With all this focus on brainwashing and its evil power, starting with Hunter’s first mention of the concept in the fall of 1950, it is surprising how quickly the story of the brainwashed Marine colonel Frank S. Schwable in the winter of 1953 went away. At first the situation garnered considerable press, but then diffused. This was largely due to the behind-the-scenes efforts of William Godel. Godel had been assigned to act as liaison between the Pentagon and the government of North Korea in an effort to get Schwable and thousands of other Korean War POWs released. The documents at the National Archives are limited in number, and many remain classified, but what surfaces is the notion that William Godel was extremely effective at his job. By the late summer of 1953, the majority of the captured pilots had been returned. Many of them appeared on television and explained what had been done to them, that they had been tortured into making false confessions. A solid narrative emerged. The evil communists had tried to “brainwash” the Americans, with emphasis on the word “tried,” and failed. Schwable recanted everything he had said and was awarded the Legion of Merit. The American public welcomed this idea with open arms; in his constitution and character, the American serviceman was stronger than and superior to the communist brainwashers.
As for Allen Macy Dulles, he was not getting any better. The brain injury had damaged his prefrontal cortex, leaving him with permanent short-term amnesia, also called anterograde amnesia. He had lost the ability to transfer new information from his short-term memory to his long-term memory. He knew who he was, but he could not remember things like where he was. Or what day it was. Or what he had done twenty minutes before.
“He was present, one hundred percent present, in the moment,” his sister Joan Talley said. “But he could not hang on to anything that was happening anymore. He could remember everything about his life up to the war, up to the injury. Then nothing.” His days at Exeter, when he was a teenager, were his fondest memories, all sharp. He retained much knowledge of the classics, and of ancient Greek warfare, which he had studied at Princeton. He could recall training with the Marines, but from the moment of the injury, it was all darkness. Just a blank page. “You would talk to him, and ten minutes later he would not remember anything that you had just said,” Joan Talley recalled. “Poor Allen began to act paranoid.” Conspiratorial thinking gripped his mind. It was the fault of the Nazis, he claimed. The fault of the Jews. His father was not his father. His father was a Nazi spy. “The psychiatrists tried to say it was mental illness. That Allen was suffering from schizophrenia. That was the new diagnosis back then. Blame everything on schizophrenia.”
The ambitious Dr. Harold Wolff could not help Allen Macy Dulles, nor could any of the other doctors hired by his father. He was moved into a mental institution, called the Chestnut Lodge, in Rockville, Maryland. This was the infamous locale where the CIA sent officers who experienced mental breakdowns. How much doctoring went on at the Chestnut Lodge remains the subject of debate, but the facility offered safety, security, and privacy. Joan Talley visited her brother regularly, though it pained her to see him locked up there.
“Allen was suffering from a terrible brain injury,” she said. “Of course he wasn’t crazy…. Allen had been absolutely brilliant before the brain injury, before the war. It was as if somewhere down inside he knew that he was [once] very intelligent but that he wasn’t anymore. It drove him mad. That his brilliance in life was over. That there would be brilliance no more.” Allen Macy Dulles was shuffled around from one mental hospital to another. Eventually he was sent overseas, to a lakeside sanatorium in Switzerland, where he returned to a prewar life of anonymity. Joan moved to Zurich, to study psychology. She visited her brother every week.
Dr. Harold Wolff did not disappear. He had become friendly with CIA director Dulles while treating his amnesiac son. Now Dr. Wolff had a bold proposal for the CIA. A research project in a similar field. What, really, was brainwashing other than an attempt to make a man forget things he once held dear? Wolff believed this was rich territory to mine. The brainwashing crisis with the Korean War POWs had passed, but there was much to learn from brainwashing techniques. What if a man really could be transformed into an ant, a robot, or a slave? What if he could be made to forget things? This could be a major tool in psychological warfare operations. The CIA was interested, and so was William Godel.
In late 1953 Dr. Wolff secured a CIA contract to explore brainwashing techniques, together with Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, his partner at the Cornell University Medical College in New York City. Their classified report, which took more than two years to complete, would become the definitive study on communist brainwashing techniques. From there, the work expanded. Soon the two doctors had their own CIA-funded program to carry out experiments in behavior modification and mind control. It was called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. One of their jobs was to conduct a study on the soldiers who had become POWs during the Korean War. This work would later be revisited by the CIA and DARPA starting in 2005.
At the Pentagon, having so adroitly dealt with the POW brainwashing scandal, William Godel was elevated to an even more powerful position. Starting in 1953, he served as deputy director of the Office of Special Operations, an office inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Godel’s boss was General Graves B. Erskine. Godel acted as liaison between the Pentagon and the CIA and NSA. So trusted was William Godel that during important meetings he would sometimes serve as an alternate for the deputy secretary of defense. In declassified State Department memos, Godel was praised as an “expert from DoD on techniques and practices of psychological warfare.” He worked on many different classified programs in the years from 1955 to 1957 and left a footprint around the world. As part of the Joint Intelligence Group, he was in charge of “collecting, evaluating and disseminating intelligence in support of activities involving the recovery of U.S. nationals held prisoner in Communist countries around the globe.” He served as deputy director of the Office of Special Operations, Department of the Navy, and was in charge of the classified elements of the Navy’s mission to map Antarctica. In March 1956, a five-mile-wide ice shelf off the coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, was named after him, the Godel Iceport. But his true passion was counterinsurgency.
