam, Making of a Quagmire, 128.
“What have the Buddhist”: Madame Nhu’s response is
viewable on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d
_PWM9gWRSE.

688
 NOTES

“T can scarcely believe”: Cited in Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The

' Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).

Chapter Ten Motivation and Morale

with a team of ARPA officials: See Hickey, “The Military Advisor
and His Foreign Counterpart.”
“En route”: Quotes are from Hickey, Window, 111.
“villagers were sick”: Ibid., 124.
a massive explosion: Donlon, Outpost of Freedom, 139; Hickey,
Window, 127.
Outside his bunkroom: The account of the ambush is drawn from
Hickey, Window, 130; Hickey, “Military Advisor,” iii.
“The July 1964”: Hickey, Window, 147.
Collbohm and Pauker: Deitchman oral history interview, 71-72;
Elliott, 48-49.
Deitchman: Trained as an engineer, Deitchman had been working at
IDA when he was asked to take a two-year leave to work at the
Pentagon, reporting directly to Harold Brown.
“Who are the Vietcong?”: Information is from interviews with
Joseph Zasloff, August—October 2014; Zasloff died in
December 2014. Seel also Zasloff, The Role of North Vietnam in
the Southern Insurgency; Donnell, Pauker, and Zasloff, Viet
Cong Motivation and Morale in 1964: A Preliminary Report;
Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War
Era, Chapter Two.
“The original intent”: Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, 235.
deal with the CIA: Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South
Vietnam, 23.
inhabited by ghosts: Tela Zasloff, Saigon Dreaming, 164.
Most farmers: Elliott, 59.
What motivated Vietcong fighters: Interview with Joseph Zasloff,
October 2014.
Pauker forwarded: Pauker, “Treatment of POWs, Defectors, and
Suspects in South Vietnam,” 13.

689
 NOTES

“The motivation”: Press, “Estimating from Misclassified Data,” iii,

26. :
identified by the Pentagon: McMaster, Dereliction, 143.
briefed General William Westmoreland: Interview with Joseph
Zasloff, October 2014.
The insurgency: Quotes in this paragraph and the next are from
Donnell, Pauker, and Zasloff, Viet Cong Motivation and Morale
in 1964: A Preliminary Report.
other RAND officers: Interview with Joseph Zasloff, October 2014.
“Tam looking for”: Elliott, 88.
elite defense intellectuals: Louis Menand, “Fat Man: Herman Kahn
and the Nuclear Age,” New Yorker, June 27, 2005.
article attacking Gouré’s work: Harrison E. Salisbury, “Soviet
Shelters: A Myth or Fact?” New York Times, December 24,
1961.
“T get red”: Interview with Joseph Zasloff, October 2014.
Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters: Karnow, 408—409.
“By and large”: Gouré, “Southeast Asia Trip Report, Part I: The
Impact of Air Power in South Vietnam.”
“Gouré gave the Pentagon”: Interview with Joseph Zasloff, October
2014.
“break the backbone”: Elliott, 90; Gouré, JCS Briefing on Viet Cong
Motivation and Morale, 7.
“Dan Ellsberg”: Hickey, Window, 179.
reports for ARPA: Gouré, “Some Findings of the Vietcong
Motivation and Morale Study: June-December 1965,” 3.
copy of Gouré’s findings: Malcolm Gladwell, “Viewpoint: Could One
Man Have Shortened the Vietnam War?” BBC News Magazine,
July 8, 2013.
Frelinghuysen said: Quotes are from Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes,
235-39.
Fulbright wrote: Jardini (unpaginated).
62,000 pages: Phillips, User's Guide to the Rand Interviews in
Vietnam, iil.

690
 NoreEs

indicted Godel: Walter B. Douglas, “Accused Former Aides Cite

Witnesses in Asia,” Washington Post, January 9, 1965.
Godel was convicted: Peter S. Diggins, “Godel, Wylie Get 5 Years for
Funds Conspiracy,” Washington Post, June 19, 1965.
prison terms: “5-Year Term for Godel Is Upheld,” Washington Post,
May 21, 1966.
correctional institution in Allenwood: Interview with Kay Godel,
September 2013.
personal financial benefit: “Embezzler Godel Sued to Repay Double,”
Washington Post, November 5, 1966.

Chapter Eleven The Jasons Enter Vietnam

secret, top secret, or secret restricted data: Interview with Murph
Goldberger, June 2014.
closely intertwined: By example, William Nierenberg earned a Ph.D.
under I. I. Rabi at Columbia. Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi
were both on the faculty at the University of Chicago when
Fermi took on Murph Goldberger and one other theoretical
physicist as Ph.D. students. See also Finkbeiner.
“The high goals set”: MacDonald, “Jason—The Early Years,”
informal presentation at the meeting of the Jason Advisory Board
held at DARPA, Arlington, VA, December 12, 1986, York
Papers, Geisel; MacDonald oral history interview.
Gell-Mann: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013; Ruina
oral history interview.
unsuccessfully tried: Johnson, 229.
“Jasons became intrigued”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013; Johnson, 256.
“the Vietnam problem”: William Nierenberg, “DCPG: The Genesis
of a Concept,” Journal of Defense Research, ser. B, Tactical
Warfare (Fall 1969); declassified unpublished manuscript,
November 18, 1971, York Papers, Geisel.
never been declassified: Harris, Acoustical Techniques/Designs
Investigated During the Southeast Asia Conflict: 1966-1972, 3.

691
 Notes

Powell said: “Colin L. Powell: By the Book,” New York Times Book
Review, July 1, 2012, 8.
“One very positive thing”: MacDonald oral history interview, 3.
“He made a point”: Fleming, 5.
“miserable”: MacDonald oral history interview, 13.
venerable Dr. Walter Munk: Von Storch and Hasselman, 226.
“And with Adlai Stevenson”: Quotes are from MacDonald oral
history interview, 6, 10, 11.
The World Tomorrow: MacDonald oral history interview, 28.
elected chairman: Weather and Climate Modification Problems and
Prospects, vol. 2, Research and Development, National Research
Council, January 1, 1966.
“a deliberate and thoughtful review”: Cited in Munk et al,
“Gordon James Fraser MacDonald, July 30, 1929—May 14,
2002,” 230.
“T became increasingly convinced”: Ibid., 231.
“searching, almost desperately”: MacDonald, “Jason and
DCPG— Ten Lessons,” 6.
Project EMOTE: Quotes are from Mutch et al., Operation Pink Rose;
Chandler and Bentley, Forest Fire as a Military Weapon, Final
Report.
“appreciable destruction”: J. M. Breit, “Neutralization of Viet Cong
Safe Havens,” 13.
inferno: Mutch et al., Operation Pink Rose, iii, 116; Joseph Trevithick
“Firestorm: Forest Fires as a Weapon in Vietnam,” Armchair
General Magazine, June 13, 2012.
forest flammability: Mutch et al., Operation Pink Rose, 103-112.
top secret report: Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness, 94-95, By war's
end, the NSA estimated “as many as one million soldiers
and political cadre” had traveled the trail during the Vietnam
‘War.
sent the Jason scientists: Deitchman, “An Insider's Account: Seymour
Deitchman,” Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability,
February 25, 2003. Deitchman’s email interview conducted
with Peter Hayes is available online at nautilus.org.

692
 NorTeEs

“anastomosed structure”: Nierenberg, “DCPG—The Genesis of a

Concept,” declassified unpublished manuscript, November 18,
1971, York Papers, Geisel.
obstructing movement along the trail: Lewis oral history
interview.
studies the Jasons performed: Interview with Murph Goldberger; see
also Federation of American Scientists, list of Jason studies,
digital archive.
“We did our studies”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2014,
quoting/paraphrasing Jason Division, IDA, Air-Supported Anti-
Infiltration Barrier, ii, as well as his interviews with Finkbeiner
and Aaserud.
“think about using nuclear weapons”: Deitchman, “An Insider's
Account: Seymour Deitchman,” Nautilus Institute for Security
and Sustainability, February 25, 2003.
“the numbers”: Jason Division, IDA, Tactical Nuclear Weapons in
Southeast Asia, 27.

