Surveillance Valley
The Secret Military History of the Internet
By Yasha Levine
Prologue
Oakland California
It was February 18, 2014, and already dark when I crossed the Bay Bridge from San Francisco and parked my car in downtown Oakland. The streets were deserted, save for a couple of homeless men slumped in a heap against a closed storefront. Two police cruisers raced through a red light, sirens blaring.
I approached Oakland’s city hall on foot. Even from a distance, I could see that something unusual was going on. A line of parked police cars ran down the block, and news anchors and TV camera crews scampered about, jockeying for position. A large group of people milled near the entrance, a few of them setting up what looked like a giant papier-mâché rat, presumably intended as a symbol for snitching. But the real action was inside. Several hundred people packed Oakland’s ornate high-domed city council chamber. Many of them carried signs. It was an angry crowd, and police officers flanked the sides of the room, ready to push everyone out if things got out of hand.
The commotion was tied to the main agenda item of the night: the city council was scheduled to vote on an ambitious $11 million project to create a citywide police surveillance hub. Its official name was the “Domain Awareness Center”—but everyone called it “the DAC.” Design specs called for linking real time video feeds from thousands of cameras across the city and funneling them into a unified control hub. Police would be able to punch in a location and watch it in real time or wind back the clock. They could turn on face recognition and vehicle tracking systems, plug in social media feeds, and enhance their view with data coming in from other law enforcement agencies—both local and federal. 1
Plans for this surveillance center had been roiling city politics for months, and the outrage was now making its presence felt. Residents, religious leaders, labor activists, retired politicians, masked “black bloc” anarchists, and reps from the American Civil Liberties Union—they were all in attendance, rubbing shoulder to shoulder with a group of dedicated local activists who had banded together to stop the DAC. A nervous, bespectacled city official in a tan suit took the podium to reassure the agitated crowd that the Domain Awareness Center was designed to protect them—not spy on them. “This is not a fusion center. We have no agreements with the NSA or the CIA or the FBI to access our databases,” he said.
The hall blew up in pandemonium. The crowd wasn’t buying it. People booed and hissed. “This is all about monitoring protesters,” someone screamed from the balcony. A young man, his face obscured by a mask, stalked to the front of the room and menacingly jammed his smartphone in the city official’s face and snapped photos. “How does that feel? How do you like that—being surveilled all the time!” he yelled. A middle-aged man—bald, wearing glasses and crumpled khakis—took the podium and tore into the city’s political leaders. “You council members somehow believe that the Oakland Police Department, which has an unparalleled history of violating the civil rights of Oaklanders and which cannot even follow its own policies, be it a crowd control policy or a body camera policy, can somehow be trusted to use the DAC?” He left with a bang, yelling: “The only good DAC is a dead DAC!” Wild applause erupted.
Oakland is one of the most diverse cities in the country. It’s also home to a violent, often unaccountable police department, which has been operating under federal oversight for over a decade. The police abuse has been playing out against a backdrop of increasing gentrification fueled by the area’s Internet boom and the spike in real estate prices that goes along with it. In San Francisco, neighborhoods like the Mission District, historically home to a vibrant Latino community, have turned into condos and lofts and upscale gastro pubs. Teachers, artists, older adults, and anyone else not making a six-figure salary are having a tough time making ends meet. Oakland, which for a time was spared this fate, was now feeling the crush as well. But locals were not going down without a fight. And a lot of their anger was focused on Silicon Valley.
The people gathered at city hall that night saw Oakland’s DAC as an extension of the tech-fueled gentrification that was pushing poorer longtime residents out of the city. “We’re not stupid. We know that the purpose is to monitor Muslims, black and brown communities and protesters,” said a young woman in a headscarf. “This center comes at a time when you’re trying to develop Oakland into a playground and bedroom community for San Francisco professionals. These efforts require you to make Oakland quieter, whiter, less scary and wealthier—and that means getting rid of Muslims, black and brown people and protesters. You know this and so do developers. We heard them at meetings. They are scared. They verbally admit it.”
She had a point. A few months earlier, a pair of Oakland investigative journalists had obtained a cache of internal city-planning documents dealing with the DAC and found that city officials seemed to be interested more in using the proposed surveillance center to monitor political protests and labor union activity at the Oakland docks than in fighting crime. 2
There was another wrinkle. Oakland had initially contracted out development of the DAC to the Science Applications International Corporation, a massive California-based military contractor that does so much work for the National Security Agency that it is known in the intelligence business as “NSA West.” The company is also a major CIA contractor, involved in everything from monitoring agency employees as part of the agency’s “insider threat” programs to running the CIA’s drone assassination fleet. Multiple Oakland residents came up to blast the city’s decision to partner with a company that was such an integral part of the US military and intelligence apparatus. “SAIC facilitates the telecommunications for the drone program in Afghanistan that’s murdered over a thousand innocent civilians, including children,” said a man in a black sweater. “And this is the company you chose?”
I looked around the room in amazement. This was the heart of a supposedly progressive San Francisco Bay Area, and yet the city planned on partnering with a powerful intelligence contractor to build a police surveillance center that, if press reports were correct, officials wanted to use to spy on and monitor locals. Something made that scene even stranger to me that night. Thanks to a tip from a local activist, I had gotten wind that Oakland had been in talks with Google about demoing products in what appeared to be an attempt by the company to get a part of the DAC contract.
Google possibly helping Oakland spy on its residents? If true, it would be particularly damning. Many Oaklanders saw Silicon Valley companies such as Google as being the prime drivers of the skyrocketing housing prices, gentrification, and aggressive policing that was making life miserable for poor and low income residents. Indeed, just a few weeks earlier protesters had picketed outside the local home of a wealthy Google manager who was personally involved in a nearby luxury real estate development.
Google’s name never came up during the tumultuous city council meeting that night, but I did manage to get my hands on a brief email exchange between a Google “strategic partnership manager” and an Oakland official spearheading the DAC project that hinted at something in the works. 3
In the weeks after the city council meeting, I attempted to clarify this relationship. What kinds of services did Google offer Oakland’s police surveillance center? How far did the talks progress? Were they fruitful? My requests to Oakland were ignored and Google wasn’t talking either—trying to get answers from the company was like talking to a giant rock. My investigation stalled further when Oakland residents temporarily succeeded in getting the city to halt its plans for the DAC.
Though Oakland’s police surveillance center was put on hold, the question remained: What could Google, a company obsessed with its progressive “Don’t Be Evil” image, offer a controversial police surveillance center?
At the time, I was a reporter for Pando, a small but fearless San Francisco magazine that covered the politics and business of Silicon Valley. I knew that Google made most of its money through a sophisticated targeted advertising system that tracked its users and built predictive models of their behavior and interests. The company had a glimpse into the lives of close to two billion people who used its platforms—from email to video to mobile phones—and it performed a strange kind of alchemy, turning people’s data into gold: nearly $100 billion in annual revenue and a market capitalization of $600 billion; its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had a combined personal wealth estimated to be $90 billion.
Google is one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world, yet it presents itself as one of the good guys: a company on a mission to make the world a better place and a bulwark against corrupt and intrusive governments all around the globe. And yet, as I traced the story and dug into the details of Google’s government contracting business, I discovered that the company was already a full fledged military contractor, selling versions of its consumer data mining and analysis technology to police departments, city governments, and just about every major US intelligence and military agency. Over the years, it had supplied mapping technology used by the US Army in Iraq, hosted data for the Central Intelligence Agency, indexed the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence databases, built military robots, co-launched a spy satellite with the Pentagon, and leased its cloud computing platform to help police departments predict crime. And Google is not alone. From Amazon to eBay to Facebook—most of the Internet companies we use every day have also grown into powerful corporations that track and profile their users while pursuing partnerships and business relationships with major US military and intelligence agencies. Some parts of these companies are so thoroughly intertwined with America’s security services that it is hard to tell where they end and the US government begins.
Since the start of the personal computer and Internet revolution in the 1990s, we’ve been told again and again that we are in the grips of a liberating technology, a tool that decentralizes power, topples entrenched bureaucracies, and brings more democracy and equality to the world. Personal computers and information networks were supposed to be the new frontier of freedom—a techno-utopia where authoritarian and repressive structures lost their power, and where the creation of a better world was still possible. And all that we, global netizens, had to do for this new and better world to flower and bloom was to get out of the way and let Internet companies innovate and the market work its magic. This narrative has been planted deep into our culture’s collective subconscious and holds a powerful sway over the way we view the Internet today.
