The Pentagon's Brain (13 page)

The following week, Robert McNamara was confirmed as the new secretary of defense. No one bothered to go to York’s house and retrieve the red telephone. “It remained there until I left Washington, permanently, some four months later,” said York.

T
he first two U.S. military advisors to die in the 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 illuminated, they pushed the muzzles of their semiautomatic weapons through the windows and opened 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 Kennedy spent more
time on Vietnam and neighboring Laos than on any other national security concern. Counterinsurgency warfare, all but ignored by President 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 foreign and far away that it was hyphenated in the official 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 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. William 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. President 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 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 deputy national security advisor Walt Rostow and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security 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 Secretary McNamara’s Pentagon were defense intellectuals, 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 advisors agreed. On April 12, 1961, in a memo to the president, Walt Rostow suggested “Nine Proposals 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 hardware team which would explore
with General McGarr which of the various techniques and ‘gadgets’ now available or being explored that might be relevant 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 following week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric submitted to the president a memorandum that elaborated on “Action Proposal Number Five.” This particular plan of action, according to Gilpatric, 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 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 president and his advisors.

The following month, President Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to meet personally 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 Johnson’s shoulder. Both men smiled broadly, expressing commitment to their countries’ ongoing partnership. Communism was a scourge, and together the governments of the United States and South Vietnam intended to eradicate it from the region.

President Diem, an avowed anticommunist and fluent English speaker, was Catholic, well educated, and enamored of modernity. These qualities made him a strong ally of the U.S. government but alienated 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 “consider 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!” Johnson famously declared.

The following month, on June 8, 1961, William Godel traveled to Vietnam with Project Agile’s first 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 windows
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 laboratories where scientists and engineers worked. Photographs 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 entourage of military advisors, soldiers dressed in neat 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 adjacent 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, U.S. 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’s first staffers included military officers, civilian scientists, engineers, and
academics. Some had research and development experience and others had combat experience. The CDTC was connected 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 year, Project Agile’s budget would double, transforming it into the third-largest ARPA program, after Defender and Vela.

Upon returning to Washington, D.C., from Saigon, Godel traveled across the nation’s capital, giving 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 introduced into the jungles of Vietnam—a boat, an airplane, 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 paddlewheel 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 infiltrate 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] is the detection and identification of enemy personnel,” 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 undertaking. The chemical had to work in a hot, wet climate, 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 oversight 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 trials.” The German shepherds’ acute sense of smell could not be sustained in the intense jungle heat.

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 aircraft, including drones.