Chapter Twelve The Electronic Fence

“T stepped on”: Interviews and email correspondence with Richard
“Rip” Jacobs, June-August 2013. Information is from
interviews with VO-67 crew members and the VO-67
Association digital archive and website.
Nine men KIA: VO-67 Crew 2 Memorial Pictures, VO-67 Crew 2
Summary-KIA, VO67A. Personnel in this incident: Denis
Anderson, Delbert A. Olson, Richard Mancini, Arthur C.
Buck, Michael Roberts, Gale Siow, Phillip Stevens, Donald
Thoresen, Kenneth Widon.
Crew Five was lost: VO-67 Crew 5 Memorial Pictures, VO-67 Crew
5 Summary-KIA, VO-67A. Personnel in this incident: Glenn
Miller Hayden, Chester Coons, Frank Dawson, Paul Donato,
Clayborn Ashby, James Kravitz, James Martin, Curtis
Thurman, James Wonn.
acoubuoys: For a technical discussion, see Office of the Secretary,
Joint Staff, MACY, Military History Branch. Command

693
 Notes

History, United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam:

1967. Volume 3, 1105-1106; for a narrative discussion; see
Rego 11-17, with photographs.
“how it happens”: Interview with Tom Wells, June 2013.
“We couldn’t control”: Interview with Barney Walsh, June
2013.
Captain Milius: Milius was first listed MIA, but his status was later
changed to PKIA (Presumed Killed in Action); the USS Milius
is named in his honor.
McNamara... looked: Ruina oral history interview, 28; Pentagon
Papers (Gravel), vol. 4, chap. 1, sec. 3, subsection 1.C. The idea
had first been proposed by Harvard Law School professor Roger
Fisher.
“Secretary McNamara asked me”: Sullivan oral history interview, 53;
Rego, 1.
high-technology sensors: Sensors are small, self powered
machines designed to measure physical qualities by
mimicking biological senses including sight, hearing, smell,
and touch. ARPA became an early pioneer in modern sensor
technology when, in 1958, before NASA was created, it was put
in charge of all U.S. space programs. The first American
satellite, Explorer I, carried a sensor into space, a tiny Geiger
counter that confirmed the presence of the Van Allen radiation
belts.
classified sensor programs: MacDonald, “Jason and DCPG—Ten
Lessons,” 10, York Papers, Geisel.
listen for Vietcong: Gatlin, Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report,
32; Mahnken, 112.
the campus grounds: Interview with Goldberger; Fitch oral
history interview. In defense of the Jasons’ role in creating the
barrier, Goldberger said the intention was to “kill fewer people”
than the Air Force was killing with its two-thousand-pound
bombs.
SADEYE cluster bombs: The bombs are discussed in Jason Division,
IDA, Air-Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier, 3-4.

694
 Notes

held a seminar: Richard Garwin oral history interview.

“aspirin-size” mini-bombs: Jason Division, IDA, Air-Supported Anti-
Infiltration Barrier, 30.
“20 million Gravel mines”: Ibid., 5.
“Tt is difficult to assess”: Ibid., 6, 9, and 13.
roughly one billion: In September 1966, the official figure the Jasons
gave McNamara was $860 million. By the time the fence was
operational, costs had reached $1.8 billion.
McNamara was impressed: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013.
“The occasion”: MacDonald, “Jason and the DCPG-Ten
Lessons,” 10.
belittled by most of the generals: All quotes from Office of the
Secretary, Joint Staff, MACV, Military History Branch,
Command History, United States Military Assistance Command
Vietnam: 1967, Volume 3, 1072-1075.
with or without the support: Ibid., 1073.
General Starbird: Details are from Foster, “Alfred Dodd Starbird,
1912-1983,” 317-321; interview with Edward Starbird, the
general’s son.
Joint Task Force 728: Office of the Secretary, Joint Staff, MACV,
Military History Branch. Command History, United States
Military Assistance Command Vietnam: 1967. Volume 3,
1072-1075.
“highest national priority”: Document 233, Foreign Relations of
the United States, 1964-1968, Volume IV, Vietnam, 1966,
DSOH.
“We are on the threshold”: Cited in Vernon Pizer, “Coming—The
Electronic Battlefield,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, February
14, 1971.
“system of systems”: MacDonald, “Jason and the DCPG— Ten
Lessons,” 8.
electronic battlefield concept: Half a century later, the results of the
electronic fence are ubiquitous—not just on the battlefield but
across America, in the civil sector. The legacy of the electronic

695
 Notes

fence is everywhere: home, phone, computer, car, airport,

doctor's office, shopping mall.
“From its outset”: Gatlin, Project CHECO Southeast Asia Eps 38.

Chapter Thirteen The End of Vietnam

received a tip: Quotes are from Finney, “Anonymous Call Set Off
Rumors of Nuclear Arms for Vietnam,” New York Times,
February 12 and 13, 1968.
“Tt was a scary place”: MacDonald, “Jason and the DCPG—Ten
Lessons,” 8-12.
“Thad probably”: Garwin oral history interview.
also allegedly stolen: James N. Hill, “The Committee on Ethics:
Past, Present, and Future,” 11-19. In Handbook on Ethical Issues
in Anthropology, edited by Joan Cassell and Sue-Ellen Jacobs, a
special publication of the American Anthropological
Association number 23, available online at aaanet.org.
“staggering 32K of memory”: Maynard, 257n.
journalists also revealed: Princeton Alumni Weekly, September 25,
LOS Mey
students chained...shut: Maynard, 193; “Vote of Princeton Faculty
Could Lead to End of University Ties to IDA,” Harvard
Crimson, Match 7, 1968.
rare declassified copy: Quotes are from ARPA, Overseas Defense
Research:A Brief Survey of Non-Lethal Weapons (U) (page
numbers are illegible).
nonlethal weapons: Steve Metz, “Non-Lethal ‘Weapons: A Progress
Report,” Joint Force Quarterly (Spring-Summer 2001): 18-22;
Ando Arike, “The Soft-Kill Solution: New Frontiers in Pain
Compliance,” Harper's, March 2010.
famously gave birth to: LAPD, “History of SW.A.T.,” Los Angeles
Police Foundation, digital archive.
came under fire: Barber, VIII-63—VIII-67; Van Atta, Richard H.,
Sidney Reed, and Seymour Deitchman, DARPA Technical
Accomplishments, Volume 1. 18-1-18-11; Hord, 4-8.
developed his first thoughts: Hord, 245, 327.

696
 Nores

a billion instructions per second: “A Description of the ILLIAC IV,”

Interim Report, IBM Advanced Computing Systems,
May 1, 1967. The machine never actually achieved a billion
operations per second, but it was at the time the largest
assemblage of computer hardware ever amassed in a single
machine.
designed to cut down: New to the mix was the concept of
building a large-scale SIMD (single instruction, multiple
data) machine. This would change the way data were stored in
the computer's memory and how data flowed through the
machine. University of Illinois Alumni Magazine
1 (2012): 30-35.
“ballistic missile defense”: Roland and Shiman, 12; Hord, 9.
still-classified ARPA program: Author's FOIA requests were
rejected by the departments of Commerce, Energy, and
Defense.
“all the computational requirements”: Cited in Muraoka, Yoichi.
“Illiac IV.” Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing, Springer US,
2011, 914-917.
Defense Department contract: Barber, VIII-63.
headline in the Daily Illini: Patrick D. Kennedy, “Reactions Against
the Vietnam War and Military-Related Targets on Campus:
The University of Illinois as a Case Study, 1965-1972,” Illinois
Historical Journal 84, 109.
“The horrors ILLIAC IV”: All quotes are from the Daily Illini,
January 6, 1970.
“If I could have gotten”: Barber, VIII-63.
firebombed the campus armory: Kennedy, “Reactions Against the
Vietnam War,” Illinois Historical Journal 84, 110.
guarantee the safety: O'Neill, 31; Barber, VIII-62. According to
ARPA, it was the agency that pulled ILLIAC IV, not the
university.
classified program to track submarines: “US Looks for Bigger
Warlike Computers,” New Scientist, April 21, 1977, 140. By
1977, the ILLIAC IV was outdated. DARPA sought to build a

697
 Notes

new machine, one that could produce 10 billion instructions

per second (BIPS).
Acoustic sensors: “U.S. Looks for Bigger, Warlike Comes
New Scientist, April 21, 1977, 140.
“practical outcomes”: Roland and Shiman, 29.
“the epitome”: Barber, IX-2.
“Tt wouldn’t surprise me”: Ibid., [X-19.
“The staff just didn’t know”: Ibid., VIII-79.
“chicken-and-egg problem”: Ibid., VIII-74-77.
“the devil”: Finkbeiner, 102.
“Tl talk about China”: Interview with Murph Goldberger; Finkbeiner,
104.
“Jason made a terrible mistake”: Joel Shurkin, “The Secret War over
Bombing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1973.
No Jason scientist: Interview with Charles Schwartz; file on “Jason
controversy,” York Papers, Geisel.
“This is Dick Garwin”: Finkbeiner, 104.
“perfect occasion”: Bruno Vitale, “The War Physicists,” 3, 12.
European scientists: “Jason: survey by E. H. S. Burhop and replies,
1973,” Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, 1921-1979, Niels Bohr
Library and Archives, digital archive.
“tried for war crimes”: Ibid.
“We should”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June 2013.
“intellectual forefront”: Lukasik oral history interview, 27, 32-33.
“an agreeable move”: Interview with Murph Goldberger, June
2013.

Chapter Fourteen Rise of the Machines

in keeping with the Mansfield Act: Barber, [X-23. Staff supervision
would remain under the control of DDR&E.
three former ARPA directors: Barber, VIII-43, VIII-50.
“high-risk projects”: Barber, [X-7
“Tt was most difficult”: Barber, [X-37. Lukasik would become a
senior vice president of RAND for national security
programs.

