The Pentagon's Brain (14 page)

The most significant weapon to emerge from the early days of Project Agile was the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. In the summer of 1961, Diem’s small-in-stature army was having difficulty handling the large semiautomatic weapons carried by U.S. military advisors. In the AR-15 Godel saw promise, “something the short, small Vietnamese can fire without 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 commanders at the CDTC expressed enthusiasm for this new weapon, Godel told Secretary McNamara, preferring 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” authority, 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 distance of approximately fifteen meters, [a U.S. soldier] 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 “The development of the M-16 would almost certainly not have come about without the existence of ARPA,” noted an unpublished internal ARPA review, written in 1974.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 dozens more were in the works. Project Agile “gadgets” would soon include shotguns, rifle grenades, shortened strip bullets, and high-powered sound canons. ARPA wanted a proximity fuse with an extra 75-millisecond delay so bombs dropped from aircraft 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 seismic monitoring devices that looked like rocks but could track guerrilla fighters’ movement down a jungle trail. ARPA needed teams of computer scientists to design and build data collection systems and storage systems, and to retrofit existing air, ground, and ocean systems so all the different military services involved in this fight against the Vietnamese communists could communicate better.

But there was one weapons program—highly classified—that commanded more of Godel’s attention 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, 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 toxicology 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 protective 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 effectiveness,” 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 could turn its focus on claims of Geneva Convention violations. For this reason, anyone briefed on the defoliation campaign and all personnel working at the CDTC were advised to move forward, “subject to political-psychological restrictions (such as those imposed by Communist claims of U.S. biological 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 indicates 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 jungles of Vietnam occurred on August 10, 1961. The helicopter—an American-made H-34 painted in 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 Vietnamese air force pilot. President Diem was an enthusiastic 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 Vietcong 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, 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 campaign 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. “I’m the responsible official of the government,” he famously said. But to his closest White House advisors, 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 situation seemed to strengthen his perception that his group of intellectually minded White House advisors and civilian Pentagon advisors, the so-called McNamara whiz kids, not only were more trustworthy but also had better ideas on military matters than did the military men themselves.

After the Bay of Pigs, in the summer of 1961 President Kennedy created a new position on his White House staff called military representative of the president. The post was created specifically for General Maxwell Taylor, a dashing multilingual World War II hero who had written a book critical of the Eisenhower administration. According to a memo that outlined General Taylor’s duties as military representative 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 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 mission was to investigate what future political and military actions were necessary there. Accompanying Taylor on this trip was William Godel. The two men shared similar views on counterinsurgency programs; 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 President 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, and most of all no military formalities. To the president, General Taylor described the Vietnam situation 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 facing the government of South Vietnam in the bleakest of terms. President Diem and his generals “were watching with dismay the situation in neighboring Laos and the negotiations in Geneva, which convinced 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 Communist 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 very few ‘secret weapons’ on the immediate horizon” at the CDTC. One such “secret weapon” was herbicide. As the program moved forward, however, there was a hitch.

In the fall of 1961, Radio Hanoi in North Vietnam 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 program 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 conducting 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.” Echoing earlier concerns from the Vietnam Task Force, the Joint Chiefs warned that the world could react with solemn condemnation, and that “international repercussions against the United States could be most serious.”

Even deputy national security advisor Walt Rostow, just back from the trip to Vietnam with General Taylor and William Godel, felt compelled to point out to the president the reality behind spraying 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.