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Return to Surveillance Valley, Know Your Enemy, History of the Internet and History of Silicon Valley, Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)

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.” (SrvlValy 2018)

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

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

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.”“ (SrvlValy 2018)

Fair Use Sources:

• B01N809DBM (SrvlValy 2018)