The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World

by Sharon Weinberger

Most advances look obvious in hindsight, but it can often take many frustrating years to understand what new technology can do. When the inventor Nikola Tesla first publicly demonstrated remote control in 1898, operating a small boat using radio signals, it caught people’s attention, but it did not instantly spark a revolution.

One of the problems Wikner saw in Vietnam was that the Pentagon, including ARPA, was employing high-tech solutions to what were often low-tech problems. Dragon’s Jaw bridge was actually the exception; most of the problems the military faced in Vietnam did not call for technological novelty. Wikner angered military officers because he would tell them they did not understand the science, and then he angered scientists, because he told them they did not understand war.

Wikner, recalling his Boy Scouts training, devised a novel fix to the trip-wire problem. He went out on patrol with marines, showing them how a six-foot stick could be used in the jungle to feel for a possible trip wire without actually setting off the explosive. “That’s the greatest accomplishment of my life,” the physicist later recalled.

The Soviets believed they could win a war in Europe “with or without nuclear weapons,” wrote the army general Donn Starry, who served in the 1970s as the commander of the Fifth Corps in Germany. “Their preferred solution: without.”

Wikner summed up the army’s attitude for facing off against the Soviets in Europe: “Nuke ’em till they glow.”

“What we want is to have a viable conventional response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe that doesn’t rely totally on nuclear weapons,” he said. Wikner realized that ARPA and its high-tech gadgetry from Vietnam might now have a role to play in military strategy.

More critically, Wikner advised Lukasik to name the study something so bureaucratically obscure that no one would notice it. “If we had called this Project Smart Kill, it would have been dead in the water,” Lukasik joked. “I’m not sure whether Congress would have killed it, or the services would have killed it, or someone up in the Office of the Secretary of Defense would have killed it.” In 1973, Lukasik signed off on the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program, or LRRDPP, an unpronounceable acronym tailor made not to appear in a Washington Post headline or be spotted by an eagle-eyed congressional staffer.

Making a study influential in a city overwhelmed by wonk reports requires choosing the right person. That was why ARPA’s director tapped Albert Wohlstetter, one of Rand’s most influential nuclear theorists, to head the study. If Herman Kahn was the court jester of the nuclear world, Wohlstetter was its cardinal whose advice carried real weight with policy makers. Wohlstetter had been a mentor to Kahn, who often repackaged Wohlstetter’s ideas for his own popular writing. If Kahn could spin up a lecture hall with briefings that tallied civilian deaths like a football score, Wohlstetter by comparison “wrote as colorlessly about nuclear catastrophe as is humanly possible,” one historian noted.

Notoriously pompous but politically adroit, Wohlstetter knew how to synthesize technical information into jargon-free language that would appeal to policy makers. Kahn popularized the notion of second strike, the ability to survive an initial nuclear attack and retaliate, but it was Wohlstetter who first described it in morbid detail in a 1958 article, “The Delicate Balance of Terror.”

The real focus of the study was the high-value Cold War real estate known as the Fulda Gap, which extended from the East German border to Frankfurt, West Germany, and was pinned as the likely invasion route for Soviet conventional forces. The lowlands there were perfect terrain for Soviet tanks to barrel across on their way west. The Soviet Union enjoyed overwhelming conventional superiority, and American policy at the time was to threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons, a sort of take-no-prisoners approach to the European battlefield.

Stripped of its wonkish language and pared down to its essentials, the study’s conclusions advocated using very precise conventional weapons in battle, in place of tactical nuclear weapons. Conventional weapons with “near zero miss may be technically feasible and militarily effective. If so, such nonnuclear weapons, under a wide range of circumstances, might satisfy the current United States and Allied damage requirements that now require the use of nuclear weapons,” a study report stated.

The specific ARPA proposal that followed was something like a cross between the Star Wars Death Star and Terminator’s Skynet. It was a weapon, or actually several weapons, that could collect and integrate data from various radar, crunch the numbers using a computer-driven targeting system, select targets, and then send a drone-packed mother ship over Soviet lines. Once there, it would release its kamikaze drones, called guided submunitions, which would hunt down and destroy Soviet targets.

By 1982, the army had adopted this strategy, which relied on new technology, much of it out of ARPA.

It was Vietnam, not outer space, that would prove formative for the modern agency. Over the next three decades, the projects in that office would give rise to precision weapons, drones, and stealth aircraft—the modern tools of warfare, or what some would later call a “revolution in military affairs.” In a few short years, Lukasik had overhauled ARPA, creating the foundations for weapons that would in the coming decades transform the battlefield. “It all came from counterinsurgency,” Lukasik said.