But spend time looking at the nitty-gritty business details of the Internet and the story gets darker, less optimistic. If the Internet is truly such a revolutionary break from the past, why are companies like Google in bed with cops and spies?
I tried to answer this seemingly simple question after visiting Oakland that night in February. Little did I know then that this would take me on a deep dive into the history of the Internet and ultimately lead me to write this book. Now, after three years of investigative work, interviews, travel across two continents, and countless hours of correlating and researching historical and declassified records, I know the answer.
Pick up any popular history of the Internet and you will generally find a combination of two narratives describing where this computer networking technology came from. The first narrative is that it emerged out of the military’s need for a communication network that could survive a nuclear blast. That led to the development of the early Internet, first known as ARPANET, built by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (known today as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA). The network went live in the late 1960s and featured a decentralized design that could route messages even if parts of the network were destroyed by a nuclear blast. The second narrative, which is the most dominant, contends that there was no military application of the early Internet at all. In this version, the ARPANET was built by radical young computer engineers and playful hackers deeply influenced by the acid drenched counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area. They cared not a damn about war or surveillance or anything of the sort, but dreamed of computer-mediated utopias that would make militaries obsolete. They built a civilian network to bring this future into reality, and it is this version of the ARPANET that then grew into the Internet we use today. For years, a conflict has raged between these historical interpretations. These days, most histories offer a mix of the two—acknowledging the first, yet leaning much more heavily on the second.
My research reveals a third historical strand in the creation of the early Internet—a strand that has all but disappeared from the history books. Here, the impetus was rooted not so much in the need to survive a nuclear attack but in the dark military arts of counterinsurgency and America’s fight against the perceived global spread of communism. In the 1960s, America was a global power overseeing an increasingly volatile world: conflicts and regional insurgencies against US-allied governments from South America to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. These were not traditional wars that involved big armies but guerrilla campaigns and local rebellions, frequently fought in regions where Americans had little previous experience. Who were these people? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In military circles, it was believed that these questions were of vital importance to America’s pacification efforts, and some argued that the only effective way to answer them was to develop and leverage computer-aided information technology.
The Internet came out of this effort: an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft. In other words, the Internet was hardwired to be a surveillance tool from the start. No matter what we use the network for today—dating, directions, encrypted chat, email, or just reading the news—it always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.
As I traced this forgotten history, I found that I was not so much discovering something new but uncovering something that was plainly obvious to a lot of people not so long ago. Starting in the early 1960s in the United States, a big fear about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies arose. People worried that these systems would be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers and computing technology—including the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet we use today—were tools of repression, not liberation.
In the course of my investigation, I was genuinely shocked to discover that as early as 1969, the first year that the ARPANET came online, a group of students at MIT and Harvard attempted to shut down research taking place at their universities under the ARPANET umbrella. They saw this computer network as the start of a hybrid private-public system of surveillance and control—“computerized people- manipulation” they called it—and warned that it would be used to spy on Americans and wage war on progressive political movements. They understood this technology better than we do today. More importantly, they were right. In 1972, almost as soon as the ARPANET was rolled out on a national level, the network was used to help the CIA, the NSA, and the US Army spy on tens of thousands of antiwar and civil rights activists. It was a big scandal at the time, and the ARPANET’s role in it was discussed at length on American television, including NBC Evening News.
This episode, which took place forty-five years ago, is a vital part of the historical record, important to anyone who wants to understand the network that mediates so much of our lives today. Yet you won’t find it mentioned in any recent book or documentary on the origins of the Internet—at least not any that I could find, and I read and watched just about all of them.
Surveillance Valley is an attempt to recover part of this lost history. But it is more than that. The book starts in the past, going back to the development of what we now call the Internet during the Vietnam War. But it quickly moves into the present, looking at the private surveillance business that powers much of Silicon Valley, investigating the ongoing overlap between the Internet and the military-industrial complex that spawned it half a century ago, and uncovering the close ties that exist between US intelligence agencies and the anti-government privacy movement that has sprung up in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks. Surveillance Valley shows that little has changed over the years: the Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today. American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.
Yasha Levine
New York December 2017
Part I
Lost History
Chapter 1
A New Kind of War
Our hatred for the Americans is as high as the sky.
—North Vietnamese song
On June 8, 1961, a military intelligence officer named William Godel arrived in Saigon from Washington, DC. It was a hot summer’s day when he landed in the South Vietnamese capital, and Godel, jetlagged and dripping with sweat, visited several low-slung barracks-style buildings not far from the Saigon River. He walked unevenly, hobbled by the limp he carried from his days fighting Japanese forces in the South Pacific. On the surface, there was nothing special about this excursion. There was little to indicate that these nondescript structures, with their bland white walls and sloping roofs, sat at the center of Project Agile, a top-secret counterinsurgency program that would play a major role in the history of the Vietnam War and the rise of modern computer technology.
From his base in the Pentagon, Godel had been pushing for an initiative like Agile for over a decade. Now, this project had the personal backing of President John F. Kennedy. 1
The first results were seen on August 10, 1961, when a Sikorsky H-34 helicopter, shaped like a giant guppy, lazily rose above Saigon and made its way toward the impenetrable jungles of Kon Tum, which borders Laos and Cambodia. 2 Once the pilot acquired his target, he signaled, and the crew switched on a special crop duster grafted onto the bottom of the craft. In a slow sweeping motion, they sprayed the jungle below with an experimental mixture of highly toxic defoliation chemicals. Among them was the infamous Agent Orange. Those who smelled it said it resembled perfume.
America was not yet officially at war in Vietnam. Yet for years, the United States had been funneling money and weapons into the region to help the French wage a war against North Vietnam, the communist revolutionary state led by Ho Chi Minh that was fighting to reunify the country and kick out its colonial rulers. 3 Now, as Godel’s crew sprayed the jungles below, America was increasing its support in money and weapons. Thousands of military “advisers” were being dispatched to South Vietnam to prop up the puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the hopes of stemming what Americans viewed as a surging global tide of communism. 4
In the sweltering jungles of Indochina, it was not an easy fight. Dense vegetation cover was a persistent problem. It was one of the rebels’ greatest tactical advantages, allowing them to move people and supplies through neighboring Laos and Cambodia undetected and launch deadly raids deep in South Vietnamese territory. With Project Agile, Godel was determined to take that advantage away.
The British Empire had pioneered the use of defoliants as a form of chemical warfare, using them against local movements that opposed colonial rule. In the fight against communist rebels in Malaya, Britain ruthlessly deployed them to destroy food supplies and jungle cover. 5 British military planners described defoliants as “a form of sanction against a recalcitrant nation which would be more speedy than blockade and less repugnant than the atomic bomb.”
Godel followed Britain’s lead. Under Project Agile, chemists at a secret US Army lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had tested and isolated potential defoliant chemicals that could eat away at the dense jungle cover. These were flown to Saigon and tested in the field. They worked with brutal efficiency. Leaves fell several weeks after being sprayed, stripping the canopy bare. A second application increased effectiveness and permanently killed many trees. Bombing the area or lighting it up with napalm also made the defoliation more or less permanent. 6 With the tests a success, Godel drew up ambitious plans to cover half of South Vietnam with chemical defoliants. 7 The idea was not just to destroy tree cover but also to destroy food crops to starve the North Vietnamese into submission. 8
South Vietnam’s President Diem backed the plan. On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy had signed off on it. Thanks to Godel and Project Agile, Operation Ranch Hand was launched.
Ranch Hand got going in 1962 and lasted until the war ended more than a decade later. In that time, American C-123 transport planes doused an area equal in size to half of South Vietnam with twenty million gallons of toxic chemical defoliants. Agent Orange was fortified with other colors of the rainbow: Agent White, Agent Pink, Agent Purple, Agent Blue. The chemicals, produced by American companies like Dow and Monsanto, turned whole swaths of lush jungle into barren moonscapes, causing death and horrible suffering for hundreds of thousands. 9
Operation Ranch Hand was merciless, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. It remains one of the most shameful episodes of the Vietnam War. Yet the defoliation project is notable for more than just its unimaginable cruelty. The government body at its lead was a Department of Defense outfit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)—better known today by the slightly retooled name of Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Born in 1958 as a crash program to protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear threat from space, it launched several groundbreaking initiatives tasked with developing advanced weapons and military technologies. Among them were Project Agile and Command and Control Research, two overlapping ARPA initiatives that created the Internet.
