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

I n June 1961, William Godel set off on a secret mission to Vietnam carrying a briefcase stuffed with cash. At a stopover in Hawaii, he converted some of the cash to travelers checks to make space for a small bottle of liquor that he carried with him on business trips. Even that did not quite leave enough room, so he moved some of his secret Pentagon papers to another case to make space for the bottle. The money, $18,000, was for a classified project that would play a critical role in President John F. Kennedys plan to battle communism in Southeast Asia.

At thirty-nine years old, Godel still wore the short buzz cut of his Marine Corps days, but his reputation had been forged in the world of intelligence. A drinker, a practical joker, and a master bureaucratic negotiator, Godel was the type of man who could one day offer to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean to make a crater for the National Security Agencys new radio telescope and the next day persuade the president to launch the worlds first communications satellite to broadcast a Christmas greeting. Colleagues described him as someone you could drop in a foreign country, and a few months later he would emerge with signed agreements in hand, whether it was for secret radar tracking stationssomething he did indeed set up in Turkey and Australiaor, in this case, winning the support of South Vietnams president for a new American proposal. Bill Bundy, a former CIA official and White House adviser, called Godel an operator with a rather legendary reputation for effectiveness working overseas.

At five feet ten inches tall, Godel was not a physically imposing figure, but he had a way of impressing both admirers and enemies with his presence. He was one of the more glamorous people to stride the halls of the Pentagon, recalled Lee Huff, who was recruited by Godel to the Defense Department. Godel was never the most famous man in the Pentagon, but for several years he was one of its most influential. And by the early 1960s, that influence was focused on Southeast Asia.

Godel arrived to the summer heat of Saigon, a congested city of semi-controlled chaos where cycle rickshaws, bicycles, mopeds, cars, and other motorized contraptions wove through the packed streets like schools of fish in a sea. The city was booming economically and culturally, even as it attracted an increasing number of American military advisers, spooks, and diplomats, who were looking to advise South Vietnams president on how best to run his newly independent country.

Parisian-style sidewalk cafs still dotted the main city streets, and the citys French colonial heritage was reflected in everything from the fresh baguettes in the local bakeries to the citys grand villas. Vietnamese women dressed in the o di, the formfitting silk dress worn over pantaloons, mixed easily with teenage girls clad in miniskirts. It was still several years before the influx of American troops would provide a boon to the citys brothels, or frequent Vietcong terrorist attacks in Saigon would drive patrons away from sidewalk cafs, but signs of that unrest were on the horizon. In December of the previous year, the Vietcong bombed the kitchen of the Saigon Golf Club, marking the start of a series of terrorist attacks in the capital. In neighboring Laos, a civil war fueled by Soviet and American involvement was spilling over into Vietnam. More disquieting was that the Vietcong, the communist insurgents in South Vietnam, were getting weapons from North Vietnam, using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the illicit supply route that snaked through Vietnams mountains and jungle, and parts of Laos.

Godel had been traveling frequently to Vietnam for more than a decade. What made this trip unusual was that he was now working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known by its acronym, ARPA. Founded in 1958 to get America into space after the Soviets launched the worlds first artificial satellite, ARPA had lost its space mission after less than two years. Now the young organization, hated by the military and distrusted by the intelligence community, was struggling to find a new role for itself. Godel figured if ARPA could not battle the communists in space, perhaps it could beat them in the jungles.

President Kennedy had taken office just five months prior and was still in the process of formulating a new policy for Southeast Asia. He had already decided to support South Vietnams anticommunist president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who hailed from a family of Mandarins, the bureaucrats who ran Vietnam under Chinese rule. The month before Godels trip, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited South Vietnams president, calling Diem the Winston Churchill of Asia, and in April, Kennedy sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam to serve as special advisers, helping to train the South Vietnamese military and the Montagnards, the indigenous tribes who lived in the countrys central plains. Diem was a deeply religious man, a lifelong bachelor who chose politics over the priesthood. Some in Western circles regarded him as an out-of-touch crackpot; others, like Godel, saw him as a flawed but promising leader.