At 10:30 p.m., on October 29, 1969, a one-word message arrived at a computer console at the Stanford Research Institute. “Lo,” read the message. That was the entire content of the first transmission sent across the ARPANET. Charley Kline, a student programmer working for Professor Leonard Kleinrock at the University of California, Los Angeles, sent the message to Bill Duvall, a computer programmer at the Stanford Research Institute, and it was supposed to be “login,” but the system crashed before it could be transmitted in its entirety, sending just the first two letters.

Even with its first brief transmission, the ARPANET already contained most of the underpinning of the modern Internet.

Without true believers, the ARPANET could have easily been killed, either by protesters worried that it was a Pentagon project to conduct nuclear warfare or by lawmakers convinced it was not doing enough for the Pentagon. The ARPANET continued through those years largely unscathed, because ARPA officials believed in the vision of man-computer symbiosis that had been laid out by J. C. R. Licklider and worked hard to protect it. Stephen Lukasik, like Charles Herzfeld before him, understood the broader importance of the project and struck a delicate balance of justifying its work to Congress as relevant to the Pentagon while publicly downplaying any potential military role.

Whether it was Timothy Leary’s lectures on the benefits of psychedelic drugs or newfound interest in Eastern mysticism, even the Pentagon was not impervious to the cultural anarchy of the late 1960s. Unconstrained by conventional wisdom but bound by a belief in rigorous science, ARPA was about to create a new field of research, transforming J. C. R. Licklider’s notion of man-computer symbiosis into technology that would allow people to control computers with nothing more than their thoughts.

Among its many classified research projects was a contract supported by the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, a division headed by Sidney Gottlieb, perhaps the most notorious scientist ever to work for the spy agency. The secret program was testing different forms of parapsychology, such as whether humans had the ability to use their minds to visualize or even influence remote objects.

Gottlieb would be remembered most for what looked like a willful contempt of common decency. As the head of the Office of Technical Service, Gottlieb led a wing of the CIA whose failed innovations to assassinate the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, included poison pens and exploding seashells. He also worked on one of the agency’s most notorious projects, the use of LSD as a mind control drug. Under Gottlieb’s supervision, LSD beginning in the 1960s was tested on unwitting human guinea pigs including, among other unfortunate victims, the mentally ill, prostitutes, and even one unsuspecting army scientist who committed suicide.

What Gottlieb really wanted to discuss was bunny rabbits and nuclear Armageddon.

According to Psychic Discoveries, one theory of parapsychology the Soviets were testing involved a projected emotional link between a newborn and its mother, which allowed the mother to “sense” her offspring’s death even over long distances. Because actually killing a newborn human child was not really an option, they resorted to experimenting with baby rabbits and their mothers. The experiment was as ghastly as it sounded: a baby rabbit would be killed out of sight and sound of its mother, while scientists in a separate lab room observed the mother for a reaction.

Presumably, a mother rabbit would be kept aboard the submarine, with a submariner assigned to monitor it for signs of distress.

Perhaps more important, the late 1960s and early 1970s had sparked widespread interest in parapsychology, even among some members of Congress, who were pressuring agencies, like ARPA, to support

The thirty-nine-year-old scientist cut a distinctive figure at ARPA. He favored bell-bottoms and wide-collared shirts over suits and pencil holders and brought his son to skateboard in the hallways of the Pentagon.

ARPA in popular culture may be portrayed as the lair of proverbial mad scientists, but the truth was that, socially speaking, even in the 1960s and 1970s the agency was almost as straitlaced as any other part of the Pentagon.

While the era of free love was alien to most of those who worked in the Defense Department, the newly divorced Lawrence embraced it, showcasing a revolving door of girlfriends. Lawrence, at least by ARPA standards, was “out there,” not just in his clothing and his freewheeling lifestyle, but also in his choice of research, which drew heavily on popular cultural notions of “mind over body.” He was not your typical antiestablishment hippie, however. In the late 1960s, when many men were looking for a way to get out of going to Vietnam, Lawrence was looking for a way to get in.

His first major program, started in 1970, was in biofeedback, a relatively new area of investigation that involved training people to control physiological functions, such as breathing and heart rate, by providing subjects with real-time information from sensors.

It was also starting to attract interest from scientists, who thought biofeedback might allow people in a stressful situation to slow their heart rates or lower their blood pressure purely through mental concentration.

The justification for ARPA’s interest in this field was to help troops in combat; biofeedback could in theory allow soldiers to shoot more accurately, or even to slow their bleeding after being shot by allowing them to control their own heart rate. Researchers hypothesized that pilots of damaged aircraft could be taught to lower their own heart rate and blood pressure, allowing them to carry out emergency procedures without panicking.

Soon, Harvard students were running up and down stairs with cardiovascular electrodes attached to their chests. Lawrence brought hippie counterculture to scientists, and scientific rigor to hippies.

