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William Godel
Return to Surveillance Valley, History of the Internet and History of Silicon Valley
“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” (SrvlValy 2018)
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 War26, he helped run former Nazi CIA assets in West Germany27, 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 anticolonial 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
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.“ (SrvlValy 2018)
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