America Goes Ballistic
In late 1957, Americans watched as the Soviet Union launched the first manmade satellite, Sputnik 1. The satellite was tiny, about the size of a volleyball, but it was thrust into orbit by hitching a ride atop the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. This was both a demonstration and a threat. If the Soviet Union could put a satellite into space, it could also deliver a nuclear warhead to just about any spot in the United States.
Sputnik crashed into America’s paranoid politics like a giant meteor. Politicians seized on the event as a sign of US military and technological weakness, and news reports focused on the Soviet victory of being the first in space. How could America fall behind the communists in something so vital? It was an affront to people’s sense of exceptionalism. 10
President Dwight Eisenhower was attacked for being asleep at the wheel. Generals and politicians spun horrific tales of impending Soviet conquest of earth and space and pushed for more defense spending. 11 Even Vice President Richard Nixon criticized Eisenhower in public, telling business leaders that the technology gap between America and the Soviet Union was too great for them to expect a tax cut. The country needed their money to catch up. 12
As the public reeled from this major defeat in the so-called Space Race, President Eisenhower knew he had to do something big and very public to save face and ease people’s fears. Neil McElroy, his newly appointed secretary of defense, had a plan.
Immaculately groomed and with perfectly coiffed hair parted down the middle, McElroy had the looks and manners of a high-flying advertising executive. Which is, in fact, what he was before Eisenhower tapped him to run the Department of Defense. In his previous role as president of Procter and Gamble, McElroy’s signature innovation was bankrolling “soap operas”—cheesy daytime dramas tailored to housewives—as pure marketing vehicles for his company’s selection of soaps and household detergents. As Time magazine, which put McElroy on the cover of its October 1953 issue, put it: “Soap operas get more advertising messages across to the consumer—and sell more soap—simply because the housewife can absorb the messages for hours on end while she goes about her household chores.” 13 [am I the only who finds it odd and bizarre that an advertising executive ran the DOD?I don't know, but seems like that job should require at least some military, but I guess Ike did not think so as both of his appointee's somehow dodged both WWII and Korea. DC]
In the weeks after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, McElroy cooked up the perfect public relations project to save the day. He called for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—ARPA—a new, independent military body whose purpose was to bridge the space gap and to ensure that embarrassing technological defeat like Sputnik would never happen again. 14 McElroy was a businessman who believed in the power of business to save the day. 15 In November 1957, he pitched ARPA to Congress as an organization that would cut through government red tape and create a public-private vehicle of pure military science to push the frontiers of military technology and develop “vast weapon systems of the future.” 16 [So not only did the clown not serve, we have him to thank for the program that became DARPA, thanks for nothing jackass DC]
The idea behind ARPA was simple. It would be a civilian-led outfit housed within the Pentagon. It would be lean, with a tiny staff and a big budget. Though it wouldn’t build or run its own laboratories and research facilities, it would function like an executive management hub that figured out what needed to be done and then farmed out the actual work to universities, private research institutes, and military contractors. 17
The plan appealed to President Eisenhower, who distrusted the cynical jockeying for funding and power of various arms of the military—which he believed bloated the budget and burned money on useless projects. The idea of outsourcing research and development to the private sector appealed to the business community as well. 18 The military brass, on the other hand, weren’t so pleased. The air force, navy, army, and Joint Chiefs of Staff all balked at the idea of civilians sitting above them and telling them what to do. They feared losing control over technology procurement, a lucrative center of profit and power.
The military pushed back against McElroy’s plan. The conflict with the military loomed so large that it made a cameo in Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union address: “I am not attempting today to pass judgment on the charge of harmful service rivalries. But one thing is sure. Whatever they are, America wants them stopped.” 19 He got his way. On February 11, 1958, a month after the State of the Union and just five months after the Sputnik launch, Congress wrote ARPA into a US Air Force appropriations bill, giving it $520 million in initial funding and a plan for a gigantic $2 billion budget. 20
McElroy chose Roy Johnson, an executive at General Electric, to head the new agency. An internal Pentagon report described him as an “utterly confident, calm, strikingly handsome individual who looked every inch like a Fortune cover tycoon.” It also noted that his only concern with taking the job was potentially losing a lucrative tax loophole: “Johnson was also a very wealthy man, leaving a $158,000 job to accept an $18,000 post at ARPA. For tax reasons, he took the ARPA job on condition that he would be permitted to be physically present in Connecticut for a minimal number of days. This meant he usually left Washington on Friday and returned Monday or Tuesday. He frequently used a private plane.” Protecting America against the Soviet Union was important. But a man had to mind his tax bill. 21 [What a fraud Ike was, dim witted researchers give the guy props for his speech on the military/industrial complex, when he was the one who did more then anyone else to marry the two, in a very crony way,and to boot, he was an out and out self hating racist.And if you do not know what I am talking about, research WW2 after the Germans surrendered, it will make you proud to be an American..not..DC]
In the first few years of its existence, ARPA took on a range of important projects. It had a space division developing ballistic missiles. It worked on spy and weather satellites as well as satellite tracking systems and did early prep work on putting a man in space. It also helped run nuclear tests like Operation Argus, which involved the detonation of several small nukes in the upper reaches of the atmosphere above the South Atlantic in a radical attempt to create an invisible charged-particle shield that would fry the electronics of any nuclear warhead that flew through it. 22
With all these projects, it seemed like ARPA was off to a glorious start, but the excitement did not last. Pentagon infighting and the creation of a demilitarized NASA—National Aeronautics and Space Administration—sucked money and prestige out of the agency. Less than a year after it was created, ARPA’s budget was slashed to just $150 million—peanuts compared to the $2 billion budget it was promised. 23 Over the next several years, it went through three directors and fought to stay alive. Everyone was convinced that ARPA was on its way to the grave. [another example of why we now have a beast, instead of a government, a commenter calling a 150 million dollars of OUR money..peanuts!, like to have those kinds of peanuts DC]
Yet one man had a plan to save it: William Godel.
Future War
Five feet ten inches tall, with almond-shaped eyes, a buzz-cut, and a smooth, intellectual manner, William Godel had the manners of a sharply dressed academic or maybe a junior diplomat. He was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1921, graduated from Georgetown, and got a job doing military intelligence at the War Department. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the Marine Corps as an officer and saw action in the South Pacific, where he took a bullet in the leg, an injury that left him permanently crippled. After the war, he shot up the ranks of military intelligence, rising to the GS-18 level —the highest pay grade for government employees—before his thirtieth birthday. 24
Over the years, Godel’s clandestine career took a series of sharp and often bizarre turns. He worked at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he liaised between the CIA, NSA, and army and became known as an expert in psychological warfare. 25 He negotiated with North Korea to retrieve American soldiers taken prisoner during the Korean War 26 , he helped run former Nazi CIA assets in West Germany 27 , and he took part in a classified mission to map Antarctica. (For this, he had two glaciers named after him: the Godel Bay and the Godel Iceport.) Part of his storied military intelligence career involved him serving as an assistant to General Graves Erskine, a crusty old retired Marine Corps general with a long history of running counterinsurgency operations. Erskine headed the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations, which handled psychological warfare, intelligence gathering, and black bag ops. 28
In 1950, Godel joined General Erskine on a clandestine mission to Vietnam. The objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of military tactics the French were using to pacify a growing anti-colonial insurgency and to determine what kind of support the United States should provide. The trip got off to a bad start when his team narrowly escaped an assassination attempt: three bombs ripped through the lobby of their hotel in Saigon. It was a nice welcoming ceremony—and no one knew whether the bombs had been placed by the North Vietnamese or by their French hosts to serve as kind of warning that they should mind their own business. Whichever it was, the party plowed ahead. They embedded themselves with French colonial troops and toured their bases. On one outing, Erskine’s team accompanied a French trained Vietnamese unit on a nighttime ambush. Their objective was to grab a few rebels for interrogation and intelligence gathering, but the intel mission quickly devolved into a rage-filled terror raid. The French-backed Vietnamese soldiers beheaded their prisoners before the rebels could be pumped for information. 29
There, out in the sweltering jungles, Godel and his team understood that the French had been doing it all wrong. The bulk of French military efforts seemed to focus on protecting their supply convoy lines, which were constantly attacked by massive guerrilla forces that seemed to materialize out of the jungle, deploying up to six thousand men along a three-mile stretch of road. The French were essentially stuck in their fortifications. They had “lost most of their offensive spirit” and were “pinned to their occupied areas,” Godel’s colleague described.