698
 Nores

altered the opinions: Commanders Digest, September 20, 1973, 2.

radar cross-section: Interviews with Edward Lovick, 2009-2015;
Jacobsen, Area 51, 97.
acoustically undetectable: Reed et al., DARPA Technical
Accomplishments. Volume 1. 16-1-16-4.
“high-stealth aircraft”: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 152.
asked the CIA: Interviews with Ed Lovick, 2009-2015. After
Heilmeier was briefed by Lockheed, the Skunk Works
division was given a $1 contract by DARPA to “study” stealth,
which essentially amounted to Lockheed handing over reports
already done for CIA. I write about this in Area 51, having
interviewed a number of program participants. The subject is
discussed in DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap but because
Project Oxcart had not been declassified by CIA when the
monograph was written, most of the narrative refers to the
SR-71.
“We designed flat, faceted panels”: Interviews with Ed Lovick, 2009;
Jacobsen, Area 51, 340.
Two significant ideas: RG 330, ARPA, Memo from George H.
Lawrence to Deputy Director of Procurement, Defense Supply
Service, Contract DAHC15-70-C-0144, NACP.
Doubling is a powerful concept: Garreau, 49.
“In a few years”: J. C. R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, “The
Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology
(April 1968), 22.
text messages: K. Fisch, S. McLeod, and B. Brenman, “Did You
Know, 3.0,” Research and Design (2008): 2.
“Ts it going to be”: Taylor oral history interview.
“the most successful project”: DARPA, A History of the Arpanet:
The First Decade, 1-2-5.
“to identify and characterize”: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 11. Fora
detailed discussion of Assault Breaker, see Van Atta et al.,
Transformation and Transition, Volume 1, Chapter Four.
Wohlstetter concluded: See Paolucci, “Summary Report of the Long
Range Research and Development Planning Program.”

699
 NOorTEs

“a circular error probable”: Cited in Watts, “Precision Strike:

An Evolution,” 3, footnote 6.
best example was the bombing: Lavalle, 7.
“It appears”: Kaplan, Daydream Believers, 13.
love of model airplanes: Van Atta et al., Transformation and
Transition, Volume 1, 40.
Praerie and Calere: Ibid., 40—41.
forward-looking infrared: Interview with John Gargus, September
2011.
“more complicated” drone: Cited in Barber, VIII-53.
Nite Panther and Nite Gazelle: Gyrodyne Helicopter Historical
Foundation, “Nite Panther: U.S. Navy’s QH-50 Drone Anti-
Submarine Helicopter (DASH) System,” (n.d.).
TRANSIT: Reed et al., DARPA Technical Accomplishments, Volume
1, 3-1-9.
planning countermeasures: Watts, “Precision Strike: An
Evolution,” 12.
a master game theorist: Jardini (unpaginated). Andrew Marshall
served eight consecutive U.S. presidents, thirteen secretaries
of defense, and fourteen DARPA directors. After forty-two
years of military forecasting, Marshall retired in January
2015 at the age of ninety-two. He was the longest-serving
director inside the Office of Secretary of Defense in Pentagon
history.
Soviets felt so threatened: Watts, “Precision Strike: An Evolution,” 5,
7, 11-13.
“military-technical revolution”: Marshal N. V. Ogarkov, “The
Defense of Socialism: Experience of History and the Present
Day,” Red Star, May 9, 1984, trans. Foreign Broadcast
Information Service, Daily Report, May 9, 1984.
“technology leadership”: Interview with Richard Van Atta, May
2014.
being pursued, in the black: Barber, VIII-36, IX-7, IX-32—40; Reed
etal., DARPA Technical Accomplishments, Volume 1, S-1—9.

700
 Nores

got a radical idea: Interviews and email correspondence with Jack

Thorpe, May 2014—March 2015. The idea, says Thorpe,
developed over time while he was working at the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research in Washington D.C.
hydraulic motion system: Michael L. Cyrus, “Motion Systems Role
in Flight Simulators for Flying Training,” Williams Air Force
Base, AZ, August 1978.
“The other flyer’s aircraft”: Quotes are from interview with Jack
Thorpe, May—October 2014; See also Thorpe, “Trends in
Modeling, Simulation, & Gaming.”
“a place where”: Interview with Jack Thorpe, clarifying his original
paper.
reviewed by senior Pentagon staff: Cosby, Simnet: An Insider's
Perspective, 3.
TCP/IP: Roland and Shiman, 117.
C2U: Thorpe clarifies that C2U was a term that originated with
DARPA’s Command Post of the Future program.
“allowed to fail”: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 68.
“networked war-fighting system was impossible”: Interview with
Neale Cosby, March 2014.
“William Gibson didn’t”: Fred Hapgood,“Simnet,” Wired Magazine,
Vol. 5, no. 4, April 1997; Deborah Solomon, “Back From the
Future Questions for William Gibson,” New York Times
Magazine, August 19, 2007.
Project Reynard: Interview with Justin Elliott; Justin
Elliott and Mark Mazzetti, “World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA
Spied in Online Games,” New York Times, December 9, 2013.

Chapter Fifteen Star Wars and Tank Wars

He had just flown in: Teller, 531.
Poindexter suggested: Broad, 164.
lead agency: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 67. The program
would not be called SDI until later. DARPA’s research and
development efforts focused on directed energy systems and

701
 NOorTEs

were later continued by the Strategic Defense Initiative

Organization.
“But is ita bomb?”: Robert Scheer, “X--Ray Weapon,” Los ie
Times, June 4, 1986.
a laser is: Interview with Charles Townes, March 2014; Townes,
4-6; Beason, 15.
had been inspired to create the laser: Interview with Charles Townes;
Townes, 6. Charles Townes died in January 2015.
“array of small reflectors”: Quotes are from interview with Charles
Townes; Townes, 3.
“like an imaginary story”: Hey, 95-96.
Fiscal Times: Merrill Goozner, “$100b and Counting: Missiles That
Work. ..Sometimes,” The Fiscal Times, March 24, 2012; Mark
Thompson, “Why Obama Will Continue Star Wars,” Time
Magazine, November 16, 2008.
“capture the sense of tankness”; Interviews with Jack Thorpe, May—
October, 2014.
“The high rankers”: Quotes are from interviews with Neale Cosby,
May—October 2014.
DARPA and the Army spent: Cosby, 4.
The Internal Look war games: Interview with General Paul Gorman
(retired), October 2014.
“We played Internal Look”: Schwartzkopf, 10.

Chapter Sixteen Gulf War and Operations Other Than War

what struck him: Atkinson, Crusade, 25.
stealth fighter aircraft: For a comprehensive story of the DARPA
stealth program, see Van Atta et al., Transformation and
Transition; Volume 2, 1-1-9.
“give them the full load”: Atkinson, Crusade, 31.
“Two thoughts”: Crickmore, 63.
“sophisticated video game”: Ibid. Feest also discusses how war is like
playing a video game in Richard Benke, ‘ ‘Right on Target,” AP,
January 14, 1996.
“video game was over”: Crickmore, 63.

702
 NOTES

tactical advantage: Defense Department New Briefing, January 17,

1991, C-SPAN.org; Robert F. Dorr, 312. Numbers vary slightly,
according to different sources.
Iraqi Scuds: Major General Jay Garner, “Army Stands by Patriot's
Persian Gulf Performance,” Defense News 7, no. 26 (1-4): 3;
Atkinson, Crusade, 182; “Intelligence Successes and
Failures in Operations Desert Shield/Storm,” Report of
the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, Committee
on Armed Services, U.S. House of Representatives,
August 1993.
surrendering to a machine: Ted Shelsby, “Iraqi soldiers surrender to
AAIT’s drones.” Baltimore Sun, March 2, 1991.
JSTARS: U.S. Air Force, Fact Sheet, E-8C, Joint Stars (2005).
600,000 lines of code: Mahnken, 130.
“real-time tactical view”: JOINT STARS, Transitions to the Air
Force, Selected Technology Transition, 68.
ten thousand more missions: According to a Defense Department
timeline of the Gulf War, www.defense.gov.
mind-numbing statistics: USA Today World, 1991 Gulf War
chronology, September 3, 1996.
terrible weather: McMaster, “Battle of 73 Easting,” 10-11.
wrote the first handbook: Wolfe, 3.
“We had thermal imagery”: Interview with Douglas Macgregor,
April 2014.
Eagle Troop: Interview with General Paul Gorman (retired) October
2014. The controversy continues over how long this battle
actually lasted.
“slaughter for slaughter’s sake”: Powell, 505. All quotes in this section
are from Powell’s book.
“a great idea”: Interview with Neal Cosby, May 2014.
Bloedorn and the DARPA team: Thorpe, “Trends in Modeling,
Simulation, & Gaming,” 12.
“capturing”: Interview with Neal Cosby, May 2014.
“an instrument of war”: This account is from Gorman and
McMaster, “The Future of the Armed Services: Training for

703
 NOTES

the 21st Century,” Statement before Senate Armed Services

Committee, May 21, 1992.
Task Force Ranger: Stewart, The United States Army in Somalia,
1992-1994, 10-11.
“a direct hit”: Norm Hooten, interview with Lara Logan, CBS News,
60 Minutes, October 6, 2013.
written report: Quotes are from Report of the Senior Working Group
on Military Operations Other Than War (OOTW). Around this
time, DARPA’s name was briefly changed back to ARPA, then
restored to DARPA.
“Historical advice”: Glenn, Combat in Hell, 1.

Chapter Seventeen Biological Weapons

thirteen-man Soviet delegation: Alibek, 226. The other twelve
members were scientists, Soviet army officers, diplomats, and
spies.
regarded with wonderment: Alibek, 194; email correspondence
with Ken Alibek, December 2013. Alibek now lives in
Kazakhstan.
Alibekovy’s job: Alibek, 194.
he later described: Ibid., 9.
“Tt wasn’t so clear”: “DARPA: The Post-Soviet Years 1989—Present
2008,” video available on YouTube at DARPAtv.
great instability: Office of the Secretary of Defense, “Proliferation
and Threat Response,” November 1992, 35.
At any given time: Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 330. As per Hoffman,
there were 6,623 land-based and 2,760 sea-based nuclear
warheads aimed at carefully selected targets inside the United
States, and an additional 1,500 nuclear-armed cruise missiles
and 822 nuclear-armed aircraft ready to fly.
helped conceive and design: Biography of Lisa Bronson, Missouri
State University, Faculty DSS-73.
“At various stops”: This account is from Alibek, 239-40.
reached out to Lisa Bronson: Alibek 242, also discussed with
Michael Goldblatt, April 2014.

