“You should call yourself Jason,” Mildred Goldberger said. Which is how one of the most secret and esoteric, most powerful and consequential scientific advisory groups in the history of the U.S. Department of Defense got its name. Over the course of the next fifty-five years, the Jason group would impact ARPA, and later DARPA, with greater significance than any other scientific advisory group. Jason’s first senior advisors were Hans Bethe, George Kistiakowsky, and Edward Teller.
In April 1960, each member of Jason was granted a clearance of top secret or above. The Jason scientists’ first official meeting took place in Washington, D.C., where they were briefed on a set of challenges to consider. Ballistic missile defense was at the top of the list. The Jasons were briefed on the classified elements of the Defender program and asked to think outside the boundaries of possibility that were currently being explored by other scientists.
Two months after their first official briefing, the Jason group held a summer study at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, formerly called the Rad Lab. It took place between June 1 and August 15, 1960, and there were about twenty Jason scientists present. Goldberger recalled that during that meeting they learned that ARPA wanted them to think about measures and countermeasures, about offense and defense. The Jason scientists were briefed on the classified results of Operation Argus and the Christofilos effect. They were asked to think about new programs to be researched and developed, and also to imagine the programs that Russian scientists might be working on. The 1960 summer study produced multiple classified reports.
Goldberger described one concept in general terms. It was a variation of the Christofilos effect. “The idea was proposed to the [Jason] study group that the enemy could detonate a nuclear weapon high up [in the atmosphere] to confuse satellite detection.” The Jasons were to think about the creation of an effect similar to the electromagnetic pulse seen during Argus. One of the Jason scientists who was present at that meeting, Sidney Drell, tried to explain the concept in an oral history in 1986. “If you have a high altitude explosion of a nuclear weapon, and it makes a [cloud] of NO [nitric oxide molecules], would that cause a big enough cloud to last long enough that we wouldn’t see the missile attack launch and we wouldn’t get the early warning?” In their first summer study, the Jason scientists were asked to calculate the size of the cloud, the amount of nitric oxide in the cloud, and the rate of dispensation in the atmosphere required to negatively impact the electronics on a nearby U.S. satellite system. From their calculations, said Goldberger, the Jasons concluded that the enemy would have to explode “many megaton warheads” to have a significant effect on the signals, and that this was “impractical.” For ARPA, this was good news.
These were the kinds of hard science problems the Jasons were excellent at solving, and ARPA wanted the group to apply this type of “imaginative thinking” to the Defender conundrum. They came up with a new idea, one that involved the age-old warfare concept of using decoys—devices meant to distract or mislead—like the mythological Trojan horse. The Jasons suggested the development of a new technology whereby American ICBM warheads could be equipped with decoys designed to evade, or trick, the Soviet’s antiballistic missile defense system. If every U.S. warhead was equipped with five or six decoys, then the entire U.S. arsenal of ICBMs would have a five or six times greater chance of getting through to a target in the Soviet Union. The Jasons called this concept “penetration aids.”
On the basis of the Jason scientists’ work, ARPA created a new program called PENAIDS, short for penetration aids. PENAIDS suggested the development of a far more aggressive offensive posture in the MAD dilemma, the inventing of new ways for U.S. missiles to outfox the Soviets’ ballistic missile defense. Starting in 1962, PENAIDS proof tests at the missile bases at White Sands, New Mexico, and at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands delivered promising results, which the Jason scientists reviewed. PENAIDS led to another ARPA study called “Pen X,” which endorsed the engineering of a new kind of advanced hydrogen bomb warhead called MIRVs, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. Their birth initiated a fierce new competition in the nuclear arms race as both sides rushed to build more accurate, more powerful, more deceptive MIRVs. The programs were initially classified, but when they were made public, MIRVs were vilified as dangerous and destabilizing because they put a premium on a nuclear first strike.
For their second summer study, in 1961, the Jason scientists met in Maine, on the Bowdoin College campus. Jack Ruina, the new director of ARPA, called Charles Townes at IDA to coordinate his attending the summer study. Ruina also wanted to bring several ARPA program managers along.
“Well, we don’t want anybody from ARPA to attend except you,” Townes told him.
Ruina was stunned. The Jasons worked for ARPA—and ARPA only. “What do you mean, we can’t attend?” Ruina said. “We are paying for the whole thing. You can’t say you’re [going to] have a private meeting when it’s the government that is paying for it.”
“Sorry, you can’t come to our meetings,” Townes repeated.
“Charlie, you can’t do that,” Ruina told him.
Townes explained to Ruina that this was how the Jason scientific advisory group worked. The Jasons sought objectivity, and they wanted to remain free from government bureaucracy and red tape. They did not want Pentagon interference during any of their summer studies. The Jasons gathered together to solve problems related to national defense. That was it.