By today’s standards, the idea of ARPA, a technical agency, investigating spoon bending and ESP might sound outlandish, but even some of the conservative elements of the Defense Department and intelligence community were being swept up in popular enthusiasm for psychic investigations. Best-selling books like The Secret Life of Plants combined botany with New Age ideas to argue that plants were sentient beings, while The Tao of Physics merged quantum theory with mysticism. A cover of Time magazine was dedicated to the nation’s “booming interest” in psychics.

Lawrence was drinking heavily and playing the part of the raconteur, telling Van de Castle that what he really wanted was to find a female psychic he could have sex with and test her powers. Van de Castle, a proponent of parapsychology, was upset by Lawrence’s cavalier attitude.

Lawrence fell back into a chair, put his feet up on the conference table, looked around the room, and pronounced, “Okay, show me a fucking miracle.”

Either Geller, on close examination by outsiders, could not or would not perform, or when he did seem to get results, there was little credible examination. “Targ and Puthoff, from the way I have encountered them by day in their laboratory, seem to emerge as bumbling idiots rather than as respected, accomplished physicists,” Hyman wrote. None of the demonstrations involved any scientific controls.

Hyman was astounded that Targ and Puthoff found it more believable that Geller had psychic powers that allowed him to erase film than that he possessed a device capable of doing the same thing. Hyman believed Geller’s work had all the classic hallmarks of a trained magician: befriend, distract, and dazzle.

If Lawrence at some point had taken parapsychology seriously, that time was long gone. “The whole thing,” he concluded, “was just garbage.”

Lawrence launched a different sort of mind-reading project: instead of relying on the paranormal, researchers would use measurable brain signals to control a computer. From his exploration of parapsychology, Lawrence found science. The brain-driven computer dreamed up by Lawrence drew heavily on, and referenced, Licklider’s idea of “man-computer symbiosis.” If Licklider’s vision of a man-computer symbiosis was futuristic, Lawrence’s program, which he named biocybernetics, was outright audacious. In biocybernetics, the machine would not just be a part of man’s decision-making process through inputs provided by a keyboard or joystick, as envisioned by Licklider; it would interact directly with the human mind, using sensors that monitor brain activity.

what ARPA officials called “the intelligent yarmulke.”

Within a few years, Vidal’s research yielded promising results: in one experiment, test subjects were able to move an electronic object through a maze on a computer screen just by thinking about it.

Donchin recalled sitting in on a National Institutes of Health study group to review a $5,000 grant proposal for Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize. The scientists were debating the funding for hours. At one point, Donchin excused himself to make a brief phone call to Lawrence about his ARPA grant. Donchin needed $15,000 for some equipment, and Lawrence’s response was “You got it.” When Donchin returned to the room, the scientists were still debating the $5,000 for Kandel. That, according to Donchin, best illustrated the difference between ARPA and other science agencies.

For example, according to a 1975 summary, ARPA hoped to achieve a capability to translate an eight-word vocabulary based on EEG signals. “The discipline of biocybernetics is essentially being created by ARPA,”

Lawrence’s brain-driven computers and soldiers tapping into the body’s autonomic functions were on the edge, but so was killing bunny rabbits to communicate with submarines or funding an Israeli magician to remotely view Soviet bases.

ARPA was a place in the early 1970s that tolerated and even encouraged exploring such outlandish ideas, but unlike some other...

At the end, one of the CIA officials turned to Lawrence and said, “They certainly haven’t been wasting our money. Dr. Lawrence, what do you think about all this?” At that point, Lawrence’s investigation of psychic phenomena had introduced him to a colorful array of mystics and frauds. “You have been wasting your money,” he exploded in frustration. “Every damn dime of this is nonsense.” There was dead silence. Lukasik quickly changed the subject, and as Lawrence recalled, no one ever asked him to look at parapsychology again.

Lawrence helped save ARPA from the embarrassment that befell the intelligence community when it was revealed the nation’s spies had spent tens of millions of dollars on psychics.

As for parapsychology, Lawrence joked years later that maybe he should not have been so forthright with his criticism, instead playing it out even longer. “At the very least,” he said, “I could have met some more witches.”

ARPA, in the view of a new crop of defense officials, was meant to be a corporate laboratory of the Pentagon—a place that built weapons—not a think tank or a scientist’s playground, let alone a place that tried to address strategic-level problems, as past directors had done. The new ARPA—now to be called DARPA—would build technology that could find enemies and kill them.

Neither the aircraft nor the test site where it was being flown existed, at least officially. It was May 4, 1978, and the pilot, Bill Park, was flying a top secret aircraft known by its code name, Have Blue.

From the Pentagon’s perspective, it was better for people to believe it housed little green men than secret spy aircraft.