704
 NOorTeEs

Vladimir Pasechnik’s defection: Mangold and Goldberg, Plague

Wars, 91-105.
Ultra-Pure: Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 327-328.
streptomycin: Poland and Dennis, WHO/CDS/CSR/EDC Plague
Manual, 55.
“You choose plague”: Hoffmann, The Dead Hand, 334.
“one of the key acts”: Ibid., 332.
declared smallpox dead: World Health Magazine, May 1980 (cover).
Lederberg confirmed: James M. Hughes and D. Peter Drotman, “In
Memoriam: Joshua Lederberg (1925—2008),” Emerging
Infectious Diseases 14, no. 6 (June 2008): 981-983.
to get the Russians to admit: Braithwaite, 141-143. As the British
ambassador to the Soviet Union, Braithwaite was stationed in
Moscow from September 1988 to May 1992.
Yeltsin confessed: Braithwaite, 142-43.
Congress got involved: In the spring of 1992, in an interview with
Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yeltsin acknowledged that the Soviet
Union, and subsequently Russia, had been operating a
biological weapons program. He blamed the arms race. In June,
while visiting Washington, D.C., Yeltsin told the U.S.
Congress, “We are firmly resolved not to lie any more,” and
promised U.S. lawmakers that Russia’s illegal bioweapons
programs would end.
“the most virulent and vicious”: David Willman, “Selling the Threat
of Bioterrorism,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2007.
Alibek confirmed: Alibek, 5.
provided chilling details: Testimony before the Joint Economic
Committee, U.S. Congress, May 20, 1998; Alibek, 40.
“They did not care”: Alibek, 257.
“blindness to the pace”: Cited in William J. Broad, “Joshua
Lederberg, 82, a Nobel Winner, Dies,” New York Times,
February 5, 2008.
“very little capability in biology”: Interview with Larry Lynn;
“DARPA: The Post-Soviet Years 1989—Present 2008,” video
available on YouTube at DARPAtv.

705
 Notes

“a SCIF”: Quotes are from interview with Murph Goldberger, June

2013. ‘
Lederberg: Nancy Stomach, “DARPA Explores Some Promising
Avenues,” 25.
unclassified findings: This section is sourced from Block, Living
Nightmares, 39-75.
cancerous human tumors: Kevin Newman, “Cancer Experts Puzzled
by Monkey Virus,” ABC News, March 12, 1994. The subject,
“The SV-40 Virus: Has Tainted Polio Vaccine Caused an
Increase in Cancer?” was discussed and debated before
Congress on September 10, 2003.
Shortly after: Block, Living Nightmares, 41.
Biological warfare defense: Quotes in this section come from
DARPA Biological Warfare Defense Program, Program
Overview no. 884, briefing slides (unpaginated).
“Star Wars of biology”: Ibid.
Preston testified: Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology,
Terrorism and Government Information and the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence on Chemical and Biological
Weapons, “Threats to America: Are We Prepared?” April 22,
1998.
“hundreds of tons”: Tim Weiner, “Soviet Defector Warns of
Biological Weapons,” New York Times, February 25, 1998.
distributed to members of Congress: Congressional Record, March 12,
1998.
sharing information: Richard Preston, “The Bioweaponeers,” New
Yorker, March 9, 1998, 52-53.
private meeting at the Pentagon: David Willman, “Selling
the Threat of Bioterrorism,” Los Angeles Times, July 1,
2007.
Alibek became president: Executive profile, Bloomberg Business Week,
October
14, 2013. See also Miller, Engelberg, and Broad, 302-4.
Popov: Quotes are from Nova, 1998. Transcripts online at pbs.org.

706
 NOTES

“enigma”: Marilyn Chase, “To Fight Bioterror, Doctors Look for

Ways to Spur Immune System,” Wall Street Journal, September
24, 2002.
biological warfare defense: Prepared remarks of Larry Lynn, director,
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, before the
Acquisition and Technology Subcommittee, U.S. Senate Armed
Services Committee, March 11, 1997.
“We hope”: “Hadron Subsidiary Awarded $3.3 Million Biodefense
Contract by DARPA,” PRNewswire, May 2, 2000. In just a
few years’ time, Alibek’s federal grant and contract money
would total $28 million.
Ukraine: David Willman, “Selling the Threat of Bioterrorism,” Los
Angeles Times, July 1, 2007.
“terrorist organization”: Testimony of Ken Alibek, U.S. House of
Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee
on Research and Development and Subcommittee on
Procurement, October 20, 1999, 15.

Chapter Eighteen Transforming Humans for War

“weakling of the battlefield”: Quotes are from interview with
General Paul Gorman (retired), October 2014.
“On the field of battle”: Colonel S. L. A. Marshall, The Soldier's Load
and the Mobility of a Nation (Washington, DC, 1950), 7-10.
Gorman wrote: Gorman, Super roop, VII-7.
radical vision: Interview with Michael Goldblatt, April 2014. This
belief is common among transhumanists.
with the wave of a wand: Garreau, 28.
“rapid healing”: Harry T. Whelan et al., “DARPA Soldier Self Care:
Rapid Healing of Laser Eye Injuries with Light Emitting Diode
Technology,” September 1, 2004.
like hydrogen sulfide: Jason, MITRE, Human Performance, 29-04:
to control the lobes: Garreau, 28.
Mechanically Dominant Soldier: Tether, Statement to Congress;
March 19, 2003.

707
 NOoreEs

look like Lance Armstrong: Garreau, 32.

“a wireless brain modem”: All quotes are from Statement of Dr. Eric
Eisenstadt, Defense Sciences Office, Brain Machine Interface,
DARPATech ’99 conference.
the answer was clear: Author's tour of Gina Goldblatt’s high
technology bedroom, April 2014.
the Dark Winter script: Quotes are from Dark Winter, Bioterrorism
Exercise, Andrews Air Force Base, June 22-23, 2001; U.S.
House of Representatives, Hearing on Combating Terrorism,
“Federal Response to a Biological Weapons Attack,” July 2001.
Nunn told Congress: Nunn, statement to Congress, July 23,
2001.
all BASIS could do: Interview with Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, October
2013.
“Any technology”: Vin LoPresti, “Guarding the Air We Breathe,”
Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Quarterly (Spring
2003), 5.

Chapter Nineteen Terror Strikes

asks Bray: Quotes are from interview with David Bray, July 2014. Per
Presidential Decision Directive 39, the Bioterrorism
Preparedness and Response Program was a joint effort between
the CDC, the FBI, and the Association of Public Health
Laboratories.
supercomputers would scan: David Siegrist and J. Pavlin, “Bio-
ALIRT Biosurveillance Detection Algorithm Evaluation,”
Centers For Disease Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report, September 24, 2004/53, 152-158. Carlos Castillo-
Chavez, “Infections Disease Informatics and Biosurveillance,”
Springer, October 2010, 6-7.
“Te was a clear day”: Cheney, 339.
“He grabbed me”: Cheney interview with John King, CNN,
September 11, 2002.
laying plans for war: Cheney, 341.

708
 Notes

sitting in his office: Rumsfeld, 335; Larry King Live, December 5,

2001.
Davis later told: This account is from Cockburn, 1-3.
Secretary Rumsfeld helped: Armed Forces Press Service, September
8, 2006, photographs.
“Best info fast”: 9/11 Commission Report, 559; Joel Roberts, “Plans for
Iraq Attack Began on 9/11,” CBS News, September 4, 2002.
“We all knew”: Rice, 83.
“We were embarking”: Cheney, 332.
Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 356-57.
Tenet sent out a memo: Memorandum from George J. Tenet, The
Director of Central Intelligence, “Subject: We're at War,”
September 16, 2001, CIA.
“On October first”: Quotes are from interview with David Bray,
July 2014.
“A war of nerves”: R. W. Apple, “A Nation Challenged: News
Analysis; City of Power, City of Fears,” New York Times,
October 17, 2001.
DARPA was asked: Interview with Michael Goldblatt, April 2014.
“a little bit of pride”: Ibid.
“There had been”: Quotes are from Cheney, 341.
“a virtually zero rate”: Vin LoPresti, “Guarding the Air We Breathe,”
Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Quarterly (Spring
2003), 5, Science and Technology Review, October, 2003; Arkin,
288n.
“Go call Hadley”: Rice, 101.
In New York City: Cheney, 340-42.
“Feet down”: Rice, 101.
additive called bentonite: ABC News, World News Tonight, October
26, 2001.
“Traqi intelligence agent in Prague”: ABC News, This Week, October
28, 2001.
disinformation campaign: William Safire, “Mr. Atta Goes to
Prague,” New York Times, May 9, 2002.