After some back-and-forth, Ruina and Townes reached an agreement of sorts. As suggested, Jack Ruina, as director of ARPA, could attend a Jason summer study, alone.
For the Maine summer study, the focus again was on the Defender program. The Princeton physicist John Wheeler had a summerhouse not far from the college campus, on a wooded island off the coast called High Island. Wheeler had the group out to his house for many of the meetings that summer, where the scientists held clambakes, ate lobsters, and considered another highly classified program. This one involved the concept of directed energy. “This was very exotic science,” Ruina recalled. Directed energy beams come in two forms: light, which involves lasers, and charged particles, which involve electrons or protons. “Particle beam weapons [are] esoteric weapons systems,” Ruina explained. They come with a “Buck Rogers death ray image,” noted an early ARPA summary, because they “work at the speed of light and involve instantaneous kill.”
The Jason scientists wondered if an incoming ICBM could be shot down by a directed energy beam. The conundrum, according to Ruina, “was whether you can use a particle beam, earth-based, to form a beam through the atmosphere and destroy an incoming warhead.” The concept’s originator was Nick Christofilos; he had first presented the idea during Project 137, Goldberger recalled. Scientists at Livermore laboratory had already conducted earlier proof test experiments under the code name Seesaw. The classified results were shared with the Jason scientists, who were impressed. Directed energy weapons were well worth researching and developing, they decided, and ARPA moved forward with Project Seesaw—its first directed energy weapons program. Goldberger recalled the program being so highly classified that not even all of the Jasons were cleared for future work on it.
“Seesaw was a sensitive, limited-access project which deserves mention in the ARPA history as the most enduring specific project ever supported by the agency,” an agency review stated. ARPA’s mission was and remains getting programs up and running, then transferring them over to the military services or other government agencies for field use. Project Seesaw remained in development at ARPA for fifteen long years. Then in 1974 it was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission. Some unclassified summaries have been released. Over the next fifty-five years, ARPA’s directed energy weapons programs would develop and grow. 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
A handsome dark-haired war hero named William H. Godel was commanding the attention of a crowd of reporters outside Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It was June 3, 1959. Godel wore the wire-rimmed glasses of an intellectual and walked with the slight limp of a Marine wounded in battle, in his case the hellhole of Guadalcanal. As director of policy and planning for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Godel had a few facts to share with the press corps about America’s tiniest space pioneers, four black mice. Not far away from where Godel was standing at the podium, a seventy-eight-foot Thor Agena A rocket, carrying the Discoverer III life-sustaining satellite, pointed upwards at the sky. The four black mice were inside the rocket’s nosecone. They were about to be shot into space.
The mice, Godel announced, were “happy and healthy.” They were all males and were about two months old. These were not “ordinary mice” but members of the C-57 strain, making them “the best specimens of a special strain of hardy laboratory animals, selected and trained specifically for their road trip into space and planned return to earth.” They had been selected, at random, from a pool of sixty similarly trained mice. Their mouse capsule, roughly two feet long and two feet wide, was air-conditioned and soundproof. They had a food supply of unsalted ground peanuts, orange juice, and oatmeal. Each rodent had a tiny instrument pack on its back containing mini-transmitters that would record its heartbeat, pulse, and body temperature and then send that information back to Air Force veterinarians on the ground.
Godel cautioned people to be realistic about the fate of the mice. Most likely they would not return to earth alive, he said. The chances that the mice astronauts would live through the journey were roughly one in seven hundred.
“We don’t want to humanize them in any way,” said a colleague of Godel’s, an Air Force officer. The mice were purposely unnamed because “it would just make it worse for those people who have tender feelings about these things.”
So much rested on the success of the mission. The space race was about creating ICBMs capable of annihilating the other side, but it was also a psychological race, about humans and science and who was best. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had succeeded in getting animals into space, but neither side had been able to launch living beings into space with enough acceleration to escape the earth’s gravity and achieve orbital motion, that mysterious balancing point somewhere between gravity’s pull on the satellite and a satellite’s inherent inertia. The satellite had to reach an altitude of 150 miles above the earth’s surface while traveling at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour. Too slow and the satellite would fall back to earth; too fast and it would disappear into deep space. The plan was for the Discoverer III life-sustaining satellite to achieve orbit, circle the earth seventeen times, then return back to earth with the mice, ideally, alive. The Navy had been rehearsing “a dramatic rescue effort” to retrieve the capsule once it landed in the ocean.