“The way Godel saw it, the French colonialists were trying to fight the Viet Minh guerrillas according to colonial rules of war. But the South Vietnamese, who were receiving weapons and training from the French forces, were actually fighting a different kind of war, based on different rules,” writes Annie Jacobsen, who excavates William Godel’s forgotten story in The Pentagon’s Brain, her history of ARPA. 30
This “different kind of war” had a name: counterinsurgency.
Godel understood that the United States was on a deliberate collision path with insurgencies all over the world: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. He supported that collision. He also began to understand that the tactics and strategies required in these new wars were not those of World War II. The United States, he realized, had to learn from France’s mistakes. It had to fight a different kind of war, a smaller war, a covert war, a psychological war, and a high-tech war—a “war that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, doesn’t have the North German Plain and doesn’t necessarily have Americans,” Godel later explained. 31 [Slightly off on the necessity of Americans there slick by 50,000 plus those injured and those crippled with lifetime trauma from what they seen, and WHAT was sprayed on them by their own country DC]
Back in the States, he sketched out what this new warfare would look like.
Counterinsurgency theory wasn’t particularly new. Earlier in the twentieth century, the United States had conducted brutal counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines and South America. And the CIA was in the midst of running a brutal covert counterinsurgency campaign in North Vietnam and Laos—headed by Godel’s future boss, Air Force Col. Edward Lansdale—that included targeted raids, death squads, propaganda, and torture. 32 What made Godel’s counterinsurgency vision different was its laser beam focus on the use of technology to bolster effectiveness. Sure, counterinsurgency involved terror and intimidation. It involved coercion and propaganda. But what was equally important was training and equipping fighters—no matter if they were US special operations teams or local forces—with the most cutting-edge military tech available: better weapons, better uniforms, better transportation, better intelligence, and a better understanding of what made the locals tick. “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,” writes Jacobsen. 33
Godel proselytized this new vision back in the United States, lecturing and speaking about his counterinsurgency theories at military institutions around the country. In the meantime, the newly created ARPA tapped him to run its vaguely named Office of Foreign Developments, from which he would manage the agency’s covert operations. The job was murky, highly secretive, and extremely fluid. Godel would oversee the agency’s highly classified missile and satellite projects one moment, then hatch plans to nuke an area on behalf of the National Security Agency the next. One such plan involved ARPA detonating a nuclear bomb on a small island in the Indian Ocean. The idea was to create a perfectly parabolic crater that could fit a giant antenna the NSA wanted to build to catch faint Soviet radio signals that had scattered into space and bounced back off the moon. “ARPA guaranteed a minimum residual radioactivity and the proper shape of the crater in which the antenna subsequently would be placed,” an NSA official said. “We never pursued this possibility. The nuclear moratorium between the US and the USSR was signed somewhat later and this disappeared.” 34
When Godel was not devising plans to blast small tropical islands, he was pursuing his main passion: high-tech counterinsurgency. As Jacobsen recounts in Pentagon’s Brain: “Godel was now in a 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 U.S. military presence into foreign lands threatened by communism—through advanced science and technology—democracy would prevail and communism would fail. This quest would quickly become Godel’s obsession.” 35
Meanwhile, in his work for ARPA he traveled to Southeast Asia to assess the growing Viet Minh insurgency and booked a trip to Australia to talk counterinsurgency and scope out a potential polar satellite launch site. 36 All through this time he pushed his main line: the United States needed to establish a counterinsurgency agency to take on the communist threat. In a series of memos to the assistant secretary of defense, Godel argued, “Conventionally trained, conventionally organized and conventionally equipped military organizations are incapable of employment in anti-guerrilla operations.” Despite the overwhelming size superiority of the South Vietnamese army, it had not been able to put down a much smaller armed insurrection, he pointed out. He pushed for letting ARPA set up a counterinsurgency research center in the field—first to scientifically study and understand the needs of local anti-insurgency forces and then to use the findings to set up local paramilitaries. “These forces should be provided not with conventional arms and equipment requiring third- and fourth-level maintenance but with a capability to be farmers or taxi drivers during the day and anti-guerrilla forces at night,” he wrote. 37
Godel’s vision clashed with the dominant US Army thinking at the time, and his proposals did not generate much enthusiasm with President Eisenhower’s people. But they were on their way out, anyway, and he found an eager audience in the incoming administration.
Bugging the Battlefield
John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 1961. Young and dashing, the former Massachusetts senator was progressive on domestic politics and a committed Cold War hawk on foreign policy. His election ushered in a crop of young elite technocrats who truly believed in the power of science and technology to solve the world’s problems. And there were a lot of problems to be solved. It wasn’t just the Soviet Union. Kennedy faced regional insurgencies against American-allied governments all around the world: Cuba, Algiers, Vietnam and Laos, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Lebanon. Many of these conflicts came out of local movements, recruited local fighters, and were supported by local populations. Countering them was not something that a traditional big military operation or a tactical nuclear strike could solve.
Two months after taking office, President Kennedy delivered a message to Congress arguing for the need to expand and modernize America’s military posture to meet this new threat. “The Free World’s security can be endangered not only by a nuclear attack, but also by being slowly nibbled away at the periphery, regardless of our strategic power, by forces of subversion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or non-overt aggression, internal revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerrilla warfare or a series of limited wars,” he said, forcefully arguing for new methods of dealing with insurgencies and local rebellion. “We need a greater ability to deal with guerrilla forces, insurrections, and subversion. Much of our effort to create guerrilla and anti-guerrilla capabilities has in the past been aimed at general war. We must be ready now to deal with any size of force, including small externally supported bands of men; and we must help train local forces to be equally effective.” 38
The president wanted a better way of countering communism—and ARPA seemed the perfect vehicle for carrying out his vision.
Shortly after the speech, advisers from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department drew up a plan of action for a huge program of covert military, economic, and psychological warfare initiatives to deal with what Kennedy saw as the biggest problem: the growing insurrection in Vietnam and Laos. The plan included William Godel’s personal obsession: Project Agile, a high-tech counterinsurgency research and development program. 39 At a National Security Council meeting on April 29, 1961, President Kennedy signed his name to it: “Assist the G.V.N. [Government of Vietnam] to establish a Combat Development and Test Center in South Vietnam to develop, with the help of modern technology, new techniques for use against the Viet Cong forces.” 40 [and so it began DC]
With those few short lines, ARPA’s Project Agile was born. Agile was embedded in a much larger military and diplomatic program initiated by President Kennedy and aimed at shoring up the government of South Vietnam against a growing rebel offensive. The program would very quickly escalate into a full blown and, ultimately, disastrous military campaign. But for ARPA, it was a new lease on life. It made the agency relevant again and put it at the center of the action.
Godel operated Agile with a free hand and reported to Edward Lansdale, a retired air force officer who ran the CIA’s covert counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. 41 Because of a need for secrecy—the United States was not officially involved militarily in Vietnam—a thick fog hung over the project. “Reporting directly to Lansdale, he conducted work so secret that even the heads of ARPA, let alone the rank and file employees, were unaware of specifics,” writes Sharon Weinberger in The Imagineers of War, her history of ARPA. 42
The initial focus of activity was ARPA’s top-secret Combat Development and Test Center, the cluster of buildings on the bank of the Saigon River that Godel helped set up in the summer of 1961. The program started with a single location and a relatively straightforward mission: to develop weapons and adapt counterinsurgency battlefield gadgets for use in the dense and sweltering jungles of Southeast Asia. 43 But as US military presence increased in Vietnam and finally morphed into a full-on, grinding war, the project grew in scope and ambition. 44 It opened several other large research and development complexes in Thailand as well as smaller outposts in Lebanon and Panama. The agency did not just develop and test weapons technology but also formulated strategy, trained indigenous forces, and took part in counterinsurgency raids and psychological operations missions. 45 More and more, it took on a role that would have felt right at home in the CIA. It also went global, aiming its sights on quelling insurgencies and left-wing or socialist political movements wherever they were—including back home in the United States.