709
 Notes

indication of his significance: Anthony Tether, biography,

AllGov.com.
five stages: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 19, 2003.
nearly three times: FY 2003 budget estimates, determined in February
2002.
“Kenneth Alibek”: “George Mason University Unveils Center for
Biodefense: Scientists Kenneth Alibek, Charles Bailey to
Direct,” press release, George Mason University, February 14,
2002.
“prototype biodefense products”: PRNewswire, Analex Corporation,
May 1, 2002.
$60: “National Security Notes,” March 31, 2006, GlobalSecurity.org.
Al Qaeda spent: 9/11 Commission Report, 169. The plotters spent
between $400,000 and $500,000.
“The match is about to begin”: John Diamond and Kathy
Kiely, “Tomorrow Is Zero Hour,” USA Today, June 19,
2002.

Chapter Twenty Total Information Awareness

nuclear physicist John Poindexter: Dr. John Poindexter, DARPA
biography.
struck with an idea: Harris, 144.
Poindexter began teaching himself: Ibid., 83.
revitalize the Genoa program: Interview with Bob Popp, June
2014.
“That's funny”: Quotes are from Harris, 144.
roughly $42 million: Ibid., 145.
existing Genoa program: Presentation by Brian Sharkey, Deputy
Director of ISO, Total Information Awareness, DARPATech 99
conference, transcript and briefing slides.
let go of profit participation: Harris, 147.
opening slide: Ibid., 150.
system of systems: Popp and Yen, 409; Dr. Robert Popp, DARPA’s
Initiative on Countering Terrorism, TIA, Terrorism

710
 NOTES

Information Awareness, Overview of TIA and IAO Programs,

briefing slides.
Tether agreed: Interview with Bob Popp, June 2014; Harris, 150.
$145 million: Congressional Research Services, “Controversy
About Level of Funding,” memo on funding for Total
Information Awareness programs from Amy Belasco,
consultant on the defense budget, Foreign Affairs, Defense
and Trade Division, January 21, 2003 (hereafter Belasco
memo).
“Tn our view”: Quotes are from interview with Bob Popp, June
2014.
multiple programs under the TIA umbrella: Information in this
section is drawn from “Total Information Awareness Program
(TIA). System Description Document (SDD).” Version 1.1,
July 19, 2002.
EELD office: DARPA, Information Awareness Office, [AO Mission,
briefing slides.
“techniques that allow us”: Quotes are from statements of
Ted Senator, DARPATech 2002 conference, Anaheim,
California.
“capture human activities”: Ibid.
Human Identification: Jonathan Phillips’s explanation of face
recognition for SPIE Defense Security and Sensing Symposium
can be viewed on YouTube.
“the war languages”: DARPA, IAO Mission briefing slides.
Red teaming: International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and
Security, Madrid, March 8-11, 2005.
“collaborations”: Quotes are from statements by Tom Armour,
DARPATech 2000 conference, Dallas, Texas.
find the snakes: Armour added, “The intelligence analyst will need
to consult vast amounts of information, from both classified
and open sources, to piece together enough evidence to
understand their activities.” Armour, DARPATech 2000
conference, Dallas, Texas.

Taw
 Notes

“artificial automaton”: Von Neumann, “The Computer and the

Brain,” 74.
lunch in Rumsfeld’s office: Harris, 185.
at Fort Belvoir: Dr. Robert Popp, DARPA’s Initiative on Countering
Terrorism, TIA, Terrorism Information Awareness, Overview
of TIA and IAO Programs, briefing slides.
a whooshing sound: Glenn Greenwald, “Inside the Mind of NSA
Chief Gen. Keith Alexander,” Guardian, September 15, 2013.
“initial TIA experiment”: Quotes are from interview with Bob Popp;
see also Harris, 187.
“a vast electronic dragnet”: John Markoff, “Pentagon Plans a
Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of
Americans,” New York Times, November 9, 2002.
Safire wrote: William Safire, “You Are a Suspect,” New York Times,
November 14, 2002.
285 stories: Robert L. Popp and John Yen, 409.
true numbers: Belasco memo; DefenseNet transfers from Project
ST-28 in FY2002 to Project ST-11 in 2003.
No interviews: Interview with Bob Popp, June 2014.
“T don’t know much about it”: U.S. Department of Defense, news
transcript, “Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability en Route to
Chile,” November 18, 2002.
offered his resignation: John M. Poindexter to Anthony Tether,
director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, August
1252003)
“terminated immediately”: Congressional Record, September 24, 2003
(House), H8500-H8550 Joint Explanatory Statement,
Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA).
Anonymous Entity Resolution: Ericson and Haggerty, 180; Steve
Mollman, “Betting on Private Data Search,” Wired, March 55
2003.
Combat Zones That See: DARPA Solicitation number SN03-13,
Pre-Solicitation Notice: Combat Zones That See (CTS),
March 25, 2003.
“to challenge the status quo”: Defense Industry Daily, August 1, 2008.

712
 NoreEs

came up with: Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski and John H.

Garstka, “Network Centric Warfare: Its Origins and Future,”
Proceedings, 124-139. Cebrowski says he first heard the phrase
at the U.S. Naval Institute Seminar and 123rd Annual
Meeting, Annapolis, April 23, 1997.
the whole world: Remarks by Bill Mularie, director, Information
Systems Office, DARPATech 99 conference, briefing
slides.
(C4ISR): Rumsfeld, 10.
internal documents: U.S. Department of Defense, Report on Network
Centric Warfare, 2001; Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski
(retired), speech to Network Centric Warfare 2003 conference,
January 2003.
“great moral seductiveness”: Cited in James Blaker, “Arthur K.
Cebrowski: A Retrospective,” Naval War College Review, Spring
2006, Vol. 59, no. 2, 135.
“The speed”: Quotes are from “Transforming Warfare: An Interview
with Adm. Arthur Cebrowski,” Nova, PBS, May 5, 2004.

Chapter Twenty-One JED War

“Mission Accomplished”: Remarks by the President from
the USS Abraham Lincoln, White House Press Office, May
2003.
“I was a gunner’: Quotes are from interview with Jeremy Ridgley,
May 25, 2014; Ridgley photographs.
“unexploded ordnance”: “Pfc. Jeremiah D. Smith, 25, OIF,
05/26/03,” Defense Department press release no. 376-03, May
28, 2003.
Defense Department official: David Rhode, “After the War:
Resistance; Deadly Attacks on G.1.’s Rise; Generals Hope
Troop Buildup Will Stop the Skirmishes,” New York Times,
June 10, 2003.
“There’s more ammunition”: Abizaid, testimony before Congress,
September 25, 2003.
greater than the number: Smith, 10.

719
 NOTES

soldiers killed by IEDs: Ibid.; John Diamond, “Small Weapons Prove

the Real Threat in Iraq,” USA Today, September 29, 2003.
“classical guerrilla-style campaign”: Cited in Rick Atkinson, “Left of
Boom: “The IED Problem is getting out of control. We've got
to stop the bleeding, ” Washington Post, September 30, 2007.
“A new phenomenon”: Quotes are from interview with Brigadier
General Andrew Smith (retired), June 2014.
CREW: Glenn Zorpette, “Countering IEDs,” JEEE Spectrum,
August 29, 2008.
study report: Clay Wilson, “Network Centric Warfare: Background
and Oversight Issues for Congress,” June 2, 2004.
“Warfare is all about”: U.S. Department of Defense, Report on
Network Centric Warfare, 2001; Vice Admiral Arthur
Cebrowski (retired), speech to Network Centric Warfare 2003
conference, January 2003.
“Network-centric warfare”: “Transformation for Survival: Interview
with Arthur K. Cebrowski, Director, Office of Force
Transformation,” Defense AT&L, March—April 2004.
added four new slides: Office of Force Transformation, “Key Barriers
to Transformation,” PowerPoint, 2002; “Meeting the
Challenges of the New Competitive Landscape PowerPoint,
2004. See also Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary’s Forward,
“Transformation Planning Guidance,” U.S. Department of
Defense, April 2003.
“That speed of advance”: “Battle Plan Under Fire,” PBS NewsHour,
May 4, 2004.
“culture-centric” solution: Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., U.S.
Army (retired), “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings,
October 2004.
“Knowledge of one’s enemy”: McFate, “Anthropology and
Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious
Relationship,” Military Review, March-April 2005, 24-38.
“Combat troops”: Meghan Scully,“ ‘Social Intel’ New Tool for U.S.
Military,” Defense News, April 26, 2004.

714
 NOTES

bringing social scientists on board: Email correspondence with

Montgomery McFate; interview with Bob Popp, June 2014.
“punk rock wild child”: Matthew B. Standard, “Montgomery
McFate’s Mission: Can One Anthropologist Possibly Steer the
Course in Iraq?” San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 2007.
received a call: Email correspondence with Montgomery McFate.
majority were left-leaning: Scott Jaschik, “Social Scientists Lean to
the Left, Study Says,” Insidehighered.com, December 21,
2005.
“evangelical mission”: George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can
social scientists redefine the ‘war on terror’?” New Yorker,
December 18, 2006.
An entire generation: Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr.,
The Irag War: A Military History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
“The nature of war”: Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., U.S. Army
(retired), “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings, October
2004, 32-36.
“When the U.S.”: McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding
Adversary Culture,” Joint Force Quarterly, issue 38, July 2005,
44-48,
“Soldiers and Marines”: Ibid.
“stability operations”: Dehghanpisheh and Thomas, “Scions of the
Surge,” Newsweek, March 24, 2008.
“J do not want”: George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can social
scientists redefine the ‘war on terror’?” New Yorker, December
18, 2006.
“Understanding and empathy”: Robert Scales, “Clausewitz and
World War IV,” Armed Forces Journal, July 1, 2006.
McFate wrote one of the chapters: Email correspondence with
Montgomery McFate.
“What is Counterinsurgency?”: Counterinsurgency, Field Manual
No. 3-24.
“the first time”: http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil.