In 1957 Godel traveled around the country, giving lectures at war colleges to promote the idea that the United States would sooner or later have to fight wars in remote places like Vietnam. In many ways, Godel would say to his military-member audiences, America was already fighting these wars, just not out in the open. In his lectures he would remark that by the time of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the U.S. had “been paying eighty percent of the bill.” Godel believed that America had “to learn to fight a war that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, doesn’t have the North German Plain, and doesn’t necessarily involve Americans.”
Godel believed he knew what the future of warfare would look like. How its fighters would act. They would use irregular warfare tactics, like the ambushes and beheadings he had witnessed in Vietnam. America’s future wars would not be fought by men wearing U.S. Army uniforms, Godel said. They would be fought by local fighters who had been trained by U.S. forces, with U.S. tactics and know-how, and carrying U.S. weapons. 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. Godel formulated a theory, something he proudly called his “bold summation.” Insurgents might have superior discipline, organization, and motivation, he said. But science and technology could give “our” side the leading edge.
In February 1958, William Godel was hired on in a key position at the newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was Godel’s role as director of the Office of Foreign Developments to handle what would be ARPA’s covert military operations overseas. For Godel, his experience in Vietnam back in 1950 left him convinced that if America was going to defeat the global spread of communism, it needed to wage a new kind of warfare called counterin
surgency warfare, or COIN. 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.
In 1959 ARPA’s Office of Foreign Developments was renamed the Policy and Planning Division. Godel retained the position of director. Herb York moved from chief scientist at ARPA to the director of the Defense Department of Research and Engineering, or DDR&E, with all ARPA program managers still reporting to him. Herb York and William Godel shared a similar view: the United States must aggressively seek out potential research and development capabilities to assist anticommunist struggles in foreign countries by using cutting-edge technology, most of which did not yet exist. In early 1960, York authorized a lengthy trip for Godel and for York’s new deputy director, John Macauley. The two men were to travel through Asia and Australia to set up foreign technology–based operations there. Godel still acted as ARPA liaison to the NSA and CIA.
Godel traveled to a remote area in South Australia called Woomera. Here the Defense Department was building the largest overland missile range outside the Soviet Union. The site was critical to ARPA’s Defender program. Next he went to Southeast Asia, where he made a general assessment of the communist insurgency that was continuing to escalate there, most notably in Vietnam. Upon his return to the United States, Godel outlined his observations in a memo. In 1960 the South Vietnamese army had 150,000 men, making them far superior, numerically, to what was estimated to be an insurgent fighting force of between only three thousand to five thousand communists, the Viet Minh or Vietcong. And yet the South was unable to control this insurgency, which was growing at an accelerating rate. South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s “congenitally trained, conventionally organized and congenitally equipped military organizations are incapable of employment in anti-guerrilla operations,” Godel wrote.
For the secretary of defense William Godel prepared lengthy memos on the unique nature of the insurgency, singling out the growing communist-backed guerrilla forces in Vietnam and neighboring Laos and the “potential value of applying scientific talent to the problem.” Godel suggested that ARPA create “self-sustaining paramilitary organizations at the group level,” to be sent into Vietnam to conduct psychological warfare operations. Godel believed that ARPA should begin providing local villagers with weapons to use, so as to turn them into counterinsurgency fighters for the Pentagon. “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.” William Godel was suggesting that ARPA take on a role that until now had been the domain of the Special Operations Division of the CIA and U.S. Army Special Forces teams. Godel believed that ARPA should create its own army of ARPA-financed fighters who would appear to be civilians by day, but who would take on the role of paramilitary operators by night. A new chapter in ARPA history had begun.
Upon returning from Vietnam, Godel roamed the halls of the Pentagon, intent on garnering support for his counterinsurgency views. He was largely ignored. “Godel continued to press his views on people throughout the government, many of them well-placed via his remarkable network of contacts,” said an ARPA colleague, Lee Huff, but the Eisenhower administration had little interest in his ideas, and he was vetoed at every turn. With the arrival of a new president, this would change.
When a new president takes office, he generally changes the guard. And the arrival of John Fitzgerald Kennedy meant the departure of Herb York. “When John Kennedy won the 1960 election [I] became what politicians call lame ducks,” York later observed, adding that he was not sorry to go. “I didn’t have to spend all my time putting out fires” anymore. York was proud of the work he had accomplished while at ARPA, the “truly revolutionary changes” he had overseen at the Pentagon. At the top of the list was the arsenal of nuclear weapons he had helped build up. “By the end of the Eisenhower period, we had firm plans and commitments for the deployment of about 1,075 ICBMs (805 Minutemen plus 270 Atlas and Titans),” York noted with pride.