The agency tested light combat arms for the South Vietnamese military, which led to the adoption of the AR-15 and M-16 as standard-issue rifles. It helped develop a light surveillance aircraft that glided silently above the jungle canopy. It formulated field rations and food suited to the hot, wet climate. It bankrolled the creation of sophisticated electronic surveillance systems and funded elaborate efforts to collect all manner of conflict-related intelligence. It worked on improving military communication technology to make it function in dense forest. It developed portable radar installations that could be floated up on a balloon, a technology that was quickly deployed commercially back in the United States to monitor the borders for illegal crossings. 46 It also designed vehicles that could better traverse the boggy landscape, a prototype “mechanical elephant” similar to the four-legged robots that DARPA and Google developed a half-century later. 47 21s
ARPA frequently pushed way past the boundaries of what was considered technologically possible and pioneered electronic surveillance systems that were decades ahead of their time. It played a big role in some of the most ambitious initiatives. That included Project Igloo White, a multi-billion-dollar computerized surveillance barrier. 48 Operated out of a secret air force base in Thailand, Igloo White involved depositing thousands of radio-controlled seismic sensors, microphones, and heat and urine detectors in the jungle. These eavesdropping devices, shaped like sticks or plants and usually dropped from airplanes, transmitted signals to a centralized computer control center to alert technicians of any movement in the bush. 49 If anything moved, an air strike was called in and the area was blanketed with bombs and napalm. Igloo White was like a giant wireless alarm system that spanned hundreds of miles of jungle. As the US Air Force explained: “We are, in effect, bugging the battlefield.” 50
John T. Halliday, a retired air force pilot, described the Igloo White operation center in Thailand in his memoir. “Remember those huge electronic boards from the movie Dr. Strangelove that showed Russian bombers headed for the U.S. and ours headed at them?” he wrote. “Well, Task Force Alpha is a lot like that except with real-time displays in full color, three stories tall—it’s the whole goddamned Ho Chi Minh Trail in full, living color.” 51
Halliday was part of a team that flew nighttime bombing raids over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, targeting supply convoys on the basis of intel provided by this electronic fence. He and his unit were amazed by the futuristic nature of it all:
Step out of the jungle and inside the building, you step back into America—but an America fifteen years from now… maybe 1984. It’s beautiful… gleaming tile floors… glass walls everywhere. They have a full cafeteria where you can get anything you want. They even have real milk, not that powdered crap we get at the mess hall. And air-conditioning? The whole damned place is air conditioned. There’s even a bowling alley and a movie theater. I and a whole bunch of civilians who look like IBM guys running around in three-piece suits all wearing glasses… it’s “Geek Central.” We never see them over on our part of the base, so I guess they have everything they need in there.
Then there’s this main control room that looks like the one we saw on TV during the Apollo moon shots, or maybe something out of a James Bond movie. There’s computer terminals everywhere. But the main feature is this huge, three-story-tall Lucite… or maybe it’s plastic, I don’t know… full-color depiction of the whole Ho Chi Minh Trail with a real-time depiction of trucks coming down the trail. It’s wild, man. 52
Igloo White ran for five years with a total cost of somewhere near $5 billion—roughly $30 billion today. Though widely praised at the time, the project was ultimately judged an operational failure. “The guerrillas had simply learned to confuse the American sensors with tape-recorded truck noises, bags of urine, and other decoys, provoking the release of countless tons of bombs onto empty jungle corridors which they then traversed at their leisure,” according to historian Paul N. Edwards. 53 Despite the failure, Igloo White’s “electronic fence” technology was deployed a few years later along America’s border with Mexico. 54
Project Agile was a huge hit with the South Vietnamese government. President Diem made several visits to the ARPA research center in Saigon and personally met with Godel and the rest of the ARPA team there. 55 The president had one main condition: American involvement must remain secret. Godel was of the same mind. Back home, to justify the need for a new counterinsurgency approach, he frequently trotted out what President Diem told him: “The one way we lose is if the Americans come in here.”
Know Your Enemy
To William Godel, high-tech counterinsurgency was about more than just developing modern killing methods. It was also about surveilling, studying, and understanding the people and cultures where the insurrection was taking place. It was all part of his vision for the future of warfare: to use American advanced science to defeat the superior discipline, motivation, and support of local insurgents. The idea was to understand what made them resist and fight, and what it would take to change their minds. 56 The ultimate aim was to find a way to predict local insurgencies and stop them before they had time to mature. The problem in Southeast Asia was that Americans were operating in environments and cultures they did not understand. So how to ensure the military was making the right decisions?
In the early 1960s, defense and foreign policy circles were awash in seminars, meetings, reports, and courses trying to establish proper counterinsurgency policy and doctrine. At one influential multi agency seminar organized by the US Army and attended by Godel’s ARPA colleagues, a military researcher described the difficulty of fighting counterinsurgencies in a very direct manner: “The problem is… that we must operate in a strange cultural environment and influence persons with different cultural values, customs, mores, beliefs, and attitudes.” He concluded with a stark statement: “The same bullet will kill with just about the same effectiveness whether used against a target in the United States, Africa, or Asia. However, the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency weapon is dependent upon the specific target.” 57
The Pentagon started throwing money at social and behavioral scientists, hiring them to make sure America’s “counterinsurgency weapon” always hit its target, regardless of the culture in which it was being fired. Under William Godel, ARPA became one of the main pipelines for these programs, helping to weaponize anthropology, psychology, and sociology and putting them in the service of American counterinsurgency. ARPA doled out millions to studies of Vietnamese peasants, captured North Vietnamese fighters, and rebellious hill tribes of northern Thailand. Swarms of ARPA contractors— anthropologists, political scientists, linguists, and sociologists—passed through poor villages, putting people under a microscope, measuring, gathering data, interviewing, studying, assessing, and reporting. 58 The idea was to understand the enemy, to know their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their social networks, and their relationships to power. 59
The RAND Corporation, under an ARPA contract, did most of this work. Based out of a building overlooking the wide, tan beaches of Santa Monica, RAND was a powerful military and intelligence contractor that had been created by the US Air Force several decades earlier as a private-public research agency. 60 In the 1950s, RAND was central to formulating America’s belligerent nuclear policy. In the 1960s, it added a big counterinsurgency division and became a de facto privatized extension of ARPA’s Project Agile. ARPA placed the orders; RAND hired the people and got the job done.
In one major effort, RAND scientists studied the effectiveness of the Strategic Hamlet initiative, a pacification effort that had been developed and pushed by Godel and Project Agile and that involved the forced resettlement of South Vietnamese peasants from their traditional villages into new areas that were walled off and made “safe” from rebel infiltration. 61 In another study commissioned by ARPA, RAND contractors were tasked with answering questions that nagged the Americans: Why were North Vietnamese fighters not defecting to our side? What was it about their cause? Weren’t the communists supposed to be brutal to their own people? Don’t they want to live like we do in America? Why was their morale so high? And what could be done to undermine their confidence? 62 They conducted twenty-four hundred interviews of North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors and generated tens of thousands of pages of intelligence in pursuit of this goal. 63
At the same time, ARPA funded multiple projects aimed at studying local populations to pinpoint the social and cultural factors that could be used to predict why and when tribes would go insurgent. One initiative, contracted with RAND, sent a team of political scientists and anthropologists from UCLA and UC Berkeley to Thailand to map out “the religious systems, value systems, group dynamics, civil-military relationships” of Thai hill tribes, focusing in particular on predictive behavior. 64 “The objective of this task is to determine the most likely sources of social conflict in Northeast Thailand, concentrating on those local problems and attitudes which could be exploited by the Communists,” reads the report. 65 Another study in Thailand, carried out for ARPA by the CIA-connected American Institutes for Research (AIR), aimed at gauging the effectiveness of applied counterinsurgency techniques against rebellious hill tribes—practices such as assassinating tribal leaders, forcibly relocating villages, and using artificially induced famine to pacify rebellious populations. 66
A 1970 investigation for Ramparts magazine detailed the effects of these brutal concentration camp– style counterinsurgency methods on a rebellious minority Thai hill tribe known as the Meo. “Conditions in the Meo resettlement villages are harsh, strongly reminiscent of the American Indian reservations of the 19th century. The people lack sufficient rice and water, and corrupt local agents pocket the funds appropriated for the Meo in Bangkok.” The magazine quoted an eye witness report: “Physical hardship and psychological strain have taken a heavy toll on these people. They are gaunt and sickly; many are in a permanent state of semi-withdrawal stimulated by the shortage of opium to feed lifelong habits. Yet the decay of the Meos’ spirit is even more distressing than the deterioration of their bodies. They have lost all semblance of inner strength and independence: they seem to have withered, while assuming the manner of the humbled.” 67
An even more disturbing dimension of the AIR’s pacification work in Thailand was that it was supposed to serve as a model for counterinsurgency operations elsewhere in the world—including against black people living in American inner cities, where race riots were breaking out at the time. “The potential applicability of the findings in the United States will also receive special attention. In many of our key domestic programs, especially those directed at disadvantaged sub-cultures, the methodological problems are similar to those described in this proposal,” reads the project’s proposal. “The application of the Thai findings at home constitutes a potentially most significant project contribution.” 68
That’s exactly what happened. After the war, researchers, including a young Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve), who had worked on counterinsurgency programs for ARPA in Southeast Asia, returned to the United States and began to apply the pacification ideas they developed in the jungles to the thorny domestic issues of class, race, and economic inequality. 69 The effects were just as disastrous at home as they were overseas, giving a modern scientific veneer to public policies that reinforced racism and structural poverty. 70
As the AIR proposal had not so subtly hinted, ARPA’s behavioral science programs in Southeast Asia went hand in hand with a bloodier and more traditional counterinsurgency policy: covert programs of murder, terror, and torture that collectively came to be known as the Phoenix Program.