715
 NOTES

Chapter Twenty-ITwo Combat Zones That See

“Combat Zones That See”: DARPA Solicitation number SN03-13,
Pre-Solicitation Notice: Combat Zones That See (CTS),
March 25, 2003.
“No technological challenges”: Robert Leheny, “DARPA’s Urban
Operations Program,” presentation at DARPATech 2005,
August 2005, with photographs.
“We need a network”: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 10,
2005, 11.
Congress had eliminated funding: U.S. Congress, H8500—H8550,
Joint Explanatory Statement, Terrorism Information Awareness
(TIA), Congressional Record, September 24,
2003.
“detect the clandestine production”: Tether, Statement to Congress,
March 10, 2005, 11.
“a network of nonintrusive microsensors”: Leheny, “DARPA’s Urban
Operations Program,” 38.
unclassified documents: Ehlschlaeger, “Understanding Megacities
with the Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Intelligence
Paradigm,” 50-53.
the HURT program: DARPA Information Exploitation Office
(IXO) HURT Program Office, aerial vehicle platform
documents; See also James Richardson, “Preparing Warfighters
for the Urban Stage,” located in DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging
the Gap, 166-67.
“The [HURT] system”: Pagels quoted in Clarence A. Robinson, Jr.,
“Air Vehicles Deliver Warrior Data,” Signal Magazine, July
2007.
terrorists could sneak in: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 169;
Glenn Zorpette, “Countering IEDs,” JEEE Spectrum, August
29, 2008.
DARPA’s goal: This information comes from Tether, Statement to
Congress, 2003; “Combat Zones That See (CTS) Solicitation
Number BAA03-15, March 25, 2003. See also Stephen
Graham, “Surveillance, Urbanization, and the U.S. ‘Revolution

716
 Notes

in Military Affairs, ” in David Lyon, ed., Theorizing

Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, 250-54.
every forty-eight minutes: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: “You can’t
armor your way out of this problem;’” Washington Post,
October 2, 2007.
the “spider”: Noah Shachtman, “The Secret History of Iraq’s
Invisible War,” Wired, June 14, 2011.
EFP: The first EFPs appeared on May 15, 2004, in Bara. DIA linked
them to Hezbollah forces from 1997.
2,000 meters per second: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘You can’t
armor your way out of this problem;’” Washington Post,
October 2, 2007.
Hardwire HD: “Hardwire Receives DARPA Funding for Novel
Armor Solutions,” Business Wire, August 21, 2006.
rip apart soldiers’ bodies: Tony Perry, “IED Wounds from
Afghanistan ‘Unbelievable’ Trauma Docs Say,” Los Angeles
Times, April 7, 2011.
JIEDDO: Interview with Brigadier General Andrew Smith (retired),
June 2014.
“We were dealing with”: Quotes are from interviews with Craig
Marsh, June 2014—March 2015.
Building 114: Interviews with Craig Marsh; Andrew E. Kramer,
“Leaving Camp Victory in Iraq, the Very Name a Question
Mark,” New York Times, November 10, 2011.
Combined Explosive Exploitation Cell: “CEXC: Introducing a New
Concept in the Art of War,” Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 2007.
“Talon robots”: Quotes in this section are from DARPA,
Distribution Statement A, “Unmanned Robots Systems: SBIR
Technology Underpins Life-Saving Military Robots,” DARPA,
Distribution Statement A, 2010, 1-7.
“Gordon the robot”: Ibid., 6-8; DARPA, “Unmanned Robotic
Systems: Small Business Innovation Research,” Featured
Technology, December 2010, 6.
Talon robots: Sargeant Lorie Jewell, “Armed Robots to March into
Battle,” Army News Service, December 6, 2004.

Why:
 Notes

“Whether it’s magic or scientific”: Rod Nordland, “Iraq Swears by a

Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless,” New York Times, -
November 3, 2009.
whistleblower revealed: Adam Higginbotham, “In Iraq, the Bomb-
Detecting Device That Didn’t Work, Except to Make Money,”
Bloomberg Businessweek, July 11, 2013.
more than two an hour: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘If you don’t
go after the network, you're never going to stop these guys.
Never, ” Washington Post, October 3, 2007.
$15 billion: Glenn Zorpette, “Countering IEDs,” [EEE Spectrum,
August 29, 2008.
Tether appeared: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 21, 2007.
“Shot. Two o'clock”: Raytheon news release, BBN Technologies,
Products and Services, Boomerang III.
CROSSHAIRS: DARPA, news release, “DARPA’s CROSSHAIRS
Counter Shooter System,” October 5, 2010.
DARPA fielded fifty Radar Scopes: Quotes are from Tether,
Statement to Congress, March 21, 2007; Donna Miles, “New
Device Will Sense Through Concrete Walls,” Armed Forces
Press Service, January 3, 2006.
HART: DARPA Heterogeneous Airborne Reconnaissance Team
(HART), Case no. 11414, briefing slides. Dr. Michael A.
Pagels, August 2008.
TIGR (Tactical Ground Reporting): Amy Walker, “TIGR allows
Soldiers to ‘be there’ before they arrive,” U.S. Army News,
October 13, 2009.
Congress was told: Leheny, Statement to Congress, May 20,
2009.
soldiers told: David Talbot, “A Technology Surges,” MIT Technology
Review, February 2008.

Chapter Twenty-Three Human Terrain

not one of the 1,200: Declan Walsh, “Afghan Militants Attack
Kandahar Prison and Free Inmates,” Guardian, June 13, 2008;

718
 Notes

Carlotta Gall, “Taliban Free 1,200 Inmates in Attack on

Afghan Prison,” New York Times, June 14, 2008.
“proto-type system”: DARPA, IAO Mission, briefing slides.
“Based on our experience in Iraq”: Thom Shankar, “To Check
Militants, U.S. Has System That Never Forgets,” New York
Times, July 13, 2011.
On patrol: USA v. Don Michael Ayala (U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division), Document
33, May 6, 2009, and Document 5, November 24, 2008.
“An indefinable spirit”: U.S. Army, “In Memory of... Paula Loyd,”
Human Terrain System, September 2011.
center of the alleyway: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, photographs.
A young bearded man: Gezari, 3-18.
He wore: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, photographs.
drew his pistol: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, Document 5, 4.
previously guarded: Ibid., Document 5, 3.
“the man was the devil”: Ibid., Document 33, 2.
leniency: Matthew Barakat, “Contractor Gets Probation for Killing
Prisoner,” Associated Press, May 8, 2009.
“advise brigades”: In Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic, Udris
Films, 2010.
earned more: USA v. Don Michael Ayala, Document 33, 1.
“military commanders”: U.S. Army press release, digital archive,
http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil.
“dangerous and reckless”: AAA [American Anthropological
Association] Executive Board, Statement on the Human
Terrain System Project, October 31, 2007.
“mercenary anthropology”: Roberto J. Gonzalez, “Towards
mercenary anthropology? The new US Army
counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 and the military-
anthropology complex,” Anthropology Today, Volume 23, Issue
3, June 2007, 14-19.
Catherine Lutz: Quotes are from Human Terrain: War Becomes
Academic, Udris Films, 2010.

yak)
 NOTES

Hugh Gusterson: Ibid.

Roberto Gonzalez: Ibid.
“My very first time”: Carlson quotes are from Dan G. Cox, “Human
Terrain Systems and the Moral Prosecution of Warfare,” 27-29.
“Can doctrine be applied”: This account is drawn from Nigh, “An
Operator's Guide to Human Terrain Teams,” 20-23.
“clearing operation”: ISAF, TAAC South, “Impacts, Contributions,”
2007; U.S. Army, “Human Terrain Team Handbook,”
December 11, 2008.
replaced Paula Loyd: Korva Coleman, “Social Scientists Deployed to
the Battlefield,” NPR, September 1, 2009.
“infamous as a killing zone”: Jonathan Montpetit, ‘Canadian Soldiers
Resume Mentoring Afghan National Army After Turbulent
Spring.” Military World, October 28, 2010.
“Michael Bhatia was”: “One Man’s Odyssey from Campus to
Combat,” Associated Press, March 8, 2009.
$200,000 a year: Jason Motlagh, “Should Anthropologists Help
Contain the Taliban?” Time, July 1, 2010.
“People use human networks”: Tristan Reed, “Intelligence and
Human Networks,” Stratfor Global Intelligence Security Weekly,
January 10, 2013.
“Phase Zero pre-conflict”: Jim Hodges, “Cover Story: U.S. Army’s
Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts,”
Defense News, March 22, 2012.
biomedical technology program: Department of Defense, Fiscal Year
2015, Budget Estimates, Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, 1:51.
“applies forecasting”: Ibid., 1:130.
“far behind enemy lines”: “DARPA Receives Joint Meritorious Unit
Award,” U.S. Department of Defense, press release. December
1752012:
Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text: Department of Defense,
Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Estimates, Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, 1:88.