In the Cold War space race, each side sought to be the first nation to achieve specific scientific milestones. Getting mice into orbit was a big one. The Discoverer program was, as a “satellite technology effort,” a scientific experiment that would eventually allow humans to travel into space. That was all true, but there was another side. Discoverer III was a highly classified spying mission, a cover for America’s first space-based satellite reconnaissance program, called Corona. The CIA had done the heavy lifting in Corona’s early years, with the support of the U.S. Air Force. ARPA had inherited the program from the Air Force in 1958. The mission of Corona was to photograph the Soviet Union from space so that the United States could better understand Soviet military hardware on the ground. Corona would remain one of America’s most closely guarded secrets, and would stay classified for thirty-six years, until February 1995. Like the U-2 spy plane, also a highly classified CIA program, this was where technology, espionage, and the quest for military superiority fused.
It was ARPA’s job to put satellites in space for intelligence-gathering purposes, and William Godel oversaw these early programs. Satellite technology gave birth to a whole new world of intelligence-collection disciplines, including IMINT, or imagery intelligence (like Corona); SIGINT, signals intelligence; GEOINT, geospatial intelligence; and MASINT, measurement and signature intelligence. Some of ARPA’s most successful early satellite programs included SAMOS (signals intelligence), GEODESY (mapping), NOTUS (communications), TRANSIT (navigation), and MIDAS (early warning). Most of these programs were highly classified, while others, like TIROS, the Television-Infrared Observation Satellite Program, amazed and informed the general public in remarkable ways.
TIROS was the world’s first true weather satellite. ARPA had inherited much of the technology from an Army program called JANUS. The TIROS satellite, a first-generation remote-sensing instrument, was developed by RCA. It weighed 270 pounds and contained a television system that transmitted images of the earth’s weather—most notably its cloud cover—from a 450-mile altitude orbit back to a ground station at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The first launch took place on April 1, 1960; by then the program had been transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. In its seventy-six-day life, TIROS transmitted 22,952 images back to earth. Every image was revolutionary. The spiral banded structure of oceanic storms, the vastness of mountain-wave cloud structures, the unexpected rapid changes in cloud patterns—none of this had been seen before. Technology offered a view of the planet previously beyond human comprehension, a new and spectacular perspective on Mother Earth. Before TIROS it was unknown.
The first set of photographs were pictures of cloud formations along the St. Lawrence River, over the Baja Peninsula, and across Egypt near the Red Sea. They were so magnificent that the director of NASA personally delivered them to President Eisenhower for him to see. The president called a press conference and shared details of the breathtaking photographs with the American public. The New York Times ran a four-column page-one article about TIROS. The very notion that it was now possible to see photographs of a storm front out at sea, before it hit land, inspired awe, if not disbelief, in millions of people. The photographs were marvels of modern science. National Geographic dedicated a large portion of its August 1960 issue to the seminal images.
To William Godel, satellites provided access to legions of foreign intelligence. Hired just weeks after ARPA’s creation, Godel held the second-most-important job after Herb York. His nebulous title, originally director of foreign developments, then director of policy and planning, purposely concealed the classified nature of Godel’s work. Godel was in charge of ARPA’s psychological warfare programs as well as its overseas research programs, both of which would intensify during the Vietnam War. When Godel departed the agency under FBI investigation for financial misconduct in 1964, he left behind the most controversial and most toxic legacy in the agency’s fifty-seven-year history. Notably, his presence at ARPA has been largely erased from the official record. “The Pentagon library has no information about him in our collection,” confirmed Pentagon librarian Myron “Mike” Hanson in 2013. Declassified files located at the National Archives and other documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal a story of intrigue.
William Godel began his career in espionage. By the time of the Discoverer III launch of the four black mice, Godel had more than a decade of experience working with and among spies. He moved back and forth between military intelligence and civilian intelligence, between the CIA and the Pentagon, with great self-confidence and aplomb. From his earliest beginnings as a Marine Corps intelligence officer until he began working for ARPA in February 1958, Godel had already forged a brilliant record in the uppermost echelons of the U.S. intelligence community. He was intensely patriotic, physically brave, and intellectually bold. He joined the Marine Corps in 1940, at the age of nineteen, and one month after turning twenty-one he foug
ht at Guadalcanal, the remote jungle-covered island in the Pacific where Allied forces won their first major offensive against the Empire of Japan. At Guadalcanal, Godel was shot in the leg and suffered a near-fatal injury that left him with a leg brace and a limp.
After the war, Godel worked at the Pentagon, in military intelligence. His boss was Major General Graves B. Erskine, a hard-charging war hero who had already fought in both world wars. In World War II, the forty-seven-year-old General Erskine led the Third Marine Division in the battle for Iwo Jima. In the spring of 1950, Godel was chosen by General Erskine to accompany him on an elite mission to Southeast Asia, a mission that would profoundly affect how William Godel saw the world and how he would do his job at the Pentagon over the next fourteen years.