One of the guiding lights of this dark side of counterinsurgency was Edward Lansdale, a former Levi Strauss and Company executive who learned the trade fighting the communist insurgency in the Philippines after World War II. 71 Lansdale’s hallmark psychological warfare strategy was using local myths and beliefs to induce primal terror and fear in his targets. A celebrated trick was exploitation of a Filipino belief in the existence of vampires to scare communist guerrillas. “One of Lansdale’s counterterror psy-war tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood,” explained Douglas Valentine, a journalist who exposed the Phoenix Program. “The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.” 72 Lansdale, who would become Godel’s boss, replicated the Philippine strategy in Vietnam: assassinations, death squads, torture, and the obliteration of entire villages. 73 It was all meant to “deincentivize” peasants from helping the North Vietnamese rebels. Somewhere between forty thousand and eighty thousand Vietnamese were killed in the Phoenix Program’s targeted assassinations; the CIA estimates the number closer to twenty thousand.
By the late 1960s, the Vietnam War had turned into a meat grinder. In 1967, 11,363 American soldiers lost their lives. A year later, that number climbed to almost 17,000. By 1970, American soldiers no longer wanted to fight. There was chaos on the battlefield and insubordination back at base. There were hundreds of cases of “fragging,” superior officers killed by their own soldiers. Drug use was rampant. Soldiers were wasted—drunk, high on grass and opium. ARPA’s Project Agile was not immune to the transformation but connected to it. Indeed, according to a former head of ARPA, William Godel was personally involved with “Air America” missions to supply the CIA’s covert war in Laos, an operation that, according to credible reports, involved smuggling heroin to finance anti-communist militias. 74
As Saigon turned into a military camp full of booze, heroin, prostitution, and cheap thrills, ARPA’s research center became a bizarre nexus of stuffy anthropologists, spies, generals, South Vietnamese officials, and sociopathic commandos passing on their way to terror missions deep inside enemy controlled territory. An old French colonial villa in the city that housed RAND scientists became a social hub for this weird scene, by day a working command center, by night a dinner-and-cocktail-party venue. 75
A strange pseudoscience emerged. Blending free-market economics and rational choice theory, military planners and scientists viewed the Vietnamese as automatons, nothing more than rational individuals who were acting purely in their own self-interest. They had no bigger guiding values or ideals —no patriotism, no loyalty to their communities or traditions or to some bigger political idea. They were interested in nothing other than maximizing positive outcomes for themselves. The trick would be to peel the Vietnamese away from the insurgency through a mix of marketing, consumer-style incentives, and a bit of tough love when nothing else worked. Cash handouts, jobs, small infrastructure improvements, land privatization schemes, anticommunist propaganda, crop destruction, mutilations, murder, assassinations— all these were legitimate variables to throw into the coercion equation. 76
Some began to doubt America’s mission in Vietnam and questioned the purpose of ARPA’s scientific approach to counterinsurgency. Anthony Russo, a RAND contractor who worked on ARPA projects and who would later help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers, discovered that when results of ARPA studies contradicted military wishes, his bosses simply suppressed and discarded them. 77
“The more I grew to admire Asian culture—especially Vietnamese,” Russo wrote in 1972, “the more I was outraged at the Orwellian horror of the U.S. military machine grinding through Vietnam and destroying everything in its path. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls were turned into prostitutes; streets that had been lined with beautiful trees were denuded to make room for the big military trucks. I was fed up with the horror and disgusted by the petulance and pettiness with which the RAND Corporation conducted its business.” 78
He believed that ARPA’s entire Project Agile apparatus was a giant racket used by military planners to give scientific cover to whichever existing war policies they were intent on pursuing. This wasn’t cutting-edge military science, but a boondoggle and a fraud. The only people benefiting from Project Agile were the private military contracting firms hired to do the work.
Even William Godel, the counterinsurgency star who started the program, got caught up in a petty embezzlement scheme that involved the misappropriation of part of the $18,000 in cash that he had carried to Saigon in 1961 to set up Project Agile. 79 It was a bizarre case that involved an almost insignificant sum of money. Some of his colleagues hinted that it was politically motivated, but it didn’t matter. Godel was ultimately convicted of conspiracy to commit embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison. 80
Other ARPA contractors had reservations about their work in Vietnam as well, but the mission rolled on. Fraudulent or not, Project Agile turned Southeast Asia, from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam, into a giant laboratory. Every tribe, every jungle path, every captured guerrilla was to be studied and analyzed and monitored and understood. While assassination teams terrorized the rural population of Vietnam, ARPA scientists were there to log and measure program effectiveness. Incentive programs were designed and then monitored, analyzed, tweaked, and monitored again. ARPA didn’t just bug the battlefield; it tried to bug entire societies. [yeah we are learning that first hand these days in America.DC]
Interviews, polls, population counts, detailed anthropological studies of various tribes, maps, available weapons, migration studies, social networks, agricultural practices, dossiers—all this information poured out of ARPA’s centers in Vietnam and Thailand. But there was a problem. The agency was drowning in data: typewritten paper reports, punch cards, giant tape reels, index cards, and tons of crude computer printouts. There was so much information coming in that it was effectively useless. What good was all this intel if no one could find what they needed? Something had to be done.
next
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/03/part-2-surveillance-valley-secret.html
Command,Control & Counterinsurgency
notes Prologue & chapter 1
Prologue 1.
Ali Winston, “Oakland Surveillance Center Progresses Amid Debate on Privacy, Data Collection,” Center for Investigative Reporting, July 18, 2013.
2. Darwin Bond Graham and Ali Winston, “The Real Purpose of Oakland’s Surveillance Center,” East Bay Express, December 18, 2013.
3. Buried among thousands of pages of official Oakland correspondence obtained by an activist through a public records request was a short email thread from October 2013 between Scott Ciabattari, a Google strategic partnership manager, and Renee Domingo, an Oakland official spearheading the DAC project. The emails were short on details but referenced a meeting that had taken place between Ciabattari and Domingo and discussed scheduling a follow-up meeting to find out what kind of Google products could be beneficial to the DAC as well as to Oakland’s Emergency Operations Center, an emergency police hub that would be tied to the DAC. “I spoke with our Intern Director of Information Technology, Ahsan Baig, last night and he will provide some potential dates for us to meet with you week after next, to begin the dialogue,” Domingo wrote to Ciabattari, cc’ing the Oakland mayor Jean Quan. “He is very interested in seeing some of the demos and products Google has available for our EOC/DAC as well as how the City might partner with Google.” She signed off: “I look forward on behalf of the City of Oakland, of working with you and Google.” Ciabattari replied, “We are excited to help and I look forward to speaking with you again.… Please feel free to contact me anytime.” Renee Domingo, email message sent to Scott Ciabattari, “Re: Thank you,” October 3, 2013, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-thread-between-google-s-scott-ciabattari-and-oakland-officials-aboutthe-dac-october-2013.jpg.