720
 Nores

Chapter Twenty-Four Drone Wars

“This war”: Quotes are from “Remarks by the President at the
National Defense University, Fort McNair,” White House,
Office of the Press Secretary, May 23, 2013.
Department of Defense reports: U.S. Department of Defense, “The
Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2013-2038,”
2014, 8:13, 26.
“My daughter”: Quotes are from interview with Bernard Crane,
September 2014.
“Those are not insects”: Quotes are from Rick Weiss, “Dragonfly or
Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs,” Washington Post,
October 9, 2007.
insisted that President Bush be impeached: C-SPAN, “Stop the War
Rally,” September 15, 2007.
multiple truck bombs: Damien Cave and James Glanz, “Toll in Iraq
Bombings Is Raised to More Than 500,” New York Times,
August 22, 2007.
reportedly played a role: “A Carpet for Radicals at the White House,”
Investigative Project on Terrorism, October 12,
2012.
served as imam: “Al-Qaida cleric death: mixed emotions at Virginia
mosque where he preached,” Associated Press, September 11,
20lT:
“Insect-size”: Grasmeyer and Keennon, “Development of the Black
Widow Micro Air Vehicle,” American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics, 2001, 1.
“We have seen sparrows”: Ibid., 8.
“micro-explosive bombs”: Lambeth, “Technology Trends in Air
Warfare,” 141.
trained bees to locate: “Sandia, University of Montana Researchers
Try Training Bees to Find Buried Landmines,” Sandia National
Laboratories, press release, April 27, 1999. In the late 1990s, the
Mine Bee Program met with great success when DARPA
researchers at Sandia National Laboratories worked with

721
 NOTES

entomologists at the University of Montana to train poles

to detect buried land mines.
Insectothopter: Author tour of the CLA museum, Langley, VA,
September 2010.
Animal rights: Duncan Graham-Rowe, “Robo-Rat
Controlled by Brain Electrodes,” New Scientist, May 1,
2002.
“The tissue develops”: A. Verderber, M. McKnight, and A. Bozkurt,
“Early Metamorphic Insertion Technology for Insect Flight
Behavior Monitoring,” Journal of Visualized Experiments, July
12, 2014, 89.
animated video: online at “Armed with Science,” the DoD’s official
science blog.
DARPA’s hypersonic stealth drones: DARPA News,
“Hypersonics— The New Stealth: DARPA investments in
extreme hypersonics continue,” July 6, 2012; “Darpa refocuses
Hypersonics Research on Tactical Missions,” Aviation Week and
Space Technology, July 8, 2013.
Falcon HT V-2: Animated performance videos of Falcon HT V-2 at
Lockheedmartin.com.
hypersonic low-earth-orbit drones: Toshio Suzuki, “DARPA Wants
Hypersonic Space Drone with Daily Launches,” Stars and
Stripes, February 4, 2014.
Hydra: John Keller, “DARPA Considers Unmanned Submersible
Mothership Designed to Deploy UAVs and UUVs,” Military
Aerospace Electronics, July 23, 2013.
Unmanned Ground System robots: Demonstration videos on
DARPA’s YouTube channel, DARPAtv.
LANdroids: USC Information Sciences Institute, Polymorphic
Robotics Laboratory, “LANdroids,” n.d.
what “autonomy” is: U.S. Department of Defense, “Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2013—2038,” 15.
“The autonomous systems”: U.S. Department of Defense, “Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036,” 43.

Vee
 NOTES

“autonomous and semi-autonomous”: Department of Defense

Directive 3000.09, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems,” sec. 4,
Policy, 2, November 21, 2012.
fourfold process: U.S. Department of Defense, “Unmanned Systems
Integrated Roadmap FY2011—2036,” table 3, 46.
“unimagined degrees of autonomy”: Ashton Carter’s letter, dated
(stamped) March 29, 2010, is attached to the end of Department
of Defense, Defense Science Board, “Task Force Report: The
Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” Appendix C, Task Force
Terms of Reference.

Chapter Twenty-Five Brain Wars

artificial brains: ArtificialBrains.com tracks scientific and
technological progress toward the goal of building sentient
machines. The website is maintained by James Pearn in
Munich, Germany.
our interview: All quotes in this section are from my interview with
Allen Macy Dulles, March 2014.
brought her brother: Interviews with Joan Dulles Talley, March
2014—May 2015.
The White House calls: White House Briefing Room, “BRAIN
Initiative Challenges Researchers to Unlock Mysteries of
Human Minrid,” April 2, 2013. Of note: partnering with
DARPA on many of its brain programs is IARPA, the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the CIA’s
DARPA.
Brain programs: Information on DARPA brain-computer interface
programs from Robbin A. Miranda et al., “DARPA-Funded
Efforts in the Development of Novel Brain—Computer Interface
Technologies,” 1-17. The authors are: Robbin A. Miranda,
William D. Casebeer, Amy M. Hein, Jack W. Judy, Eric P.
Krotkoy, Tracy L. Laabs, Justin E. Manzof, Kent G. Pankratz,
Gill A. Pratt, Justin C. Sanchez, Douglas J. Weber, Tracey L.
Wheeler, and Geoffrey S. F. Ling.

23:
 Notes

According to the Pentagon: Armed Forces Health Surveillance

Center, “Summary of Mental Disorder Hospitalizations, Active
and Reserve Components, U.S. Armed Forces, 2000-2012,”
Medical Surveillance Monthly Report
20, no. 7 (July 2013): 4-11.
SUBNETS: “SUBNETS Aims for Systems-Based Neurotechnology
and Understanding for the Treatment of Neuropsychological
Illnesses,” Department of Defense, press release, October 25,
2013)
chips wirelessly transmit: George Dvorsky, “Electroconvulsive
Therapy Can Erase Unwanted Memories,” 109, December 23,
2013.
“incorporate near real-time”: “SUBNETS,” DARPA News, October
25, 2013;
“notes on a piano”: Emily Singer, “Playing Piano with a Robotic
Hand,” MIT Technology Review, July 25, 2007.
“The Intrinsic hand”: Jonathan Kuniholm, “Open Arms,” JEEE
Spectrum, March 1, 2009.
Dean Kamen: Kamen interview with Scott Pelley, CBS News,
60 Minutes, April 10, 2009.
yet to find a partner: Rhodi Lee, “FDA Approves DEKA Arm
System,” Tech Times, May 10, 2014.
“debt we owe”: “From Idea to Market in Eight Years: DARPA-
Funded DEKA Arm System Earns FDA Approval,” DARPA
News, May 9, 2014.
“turn a valve”: Interview with Noel Sharkey, September 2014.
Even the cooks: Interview with LANL cooks, March 2014.
Kenyon and his team: Kenyon’s DARPA contract is administered
through the University of Michigan as part of the New Mexico
Consortium (NMC). Kenyon says, “The NMC is sort of an
incubator for LANL. It’s a place where scientists like myself can
work with a team of students and pursue risky ideas that would
be hard to pull off within the confines of LANL itself.”
simulating the primate visual system: Quotes are from interviews
with Garrett Kenyon, March—-November 2014.

724
 Notes

world’s record: “Science at the Petascale,” IBM Roadrunner

supercomputer, press release, October 27, 2009.
Tianhe-2: Lance Ulanoff, “China Has the Fastest Supercomputer in
the World—Again,” Mashable.com, June 23, 2014.
points inside: Kenyon noted that the computer room contains a
number of different machines.
“Regeneration is really coming alive”: Quotes are from interviews
with David Gardiner and Sue Bryant, June 2013—October 2014.
children born with mutations: Ngo Vinh Long, “Vietnamese
Perspectives,” in Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, ed. by
Stanley Kutler (New York: Scribner's, 1996).
a human uterus: Stephanie Smith, “Creating Body Parts in a Lab;
‘Things Are Happening Now, ” CNN, April 10, 2014.
make body parts: “Ears, Noses Grown from Stem Cells in Lab
Dishes,” Associated Press, April 8, 2014.
laboratory-grown beef burgers: Maria Cheng, “First Reaction: Lab-
Made Burger Short on Flavor.” Phys.org, August 5, 2013.
“One can imagine”: S. Hawking et al., “Stephen Hawking:
“Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial
Intelligence— But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?’”
The Independent, May 1, 2014.
“these [autonomous] systems”: Interview with Steve Omohundro,
May 2015; See also “Autonomous Technology and the Greater
Human Good,” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial
Intelligence, November 21, 2014, 303-15.
“human-machine interaction failures”: Interview with Noel Sharkey,
September 2014.

Chapter Twenty-Six The Pentagon’s Brain

sharing his idea: Interview with Charles Townes, April 2014.
SIGMA group: Interview with Doug Beason, who is a member.
Beason, a physicist and the former chief scientist, U.S. Air Force
Space Command, is the author of fourteen science-fiction
books, eight with collaborator Kevin J. Anderson; Email
correspondence with Arlan Andrews.