He also admitted that these accomplishments presented a paradox. As he put it, “Our nuclear strategy, and the objective situation underlying it, created an awful dilemma.” After his years working on ARPA’s Defender program, he had “concluded that a defense of the population was and very probably would remain impossible in the nuclear era.”
At noon on January 20, 1960, John F. Kennedy became the thirty-fifth president of the United States. It would be more than a week before York would officially leave office. As the “senior holdover in the [Defense] Department,” York explained, “I became the Secretary of Defense at the same moment” the president took office. Former Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara had been nominated to serve as Kennedy’s secretary of defense, but it was not known how long the confirmation hearings would take. In the meantime, someone had to be in charge of the nation’s nuclear weapons. The practice of the president remaining in constant contact with the so-called nuclear football, the briefcase containing the codes and other data enabling a president to order a nuclear launch, was not yet in effect. In January 1961 it was the job of the secretary of defense to carry the case, to be responsible for, in York’s words, “getting the nuclear machine ready to go into action when the president so ordered it.” What this meant was that for now, Herb York was in charge of America’s entire nuclear arsenal.
A special red telephone was installed in York’s bedroom, at his home just outside Washington. It had a large red plastic light on top that would flash if York was being called. The red phone was connected to one place only, the War Room located beneath the Pentagon. The day after Kennedy’s inauguration, York decided to venture over to the War Room to see what was going on down there.
“When I knocked at the door, a major opened it a crack,” York recounted.
From behind the crack in the door, the man asked, “What do you want?”
“I’m the acting secretary of defense,” York answered.
“Just a minute,” said the man. He closed the door gently in York’s face. A few moments later, the man, an Army major, returned and let Herb York inside, not without some fanfare. York looked around. Here, the Pentagon was keeping special “watch” on situations around the globe considered most critical to national security. One place was the Central African Republic of the Congo, not yet called Zaire, where a rebellion was under way in the mineral-rich province of Katanga. “The other was Laos,” recalled York, Vietnam’s turbulent neighbor. The next three presidents would have their presidencies defined by the Vietnam War. But at that time, as far as the rest of America was concerned, “nothing special was going on in either place, as far as our people knew. Vietnam was not yet in our sights.”
The following week, Robert McNamara was confirmed as the new secretary of defense. No one bothered to go to York’s house and retrieve the red telephone. “It remained there until I left Washington, permanently, some four months later,” said York.
PART II
THE VIETNAM WAR
CHAPTER SEVEN
Techniques and Gadgets
The first two U.S. military advisors to die in the Vietnam War were ambushed. Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnand were sitting with six other Americans in the mess hall of a South Vietnamese army camp twenty-five miles north of Saigon when the attack came. The lights were off and the men were watching a Hollywood movie, a film noir thriller called The Tattered Dress. When it was time to change the reel, a U.S. Army technician flipped on the lights.
Outside, a group of communist guerrilla fighters had been surveilling the army post and waiting for the right moment to attack. With the place now illuminated, they pushed the muzzles of their semiautomatic we
apons through the windows and opened fire. Major Buis and Master Sergeant Ovnand were killed instantly, as were two South Vietnamese army guards and an eight-year-old Vietnamese boy. In a defensive move, Major Jack Hellet turned the lights back off. The communist fighters fled, disappearing into the jungle from where they had come.
In his first two months in office, President Kennedy spent more time on Vietnam and neighboring Laos than on any other national security concern. Counterinsurgency warfare, all but ignored by President Eisenhower, was now a top priority for the new president. William Godel finally had an ear, and by winter, the Advanced Projects Research Agency made its bold first entry into the tactical arena. On the morning of his eighth day in office, the new president summoned his most senior advisors—the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the director of the CIA, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the assistant secretary of defense, and a few others—to the White House. The subject of their meeting was the “Viet-nam counter-insurgency plan,” the location still so foreign and far away that it was hyphenated in the official memorandum. Two days after the meeting, President Kennedy authorized an increase of $41.1 million to expand and train the South Vietnamese army, roughly $325 million in 2015. Of far greater significance for ARPA, President Kennedy signed an official “Counter-insurgency Plan.” This important meeting paved the way for the creation of two high-level groups to deal with the most classified aspects of fighting communist insurgents in Vietnam, the Vietnam Task Force and the Special Group. William Godel was made a member of both groups.
From the earliest days of his presidency, Kennedy worked to distance himself from a traditional, old school military mindset. President Eisenhower, age seventy-one when he left office, had been a five-star general and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. President Kennedy was a dashing young war hero, full of idealism and enthusiasm, and just forty-three years old. Kennedy sought a more adaptable, collegial style of policy making when it came to issues of national security. The Eisenhower doctrine was based on mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The Kennedy doctrine would become known as “flexible response.” The new president believed that the U.S. military needed to be able to fight limited wars, quickly and with flexibility, anywhere around the world where communism threatened democracy. In describing his approach, Kennedy said that the nation must be ready “to deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear or conventional, large or small.”