The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen

I learned that at any given time in history, what DARPA scientists are working on—most notably in the agency’s classified programs—is ten to twenty years ahead of the technology in the public domain. The world becomes the future because of DARPA. Is it wise to let DARPA determine what lies ahead?

“What this meant,” Freedman explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the earth’s atmosphere, when Castle Bravo exploded, it could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some scientists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about the end of the world.” This was not Freedman’s first atmospheric nuclear bomb test. By 1954 he had worked on more than

The presence of x-rays made the unseen visible. In the flash of Teller light, Freedman—who was watching the scientists for their reactions—could see their facial bones. “In front of me… they were skeletons,” Freedman recalls. Their faces no longer appeared to be human faces. Just “jawbones and eye sockets. Rows of teeth. Skulls.”

“The mushroom cloud should have been fifteen [or] twenty miles wide at this point. Instead it was forty,” Freedman explains. “As the cloud kept growing behind me, I could see in the faces that [some] of the scientists thought the atmosphere was catching on fire. The look said, ‘This is the end of the world.’”

Ernest Lawrence met with David E. Lilienthal, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. “If we don’t get this super [i.e., the hydrogen bomb] first,” Lawrence warned, “we are sunk, the U.S. would surrender without a struggle.” Lawrence considered the atomic bomb “one of mankind’s greatest blessings,” and felt that the hydrogen bomb was “a technical means of taking profit out of war.” He met with Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee. Lawrence took umbrage at the idea of anyone’s bringing moral principles into the mix. Their conversation inspired Strauss to appeal directly to the president. “A government of atheists is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on ‘moral’ grounds,” Strauss wrote. The “super” must be built. “If we let the Russians get the super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain,” Brien McMahon told the president and his national security advisors. “It’s either we make it or we wait until the Russians drop one on us without warning,” said National Security Committee member Admiral Sidney Souers.

In the summer of 1955, John von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer. He had slipped and fallen, and when doctors examined him, they discovered that he had an advanced, metastasizing cancerous tumor in his collarbone. By November his spine was affected, and in January 1956 von Neumann was confined to a wheelchair. In March he entered a guarded room at Walter Reed Hospital, the U.S. Army’s flagship medical center, outside Washington, D.C. John von Neumann, at the age of fifty-four, racked with pain and riddled with terror, was dying of a cancer he most likely developed because of a speck of plutonium he inhaled at Los Alamos during the war. Two armed military guards never left his side.

Von Braun and his team had just launched America’s first successful satellite, Explorer I, and as far as the public was concerned, von Braun’s star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had information on von Braun that the rest of the world most definitely did not, namely, that he had been an officer with the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS during the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of thousands of slave laborers forced to build the V-2 rocket, in an underground labor-concentration camp called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.

York moved into his office in the Pentagon the following month, in March 1958. He would remain on the president’s scientific advisory board. On the wall of York’s new office he hung a large framed photograph of the moon. Next to it he hung an empty frame. When people visited they would ask, why the empty frame? York told them he would leave the frame empty until it could be filled with a photograph of the backside of the moon, taken from a spacecraft to be developed by ARPA. This new agency Herb York was in charge of at the Pentagon would be capable of phenomenal things.

Christofilos’s theoretical Astrodome-like shield was the hoped-for result of exploding a large number of nuclear weapons in space as a means of defending against incoming Soviet ICBMs. By Christofilos’s count, this likely meant “thousands per year, in the lower reaches of the atmosphere.” These explosions, he said, would produce “huge quantities of radioactive atoms, and these in turn would emit high-energy electrons (beta particles) and inject them into a region of space where the earth’s magnetic fields would trap and hold on them for a long time.” Christofilos figured that this electromagnetic field could last months, or perhaps longer, and that “the trapped electrons would cause severe radiation—and even heat damage—to anything, man or nuclear weapon, that tried to fly through the region.” In short, the idea was that the arming and firing mechanisms on the incoming Soviet ICBMs would be fried.

During a practice run of a missile launch, one of the X-17As failed in flight, after only twenty-five seconds. Had there been a nuclear weapon in the nosecone, it would have produced a catastrophic disaster. The missile would have been just a few thousand feet up, and exploding at that height would likely have killed or injured many of the crew. Making matters seem even more precarious, in the following test run, the missile failed again, this time just three seconds after launch.

The majority of them remain highly classified. “Directed energy is the weapon of the future,” said retired four-star general Paul F. Gorman in a 2014 interview for this book. “But that is a sensitive area and we can’t get into that.” CHAPTER SIX Psychological Operations

It was a CIA move that was three years in the making. In fact, the word “brainwashing” had entered the English lexicon in September 1950, courtesy of the CIA, when an article written by a reporter named Edward Hunter appeared in a Miami newspaper, the News. “Brain-Washing Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party,” the headline read. Although Hunter had been a journalist for decades, he also worked for the CIA. He’d been hired by the agency on a contract basis to disseminate brainwashing stories through the mainstream press. “Brain-washing,” wrote Hunter, was a devious new tool being used by the communists to strip a man of his humanity and “turn him into a robot or a slave.” The very concept grabbed Americans by the throat. The notion of government mind-control programs had been a mainstay of dystopian science-fiction novels for decades, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 classic We to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 best-seller Brave New World. But that was science fiction. This was real, Hunter wrote. To be incinerated in a nuclear bomb attack was an ever-present Cold War threat, but it was also an abstraction, difficult to conceptualize on an individual scale. In 1950, the idea of being brainwashed, as if controlled by an evil wizard’s spell—that was somehow much easier to relate to. Brainwashing terrified people, and they wanted to know more.

On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy approved the chemical defoliation program in Vietnam. The program, said Kennedy, was to be considerably smaller than the Advanced Research Projects Agency had originally devised, and it should instead have a budget between $4 million and $6.5 million. With President Kennedy’s blessing, the genie was out of the bottle. By war’s end, roughly 19 million gallons of herbicide would be sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam. A 2012 congressional report determined that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange.

CHAPTER NINE Command and Control In October 1962, a quiet forty-seven-year-old civilian scientist from Missouri arrived at the Pentagon to begin a new job with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. His work would change the world. By 2015, 3 billion of the 7 billion people on the planet would regularly use technology conceived of by him. The man, J. C. R. Licklider, invented the concept of the Internet, which was originally called the ARPANET.

By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eisenhower’s test ban had failed, and the United States and the Soviet Union had both returned to nuclear weapons testing. Twice during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 20 and October 26, 1962, the United States detonated two nuclear weapons—code-named Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime—in space. These tests, which sought to advance knowledge in ARPA’s pursuit of the Christofilos effect, are on the record and are known. What is not known outside Defense Department circles is that in response, on October 22 and October 28, 1962, the Soviets also detonated two nuclear weapons in space, also in pursuit of the Christofilos effect. In recently declassified film footage of an emergency meeting at the White House, Secretary of Defense McNamara can be heard discussing one of these two Soviet nuclear bomb tests with the president and his closest advisors. “The Soviets fired three eleven-hundred-mile missiles yesterday at Kapustin Yar,”

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies.

were discreetly working on classified weapons projects

No Jason scientist was spared defamation. A group of antiwar protesters learned the home address of Richard Garwin in upstate New York and showed up on his front lawn with hate signs. Another time, when Garwin was on an airplane, a woman sitting in the seat next to him recognized him, stood up, and declared, “This is Dick Garwin. He is a baby killer!”

And Staff Sergeant Thomas B. Turner told Marshall, “Under fire we learned what we had never been told—that fear and fatigue are about the same in their effect on an advance,” such as storming a beach.