725
 NOorTEs

“Those responsible”: Jenna Lang, “Sci-fi writers take US security

back to the future,” Guardian, June 5, 2009. :
brain-computer interfaces: R. A. Miranda et al., “DARPA-Funded
Efforts in the Development of Novel Brain-Computer Interface
Technologies,” Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2014). The term
was coined by Jacques J. Vidal, in 1971.
DARPA’ stated goal: M. L. Cummings, “Views, Provocations:
Technology Impedances to Augmented Cognition,” Ergonomics
in Design (Spring 2010): 25.
“Human brain activity”: DARPA, Cognitive Technology Threat
Warning System (CT2WS) Solicitation no. BAA07-25, April
11, 2007.
DARPA scientists: R. A. Miranda et al., “DARPA-Funded Efforts in
the Development of Novel Brain-Computer Interface
Technologies,” Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2014).
“groundbreaking advances”: Ibid., 3, 5.
DARPA program managers: Ibid., 10-13. The four DARPA program
managers are William D. Casebeer, Justic C. Sanchez, Douglas
J. Weber, Geoffrey S. F. Ling.
augmenting cognition: Quotes are from Jason, MITRE Corporation,
“Human Performance,” 70, 72.
“The Jason scientists”: Quotes are from interview with Michael
Goldblatt, April 2014.
“For commanders”: Quotes are from Defense Science Board, “The
Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” 2012, 2, 19, 46, 48.
“Among the key challenges moving forward,” according to the
DSB, “is advancing tests and evaluation capabilities to improve
trust for increasing autonomy in unmanned systems.”
“probability and consequences of failure”: Department of Defense
Directive no. 3000.09, November 21, 2012.
“the effect of narrative”: Miranda et al., 9.
“We would all benefit”: Interview with Paul Zak, October 2014.
“erase fear”: Bret Stetka, “Can Fear Be Erased?” Scientific American,
December 4, 2014.

726
 NOTES

DSB chairman Paul Kaminski: Information according to his White

House biography. Kaminski had a twenty-year career as an
officer in the Air Force. He served as director of Low
Observable Technology and was responsible for developing and
fielding the Pentagon’s stealth programs. Later, as under
secretary of defense for acquisition and technology, he had
responsibility for an annual budget that exceeded $100 billion.
See also “Dr. Paul G. Kaminski, Former Under Secretary of
Defense for Acquisition and Technology, 2011 Ronald Reagan
Award Winner,” Missile Defense Agency, digital archive.
DSB members: Email correspondence with Major Eric D. Badger,
public affairs officer for the DSB Executive Director;
Department of Defense press release, January 5, 2010; DSB,
Appendix D—Task Force Membership, 109, Appendix E—
Task Force Briefings, 110. Also participating in the DSB report
advising the Pentagon on the role of autonomous weapons
systems were briefers from the defense corporations Northrop
Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics,
General Atomics, SAIC, and QinetiQ.
“chicken-and-egg”: Barber, VIII-76.
military-industrial complex: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Radio
and Television Address to the American People,” January 17,
1961, UCSB.
“The battlefield is no place”: Cited in Van Atta et al., Transformation
and Transition, Volume 2, V-19.

727
 LIST OF INTERVIEWS AND WRITTEN
CORRESPONDENCE

Dr. Ken Alibek: Virologist, former deputy director Biopreparat,

USSR
Dr. Jorge Barraza: Social psychologist, Claremont Graduate
University
Colonel Doug Beason, Ph.D. (retired): Physicist, former chief
scientist U.S. Air Force Space Command
Chris Berka: Co-founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc.
Major David Blair: Technologist, MQ-1B instructor pilot,
AC-130 gunship pilot
Dr. David A. Bray: Information technologist, chief information
officer, FCC; former information chief for Bioterrorism
Preparedness and Response, Centers for Disease Control
Rebecca Bronson: FBI records administrator
Dr. Susan V. Bryant: Regeneration biologist, former dean of the
School of Biological Sciences and vice chancellor for
research, UC Irvine
Colonel Julian Chesnutt (retired): Former program officer,
Defense Clandestine Service, DIA
Colonel L. Neale Cosby (retired): Former SIMNET principal
investigator, DARPA
Bernard Crane: Lawyer, Washington, DC
Dr. Tanja Dominko: Biotechnoengineer, stem cell biologist,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
 List OF INTERVIEWS

Allen Macy Dulles: Student of history, Korean War veteran, son

of Allen Welsh Dulles
Dr. Jay W. Forrester: Computer pioneer, founder of system
dynamics
Ralph “Jim” Freedman: Former nuclear weapons engineer, EG&¢G
Dr. David Gardiner: Regeneration biologist, professor of
developmental and cell biology, UC Irvine
Colonel John Gargus (retired): Former special operations officer,
US. Air Force
Lieutenant Colonel Peter A. Garretson: Transformational strategist,
USS. Air Force
Dr. Marvin Goldberger: Former Manhattan Project physicist,
founder and chairman of the Jason scientists, science advisor
to President Johnson
Dr. Michael Goldblatt: Former director, Defense Sciences Office,
DARPA
Dr. Kay Godel-Gengenbach: Academic, daughter of William
Godel
General Paul F. Gorman (retired): Former commander in chief,
US. Southern Command (US SOUTHCOM), special
assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Richard “Rip” Jacobs: Former engineer, VO-67 Navy squadron
Dr. Garrett T. Kenyon: Neurophysicist, Synthetic Cognition
Group, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Paul Kozemchak: Special assistant to director, DARPA
Edward Lovick Jr.: Physicist, former Lockheed Skunk Works
stealth technologist
Sherre Lovick: Engineer, former Lockheed Skunk Works stealth
technologist
Robert A. Lowell: Radiation scientist, satellite technologist
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Ph.D. (retired): Former squadron
operations officer, Battle of 73 Easting
Master Chief Petty Officer Craig Marsh (retired); Former master
explosive ordnance disposal technician, Combined Joint
Counter-IED Task Force Troy, Iraq

730
 List OF INTERVIEWS

Montgomery McFate, J. D., Ph.D.: Cultural anthropologist,

former senior social scientist, Human Terrain System, U.S.
Army
Cullen McInerney: Former military contractor, former U.S.
Secret Service
Eugene McManus: Former technician at BMEWS J-Site, Thule,
Greenland
Timothy Moynihan: Pastor, former soldier and operations officer,
U.S. Army .
Dr. Walter Munk: Oceanographer, former Jason scientist
Captain C. N. “Lefty” Nordhill: Former aircraft commander,
VO-67 Navy squadron
Alfred O’ Donnell: Former nuclear weapons engineer, EG&G
Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Ph.D.: Neurologist, Harvard Medical
School, director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Non-
invasive Brain Stimulation
Dr. Robert Popp: Former deputy director, Information Awareness
Office, DARPA
Dr. Leonard Reiffel: Nuclear physicist
Robert E. Reynolds: Former air crewman, VO-67 Navy
squadron
Michael E. Rich: Assistant U.S. attorney, Department of Justice
Jeremy Ridgley: Former soldier, Eighteenth Military Police
Brigade, U.S. Army
Rob Rubio: Business director, Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc.
Colonel Jack W. Rust: Commander, U.S. Navy, NRO
Dr. Charles Schwartz: Physicist, former Jason scientist
Dr. Noel Sharkey: Emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and
robotics at the University of Sheffield, England, chairman of
the International Committee for Robot Arms Control
Brigadier General Andrew Smith (Australian Army, retired):
Former director, Combined Planning Group, Headquarters,
U.S. CENTCOM
Colonel Edward Starbird (retired): Son of General Alfred Starbird
David J. Steffy: Former air crewman, VO-67 Navy Squadron

731
 List OF INTERVIEWS

Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman (retired): U-2 pilot, CIA

and U.S. Air Force
Clifford Stoll: Astrophysicist
Robert Surrette: Former senior acquisition executive, CIA
Joan Dulles Talley: Jungian analyst, daughter of Allen Welsh
Dulles
Lieutenant Colonel Troy E. Techau (retired): Former biometrics
technologist, Identity Dominance Operations, U.S.
CENTCOM
Elizabeth Terris: Neuroeconomics researcher, Claremont
Graduate University
Kip S. Thorne: Theoretical physicist
Colonel Jack Thorpe, Ph.D. (retired): Creator and founder of
SIMNET
Dr. Charles H. Townes: Inventor of the laser, Nobel Prize in
Physics, 1964
Andrew Tudor: Nanofabrication and nanoscale researcher,
physical intelligence, UCLA
Dr. Richard H. Van Atta: Senior research analyst, IDA
Eric Van Slander: Archivist, National Archives
Jim Wagner: Former co-pilot, VO-67 Navy Squadron
Captain Barney Walsh (retired): Former co-pilot, VO-67 Navy
squadron
Tom Wells: Former engineer, VO-67 Navy squadron
Dr. James M. Wilson: Virologist, former special assistant to the
director for weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Army
Medical Research and Materiel Command
Dr. Paul J. Zak: Scientist, neuroeconomist, Claremont Graduate
University
Dr. Joseph J. Zasloff: Social scientist, former RAND analyst for
the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project
Dr. Alan Zelicoff: Epidemiologist, former senior scientist in the
Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia
National Laboratories

732
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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771
Jacobsen exposes both sides of the DARPA coin:
the fantastic technological advances from which
we all benefit, and the darker side drawn up in a
race for military supremacy.
Based on information from inside sources,
exclusive interviews, private documents, and
declassified memos, The Pentagon's Brain reads
like science fiction but is absolutely true, a ground-
breaking look behind the scenes at the clandestine
intersection of science and the American military.

ANNIE JACOBSEN is a journalist and the

author of the New York Times bestsellers Area 51
and Operation Paperclip. She was a contributing
editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine. A
graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Los
Angeles with her husband and two sons.

AnnieJacobsen.com
Oi @AnnieJacobsen
EF AnnielacobsenAuthor

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tantalizing tale of The Pentagon’s Brain—tro
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ingenuityas it is a paean to er
the bureaucracy of the mili

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ISBN 978-0-316-38769-9

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