Chapter 1
1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961, Document 96, “From June 8 through 25, 1961, a Research and Development Team Headed by William H. Godel…” (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Office of the Historian, 1988).
2. Vegetational Spray Tests in South Vietnam (US Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories, April 1962), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/476961.pdf.
3. Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, United States Army, 1985).
4. “Vietnam ‘Program of Action’ by Kennedy Task Force,” New York Times, July 1, 1971; Mai Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), 33.
5. Judith Perera and Andy Thomas, “This Horrible Natural Experiment,” New Scientist, April 18, 1985.
6. H. Lindsey Arison III, “Executive Summary: The Herbicidal Warfare Program in Vietnam, 1961–1971,” published July 12, 1995, last modified May 1, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/20061025232940/http://members.cox.net/linarison /orange.html.
7. Donald J. Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1989).
8. “Its goals were to strip the border areas along Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to ‘remove protective cover’ from Vietcong reinforcements, to defoliate Zone D in the Mekong Delta where the Vietcong had numerous bases, to destroy the manioc groves that the Vietcong used for food, and to destroy the mangrove swamps where the Vietcong hid. Taken together, the two phases of the program would have defoliated 31,250 square miles of jungle—about half the land area of South Vietnam—as well as 1,125 square miles of mangrove swamps and 312 square miles of manioc groves.” Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War, 134.
9. Even today, the dioxins that seeped into the soil almost a half century ago continue to cause horrific birth defects. Thousands of Vietnamese infants are born every year with grotesque deformities. Orphanages are full of children suffering from exotic genetic mutations that cause painful conditions such as hydrocephalus, in which the brain fills with fluid and deforms and enlarges a child’s head and causes severe brain damage. Ash Anand, “Vietnam’s Horrific Legacy: The Children of Agent Orange,” News.com.au, May 25, 2015, http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/vietnams-horrific-legacy-the-children-of-agent-orange/news-story /c008ff36ee3e840b005405a55e21a3e1.
10. Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
11. Werner von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who got a new lease on life working for the US Army, went on television to warn America that Sputnik was a clear sign of impending total domination by the Soviet Union—not only of earth, but of heaven itself. “I’m convinced that the Russian concept is very clear. They consider the control of space around the Earth very much like, shall we say, the great maritime powers considered the control of the seas in the 16th through the 18th centuries,” he said, confident that the Sputnik would provide a nice bump to his missile research efforts. Sputnik Declassified: Top-Secret Documents Rewrite the History of the Famous Satellite and the Early Space Race (Arlington, VA: PBS, 2007).
12. Ed Creagh, “Nixon Seemed More Concerned over Sputnik Than President,” Rome News-Tribune (Associated Press), October 17, 1957, https://surveillance valley.com/content/citations/ed-creagh-nixon-seemed-more-concerned-over-sputnik-than-president-associated-press17-october-1957.pdf.
13. “The Cleanup Man,” Time, October 5, 1953.
14. Much of the fine-grained detail about the history of ARPA comes from a previously classified 1975 report that was commissioned by the agency and carried out by Richard J. Barber Associates, The Advanced Research Projects Agency 1958–1974 (Washington, DC: National Technical Information Service, 1975).
15. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, II-7.
16. McElroy developed the idea for ARPA in consultation with James R. Killian Jr., the influential president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Eisenhower’s presidential assistant for science.
17. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
18. Ibid. The US Chamber of Commerce had proposed something similar to ARPA: “the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had floated the notion of creating a single research-and-development agency for the federal government during congressional hearings months before Sputnik. Such talk was in the air.” Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 18.
19. President Dwight Eisenhower, State of the Union Address, 1958.
20. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, I-7.
21. Initially, Roy Johnson wanted to hire Dr. von Braun to be ARPA’s first chief scientist. But that would have required relocating his entire team of ex-Nazi rocket scientists to the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. The idea was killed. Instead, Johnson chose Herb York, a respected nuclear scientist who set up an ambitious missiles and nuclear research program for the agency. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 21.
22. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, I-8, III-8.
23. Ibid.
24. Parts of this chapter that deal with William Godel’s vision of counterinsurgency are largely informed by Annie Jacobsen’s The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Back Bay Books, 2016). Other parts come from archival research, memoirs, and declassified ARPA and CIA records. Sharon Weinberger’s The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) was also very helpful in filling in some of the finer details about Godel’s life. Both The Pentagon’s Brain and The Imagineers of War are highly recommended as deep histories of ARPA.
25. In State Department documents, William Godel is described as “an expert from the Department of Defense on the techniques and practices of psychological warfare.” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961, Document 96 (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Office of the Historian, 1988).
26. William Godel’s negotiations with North Korea was a delicate issue. Some of the American prisoners had confessed on television to taking part in illegal chemical weapons attacks against North Korea. Godel’s job was to cover up the allegations by blaming the whole thing on advanced communist brainwashing techniques, which could reprogram people’s minds and make people believe or do anything their captors wanted. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6, “At the Pentagon, the man tasked with handling the situation was William Godel …”
27. The former Nazi asset Ernst Brückner (codename CARPETMAKER) occupied a high office in Germany’s Ministry of the Interior. Declassified CIA documents show Godel taking part in an effort to weed out Soviet agents embedded among the mass of German prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union as well as counseling his CIA asset on how to evade Soviet electronic surveillance inside West Germany. Central Intelligence Agency, FIOA# 51966ec2993294098d509809, Memorandum for the Record: Subject: Meeting with CARPETMAKER, June 27, 1956, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/brueckner-ernst-vol.2-0010-document-number-foia-esdn-crest51966ec2993294098d50980a.pdf
28. Secretary of Defense Roger M. Kyes, “Memorandum for the Secretaries of the Military Departments, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Assistant Secretaries of Defense, Chairmen of Boards, Committees and Councils, OSD, Assistants to the Secretary of Defense, and Directors of Offices, OSD: Subject: Reorganization—Office of Special Operations, Office of the Secretary of Defense,” July 15, 1953, https:// surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/subject-reorganization-office-of-special-operations-office-of-the-secretary-of-defense-the-secretaryof-defense-15-july-1953.pdf.
29. Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (New York: Free Press, 1985).
30. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6.
31. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, 286.
32. Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 1947–75, a Studies in Intelligence anthology (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, August 2016), http://web.archive.org/web/20170523094620/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-studyof-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/Anthology-CIA-and-the-Wars-in-Southeast-Asia/pdfs-1/vietnam-anthology-printversion.pdf.
33. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6.
34. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 304.
35. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6.
36. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-38.
37. Memo, William Godel, Director Policy and Planning Division, ARPA, for Assistant Secretary of Defense, September 15, 1960, quoted in Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support, 351–352.
38. President John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on the Defense Budget, March 28, 1961.
39. William Godel had access to the inner circle of the Kennedy administration. “Godel’s success is not surprising as his assessment of the problem in Southeast Asia closely corresponded to the views of the Kennedy leadership.” Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, V-39–V-40.
40. “Vietnam ‘Program of Action’ by Kennedy Task Force,” New York Times, July 1, 1971.
41. Eric Pace, “Edward Lansdale Dies at 79; Advisor on Guerrilla Warfare,” New York Times, February 24, 1987.
42. Weinberger, Imagineers of War, chap. 5.
43. Herman S. Wolk, USAF Plans and Policies: R&D for Southeast Asia, 1965–1967 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1969).
44. Project Agile’s budget—which started out at $11.3 million in 1962—grew as the war progressed. By 1964, it was $26 million, or one tenth of ARPA’s total budget, according to the Richard J. Barber Associates report.
45. ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was more than just a technology research and development center. It took part in active counterinsurgency missions, including going out with the 4400th “Jungle Jim” Squadron, a covert special forces counterinsurgency division. Report on General Taylor’s Mission to South Vietnam (Washington, DC: National Security Council, November 3, 1961), 162.
46. Institute for Defense Analysis, DARPA Technical Accomplishments: An Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects, Vol. I (Washington, DC: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1990).
47. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, II-7.
48. Matt Novak, “How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America,” Gizmodo Paleofuture, September 24, 2015, http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-vietnam-war-brought-high-tech-border-surveillan-1694647526.
49. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
50. Bugging the Battlefield (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1969), motion picture, https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.4524913.
51. John T. Halliday, Flying through Midnight: A Pilot’s Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions over Laos during the Vietnam War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005).
52. Ibid., 17–18.
53. Edwards, Closed World, 4.
54. “These early uses of ground sensors were effective and within a year John Mitchell’s Justice Department was seeding a 65-mile experimental stretch of the border with Vietnam-tested acoustic sensors, buried strain-sensitive cables and infrared detection devices. In 1972, when the test section was fully operational, 128,889 illegal crossers were apprehended and authorities claimed more than 30,000 were netted as a result of the electronic fence. In the fall of 1973 the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service jointly announced plans to expand the fence along the whole 2,000-mile border with the exception of the most inaccessible areas and immediately pledged $1.5 million to start the job. Today electronic sensors are installed at the most active points along the border, but there is some question at the moment whether the whole border will be wired. This situation results largely from the success of the system (although costs have been a factor too). General Leonard F. Chapman Jr., head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, explained in a 1975 interview in Nation’s Business that the sensors work fine but that more than half the alarms go unanswered because the Border Patrol is spread too thin” (Paul Dickerson, The Electronic Battlefield [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976]). An excerpt of the book was read into the Congressional Record. (“Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, United States Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess. [June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975]).
55. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961, edited by Daniel J. Lawler and Erin R. Mahan (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 96, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus 1961-63v01/d96.
56. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency.
57. Proceedings of the Symposium “The U.S. Army’s Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research,” March 26–28, 1962, edited by William A. Lybrand (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, 1962).
58. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
59. The Richard J. Barber Associates report has a great discussion of Godel’s pioneering use of data and social science for counterinsurgency: “Despite its hardware and ‘hard science’ image, ARPA’s AGILE leadership—very much reflecting Godel’s sensitivity to the ‘people’ aspects of insurgent warfare—began to undertake studies in Thailand intended to focus on the village and rural atmosphere within which insurgent situations seemed to develop.… The MRDC effort, a relatively crude first cut exercise, involved sending a Thai-U.S. team composed of an economist, engineer, forester, anthropologist, and operations analyst to 40 villages in Northeast Thailand. Their report covered physical characteristics, locational and communications data, population and census information, officials and village leadership, villager skills and specialists, migration patterns, and villager responses to perceived ‘threats.’” Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, VI-43–VI-44.
60. The RAND Corporation was originally created by the air force in 1946 as Project RAND “to perform a program of study and research on the broad subject of intercontinental warfare, other than surface, with the object of recommending to the Air Force preferred techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose.” US Army Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research symposium, Special Operations Research Office, American University, Washington, DC, June 1962.
61. In The Imagineers of War, Sharon Weinberger excavated the previously unrecognized fact that William Godel’s ARPA counterinsurgency work in Vietnam played a role in the Strategic Hamlet Initiative. “The Defense Department’s internal study of the war, known as the Pentagon Papers, would later claim Robert Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission, was the one who proposed and persuaded Diem in December 1961 to pursue strategic hamlets,” writes Weinberger. “But by the time Thompson showed up, Godel had already spent months laying the groundwork. Van, the Vietnamese government official who was Godel’s traveling companion on his trips in the summer of 1961, made clear who was responsible. ‘Only one man helped me and my team to instill the idea [of strategic hamlets] to our government,’ Van told American officials investigating Godel in 1964. ‘Mr. Godel, and his team’” (chap. 5).
62. Anders Sweetland, Rallying Potential among the North Vietnamese Armed Forces (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1970).
63. Although many of these ARPA studies had the appearance of scientific objectivity, those that produced results that fit preconceived notions or that provided rationales for existing military doctrine got wider play and attention; those that didn’t were buried or ignored.
64. Remote Area Conflict Research and Engineering Semi-annual Report (Washington, DC: Advanced Research Projects Agency, Project AGILE, July 1–December 31, 1963).
65. H. P. Phillips and D. A. Wilson, Certain Effects of Culture and Social Organization on Internal Security in Thailand (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 1964).
66. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2002), 60–61.
67. Banning Garrett, “The Dominoization of Thailand,” Ramparts, November 1970, http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1970nov-00007.
68. Ibid.
69. Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
70. Take Charles Murray, a young researcher who worked on ARPA’s counterinsurgency programs for the American Institutes for Research in Thailand (Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand [Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1998]). His experience among the rebellions of Thai peasants marked his thinking for life. He became convinced that the carrot was much less effective than the stick: social programs—things like building roads and health clinics and providing jobs—designed to “buy” hearts and minds simply didn’t work. But harsh, punitive measures did (Jason DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray,” New York Times, October 9, 1994). He would apply that logic in the United States to the difficult socioeconomic problems faced by black ghettoized communities. Reducing poverty and inner-city crime—these were not problems that could be solved through welfare and social programs. In fact, anything the government did to support and nudge people in the right direction didn’t work; they had the opposite effect: they only encouraged the very behavior they were aimed at curbing. So, Murray advised the opposite: harsher prison terms and punitive zero-tolerance measures to deter crime as well as abolishing all government social programs, including food stamps, welfare, and the Social Security pension system (“Prison Called Best Treatment for Juvenile Offenders,” Associated Press, November 1, 1979, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations /prison-best-treatment-for-juvenile-offenders-associated-press-1-november-1979.png; Charles A. Murray and Louis A. Cox Jr., Juvenile Corrections and the Chronic Delinquent [Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research, March 1979]). Today, Murray is a libertarian political scientist and one of the most influential ideological architects of the post Reagan era. He is best known for The Bell Curve, a controversial best seller that promoted racial eugenics theories, claiming among other things that whites and Asians are genetically superior in intelligence to blacks and Latinos. But his most lasting achievement was giving intellectual backing to President Bill Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Signed into law in 1996, the bill killed traditional federal welfare in America in order to incentivize people to get a job. The law had a specific emphasis on cutting welfare for single mothers as a way to reduce poverty, the idea being that welfare incentivized them to have children, thereby perpetuating poverty. It was a cruel move and, like much of the research tested in Vietnam, was ineffective at achieving its stated goal. Instead of decreasing joblessness and alleviating poverty, these reforms plunged minority communities into even more suffering and impoverishment (Timothy Casey and Laurie Maldonado, Worst Off—Single Parent Families in the United States [New York: Legal Momentum, December 2012]).
71. Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counter-Terrorism, 1940–1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), chap. 8.
72. Douglas Valentine, “Dirty Wars and Self-indulgence,” Dissident Voice, June 7, 2013, http://web.archive.org/web/20170523152813/http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/06/dirty-wars-as-self-indulgence/.
73. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
74. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (New York: Verso Books, 1997). “He may have been involved to some extent with an organization which I think was called Air America. I’m not sure, but it was a CIA operation in Vietnam,” said former ARPA director Robert Sproull in a 2006 interview (http://web.archive.org/web/20170523134945/http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/DARPA/15-F-0751_DARPA_Director_Robert _Sproull.pdf).
75. T. Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
76. Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
77. Barbara Myers, “The Other Conspirator: The Secret Origins of the CIA’s Torture Program and the Forgotten Man Who Tried to Expose It,” TomDispatch, May 31, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176004/tomgram %253A_barbara_myers,_the_unknown_whistleblower/.
78. Anthony Russo, “Inside the RAND Corporation and Out: My Story” (photocopy), Ramparts, April 1972, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20 Materials/White%20Assassination% 20 Clippings%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Study%20Groups/Misc-SG-045.pdf.
79. Jerry Kline, “Never Talked to Wylie of Money, Godel Says” (photocopy), Washington Star, May 1, 1965, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations /jerry-klein-never-talked-to-wylie-of-money-godel-says-the-washington-star-1-may-1965.pdf; Peter S. Diggins, “Godel Tells of Taking $18,000 to Asia and Starting Anti-Guerrilla Center” (photocopy), Washington Post, May 15, 1965, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/peter-s.diggins-godel-tells-of-taking-18-000-to-asia-and-starting-anti-guerrilla-center-thewashington-post-15-may-1965.pdf.
80. Weinberger, Imagineers of War, chap. 8, “Shortly before 10: 00 p.m., the foreman sent a message to the judge…”
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